A month or two ago I was watching a (bogus) documentary about M. Night Shyamalan. This was the first time I’d ever seen what he looked like, and immediately, I realized something. I think maybe my boss is making blockbuster movies on the side. Here is my proof:

Tell me those are different people. Seriously.

So, we finally got some wedding photos back. I think this one is nice :)

I really wish they would stop saying things like this:

Red Hat’s software technology is 100 percent open source. If you want to put us in a box, then the most obvious box is that Red Hat only, exclusively sells and supports open source — GPL’d software.

…

Quite frankly, if tomorrow we decided to release a closed piece of software, literally half the engineers would quit on principal that day.

That’s Paul Salazar, European Marketing Director for Red Hat. Can someone please mail me an URL to the source code for Satellite?

I hate Todd.

Kris “released” his whir2il code today. I haven’t tried it yet, but the results he has had with it so far are very promising. PInvoke is great and all, but being able to actually compile existing C/C++ code to bytecode is just so freaking sweet.

I moved today. It went pretty well. Amy and her parents helped out a lot so that was good. Rupert is back online so that made people happy.

A guy (Darren Brierton) has been mailing me lately about rcd on fc2, and eventually he told me he wanted to get rcd into fedora. He totally rules.

9 days till wedding :)

Update: I committed mono bindings for libredcarpet to CVS this week. Ph33r.

I totally wanted to go to GUADEC, but couldn’t for various reasons (time and money, mostly). It was almost like being there, though, when I was able to make fun of Dave during his talk by proxy. Seriously. I think next year each room should have a projector showing a moderated IRC channel where people can ask questions.

Work has been going well lately, finally getting back into the groove after being pulled in different directions for a while.

Wedding plans are progressing, invitations went out last week. Really starting to hit home now :)

There is this intersection near my apartment where quite frequently there will be someone begging for money or something. Usually they have a cardboard sign with stuff like “hungry need food” on it. Now, I’m all in favor of helping people if they really need it, but today there was a guy LISTENING TO A GOD DAMN IPOD WHILE BEGGING FOR CASH. Sigh.

So, I committed my yum support to rcd today. It rules. Snapshot builds will have them soon (tomorrow morning I guess). You can simply subscribe to the ‘rcd-snaps’ channel and do a ‘rug up’ to get it. The yum support works a lot like the apt support, so you need to use something like open-carpet.org to get access to yum repos. If people have some they would like to see in open-carpet.org, mail me and I’ll add it.

I also committed some performance improvements that will help a lot if you’re using a large package repository like open-carpet.org. Yay.

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.