Category: General

10/February/2004

Broken desktop

This morning I woke up to find my desktop machine broken, with what seems to
be a hard disk problem. Although it’s quite weird, since e2fsck says the
partitions are ok, but even though I can boot, none of the boot files
(/etc/mtab, /etc/fstab, /etc/init.d...) seem to
be read. Now trying to recover my home directory, where yesterday’s work
is.

8/February/2004

GNOME

Nice article that outlines
some places where GNOME does a better job than Windows and Mac OS. This simply demonstrates
that we can do much better than others!

Networking

I had an interesting talk this morning over IRC with James Cape, of libgtcpsocket/libgnetwork
fame, about how to architect the libgnetwork API. The idea is to provide a very simple
API for all network services, similar to what there is in GNOME-VFS. That is, you would
be able to do stuff like:

      ftp_client = gnetwork_client_new (host, GNETWORK_PROTOCOL_FTP);
      http_client = gnetwork_client_new (host, GNETWORK_PROTOCOL_HTTP);

And then use the same set of functions (the one in gnetwork_client_)
for both the FTP and the HTTP clients.

After the talk, I started having a deep look to OpenSLP,
and even managed to install it in all the machines in my home network. I’ve got now several
services registered (SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, LDAP, etc), and can, via the OpenSLP’s command-line
tools, get the list of registered servers for each service:

      $ slptool findsrvs https
      service:https://192.168.0.2,65535

      $ slptool findsrvs http
      service:http://192.168.0.5,65535
      service:http://192.168.0.2,65535
      service:http://192.168.0.3,65535

      $ slptool findsrvs ssh
      service:ssh://192.168.0.5,65535
      service:ssh://192.168.0.2,65535
      service:ssh://192.168.0.3,65535

      $ slptool findsrvs ldap
      service:ldap://192.168.0.5,65535

Now we just need to start using the discovery mechanism in client applications, so that they
can let the user choose from a list of discovered servers instead of having to type
(and remember) host names (or, worst, IP addresses).

SLP seems to be much better suited for service discovery than Zeroconf, specially on large
networks (that’s what some network admins have told me), so it seems to be the way to go.
Some work on libgnetwork about this is going to take place soon, as soon as we decide how
to integrate all kind of service discoveries (Microsoft’s, SLP, Novell’s, etc) into a
single entry-point API. Once that is done, we’ll start sending patches for the GNOME applications
to start using the service discovery features.

5/February/2004

Mono on Debian

At last someone
has taken over the tasks of maintaining updated Mono packages for Debian. Kudos to the
Debian Mono Group!

GNOME-DB

Laurent (of GDA Ruby bindings fame)
has added support for converting between GDA and Ruby types, thus allowing the removal
of the GDA:Value class. This is something very nice for Ruby developers, since it
allows them to avoid having to do the conversion and work directly with the Ruby
language types. It’s so clever than it seems many Ruby developers are starting
to look forward to it instead of DBI.

More details in Laurent’s
diary.

2/February/2004

GNOME-DB

Vivien committed this weekend all his pending changes for the new Mergeant version.
Very nice to see that going on, since Mergeant development was a bit halted after
the 1.0 release of libgda/libgnomedb. There is still a lot of work to be done,
but this is another step towards Mergeant 1.0, which will solve the “missing
Access alternative problem”, of course with a better one than Access itself.

31/January/2004

Mars

From NASA’s
bulletin: “Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove down a
reinforced fabric ramp at the front of its lander platform and onto the soil
of Mars’ Meridiani Planum this morning“.

“Pelota” Game

I went this afternoon to a Pelota
game (this is the most popular sport in the Basque country, of course, after football),
and I had some good photos:






New car

I finally got my new
car on Thursday. In the morning, I had this:





Since then, I am a happy owner of this:



25/January/2004

Mars

Opportunity, the 2nd of the rovers recently sent to Mars by NASA, has landed
safely on Mars: “NASA’s Opportunity rover returned the first
pictures of its landing site early today, revealing a surreal, dark
landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars“.

The photo is here.

24/January/2004

GNOME-DB

Just completed another CVS merging, by putting the never released
GDA
Evolution provider into libgnomedb.
This provider, for those who don’t know, offers a data source that allows access
to Evolution’s contacts, calendar and tasks. It still uses the old Evolution API,
but will be converting to the new one soon.

GNOME Network

Finally started the splitting of GNOME Network, with a CVS module for
each tool. I’ve started with GNOME
Netinfo, the network information tool. Ã lvaro PeÃ&plusmm;a is starting
to work in the second iteration of the file sharing tool, now better integrated
into the desktop itself. It won’t be a separated tool, but a set of Nautilus
extensions to allow sharing files via many protocols. So far, only HTTP via Apache
(using the ~/public_html), but will be extended to
work with other web servers (like Cherokee)
and other network services, like NFS, SMB, NCP, FTP, etc. A screenshot of what
à lvaro has done so far is here;
the source code itself is in GNOME
CVS.

Heavy Metal

Just finished watching “Heavy Metal, F.A.K.K. 2”, the second part
of “Heavy Metal”, a very good comic-like cartoon movie, for adults. As the
first part, good music and fantastic fightings and animations. I had been
for years willing to watch again the first part, so it’s been great to watch
the second one, and even better to see that its end leaves everything open
for a third part.