inactivity log for davidz

Earlier today Richard and I did a DeviceKit (the set of projects replacing HAL) presentation for some other group here at Red Hat. You can see the slides here and here.

Perhaps of interest to the GNOME community, there’s also screenshots of Palimpsest, an upcoming Disk Utility library and application for GNOME. Most of this is already available in Fedora’s development branch, dubbed Rawhide, but won’t be installed by default in Fedora 10. Right now I’m busy with PolicyKit stuff but the plan is definitely to get a gnome-disk-utility mailing list going soon and get this stuff integrated throughout GNOME (I’ve already made sure it’s easy to plug into gvfs for example).

For example, I learned the other day that my disk is failing (actually, as mjg59 pointed out, it’s wrong to use the word FAILING since it’s Old-Age. Easily fixed.). Now, it would definitely be useful to have a notification bubble indicating this. This is pretty trivial to write using the DeviceKit-disks API; just monitor the org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks.Device:drive-smart-is-failing property. Of course the gnome-disk-utility libraries (there’s one at the GLib level and one at the GTK+ level) wraps this nicely. In fact the gnome-disk-utility library at the GTK+ level should probably provide the code for doing this status icon. Something to discuss. Hence why a mailing list and more community involvement in the gnome-disk-utility project is needed.

Anyway, the goal is to port the most of the Fedora desktop to use DeviceKit instead of HAL for the Fedora 11 time frame.

Andy Oram wrote a nice piece on PolicyKit detailing what it is and some of the plans for the future. I also did a short walk-through recently on one of our staff meetings here at Red Hat, there are some pseudo slides here. On the topic of coverage I’ve recently add unit tests to all the library sources and gcov tells me we’re at 59%. Not too shabby.

I think, over the past 3.5 years I’ve been working on free software, I have sent more than 5,000 mails, all in English, to various mailing lists, most of them with more than a few hundred subscribers. It’s always a bit weird (even after living in Massachusetts for more than 2.5 years) to use your second language and I believe it will stay that way the rest of my life. Which is fine and all.

Sketchy Dane

In general, I’ve found that native English speakers are very nice to non-native English speakers. In stark contrast, for example, are natives of my own country Denmark; whenever a foreigner attempts to speak Danish everything becomes a bit weird. One common thing is that the native Danes try to switch to conversation to English because it makes them less uncomfortable. I guess there are many reasons for this difference of behavior; first, Danish is a small, insignificant (and dying) language, most people speak English anyway and not a lot of native English speakers have a second language at all. But it’s also a cultural thing. In particular, I find that it’s very easy to live among the Americans; they’re friendly (actually, I jokingly tend to say “it’s like living with the smurfs”; many, not all though, people here are just more optimistic about the future than in Denmark and the EU.). The fact that English is a second language have never been an issue for me at all.

Sketchy German

Until today. I guess there’s a first time for everything, the topic of my native language came up on the Fedora live cd mailing list just recently. Response here. Time to watch How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too) again I suppose.

The whole thing just makes me a little sad inside.

Barely back in Boston (UTC -0500) after the xmas break in Denmark (UTC +0100), I’m now in Sydney (UTC +1100) for linux.conf.au 2007. I don’t feel jetlagged though.

Coogee, NSW, Australia (not my bottles)

Managed to sleep a lot on my 24-hour journey; I was fortunate enough to be traveling with blizzard. We even got picked up at the airport; I suppose Chris’ description of us to the organizers was somewhat accurate

Just look for crazy man and fisheye boy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherblizzard/306028359/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidz/235769935/

(Together, we fight crime!)

Now to check out of my hotel and find the campus of UNSW. Times are good.

Looking at myself or looking at you?

• Just booked tickets for LCA 2007 in Sydney, Australia in January 2007. Am also taking some vacation to bum around .au the week following the conference. Am also planning to submit a proposal for the GNOME miniconf.
• Sad to see yet another defector. Here’s a very insightful comment from davej about some of the damage done to the free software community.
• Less-than-insightful rant about “crappy HAL” that frankly pisses me off.
• Spent around 3-4 days optimizing HAL for CPU and memory consumption, here are the difference it makes on the 770, courtesy of Rob Taylor
• Am almost done with a huge freakin patch for activation on the system message bus. Will need to write down how this relates to some of the init replacement projects out there; here are some thoughts about that for now, but it really deserves a full blog entry.
• With the D-Bus bits (system bus activation) in place, I can move forward and do some PolicyKit stuff that requires the D-Bus bits in order to be useful.
• Trying to spend lots of time on work-stuff since personal life is a bit busted at the moment.

I’ve just released HAL 0.5.7.1 “Unmaintained piece of crap” and all vendors should upgrade as Linux kernels later than 2.6.17 will break HAL 0.5.7 (e.g. HAL will break in hardware detection, not the kernel). It should be a smooth upgrade and credit goes to Kay Sievers for the patches.

Introspection

Just a few hours after my last entry, Jonathan Corbet of LWN found me at OLS and said it wasn’t LWN badmouthing HAL, he was just reporting what was going on at the kernel summit. So, sorry if I made it sound like it was LWN’s fault, it wasn’t, I do believe in free press and LWN is just an awesome resource. Oh, I just find the whole “unmaintained piece of crap” thing slightly amusing (hence the release name for 0.5.7.1) - the community around HAL is alive and well even though I’m not presently around doing HAL stuff as much as I like.

I appear to be in Ontario, Canada. More specifically I’m in Ottawa though hours last night was spent at a bar in Quebec.

In Logan’s terminal 3 enroute to OLS

Yesterday, Kay and I gave a talk on Dynamic Device Handling on the Modern Desktop and I think it was well received. Yeay!

Oh, and I’ve even got to say that hal-device-manager (the small python GTK+ app for viewing the hal device objects and their properties) was an “unmaintained piece of crap” alluding in a funny way to the recent LWN article badmouthing HAL. Some people in the audience laughed. Lots of excellent questions too. Good times.

I’ve uploaded the slides from mine and Kay’s talk here. Enjoy.

Got back from GUADEC and Spain on Sunday. Nice conference; I liked the touch with seven days instead of three even though it was a bit exhausting in the end. I’ve also got sick around Saturday so spent that day in bed in my hotel room before traveling back Sunday. As a result of all this, I’m way behind on mail so to those who I owe a reply, hang in there, I’ll get back to you eventually.

Robert and Joey as batshit insane movie stars?

I’ve now uploaded the slides from my talk (ODP, PDF).

Taking a break from the action at the Fluendo party

I enjoyed the 4th of July fireworks from my balcony in Somerville, MA overlooking Boston

Zeppelin just after dropping it’s payload on Boston, MA?

All my GUADEC pictures are available here.