Corrupting little ones

My 5 1/2 year old sister Jenna and I talked on the phone this afternoon. We were discussing the Dream Theater concert, some stuff that’s going on in her life, and just general chit-chat. She started talking about how they lit a fire in the fireplace, and I told her how I wish I had a fireplace here, and maybe someday. She said, “You could come move back here!” I chuckled, as that’s a trick she’s used many times, and told her that this is really the place closest to her I could live and work at. She told me she was going to learn more about computers so that she could get a job at VMware and live near me.

She then said she had some questions about computers. She told me she knew that a computer had fans, some wires, drives, and a couple of boards. She asked what else was inside a computer. She then asked about fixing them. She described a couple of scenarios, such as it not powering on when you press the power button, and when the mouse stops moving, and asked how you would fix each one. That was new to me 🙂 So I told her, and also talked a little bit about writing programs. She now insists she’s going to learn this someday. Which is fine, if that’s what she really wants to end up doing. I just find it really cute.

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I’m deaf and happy

I just got back from the Dream Theater concert. This tour celebrates both their release of their new album Octavarium and their 20th anniversary. The concert was awesome. They played songs from I believe all of their albums. Several songs from some. They were energetic and enjoying themselves, and so were we. Our seats were pretty good too. Decent viewing angle, and close enough to see them pretty well. If anyone gets a chance to see Dream Theater in concert, don’t hesitate!

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Medals, concerts, and super gates

  • Olympic Medal

    A few days ago, an Olympic medal winner, Valerie Fleming, paid us a visit at VMware. It turns out she has family there. Small world. A bunch of us, including Alex Graveley and I, were allowed to wear the medal. We of course took pictures. Many were taken with digital cameras, hence the quality issues on some, but one co-worker managed to get some decent pictures with a good camera.

  • Concert

    My brother and I are attending a Dream Theater concert tomorrow. It promises to be very exciting. It’s actually my first concert, and I’ve been a fan of Dream Theater for years. I should be meeting up with my dad and brother tomorrow, spend the day doing whatever, and then head to the concert. Is anybody else in the area going?

  • Stargate SG-1

    Last year, I ranted a bit about how bad the new Stargate SG-1 season was starting out. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, though, and continued watching it. Aside from some lame plots spread out throughout the season, I’ve grown to like it and where it’s going. The season finale was tonight, and left me on the edge of my seat. I can’t wait for next season to see what’s going to happen. The new enemy, the Ori, is actually a good replacement for the Goa’uld, and for once, it looks like the good guys have a chance of not winning. Of course, this being a popular TV show, the good guys will win, but at least there’s finally a real challenge.

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Tetringo 0.3.1 for the desktop and Nokia 770 released

I just released version 0.3.1 of Tetringo for the Linux desktop and for the Nokia 770. It’s still only single-player, but it works well and plays wonderfully on the Nokia 770. This is actually the second release of the night, and features an all-new shiny Quit button! And some rendering speed-ups and reduced file size.

This release is dedicated to Philip Langdale, who wanted a new game for his Nokia 770 that he could play this weekend. Enjoy 🙂

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Tetringo!

I’ve been playing a bit of Second Life lately with my girlfriend. Second Life is an interesting free (for basic usage) fully-scriptable virtual world. One of the more popular games inside of Second Life is a 2D board game called Tringo. It’s a mix between Tetris and Bingo, where you compete with others for cash. The game consists of a 5×5 grid, and you have to make 2×2, 2×3, and 3×3 blocks with the pieces you get.

The game is fairly addicting, and my girlfriend and I have been wanting a way to practice while away from Second Life. So, I worked a bit on the bus and spent a couple of nights hacking on my new game Tetringo. It’s a clone of Tringo, playable on the Linux desktop, and designed so it will work on the Nokia 770 (once I finally do packages). Screenshot below.

Tetringo

For instructions, see the Tetringo page for more details.

It’s fun so far, but has some work I’d like to still do on it.. eventually. Multiplayer over a network and over Bluetooth is high on my list. I’ll probably get back to it after more productive software releases (leaftag, notification-daemon and Galago).

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New Server

Well, if you’re reading this, then the move of ChipX86.com to a new server has been successful. I’ve slowly been moving sites such as galago-project.org to a new GSX VM provided by a friend and co-worker of mine. While Linode is a fine service, it has become somewhat problematic for me lately, and I’ve been wanting to get off a UML-based system.

If people have any issues at all with ChipX86.com, please report them.

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Taggable Desktop


Luis: You wanted a taggable desktop? Oh, okay.

Announcing Leaftag, our desktop tagging framework. This is an evolution of the original prototype we created, originally named fstaglib (isn’t leaftag just so much better?).

The main part of Leaftag is a library called (oddly enough) libleaftag, which interfaces with the tag database. It’s GObject-based, and the API is quite small. It can tag anything with a URI.

There’s tagutils, a small app used for working with tags and files. It is able to tag and untag files, list all known tags, list all files with a specified tag, and manipulate tag properties (such as icons and descriptions). It also includes some symlinks that provide shortcuts to common tagutils functions (tag, untag, tagls, tags, and tagprop).

leaftag-python contains Python bindings for libleaftag. It simplifies the already simple libleaftag library.

And then there’s leaftag-gnome, which will contain all future GNOME support for tagging. Currently, it supports only a Deskbar handler. Future releases will hopefully include Nautilus search integration and property pages.

Now, it’s important to point out that the screenshots on my previous blog entry are of the old implementation, and have not been ported over to Leaftag yet. This is largely due to lack of time as of late (because of Galago and VMware Server work, on my part), but it’s also because we want to re-implement this correctly. In the meantime, we’re hoping additional apps will start supporting this.

This is the first public release of the Leaftag framework, so please report any bugs to us. In time, after a server migration, I plan to put together a dedicated Leaftag site and bug tracker.

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I present to you, VMware Server 1.0 beta 1

Wow, what a ride. We just put out this morning (or late last night, depending on time zone) beta 1 of our new VMware Server product. Now you know why I’ve been saying “I’m really busy, can we discuss this later?”

Yes, this is the one that you may have heard rumors about on CNET, Slashdot, etc., but those sites didn’t all have the facts right.

What VMware Server Is:

  • Free virtualization for servers.
  • A way to give people free virtualization with the hope that they’ll consider eventually moving up to ESX for the enterprise.
  • Based on VMware GSX.
  • The successor to GSX.
  • Capable of 64-bit guests, Virtual SMP, new guests like Ubuntu, auto-detect devices, etc.
  • Capable of opening Workstation 5.5 VMs.
  • Available for Linux and Windows hosts. It should be the same set that Workstation 5.5 works on.
  • Ported to GTK2 (using a slightly more evolved Workstation 5.5-based UI).
  • Beta!

What VMware Server Is Not:

  • A stripped down or crippled version of VMware GSX. Server has even more capabilities than GSX did.
  • A replacement for Workstation. VMware Server has no support for multiple snapshots or team functionality, and while Server is a server product, Workstation is a good desktop and development product.
  • A replacement for Player. Player is still high on our priority list, and we useful for the average person who just wants to run VMs.
  • A response to an apparent Xen or QEMU threat. While Xen has potential, it’s primarily just a hypervisor, and we’ve had one of those for ages. The interesting work is built on top of that (as XenSource, another proprietary software company, is doing).
  • A sign that VMware is doomed. I’ve heard this one a lot, and it just makes me chuckle. This should be taken as a sign that we’re doing pretty good. How many companies have the insight and abilities to give away their products for free and still make money?
  • A dead product before it begins. I don’t think there’s a worry about that. We’ve put a lot of effort into it so far, and are already hard at work on beta 2.
  • A money sink for us. We’ll be making money through optional support contracts.

I’m especially proud of this product. I’ve invested a lot of time into it, and so has everybody else involved. I’d like to thank everybody who has had to put up with me telling them I’m too busy for this or that lately 🙂 We’ll be working hard on getting this to a mature 1.0 state.

I present to you, VMware Server 1.0 beta 1 Read More »

Spice things up in your relationship with libsexy v0.1.6

libsexy v0.1.6 has just been released, along with libsexymm and sexy-python (mono bindings coming soon). It contains two new widgets, SexyTreeView (a GtkTreeView subclass with support for per-cell tooltips) and SexyTooltip (a tooltip that can have widgets packed into it). It also fixes a few licensing inconsistencies (the header files on a couple files were incorrect) and some bugs.

If you’re using the new notification-daemon, it is advised that you update your copy of libsexy in order to fix a minor visual glitch.

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