GUADEC is done and a success. Thanks to gman and his helpers it was the best yet. I really didn't expect it to run so smoothly, not because gman was organising it, but because none of seemed to be helping him enough. If only he could organise every GUADEC. Daniel Pisano also deserves many thanks for arranging the perfect accommodation.

My talk was a shambles again, possibly more than last year. I type up notes and then realise that I can't actually read them on the desk while I'm standing up, so I just show the slides and burble about what's on them. The talk is online, in a more structured form.

The combined efforts of several GNOME hackers got one of my WLAN cards working, and educated me about how to do WLAN networking stuff on the command line. Thanks Daniel Pisano (docpi) and frehberg in particular. It's kind of fun having the connection while sitting in the lecture halls, particularly irc, and it means you can get something done during the more dull presentations.

I was utterly demotivated before GUADEC and conciously avoided any new responsibility that might arrise from talking to people, but despite my determination to be glum, even I was eventually enthused by the sheer youth, energy, and activity around us.

We tend to forget it until after every GUADEC, but these face-to-face meetings really help to motivate us. Luckily it sounds like the Boston meeting will be repeated, somewhere else in America, so that other continent can get the benefit too.

Here are some significant people that I met this time:

• RossBurton, Dan Alderman, and another colleague, who are using gtkmm quite intensively at OneEighty Software. Their company paid for their trip while I took unpaid holiday. Maybe I should ask for sponsorship next time. At least Dan bought me a Guiness, possibly the first direct payment that I've received for gtkmm. I wasn't expecting them to be there, so it was nice during my talk when I said that lots of corporations use gtkmm and someone in the audience backed up my claim.
• Antonio Sáenz from Isotrol in Seville who also use gtkmm and who is getting more and more involved with GNOME and free-software itself. He's seems to be making good progress with local business and government in Spain and other countries too. Lots of other spanish oragnisations and individuals were at this year's GUADEC, so last year's GUADEC in Seville clearly had an impact.
• Dave Malcolm, who is now working on Conglomerate with great enthusiasm and sense. This app isn't quite there yet, but it's very close to being a very usable generic XML editor with very wide appeal. It's an app that should exist. Dave should be on advogato.
• jdahlin, who is working on the Python bindings, and actually tried to convert me from the evils of C++. Live and let live. jamesh stills seems to be the nicest person in the world, and had could at least claim that the ORBit bindngs are easier in Python. By the way, have you seen the GTK+ bindings page recently? It's vast.
• The release-team, some of whom I had never met in person. Pensive silences during meetings are far more helpful when you can see people's faces. We worked out the final 2.4 new modules list, which I expect jdub will email soon. We're sorry that it's terribly terribly late.
• Tim Ney, the GNOME Foundation director/administrator, and Leslie Proctor our invaluable PRist. These are two of the least known, but most positive and helpful people in our community. Also, Stormy Peters from HP, who seem to be supporting Linux and GNOME far more than I suspected.
• Fernando Herrera, the new bug-buddy maintainer. It sounds like he's doing important stuff that will make it easier to triage bugs in future. More importantly, he's full of energy and is a good laugh while enjoying a Guinness.
• Carlos Garnacho, the gnome-system-tools maintainer now that Ximian no longer expect to make money from them. I really wish these were ready for GNOME 2.4. I pray they are in GNOME 2.6. He seems really dedicated to them.

Before flying back I went on a quest for some UK-style essentials. Alpen and Cider. I should have bought some vegetables to avoid the strange look at the checkout.

Perpetual GNOME

Among other things, I put these pages together during some lectures:

• GNOME How To Get Involved
• GNOME 2.4 UI Review
• GNOME UI Review Check-List

Both of these need to be improved/updated by people who have more of a clue. I really hope that we can get the GNOME community running pretty much perpetually with no barrier to entry.

I've noticed that you can make a difference just by getting things started or asking what's happening. It doesn't take expertise to do that.

Linz

So I'm back in Linz, in connection hell. I think it's my WLAN antenna that's broken, but I have no idea how to get a new one in Austria without having one delievered from Germany at great expense.

I have found a spot where I can get a fairly reliable connection, but it is in the middle of the street and it's a problem when cars come by. This does not seem like something that an adult should be doing.

Oh, and work is deeply unpleasant. ClearCase now refuses to let us see our own source code. People pay for ClearCase, but I don't know why.

Still no cvs access. I’m trying with the cisco card again but mysteriously can’t log into any hotspots even with that. I’m getting pretty sick of the network settings stuff but I don’t know if it’s the fault of RedHat or linux in general. In the past I have had to manually delete config files to get stuff working but they seem to be duplicated in three different places. Adding and removing PC cards generally mucks up all the settings, because it tries to remember stuff instead of scanning on every bootup. I don’t see why I should have to edit /etc/modules.conf just to delete some alias crap that isn’t true anymore. My only consolation is that I know it would be even worse under Windows.

This lack of connection is killing me. I can’t even push things forward via email because everything depends on stuff that’s stuck on my hard drive. I have had so little time for my projects lately, but at least I could work offline and upload stuff occasionally during the past few weeks. But now I can’t even carry out the least of my responsibilites.

Meanwhile I have a crushing and demoralising schedule at work which leaves me without any extra time or energy. I hate ClearCase as much as I can possibly hate any software. It is as crappy as everyone ever said it was. Anyone who thinks it is acceptable does not have experience with anything else that isn’t as crappy. It’s been a long time since a piece of software has made me wonder whether I would actually feel better if I drove my fist through the screen. This is not good.

For gtkmm, this kind of problem was supposed to be avoided by having two maintainers, but danielk has been totally off the radar for months and doesn’t reply to emails. There are lots of regular contributors but no obvious new maintainer (nobody to review patches and bugs), so I guess I am tied to that for now whatever the cost.

One bright spot is that Bowie Owens has been doing incredibly good, sensible, work on orbitcpp, and lots of it, and it looks like he can take over maintainership. I spent several hours here and there last week doing a big simplification of the stubs/skels/common confusion but that work is still stranded on my hard drive.

Bryan Forbes is also making good progress with gnome-vfsmm, but he’s only just got involved and he’s still learning about gtkmm so I can’t hit him with too much responsibility just yet.

I’ve offerered a few times to step down from the GNOME release team to make way for someone with more time and resources, but they haven’t taken up the offer. And according to the JFDI principle, I’m not confident that some stuff would get done without me. That’s generally a mistake.

So, I plan to do my best for the GNOME 2.4 release cycle with the aim of mostly disappearing afterwards, leaving stuff documented so that everything works without me.

It’s been difficult enough to survive during the past year, let alone be properly involved with GNOME. I’ll be in Dublin next week for GUADEC but don’t expect me to be enthusiastic or constructive. I’m doing what I can.

GNOME on the other hand is doing great. It’s vital and lively and focused and making great progress.

All my cvs and irc access in the last 2 months has been via WLAN hotspots, because

• I work at the offices of a very big slow-witted german corporation that doesn’t allow use of the real internet through its proxy.
• To get DSL at home, after numerous dull and time-consuming problems, Austria Telekom tell me they need to replace a telphone pole, but refuse to give an even approximate date for it, while subtly refusing to say that it will never happen.

Now my WLAN antenna seems to be broke, so stuff is stranded on my hard disk. I am not enjoying this. In August I need to find a new place to live. That might makes things better or worse.

I will scream at the next person who emails me directly with some technical question. It’s bad enough when people email me directly about projects that I happen to be the maintainer of, or one day sent an email about, instead of asking the whole mailing list. But why the hell do people think it’s a good idea to ask me generic software development questions instead of using a newsgroup or mailing list. Am I really likely to help some student write his whole thesis or do a free requirements and design analysis for some system architect? It’s pure lunacy – they should be locked up for their own good. It’s like a highly-targeted form of spam, but still spam. And then they get offended when I tell them to go away. Somewhere my email is listed as a technical support contact for the world and people are not satisfied with the level of service.

I am now 30 and it does not please me. I plan to be in an even worse mood for the next decade as I was for the last 10 years. You have been warned.

GNOME

We had an interesting release-team meeting about the new 2.4 modules. We normally release the meeting minutes, but we would prefer to give a proper united decision when the time comes. And it's not for us to decide – it's just for us to decide what the GNOME community wants. We are extending the arbitrary deadline a couple of weeks so that some new issues can be discussed properly in public.

WLAN

I finally found a decent WLAN card – an ELSA Vianect MC-11 from freebird in Berlin, via ebay. With the extra antenna it's now even better than the impossible-to-buy Cisco card. It seems to be a true classic Orinoco card. I had to add the hermes.conf file to my /etc/pcmcia/ to make it recognise the card, as described here. And I had to recompile, patch, and install the orinoco driver to get a monitor mode for kismet, as described here. Also, unlike the cisco card, I have to start kismet_hopper to actually detect any WLANs. It all sounded scary but it really was as simple as those documents say. Well, I had some strange “eth0 device not found” errors from ifup but deleting some old files in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ fixed that. After all, I have tried 5 WLAN cards in this machine now.

I hope people don't hate me for criticising all their proposed 2.4 modules. I really wish other people were trying stuff out so I didn't have to get the conversations started. We only have 1 more week and it'll be a lot harder to have these conversations afterwards.

When it came to GnomeMeeting we had some of the "What is the desktop?" conversation sooner than I had expected.I'm surprised that more regular GNOME contributors aren't stepping up to say that GnomeMeeting should be in account of its coolness. I generally do not represent the consensus.

I'm trying out some of the accessibility stuff now. It's surprisingly obscure. There's something fundamentally wrong about that.

There's so much happening with GNOME now, and I think it's all remarkably directed and cohesive while still being fun. The future is big because people are not waiting for other people to do stuff for them.

gtkmm

I was wrong about the STL-style API problem I mentioned before – it was just a one-off and not a general problem. I also solved a lifetime bug that had been scaring me for a while, but it turned out to be another one-off. So all is well in the gtkmm part of my brain again.

I've been encouraging the GNOME 2.4 new modules discussion. Ignorance is no obstacle. We have 2 weeks left to agree. So far, I'd bet battfink, gpdf, gucharmap, fontilus, nautilus-cd-burner, and themus will be in GNOME 2.4. I have yet to try out a few more of the modules. Talk on desktop-devel-list if you have opinions or questions.

gnome-vfsmm

I thought nobody was looking at this, but Bryan Forbes and Per Kristian Gjermshus fixed up some gnome-vfsmm stuff, so I put out a new verion.

I want someone to patch regexxer to use gnome-vfsmm.

I found a map of WLANs in Linz. (I live in the middle-left, by the river.) I think I’ve picked up this guy’s WLAN from across the water.

I’m not just playing with this wireless stuff. I am using the moments of connectivity to prune the gtkmm bug list a bit.

garnome

I noticed that wget works through proxies, so I tried out GARNOME for the first time in a while. This is probably a good idea, because it’s an important de-facto part of our release process. I had more success than the last time, but hit the RedHat 9 bonobo-activation problem.

RedHat 9

Maybe I had forgotten what a default RedHat was like before I’d messed it up by installing a development GNOME on top of it. Other than a few oddities here and there it really does seem like a very usable desktop system. It’s certainly no more difficult than a standard Windows desktop, and it’s a lot simpler. Every now and then I look at KDE, most recently on SUSE 8.1, and I find it ridiculously cluttered, as if someone thought the Windows people knew what they were doing. It’s nice to see GNOME and RedHat use the old prove-by-doing principle.

I explored the underlying RedHat network scripts a bit and realised that lots of this underlying stuff is a bit heath robinson. But it does work very well, and seems to be well understood. I don’t know how the not-yet-part-of-GNOME GNOME System Tools compare, or whether this is similar on other distros.

Now that I have Kismet working, my search for a WLAN hotspot was successful. I found an open net just a few metres from my front door. I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from but I hope they mean it to be open. While the weather is good this should allow me to at least cvs update, work offline, then cvs commit.

I’m amazed at how many WLANs there are. At the end of the road, there’s a high lookout over the Donau/Danube, in a park, and there seem to be several networks available there. They seem to be coming from the other side of the river.

It turns out that my borrowed Cisco Aeronet 350 was probably one of the best cards I could have had, but they seem to be hard to buy in Austria and Germany. I tried all 3 cards in the local Saturn shop – The US Robotics 2210 and a Belkin one didn’t show up in RedHat 9’s network control panel. The slightly-more expensive Netgear MA401GR did so I’m trying it out.

It’s really a MA401AR apparently. I’ve read that the regular MA401 has an orinoco chipset but the MA401AR has a Prism2 chipset. Well, RedHat 9 is setup to use the orinoco driver with it. It works, but it’s incredibly slow, and there’s no monitor mode so Kismet doesn’t work with it. I read that you could use the wlan-ng drivers (normally for Prism2 chipsets) with it instead so I installed them from rpm I wonder why RedHat doesn’t ship/configure the wlan-ng drivers. That works – it’s far faster and Kismet works again. But the Redhat Network control panel doesn’t recognise the card anymore and can’t be used to configure/activate the connection. You have to edit /etc/wlan/ configuration files manually and do a manual /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart. That’s dull and might make it more difficult to glom onto random open WLANs.

If I can find someplace that’ll sell me a Cisco card then I think I’ll take this one back to the shop.

While I'm cut off from CVS Ole Laursen has been helping out by applying patches once I've approved them.

Actually I'm beginning to think this might not be such a bad situation for me – it forces people to do more work themselves because they know I can't integrate half-done patches myself.

People are beginning to do API addition patches for gtkmm 2.4, but it's nothing major so far.

I might have found a silly-but-major problem with most of our STL-style widget child interfaces. If so then it can only be fixed in gtkmm 2.4. It's a good thing we have non-STL-style interfaces too.

WLAN

Still without a real internet connection, I've been playing with a WLAN card recently. It's interesting, but not as easy as I had hoped. I found lots of networks with a windows laptop with netstumbler, but I can't seem to connect to any. There's a bunch of 10-euro-per-hour metronet hotspots in Linz, but I couldn't even connect to one of these. I could get an IP address but couldn't do anything more than ping their DNS server.

I found lots of WLANs around the university and I think some of them are open.

I've been trying to set up some wireless sniffer tools on Linux instead, and I think I've finally got kismet working. The following technical bits might be helpful to someone googling in future:

• RedHat 9 has kernel version 2.4.20, so, as mentioned here, you need to specify cisco_cvs instead of cisco as the capture_cardtype in the kismet.conf file.
• And when using cisco_cvs, you need to specify wifiX instead of ethX for the capture_interface. Both seem to exist, but wifiX is used for “raw packet capturing”. Kismet needs to use the ethX interface to enable “monitor mode” for the WLAN card, but unfortunately it just seems to infer the ethX number from the wifiX capture_interface name and they are not necessarily the same. So I had to juggle my network settings a bit so that my WLAN card was on eth0, causing the wifiX to be on wifi0.
• For instance, this is my line in /usr/local/etc/kismet.conf:
  source=cisco_cvs,wifi0,Kismet

• When you su to root to run kismet_monitor, you'll need to add /sbin to your PATH, so it can find /sbin/ifconfig.
• As mentioned here, I had to do a manual /sbin/ifconfig wifi0 up

This cisco card is borrowed. I think I'll get some more standard card for myself.

airsnort now seems to work too, when I specify wifi0, but I don't know how useful it is yet. airfart doesn't seem to work with cisco cards at all.

So now I'll go wandering again and see if I have more success with these new toys.

RedHat 9

RedHat doesn't feel all that different than RedHat 8, but the fancy animated hourglass cursor is surprisingly slick.