published on 2009-11-21 23:31:15 in the "traffic" category
I missed something I wanted to go to yesterday, because I opted to wait for the bus that was coming in 5 minutes, and thus be early, rather than walk and only just make it on time.
The bus companies in Melbourne seem quite small, they only run a couple of lines each. Most shifts seem to be a driving the same line back and forth. The problem is when there is a delay on a route, driving the same route back and forth leads to that delay stacking and stacking. A technique I've seen to combat this is having buses change routes at the end of every route, effectively driving in circles around the area. This hopefully gives them an opportunity to make up the lost time. Of course, it requires bus routes that terminate in the same place and bus companies that operate more than just a couple of routes.
For what it's worth, a lot of yesterday's angst could probably have been avoided if the City of Yarra had bothered to tell someone it was closing part of Johnston St. Simply adjusting the traffic light sequences for the detour would have been a huge win, instead of having a traffic light that gave you but 15 seconds to turn down the next road, backing traffic up for 15 minutes.
published by jimgris on 2009-11-21 07:29:51 in the "OpenSolaris" category
On Tuesday we went to ITHB in Bandung, which is about two hours from
Jakarta, for another university visit. We were a bit late due to some
impressive winter rain, but when we arrived the energy in the room was
palpable. Great fun. Loved every minute. Can`t wait to go back.
More presos on OpenSolaris from Harry Kaligis, Agus Setiawan, Lukman
Prihandika, Rachmat Febrianto, Alex Budiyanto. And me.
published on 2009-11-20 21:41:00 in the "cuddletech" category
Role models aren't something we have few of; sad that perhaps the most recent one comes from a beer commercial:
I mean, come on... his advice on careers "Find what you don't do well.... and don't do that thing." Classic!
Need something more expansive? Learn Chinese! If you find it difficult, try to learn Japanesse... and then you'll go back and appreciate how much easier Chinese languages are.
Not intellectual enough? Need to stretch those brain cells a bit more? Then, I ask, what is justice? As a Christian I have all those answers, laid down thousands of years ago, but since apparently folks like to re-invent the wheel (something King Solomon explained to us about 1,000 BC... "There is nothing new under the sun"), try Harvard's Michael Sandel discussion on Justice. A fun and engaging discussion in one of Harvard's beautiful facilities, exploring the "Moral Side of Murder". Its an enjoyable metal excersize and well expressed.
If your reading this post on an aggregator or via RSS and don't see the embedded video, just come here to cuddletech to see it properly.
published by jimgris on 2009-11-20 04:22:10 in the "OpenSolaris" category
I was in Indonesia earlier this week for some OpenSolaris university
and user group events. Really cool trip. Exhausting, too. I did a lot
of talking. Much more than usual. The community there is engaged and
thriving, so there was a lot of talking in between the talks, too.
Everyone was super friendly and quite obviously talented. It was my
first trip to Indonesia, and it moved me deeply. I will go back, no
question about it. I really liked it there. And I learned a lot. I shot 500 images and saved
about 200, so I`ll post them across a few entries over the next few
days. Indonesia should make for an interesting future for OpenSolaris
in South East Asia with these guys coming along. Trust me on that one.
On Monday we started the day at Gunadarma University in Depok, which is
about an hour outside Jakarta. Presenting at the event were Harry
Kaligis, Alex Budiyanto, Made Wiryana, Agus Setiawan, and Rachmat
Febrianto. And me. I talked about the history of OpenSolaris, some of
the open development and website projects to support contributions, and
how we are building a development community around the world. The other
guys talked about local programs and specific technologies in the
OpenSolaris distribution. After all the talks and questions/answers, we
met with the school faculty to discuss how OpenSolaris can be used to
help students learn software development, and we also stressed the
importance of building an engineering community on campus where
students can contribute both locally and globally.
published by jimgris on 2009-11-20 00:04:37 in the "OpenSolaris" category
It's excellent to see that the Sun Globalization Engineering team
released a new version of the Community Translation Interface tool: Sun
OpenCTI: https://translate.sun.com/opencti
Among other things, this is the tool that the OpenSolaris community used to localize Auth (which we'll update with new languages soon as well). Also, the announcement from Ales
says that he's opened some new translation projects to get ready for
the next release of the OpenSolaris distribution. So, if you want to
contribute translations to OpenSolaris, check out this new version of
the Community Translation Interface. Send questions to the Internationalization & Localization Community on i18n-discuss (subscribe to the list here and/or post to the Jive forum here). More info here at the CTI team blog.
published by jimgris on 2009-11-20 00:03:03 in the "OpenSolaris" category
I updated to OpenSolaris developer build 127 a few days ago. Nice. It performs much better than b126 on my Toshiba Tecra M10. That freezing mouse bit is gone.
published by jriddell on 2009-11-19 22:01:32 in the "DCOP" category
Today I updated the KDE Licensing Policy with a couple of changes following requests from folks. Most notably Creative Commons is now allowed. This is only for standalone media files (such as an image for a splash screen) and not for anything which might want to be mixed with GPL material such as icons. "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported" is the version allowed. The other change is requiring BSD licencing for CMake modules, which brings the policy into line with existing practice.
published by jriddell on 2009-11-19 19:06:10 in the "DCOP" category
The Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening this week in Dallas. The theme of the discussions is LTS and what it will take to have a release in six months which can be supported for three years hence. We've been having sessions on packaging, development, bugs policy, translations and more. You can find the schedule and how to take part in sessions on the summit website, there are icecast streams for all the rooms. The Kubuntu specs are on this wiki page still works in progress of course. It's going to be great to have a KDE 4 release suitable for LTS, just six months to do it!
published on 2009-11-19 18:57:00 in the "cuddletech" category
Lots of folks have switched to Mac, its the most commonly used laptop in the Bay Area now. Sometimes people give me flack for using it, but I'll tell you why I use a Mac laptop:
It just works! When going to a client site, a conference, or just a cafe, there is nothing more embarrassing than spending 20 minutes trying to get your l337 *NIX laptop to connect to wireless or properly DHCP or work with a printer. This isn't as big a problem as it once was but it can still happen. This is especially the case if you ever do a presentation where your fiddling with things in front of 30+ people. Mac's just work, period.
The Apps are high quality! Thanks to the Linux desktop invasion we have a lot of great apps for *NIX; however Mac apps have a very high standard for quality, all work more or less similarly, and there are lots of great apps. The problem I have on Windows these days is that there aren't as many great apps for Windows as there are for OS X.
Its UNIX! This is the most important fact for me, its a real desktop OS with a real UNIX underneath. I was a Mac hater prior to OS X, but developed a love affair with NeXT... when the two converged in OS X I was a happy camper indeed.
The Apple Laptops are the best on the market! I can not find a PC Laptop with the same build quality and durability of the Apple's. Most PC's use cheap plastics, are too thick, too flimsy, etc. The MacBook Pro 15" Aluminum is what I still use and love. The size is absolutely perfect, the thing is solid, and very comfortable to use. The power adapters are even better. Even if I wanted a machine just to run Solaris on metal, I'd want a MacBook Pro over any PC laptop available. In terms of hardware you really do seem to get what you pay for.
Now, please note that I do not have nor do I ever plan to have a Mac desktop! For my daily work I need a real UNIX Workstation. I prefer to work with Enlightenment, Eterm, and have a real Solaris system on which to work. Without my desktop I can't accomplish real work, but for the road I need my MacBook Pro.
So here are some of my "must have apps" for OS X:
iTerm: It once was that OS X's terminal was pretty basic and pathetic, glTerm and iTerm filled the void. Since that time the default terminal application has improved significantly making iTerm unnecessary, but I continue to be faithful to it.
Adium: Adium is the best multi-protocol IM client available for Mac. While iChat AV is fantastic for voice and video "chat", I want to keep my desktop tidy which means I want IRC style chat in multiple tabs, not windows. I just can't stand having a real discussion in those iChat balloons.
NewsFire: Best RSS reader, imho. The primary advantage to Newsfire is that it doesn't make RSS look like email! Email feels like work, I just want to flip through RSS and see whats news. Newfire is free and really spiffy.
TrueCrypt: I'm not a really big crypto freak, I wish I were, but I'm lazy. Never the less, at some point you'll go on the road and Sysadmins are bound to have text files containing sensitive information. TrueCrypt makes it easy to create a small encrypted drives on which to store that data. Plus, the virtual drives it creates are cross-platform, so your not locked into only retrieving the data on Mac like other encrypting archive apps.
Things: I think its the best todo application available. Its light-weight and easy to use. OmniFocus is a much more structured application and I think is good for people who need rigorous structure to keep them honest, but Things can be made to do almost everything OmniFocus can do, if you choose to, or be used much more casually.
RealVNC: The most popular VNC Viewer application for OS X is "Chicken of the VNC". I love the name, love the icon, but a lot of times it doesn't work for me. RealVNC isn't so sexxy but works every time without a problem.
Colloquy: Great IRC application. Many *NIX folks will prefer a more traditional terminal based IRC client, but if your an Xchat users who's looking for a nicely integrated IRC client for OS X Colloquy is the best imho.
VirtualBox: Very powerful and free to boot. I use both VirtualBox and VMware Fusion. Honestly, VMware is slightly faster, but VirtualBox is still fantastic and the additional portability is handy.
Apache Directory Studio: If there is one nifty app the Windows boys have its Softerra LDAP Administrator. Apache Directory Studio is the best alternative I've seen, and I think will ultimately surpass Softerra's capabilities.
iShowU: Best screen recording app period. Very easy to use, very flexable and lightweight. When creating screencasts I recommend using the Quicktime Animation CODEC; you'll be happy with it.
globalSAN iSCSI initiator for OS X: Its sad that even in Snow Leopard we don't have an Apple supplied iSCSI Initiator, but thankfully globalSAN has us covered. Its free and works very well with COMSTAR.
Cornerstone: I didn't think Subversion needed a GUI... but Zennaware Cornerstone changed my mind. Its expensive, but if you do a lot of SVN work you won't want to miss it.
I'll add some more to the honorable mention list...
Textmate
iWork '09
iLife '09
Skitch
iStumbler
Netbeans
Navicat Lite
OmniGraffle
...
On the hardware side, every UNIX Admin must be able to access an RS-232 serial console. This fact kept me away from Mac laptops for a long time. Which is why you need this:
The Keyspan Serial-USB Adapter. Buy one, download the Keyspan Assistant software and install Zterm. Good to go!
Finally let me point out 2 things which are already in Leopard that you may not be aware of:
First, with the OS on the Install disk is the Apple Xcode IDE. Along with Xcode is the koolest GUI for DTrace you'll ever see: Instruments Its really amazingly awesome and a must see.
Secondly, OS X includes native Kerberos support and a ticket management GUI which is sort of buried: /System/Library/CoreServices/Kerberos. If you use Kerberos at all drag that binary onto your doc for quick access. Several other hidden gems can be found in the same directory.
We have recently uploaded our very first Cherokee Web Server introductory screencast. It's a 5 minutes video to introduce the Cherokee configuration interface:
We will record more videos in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully they will help us to show the World the cool features that Cherokee offers. Enjoy it!
published on 2009-11-19 06:04:29 in the "art" category
[Apparently today is one of those days where a lot of blogging happens.]
Recently, Sydney Rd (the road that runs through the middle of Brunswick, once upon a time the road to Sydney, and to the goldfields) business were exhibiting local art in their windows. A couple of the pieces, by an artist called Lynette Joy Weber, really caught my eye. Specifically, I was fond of a piece called Little Raven. So we got in touch with her to buy one. Unfortunately, when I went to meet her, she wasn't able to liberate that piece of artwork from the shop it was in, so she was showing me some of the other pieces in her collection. I also fell in love with a piece called Friends. Because I'm like that, I ended up buying both of them.
They're now hanging in our entry hallway, outside my office. They make me smile when I see them. Most people are unimpressed; too poppy and too commercial, they say. I don't care, because I really, really like them.
published on 2009-11-19 05:07:21 in the "work" category
It seems, even though we talk about Telepathy a lot, that there are still people out there who believe that Telepathy is really just a reimplementation of libpurple, just with an annoyingly retentive specification, and D-Bus.
The big thing to understand about Telepathy is not that it's platform independent (even though it is, and that's pretty neat). Or that it's modular (even though it is, and that's also pretty neat). The neat thing about Telepathy is that it's a service. Telepathy provides communications as a service.
What does this mean? This means that Telepathy is not just a library for enabling communications in Empathy, or Kopete. Telepathy can enable communications in everything. Any program can listen to and interact with Telepathy. This means that you can send a user files, straight from Nautilus; or share your desktop with Vinagre/Vino, via a Telepathy Tube; all without having to set up your accounts in each of these programs (this information is stored in the Account Manager, a session-wide Telepathy service responsible for maintaining accounts and connections — Empathy's accounts dialog is just a user interface to this service).
Because the information you need is available everywhere, this allows communications features to be integrated into places where they make the most sense in your desktop, rather than implemented in your contact roster (like another chat client does). For instance, mail notifications that Telepathy learns about from webmail services such as MSN and Yahoo (note: not yet implemented) could be plugged into the existing mail-notification applet, or into Evolution to hint when to pull from IMAP. GNOME Shell could provide an embedded GMail-like chat-UI, with popout chat-windows provided by Empathy. All of this is possible without those applications having to have their own preferences dialog for your accounts.
telepathy-glib provides classes for talking to the the Account Manager and Channel Dispatcher, setting up channels and handling contacts. In the future this will be expanded to make it much easier to develop Tube clients and other common tasks (note: avoid libtelepathy and libmission-control, they are deprecated traps and not to be used). Hopefully soon there will be a telepathy-gtk to provide common, reusable GTK+ widgets that applications can use. Telepathy-Qt4 has made it's first shared-library pre-release for those who prefer the other toolkit. If you're interested, I've been working on the Telepathy Developer's Manual.
I missed something I wanted to go to yesterday, because I opted to wait for the bus that was coming in 5 minutes, and thus be early, rather than walk and only just make it on time.
