One more package update, one more bug to comment on, one bugfix to prepare for inclusion. One release party to survive ;-) and then - Crete, here I come.

I really need a vacation. There will be no network, and I won't take a camera. See you all in 2.5 weeks.

Add classes and concerts, tunes and songs, long session nights, old friends and little sleep. Stir and simmer for three days. Enjoy without distractions from the world beyond the castle walls.

There is a new motivation campaign for Germany. Or germans. I am not sure I understand its purpose, but at least they built the website with OpenCMS, which is of course always commendable in anything done by the government. On the downside, they managed to screw up browser detection so that the site stays completely blank in Firefox. Oh well.

Managed to run two rounds in the park near my place (to the locals: shut up, I know it's a small park, but I have to start somewhere). Lesson learned today: don't listen to Irish flute music while running, it completely confuses my breathing - probably because it's a wind instrument, or because I play the stuff myself. I'll take some electronic music next time, guaranteed without human breath in it.

Many fallen leaves and acorns on the ground, which were definitely not there last week.

Went to the airport yesterday, spotting planes and especially: watching them not crash, one after the other. I'll fly again in two weeks - this time on vacation, no booths, no customers ;-) - and don't like my own nervousness. I just want to enjoy the view.

So tomorrow I'll leave town to go to my first Novell BrainShare in Barcelona and present the openSUSE project to Novell customers there. It's a rather expensive event for visitors, and I have no idea what kind of people will be there with what kind of questions, and if they want to hear about that hacker-community-freak project at all ;-)

The discussions on the openSUSE list gain momentum as the more difficult questions get asked - how will we manage to create a truly open project when we have to control the distribution rather tightly to keep the quality? Do we have to keep that control everywhere? Do we need only one distribution, or maybe three trees as Debian has, or a completely different model? How much work can we expect from people who want a feature in the distribution which we just won't accept? Is it ok to say - hey, build your own packages, create your own CDs, here's how we can help you?

What can a linux distributor _really_ give back to the community if not the knowledge how to make distributions? (Employing hackers, sure. We do, too.)

At the same time 10.0 needs time for the final polishing, so nobody here really had the time to fully participate in these discussions, but they are necessary, keep them coming. And if you're not yet on the opensuse mailing list, hop on now.

I spent some time last night hacking up some Avahi bindings for C#, using the DBus API. The wrapper is here, and a little test app is here. The test app registers a ‘foobar’ service, and then lists all services in the default (I think?) domain. Obligatory ‘screenshot’ below. Unfortunately, I ran into some dbus-sharp bugs while doing this. You’ll need this patch to dbus-sharp in order to use it. You can also grab a dll here.

snorp@sackbut misc/avahi/avahi-sharp % mono test.exe Service 'Living Room' at DVR-8477.local:80 Txt: TSN=54000000000000 Resolved DVR-8477.local to 192.168.1.105 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.105 to DVR-8477.local Service 'Now Playing on Living Room' at DVR-8477.local:443 Txt: TSN=54000000000000 Resolved DVR-8477.local to 192.168.1.105 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.105 to DVR-8477.local Service 'Now Playing on Living Room' at DVR-8477.local:443 Txt: TSN=54000000000000 Resolved DVR-8477.local to 192.168.1.105 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.105 to DVR-8477.local Service 'iTunes_Ctrl_60AA03D0FEE58A7F' at homer.local:3689 Txt: DbId=10000 Resolved homer.local to 192.168.1.103 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.103 to homer.local Service 'snorp’s Music' at homer.local:3689 Txt: Password=false Resolved homer.local to 192.168.1.103 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.103 to homer.local Service 'Remote Terminal on sackbut' at sackbut.local:22 Resolved sackbut.local to 192.168.1.101 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.101 to sackbut.local Service 'sackbut [00:0d:60:36:95:4d]' at sackbut.local:9 Resolved sackbut.local to 192.168.1.101 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.101 to sackbut.local Service 'foobar' at sackbut.local:8080 Txt: Resolved sackbut.local to 192.168.1.101 Reverse resolved 192.168.1.101 to sackbut.local

In case you haven't heard ;-) : beta 3 is also available for PowerPC now!

I'll take it home with me this evening to install and test it on my PowerBook (which at the moment runs something closely resembling SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 from the internal install sources).

Michael made me watch four episodes of Babylon 5 in a row in order to keep me awake until 10pm, and I really slept 8 hours without much interruption, all of them while it was dark outside. Success!

Back at work I'm catching up on opensuse mail and packaging work, bracing myself for beta 2.

Thanks for inclusion in the planets. For those who don't know me, I've been working for SUSE and then for Novell since 2002, mainly on package maintenance, java related stuff and some internal tools. You might have seen my name on the LinuxChix lists where I've been quite active for a while, too.

Ah, the cluetrain manifesto.

I remember reading it when it came out, this fresh breeze of basic common sense. And the hype it created in the business media (or media business?) world. And how little, if anything, changed. Just words.

The world, even our little part of it, is as it is not because people don't know better, but because enough people want it that way. A saddening thought.

I actually forgot the most frequently asked question: "How do you pronounce SUSE?" ;-)

After an uneventful, if bumpy, flight in an Airbus which thankfully didn't burst into flames at the end of the runway, but just did what it's supposed to do, I'm back home now. With a pile of new books - I had time for trips both to Borders and City Lights Bookstore while in San Francisco. Interesting catches among them are "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, two novels by Ursula K. LeGuin who I adore, and an Introduction to the Mind by John Searle.

I'm already finished with the first one. It is a high level introduction to the current state of neurobiology regarding how our neocortex manages to store and handle information, and a new (well, to me it was new) theory how intelligence is created there. Basically he says that everything is achieved by recognizing patterns in the world around us and making predictions what will happen next based on them. It is an interesting read, though unfortunately non-trivial enough for me not to be able to sit down and hack up a quick simulation of the workings of the neocortex as he's describing them. ;-) If it was that simple, we'd be surrounded by simulated brains already.