SVU's blog

Label in tray = P in the A

In GNOME 2.30, the kbd indicator moved to the tray. People are happy, most of them. But … there is a trouble here.

StatusIcons are not GTK widgets. And, as the result, the indicator has to “emulate” gtk widget. That’s a real pain, folks. The indicator renders text to cairo, converts cairo to pixbuf, sets status icon from pixbuf. Worst of all, the widget has to follow and track all changes in gtk style, font rendering etc. What a pain.. Bug reports… Now, another one. Here is my question of the day: can anybody tell me why the font size retrieved from gtk and provided to cairo gives different results comparing to the gtk itself? I simply do not get that…

Giants fight

Reading the Miguel’s answer to RMS, I could not stop thinking Richard had a good point.

The last thing that convinced me was that footnote: “the “open source” vs “free software” non-issue”.

It is amazing that after all those years people still do not see the difference between ethics and technology. Or – even worse perhaps – consider that difference as “non-issue”. Richard explained that difference in many many ways – still noone listens. People oh people, where are your ears?

It is not a problem for the corporate world to fight open source. Actually, as a matter of fact, there is no immediate need to fight – these phenomena can collaborate[1]. No doubt. That’s how CodePlexish things appear (though, of course, let’s wait for the fruits before judging). Open source can be embraced by companies, as long as holes (big and small, as in BSD and GPL2) in open source licenses support ethically questionable business models.

I think that’s what RMS means when he say bad things about Miguel and Linus. The guys concentrate on the technical aspects, processual aspects of the open source idea. Listening to them, I got impression that keeping the source open is a formal requirement that guarantees that certain methods of development and maintenance would work – that’s it. I wonder, do Miguel and Linus always remember that open source is just a logical consequence of the higher level ethical requirements (and these requirements have some other consequences – like not supporting unfair business models)? If yes, RMS owes the lads apologies perhaps. If no, RMS is right, at least from the POV of the free software values.

[1] In terms of fighting… Open source development model is not a silver bullet, you we all can see proprietary products technically superior to the open source ones, and vice versa. Open source cannot decisevly win technical battle on all grounds – so, it will never be an unavoidable threat to the world of proprietary technologies.

festival-ru

TWIMC. If you want to hear Russian “text to speach”, you need the package maintained by Nickolay Shmyrev (really high quality). It was already packaged for Debian. I made nearly identical deb for ubuntu 9.04, in my PPA. Feel free to check and download.

But actually I would love to see that from the box in 9.10 repos. If you share that idea, please raise your voice in that “needs-packaging” bug.

It would also be cool to apply Russian voice to flite, so maemo-mapper/n810 would give directions in Russian…

PS A bit of annoyance. festival has funny effect: last ~0.3s of the sound sequence is doubled, which sounds like a person with some lexical defect. Is it between festival and alsa or what? It does not depend on the chosen voice, English or Russian

Misc

Regarding recent discussions related to (D)VCS for GNOME, I think people might fight interesting results of the voting on highly popular Russian Linux site (analog of Slashdot). The comments is all in Russian, but everyone can read and interpret the results… (Just in case you care to follow the link, “Не использую”=”Do not use”). May be, staying with the current Subversion is not a bad idea, after all?;)

Yesterday, I reformatted internal n810’s flash from FAT32 to ext3. Why? Because root partition is too small and crouded. Now, I have several Megs of canola2 covers, this is too much for my small root…

BTW, I could not find the way to make canola use non-default place for disk covers (and symlinking to FAT32 partitions does not help – there are some issues with Russian dirnames).

¡No Pasarán!

That is why a lot of free software people consider Miguel as some kind of “Pro-Microsoft Trojan horse”. That posting looks to me like rather impudent attempt to shift community attention from one real problem (patents-charged OOXML as ISO standard) to some set of other (also real but still) unrelated issues.

DHCP+NTP and various OSes: Ubuntu, OS2008, …

I am trying to establish my own time server in the home LAN.

First I configured a couple of Ubuntu instances (matter of adding “ntp-servers” to request specified in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf)

Unfortunately, out of the box OS2008 ignores NTP server provided by DHCP. In order to enable that functionality, I had to add a couple of lines into /etc/udhcpc/udhcpc.script:

[ -n "$ntpsrv" ] && echo "server $ntpsrv" > /etc/ntp.conf.dhcp
/usr/sbin/ntpdate-debian

My next question is how to make MacOS X use that information (and check MSWin btw)

Google, WTF?

After some investigation I found the most probable reason of the break-in into my gmail account, which caused the spam message to be broadcasted to my entire gmail address book.

GMail performs login using https. Then (bah!) it redirects to http! All further interactions are done in insecure mode – unless the original address you typed in your browser started with https (or you change it manually and explicitly in the address line). Awesome, isn’t it? For details, see for example here.

So, I guess when I read my gmail using some occational free hotspot in the city (thanks to my n800), there was some “man in the middle” attack. It is not a big deal for minimally educated script kiddie – once http stream is not encoded and all cookies are there…

I definitely blame myself for being so lame and not knowing that bad fact about GMail (and not being paranoid enough to check the security of the connection when I have to). But I am deeply disappointed that GMail is so unsecure by default – and that information is not printed with big red letters on top of the page.

I guess there might be some people around who are still not aware of that shameful detail about GMail – so I am warning them.

Apologies

My GMail account got broken today – the spam message got sent to my entire abook. I sincerely apologize to everyone who got that spam. I will try to find out how it could happen… Deeply sorry.

WMF handling, various apps and libs

I guess, a number of people would find this report interesting and insightful…

Likewise, countless contributors’ first experience of the GNOME organization has been an attempt to have their blog added to the Planet GNOME page. The board has allowed Jeff Waugh total control over this, so their first experience is usually to be ignored, then to be accused of lying, and often to be abused. Some of them give up at the first stage, and I can’t blame them. You don’t hear their thanks.

Thanks, Murray