J5’s Blog

UPDATE: Build 242 screwed up the devel builds. Build 243 should fix this issue.

I have added Johan Dahlin’s python-launcher utility to the devel builds starting with build 242. Anyone wanting to hack on Sugar performance during FUDCon this weekend should update to that build or any later builds. I should have an update image floating around for anyone interested. I basically want to collect some metrics on startup performance of activities and then go ahead and update code to use the launcher to see if we gain any improvements and also file any bugs we encounter. There will also be many other performance areas we can target during hacking sessions so for those who are interested there is plenty of opportunity to contribute to the OLPC project.

One of the D-Bus developers, Matthew Johnson was asking about the Drooling Macaque Band in refrence to packaging up Frets on Fire. Frets is very much like DDR, Guitar Hero, or any other of those games in which you hit buttons in time with a beat or music. Unfortunately the songs it uses I hear are in some way in conflict with distribution.

There are a number of people in the community who already record studio quality songs. It would be great if they would contact the author and offer their songs. What would also be cool is if we could get the Drooling Macaque band together sometime before GUADEC to write and record a few songs.

This would take a bunch of logistics to pull off, including finding instruments and cheap or free studio time which is why I am throwing the idea out there now to see who is interested and what kind of resources we can pull together.

Here is one of the reason I get up in the morning.

And here is another reason why I stay late.

So someone put me on the list to receive the N800 discount. Thanks goes out to Nokia and I hope to get pictures of the XO-1 talking to the N800 soon after I receive the device. It wasn’t easy as I ended up calling sales three times because the web site was having issues but I am not complaining. The sales staff was very easy to work with even when they didn’t fully understand what was going on they ran around trying to figure it out. Quite the best “something went wrong with your order” experience I have ever had.

I landed dbus-python 0.80.1 in Fedora yesterday. This is a complete rewrite of the lowlevel bindings from Pyrex to C done by Simon McVittie. Please check your packages if they use the python bindings to make sure they still work with the new bindings. Some API has been deprecated, some kept for compat reasons and some broken. Most of the broken API comes from the lowlevel dbus_bindings API which wasn’t public in the first place. If you use those lowlevel API’s and can’t find a way to do what you want in the highlevel public APIs please contact us on the D-Bus list or in bugzilla so that we can figure out a way to support your usage in a sane public API. The more input we get the faster we can move to stabilizing the Python APIs just as we stabilized core D-Bus. And now for a list of changes:

• The “Everything changes” release (0.80.0), quickly followed by the “oops” release which made it work
• dbus_bindings and dbus_glib_bindings rewritten in C rather than Pyrex, and renamed to make it clear that they’re not intended to be public API
• Low-level public API moved to dbus.lowlevel to give new users a hint that it’s probably not what they want
• Remove Variant class, add variant_level property on all D-Bus types
• Make signal matching work as expected after name ownership changes
• Use unambiguous D-Bus data types when converting from D-Bus to Python, and follow well-defined rules when converting from Python to D-Bus
• Add utf8_strings and byte_arrays options in various places, so a user can tweak the calling conventions to be more efficient
• Raise error if no main loop is configured and the user does something that only works with a main loop
• Make async method calls actually async when made while still introspecting
• Redo main loop machinery to allow for pure-Python main loops later
• Allow construction of a dbus.service.Object if you have no BusName
• Remove dependency on libxml2 by porting introspection XML parser to use expat
• Port build system from distutils to autofoo
• Install a header file for third-party main loop integration
• Python 2.5-compatible, on 32 and 64 bit
• More documentation, tests, examples, interoperability tests

Raise the hammer has an interesting article that compares the iPhone and the OLPC XO, not on technology grounds but on social directions. While the iPhone and the XO may be the poster children in this article, the question that is posed is a valid one people must ask themselves. In a world where technology is shaping society, is it better to create an “I” generation or a “We” generation?

I picked up an excellent Riesling from my local wine shop. It paired well with the monkfish I cooked. This time I rushed out the door so I forgot my camera at home. Luckily I got a picture of the wine bottle the day before but missing a chance of showing the starting product was a bit of a letdown. I literally felt like I was thrown into an episode of Iron Chef where the secret ingredient is some slimy creature. “And the secret ingredient is Lockness Monster. Have fun!!!”. When I opted for the recipe a couple of people turned around and said they wondered who was going to take that recipe.

Thank god the head was cut off. Those suckers are ugly. However after skinning and filleting the fish (it has a slimy rubbery skin) the fillets looked like any other white fish you might eat. The cooking procedure was simple. Wrap fillets in bacon, put in oven and check back in fifteen minutes. Bacon wrapped seafood is awesome because it requires little to no seasoning and the fatty bacon allows for mistakes as it keeps the seafood moist. The hardest part of the dish was the prep work and keeping the side garnishes of broccoli and wild mushrooms warm. There was also a butter emulsion sauce made from butter, sherry vinegar and shallots. Lorraine-Alsace is not known for their low fat foods being so close to Germany We also had an awesome cheese salad, and a pork and kraut dish among others (sorry no quiche).

This coming Sunday is Burgundy. I am itching to pick up a nice pinot noir which counts among my favorite types of Red Wine (that and chianti). Hopefully I will remember to bring my camera this time around.

Thanks for all those who had suggestions on wine last week. Please feel free to point me in a good direction for Burgundy too. Also if anyone will be in the Boston area around February 10th and 11th there is a huge wine expo going down at the Seaport World Trade Center. With over 440 wineries one can’t go wrong.

Glad to have you aboard. Actually I would have been happy if you had ended up at the FSF or any FOSS company doing legal work. I know I have talked to you and you have said you are not a technical person but as far as importance to GNOME and Free Software I place you as one of the most influential people I personally know. GNOME loses a small piece of itself the less you are able to be involved but I can say meeting you at the New York GNOME Summit and watching you debate with Richard Stallmen made me realize how diverse and wonderful the community really is. Again, glad to have you aboard.

And now a bit of a note at the sniping that has gone on between different distributions. Luis is the type of person who I wish every hacker would emulate in terms of courtesy towards others. He realizes every distro has something to offer the community and the world. He will point out when something runs counter to the communities memes and praise work which adds value to the community. He carefully tries to avoid situations which would cause a conflict of interest and balances his words with facts and well thought out arguments.

As I said in my talk about GNOME and KDE cooperation and competition, our main competitor is Microsoft. If we end up squabbling over each other we ultimately lose. We want competition, but not at the price of our dignity.

The new camera activity is shaping up nicely..

In fact the whole project is shaping up nicely. Being the build master, I get to see changes as they come in. This post was done from start to finish on build 235. Pretty solid.

Sorry to the Planet Gnome people who have seen this already. For the benifit of those following Planet Laptop which is OLPC’s planet aggregator, Thomas Vander Stichele managed to get streaming working from the OLPC camera to a Flumotion server over an ad-hoc network.

We should get Thomas syndicated on Planet Laptop. Thomas, do you tag your posts?