Yesterday a thunderstorm passed through. There was lightning. Apparently some of it got close enough to fry some of my electrical things. Specifically, the stereo, gamecube, and wifi AP. Also, the laptop’s AC adapter was destroyed (but I have a new one thanks to IBM and all is well).

So today at lunch I went and bought a new wifi switch. I picked up a Linksys WRT54G, the one that has open firmware. So far it rules. No, I mean it totally rules. You should run, not walk, to the nearest Best Buy (or whatever). The open firmware lets you do local dns stuff. So you can have actual dns names for the machines on your LAN. This is the feature I have wanted most in these sort of boxes, and none of them appear to have it (except for this alternative firmware, from sveasoft). Also supposedly the sveasoft firmware has other neat stuff like a VPN server.

Red Carpet

Also I’ve worked the rest of the bugs out of the yum support for rcd. I think it’s pretty solid now. It even avoids downloading the headers you already have (much like yum itself does). I should commit it soon. I know Shaver and Vlad have been using rcd on FC2, so it might be nice to get some of the yum repos that don’t also have apt ones.

I’ve been thinking about writing a tool that creates an open carpet repo out of a yum or apt one. That way apt/yum repo maintainers can just run this magical script without having to do the (relatively painless) process of setting up an open-carpet repo ‘from scratch’. I wonder if something like this would help open-carpet adoption?

Oh, I forgot to blog about this earlier, but anyone that has seen the “rcd eats 99% of my cpu” bug will be happy to know that the latest release fixes it. If you use rcd and see this bug in the latest release please report it. I promise I will hunt it down and kill it dead. Either that or I will get smart people like Tambet or Dan Winship to do it for me (who fixed it in the first place).

GNOME

A long time ago (like a year or more) I worked on some code that allowed you to migrate windows from one display/screen to another. Basically it was just some X message passing stuff that ended up calling gtk_window_set_screen(). I wrote a spec for it and posted it to wm-spec-list, but nobody really seemed that interested. I’ve started working on it again, and I think I’ll give the spec/patch another go. There is lots of badness in gtk+ with closing displays, and that sucks. Also there doesn’t seem to be an async way of opening a display, so if you try to migrate a window to someplace that’s not listening on the right port or whatever, it blocks the GUI.

Apparently Red Hat’s FUD campaign extends to more than just mono. From a computing.co.uk interview with Matthew Szulik:

Why Red Hat versus Novell-SuSE or Sun JDS on the desktop?

They’re all proprietary except us. They all have proprietary technology inside, not 100 per cent open source software. They continue to lock customers in to limit choice.

If you buy the Sun desktop, you’re going to buy into the proprietary Sun architecture. With SuSE there’s Red Carpet, integrated with other Novell technologies, still proprietary.

I’m sorry, did I miss something? Was RHN recently freed unto the world? Sigh.

I took some time today to update my wireless patches to latest GNOME CVS, and the latest development release of wireless-tools. If you would like to try it, here are instructions:

1. Get the latest wireless-applet and wireless-tools patches
2. Get the latest wireless-tools (version 27pre22) and apply iwlib_jwillcox_scanning_27pre22.diff to it, install it, etc.
3. Unpack the wireless-applets patch tarball thingy in the root of the gnome-applets tree. Apply the gnome_applets_jwillcox_wireless_v4.diff patch. Run autogen, make, etc.
4. Enjoy.

This still only works on Red Hat systems due to the usage of consolehelper. You can fix that by putting appropriate root-getting-and-essid-setting-and-renew-dhcp-lease bits for your distro in the wireless-applet-helper script.

Update:

Screenshot for those of you who haven’t seen it.

So, I’ve ditched MovableType in favor of WordPress. I have to say I’m fairly impressed with it. The installation (including the MT import process) was incredibly simple and painless, save one problem with the dates for the imported entries which was hosing the RSS feed.

Hooray for Free Software.

Nautilus

I actually did some nautilus hacking recently. It had been a while, and it was pretty fun. I added desktop item editing to the property window.

It’s pretty simple. Way better than the UI in gnome-desktop-item-edit, IMO. Anyway, Dave branched nautilus the other day and that’s now in CVS. Now someone needs to fix the UI for adding new launchers/links :)

Work

I also added yum support to the Red Carpet daemon this week. This should be particularly interesting to Fedora users, since there seem to be a lot of apt and yum repositories for that (and rcd supports both now). I haven’t committed the patch yet due to some other stuff going on, but if anyone wants to try it just mail me.

Also, Petreley sucks. That is all.

So, haven’t blogged in a pretty long time. Lots has happened. Most notably, I got engaged to my long-time girlfriend, Amy! We set the date for July. I’m really happy! :)

Just got back from BrainShare. It was pretty cool. I took some pics, but I don’t have them pulled off the camera yet. I think we were all kind of in awe about the number of Large Monkey Buttons plastered all over :)

the floor near the mono booth

So, more wireless applet hacking today. This time I fixed the build so it installs all the nifty pam magic. Patches for all. Apply this patch to the latest wireless-tools development version, and unpack/apply this one to gnome-applets CVS. You’ll want to pass something like —sysconfdir=/etc to configure to get the pam stuff working.

[Disclaimer] I have only tested this on my own machine, which is running Fedora Core 1. Other RedHat systems will probably work. Basically, “ESSID=<essid> /sbin/ifup <interface>” needs to work, and you need consolehelper.

Spent some time today and yesterday hacking on the wireless applet some more. Now you can double-click a network to switch to it (sets the essid and gets a dhcp lease). I was thinking of what the applet should do while its in the process of switching. Getting a IP can take some time. For now, at least, I just made it insensitive with a “switching…” message.

Anyway, I finally sent a patch to Jean today (the wireless-tools maintainer) for the scanning stuff. Hopefully it’ll make it into the next wireless-tools release. It’s a shame I didn’t get this stuff done before the feature freeze….

I also spent a few minutes on recent-files stuff this week. I reverted the (unstable and unfinished) changes I made last year, and applied a patch from bugzilla that fixed some NFS file locking issues. I think by gnome 2.8, dbus will have matured and maybe we’ll be able to rewrite recent-files as a dbus service instead of the file spec we have now….

I’ve been hacking on the wireless applet a bit the last couple days. This is the result:

Right now it just lists the access points and the quality. It would be sweet if you could switch to another essid from there, etc.

Paolo has been working on recent-files stuff. I feel guilty for not helping him yet, so maybe I’ll work on that tonight.

My Dad’s old car (which I have been driving) was getting in pretty bad shape, so I bought a new (used) car on Saturday. It’s a green VW Passat. It’s totally sexy. I took pictures but don’t have them up anywhere.

Work isn’t taking as much of my time now, which is good I guess. Unfortunately, after hacking all day at work I have little desire to hack on GNOME, which is bad. The API/ABI freeze is on Monday and recent-files STILL isn’t ready to go in. Paolo has been working hard on a new document model and other good stuff, though, so maybe we’ll make it. OO.o has its own implementation, though, so we need to coordinate with those guys on what is happening…