Politics. Mudslinging. Chocolate.

Whether Murray is right or not, I think his recent rant is rather tasteless and I agree some kind of retraction/apology is needed.

FWIW, Murray’s post certainly don’t reflect what I’ve experienced when I started participating in the GNOME project 2003-2004ish. That said, I acknowledge it may reflect what others have experienced. I don’t know. Also, I tend to stay out of politics… at least politics on that level. That said, I do appreciate others doing all this work; for a project of GNOME’s size we do need people in the foundation and some board, we need people spreading the word around GNOME, we do need to participate in standard organizations etc.

Either way, this kind of mudslinging is very unproductive for the project and everyone involved should know better. An old friend of mine once said “Can’t we just focus on the chocolate?”. This was in reaction to stupid in-company fighting and also a pun on a tv commercial from some chocolate company. The commercial involved three chocolate makers. They were making chocolate. Or rather, two of them were ranting about all sorts of non-sense and as a result they didn’t make much chocolate. At some point the third guy just had enough and he started whining. Much like me in this post.

Guys, can we please focus on the chocolate instead of all this non-sense?

Frustrated…

Battery Recall^WExchange

Just found, via the interwebs, that the battery in my 15″ Macbook Pro was recalled^Weligible for exchange almost a year ago although not for safety risks, merely because “… batteries supplied to Apple do not meet our high standards for battery performance.” [sic]. So that’s something. Anyway, since this is useful information, I wanted to add information to hal-info such that other Macbook Pro users would benefit as well. By getting spammed with a popup like this

Useful feature in g-p-m

But as it turns out this data is not easily available


$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present: yes
design capacity: 55000 mWh
last full capacity: 47150 mWh
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 10800 mV
design capacity warning: 250 mWh
design capacity low: 100 mWh
capacity granularity 1: 10 mWh
capacity granularity 2: 10 mWh
model number: ASMB012
serial number:
battery type: LION012
OEM info: SMPN012


meaning it’s hard to match on anything sensible from the fdi file. Maybe this is because it’s a Smart Battery? FWIW, I can see that the sbs driver is loaded. Lazyweb, please help - as comments on my blog are busted, please provide answers personally to me or, preferably, the hal list (requires subscription).

Btw, I couldn’t find this information by poking around in Mac OS X either… but it must be there; I mean, normal non-smart batteries record make, model and serial numbers just fine via ACPI. That’s what we use to tag other recalled battery units. So I’m sure it’s possible to get at. And if Apple wanted, they could easily have similar mechanisms for displaying notifications similar to the ones we have in GNOME. But I can understand it would hurt their bottom line. I guess.. this is one interesting aspect of getting your OS from the same vendor as where you get your hardware.

Anyway, I filled out the form and a new battery is on it’s way. I guess, uh, thanks Apple. Just wish you had notified me earlier and I wouldn’t have to find out this way .

Update: I suppose this isn’t technically a Product Recall; Apple specifically uses the word Exchange instead. I guess, from a legal point of view at least, there’s a difference. To me, as a consumer, it’s doesn’t make huge difference however… hmm.. maybe we need to add a new property info.is_eligible_for_exchange to the HAL spec to avoid using the word “recall” at all in such situations. I mean, to, uh, cover our collective asses from angry hardware vendors.

Who Killed The Electric Car?

Yay, just found out that Who Killed The Electric Car? is available on-demand on Comcast. It’s pretty awesome so far. Update: favorite quote “they’ll make me drive a small car, make me be cold in my own home… in other words, make me live like a European.”. My gods, that’s awesome .

I miss the summer (photo from Sydney, January 2007)

Weather here in MA continues to suck although my relatives in Denmark says it’s much worse there.

Trying to be Constructive

Daniel, actually I wasn’t referring to binary drivers per se in that particulary obnoxious post of mine; what I had in mind was primarily out-of-tree drivers / features including ones that explicitly disable rootkit prevention features for example. Using the word damaging to the free software community however was perhaps over the top, sorry it upset you and probably others, but I just don’t think including a bunch of not-so-heavily-audited code (e.g. a driver that is not in mainline) or code that disables security features is doing your users service. Most users of course don’t care, but developers like you and I should. In particular, OS vendors needs to care.

It seems you and I don’t disagree on Linux based distributions including proprietary drivers but I think that one thing you might not realize is how damaging it is when a popular distro starts doing this… years of work in dealing with certain vendors to open up code is undone in a jiffy. I don’t want to be all moody here, trying to be constructive (could use much stronger words but that would serve no purpose), but it’s flat out depressing when stuff like this happens.

With regards to you commenting on the Fedora community, most of your points, I think, are well understood by the community and some are being dealt with. For the record (and this should be clear to anyone involved in the areas I also participate in), I think of myself much more as an upstream guy rather than a Fedora guy as I think it’s silly we have all thesse differences between distributions - just do the work upstream (swim upstream dammit ) instead of adding distro-specific non-sense unless it’s absolutely necessary (things like branding, defauls etc. all fall under this). I think you know this already, so please don’t tag me as a Fedora guy just because I’m ranting about other distributions on my personal blog space. I happen to use Fedora because it’s aligned with my personal views about free software, because it’s a first class distro with cutting edge features… and also, of course, because I’m paid to work on the software by my employer.

introspection, bridges and people driving by

The larger problem, in my view, is really that we have some work left in building bridges between the various communities that participate in writing code for the GNU/Linux system. Heck, even inside a company like the one I work for it’s sometimes difficult to coordinate features between kernel, base os and desktop teams, sometimes even more difficult that dealing with other downstreams. However with collaboration zones like freedesktop.org we’re slowly getting there and things do look a bit better than they did just two years ago - next up, for example, is pm-utils so distros can start sharing quirks and infrastructure to improve the power mangement mess.

I hope this clarifies.

(Disclaimer: I am employed by Red Hat and am paid to work on (among other things) Fedora but my views are strictly my own.)

(Oh, and I also think it’s called “The New Pink” instead of “The New Black” but, uh, maybe saying that just reveals I’m eligible for membership in the GNOME old farts club.)

Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?

Saw Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? at the Kendall Square Cinema last night (review here). Movie itself was good. What was pretty awesome was that after the movie there was a Q and A session featuring Jeff Smith himself where we could ask questions about both the movie, the grass root stuff and his current political engagement.

If you have the chance run, don’t walk, down to the cinema and see the movie.

There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity

I’ve been hacking on and off with W. Michael Petullo on integrating LUKS into the GNOME desktop via HAL and patches are now upstream.. I think it rocks. I’ve prepared a small screencast:

Screencast of LUKS integration into GNOME

Hopefully we can get these bits into FC5; the patches themselves are pretty simple but you also need HAL and gnome-mount from CVS. I’ll do releases of the latter two later this week.

We still need some UI for setting up volumes; this should probably be integrated with gfloppy or maybe an entirely new UI for partitioning and formatting media. Fortunately, however, someone is already working on this but to do this securely we need to formalize privileges in HAL and I think there is consensus about how we want to do that.

In other news, danish are renamed in Iran. Some times, the world is so silly that it’s sad.

More Banana Republic coverage

Here is a less sober take on the recent democratic developments in Europe.

However. I’m not happy about this development at all. People should care more about freedom and the fundamental values of our society instead of just caring about themselves and the next reality show on the telly (that’s one for you Joey Punchclock!). Because, before they know it, they’ll have to pay a tax to some big corporation in the northwestern part of the United States to even watch TV.

Just like they do today to be able to exchange documents with the rest of the world.

Someone please explain how this is freedom.

Banana Republic

We Europeans should be ashamed of ourselves.



Sod it.

World Map

Heh, even after a little more than four months over here, I found this quite amusing

Hacking; Power outage

Life

I’ve been told that I had a fun time at IBC

Hacking

I’ve made good progress on the HAL project, lots of discussion and feedback on both xdg-list and linux-hotplug. It’s my first involvement in open source development and the ideas of extensive peer-review and general openness seem very good.

Reading

I’ve started reading Beyond Software Architecture : Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions and it’s very good. Right up my alley with the role I have right now at work.

Robocurl

Finally some progress; we tested the kit sunday at the curling rink and it seems to work wrt. framerate updates etc. More on that later..

Power outage

Today, at approx 1240 local time all power disappeared in Copenhagen and parts of Sweden and Denmark. Four million people was without power for three to four hours. CNN is carrying the store here and the BBC coverage is here.

We all left work at about 1330 local time. On my way home people looked disoriented and there were signs of traffic congestion.. Power was restored at 1645 local time in my apartment and fortutantly my server came up again.. I did had to tweak around with my OpenVPN scripts and manually start the MySQL database, but that was really my own bad.

I’m quite amazed that something like this can happen in a country like Denmark where we pay more than 50% in taxes. I don’t mind doing that (that much), but then I want some freakin service and not this…

There are no reports on any fatalities (yet), which is good. On the bright side, I managed to do the dishes while the power was out

So MS wants to update software on my linux machine?

Heh, was just rebooting my laptop (Red Hat Linux 9 sometimes hangs when removing the power) and when logging into gnome, gaim gave me this (message text is in danish)

I wonder how some sysadmin guy at MS reacts when he sees it.. On the topic of laptops, I think I’m going buy an apple 12″ powerbook soon - my current laptop, a 15.4″ dell inspiron 7500, is more than 3.5 years old.. It’s still the computer I use the most though