This here’s a recipe for unpleasantness

We had snow today - good thing I was working from home

How the world really is

Sunset

I fought the mountain and the mountain won

Today, Kristian and I drove up to Killington, VT to go skiing. It was my first time out on sloped terrain, let alone the first time in 15-20 years wearing a set of skiis.

I fought the mountain and the mountain won

After some moderate success on the learning slope, Kristian convinced me to try the green slope pictured above (or was it blue? Supposed to be an easy one either way). I was told that I looked rather freaked out after safely returning to the base camp but that it was somewhat decent attempt; go go go! Heh, things take time I guess.

Either way, it was awesome and I’m definitely going to go again soon. Especially as I shelled out quite an amount of money for skiing clothes but ended up renting the skiis, boots and other stuff.

Bokeh Galore

I also brought my camera and a set of lenses (the 10-22, 24-70, 70-200 and 2x extender) though, since the weather was quite bad, I only used my recently acquired 50mm f/1.4 - the bokeh on that one is awesome, though it’s a bit difficult to focus correctly although that is a known issue.

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.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn

Zoo

Went out to Franklin Park Zoo this morning and took a bunch of pictures.

Waterfall in the Tropical Forest

Most of them ended up pretty bad due to lack of light (thanks to the somewhat hazy weather here in Boston). I’ve uploaded some of the better ones in this gallery.

Volume handling

Been spending quite some time on a rather large gnome-vfs patch (it’s about 80k now) that enables gnome-vfs-daemon to recognize drives without having them in the /etc/fstab file.

Look mom! No /etc/fstab entries!

There’s a bunch of other benefits including the fact that we actually show drive icons even when no media is in the drive and, of course, that we stop using /usr/sbin/fstab-sync in Fedora and instead use mount/umount/eject programs that can integrate nicely with the GNOME desktop. The latter is quite important, actually the point of this whole exercise.

The main benefit is that we can move all policy into the desktop - this means that we can write a GNOME-based mount wrapper that queries your settings from gconf about where to mount volumes (the mount point) and what mount options to use (e.g. iocharset comes mind). Of course, we have to be extremely careful in what options and mounts point we’ll allow. It will be almost trivial to write a Nautilus extension so this can be edited in a tab per drive/volume. This is planned too. While this sounds like a super-31337 geek feature it’s actually something that both Fedora and upstream HAL has gotten a lot of bug reports about. Another benefit is that we can actually put up meaningful dialogs if the mount/umount/eject fails. For instance, we may put up a dialog with a list of the applications that is blocking the unmount (of course, applications like these needs to be fixed so maybe not worth the effort).

Finally, we’ll be able to do lock-down much more effectively - for instance, administrators should be able to say “Require root password to mount external storage device read/write” (which is done by setting a mandatory gconf key) and we pop a dialog telling the user that we can only mount read-only unless the user authenticates (using the root password or other mechanishms is another discussion). While this sounds like a stupid feature check this out (search for “solder”) and also take a look at some of the discussion regarding what Sarbanes-Oxley is requiring from businesses.

Implementation-wise, I’m planning to use pmount as the backend for the GNOME-specific mount/umount/eject wrapper but right now I’m running into some issues with the privileged parts (that should trust nobody) insofar that they have to check things in gconf / HAL. Have to think a bit more about that and also email Martin.

Chopsticks

So, this female Asian coworker (who has requested anonymity when I told her I was going to blog this, so can’t be specific gave me a set of chopsticks last week. They’re supposed to be easier to use than what they give you at restaurants.

Chopsticks. In orange. They even match my sleeping sofa.

I’m still undecided whether it’s something I should bring to a fancy restaurant, so I carry them around with me until that matter is resolved

Size does matter

New lens

Went to the Cambridgeside Galleria tonight and picked up the EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Telephoto Zoom Lens. It’s awesome. Can’t wait for the sun to get up as it requires a bit more light than the standard 18-55mm lens that came with my Digital Rebel XT

Size does matter

Now to start thinking about a quick weekend get-away to try out this beast.

D-BUS

Been spending some time on D-BUS the past few days, got a patch for automatically reloading policy in and also some bitching about not breaking the ABI. John put out the 0.34 release that also includes glib/gobject goodness from Colin and Ross. Sweet.

Playing in the band

Friday, me, Kristian, Chris, Søren, John and clee went to this Somerville bar since it was country/southern rock night. It was pretty cool. So, I was standing out smoking, casual and minding my own stuff you know, and this old timer who reminded me of Johnny Cash came up and asked if I was part of the band. I had to say no but he insisted that I looked like a natural-born guitar player and gave me several addresses where to buy a guitar and encouraged me to start playing. I contemplated starting singing to get him on better thoughts

Fedora Core 4

The Amazing Fedora Core 4! is out. Go get it.

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