J5’s Blog

Guido just released it today.

Thank you mugshot for pointing this out. Apparently RHEL5 will be shipping on HP computers in Australia. A tip of the hat goes to the desktop team which I worked on before moving to OLPC and the GNOME community which makes such a wonderful desktop.

Taking a look at Rob Bradford’s Open Moko post I noticed something really nice. The notification area icons weren’t some multi-colored blurry blobs and they looked great. They are crisp and clean. With the exception of one of the more busy icons I can readily tell what each one of them does.

Why do we waste our artist’s time adjusting icons for smaller resolutions instead of having them concentrate on the bigger beautiful full color icons? For every icon an artist produces they unusually need to produce two smaller icons at lesser detail since scaling inevitably just makes the lower resolution icons look horrible. This creates extra work and the results are far from perfect. The advantage of black and white icons are that they are simple to create, for the most part can match any theme and produce much sharper icons at lower resolutions. Since we agree mostly on metaphors one set could be produced to work with the majority of themes out there. Elegance through simplicity.

This has been running around in my mind for awhile now, especially after working with the OLPC two tone icon set . Apple does this too.

Here is another update on the progress of the cookbook.

Recipe’s

We’ve gotten tones of recipes, keep posting them to the wiki. I’m going to start editing them this weekend and e-mailing people with requests for clarification. For instance I already did this with Adam Schreiber’s Plain Yogurt recipe. In it he mentioned keeping the yogurt at 110 degrees Fahrenheit so I asked him to describe in detail how and why this step is needed. For that he produced the incubator and yogurt science section which fit in really nice with the theme of a cookbook for people who like to tinker and find out how things work. I’m not going to ask that of all the recipes but I may ask for elaborations or clerifications. Please be timely with replys as we have two weeks after this weekend to have something in a publishable state (yikes!!!). One thing I will ask everyone to do is give their recipies a “title”. In other word, make my mouth water with the name of the dish. We can always put a common name next to it to make it clear what it is but food is as much about presentation as with taste. As we say, you eat with your eyes first. If your native language is something other than English then show it off.

Layout

Three people have submitted excelent layouts. There is room for more though I am not so worried about this aspect as I was a few weeks ago. There is still time to enter the design contest. Entries are due by the end of Sunday.

Cover Art

No one has sumbitted anything yet. I am getting a bit worried here. The contest may need to be extended, hopefully not up to the day we publish.

Cash from Book Sales

Though I don’t expect a windfall from sales of the book, if the cost to publish the book is reasonable enough we may wish to charge a small markup which would go to GNOME and be earmarked for promoting such projects in the future. I will have to talk to the GNOME Foundation about it and see what they think. It is hard to say without knowing how much money will be brought in but it could go to simple things like buying books for raffles at confrences or large thing such as buying studio time for the Drooling Macaque to record a GNOME song. The PDF itself and sources will be free with a suggested donation.

I’ve been reading all about the Skype hysteria. It is kind of funny given that the question that was asked - is this close sourced app reading things it shouldn’t? - is legitimate but the hysteria that followed made a mountain out of a molehill. What makes it even funnier is that I can most likely point out an answer to at least one of the questions - why is skype poking at /etc/passwd? The answer is the punchline to this whole non-story. I know the answer because I can read the source - not the Skype source of course but the open source component called D-Bus that Skype uses. They can use it because it is dual GPL/AFL licensed.

D-Bus authenticates users for various reasons on Unix systems and makes calls to the getpwnam function. If you look at the following simple program and run it with strace -f you will see that this call does in fact open /etc/passwd:

#include <sys>
#include <pwd.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  char *lgn;
  struct passwd *pw;
  if ((lgn = getlogin()) == NULL || (pw = getpwnam(lgn)) == NULL)
    {
      fprintf(stderr, "Get of user information failed.n");
      exit(1);
    }

  return(0);
}

Now lets look at some of the output from strace -f


fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=50840, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 45712, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x51b000
mmap2(0x525000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x9) = 0x525000
close(3) = 0
mprotect(0x525000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0
munmap(0xb7f29000, 54658) = 0
open(”/etc/passwd”, O_RDONLY) = 3
fcntl64(3, F_GETFD) = 0
fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1653, …}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7f36000
read(3, “root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n”…, 4096) = 1653
close(3) = 0
munmap(0xb7f36000, 4096) = 0
exit_group(0) = ?


What does this all mean? Well I can’t say for sure if D-Bus is the only place accessing /etc/passwd in Skype but I like to give people and companies the benefit of the doubt. If you feel they are being sneaky just don’t use it. I don’t use it but then again I do trust the phone companies to not steal my credit card number when I give it to my travel agent over the phone. For that matter I trust my travel agent too.

It does show the benefits of Open Source in that it gives you peace of mind that you can look at the code instead of just guessing what is going on. That should be the draw of Open Source, because hysteria certainly isn’t.

“Yes, yes that all sounds all nice and fantastic!!! Come back when you know how to get there.”

Context to come…

GNOME’s 10 year aniversary happened last week and we are celebrating for a month to mark such an auspicious milestone.  The cookbook is going at a good pace.  We didn’t expect to be done before the anniversary as we didn’t want it to be a rush job.  Recipes are coming in at a steady pace however we are lacking in one area.  We need designers to produce a cover and a coherent design for the recipes.

To up the incentive even more I am implementing a Cookbook Design contest.  The winners will get a copy of the book payed for by myself.  I’ll even have it shipped to my place, signed and reshipped to the winners if they would like.  Who knows, that signature could be worth something someday (when you happen on one of my blank checks and are able to forge it).

There will be a winner for the cover design and two winners for the interior design.  Bonus point go to those who produce designs that we can be changed around depending on layout and section.  For instance having simple colors allows us to change the color for different sections and having variations on the layout allow us to make the book more interesting.

To enter please add your design to the wiki.  Designs should be at 300dpi lossless for bitmaps or be vector based, preferably in an open format.  The size of the book has yet to be determined so designs may need to be altered in the end.  Designs can also take into account what size and orientation the designer thinks the book should be in.  Go to Lulu.com to see the options available to us.  Winners must stick around to help us tweak the design for the finished product.  The contest will be over September 2nd.  If we don’t have enough entries by then I think I will cry.  Happy designing!!!

I was bored one day and started rifling through GNOME Games. I played the usual Blackjack, Tali and Nibbles when I happened upon a game I had not seen in the set before. It was GNOME Sudoku. It was simple enough to pick up - you get nine large squares, each containing nine smaller squares all laid out in a 9×9 grid. In each of the smaller squares you place a number between one and nine. Each of the bigger squares can only hold one of each number. The catch is that each row and column can only hold one of each number in the set also. What you get is a perfectly balanced board where each number is used nine times yet they do not repeat within a row, column or the nine smaller squares which makes up one of the bigger squares. It is a pattern matching game which sounds easy enough but can get quite frustrating if you happen to make a mistake. This is because each “move” effects the outcome of successive moves. If you make a mistake early it can compound to the point where it is hard to unravel without erasing the whole board and starting over again.

So because of GNOME Sudoku I picked up a sudoku book on my flight home from Amsterdam. That was a huge mistake. Now I can’t get to bed without finishing one of the puzzles and I can’t get out of my apartment in the morning without finishing another. I feel somehow incomplete if I can’t finish the puzzle I am working on - and they keep getting harder. If it gets bad enough I might need an intervention. Thanks GNOME Games.

Recipes

The GNOME Cookbook Project is now in full swing. We now have a wiki and mailing list. Anyone who has mailed me with a recipe can you please post it up somewhere and provide a link on the wiki. Feel free to add the recipe as a wikipage. We also need more contributers. Please pile on as many recipes as you wish.

Photos

Remeber we also need high def pictures ready for print so all you GNOMIES out there with SLR cameras, it is time to team up with some cooks and get snapping. Hey you might even get a free lunch or dinner out of it.

Design

Design is also very important. All you design gurus out there we need to slap together a workable layout using open source tools. Are you up to the challenge or are you affraid your hunger will get the best of you? Feel free to take breaks and cook up the recipies you are laying out.

Cover Art

Have you ever said to yourself, I wish my design would end up on the front of a GNOME Cookbook? Well now is your chance…to say that to yourself and compete to get your art on the cover. Whoever wins I will personally come over, if am ever in their neighborhood, and cook them a dish from the book.

Remeber GNOMERS, feet are vehicals for finding food and fine food is worth finding. So run, don’t walk, to contribute to this wonderful symbol of our community on this, the tenth anniversary of GNOME.

Yesterday I tasked Dan Winship, who recently joined Red Hat on the OLPC project, with porting WebKit as a Sugar activity when he had free time. Today I came into the office to find an e-mail with a link to the activity.  Here are some screen shots.  Ignore the different scaling as we have tweaked  XULRunner to better utilize the XO’s screen.

XULRunner

WebKit

My initial reaction is it shows promise but needs some work to become really usable. On the plus side it uses on average 10 megs less in resident memory according to Dan’s testing. It also starts up five seconds faster. In my qualitative tests WebKit feels a bit more responsive when scrolling.  The biggest problem with WebKit is the gtk port is just not finished yet and as such it is not a usable browser, but it is close.

Why are we looking at WebKit?  In my mind it is another Open Source project that is just more aligned to our needs as a small and fast  browser.  The issue I see with the Mozilla comunity is that they are mainly chasing the fat desktop market.  Every effort I have seen to make an embedded focused project based off of Mozilla has fallen in one aspect or another.  WebKit’s specific claim to fame is to be small and light while not sacrificing needed functionality.  For instance the Gtk port of WebKit uses cairo and pango which we need for nice antialiased and internationalized fonts.  The last embedded mozilla project I talked to spent their time blaming cairo and pango for their performance problems.  Instead of fixing their issues they opted to pull them both which gives you a slightly faster browser with no real internationalization support to talk of.

To be fair I have heard that Mozilla upstream is fixing the issues with cairo rendering in their next major release and have been getting friendlier when dealing with Linux distributions.  This is all good signs of progress.  The question is what is the direction Mozilla is looking to the future and will it line up with our requirements for low powered computing?  Can a project as large as Mozilla serve both the embedded and power desktops equally well or do we look to other projects like WebKit which have more focused goals?  For that matter, what is to say WebKit doesn’t spiral out of control and go in directions which are unsuitable for us?

For now we are using XULRunner, which works and has many benefits along with some pitfalls.  We will keep an eye on the development of the WebKit Gtk port as it is shaping up to be a worthy contender.  In the end it will come down to which offers the best experience on our platform.