Acer Travelmate 4101WLMI and Ubuntu

General

I added the information about my new laptop to the Ubuntu wiki page for acer laptops. I'm not too bothered that the built in ethernet and wireless networking don't work, because I still have the external cards from my old laptop, and I'm sure they'll work in some future version. Suspend would be nice, though it never worked on my old Dell either. The lack of true widescreen resolution is more annoying (Fuzzy) though, and the 855resolution hack just makes my screen scrollable instead of squeezing everything into the screen size.

However, I am incredibly pleased that the keyboard's volume buttons work. Even the gimmicky volume knob on the GNOME Event Box's german wireless keyboard works. It shows a little temporary window with a picture and a level bar. Maybe it's part of GNOME. My priorities are clearly not ideal.

GNOME at Systems, Munich

General,

All this week, GNOME Deutschland is at the Systems fair in Munich. Our part of the show does not feel as busy as a LinuxTag, but there are many people eager to see how Linux looks, and very receptive to the idea of a beautiful easy-to-use desktop that’s provides an escape from Windows hell.
IMGP0715Unfortunately one of our volunteers dropped out so I have to be here all five days, which hits me pretty hard as I already have so much work to do. However, Joerg Kress is doing a fantastic job here, representing Ubuntu as well as GNOME.

A few thousand Ubuntu Breezy CDs should arrive tomorrow so we’ll be able to satisfy all the Linux newbies who are asking about it.

Comments disabled.

General

Yes, I have turned comments off. I'm being hammered by thousands of spam hits per day. It is even causing a huge load on the server with comments turned off. pyblosxom seems to need too much resources when there are lots of entries, so I must switch to WordPress when I have a chance. I've tried banning the referrers with .htaccess, but they then change to a different domain.

Meanwhile, my glom wikipedia site is getting hammered by spam. One spam user deleted most of the content while adding spam links. There's also a huge number of bogus users, though they don't seem to have done much yet. I don't know how to deal with this at all. Even banning one user seems to require an IP address, which I don't know how to discover easily.

GNOME Board size referendum

General

I'll be voting Yes in the referendum. It's not necessarily the best solution, but it's the one that's likely to have an effect. Making the existing large group decisive has been tried without success. If the referendum does not succeed, then the members pretty much lose the right to keep complaining that the board does not make decisions quickly enough.

My logic:

  • The board is delayed by decision making more than by a lack of people
    getting things done. Decisions get punted repeatedly to the next meeting
    and eventually forgotten about for a few months, so we miss
    opportunities. In comparison, tasks are usually not much more than “send
    an email” or “write a wiki page” – we delegate large task to groups such
    as release-team and marketing.
  • Theoretically, time-limited discussion followed by votes within the
    board, would make decision possible. However, as a community we have a
    strong urge to reach consensus so any single person can veto a decision.
    I do not believe that we can change that, so we must reduce the number
    of vetos.
  • One or two people have suggested the alternative of having a
    president with the ability to make decisions without consultation. This
    is going too far, and has usually been suggested as a way to make
    (usually technical) decisions which are not the board's responsibility.
    Even the suggestion of conflict of interest would be huge and
    destructive.
  • The stuff that we disagree on is usually important, but there is
    rarely a great difference between the available options. Any one of them
    would probably be good enough, so there isn't a great risk in making it
    more possible to choose one.
  • When there's less people, there's more personal responsibility, and therefore more pressure to get things done, and more pressure only to
    run for election if you really have the time. Throughout GNOME, I've
    noticed that when you give responsibility, people take responsibility.

Whether or not this referendum is passed, I am pleased that it is yet another issue that we will have dealt with this year.

Dangerous Windows

General

A while ago I installed Ubuntu Hoary on the home PC of my girlfriend's father, because the existing Windows installation was broken (to the point of not starting Windows) by vast amounts of ridiculous worms, spyware, adware, and viruses. Nevermind that it would be unsafe for online banking and email even if it half worked. I could have re-installed Windows but I couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't be infested quickly, and I've never met anyone capable of doing that either. He's had people reinstall it a couple of times already.

I've discovered the same awful situation on several people's home computers running Windows. These people live with the instability, confusion, and fear. There's even an “anti-virus” program that's installed by default on many computers here. It doesn't do much more than repeatedly warn you (via the notification area) that “your computer is in danger” (a rough translation of the German). It has a GUI to make your computer not in danger but it's insanely complex, so people's computers will of course remain in danger so they are encouraged to feel it's their fault.

I bought a new laptop last week. After a tedious post-install wizard, the “your computer is in danger” message is the first you see. Then it restarts twice, showing you the message again each time. It should say “Your computer is in danger. Get Linux.”, or “Get Linux with easy-to-use GNOME. Don't be afraid any more.”.

The Ubuntu PC works fine for browsing, email, document editing. He just uses it and doesn't seem disturbed by the change. It's still working.

Dead Laptop

General

Since Friday my old Dell Inspiron 8100 has refused to start. The lights go on, it whirs for a second, and then the lights go out. It feels like a mainboard failure, but I don't do hardware. These laptops seem to be worth about 500 EUR new on ebay, so I guess that a new laptop might be the most economical solution, but it seems like such a waste.

As I'm working away from home, this is likely to stop all my open source work for a while. If anyone knows of a laptop repair place in Karlsruhe, an email would be nice.

Slightly here

General

I've had very little time for GNOME stuff during the past week – just an hour or so in the early mornings during the week. With that time I gradually managed to get the release notes done and now I'm trying to port Glom to the new libgda API (which looks like a minor, but not spectacular, improvement). libgdamm is ported to the new API, but hasn't settled down yet.

Nokia will kindly give me some days of freelancing work to get Maemo/Hildon C++ bindings done, and I'm looking forward to that, but I won't have time to start until the end of October.

I'm doing precisely zero work for the board at the moment, and also none for marketing, and I feel bad about that. I am very glad to see Dave Neary giving us forward momentum.

I'm also sorting out the hardware for the events box, which should just be ready in time for the first set of events, if I get the delivery addresses in time. I had to leave it a bit late, waiting on some hardware-donation decisions that fell through in the end.

Network programming

General

For my paid work, I'm currently putting together a little custom server application, in order to farm some processing out to another computer. Although I've been involved in large telecoms projects for a few years now, this is actually the first time that I've sat down and actually tried to use the sockets API directly. It's also the first time I've had to think seriously about how best to use multiple threads. It's quite fun, and nice when it works, though it took me a couple of days to figure out the nuances of select(), such as that you can add the listening socket to the list of sockets that you test for readableness, in order to detect whether it's ready to accept() a new connection.

I know about epoll too, but I'm stuck on Linux kernel 2.4, and suspect that it wouldn't have an advantage in this particular situation.

Reading Robert Love's book (which I'm still reading gradually) also made me have a mini epiphany about multithreading. For instance, the explanation of how the kernel handles keyboard interrupts. The kernel needs to quickly store the new data in the buffer, but doesn't need to block at that moment waiting for some more involved processing. So it defers the work to a “bottom half” that runs in a different process. That and other examples in the book help me to think a bit more clearly about what part of work must be done immediately, what can be done a bit later, and what can be done concurrently.

2.12 release notes and press release for translation

General

The GNOME 2.12 press release and release notes are ready for translation. Hopefully we'll have even more translations than we had for 2.10. I already know that we have support several more languages in the software itself.

Luis Villa did a very sensible reorganisation of the release notes and Davyd Madeley made his usual pretty screenshots. Thanks to Telsa for proof-reading, and thanks to marketing-list for the ideas.

The release notes were a bit rushed, due to lack of time, and after doing this 4 or 5 times, I'm becoming tired of writing the same sentence structures repeatedly. It's time for someone else to take over and shake it up, so I'm declaring now that I'm not doing it next time. I've already documented what needs to be done and when to do it, though you've really got to stick to the schedule, so that translators have time. I will try really hard not to get in the way whenever I see some dodgy grammar, amateurish phrase, or obvious reaching. We can afford small mistakes like that, and the review phase should catch all that anyway.

xml2po is so good

For translations we are using Danilo's xml2po again, with the source in DocBook, but this time it's all built into the web site build system, so we don't need to manually generate the translated HTML and manually copy it across. I'm also using this for the not-ready-yet GNOME tour. This is such a great system, which solves a problem that all translated web sites have – The translations become out of date as soon as the original changes, because there's no way for the translators to see exactly what's changed, so users read the original because they don't trust the translation. There must be lots of web site systems (CMSs, etc) which store the content in XML. They should integrate xml2po immediately.

xml2po is also being used now for GNOME's user documentation. We hope that the English text will get more attention as a side-effect of all those translators looking at it. Hopefully that will make documentation more fun, and less work, for Shaun.

GNOME Lockdown Editor?

General

As I mentioned recently, we don't seem to have a real user interface for setting lockdown keys, and some of these are not just simple booleans. I think this would be a great gnome-love project for somebody getting involved in GNOME, and I even found some code that could be used as a starting point. I create a wiki page. Someone should try it and make me happy.