GUADEC

Was really good overall. I'm sorry it's over now, it was a lot of fun. I definitely want to go back next year, which looks like it'll be a bit easier, since it's going to be in Germany.

I slept in on the last day, so I missed a few of the morning sessions, which is too bad. Even though they were more political-type stuff on the third day (which isn't really the main interest for me), one of the organisers pointed out that it's in all our best interests to ensure that we have a legal environment that is welcoming to open source and free software.

Had dinner with the NITI brigade, Luis and Frédéric on Wednesday, which was good. wlach, Luis and I talked a bit about Novell's plans for packaging their future desktop stuff. It'll only be packaged for SuSe, but they're hoping to get most of their stuff upstream a lot faster than they did in the XD2 days. Only time will tell, I guess.

Frédéric is the GNOME packager for Mandrake, so it was interesting to talk to him. Packaging GNOME seems a huge a task for one person, and I know how difficult packaging stuff can be, from my Expression experience. Sure, you can have an autobuilder, but when the builds don't work in the first place (as is the case with most spec files shipped in GNOME) you still have a lot of work to do. Interestingly, all of Mandrake's package-building tools are apparently open-source, including some cool-sounding cluster-like stuff (which may just be on top of distcc). Should definitely check that out sometime.

Nat and some other Novell-ites at Paddy's

After dinner, pretty much all GUADEC people descended on Paddy's, where I had an interesting discussion with a Finnish guy, Casper, about GNOME System Tools, a project to provide nice GNOME interfaces for configuring stuff that usually requires root access, like network interfaces. RedHat already have some stuff, but the UIs are pretty crappy and they ask for the root password. Ideally, authentication would be tied into sudo, like with OS X, so that when you want to make administrator changes, you're asked for your password, and then get a 5-minute (or something) window. The real trick, though, is to have some kind of pluggable system so that it can work on any distro. Maybe the recent open-sourcing of YaST will help with that, since although the YaST GUI is crap, it does apparently provide a decent API. If distros start to adopt it, it could really help the configuration situation in Linux.

Nat and Dave Camp play football outside the flats

Finally, to top it all off, KLM lost my bag yesterday. They suck.

Norway

Ok, aside from the prices and veggie-unfriendly food, this really is the greatest country ever. Where else do people called "Middelfart" get married?

Middelfart is the bride, so the name won't last (unfortunately?)

In addition, I guess sex-overgrep (whatever it is) is a big deal here.

It's like you grepped your disk for sex too much, leading to disk failure Ottawa

I went to Ottawa today, to see my friend Mel from Calgary, who was in town. dcoombs bugged me about having been to weird places like Norway and China, but never having been to Ottawa. I got him back though, since he's never been to Vancouver.

Mel across the river from parliament

Anyway, now I have been to Ottawa, if only for a day. I gotta say, it seems like a really nice city. We had dinner at a nice sushi place called Kinki. With a name like that, how could it not be good? I must say, it's nice to be back in Canada, where beer is less than $12 a pint and veggie food is pretty easy to find.

A polar bear statue near the restaurant

July 08, 2004 (link)

Work

Released ExchangeItEvolution 0.9.1 a few days ago. It contains some nice fixes since 0.9.0, and has been working very well for me so far. 0.9.0 was a bit rushed and contained a couple kind of embarassing bugs (eg. contact duplication) but it was definitely good to have something released that we could point to at GVUADEC.

hub joined us this week, and it should be good working with him.

Life

Had a good time celebrating pphaneuf's birthday tonight. He's really getting up there! I have to savour these years where I can bug people in their 20s about being old before it starts happening to me, I guess. Although some close friends of mine in Calgary just bought a house, and some others are getting married, so I guess it's beginning...

July 20, 2004 (link)

Life

Got up at 9 (!) today. I was feeling pretty groggy, but I got my lazy arse onto my bike and headed up the mountain before work. It felt great, so I'm going to try to start doing it more often. I'm also going to make an effort to get into work before noon, like jnc, though I'm not going to go to quite the same measures if I fail. I'm typically pretty good about getting in between noon and one (well, if you can count that as "good" in any kind of way :) but last week that slipped twice to 2, which really is too late to be starting your day...

Work

Handed off the ExchangeItEvolution stuff to hub. Sucker! Seriously though, I'm sure he'll do a great job.

I've been given a few things to do involving nss, PAM and UniConf, which is interesting because it's the kind of stuff I don't usually do. I'm not sure exactly what I'll be doing for the rest of the term after these few things, though.

Linux/PPC

So I recently installed Linux on my iBook. My reasoning was that I spent about 95% of my time in OS X using Terminal and Safari, the other 5% breaking down into iTunes and iPhoto, both of which are kinda cool, but not earth-shattering. Plus I wanted to be able to do GNOME development stuff more easily.

My Linux/PPC adventures started with Gentoo. Their PPC support was pretty decent; the LiveCD had support for sound, airport, and ethernet, so I could listen to music while installing. Genkernel also managed to build me a kernel that had everything necessary to support all the power management stuff (CPU frequency scaling, sleep, LCD powersave, etc.) without any intervention. And, surprisingly, there was a pretty large library of binary PPC packages available. However, it turned out not to be quite large enough; every once in a while, there'd be something fairly big (like galeon) for which there was no binary package, and since the machine has only a 700MHz G3, compiling stuff like galeon tends to get old pretty fast.

Then I tried Fedora. Wow, what a huge waste of time. I'm sure Fedora is pretty reasonable on x86, but their PPC stuff sure has a long way to go. They don't even have an install CD; you have to boot from one CD, and then install over NFS. And there are extremely few binary packages available for Fedora/PPC. Ironically, Gentoo had way more binaries available. Plus, yum must be the absolute worst package tool in existence. It took the stupid thing 10 minutes to figure out the dependencies to install totem! 10 minutes! It compiled in less than that on Gentoo, for crying out loud! Oh, and I had to recompile the Fedora kernel to do such eccentric tasks as, say, setting my clock. Lovely.

So I finally settled on Debian. I'm not the biggest fan, as some of you know, but nothing beats Debian for cross-platform support. The default 2.6 kernel available in unstable right now supports all the power-management hardware, and getting it going was just a few apt-gets and Googles away. I still maintain that update-rc.d is the worst init script tool ever written, however.

Ah well, live and learn, I guess. (Whatever that means.)

July 23, 2004 (link)

Kernels

pphaneuf: I use kernels straight off kernel.org, and have for years, without having a problem. So I'd be kinda peeved if they left it "up to the distributors" to stabilise it. I mean dude, have you tried a freaking Fedora or Debian kernel lately? They're pretty crappy. The Debian kernel on my laptop, while it does support power management stuff, likes to kernel panic when playing DVDs (discovered this today) so I'll be compiling a vanilla one shortly...

Ever since my first days with Slackware, kernel.org kernels were a bastion of sanity for me. So seeing that go makes me sad for sentimental reasons as much as it does for the practical reasons above. sniff

Work

I briefly had 0 open bugs filed against me today. Wow. It felt kinda weird. Don't worry though, the situation has since been alleviated: mrwise assigned me a UniConf bug, and I got a few more since then too.

Having 0 bugs is the kind of thing you don't want to say too loudly around the office :) It looks as if there are a bunch of interesting options for things I could be doing for the rest of the term, though, so that's cool.

hub seems to be making good progress with the ExchangeItEvolution plugin: it now actually tells you when you entered bad auth info, and prompts for the password again (ooh, so advanced :) I'm kind of wondering what the "roadmap" will be for officially releasing it, as it's looking increasingly sane these days. It runs for weeks on my box without complaining, etc.

Heat

Man, it's pretty hot in Montréal these days. I don't think the temperature is actually all that high, but it's been incredibly humid these past few days. Our office is air-conditioned, of course, but my apartment is not, which means I tend to employ some of pphaneuf's clothing practices around the apartment (sorry mrwise!) I guess he's making a lot of converts, since he got dcoombs too.

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