If you’re going to invest, don’t invest in llamas

The Motley Fool had some great 401(K) advice. They say that if your 401(K) lets you invest in llamas, consider moving to a job where the owner is not insane, as llamas cannot possibly help your retirement. I think they understimate the power of the llama.

Galago with D-BUS 0.30

I’ve been hacking a bit on Galago’s D-BUS 0.30 support the past couple of days, and although it’s not yet complete, good progress has been made. Most things now work, with the exception of a few bugs here and there.

Thanks to D-BUS 0.30’s new struct container support, I can really start to clean up the protocol. However, for the time-being, not much protocol-wise has changed. I’ve been developing a small abstraction layer to minimize the number if D-BUS versioning checks in the code. You see, I’m not dropping D-BUS 0.23.x support just yet. Not until more desktops have 0.30+ installed.

I do all development nowadays on my laptop, which runs Ubuntu Hoary (containing D-BUS 0.23.x). I needed to be able to quickly and easily move back and forth between this and a distro with D-BUS 0.30.x support for testing, and I certainly didn’t want to set up a new distro on one of my other computers.

I ended up installing Fedora Core 4 test 3 inside a VM using VMware Workstation 5. It’s working beautifully, and just sits on one of my virtual desktops taking up a good portion of the screen. The theme and everything matches, so for the most part it doesn’t even feel like I’m using another virtual computer. I’ve been able to make a D-BUS 0.30 change, submit the code, switch virtual desktops, and make sure the 0.23.x support still works. And vice-versa. It truly makes this kind of development a lot easier to deal with.

Also, since I’ve been using my laptop and taking that to work with me, I’m able to just click Suspend on the VM when I need to power down to travel with it. Gotta love that. I wish I had suspend working on my laptop itself.