25th August 2004
fighting a battle of who could care less
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I'm not even sure if that's the line from the song, however that appears to be the line I have stuck in my head. Haven't written anything for a while (because I haven't done anything worth mentioning), however here are some interesting things.
IBM
IBM are holding a set of Linux bounties. If you do good in a challange of your or their naming (and are a university student), you get a Thinkpad, with 20 Thinkpads to give away (link). This seems to be very clever on behalf of IBM, as it's being held like a contest, and they are going to heaps and heaps of GPLed, freely usable code, and only have to give away 20 Thinkpads. Not much of it seems to related to GNOME, instead they are more interested in improvements in the kernel itself, rather then the userland we sit on top of it. Lots of interest in making things work on Power. I do like the one about writing a driver for a tape drive you probably don't own, on an architecture you probably can't afford (particularly because why would you buy a tape drive to use on an architecture it doesn't work on?). Still, it would seem that only good can come of it, it would be nice to have Valgrind working on PowerPC.
Work
I registered bridgeway.net.au as a domain name, because bridgewayconsulting.com.au is too damned long to type. I'm used to registrations taking days, or at least hours to get sorted out. This one took about 20 minutes before I had the keys in my hand. That's quicker then it usually takes to get takeaway food!
I've also been reading up on how easy is it to install Hylafax (since a client wants faxing). Installing Hylafax itself seems incredibly trivial, and rather then wasting time hacking up a virtual printer for it in CUPS you can just install a faxing client on the Windows desktop that connects to the fax server. It seems there are two: one that is free, and one that ain't. Unfortunately, the non-free one seems the best (at USD$35 a license).
netapplet
The applet that isn't an applet. I was wondering during class today how hard it would be to make it work on Debian. It seems that mjg already found out. The debian package seems to work quite well, and gave me some insight into how it works. I still think the code should be in an applet instead of a notification area icon, so I'm thinking about taking their daemon (and large chunks of the code) and making it all work in gnome-netstatus, since I think gnome-netstatus is where the action is. We'll see how this goes.
gnome-applets
They are still there, not yet entirely replaced my notification area icons (yet!). Not much code changed during the last release cycle, so there aren't that many bugs to squash. Still, I think the package is in good shape. Also translators should be aware, yes, there are a large number of crap strings in the applets.
I also finally fixed this bug in gnome-vfs. You should all make sure I haven't broken anything, especially you Sun people, who apparently have 300 mounts.
IBM
IBM are holding a set of Linux bounties. If you do good in a challange of your or their naming (and are a university student), you get a Thinkpad, with 20 Thinkpads to give away (link). This seems to be very clever on behalf of IBM, as it's being held like a contest, and they are going to heaps and heaps of GPLed, freely usable code, and only have to give away 20 Thinkpads. Not much of it seems to related to GNOME, instead they are more interested in improvements in the kernel itself, rather then the userland we sit on top of it. Lots of interest in making things work on Power. I do like the one about writing a driver for a tape drive you probably don't own, on an architecture you probably can't afford (particularly because why would you buy a tape drive to use on an architecture it doesn't work on?). Still, it would seem that only good can come of it, it would be nice to have Valgrind working on PowerPC.
Work
I registered bridgeway.net.au as a domain name, because bridgewayconsulting.com.au is too damned long to type. I'm used to registrations taking days, or at least hours to get sorted out. This one took about 20 minutes before I had the keys in my hand. That's quicker then it usually takes to get takeaway food!
I've also been reading up on how easy is it to install Hylafax (since a client wants faxing). Installing Hylafax itself seems incredibly trivial, and rather then wasting time hacking up a virtual printer for it in CUPS you can just install a faxing client on the Windows desktop that connects to the fax server. It seems there are two: one that is free, and one that ain't. Unfortunately, the non-free one seems the best (at USD$35 a license).
netapplet
The applet that isn't an applet. I was wondering during class today how hard it would be to make it work on Debian. It seems that mjg already found out. The debian package seems to work quite well, and gave me some insight into how it works. I still think the code should be in an applet instead of a notification area icon, so I'm thinking about taking their daemon (and large chunks of the code) and making it all work in gnome-netstatus, since I think gnome-netstatus is where the action is. We'll see how this goes.
gnome-applets
They are still there, not yet entirely replaced my notification area icons (yet!). Not much code changed during the last release cycle, so there aren't that many bugs to squash. Still, I think the package is in good shape. Also translators should be aware, yes, there are a large number of crap strings in the applets.
I also finally fixed this bug in gnome-vfs. You should all make sure I haven't broken anything, especially you Sun people, who apparently have 300 mounts.
mood: 
lethargic
lethargicwe are building a religion, we are building it bigger
jhbuild-trayicon
jhbuild-trayicon is an attempt to add a notification tray icon to jhbuild, so that you know how your build is going. Ideally it would pop up a message bubble, but those seem to be broken in the notification area. At the moment we have shoddy artwork done by yours truly and a python application that listens to notifications of stdin and updates the icon appropriately. Integration into jhbuild isn't yet done, although all you'll have to do is popen the program and write to it when you want to update what it says. Compiling the EggTrayIcon module might be a bit of a pain if you don't have the python-gtk2 development crack (and possibly other things). tarball (23K) and the bug report (in case you want to finish it off). Also, thanks to Grahame who's pyconsole application gave me most of the pointers I needed to get this working.
jhbuild-trayicon is an attempt to add a notification tray icon to jhbuild, so that you know how your build is going. Ideally it would pop up a message bubble, but those seem to be broken in the notification area. At the moment we have shoddy artwork done by yours truly and a python application that listens to notifications of stdin and updates the icon appropriately. Integration into jhbuild isn't yet done, although all you'll have to do is popen the program and write to it when you want to update what it says. Compiling the EggTrayIcon module might be a bit of a pain if you don't have the python-gtk2 development crack (and possibly other things). tarball (23K) and the bug report (in case you want to finish it off). Also, thanks to Grahame who's pyconsole application gave me most of the pointers I needed to get this working.mood: 
accomplished
accomplished