Author name: chipx86

Review Board 1.0 alpha 1 released

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Roughly two years ago, David Trowbridge and I began development of Review Board for use in our open source projects and our team at VMware. During that time, we’ve turned Review Board into a powerful code review tool that works with a variety of version control systems. Most of VMware has moved over to it, as have an estimated 50-100 companies world-wide. We’ve had over 100 contributors to the project, people providing volunteer support on the mailing list, and people have developed third party tools for integrating with Review Board.

After all this time in development, with this many people contributing, we decided it’s probably time to get a release out there. Sure, we could have done this a long time ago, but there’s a number of large things we were hoping to get in (a recently-committed UI rewrite, for instance). Now that we have most of the major features we want for our 1.0 release, we decided it was time for an alpha.

Over the coming months, we’ll be working on stabilizing the codebase, fixing a few large remaining usability quirks, enhancing performance, and writing some proper documentation (which is coming along nicely).

We’re eager to get a quality product out there and to begin development on the next release. There’s a lot of neat things planned:

  • Support for writing extensions to Review Board.
  • A fully-featured API covering every operation you’ll need to perform.
  • Some degree of policy support (specifying which users/groups can see which parts of a repository, for instance).
  • Reviews with statuses other than “Ship It”. This will probably be customizable to some degree.
  • Possibly some theme customization to allow Review Board to blend in better with corporate sites, Trac installs, etc.

Along with this, I plan to roll out a new website for the project that will have a browseable list of third party extensions, apps, Greasemonkey scripts, and more.

We have more information on our release on our release announcement.

Review Board 1.0 alpha 1 released Read More »

Armed robbery in progress

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Our Christmas this year was very nice, with lots of good presents, time spent with family, delicious food, and an opportunity to foil an armed robbery. Yes, an armed robbery. How do I continually get myself into these situations?

While heading back home from my stepdad’s parents’ house, I spotted a guy standing in a small field at a street corner near my parents’ house, holding what looked to be a gun. The guy was probably late teens/early adult, Caucasian, and dressed in all black. His actions looked instantly suspicious. He was pointing the gun to the ground and made some motion as if he was checking the ammo or something. He seemed pretty lost in his own world, apparently not even realizing he seemed very suspicious.

My Mom was driving, and decided to slowly drive away from home instead of toward it, and then turn around, giving us time to watch and see what was happening. We knew there was a gas station across the street and wanted to see if he was going to head in there. If so, there was a good chance we’d be witnessing a robbery.

Sure enough, he started walking across the street to the TowerMart, a gas station/convenience store. We parked the car and my Mom grabbed my phone and called 911 while my brothers and I carefully watched from behind a building, making sure we weren’t noticed. We saw the guy walking back and forth at the side of the building, looking very nervous. He was wearing long sleeves with his left hand exposed and his right hand (which was holding the gun) completely covered. As my Mom talked to the police, we continued to watch, and the guy eventually psyched himself into going into the store. He put the gun in his pocket and went in.

The store was pretty crowded, and we weren’t sure what to expect. Would people be running out screaming? Would people be locked in? Would we hear gun fire? Or would he just leave?

We never saw him actually leave, but we could only see the one side of the building. A couple minutes later, six police cars drove up, two right beside us. Two cop cars pulled up alongside us. One of them hopped out, grabbed a big ol’ semi-automatic, and approached the building, pointing the gun, ready to fire. Three other cops did the same, surrounding the building. A couple other cops went in and got people out of there, with another couple cops asking those people if they had seen anyone matching the description we gave, or saw other suspicious activity.

They spent some time going through the TowerMart and eventually came back out once they were sure he wasn’t hiding in there. It seems at some point, he had left the building. We weren’t able to see when. However, he was definitely in there. Practically everyone they talked to noticed him, as he was nervously walking in circles around the building, completely covered. He had either grown nervous with the number of people in there, or heard the sirens come. Either way, he got out of there before doing anything.

As most of the cops started to exit the building, the one who had pulled up closest to us walked up and asked what we saw. Then he said, “Oh, I talked to you before.” We all thought that was strange, since he hadn’t actually talked to us, but then he pointed out that he remembered us from the assault back in May. Good memory.

We walked with him to the field and pointed out roughly where we saw him standing. He found the footprints and was calling out the detectives to take pictures or whatever. We chit-chatted briefly before returning home. He told us we very well may have saved the store and a lot of people from experiencing a robbery on Christmas Day. I just hope the guy didn’t make another attempt elsewhere.

We found out that an hour or two later, the police were still all over that place. About an hour ago, they apparently had arrested someone not too far from here. Whether related or not, I don’t know. Given that they had video footage of the guy, testimonies and descriptions from a bunch of people in the store, and his footprints, it’s probably only a matter of time.

The rest of Christmas proceeded without police intervention. Merry Christmas!

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Ubuntu and Desktop Notifications

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This past Monday, Mark Shuttleworth wrote about their plans for an overhaul of desktop notifications (the little popup bubbles telling you someone IM’d you or there’s updates available). Many people have asked me about this, some concerned, and wanted to know what I thought. Being the maintainer of libnotify, notification-daemon and the Desktop Notifications specification, some people were concerned that this work would supersede my own.

The reality is, this isn’t a replacement of my project. This is a new joint effort between Ubuntu, KDE, and myself. What’s been written in Mark’s post may not end up being the end result. We’re still deciding how this will progress, and Ubuntu wants to experiment a bit. Aaron Seigo’s post on the subject sums up a lot of my thoughts on this, and I recommend reading it, though I’ll go further and discuss where this all started and how it’ll affect the project.

First of all, libnotify/notification-daemon isn’t going anywhere. It’s not being replaced, nor is an alternate spec being drafted. Ubuntu’s User Experience team has some new things they want to try, and that’s fine. The plan is to see how this stuff goes in their codebase, with the intention of migrating code back upstream.

A couple of weeks ago, during the Ubuntu Summit, I was invited to speak with some of the developers and User Experience guys from Ubuntu about their plans. They showed me the mockup that’s on Mark’s blog and told me about their plans. They have things they want to do that could definitely improve the experience. Some things are pretty controversial, such as the removal of actions on notifications. We sat down, discussed and debated various aspects of the proposals for a while, and I believe reached a general course of action for the project. The highlights include:

  • Actions will be removed for applications packaged in Ubuntu. The developers will try to replace them with something that they feel makes more sense, with the hope of pushing these changes upstream.
  • The released notification-daemon will, I believe, support actions, since many non-packaged applications do use them. They will, however, appear as old-style notifications and not appear in the new window stack demoed in Mark’s blog post.
  • We’ll be drafting new additions to the notification spec in order to address the needs of KDE and Mozilla.
  • The work will be done by their developers in either a fork or a whole new notification-daemon implementation, allowing them a greater ability to experiment. These changes (or parts of them) will make their way upstream. It will be spec-compatible so users won’t have to worry too much about losing features (aside from actions, perhaps).
  • In the end, it’ll likely be that the Ubuntu theme specifically works this new way, and that other themes will work differently (they may support actions more directly, for example).

Now I should point out that I don’t believe actions are a bad thing. There’s many use cases where actions are very much warranted, and it seems Aaron agrees. While the Ubuntu team has discussed the possibility of deprecating this in the spec, I believe the end result will be that actions will live on. I’m also pretty adamant that upstream notification-daemon will still support actions and some other features. Ubuntu can choose what experience to give their packaged applications, but that may differ a bit from what we decide upstream.

Time will tell how this all turns out. I personally think it’s great that there’s some momentum on this project. I know I haven’t had much time to work on it as of late, between VMware and Review Board, which is why getting some new people on board with fresh thoughts will probably be a good thing.

On a related note, I’d like to welcome Andrew Walton to the project. He’s going to be working as a co-maintainer and helping out when I’m busy (which will be a lot of the time for a while).

Over the next month or two, the project should start to pick up. We’re beginning to look at ways to improve the spec and at what work needs to be done in the near future for the project. These discussions will take place on xdg-list.

And with that, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas (or just a very good December 25th for those who don’t celebrate Christmas)!

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Fixing broken key codes in VMware on Ubuntu 8.10

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I recently upgraded a system to both Ubuntu 8.10 and VMware Workstation 6.5, and while using it, I realized a number of keys were broken. The down arrow invoked the Windows Start Menu, for instance. Pressing Alt caused the key to be stuck. I knew this stuff worked in 8.04, but it certainly wasn’t in 8.10.

After some digging around, I found a forum post (lost the link, sorry) that fixed this. It’s worked pretty well for me, and so I thought I’d share for all those who have hit this issue.

Edit your $HOME/.vmware/preferences file and add:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78  = 0x46  # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

That should do it!

Fixing broken key codes in VMware on Ubuntu 8.10 Read More »

Twittering as Review Board Approaches 1.0

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On the road to 1.0

We’re getting very close to feature freeze for Review Board 1.0. The last couple of major features are up for review. These consist largely of a UI rewrite that simplifies a lot of Review Board’s operations and moves us over to using jQuery. This will go in once it’s been reviewed and tested in Firefox 3, IE 6/7, Opera and Safari.

There are some preliminary screenshots up of the UI rewrite. Some things will be changing before this goes in, but it should give a good idea as to the major changes (if you’re already a Review Board user).

In the meantime, we’re working to get some other fixes and small features in, and I’m beginning work on a user manual. I’m not sure how much will get done for 1.0, but with any luck I’ll have a decent chunk done.

Twittering the night away

I’ve just set up a @reviewboard user on Twitter that I’m going to try to keep up-to-date as progress is made. This should give people a decent way of passively keeping track of updates if they’re Twitter users.

Barter system?

Britt Selvitelle of Twitter fame just sent me a great screenshot of a barter system for Review Board. Can’t get someone to review your code? Offer them something in exchange!

As some people know, we’re planning to have extensions in the next major release (1.5 or 2.0). This would be a fun little extension to have 🙂 Maybe I’ll write it as part of a tutorial.

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libnotify 0.4.5 and notification-daemon 0.4.0 released

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It’s been a long time since I’ve really put out a libnotify or notification-daemon release. Review Board and VMware have taken up a lot of time the past year, so development has been slow, but I think these releases are worth it.

libnotify 0.4.5 [Release Notes] [Downloads]

This is mostly a small bug fix release, but introduces support for associating a notification with a GtkStatusIcon. This allows for better position tracking when notification icons are jumping around.

notification-daemon 0.4.0 [Release Notes] [Downloads]

This is a large feature and bug fix release. The major two features are multi-head support and a new control panel applet for specifying the notification theme and corner origin.

The multi-head support will show standard (non-positioned) notifications on the monitor the mouse is currently on. Previously, they would only appear on the primary head. This helps to notice new notifications, and fixes problems with some people who have a multi-head setup but only have one monitor on or in view. Also, notifications that appear on the edge of a monitor in a multi-head setup will no longer cross the monitor boundary, and will instead just stay on the correct monitor.

The new control panel applet makes it easy to switch notification themes or to specify which corner notifications should appear from. This will be expanded in the future.

As mentioned above with libnotify, notification-daemon can now track when status icons have moved so that the notifications are no longer in the wrong position during startup.

There’s a bunch of other nice little bug fixes that are mentioned in the release notes.

Thanks for the patience, everyone!

libnotify 0.4.5 and notification-daemon 0.4.0 released Read More »

Racism, Sexism, and now Prop 8

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I found out this evening, to my dismay, that my site was littered with “Yes On Prop 8” banners. Now, for those who live outside California and haven’t been following this, Prop 8 is a measure designed to introduce an amendment to the California constitution to ban gay marriage, basically ensuring that certain people would never have the same rights as others in this state.

Now I normally try to stay away from politics on my blog, but I want to talk about two points.

First, I don’t mind banners on my site that are designed to sell a product. People generally understand that an ad for an online web service or a product of some sort is not necessarily endorsed by the site it’s running on. Ads are everywhere and most people generally get that it’s provided by an ad service, and just ignore them.

What bothered me about the Yes On Prop 8 ads is that it felt as if I’m endorsing Prop 8. Somehow, it feels wrong to me. I’m not morally outraged about Sun Microsystems wanting to sell a server system or Microsoft wanting to sell an office suite. I am outraged about Prop 8. Products are fine to advertise on my site. Controversial freedom-limiting propositions I’m completely against are not.

I look back in our history and see that by and large, our generation is regretful of how we’ve mistreated people in the past. Shooting Native Americans used to be fine. Stripping away their rights and making them unequal was socially accepted. It was completely understood that if you’re black, you’re property. If you’re a women, you had no rights to vote and your opinion didn’t matter.

I like to think we’ve come a long way from that. People pride themselves on how we’re more mature now. Black, white, red, men, women. It doesn’t matter. This is the land of the free, the land of equality. So why is it that it’s still okay to discriminate against someone because their love of someone makes you feel uncomfortable?

It’s okay to not feel comfortable with gay marriage. A lot of people don’t. But do you feel more comfortable being part of a group of people that knowingly discriminated against another group, stripped them of certain rights that you yourself enjoy, simply because something you don’t have to deal with on a daily basis makes you feel uncomfortable to think about? Are you going to be okay with the thought of your grandkids or your great-grandkids feeling embarrassed because of how you voted, like how you feel about your great-grandparents’ racism? How much is preventing marriage for two people who love each other, in order to feel less uncomfortable, worth to you?

The Yes On Prop 8 advertisements often show the clip with the mayor of San Francisco saying “It’s going to happen, whether you like it or not!” It’s a good strategic clip for them to have chosen, as it can be interpreted as him saying “you have no say, we’re forcing gay marriage on all of you.”

I see it another way. I see gay marriage being inevitable not as an attack, but as the inevitable rise in tolerance that, over time, we’ve come to develop in this country. As a country, we don’t have the best track record of tolerance to new things, but we always mature in the end. This is not the last time we’ll face such mass intolerance and the limiting of rights of a group of people, just as this will not be the first time that we as a people will overcome our fears and begin to see us all as being equal.

So this is important. It’s not just about your level of comfort with those who live a different lifestyle. It’s about equality. It’s about overcoming personal fears. It’s about making an effort to keep this country on a path of freedom. Because if we start going back to our old ways of discrimination and fear, all we’re doing is regressing and limiting the rights of others out of some fear of the world spiraling into chaos. We’ve worked to abolish racism. We’ve worked to abolish sexism. The world is still here. We can do this again.

Vote no on Prop 8.

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Random friend seeking on Google Talk?

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Has anybody else noticed this?

Over the past several months, I’ve had a few people add me to their Google Talk account, claiming they want to make friends. The conversations start simple enough, asking basic “getting to know you” questions. Nothing seems too prying, and it certainly doesn’t seem like a bot. However, in each case, something doesn’t fully seem to add up, or maybe I’m just being paranoid. Either the person doesn’t remember how they found my address, or they claim they were just trying random addresses. Some people are from India, some from the US. However, they never seem to be able to find a picture when requested. They look and look but never manage to find one, and then suddenly have to go.

I’ve IM’d with a couple of them for a few days, a week, just to see if they were going to ask any questions indicating they were looking for specific information, but they haven’t really.

I’d feel bad if these were actually real people just “looking for a friend,” as they’ve said, but the fact that nobody can seem to give me a good reason for how they got my info concerns me, as does the behavior about a picture. Have other people seen this? Is it some new kind of weird spam/info gathering attempt? Or what?

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Designing Unity: The Start Menu

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Early on when we began to develop Unity for Workstation, we started to look at ways to give users access to the guest’s start menu. This seemed like an easy thing to solve at first. A month later we realized otherwise. We debated for some time and discussed the pros and cons of many approaches before settling on a design.

We had a number of technical and design restrictions we had to consider:

  • The UI should be roughly the same across Windows and Linux hosts.
  • Start menu contents must always be accessible regardless of the desktop environment on Linux.
  • Need to cleanly support start menus from many VMs at once.

Our chosen design

The design we settled on was to have a separate utility window for representing the start menu. This window can auto-hide and dock to any corner of the screen, or remain free-floating, and provides buttons for each VM. The buttons are color-coded to match the Unity window’s border and badge color. When you first go into Unity, the window briefly shows, indicating where it’s docked.

Unity Start Menu Integration

There are many advantages to this design.

  • You don’t have to re-learn how to use it between platforms or even desktop environments.
  • It’s pretty easy to get to and yet stays out of your way when you don’t need it.
  • All the start menus are easily accessible from one place.
  • The start menu buttons are color-coded to match the Unity windows.
  • Users can control whether the window is docked in a corner or free-floats on the desktop.
  • We have a lot of flexibility for feature expansion down the road.

Why not integrate with the Start Menu?

Since the first Workstation 6.5 beta, I’ve been asked why we chose the design we have instead of integrating the start menu into the notification area or into the existing Applications/Start menus. The idea to do so seems kind of obvious at first, but there are many reason we didn’t go that route.

Let’s start with the host’s Applications/Start menus. This seems the most natural place to put applications, as the user is already used to going there. We began going down this route, until we realized the problems associated:

  • On Linux, not everyone runs GNOME, KDE or another desktop environment with an applications menu supporting the .desktop spec correctly or at all. This means we’d be drastically limiting which desktop environments we could even represent applications in.
  • In the case of GNOME, it would add more clicks to get access to any application (Applications ? Virtual Machines ? VM Name ? Applications). This becomes tedious, quickly. Also, from my tests, adding entries three levels deep doesn’t always appear to work reliably across desktops.
  • In Windows, the situation is just as unclear. People tend to think that Windows only has one Start menu, but in reality, we’d have to support three (Classic, XP, and Vista). For quicker access, we’d need to add something to the root menu, and each of these start menus have slight differences in how we can do this. None of the solutions are even particularly good there, as entries may be hidden from the user to make room for other pinned applications.
  • In summary, where you go to access the start menu contents will be different not just on each OS, but across desktop environments and even different modes of the same environment (on Windows).

What about the notification area/system tray?

Another possibility that has been brought up is to use the notification area and to tie the start menu to an icon there. While this would generally work, it wouldn’t work too well.

  • On Linux, it’s frowned upon to put persistent entries in the notification area. A panel applet could work, but users would have to manually add it, and it would be GNOME or KDE-specific.
  • There’s no guarantee there even is a notification area or even a panel in Linux desktops.
  • On Windows, the icon may be automatically hidden in the system tray to make room for other icons.
  • The icon is such a small area to click on, making it annoying to launch applications quickly.
  • The icon is generally not too discoverable.

Tips and future improvements

While we’ll probably keep our current model, there are definitely improvements I’d personally like to make in some future release. One such possible example is to allow dragging an entry off onto the panel or desktop to create a shortcut/launcher. If you frequently access certain applications, you’d be able to put them wherever you want them for quick access. Clicking them while the VM is powered off would power the VM back on in the background and then run the application.

A lot of this exists already. While there is no automatic launcher creation, you can create your own that run:

vmware-unity-helper --run /path/to/vmx C:pathtoapplication parameters

This is not a supported feature at this time and may have bugs, but in the general case it should work just fine.

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VMware Workstation 6.5 released!

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I wanted to come up with some witty introduction here, but after a year of hard work on Workstation 6.5, I’m just too tired to come up with anything.

Workstation 6.5 is the latest release yet of our Workstation product, and continues in the fine tradition of being an awesome program. It’s also the first version to introduce Unity, a feature I’ve spent a lot of time on and will be blogging about in more detail soon.

So why should you upgrade to Workstation 6.5? Well, if you’re a Workstation 6.0 user, it’s free, which is a pretty good incentive. It also comes with a bunch of new and improved features.

Unity

Unity is a feature I’m particularly proud of, because it’s pretty much the only thing I worked on for Workstation 6.5.

Unity breaks down the walls between the host computer and the virtual machine. With the click of a button, application windows from the VM pop out onto the host desktop, allowing you to put your host and guest applications side-by-side. If you’re a Linux user but you need to use Outlook for work, this feature will let you just simply run Outlook alongside your other windows.

Unity isn’t just a Workstation feature on Linux or Windows. The free Player product can also run your VMs in Unity!

Unity works best with Windows guests right now but does support Linux guests as well. Linux guests are more experimental and I strongly recommend using a recent version of Metacity in the guest. For Linux hosts, you’ll have best results with Compiz, Metacity or KDE.

It’s a complicated feature and, while not perfect, is still pretty great. I’ve written a little about it (see Working outside the box with Unity and Workstation 6.5 Beta 1 – Now with 100% more Unity!).

In the coming weeks, I plan to write a small series of blog entries about the development of this feature, including some of the complications involved and design decisions we made.

Record/Replay

Workstation 6.0 introduced Interrupt Record and Replay, a feature enabling users to record on the CPU level everything that’s happening for a range of time in a virtual machine for later playback. This is a powerful feature for development and debugging, as one can record a session during the testing of an application and forever capture that annoying 1-in-100 crash.

Workstation 6.5 improves upon this by providing a much more flexible UI with the ability to skip around a recording, adding checkpoints for quick navigation, and just generally bringing the feature into a more mature state.

Improved Linux Installer

One of the main grumble points that users (and ourselves) have had with past Workstation for Linux releases is that the installation process wasn’t very smooth, and the vmware-config.pl script had to be re-run after any kernel upgrade.

We’ve fixed these issues by providing a new GTK-based installer that walks the user through the installation process, and by handling kernel configuration (if needed) during Workstation startup. The days of running a shell script to get Workstation running are over. Finally.

Virtual Machine Streaming

Ever want to preview a downloadable virtual machine without having to grab the entire zip file or tarball? VMs can be quite big and it’s a pain to download one only to find out that it doesn’t meet your needs.

The new VM Streaming feature gives users the ability to point Player or Workstation to a remote VM (if provided in the proper format). It will then download the bits as needed, and allow users to pause or restart the stream. It’s important to note that this will be slow at first until it has enough data to smoothly run files off the disk. When finished with the VM, the user can choose to keep what they have, or delete the cached VM from disk.

3D Acceleration with DirectX 9

Our hard-working team of 3D Code Monkeys have been working to bring support for DirectX 9 in the guest, supporting up to Shader Model 2.0. This means many more games are now playable, including one of my favorites, Portal.

Easier VM Creation

We’ve revamped the New VM wizard to provide a more streamlined VM creation process, complete with our new Easy Install feature. Simply put your installation CD in the drive or point the wizard to your ISO file and it will automatically determine the guest OS and default settings.

And lots more…

That’s just scratching the surface. We’ve made plenty of other improvements, listed in our release notes.

Some of us developers will be providing some support in the forums, and if you have a Linux Unity question, feel free to contact me directly.

Love,

Christian

VMware Workstation 6.5 released! Read More »

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