Looks like we are getting some attention from Linux Magazine. Dmitri Popov has written a 3 page article on Conduit and Unison. Some lovely screenshots (looks like he’s an Ubuntu user too 
). Click here for the article.
Archive for the ‘Nerd’ Category
Conduit in Linux Magazine
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007JHBuild and Debian
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007So mysteriously around the same time as John is working on JHBuild for Windows, i’ve set my sights on something a little easier. There is a variant of JHBuild for Debian users wanting packages of SVN versions called JHDebuild. (If you search for it now, you’ll find about twice as much because Google has indexed my tweets and launchpad entries).
I spent a week fighting with JHBuild. It was quite annoying, and I ended up making a script to set up a chroot that I could guarantee /would/compile. But just as I was finishing that I found out about the stuff that Ken was working on. After drooling a little while I decided I wanted to get a few things out of my Debian development environment. I want to be able to easily get a .deb of any GNOME project. And I want to be able to get debs of the whole suite. JHDebuild seemed to fit my needs. Unfortunately its proving more difficult to get going than JHBuild 
So far my patches have been for properties that seem to be missing for some of the repositories and their branch classes. I patched the reprepro support to support more archs. At the moment i’m just trying to get my head around the “get debian/ folder” business – i think i’ve found some duplicate code. Then its back to figuring out why so many packages won’t build. Right now, I think I won’t be able to proceed until I resolve the make dist GNOME Goal…
I’ve set up a branch on launchpad to hold my changes for now, with the hope of pushing most, if not all, back upstream when i’ve gotten things working a bit more.
More HSPDA/3G with Xbox 360 and Wii
Monday, December 10th, 2007Its amazing – 40% of the traffic to my blog has been from people frantic to learn about HSPDA and their games consoles. Here’s a little update.
I’m happy to report that it /does/ work. I went back to my friends to try it out the other weekend and Halo 3 works over HSPDA – even with two of us playing online at the same time. There are moments of lag, but for the time we played it was rare. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least.
We tweaked the settings some more. It looks like the network at Three’s end is introducing a NAT.. We set up port forwarding but nothing ever comes to the PC to be forwarded to the 360. So you will get warnings about NAT, but these are harmless. Everything seems to work regardless \o/
Why i use open source over microsoft
Thursday, December 6th, 2007Just felt like sharing a quote i only read for the first time today. It sums part of my feelings up quite nicely.
“Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft’s actions have conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the computer industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, IBM, Compaq, Intel, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft’s core products. Microsoft’s past success in hurting such companies and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and businesses that exhibit the potential to threaten Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft’s self-interest.”
Conduit in GNOME SVN
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007So Conduit has moved to GNOME SVN at last If you are running SVN conduit, you can now get your fix from:
http://svn.gnome.org/svn/conduit/trunk
This is great news for Conduit, and will hopefully help us spread the syncable desktop vision throughout GNOME and the free desktop in general.
More Always Up To Date
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007Just checked in some more code for automatic background syncing. The user story is now like this:
- Create a Conduit with a Tomboy and Folder dataprovider
- Sync manually (optional, and may happen automatically in future…)
- Make changes without thinking about conduit anymore
- Changes are synced automatically
The first sync will always use the change calculation code to make sure all changes are detected. But from then until conduit is closed the sync engine will only use the changes detected “on the fly”. In most cases this means the built in DeltaProvider code (which has to get() every object and compare to a previous state file) is bypassed, so big savings can be made.
Fresh, fresh, SVN only code. There no doubt be dragons 
Always up to date
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007Just switched on one of the “always up to date” mechanisms in Conduit. Simply, a dataprovider can now request a sync when it detects a change. The sync will happen straight away, so the data wil always be up to date.
I’ve also cobbled together an AutoSync mixin for the common cases to use. This buffers changes and provides a way to feed a list changes to the sync engine. This means the sync engine can avoid a “calculate what has changed” step. The code deals with situations such as added and deleting an object before it is even synced anywhere transparently, making custom dataproviders with change detection super easy. The code is there and ready for dataproviders to use, though I still need to implement some glue before the sync engine will be able to fully take advantage.
So far, Tomboy, Folders and the experimental GConf preferences sync are geared up to use autosync. F-spot and Evolution are on the list to get this functionality, in both cases we need to implement some code in our dependencies (in f-spot directly, and in the python-evolution support libary). PC to PC needs more thinking as XML-RPC isn’t geared up for two-way communication…
This behaviour should integrate well with Online Desktop, which i hope to blog about in the near future..
3G/HSDPA Xbox Live/Wii Online
Monday, November 5th, 2007So yesterday I went to a friends to play Halo 3, play Halo3, eat curry and oh yeah.. Get destroyed at Halo 3. Luckily for my ego and really unfortunately for him, his 360 started with the red ring problem before i was defeated too badly. I really feel for you mate!
Anyway, lets add insult to injury. His new house sucks. Simply, it has TPON so he can’t get broadband. No Xbox live! It isn’t even in a cable area. So to ease his pain, I figured out how to plumb his desktops 3G/HSDPA to the 360, only for the DVD drive to die within an hour…
How to recreate this? We only had a single patch cable (no crossover for 360 to PC, and quite a large cable was needed). The 360 had wireless, his PC did not. He had a router from when he applied for broandbad. We picked it up from his parents and plumbed it up so that the connection was like so:
- My laptop / Xbox 360
- Wifi
- Netgear DG834G
- Ethernet
- Dell Windows XP Desktop
- 3 USB Modem
I found that the 360 will work on a network with Microsoft ICS. Unfortunately the information on that is insanely limited. Or perhaps there is too much non-geek whitenoise: You can find out how to set it up in conventional situations, but not how it actually works. Which makes unusual setups challenging. The internet suggested the ICS host needed to be on 192.168.0.1 and that it either acted as a DHCP server or used zeroconf addresses. So I duly turned off DHCP on the router, moved it to 192.168.0.2 and made the PC 192.168.0.1.
So now I booted my Linux laptop and did some ping testing. I had a zeroconf address and could ping the PC and the router. Pinging google, however, failed on DNS resolution. I checked my resolv.conf and it had chosen the PC as the gateway and had a reference to “mshome.net”. So I was happy the setup was working “theoretically”, and that ZoneAlarm was at fault. Sure enough, down the firewall and it worked just fine. Gah.
ICS mode in ZoneAlarm got DNS working, but the connection still seems blocked. No idea how to fix that If you are insane and down the firewall.. Both the 360 and Wii happily venture online! Yay..
Mugshot?
Saturday, October 20th, 2007Just set an account. Not sure what to think about it. Seems like a cool idea, but so far its not really selling me.
The page is split in to “My Stacker” and “My Home”. I’m not sure what the difference is – right now the same two items are showing in both. The only thing that shows in one Tweet and a message that facebook is OK (but i’m not getting anything from facebook.. what is it meant to show?). My attempts to poke it through Last.fm have failed too. Do I need the Mugshot software so it works properly? It’s not packaged for Debian/Ubuntu
Not pleased
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007So they implemented sync. Good for you guys. The whole approach does, as Owen suggested, sound a tad over-engineered. But I don’t see that as a problem. In this case I agree with Havoc, and the possibility for alternative backends is quite exciting.
What does upset me is that the whole approach is very familiar. As far as i’m concerned, online-prefs-sync-daemon is redundant. They should have got Conduit SVN and contributed a GConf twoway dataprovider. Conduit is online-prefs-sync-daemon for the whole desktop, not just one use case.
The sooner people grok that sync is something that shouldn’t be implemented 60 different times the better!
