Category: General

I’d read some of Joel’s articles
before, not never really got around to reading a lot of them. Maybe its
because I hate reading long articles on a computer; maybe its because I
only became aware of his stuff well after he was at his most prolific.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly enjoying reading the
book at the moment. Catherine gave me her typical “you’re such a freak” look
last night as I chuckled to myself over this description of Architecture
Astronauts:

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.

Last year Caolan
and I demoed hotdesking with GDM and VNC. Owen later pointed out that VNC
probably wasn’t the way to go once the rendering
improvements they’re working come on line.

So, last week I picked up a patch I’d hacked up before Christmas,
finished it off and committed it to GDM. The idea is to do the same
thing as the VNC patch, but this time using a X proxy (like Xnest)
server on the terminal server instead of a VNC server.

Specifically, though, the features added to GDM are:

• You can now configure GDM to run XDMCP sessions on a local X
  proxy server. This may be useful on its own for performance reasons;
  in theory, at least, an X proxy server should be able to limit the
  number of roundtrips it makes to the remote X server since if all you
  want to do is query server state, then that state is local. I’ve no
  idea yet how well Xnest and others do on this in practice, though.
• If the proxy server supports disconnecting from its parent
  display and re-connecting later, you can configure GDM such that you
  can disconnect from your session and reconnect later simply by logging
  back in. The only proxy server’s that I know of which support this is
  the DMX X server and NoMachine NX’s nxagent. Its
  certainly possible to do this with any proxy though; I had it half
  done for Xnest before realizing DMX had good enough support to get the
  GDM patch done.

I’ve played around a little today with NoMachine’s proxy. You can try
it out with GDM HEAD up by:

1. Install NoMachine’s server package
2. Set xdmcp/EnableProxy=true in gdm.conf
3. Download these scripts (run-nxagent.sh
   and reconnect-nxagent.sh)
   and stick them in /tmp
4. Set xdmcp/ProxyXServer to
   ProxyXServer=/tmp/run-nxagent.sh -audit 0 -name NX -geometry
   768x576 and xdmcp/ProxyReconnect to
   /tmp/reconnect-nxagent.sh
5. Re-start GDM
6. From another machine run X -query $server and login
   through the login screen
7. Run /tmp/reconnect-nxagent.sh --to :20 on the server to
   disconnect your remote X server from the session
8. Run X -query $server again on the server, login and you
   should be immediately re-directed to your original session

(Jaysus, thats a very long name for a few hundred lines of
code)

I’ve just finished hacking on what was a really interesting little
project. Basically, its a GConf backend which uses information in
the user’s LDAP entries to generate the mail account configuration for
Evolution. The idea is that if you’ve a large number of users, all you
have to do is stick each user’s email address, incoming mail server and
outgoing mail server in her LDAP entry and Evolution should just
magically work.

I’m really happy with how well this thing turned out. I mean, it
actually works, it didn’t take much code, there wasn’t anything
lurking in GConf or Evo waiting to stab me in the back … and, most
of all, it should actually be very useful.

The code is in evolution-gconf-ldap-backend
in GNOME CVS and more details are in the README.

What’s more, Dave Malcolm has also written some cool
scripts to solve the same problem, but without LDAP.

Another big Six
Nations rugby weekend over that saw Scotland beat Italy in the
dullest international game in a while, Wales beating France in a
breathtaking match in Paris and Ireland beating world champions
England in a tense, down-to-the-wire encounter in Dublin.

Its all looking like it’ll end with a grand slam showdown between
Ireland and Wales in Cardiff. Who would have thought it?

The most bizarre example of how professionalism has changed Irish
rugby is that Brian O’Driscoll, Ireland’s star centre, having strained
his hamstring was sent to this whole body
cryotherapy unit where you get put in a freezer at below -120°C
(-184°F) for a few minutes so that you can train at four times the
inensity for the next few hours. Three weeks after an injury that
would have put players out for months and he’s back on the pitch
leading the team and scoring tries.

So, I just plowed through a few hundred emails in my gnome-panel bugzilla.gnome.org folder. In one
sense it was incredibly boring, because I don’t think I actually
interacted with a single bug report, but in another sense its was just
incredibly awesome. The folder appears to be just full of bugs which
Vincent Untz has already
closed. Rocking!

I didn’t know Vincent had a blog, interesting. I’ll need to
polish my French a bit to understand it, though. About all I could
understand was "J'adore vim". I guess its a good thing he
uses vim, really. If he used emacs he’d put us all to even more
shame fixing even more bugs.

Discovered something interesting yesterday while trying to figure out
why Sabayon wasn’t
working for jdennis over SSH:

• With ssh -Y, the SSH server creates a proxy X server to
  your local display which is just like any other SSH tunnel. Then
  it points $DISPLAY at the tunnel,
  e.g. DISPLAY=:10
• In order for you to have permission to access the local display,
  though, it also needs to add an xauth cookie your ~/.Xauthority on
  the remote host.
• The interesting part is that it doesn’t do what you might assume
  and just forward your xauth cookie for the local display to the
  remote host. Instead it creates another cookie, sends that to the
  remote host and its that cookie which gets merged to your
  ~/.Xauthority. When you try and connect from the remote host to the
  local display over the tunnel, the SSH client compares the cookie
  in the first protocol message and if it matches the one it
  generated for the tunnel, it swaps that cookie with the original
  cookie and allows the connection to complete.

At first that might just seem like misguided paranoid delusional
crackrock, but it does actually make sense. With this cool trick, if
you SSH to a compromised machine (i.e. a machine where an attacker can
access you ~/.Xauthority), then your display is only vulnerable while
you remain logged in. Once you log out again, the compromised cookie
is useless.

Luis: Um, it appears my sound was
“broken” too.

I’m sure there’s a moral to this story other than
“how fscking dumb am I?” but …

I’m in Boston at the moment and I have to drive to work in
this this thing:

Brrr.

Luis commented on old
bugs recently. It certainly feels good to close old bugs. Like this four year old
bug.

People will be glad to know that with very latest glibc (it’ll be in
glibc 2.3.4), you’ll be able to change the timezone and the clock
applet will actually notice. Yay for us! 🙂

Spent the weekend surfing with five friends on the wild and windy west
coast. Having never surfed before, I’m now so sore I can barely
move. If I had to leave the house to do my job, I’d be taking the day
off I reckon.

Six of the lads going away for the weekend used to be a Very Dangerous
Thing. But this weekend we managed to stay out of trouble. Are we
getting old or were we just too tired after the surfing? I wonder …

Never in my life have I never heard so many bad chat-up lines, though:

Boy standing in pub porch smoking. Girl runs in out of the rain and
stops. Boy, “How’s it going?”. Girl looks up, sees the inane drunken
grin, dismisses Boy immediately, looks back down at her phone and
starts typing a text message. Boy, “Ah, we’ve only just met and you’re
texting me already?”. Girl runs.