J5’s Blog

I just found this out after reading and article about the GNOME Mobile release.  Apparently Movial joined LiMo sometime in August and have pledged to release their Browser D-Bus Bridge as open source.  Perhaps this went over the D-Bus mailing list and I missed it but I am eager to look at the code and documentation to make sure remote sandboxed code doesn’t now have a way of breaking out of its jail.  In other words I hope they have added a permissions based system much like we have for the system bus. If they have a sane system this could really be a powerful tool.

In a local world where all your applications are installed by the user, security on the session bus doesn’t have to be tight as the application will already have all the capabilities that they might gain from using the session bus. They even have more such as rm -rf ~.  However, if web pages are now able to access the bus without a failsafe security model for access rights you would be allowing remote applications access to whatever the session bus exposes.  They would be first class citizens in a very bad way.  Depending on what services are running on the bus, information could be stolen, files added and deleted as well as other exploits.  Already gVFS runs over D-Bus and hopefully in the future we will be moving from a corba based accessibility layer to a D-Bus one which means every UI element would be exposed via the bus.

That is not to say it is all doom and gloom.   Having a browser/D-Bus bridge is very important towards moving the desktop experience forward, so much so that I was considering writing one until I saw this.  Of course there is no open code or documentation yet, at least what I could find.  I do trust them to do the right thing but it would have been nice if the development was done in the open from the start.  Can someone working with LiMo point me to the source or information of when it will be released?

It’s happening all over again!!! Let us know you are coming. There may be some exciting announcements, good fun and who knows…another beer summit, tack on conference may present itself again. So, come on up (or down or sideways depending on your latitude and longitude) to Boston for some good friends, good hacking and good times.

Since I know not many people read the board meeting notes even though Luis slaves tirelessly over them after each meeting I though I would write up a short, what’s happening to get people in the loop.

•  First and foremost, the Foundation is changing in very good ways.  We hired Stormy Peters as our Executive Director and she has gotten off to a flying start, posting on the board list faster than the board can respond and generally keeping us part timers on our toes.  This brings up a good point that members should start participating more in Foundation activities and teams such as with GNOME Marketing, or helping organize hackfests.  With Stormy on board there are more opportunities the Foundation can pursue but we will need people to oversee these initiatives and make sure they are a success.
• As people should know the next Boston GNOME Summit is happening at the MIT Slone building (map):
  DATES:             October 11, 12 & 13, 2008
  TIME:                7:00 AM – 11:59 PM
  ROOMS:            E51-315, E51-325, E51-335, E51-34
• We are also holding the GLib Introspection and User Experience hackfests around the same time frame in Boston.  Hackfests are small invite only gathering (around 5-20 people) focused on moving specific parts of the GNOME stack forward.  I encourage people running these hackfests to blog about them and the work that was accomplished once the hackfest is over.
• The GNOME Asia summit is also set to kick off in Beijing on the 18 and 19th of October.  That is only 25 days left until our first Foundation sponsored Asian event.  It looks like it is going ot be a hit already and something we want to continue to sponsor annually.
• Budgeting changes - as treasurer I have had my head filled with budgets for the last few months.  With the hire of Stormy and the feedback she has been getting from members of our Advisory Board we have started to move budget planning for the whole year instead of adding budget items and asking for money as we need it (like we did for the hackfests this past year).  We want to grow GNOME and the Foundation and in order to do that in a responsible way we need to plan further ahead than we have traditionally done.  A draft budget for 2009 went out to the Advisory Board yesterday to make sure we hit companies budgeting schedule.  In the future I hope to start budgeting talks at GUADEC and get all foundation members involved in figuring out how to best utilize the resources we are given every year.  This also means I will expect more participation in board activities from members as we move forward.
• As many have noticed while we get a healthy amount of donations from individuals from the Friends of GNOME program it pales in comparison to the corporate sponsorships.  While it may always lag behind since a large part of our community may not have the money to donate, whether they are in school or times are getting a bit tougher we still think we can do much better.  Because of this Friends of GNOME is going through some changes to make it easier for individuals to donate throughout the year.  While I don’t want to spill the beans before we launch, sufficed to say,it tears down a lot of the barriers that can make donating to GNOME a bit of a pain.

Well, that is all the exciting bits, to some degree of exciting.  I’m going to try and post regularly but most of the time the week to week running of the Foundation isn’t all that exciting (if it were more people would read the meeting notes).  The exciting bits happen around the stuff that the Board enables through its work.  While we make sure resources are procured and allocated for the various projects and conferences it is the people on the ground, hacking, organizing and making these things happen which make the Foundation run smoothly and GNOME get better from year to year.  This is something seven board members and two staff members can not do on their own.  Consider getting more involved in our different teams, offering to help with a local event or donating your expertise in various areas that the board deals with (e.g. read the meeting notes on foundation-announce to see what we are working on and see if there is an action item you may be able to help out with).

It seems that Cindy McCain didn’t like the questions the hosts on the View asked her husband and her.  You can see the View interview here.

Watching it I saw a lot of evasion from John McCain and fair tough questions being asked by the hosts of the View. Questions on how Palin was going to change Washington, on why John McCain approved ads which have been debunked as lies about Obama - a point even Carl Rove has talked about.

It just seems all of John McCain’s “straight talk” rhetoric has fallen aside to a “perception talk” agenda where his campaign hides the realities by twisting the perception to their view point. Just looking at Governor Palin who has pirouetted around her own beliefs on topics such as global warming and the war in Iraq (has God tasked us with this war?) makes me shiver thinking about what would happen if she had real power. It isn’t so much her beliefs that scare me (though it isn’t the America I want to live in) but the fact that she understands these beliefs to be unpopular so she has to sugar coat them to be more palatable to the majority of Americans. And then there is the bridge to nowhere debacle which was supposed to paint the perception of Palin as a reformer but we instead find out that she had actually only came out against it after it was killed in congress (and she still kept the money). Oh I don’t doubt she is a reformer but I simply can’t trust what she is going to reform if I can’t trust her own words.

McCain’s own performance on the View along with the actions and words of his campaign make me seriously doubt McCain is in control of this machine. There was a time I had respected the Senator but since he has replaced his straight talk with pandering and slight of hand tricks I just have no trust in him and the policies he may pursue if elected.

On the lighter side, you’ve got to love Tina Fey.

You can post whatever you want within the guidelines of the Gnome Code of Conduct (and I don’t think I have seen anything in your posts to say you have overstepped those rules).  I would fight for your right to post whatever to your blog and be aggregated even though I often find your posts illinformed.  You however should understand that others also have the right to disagree with you, and disagree with you strongly.  Throwing a temper tantrum doesn’t really help your cause, whatever that is.