Old Stuff

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.

I’ve been hacking away at various pieces of Galago lately at an attempt to improve the API and Gtk+ widgets. This is leading to some very cool applications and utilities I’m developing. Hopefully if I can get some of this set up the way I want soon, I’ll get another release put together.

A wiki has been put up containing some installation documentation, a preliminary FAQ, and other documentation. It’s also hosting the wiki for Project Soylent, which we’re starting to develop some decent plans for (they’re not on the wiki yet, just in some discussions).

My latest cool Gtk-related Galago work is the Contact Chooser. I love this thing, seriously. It’s not finished yet, but is close, and is simple and easy to work with. The screenshots are fairly self-explanatory.

If you haven’t guessed, it’s a widget and dialog that resembles the Gtk+ file chooser, but it’s designed to select contacts. The gnome-presence-applet will be using this fairly soon. I need to work on some of the speed issues, but they’re not too major.

libgalago got some major code cleanups these past couple of weeks. A lot of the communication code was abstracted, and as a result, several hundred lines of code have been removed. This will dramatically ease the porting effort to D-BUS 0.33. I plan to keep compatibility with D-BUS 0.23.x as well. I’m not sure when exactly all this will be done, but definitely before the upcoming stable release.

I’ll post some screenshots of the design we’re considering for Project Soylent once we have something I feel is worth demoing.

I felt especially motivated today and started work on an API I came up with in the shower. I spent hours hacking on libgalago and, when I was done, I had reduced the codebase by over 800 lines, all of which consisted of D-BUS 0.23.x-specific communication code. There’s now a much cleaner API abstraction over D-BUS, which could easily in the future be expanded to not be D-BUS-specific, if that ended up becoming important (say, a Windows port of MacOS X port without D-BUS). Furthermore, it should now be much simpler to get Galago working cleanly with D-BUS 0.31+. I’m not going to be able to work on that right away, but it’ll happen sometime before libgalago 0.4.0.

The abstraction still has some work to go, but most of the codebase for libgalago has moved to it. I still don’t know what I’m going to do for galago-daemon’s D-BUS 0.31+ support, but it’s probably not as huge an effor as I’m thinking. Worst case, I do some more abstraction work, but it won’t be as bad as libgalago’s.

Also, I hacked up contact-lookup-applet a few days ago to check for libgalago at compile time and to use Galago for the Instant Messaging section of the Address Card dialog. If Galago’s dead due to some bug, it falls back on the default implementation of just showing a protocol icon. There is a patch available for now, and I’m hoping that perhaps support can be added to CVS at some point. Next stop, gnome-present-applet UI work and Evolution.

Well, I finally did it. The 0.3.0: Wrath of Squirrel release of Galago is out! No, seriously. It needs some testing, and I have a bunch of neat little projects in the works. If you’re in the Silicon Valley area, I’ll be giving a presentation at SVLUG in the near future. That is, if I can get everything working in time.

There’s been some concern of code theft in a project I’m involved in, so we put in place an SVN repository wrapping my Source COde authentication tool. This is an old project of mine, and for those interested, you can read about it. With SCO, you’ll never have to worry about code theft again.