J5’s Blog

I just finished readding the regression tests to the dbus-python git repo. I also fixed a bunch of bugs in dbus itself. I am going to go ahead and remove the bindings from core on Friday. It looks like D-Bus 0.90 will actually happen in the near future. Please check out D-Bus’s project wiki for more information.

On that note if you want to be a contributing member of the D-Bus 1.0 team but don’t know where to start, fixing up the wiki to be more user friendly would be great.

Hey Jono,

If you could make the Jokosher release on the 19th instead of the 22nd, that is my birthday. Hint, hint, wink, wink

Run for your lives. I finished commiting the tests and Doxygen generation bits to the dbus-glib git repository. dbus-glib now builds and make check’s on its own. I also submitted a patch to remove them for the D-Bus Core in CVS.

Thanks to Diana Fong for creating my new hackergotchi from kikidonk’s great photography. Please replace my old one on Planet Gnome and Fedora People.

When all you’ve got is a hammer…

I seem to have to bring this up way too much. Perhaps we should have a School House Rock song on how a standard becomes a standard.

Standards arn’t made. They are agreed upon. Forcing standards because “it would solve all of our problems” panders to the idea that we must make everyone happy. That is a sure way to make sure no one is satisfied. Standards should happen because they solve specific problems and solve them well.

Take for example D-Bus. It isn’t a standard but because GNOME and KDE use it extensively it has become a defacto standard. It has taken almost five years (which is fast) to get to that point and we still have a ways to go. The thing about D-Bus is that it never set out to be a standard. There was certainly hope that others would adopt it but its real goal was to be a kick ass desktop communication layer. At some point when we feel it is ready we may suggest it be part of the LSB and perhaps through them go through an ISO process.

Freedesktop.org is not a standards organization. There are a couple of defacto standards that have come out of the project and there are a couple that have failed specifically because they came to fd.o as preconceived standards (i.e. standard by proclamation instead of merit). Fd.o is a place for incubating and discussing possible future standards and experimenting with way out ideas for technology sharing between free desktops (ideas that may never see the light of day).

We must be honest with ourselves when talking about standards. If we rush into them, remove debate, and accept them point blank for some “greater good” then we lose. Standards must be able to stand on their own not as examples of great standards but of examples of great technology. So when talking about why GNOME or KDE should adopt a piece of technology the argument shouldn’t be, “because if they do then we have a standard”, the argument should be, “because it is a great piece of technology that solve a problem in both desktops really well”. The onus is on the project to prove that point.

If my paper to aKademy is accepted I will be going more in depth about this subject while analyzing where collaboration between the two leading desktop projects has been a success and where it has failed. I will also submit it to the next Boston GNOME Summit.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not on the Mugshot team and don’t know what their plans are but with any open ended tool such as Mugshot others can find their own uses. Here are my thoughts on Mugshot’s potential.

One of the the things I heard a lot of at GUADEC being a Red Hat employee was, “what is mugshot?”. People are still wondering what it is for. I wish we had someone from the Mugshot team in attendance. Imagine people Web Swarming the slides or video streams and having a live persistent chat on a presentation as it was happening.

Most people who have used Mugshot will associate it directly with Web Swarming which right now is the major use case. It is however much more than that. From my point of view as a user who wants to use Mugshot in a specific way I see Mugshot as being broken down into a couple of parts. The first is live group notification (the web swarm) and the second is contextual live update data stores (the chat). The data stores are contextual because they are directly related to the notification.

Using these parts one could create collaborative apps that utilize the Mugshot network. One of the things brought up at GUADEC was networking Jokosher so a band could work on new songs or practice together even if they didn’t live close to each other (e.g. the Drooling Macaque Band). One of the central problems that needs to be solved for this to work is how do we publicize shared projects and how do we notify people when new tracks are added or edited?

Thinking in terms of Mugshot, this could be solved by bands creating groups. In this group they publish links to shared projects, similarly to how Web Swarms work. The group members would use the chat to store notes about the project and every time a track is added or modified Jokosher is notified. Not online at the time? Not a problem. Remember data is persistent on Mugshot so the next time you turn on Jokosher you would get all the update notifications.

Of course you would only want to send metadata over Mugshot. The actual tracks would have to be stored somewhere else. There are also numerous other issues to deal with before we have fully collaborative music editing but it is a piece of the puzzle.

So for all those who don’t understand what Mugshot is, perhaps it has just failed to touch on something you are interested in. Perhaps you just need to dream up what Mugshot should mean to you.

I had so much fun playing infront of a packed audience at GUADEC and then I just saw this article on news.com.com.com…. (would someone mugshot that? I don’t have it running on this laptop). It talks about a battle of the bands for techies at the Middle East in Central Square. I guess my style would be a mix of Jazz, Blues, Pop and Rock.

Had an awsome day in London. It reminded me of why I loved living there some years ago. I ended up going to see the Blue Man Group. Remind me to go get their albums when I get home. Tonal rhythem kicks butt.

I haven’t been able to get in touch with my friend which is a bummer. I hope she is ok. Losing my cell phone on the beach at GUADEC has made it hard to coordinate with others. I’m off to the other Cambridge tomorrow to meet up with some of the people working on various aspects of D-Bus. I’ll be back in my Cambridge on Monday in time for the 4th of July celebrations.