J5’s Blog

After walking by the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts many times I finally took the plunge last weekend and enrolled in a back to basics six week course. I figured I lived and worked around here, there was no excuse for not taking advantage of the area. The classes are 3 and a half hours long on Saturday mornings which give me a reason to get my lazy butt out of bed. The best part is we all sit around a table at the end of class and eat what we make. To celebrate finishing my first lesson, knife skills, I went out and bought a set of Global knifes from Ser La Table in the Chestnut Hill Mall. I also somehow got myself committed to helping with Thanksgiving dinner.

According to news.com.com.com… when Fedora Core 6 was released it was downloaded 10,000 time in 5 hours. I would like to take a moment and thank everyone that was involved with this release including the people at Red Hat, The Fedora Project, GNOME, KDE, GNU, fd.o, Mozilla,all the other distributions and companies who work on upstream projects and everyone else I didn’t mention whose code, intelligence, energy and tenacity went into this release. Keep up the good work and I’ll continue to do the same.

Ever have one of those ideas which just pop into your head and you need to get it down right away. It might sound stupid later on and not quite thought through but that is the nature of quick thoughts and some of them turn around and become the seed to bigger things. When I took a small business course once I was told to always carry a pen and paper to jot down ideas that came, the instant they came. It was said that you never know when one of those ideas will launch your next new business. These days I have a syndicated blog so I can annoy or perhaps touch off light bulbs is others with my live notepad.

It struck me while I was on the T going to work this morning. I was reading the Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything. It is a sort of spoof of Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time but actually ends up being a very well researched book that can be referenced if one were to do a report on the birth of modern day scientific thought. The Bill Bryson whit shows it head mostly in revealing the more salacious details of how scientists are accredited with discoveries.

In any case I though much of this book would be great to mark up so I could later quickly reference which scientists did what for general trivia knowledge and if any day I wanted a quick analogy. Then I got to work where someone brought up evince getting onto the OLPC builds and I quickly remembered part of the projects goal was to provide ebook functionality. The idea then struck me, what if I was reading the Bill Bryson book as an ebook? I could go into something like Tomboy and make notes to pages in the book. But what if we were to define an annotation interface which Tomboy or a similar app could export? Imagine being able to highlight a section on the ebook and instantly get a note which referenced the page number and selection and then putting even more tomboy links in. Pretty soon you would have a mindmap of thoughts and even references to other ebooks and pages in the same ebook. Reports would practically write themselves and attribution and bibliographies would be instantly put together. I remember spending just as long as it took to write my papers, putting together a comprehensive bibliography. Applications would also be free to present the notes in a more orderly fassion then is now possible with Tomboy since I envision that attaching metadata would be part of the interface. Tools could be created to construct time lines and sort out the notes into more constructive and ordered forms.

In any case, there is my idea. Now run with it

If you try to dbus_connection_close() then your overlords will laugh in your face. Hahhaha, your application has done something totally evil and will be ignored.

The truth is in D-Bus when you get a bus connection you do not own that connection. The only time you own a connection is when you create the connection yourself. Whenever using the dbus_bus_get API you are given a shared connection which is owned by libdbus. We keep weak refs around to make sure it only goes away when everyone is done with it including the library itself. Closing a shared connection would be very bad and in fact ancient versions of the library let you do just that. It wasn’t much a problem when D-Bus was being used in limited places. These days you are never sure who will be using D-Bus and if they will be linked into your app and using the very same shared connection to save resources (opening up a private connection for every library would be a huge waste though some do it for good reasons).

To that end newer versions of D-Bus simply ignore requests to close a connection if it is shared and print out a warning. If fatal warnings are on, your app will halt and sit for gdb to attach to it. It is recommended that apps which call this API remove the call and simply make sure they unref the connection appropriately. Unreffing will do the right thing(tm). Reserve dbus_connection_close for those days when your apps are creating their own private connections.

Release Candidate 2 for D-Bus 1.0 (official version 0.94) has been released. There were some issues that needed to be worked out before the 1.0 version which have culminated to this release. Left to do is to make sure we compile and run on Solaris, *BSD, and MacOSX and to find and fix any remaining blocker bugs.

This release adds a dbus-uuidgen binary which packagers should run in their post scripts.

You can download this release at:

http://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus/dbus-0.94.tar.gz

Fresh from the news wires, CNN says Libya will buy OLPC laptops for ALL of their 1.2 million school children.