Seems that Gmail users just got 3 invites to use. I’ve used one up already. Going fast! 🙂

Updated: Sorry guys, they’re gone.

I just finished reading Mike Hearn’s article The user interface vision. It’s an interesting read on his views of what the UI for package management can evolve into. I like the ideas, although some things need fleshing out more (as he also states).

If we really want to get Linux on the desktop, this is an area that needs to be tackled. Sure, Gentoo’s method works great for Gentoo. Debian’s method for Debian… The thing is, the average person who buys a computer for school or entertainment or whatever shouldn’t have to care what distribution they’re using. I’ve seen this many times in Gaim. A person will come in asking how to install Gaim, saying he downloaded “the file” from our site, but can’t run it. We then have to explain package management, the commands required, and tailor it to the distribution they’re using. A better solution is needed, and it’s about time we figured something out.

About a year ago, various people who were/are involved in package management (Mike Hearn from autopackage, Jeff Johnson from rpm, Alain Penders from Gentoo, myself from GNUpdate, and many others got together to discuss package management and a way to standardize on meta-data (such naming conventions, dependencies, etc.). We had some good discussions, but in the end, not a whole lot came from it. Although disappointing, it wasn’t unexpected. The differences between various package systems is not only technical, it’s political in some cases.

So far, Mike’s autopackage is the first possible solution that has impressed me. While it has a ways to go, it’s providing an interesting distro-neutral form of packaging, and appears to be well thought-out. I’ll be supporting autopackage in the first release of the Galago software.

I guess only time will tell. A lot of effort will be needed, as well as cooperation, if we’re going to solve this problem.

One of our Gaim patch writers, Felipe Contreras (AKA shx), sent in a wonderful patch today that he’s been working on for some time. Aside from cleaning up a lot of the MSN code, we now have support for MSN buddy icons and file transfer! There are a few bugs to work out, but it’ll still be a couple of weeks until we release, so they’ll be sorted out.

I finally got fed up with the default events and actions for buddy pounces. The defaults were to send a message (which is blank, and therefore does nothing, by default) when the buddy signed on. I felt they could be smarter than that.

Now, when you right-click a buddy in the buddy list and add a buddy pounce, it will automatically pick some sane defaults. If the user is currently idle, “Return from idle” will be enabled. If the user is away, “Return from away” will be selected. And finally, if the user is offline, “Sign on” is selected. “Sign on” is the default if no other defaults were chosen. As these are, I believe, the more popular options, and fit the scenarios people use the buddy pounces for best, these “smart” defaults should save some time.

Also, the default action(s) are now set based off the previous pounce’s enabled action(s). Those of us who always unchecked “Send a message” and checked “Popup notification,” or something similar, should rarely have to change the actions anymore.

I finished up this week’s Galago status report, and it turns out I did a lot more than I thought I did. Sometimes I wonder where I am mentally when I work on these things.

Now comes the real trick. Before I can get a release of the core Galago components out, I have to fix up some critical bugs. The problem is figuring out what’s causing them. I’ve spent several days on each of these, but I haven’t come a whole lot closer.. Yet. Maybe I’ll have some luck tomorrow.

This week has been really bad for my productivity. It seems that with only a few exceptions, I’ve ended up reverting nearly all the code I’ve written this week. Wednesday, however, I managed to be very productive and get a lot of important code written for Galago. I also managed to start the protocol docs, but those aren’t very far yet. Still, I should have some things for this week’s Galago status report.

I decided today to pick up a dual-head Sapphire Radeon 9600 card. I hear good things, and two monitors should really make things easier when I’m working with a bunch of terminals while reading documentation. I’m hoping to get it this week, but I’m in no rush.

Back to working on the status report…

I think there’s something wrong with me. With the help of Mike Hearn, I now have After Dark running in Linux, through xscreensaver. I couldn’t be happier.

Woo! Yesterday marked my last day of finals. Though now I’m finding that I miss my classes. Ah well, plenty to do this summer.

The computer situation has been fixed. The motherboard, it seems, had some “issues.” On top of that, two drives were going bad. The reason for all the lockups and kernel panics were probably a result of bad sectors where the virtual memory was. So now I have a new, better motherboard and a replacement harddrive for the two that were failing.

Oh, but now that that’s all fixed up, the mouse decided it’s time to die. No real surprise there.

I wonder what I’m going to do with 8 USB ports and 3 firewire ports…

It’s never a good thing when your daily alarm on your computer (which is basically XMMS here) doesn’t go off in the morning. Seeing the keyboard LEDs blinking and a frozen screen saver aren’t much better. Once again, this new box kernel panicked in the middle of the night.

I’m not sure whether to blame the hardware, or the 2.4.26 kernel. The RAM checked out fine, and nearly everything works otherwise, with a few exceptions. My IntelliMouse Explorer keeps losing the ability to function, and I have to unplug it from the USB port and plug it back in every 20 minutes or so. I replaced mice, and it seems to work now. However, now the IntelliMouse is working fine in the iMac. I can’t tell if the mouse is going dead or if it’s a kernel issue.

I couldn’t get 2.4.26 working on the server box (which used to be my main desktop). It would lose all network connectivity, no matter what I did. Oddly, the same configuration works on this box, using the same network card. I suspect 2.4.26 is just a buggy kernel, but I haven’t seen a whole lot from other people to indicate that.

So anyhow, this morning, I rebooted and it came up with a whole bunch of filesystem errors. All kinds of stuff. Several of the errors said, "attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read." A quick google search indicates that this could be the disk going bad, so I’m sure I’m in for a lot of fun these next few days. Fortunately, the only data I lost were a bunch of KDE .desktop files and some .m4 files that apparently weren’t even lost. No clue what happened there. *sigh*

Some days, I really miss using my Commodore 64.