Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Owww. Head hurts, mostly typing with one hand and using the other to hold ice against my head.

Apparently my post yesterday was unclear. All I did in the wiki was make sure times/etc. made sense, and clear out the cruft from last year. Making the schedule is mostly up to the people who want to speak. What we did last year was create a few ‘themes’, solicit speakers in those tracks who then added their names/titles to the bottom of the wiki page, and then someone (me, mostly) grouped them into a schedule about a week or two before the event. It worked well, I thought, so I figured we’d do it again. That means, if you’re interested in speaking or hosting a BOF-ish-thing at Summit, go add yourself to the page. Talks last year were brief (30 minutes max) and informal, and that also worked well, so keep that in mind. We’ll remove the ‘foos’ and ‘bars’ later.

There are new Ubuntu liveCDs, so hopefully I’ll have a 2.11 liveCD out tonight.

Have accomplished something today besides clearing out my inbox (no small feat!)- I skeletoned out a schedule for the upcoming Summit. Anyone who is coming and wants to talk a bit should throw their presentation titles and names up towards the bottom of the page; I’ll work on organizing them into an actual order/schedule later. Please, sign up, and don’t be afraid to throw out an idea.

Am currently downloading the hot new ubuntu livecd, and earlier today grabbed a beta of a, uh, slightly more closed distro :) Hopefully hot testing action on the liveCD and a 2.11.90 GNOME liveCD tomorrow, though I really have to buckle down and get some finalizing action going on the paper, and have a call about potential short-term contracting work that I hope will prove interesting.

Second to last class session today. All in all, I’m glad I took the class, but man, some lectures… just not as cool as some others. Do currently have a half-dozen papers on the interaction of patent and antitrust law open in front of me; interesting sidebar to the TM/GPL issues I’ve been wrestling with (mostly unsuccesfully.)

Oh great lazyweb, my printer has gone go the dead printer place in the sky. Great lazyweb, I need a new printer; one that is reasonably cheap, small-ish, works with cups over a network, and (here is the catch) has an ethernet port instead of usb (since I have a spare ethernet->802.11 converter and would like to stuff this far away from any of the computers. Oh great lazyweb, your friend, google, has failed me… but perhaps you can help me@tieguy.org.

Other than bemoaning my printer, I spent most of the day cleaning- I bought bookshelves some time ago, and Krissa and I finally sat down and reorganized our books so that (at least as of right now) none of them are in piles anywhere. Parts of the house that aren’t roomba-able have also been vacuumed for the first time in ages. Still lots of crud all over, unfortunately. But we’re getting there.

Second bbq in two nights tonight; nice, relaxed bbq weather these days. Contribution last night was a chilled rice and black bean salad, and mint ice cream; today pork loin.

Continue to poke some at the tinderbox- the atom xml should validate as xml now (though not yet as atom) and some of my other old patches are now in CVS (though not automatically applied yet as they should be by tinder-setup.sh.) Still, we’re getting closer to being able to just slam this onto any available box and get a real tinderbox on it. Yay us.

Late last night I’d despaired of doing anything useful, particularly on tinderbox, which is a bit of a mess, and which had no short-term prospects of getting a central data repository a-la fluendo’s build bot. So I tried to go to sleep, at about 3am.

While laying in bed, I realized that if the extant patch for rss generation in tinderbox could be made to work, it would be easy enough to set up a planet tinder that could fake a respectable multi-machine/platform tinderbox, for minimal work. So I woke up.

10 hours later, I’ve submitted a patch to get rudimentary atom support in jhbuild tinderbox (should be easy for someone to improve the quality of the outputted data, I’m just wiped ATM), and I’ve also cleaned up the microtinder scripts to make them easier to use. To run a tinderbox right now should be basically 4 steps:

1. ‘cvs co microtinder’ somewhere with several gigs of disk space. (Your exact mileage may vary.)
2. ./tinder-setup.sh
3. ./tinder.sh[1]
4. put the resulting ‘web-output’ directory somewhere public, either by symlinking to it on a public-facing box, or by putting an scp statement in the script somewhere.

Bam. Do that, you’ve got a tinderbox.

There are a couple details that may have changed overnight- the atom bits probably don’t work quite right, even with my jhbuild patch applied, so don’t send me atom feeds quite yet. There isn’t a planet for them yet anyway. But otherwise, if you’ve got a solaris box, or some obscure processor, or whatever, it is that easy- you can help get GNOME up and running on your box, and keep it that way, with no need to give Uncle Louie root :)

Anyway, having accomplished that, now I sleep…

[1] This step runs jhbuild, so of course you will likely have to install some dependencies, etc. If you’re experienced in setting up jhbuild, this should be trivial; if not, I recommend consulting the excellent and comprehensive guide to jhbuild dependencies from the wiki.

Didn’t accomplish much yesterday. Did get an elizabot up and running, though; look for it on the next liveCD ;)

Shockingly no one has yet congratulated Jeff on winning an O’Reilly award for open source evangelism, so… now I’ve done it. Congrats, Jeff. The award cash does mean you’re buying the first round at Summit. And by first, I mean ‘every.’

I was going to continue my quest not to win such an award by responding to the micro-blog-war I started the other day, but I realize there is nothing I can write here that is (1) honest (2) won’t be interpreted as antagonistic and (3) will actually move us all forward. Particularly keeping (3) in mind, I’m just going to shut up, and look forward to ‘just’ being a user again in the not too far future.

[On frankendesktops: I think this is quite nice, and look forward to it being available, though ATM I'm using Abi for all my word processing needs.]

Oh, congrats also to Blizzard and the moz guys for striking out in a new direction- this is certainly an interesting and potentially important step forward for many of us. Good luck, and thanks for testing the waters :)

Continue to move forward on my paper (it lost several pounds last night, usually a good sign); am more than a bit bummed that GNOME was not represented at this discussion of TM and free software organizations.

Added a new app to the Power User Tools page on the wiki. Someone needs to get around to packaging all of those (and pulling this one into nautilus…) Also discovered that art.gnome.org has an rss feed; added that to my personal gnome planet. Am thinking that what I need to do after I go back to school is become a foonote reporter, so that I can contribute without being quite so involved.

Sri’s comment about ‘the other desktop’ getting lots of press is dead on- it’s a shame that in our corner we have Sun, Novell and Red Hat investing heavily, Adobe and Real as our ISVs, LSB looking at incorporating our toolkit, a thriving environment of small professional developers, and some of the biggest non-Windows desktop deployments in the world, and they have Linspire (and admittedly apparently Intel, which appears to be something we screwed up), and yet they are the ones pushing themselves (successfully) as The Open Source Desktop. Clearly we need to figure out how we booted that one and get a move on it.

Ed. note: I have been reminded that despite Intel’s sponsorhip of this OSDW, they also are working on gtk testing for LSB and various other GNOME bits. Of course, Novell is also similarly conflicted, I mean, uh, covering all their bases ;)

Just a reminder- the Boston Conspiracy is gearing up for Summit 2005 @ MIT, and couches are needed for out of towners. If you have a couch in or around Boston, you can volunteer to host people at this wiki page.

I personally need to get off my butt and sketch out a schedule mockup like we did last year- I think the ‘schedule light’ mode worked well, but we did seed it at least a tiny bit. If there is something you’d like to see on the schedule, email me. We’ll have (like last year) some speed talks, and some longer talks, with time set aside after every talk for hacking.

[As an aside, so I have this on the record: I don't have comments because (1) I don't need yet another information stream to browse and (2) if you can't find my email address and mail me a response to a blog post, you aren't trying very hard. :)]

Awesome! Via James Ogley I see that SUSE has released GNOME 2.11 packages for SUSE 9.3. If you have 9.3 installed, go forth, install, and file bugs. Open question for p.g.o Sun readers- is there an easy-to-install open solaris with the devel packages I’d need for a tinderbox? If not, will there be one?