We're looking for a neat, meticulous person to help us rack and wire some servers next week, on Tuesday and Wednesday. The tasks are unboxing, carrying, mounting, screwing, wiring, and testing the servers. Pay is $20/hour, duration is until we're done, location is in Waltham (we'll pay for your transport).
If you're interested, send mail to pzb@novell.com and mention any relevant experience or skills.
As I've mentioned before, in my spare time I've been working on a fun project to replace the Unix terminal and shell with native graphics and a high-level language runtime. One thing that I quickly found out though was that certain applications require a real VT100 terminal emulator; for example, less is a highly optimized program, and while replacing it with a proper X11 app would be possible, it would not be trivial and would largely be a distraction from my goals anyways. Another situation where you need a terminal emulator is connecting to remote Unix hosts; while I have complete control over the software on my laptop, it's hard to change all the existing servers out there.
SSH in particular is something that really cries out for a nice application around it, rather than launching it primitively from an existing terminal emulator. Earlier I mentioned the result of a few hours of PyGTK hacking. Over the last week or two I've been working on improving it. Today David Ascher of Thunderbird fame asked for it, so I should probably kick it out the door (though HotSSH is primarily for X11/Unix and not the Mac).
As you can see, the new version of HotSSH now remembers what you do, automatically. For example:
The only dependencies are CPython, GTK+, DBus, and OpenSSH. I've broken it out of where it previously lived in the Hotwire tarball into a separate source tarball. You can currently get it from the Hotwire downloads page, though my long term plan is to import it into GNOME SVN and ideally have it come with GNOME out of the box. The code is currently here, and bug reports here. It works well enough for me now; about all it might make sense to add is some sort of color scheme (we currently just pull from the gnome-terminal defaults). To run, you can just unpack the tar and python ui/hotwire-ssh. If you install it, it should create a default bash alias for ssh, but this is something that package distributors will need to make sure integrates well.
There has been some criticism recently of Nokia and its handling of maemo - improving the state of affairs is one of the reasons why Quim contacted me and asked me if I’d be willing to work with the project to improve things.
The key to solving any problem is straightforward:
This is similar to Federico Mena Quintero’s characterisation of profiling code. In fact, a surprising array of problems are suitable for attach with measure, change, re-measure, rinse, repeat.
The over-riding arc I’ve been hearing so far is “Nokia is hoarding control over the project, and aren’t doing enough to help the maemo community”. I think that’s a mite unfair, and often I get the feeling that people on the mailing list are confusing a reality where there are problems, but they are poorly characterised, and malicious intent on the part of Nokia.
Some examples:
So I plan to apply this optimisation technique to various problems in maemo. For each proposal I make, I will be looking for feedback from Nokia and the maemo community to see if it is a step in the right direction.
For a start, I will be proposing policies for access to maemo resources, including maemo.org email addresses, the maemo trademark (which is of course linked to the email addresses), and any parts of the maemo platform which community members don’t feel are sufficiently open.
My goal is not to get everything open in doing this. It is to make clear the limits of the maemo project, and in this way ensure that expectations on both sides of the equation are coherent. I hope that Nokia will accept the proposals I make, but even if there are arguments against, I believe those arguments can be open, and clearly understood by all involved.
* I don’t believe that there has ever been ambiguity about this - all of the tablet which can be open is open, but some decisions to use closed components were made in the interests of product differentiation, cost and other reasons. The N8×0 is not meant to be a completely Free product (unlike the Neo1971 or OLPC, which do aim to be completely Free). What we should insist on is that someone buying an N8×0 has all of the tools they need to paperweight it with custom, non-Nokia, software, and access as much of the hardware as possible with free software.
The final batch from this years Faire, including some which are slightly out of focus. Hopefully the links will give you a better idea.
Four Lego related ones. There are 16 motors in that crane. Also the LEGO Train Town and Village from the Bay Area Lego Users Group.
We got the Forbidden Lego book out of the library a few months ago, with the idea that we could try to build some of the models, only to find out that it uses a lot of non-standard parts. Grr!
That's Robyn Beer preparing a piece for enameling, another hobby I'd like to try when I can find the time. Also glass bending, the CandyFab Project and grow your own mushrooms.
Various robots,robot-like scuptures and blinky things. That's the work of Mike Scioli. Also Voxhead from Michael Brady, and a couple of AntBot's.
Pong Watch. There was also another playing asteroids. Plus some kinetic metal sculptures including the Giant Squid.
What to do with your prototyping failures, The Incredible Marble machine and motorized armchair. That woman was having a great time.
So our Windows developer strike force came up with a windows version of Elisa, Windows XP and Vista are supported. Check out the Elisa download page to find the alpha version of the installer. There are some issues, this is an alpha, you're warned :)
Alessandro and Olivier cooked 2 tutorials showing off how to develop new features for Elisa, by example. The API of the upcoming 0.5 branch of Elisa has also been published, it might evolve a bit but it's already a good starting point for motivated contributors out there :)
I had submitted two abstracts in April to two conferences over the summer. The good news is both of them have been accepted!
o OpenSolaris Developer Conference, June 25-27, 2008 Prague, Czech Republic.
o GUADEC 2008, July 7-12, 2008, Istanbul, Turkey.
The schedule for both conferences have now been published OSDEVCON 2008 schedule and GUADEC 2008 schedule.
The OSDEVCON is also about Printing Tools, it is primarily concentrated on Presto on OpenSolaris Desktop. While I have been looking forwards going to Prague (never been there before) to talk about Presto and also meet face to face with many of the OpenSolaris developers. Despite all the good reasons to go, I could not make it due to unforeseen family circumstances. So to this end, Michal Pryc has kindly agreed to present the paper on my behalf. Thanks Migi!
The GUADEC session is a BOF on Printing Tools, so in order to make it to work well, I need input/involvement of the communities. So I really look forwards to see everyone who is interested in printing or your applications have printing elements in them to be there! I plan to provide you an update on the GSOC project that I am mentoring on Integrated Printer Management. So Rui, pressure is ON! 
I finally got a copy of Getting things done from Amazon about 3 weeks ago. Now if only I could find the time to read it…
Your application used to be single threaded and is consuming a resource that is not thread-safe. You’re splitting your application up into two or more threads. Both threads want to consume the non-thread-safe resource.
In this GNOME-Live item I explain how to use GThreadPool for this.
It’s a wiki so if you find any discrepancies in the sample and or text, just correct them. I’m subscribed so I’ll review it that way.
The GNOME-Live item is done in a similar way to the item about using asynchronous DBus bindings and the AsyncWorker item.
A few years back, like everything else, the RoyalMail got privatised – can’t exactly remember when, since I wasn’t really paying attention, and they did it in stages. Anyway since privatisation things haven’t always gone well, but there is at least something they are doing right – you can buy postage online!
Just weigh and measure your letter or parcel, enter the address, and pay (either from a prepay account or on a credit card) and presto a pdf label in a choice of formats (DL envelope, quarter, half, or whole A4) is created. Print, stick, and then post in any postbox. I don’t think I’ve sent as much mail in the last 5 years as the last couple of months – partly because now I’ve discovered this service, putting DVD’s and books on Amazon is a lot less daunting and friends and family have benefited from my new found postal renaissance. It’s easy to work out the postage beforehand (to see if the item is even worth selling) and then no mad rush to the post office to get the parcel sent once it’s gets sold.
Now, despite all this gushy gushy stuff, the service is far from perfect. The doesn’t appear to be a developer API, so no direct integration with Amazon, Ebay, Evo Addressbook, or other service is possible (yet). Hence lots of annoying copying and pasting. It would be useful to be able to build up a page of labels to avoid wasting paper printing each label in the top left corner. Also they use some layer feature on the pdf’s that doesn’t work (yet) in Evince, so I had to install the official Adobe reader.
Now if they can just stop losing mail (and money) things will be golden.
If your in the greater Salt Lake area and love python swing by the meeting this evening! We’re doing a python editor head-to-head, should be fun!
lazyweb, poll time!
When you sleep, how do you use your pillow ?
Let’s say Welcome! to our GSoC students! From now on, you’ll see their blog posts on Planet GNOME with this GSoC mini-banner:
Not many of them have sent me their blog feed info but I’m working on getting most of our students on Planet as soon as possible. Students, it’s time to introduce yourselves! :-)
If you were planning on going to the Summer Olympics in Beijing this year, but have not yet purchased your tickets, then be glad you waited. Turn your trip to see the Olympics into a tour of China, and save money with the whole package. Go to http://skyhoppertravel.com/china2008/ to book your tickets for a 9 day or more tore of china, including the Beijing Olympics, starting at $1499.00 departing from LAX.
It’s time to start looking into a new search method for Thunderbird. One of the major changes planned for Thunderbird is a new and improve search, but what does that mean?
First lets look at what we have for a search system. At a very simple level most search systems break down into two pieces, a search interface for filtering and a results interface for listing. Thunderbird does this in a couple places.
Quick Search
The quick search entry is always at the top right of the Thunderbird window and allows people to search over the current view. The results of a quick search fill into the current view, replacing whatever listing was previously shown.
The Quick Search defaults to searching only the Subject or Sender and will only search mail that Thunderbird has downloaded already. Messages that are not listed in the current view (like in another folder) will not be searched unless that folder is selected, otherwise a person needs to use the Advanced Search.
Advanced Search
Hidden under the Edit Menu and Find Sub-Menu is an advanced search dialog that can make use of the remote mail or news protocol to perform a full search instead of just a local search. The Search Messages dialog provides it’s own search interface as well as it’s own results view directly below the search. While the Search Messages dialog provides some more advanced search methods over the quick search it’s hard to find and difficult to use effectively.
The Search Messages dialog allows for complex search queries to be built with multiple search terms composed of a number of different field type selectors. The queries require a lot of input from the user because of the tight structure used to create them. The same search and results interface code is used for creating mail filters.
Edit -> Find -> Search Messages… |
Advanced Search Dialog |
I was lucky enough to chat with Andrew Gilmartin yesterday and he framed a future goal very well. “We’re not looking to make search an added feature box on the side of Thunderbird“, we’re looking to make search the definitive method for viewing mail.
What does “Search as the definitive viewing method for your mail” mean? That’s a good question and I’m not sure exactly what a good answer is yet. A search would help you find the message you’re looking for, and perhaps a search view never lets you lose that message in the first place. There’s a lot to explore.
Here are two important pieces of a search system and view that need to be examined and somehow exposed in the interface.
Search and Filter
An impediment of the current search system is requiring people to choose a search type (Subject or Sender) before they even enter any text. To help people hunt for the correct item you want to allow for starting their search very broad and then allow them to narrow down that broad search with filters like subject or sender.
The current search system has some speed issues that likely prevented a broad to filter system of searching to be implemented. The mail client Mail.app provides a decent filter bar when searching mail that allows people to see what the current filters are (folder, account) and change them.
Browse and Filter
The SEEK extension is an excellent example of how offering a system of browsing mail by grouped attributes from the start can help people find the item or group of items they were looking for. Instead of starting with a search term you give the person a list of attributes they might use to filter the list of messages.
An inspiring system for a similar searching, browsing, and filtering methods is things, you should try it if you haven’t already.
Moving towards a new search based paradigm will take some adventurous steps and it’s important not to disturb current usage while making those steps. Here are a number of changes to look at making.
Merging Search Interfaces
Each of the two current search interfaces provide some needed features and capabilities, however having two separate interfaces for searching is confusing and difficult to understand. We need to combine the ability to do a quick search with the ability to perform a full search into a single interface with an improved results view.
With a single search interface Thunderbird will be searching the local and remote mail (like IMAP) at the same time. However local results will be listing quickly and remote results will likely take a little more time. Both sets of results, local and remote, can be merged into the same search results view by showing local results instantly and filling in remote results as they arrive.
Offline Cached and Indexed Mail
In order to have a fast search system even while offline Thunderbird needs to do a much better job of caching and indexing mail as it encounters it. With new messages instantly cached and indexed they can be made available to search queries, filters, and views immediately.
This is an excellent time to start thinking about the data mining mail in a way that helps searching messages later. It’s also time to think about making the defaults tuned towards offline usage while still allowing people to control online / offline caching.
Auto Complete
With mail data indexed locally and quickly available Thunderbird should be able to provide a slick and fun auto-complete on search terms it knows about. Auto complete when searching for items you’re already aware exists helps with miss-spelling errors and more complete matching. The awesomebar shows how with just a little broken memory of a title or url you can easily find the page you saw once before.
Our current drive is to investigate some indexing on messages (at least subjects), pull the new auto-complete into Thunderbird, and get a search bar using that fancy auto-complete on mail subjects and hopefully the addition of a couple more fun things. Leave some comments or jump on the newsgroup to participate.
A wire frame of a possible mail search auto-complete
(sorry for my painful english)
In the last weeks, I had trouble using SVN in my University. I talked to the network admin, he said it should be working, and now he is going to fix it. That’s good news for next week. But I couldn’t wait: I did an incredible workaround (”gambiarra” in portuguese… do you know Gambiarra? 
), so incredible that I’m ashamed of writing about it in details.
I’ve been reading several tomboy addins code, and got the idea of the implementations. I’ve already coded something I think will be the “skeleton” for my addin. C# is very easy - but I think it’s weird. Even Java is more elegant… Anyway, I prefer Python ;D.
Monodevelop is very nice. Monodoc is cool. I just didn’t get the point on not using devhelp instead. (Okay, maybe they wanted to keep .NET documentation grouped and isolated from the rest…).
Everything seems to be alright, the only problem now is: I haven’t eat pizza for two weeks. I ran out of money traveling to Porto Alegre (FISL) and now I’m desperated!
P.S.: 10% of my GSoC money is reserved to pizza. Plus other 10%, for home-delivered pizza, and 10% for that frozen pizzas we can buy in supermarkets.
Two shots of a steampunk motorcycle scooter (thanks Corey) and two electric bikes.
There was a camera providing a stereoscopic 3D effect, so I took a couple pictures of myself. Grab your anaglyph glasses for best viewing.
Here's Artoo-Detoo (that the adventurous of you can make for yourself). It's even better than the real thing (according to Gizmodo).
Robbie was there too, but a little less animated.
Winner of the cutest robot at the show (by far) is the Pleo. What you can't tell from the photo is that it's gently moving around (like it's trying to get comfy) and making endearing little noises. Also a picture of one that had been flayed.
This is what I want for Christmas. Or I'll take it as a gift. I'm not proud. Some examples of what you can make with it. Similar CNC PC controlled router for foam.
And finally a miscellaneous set. A really nice home made, computer driven etch-a-sketch.
The Hydraulic Flight Simulator
Outside they had a huge "pond" setup for robotic model warships to shoot at each other and fight to the death (more info). There was a large battleship under several inches of water still shooting away (shells now becoming torpedoes). The top part had come off. I guess the boards inside must of been waterproof although they didn't look it.
In the Dark Room there were several POV machines.
Last batch of photos tomorrow.
/etc/init.d/apport showed this was disabled so I enabled that by editing /etc/default/apport and set enabled=1. After /etc/init.d/apport restart I could happily file away a nautilus bug.To some people, the opposite of increment is excrement.
That is all.
If you are using a new T61 or T61p please check your bios version. You can do this using:
lshal | grep system.firmware.version
If you are not running 7LETB7WW, then you really need to update your BIOS to v2.17-1.08
Symptoms of an old BIOS version are hard hangs when docking/undocking from the smart dock, or the USB might mysteriously stop working with Disabling IRQ #19 in the logs.
What the hell is wrong with some of the people in this country? Some of the other papers have comments as well, but many of them are so sickening I couldn’t link to them.
While i’m here, why did ubuntu 8.04 install a damn beta of firefox? At least it’s easy to downgrade.
Thanks to the superb work of Matteo Zandi the invest applet has undergone some major improvements. If you ever worried about the strange grey square, then the next gnome-applets release if for you.
Matteo has more improvements in the pipeline, but for now here are the before and after shots.
before
after
For those of you who missed the greatness that was LugRadio Live USA, or those lucky lucky people who were there and couldn’t see all the talks, we’re now starting to make videos of the talks available for download! Tony Whitmore, our hyper-competent video guy, is busily processing the videos, and as they’re made available we’re adding them to the LugRadio Live USA schedule. Currently there’s video of the LugRadio live show recording, Ted Haeger talking about “Freedom and the Cloud”, and Emma Jane Hogbin talking about women in open source. More will be appearing over the next few weeks! Keep an eye on that page to find video that you can stream or download in a load of formats.
(Those of you who are hyper-keen can actually get the videos quicker by watching the official video thread in the LugRadio forums, too.)
I thought i’d try something a bit different and recreate some Amiga demo routines I wrote 15 years ago (hmm, was it that long).
Hmm, still some way to go … The next bit of this routine is going to be tricky without the blitter and a bitplane oriented display …
I’ll be attending and giving a presentation at Libre Graphics Meeting this year in Wrocław.
Title: ”Programmer’s hell: working with a UI designer”.
Time: Friday, 14:25.
Lot’s of fun guaranteed, come to feel some hot flames.
A few days ago I made a completely correct analysis of how the Schuko standard for power sockets and plugs, used on the continent of Europe, is superior to the British BS1363 standard.
Today I noticed the fruits of our hard work of trying to convert the British people to the fine uses and traditions of the people who live on the European continent. I saw a carton “Gezeefde Tomaten / Purée de Tomates” at a supermarket in Durham UK.
Just like how politics in Belgium work we have started applying the principle of divide and conqueror: instead of using their native language English, we are now sending them products with dual language branding and descriptions. Just like in our own country. This introduces doubt about their English identity. To divide you first need to generate fear and doubt (Am I really English? I’m not Welsh either? Maybe I’m Dutch? Maybe French!! Wouh!). Then you conqueror them by telling them, with a soft voice:
No no, you are Europe.
Works great! Just make them believe those Belgian “Purée de Tomates or Gezeefde Tomaten” are good. Once they grasped that, tell them: “but the tomatoes and the brand itself (Valfrutta) actually comes from Italy”. That’ll completely confuse them! Then relax them by softly putting your hand on their forehead and say: you are European, don’t be afraid child.
ps. Dear people who don’t live in Europe: this post is sarcasm, irony, a joke.
Today someone at work asked me what graphing component our stats portal uses. I didn’t know either, so I took a look in our website code. Seems we use something called Open Flash Chart. I’m not a big fan of Flash for the obvious reasons, but it sure does get the job done and looks pretty doing it.
Quote from their website:
And it’s really free?!
Yes. Once upon a time I had to deal with a company who sell flash charting components, their component had a bug that I needed fixing, so I emailed them about it asking when it’d be fixed. (Remember that I had paid real money for this software.) They were so incompetent, rude and obnoxious that after three or four weeks of emails I thought to myself “I could learn Flash and Actionscript and write my own charting component, release it as Open Source, host it on sourceforge and build up a community of helpful coders faster than they can fix a single bug.” And that is what I did. And that is why it is free. I guess the moral of the lesson is: don’t piss off your customers.
How can any Free Software hacker not like that story ? Don’t piss off your customers, put into practice.
Havoc’s recent post on git was interesting because it shows how frustrating git can be if you try and treat it as “just another CVS”. From that perspective, git just seems like it’s just some bizarre way for kernel hackers to torture those who just want to get work done.
I turned that corner with git when I learned about “git-rebase -i” and came to the startling realisation that git’s history is editable. Basically, this allows you to change your workflow such that you can hack away at will, commit often and then rewrite the history of your hacking session so that you have a coherent set of patches/commits at the end of it with a useful changelog.
e.g. you can go from:
A1---B1---A2---A3---C1---B2---C2---C3
to:
A1---A2---A3---B1---B2---C1---C2---C3
or even:
A'---B'---C'
Using git rebasing, I found that I could use a similar workflow to using quilt with CVS, or mercurial with its patch queue (mq) extension. The revision history becomes less about tracking the progress of your work, and more a maleable mechanism for preparing patches before submitting upstream.
Red Hat Magazine has a nice article explaining all this, and I even picked up some new tricks to try out:
I have the pleasure of knowing the great mpt. He actually spent a couple of months in Brazil back in 2006 and we ended up sharing the same apartment during this period. One of the great things he masters is the art of writing ascii art mockups of user interfaces As I am a mere beginner might not be the best person to explain this. However I will make an attempt to explain the basic principles, in the effort of having this written down somewhere.
In this blog post I will focus on commonly used interactive widgets available in Gtk+, since these are the ones I tend to care the most about.
GtkEntry
An entry is straight forward, you use brackets in the beginning and the end and underscores to fill up the allocated width of the widget:
[____________]
If you want a text, just replace the underscores with letters
[Hello World____]
GtkButton
Buttons are similar to entries, the main difference is the lack of underscores and the use of capital letters. Icons are usually ignored as they often are rather tricky to represent using the ASCII alphabet. A cancel button looks like this:
[ CANCEL ]
GtkToggleButton and GtkRadioButton
Toggle buttons uses brackets around the toggle part and no brackets around the rest. If the value of the radio should be active, use a lowercase x to say so:
[ ] Buy milk and cheese for breakfast [x] Eat strawberries after lunch
Radio buttons are similar but uses parenthesis and o, eg:
(o) Fresh fish ( ) Rotten eggs
GtkSpinButton
Spin buttons are similar to entries, but they have two small arrows on the right hand side. To represent the arrows, use H:
[1234 H]
This might not look good in all fonts, but it’s the best that can be done, at least as far as I know.
GtkComboBox
A combobox tend to be represented again by using brackes in the beginning and the end. To represent the arrow, use a lower case v and separate it from the text by using a | (pipe) sign.
[ Stockholm | v]
GtkDialog
Prett simple, use _ (underscore) and | (pipe) for the borders, titles and window manager buttons can usually be skipped since they are mostly noise to us in this context:
________________________________| || Do you want to close the open || document and lose the changes || made to it? || [ CONTINUE ] [ QUIT ] ||________________________________|
These are the widgets I usually end up using in my mockups. Have any missed any important onces? Or I have I done any serious mistakes? Comments appreciated!
I often end up reading code using GtkListStore in Python, either in existing projects or on irc when someone asks me to fix their program. It’s pretty straight-forward to using the GtkTreeModel interface and it’s various implementations such as GtkListStore and GtkTreeStore. However, due to lack of proper documentation, the small pieces of Python sugar on top of the raw C wrappers is seldomly used. In this blog post I will attempt to document the most useful one in hope that some popular search engines will pick this up and help someone in the future.
Construction
For starters, let’s look into construction of GtkListStores:
model = gtk.ListStore(gobject.TYPE_STRING, gobject.TYPE_INT, gobject.TYPE_FLOAT)
This creates a liststore with three columns, a string, an integer and a float. The column types are specified using the constants available in the gobject python module. Since I’m hardly a normal person, I’ll immediatelly get frustrated when I see that kind of code. Instead, I wish people could write the following code instead, which is shorter and thus easier to parse:
model = gtk.ListStore(str, int, float)
It does exactly the same things, interally str is mapped to the gobject.TYPE_STRING constant and so on.
Appending data
At some point during the life time of a program you want to insert data into a model. A common way of doing is that is
the following:
iter = model.append()
model.set(iter, 0, “foobar”)
model.set(iter, 1, 1138)
model.set(iter, 2, 3.14)
This appends a new row and sets the values”foobar”,1138 and 3.14 to the three columns. You can avoid the three different calls by sending in a list to append as the first argument, eg:
model.append([”foobar”, 1138, 3.14])
Which again, is the exact same thing. (Modula saving a reference to the inserted tree iter of course)
Fetching values
To fetch a value from the a model you usually get an iter, for example from a selection:
model, path = selection.get_selected()
value = model.get_value(model.get_iter(path) , 0)
Two things can be simplified here: First of all we take advantage that model implementes a list like api, you can just access the model list a list, eg: model[n]. Secondly you can send in either an index, path or iter as n, so the example above is simplified to:
model, path = selection.get_selected()
value = model[path][0]
Iteration
Iteration over all the values in the model is usually done something like this:
iter = model.get_iter_first()
while True:
value = model.get_value(iter, 0)
iter = model.iter_next(iter)
if iter is None:
break
Which can also be considerably simplified:
for row in model:
value = model[row][0]
Also note that using the variable name iter in a python program is always wrong, since there is a builtin variable with the same name. Avoid the name iter, and use for instance titer instead, which is almost as short and a bit clearer.
One of the advantages of working in a biology lab is getting deliveries of stuff in dry ice and getting to play with the dry ice afterwards. Sadly, while dry ice is clearly very cool (a-ha ha ha ha ha (dies)) it makes a lousy way of cooling down your drinks[1]. With a latent heat of sublimation of merely 199kJ/kg, CO2 draws less energy out of the liquid than ice's latent head of melting of 334kJ/kg. That's easily dealt with by using larger blocks of dry ice, but the fundamental problem seems to be that most of the sublimed CO2 boils straight out of the glass and just gently cools the atmosphere instead. Maybe ethanol cubes are the way forward.Altlaw, the restoring-caselaw-to-the-public-domain-where-it-belongs project I’ve been involved with on and off since last year, just got a new feature; it now parses the cases that are cited and shows them as sidebar links. It hasn’t propagated to all cases yet, but you can see an example here. (I stumbled across this by looking up that case for my exam tomorrow, rather than because anyone actually told me what was going on. Clearly I should be subscribed to the site’s news feed. :) Still needs some love, but it is great to see it getting there- impressive what can be done these days on a very serious shoestring.
I subscribe to cairo-list just to read what Carl Worth has to say. Carl is smart, fair, level-headed, perceptive, very sympathetic to people that come with problems, yet opinionated as well. It's refreshing, inspiring, and humbling at the same time.
This blathering inspired by one random post, although it could have been any other post just as well.
Tamir Khason published an interesting approach at hosting standalone Silverlight applications.
His solution is a Windows.Forms application that hosts a Windows.Forms.WebControl and inside the WebControl he hosts Silverlight.
Unlike my proposal for standalone Silverlight Applications that is currently Moonlight-specific (and currently limited to Linux/X11) this approach works on Windows with .NET and with Linux using Mono and Moonlight:
Left side: .NET hosting WebControl and Silverlight on Windows; Right side: Mono hosting WebControl and Moonlight running on Linux.
In addition to hosting the WebControl for hosting Silverlight, a thread is running to dispatch http requests locally using HttpListener. HttpListener is an embeddable HTTP server that is part of the class libraries, and exposes a very limited API. You can host ASP.NET with HttpListener by doing the bindings by hand, or you could use our Mono.WebServer library (part of our XSP/mod_mono distribution) to allow your applications to have a fully hosted ASP.NET server.
Mono.WebServer is what iFolder uses to embed the ASP.NET server to expose SOAP-based WebServices to clients.
Of course, this currently does not work on MacOS X as we do have no implementation of WebControl for Windows.Forms on OSX, something that a contributor might want to look into.
You can get the source for the sample from Tamir's page.
We are looking for consultants to work on a six to nine month project at Novell to write a prototype for a Visual Studio addin in C# or C++ that will connect Visual Studio and its debugging infrastructure to a remote Linux machine running Mono and the Mono Debugger.
If you are interested in working with us in this project, you must have good C# and C++ skills, experience with networking and protocol design, knowledge of COM and assembly language programming are pluses.
We are looking to bring two consultants for the duration of this project. If you are interested, please click this link and attach your resume, pointers to some existing projects of yours and so on.
I created a project page and a roadmap for my as-yet-unnamed (or rather, currently named poorly) SoC project. It can be found here, although there's currently not a whole lot of information up there beyond a basic roadmap. I guess this means I've officially started "work" for the summer.
The public library of Amsterdam, i.e. the Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam (Wikipedia entry, check out the pictures!) not only offers a enormous amount of books, cd’s and several reading and conference rooms inside their great building, but also offers free access to their wireless network, so that you can access the internet.
Before I start, a few words to help people find this blog post using Dutch query terms: Dit artikel beschrijft hoe ik onder Linux het draadloos internet in de Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam aan de praat heb gekregen. Het draadloze netwerk werkt goed, maar alleen als je weet hoe je het moet instellen!
First, you need to register an account. Instructions can be found at various places in the building, and you should activate it by showing your ID at the reception desk near the entrance.
Then you need to configure your computer. However, only instructions to set up the wlan in Windows and Mac operating systems. Linux users like me are left in the dark.
It took me quite some time to get it to work, mostly because none of the Network Manager configuration options worked for me. That is, none of the options provided in the popup window that asks for connection authentication tokens and the security setting (WEP, WPA, and so on). I’m using version 0.6.6, by the way. The trick is that you need to use the connect to other wireless network option instead of just picking the right network from the menu:
Network Manager menu. Choose the highlighted option, not the OBA Hotspot Service item.
The next step is to configure the network settings. Choose WPA Enterprise, fill in the network name, specify PEAP and Dynamic WEP, and fill in your username and password. The screenshot below shows the result:
Network settings for the OBA network
Hit the connect button and a connection will be made. That’s it: happy surfing! The internet connection is quite fast and pretty much unrestricted, e.g. you can use SSH without trouble, for instance. This is definitely not always the case, e.g. you can’t in the Public Library of Den Haag (The Hague).
For completeness, here’s an alternative, manual way (hacky and ugly) if you don’t (want to) use Network Manager. You may stop reading here if you’re using Network Manager (I heartily recommend it). Beware, the next few paragraphs require you to know how to work with a shell and how to edit system configuration files properly! Only proceed if you know what you’re doing!
You will have to edit the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf configuration file manually (create it if it’s not there already) to be able to connect to the OBA Hotspot Service wireless network. The relevant snippets you need can be dow
