Plumbers 2009

Had a great time at Plumbers Conference last week in lovely Portland, OR. On the Friday on the conference, Kay and I gave a talk, aptly named “Replugging the Modern Desktop”. The talk covered most of the hal-ectomy that has been happening and included a couple of demos. The slides are here. UPDATE: People on IRC are telling me that the fd.o servers are not reachable, I’ve put up another copy of the slides here.

Linux Plumbers Conference CFP extended!

I rarely blog these days, doing the Twitter thing instead and all. Anyway. The Call for Papers for the Linux Plumbers Conference in September in lovely Portland, Oregon has been extended until July 31st 2008. It’s a conference about the core infrastructure of Linux systems: the part of the system where userspace and the kernel interface. It’s the first conference where the focus is specifically on getting together the kernel people who work on the userspace interfaces and the userspace people who have to deal with kernel interfaces. It’s supposed to be a place where all the people doing infrastructure work sit down and talk, so that each other understands better what the requirements and needs of the other are, and where we can work towards fixing the major problems we currently have with our lower-level APIs.

I’m running the “Desktop Integration” microconf at Plumbers. I have two goals for the microconf. One is to be informative about what’s going on in the dusty hallways between the Kernel and the Free Desktop. Which I think is important at a place like Plumbers where we’re going to a lot of people working on similar problems present. The other goal is to actually try and make some headway on actual problems that require people from multiple communities working together. Such as some of the work Jon is focusing on, e.g. how to make fast-user-switching, multi-seat and terminal services Just Work(tm).

The conference is expected to sell out pretty quickly so it’s a good idea to go ahead and register for Plumbers Conference instead of procrastinating about doing it!

See you in Portland!

gnome.conf.au 2008

Am in Melbourne, VIC, Australia for linux.conf.au 2008; just gave a talk on PolicyKit, the slides are here. Only had 20 minutes so the whole thing felt a bit rushed and I didn’t get to go into much detail. Hopefully it made some sense though, otherwise checkout the design and API docs.

i’m in ur RAID, striping ur disks all the way to CA

Recently I acquired a pair of 500GB USB2 hard disks that I use in a RAID-1 configuration (on two different host controllers!); you know, to store my photos and other important, uh, stuff. I had some spare time this weekend to look at fd.o #6426 so I wrote a small patch to teach HAL about Linux software RAID.

RAID rebuilding

I also whipped up patch to gnome-device-manager such as to show the new properties introduced including whether an array is running in degraded mode or is being rebuilt. It’s pretty spiffy.

All that this code is doing right now is basically just listening to kernel events (via udev and priority data on /proc/mdstat) and then representing the RAID arrays as HAL drives and volumes. It’s spiffy because the RAID drive inherits things like storage.hotpluggable from the physical components (e.g. the two USB hard disks) so in my case the RAID array simply appears in Nautilus and is totally mountable just like a regular external drive. Works out of the box. Desktop integration++. However, we can do a bit better so for GNOME 2.20 I’ll be writing some patches to gnome-vfs and gvfs. You know, to use the new HAL properties to choose some helpful icons and icon captions.

Going forward, there needs to be some way of assembling and disassembling RAID arrays; hot-adding components to degraded arrays and so on and so on. Probably neither Nautilus nor gnome-device-manager is the right approach here. And there will probably be some sort of auto-assembly happening at the system-wide level anyway, need to sort that out with Kay (the udev maintainer) and also talk to various distro maintainers too. It’s also probably also time to revive my never properly announced GNOME Disk Utility project. Actually, that’s one reason that I split the Device Manager into a shell and library component; right now the shell is around 1200 lines (compared to 4000+ for the library) and there’s no reason that the Disk Utility shell would be a lot bigger. Plus it’s always awesome to put pretty UI on top of useful infrastructure.

Tomorrow I’m leaving for The Golden State to go the Red Hat summit, then hang out with Kay Sievers and finish off the west-coast invasion with FreedomHEC. The next two weeks are going to be busy.

Stupid meme

Sydney

Barely back in Boston (UTC -0500) after the xmas break in Denmark (UTC +0100), I’m now in Sydney (UTC +1100) for linux.conf.au 2007. I don’t feel jetlagged though.

Coogee, NSW, Australia (not my bottles)

Managed to sleep a lot on my 24-hour journey; I was fortunate enough to be traveling with blizzard. We even got picked up at the airport; I suppose Chris’ description of us to the organizers was somewhat accurate

Just look for crazy man and fisheye boy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherblizzard/306028359/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidz/235769935/

(Together, we fight crime!)

Now to check out of my hotel and find the campus of UNSW. Times are good.

Fast User Switching

I’ve just put up some notes about Fast User Switching and how we plan to integrate this into Fedora for our next release.

Most of this work builds upon ConsoleKit by the ever-so-awesome Jon McCann of gnome-screensaver fame. It’s not very Fedora centric so hopefully other Linux distributions (and other free UNIX-like systems like OpenSolaris and FreeBSD) will pick it up too. I’m excited, in particular, about the fact that, with infrastructure like this, we’ll be able to enhance applications to behave intelligently when f-u-s is used, e.g. pause media playback, go to away mode for IM etc.

Don’t forget the beer tonight

Going to pick up Kay later in the PM, he’s flying in from Hamburg. We’ll most likely end up at Flat Top’s later tonight for Dave’s shindig!

A few days ago Artem merged the Solaris backend for HAL. Awesome. The FreeBSD backend is going to be merged real soon now as well, the patch is already on the list.

Random Stuff and Random Flames

Looking at myself or looking at you?

• Just booked tickets for LCA 2007 in Sydney, Australia in January 2007. Am also taking some vacation to bum around .au the week following the conference. Am also planning to submit a proposal for the GNOME miniconf.
  


• Sad to see yet another defector. Here’s a very insightful comment from davej about some of the damage done to the free software community.
  


• Less-than-insightful rant about “crappy HAL” that frankly pisses me off.
  


• Spent around 3-4 days optimizing HAL for CPU and memory consumption, here are the difference it makes on the 770, courtesy of Rob Taylor
  


• Am almost done with a huge freakin patch for activation on the system message bus. Will need to write down how this relates to some of the init replacement projects out there; here are some thoughts about that for now, but it really deserves a full blog entry.
  


• With the D-Bus bits (system bus activation) in place, I can move forward and do some PolicyKit stuff that requires the D-Bus bits in order to be useful.
  


• Trying to spend lots of time on work-stuff since personal life is a bit busted at the moment.
  

Drinks, Software and Gambling

How to make a David Zeuthen

Ingredients: 5 parts friendliness 1 part humour 5 parts energy

Method: Add to a cocktail shaker and mix vigorously. Add a little fitness if desired!

Username:


Personality cocktail
From Go-Quiz.com

In other news I just released HAL 0.5.8 “The Skynet Funding Bill is passed.”. Get it while it’s hot!

Only in Vegas!

The girl and I went to Vegas over the Labour day weekend. I’ve uploaded some photos here. I was lucky at the roulette table too (put some $15 at my age, yeay!), got home with $700 more in the pocket.

Linux Symposium

I appear to be in Ontario, Canada. More specifically I’m in Ottawa though hours last night was spent at a bar in Quebec.

In Logan’s terminal 3 enroute to OLS

Yesterday, Kay and I gave a talk on Dynamic Device Handling on the Modern Desktop and I think it was well received. Yeay!

Oh, and I’ve even got to say that hal-device-manager (the small python GTK+ app for viewing the hal device objects and their properties) was an “unmaintained piece of crap” alluding in a funny way to the recent LWN article badmouthing HAL. Some people in the audience laughed. Lots of excellent questions too. Good times.

I’ve uploaded the slides from mine and Kay’s talk here. Enjoy.

GUADEC recap

Got back from GUADEC and Spain on Sunday. Nice conference; I liked the touch with seven days instead of three even though it was a bit exhausting in the end. I’ve also got sick around Saturday so spent that day in bed in my hotel room before traveling back Sunday. As a result of all this, I’m way behind on mail so to those who I owe a reply, hang in there, I’ll get back to you eventually.

Robert and Joey as batshit insane movie stars?

I’ve now uploaded the slides from my talk (ODP, PDF).

Taking a break from the action at the Fluendo party

I enjoyed the 4th of July fireworks from my balcony in Somerville, MA overlooking Boston

Zeppelin just after dropping it’s payload on Boston, MA?

All my GUADEC pictures are available here.

New year and Policy Daemons

New Year, Same Old

It’s a new year and I returned late last week from Europe - nice with relaxation but maybe a bit too much travelling… Anyway, pictures speak much more than a thousand words, or something, so nuff’ said. I’m not sure I like 2006 yet, maybe things will change.

Danish food

For new years I went to Hamburg, Germany to visit my good friend Kay Sievers - awesome to see Kay again. With Kay working for Novell and me working for Red Hat we talked a lot about the current state of our various distributions and how we can work closer together in the trenches. Specifically we discussed how to manage policy enforcing daemons and below are some of my thoughts on that.

On Enforcing Policy

Background

Starting with Fedora Core 1, Red Hat started shipping the system-wide bus (D-BUS) in Fedora Core, but it wasn’t until Fedora Core 3 with the advent of HAL and NetworkManager that the bus started to see extensive use.

Today, in what will become Fedora Core 5, unpriviliged applications running in a desktop session on the console can invoke methods for putting the system to sleep, configure display brightness on laptops, configure networking and mounting storage devices. With time, more and more methods will be available for configuring the hardware and/or system. All such method invocation happens in a secure way through the (unprivileged) system bus daemon that checks, validates and passes messages between the sender and receiver. Additional lock-down via e.g. SELinux security contexts are possible too but I’ve yet not seen anything use it.

Configuration

Back in the day, the traditional UNIX way for system-wide daemons prescribed using a textual configuration file somewhere in /etc - acpid and networking scripts comes to mind. With this, users had to resort to using a text editor and learn about the configuration file format; very educating and l33t for the geek hacker, but not ideal for ordinary users; not ideal for grandma. When available, UI tools simply rewrote the configuration file which most people agree is error prone and just plain wrong.

Allowing applications in the desktop session to enforce policy makes a lot of sense from a configuration point of view. Today, in the development tree of Fedora we now ship gnome-power-manager. Settings are read from gconf at /apps/gnome-power-manager. We have a nice, not horrible at least, user interface (Desktop -> Preferences -> Power Management) for configuring the policy. It is per-user, and since it uses gconf it’s possible to configure both default and mandatory settings (for lock-down), these days this can even nicely be achieved with e.g. Sabayon. In almost every way possible way it’s superior to textual configuration files. John has some good stuff about gconf here.

Also, gnome-power-manager sports a notification icon along with a menu for performing actions such as putting the system to sleep or hibernation. These days, when the kernel is in a good mood, power management just works. It’s like using my Mac.

However, there are two obvious downsides to running policy enforcing daemons in the desktop session, namely

1. 
   when no user is logged in, no copy of gnome-power-manager is ever running; hence no policy is maintained; hence your laptop won’t suspend after e.g. 15 minutes of inactivity when at the login screen.
   


2. 
   when multiple users are logged in (either via fast-user-switching or via multiple physical consoles) multiple copies of gnome-power-manager are running. This is bad as e.g. inactivity on one console might trigger e.g. a system suspend.
   

Exactly the same problems apply for the screen saver (gnome-screen-saver), networking (nm-applet), storage management (gnome-volume-manager) and probably other things too. Wonder why there is no screen saver on the login screen? Wonder why your wireless network isn’t configured before login? That’s why.

The Opera House in Copenhagen, Denmark

A framework

To solve problems 1) and 2) above we first need some infrastructure for tracking what sessions are at the consoles attached to the system. Remember that several users can be logged in at the same console through fast user switching (even multiple sessions from the same user on one console) so we need a notion of who and what is active at each console.

The proposal is a simple D-BUS service on the system bus; in quick and dirty pseudo code it would look like this


service org.freedesktop.DBus.ConsoleTracker {
methods:
array{tupple{string sessionId,int console, bool isActive}} GetSessions();
int GetNumberOfConsoles();
int GetUnixUidFromSessionID(string sessionId);
signals:
SessionBegin(string sessionId, int console);
SessionEnd(string sessionId, int console);
SessionActivityChanged(string sessionId, int console, bool isActive);
NumberOfConsolesChanged(int numConsoles);
}

The sessionId is simply a unique identifier maintained by the ConsoleTracker service - most likely this is the X11 display number though ConsoleTracker shouldn’t rely on a certain windowing system. The isActive boolean denotes where the session is currently visible on the console. Along the way the ConsoleTracker service may also provide methods such as GetSessionBusAddress(string sessionId), it might provide properties to tell what kind of session is running (GNOME, KDE, …) but that is beyond the scope of this write-up.

A service like this (I’m sure the choice of names and methods / signals can be much improved) simply tracks sessions and, as such users logging in and out. Ideally this service is shipped with the D-BUS tarball and ideally we’d make the system bus dependent on this service insofar that we can introduce policy directives such as “at_active_console” etc. in addition to the “at_console” directive we already have.

The ConsoleTracker service should also be possible to implement without pam_console which means that we can get rid of the optional pam_console dependency in D-BUS. This also means that e.g. HAL and NetworkManager can ship D-BUS configuration files with “at_console” without the Debian people having to patch things out and only users logged in at the console may invoke methods like e.g. Suspend() to put the system to sleep. Of course, the Debian people may still change the policy because they think group membership is more correct. It’s their OS distribution after all.

Rupert spotted in Germany

Now, with the ability to track logged in users and sessions, it becomes almost trivial to write the next system-wide service, let’s call it org.freedesktop.PolicyManager. This is a daemon that reads configuration files in /etc/PolicyManager.d/ (only programs will dump files here, not people)

/etc/PolicyManager.d/power-management.conf
storage-management.conf
...


where e.g. power-management.conf contains

[policy-service]
exec=/usr/bin/my-power-manager-when-no-one-is-logged-in
id=PowerManagement
per_console=false


which simply states that the PolicyManager daemon should run the program /usr/bin/my-power-manager-when-no-one-is-logged-in when no user is logged in (the console number is passed in the environment). This configuration file also provides a unique identifier for the kind of policy service it is, in this case power management. Part of the “specification” for the PolicyManager daemon contains a list of well-defined policy services, e.g. PowerManagement, StorageManagement, ScreenSaver, NetworkManagement and so forth.

My sister has a Pony called Conny

The per_console field requires further discussion, but let us first take a look at the D-BUS interface offered by the PolicyManager daemon:


service org.freedesktop.PolicyManager {
methods:
bool ClaimPolicyService(string id);
bool ReleasePolicyService(string id);
signal:
PolicyServiceClaimed(string id, string sessionId, int console);
PolicyServiceReleased(string id, string sessionId, int console);
}


The thinking here is that when I login to the GNOME desktop, then gnome-power-manager is started and it invokes ClaimPolicyService("PowerManagement") on the PolicyManager system service. Since D-BUS now sports the ConsoleTracker service, the PolicyManager can determine what console, if any, the method call from the gnome-power-manager instance stems from. Specifically, if the method invocation stems from a process not at the console it is denied.

The PolicyManager service now kills the existing process responsible for power management, e.g. /usr/bin/my-power-manager-when-no-one-is-logged-in, and returns TRUE which means that our copy of gnome-power-manager is set to go. This daemon starts enforcing policy, e.g. suspends my laptop after inactivity and so forth.

Whenever my copy of gnome-power-manager terminates (normally when logging out), then the PolicyManager is notified through a signal on the system message bus (already part of the system bus) and starts up /usr/bin/my-power-manager-when-no-one-is-logged-in to enforce policy. Also, at any point my gnome-power-manager copy may invoke ReleasePolicyService("PowerManagement") if the user e.g. manually disables it (though it is unlikely why g-p-m would provide such functionality).

Suppose that user A is logged in at console 0, it’s session "s100", and has a copy of gnome-power-manager runnning. Now suppose that user B logs in via fast user switching at console 0, session "s101". The following happens.

First, the ConsoleTracker service emits a signal telling that session "s100" is no longer active, SessionActivityChanged("s100", 0, FALSE), and the gnome-power-manager copy in session "s100" receives this signal and stops enforcing policy (it doesn’t invoke ReleasePolicyService() though). Now another copy of gnome-power-manager for user B starts up in session "s101". It also invokes ClaimPolicyService("PowerManagement") on PolicyManager and it recieves TRUE and this copy starts enforcing policy.

When switching back to session "s100", the g-p-m copy in session "s101" stops enforcing policy, due to SessionActivityChanged("s101", 0, FALSE), and the g-p-m copy for session "s100" starts enforcing policy in response to the SessionActivityChanged("s100", 0, TRUE) signal.

Frightening Sky

The per_console field, which is FALSE in the power management example, defines whether the policy enforcing daemon is per console or per system.

For example, consider a system with two consoles, 0 and 1. Since per_console is FALSE for power management only one copy of /usr/bin/my-power-manager-when-no-one-is-logged-in is launched. When there are two user sessions, one on each console, only one of them get to enforce policy, e.g. ClaimPolicyService("PowerManagement") will fail for one of the two copies of gnome-power-manager. The loser will probably revert to only showing battery information, not enforcing policy, and it is up to the two copies to negotiate when to suspend the system. This may be done in a number of ways.

So when is per_console=TRUE useful? It’s useful for policy enforcing pieces like the screen saver or the storage manager. In general, it’s useful when you want a copy running for each console. For example, when PolicyManager starts up on a system with two consoles, it will launch two copies of the /usr/bin/my-screen-saver-when-no-one-is-logged-in (how it gets access to the X display is another matter though). Specifically, for storage management, e.g. gnome-volume-manager, one also wants to ensure that policy is only enforced for drives local to the console, e.g. only mount USB storage for the USB ports local to the console. How this is determined is beyond the scope of this write-up for ConsoleTracker and PolicyManager but it’s not difficult to imagine that this information could come from HAL.

Reusing desktop policy daemons for system use

One problem remains to be solved. How do you configure the policy for the policy daemon when no user is logged in? Also, why would you want to maintain two code bases; one for desktop case and one for the case when no use is logged in? The answer here is simply to reuse the desktop policy daemon. For instance, for power management we get


[policy-service]
exec=/usr/bin/gnome-power-manager --no-one-is-logged-in
id=PowerManagement
per_console=false


and gnome-power-manager simply don’t provide any UI (or maybe it paints the UI on top of the login screen, e.g. gdm). Since this copy of gnome-power-manager is invoked by the PolicyManager daemon it runs as nobody or some other unprivileged system user. It still reads it’s setting from gconf but since this is not a real user it will get the default settings.

With this approach the UI for gnome-power-manager may include a button “Set as system default” that simply copies the settings from the logged in users gconf schema to the system default ones in /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults. This of course requires administrative privileges and we may even hide this button if we can detect whether the user is an admin or not. Notably this will also work for other policy enforcing daemons, e.g. NetworkManager’s nm-applet, the GNOME screen saver and so forth.

Confetti is Everywhere

Not tied to one desktop

I’ve used GNOME as an example above, mostly because I’m a GNOME user and developer myself, but nothing prevents KDE or XFCE to do the same. Indeed, if there is agreement on all desktops using the ConsoleTracker and PolicyManager things will “just work”. Of course, someone will have to write this stuff , I’m just rambling about one possible framework.

Last few months in review

I realized today that I haven’t blogged in almost three months.

Conferences

In July, I went to the Desktop Developers Conference and then the Ottawa Linux Symposium after that. One busy week where I shared a room with Kay Sievers, good pal and now proud maintainer of udev (congrats Kay!). It was my first time going to one of the DDC and OLS conferences, and it was good to meet both old and new friends. Pictures here. Next up is the GNOME Boston Summit.

Hackers

Visit

An old friend Søren, from Denmark, was in California so he stopped over in Boston for a visit in the start of September. We drove down to NYC, had a good Saturday night out clubbing with friends, hung out in the city on the Sunday. Labour-day Monday, we headed south for Washington DC for another 2.5 days. Pictures here.

At the corner of 33th street and 7nd Ave

Photography

I’ve upgraded to the Canon 20D and also acquired my first L lens, the 70-200 f/2.8L zoom lens. It’s awesome. Coupled with the 2x II extender I grabbed a picture of a full moon the day before yesterday, see below. For candid shots and low-light-photography (good for capturing people that has issues with fire alarms) I still swear to my copy of the Sigma 28mm f1.8, it’s pretty good, though I do admit that I miss a zoom and eventually I’d like something like this instead .

Full moon

Mass Drivers License

I passed the written test last week and the road test yesterday, so now I’m licensed to drive here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and, for that matter, in the rest of the US. Compared to the tests I had to take in Denmark, some 11.5 years ago, this was a piece of cake. It is pretty fortunate that I finally got this done, as after one year in the US my Danish license will stop working and that is nine days from now. Btw, thanks a million to J5 for being my sponsor.

Work

Been busy with new projects. I feel a little bit sad that this means that I’ve been slow to reply on mail on the HAL list, but this is also because life have been somewhat busy and trying lately. Fortunately Danny Kukawka and Richard Hughes have been helpful looking after the project. Also happy to see that GNOME Power Manager will soon enter Rawhide. I’ve been using g-p-m for the past few weeks and it makes the whole laptop experience better.

This is where mechanical excellence and one-thousand four-hundred horsepower pays off

California
Impulse struck me last week and Wednesday I booked a quick getaway on site59.com - a site that Seth told me about. I got an awesome deal; highly recommended.

California Route One

I left for sunny California (wasn’t that sunny though) very early Saturday and arrived back in rainy Boston (very rainy when we landed) very early Wednesday. I didn’t really have any specific plans for the trip so things just happened along the way which happened to work out very well. Spent Saturday night in San Francisco (notably at the Irish Bank and The Swig) where I met and chatted with a bunch of different people including one professional photographer (which was interesting as I like to think of photography as a new hobby for me). Sunday I left for Monterey and stayed there until Tuesday.

The most amazing part of the trip was probably driving on the very amazing 90 mile stretch of Route 1 from Carmel to San Simeon. Well, pictures speak more than a thousand words.

Spent most of Wednesday catching up on mail and on meetings / IRC; still got lots of mail and issues to attend to though.

A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man

NetworkManager

So, I finally got round to finishing up and committing my NetworkManager VPN patch; here are the details. Also, since all the cool kids do it, I made a screencast to show how it works. Peruse it by clicking the picture below.

davidz does screencasting

The next step is to add support for more VPN software, not at least so we can finalise the extension points (interfaces really) for how to integrate VPN software with NetworkManager. Things like OpenVPN and Openswan comes to mind. When that is done, we’re probably going to lock down the interface and keep it stable. You know, even so proprietary software vendors may integrate their VPN software with NetworkManager.

Denmark

I had a very very nice time in Denmark; arrived on Wednesday the 1st of June, spent the evening at my moms new house in Trørød with my mom, my sister Maria and her husband and two kids. On Thursday my mom and I embarked on a journey to Fyn

the uncle and the nephew - who’s who?

to visit my sister Birgitte and family. It was awesome, Birgitte and co. lives on an old farm and there was a ton of motives which meant that I put good use to my new camera. I need to upload those pictures soon now that I got an account at flickr (again, like all the cool kids .

I returned to Copenhagen on Friday and met with a lot of friends at Vesterbro Torv - I think we were 10-11 or so. It was very nice to see so many of my old pals and it got very late until I returned home (in more than one sense). It was totally awesome.

Beantown

When I got back to Boston about a week ago the weather had changed. It used to be cool. How did that happen? Now it’s about 90F (32C) and extremely humid. We have already had two thunderstorms IIRC. Thank god for AC - except that the one in my car is broken and the one in my apartment is extremely noisy. Oh well, can’t win them all

Stuttgart

GUADEC

Hanging with Kay Sievers in the Bier Garten

Jeff rocked

Stuttgart is rather nice

Copenhagen

I’m going to Copenhagen tomorrow. As mentioned here I’m up for beer but we moved it to Friday from Thursday. Send me mail!

Refined Travel Plans

As mentioned earlier I’ll be travelling to Europe for GUADEC in less than a fortnight.

Friday night I felt like spontaneously visiting Revere Beach, MA

Tonight I just spent some airline miles so after spending $51 for taxes etc. I got this in the mail

OUTWARD FLIGHT: SK658, SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES
01 June, 10:40, Stuttgart Stuttgart Apt Terminal 1
01 June, 12:20, Copenhagen Copenhagen Apt Terminal 3

RETURN FLIGHT: SK655, SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES
04 June, 15:15, Copenhagen Copenhagen Apt Terminal 3
04 June, 16:45, Stuttgart Stuttgart Apt

which leaves the Saturday night in Stuttgart before I return to Boston on June 5.

Time: To measure, as in music or harmony. 1913 Webster

I hope to see all my buddies and family in Denmark! Even LKL despite he haven’t responded to mail for the past month. Slacker

Good times

M&M visit

My mom and older sister, Maria, visited last week; we went to Niagara Falls (on a two day trip), Cape Cod and did other tourist things here in Boston.

Visiting Niagara Falls, NY early Sunday

It was absolutely great to have the girls visiting and everything panned out very nicely. Also, now I’ve also got the right gear in the kitchen to cook food (my mom remarked that it’s an useful asset in order to pick up a girlfriend)

The Falls!

Visitors

Given I’ve lived here for about 7 months, I’ve been quite fortunate with friends/family visiting me; Dennis was here in December, Maz dropped by in January, the girls in April and it looks like Marco and Lars is coming in May. Yay!

Visiting Race Beach near Provincetown on Cape Cod

New camera

I’ve finally bought a new camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XT which is a very nice 8M pixel SLR camera. It nicely complements my (nowadays, rather old) Canon Digital Ixus V - one for serious pictures, and one for fun.

My view of Beantown through the new camera

Conferences / Travel

I will be at 6UADEC in Stuttgart, Germany and will also spend five days after that probably travelling around Europe (returning June 5). Also, I’m going to OLS in July and will probably fly up there with Blizzard in his small plane . Also, Kay is talking about visiting Boston just before OLS.

Back in Beantown

After 8 days of vacation in the old country, I’m now safely back in lovely Somerville. Refreshed and ready for a smashing 2005, hope it will be less disruptive than 2004.

Happy new year to everyone!

Fitting in

Woow. Finally got my act together after being over here in the US for about 4 weeks now. So I setup this blog so I can, uhm, broadcast information rather than answering individual mails. Which is good as the latter is somewhat timeconsuming. So, to do this the right way I’ve also subscribed a bunch of friends and family; I’m sure they’re all delighted about reading when I buy a new brand of toothpaste and whatever. We’ll see

A view of Manhatten on a trip to Raleigh, NC

Things have been very hectic with work up until last week or so, with the freezing of what will become Fedora Core 3. This release features HAL and other components from the Utopia stack that I and others have been working on for the past year.

Yay! Plugging in the hard disk from my old FC1 server Just Works(tm).

I’m pretty happy with the outcome; big thanks go to Kay for all his patches and hard work especially on the volume_id library. He rocks.

The US is a strange and wonderful place at the same time. One thing is that I’ve become somewhat a baseball fan with Red Sox and their powerful comeback; it looks like they are going to beat the curse this year. Another thing is that I’m down to fifteen cigarattes a day. I guess that is a good thing.

For the record, my new car so much beats the one that krh bought

Well, off to find a bar and see the Red Sox play.