Older blog entries for gicmo (starting at number 15)

The big X-bit lie
I could imagine this would be the headline in the yellow press! "r" means that file is writeable. On a directory, write access means you can add or delete files. - "x" file is executable. Execute permission on a directory means you can list the files in that directory. You can read that in most Unix file permission tutorials! But that seems to be only half of the truth. I noticed that while I was fixing bug 78486. To copy or move files into a directory you need both the "x" and "r" bits! Well anyway but 78486 is fixed and you should now be able to copy files to FAT16 based usb devices! Yipiee! :)

Gnome User Share
I became the new maintainer of g-u-s. Another Yipiee here! I have some cool ideas to extend it and make it even more rock. I totally like alex's way to have one Public folder where you can drop in files and have them shared very easily. There still is the problem with internationalization - that will be one of the first things I will take care of. I will outline some of my ideas some time soon.

Epistemology
The winter semester 04/05 will soon be over and with it the "human beings as a vehicle of their genes" phiolosophy lecture. As always Thomas Mohrs did a great job and his class was very "eyes opening". The selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is really a good book! We had some good discussion about theory of science and epistomology as well and I am looking forward to the Popper lecture next semester.

Future Gnome VFS

As I wrote some time ago I was thinking about how a gnome-vfs 3.0 could look like. I noticed that Havoc already has had the same (well pretty much the same) idea about it some time before I did(*)! While I was looking at the kde http kioslave I noticed that they already have such a system :) So I created a Page on the Gnome Wiki to have some discussion about it. I am not so sure if my attempt to structure things is good so please help me!

(*) I have had this experience quite often in Philosophy. You have and great idea about something and then you read one of the big philosophers and you have to realize that you are not the first one who had that idea. Well as one of my favourite old comedian once said: "Everything is already said, but not yet by everyone" (not sure if my transaltion of it is accurate)

Fighting the HTTP (gnome-vfs)
So I think I finally fixed 164019. But to get this done I had to change the way to handle dav://. So far we didn't differ dav:// from http:// at all but it first one was just a alias to the latter one. Now if you wanna access a webdav share you must use dav://. If you use http:// gnome-vfs will be in normal http mode as if it would be a normal web browser. So be sure to use dav:// for webdav resources from now on. (That will of course go into the release notes as well)

If you are going to San Francisco ...
I will fly to California on the 26th of February to work for Scalix again. This totally rocks and I can't wait to get there and see all the nice people again! Like last time I will stay in a hotel in San Mateo. It kinda sucks to stay in the hotel for 6 weeks so if you life in San Francisco (what I would like best) or in the Bay Area anywhere near San Mateo and need a temporary (6 weeks or so) roomie just drop me a mail (g i c m o (at) x a t o m (dot) n e t)!
To get me into the right mood for this trip I started to read Tom Wolfe's The electirc kool-aid acid test again which is not so easy to read for a non nativ speaker like I am. It's a good book and I really enjoy reading about lots of places I'll visit again soon!

Http, webdav, standarts and other nightmares
It's the third day now I am trying to "fix" 164155, and 164019. It is not really fixing because the gnome-vfs http module acts totally standart conform. It's working around other peoples broken code. But first things first. While I was rewriting the http module for GNOME 2.8 I reached the conclusion that the webdav and/or http RFC could be better and more accurate on many places. Some of the real big problems are due to the fact the webdav is superset of HTTP/1.1 and tries to be downwards compatible to that. On some places it lacks even so basic things that calling it a network file system is more than megalomaniac.
But that's not the biggest problem if you wanna implement a http/webdav client. The real problems are totally borken servers and scripts:

1. Some server just understand a small subset of HTTP e.g. the Google WS terminates connection on OPTIONS (that's already defined in HTTP/1.0)
2. Icecast/Shoutcast servers start streaming on any request or respond with "ICY" instead if "HTTP"
3. And now last but not least - my new personal enemies - kiddy script engines (yes e.g. php). You send a OPTIONS request - you get the page. You sent a PROPFIND request - you get the normal page. Hey dear script engine coders if you don't know how to deal with a request method just send a "Method not supported".

Not to mention that even Apache sends a body on OPTIONS. Why the hell does anybody need a html message on OPTIONS.
So I am going to commit a bunch a code tomorrow that tries to work aorund all that http/webdav weaknesses,all that broken servers and kiddie scripting engines. I really wonder why we have something like standarts at all if nobody cares and how this "internet thing" actually works with all that broken code out there :) Puh!. Yes I am feeling better now!

University
I am about to change my Major from Computer Sciens to Physics. CompSci tends to be very boring and I am totally sure I wanna study Physics. On the other hand I still wanna have some kind of degree in CompSci so at least I will switch form the german Diplom to Bachelor (the latter will take less time to finish). Well I am not so sure about the whole thing yet; time will tell.

Gnome VFS
I got some interesting Mail today. It's a probosal by Norbert about the integration of the kde and gnome file system layers. I think to have one file system layer for both desktops is a very good idea but I am not so sure if the current POSIX-like strucutre is a good thing. I learned that while writing the gnome vfs http backend
I would suggest to be more abstract here:

• Of course I would still have a common API and various diffrent backends.
• Have some very basic i/o operations like vfs_read_entire_file(), vfs_write_entire_file() and vfs_file_info() that every vfs backend must implement.
• Then provide a vfs_get_capabilities () functions or something like that. This function is then used to list all additional features a module provies e.g.: streaming files, acls, and all that stuff. The stream base interface could look like this: vfs_read_stream (offset start, offset end) and vfs_write_stream (offset start, offset end).

I have lots of written tests at the moment but when they are all over I wanna write a better proposal for that. I am not so sure if this is a good idea or if its even better then to have the POSIX like io interface but I think it's worth to wirte something down.

The party-thursday and Weekend
I again was busy taking photographs for Spassmobilon Thursday and the weekend. I am not sure if this is only valid for the city I study in or if this is a common habit among students but here are all the big student parties on Thursdays. All party and no rest makes Chris a dull boy.

No rest for the wicked
I am also on the orga team for our faculty party "FMI Party 04" and I really have to invest more time on helping there this week.

2.30 am
Tomrrow (or arrrghh wait - its 2.30 am so actually today) at 10.00 am is the deadline for the first of four Java projects I have to do for university. I just finished it and therefore don't wanna see any Java for the next few days - please! As always it wasn't a pleasure to code in Java. The top 3 things I missed during my first project:

• Properties!
• out parameters
• switch on strings

I really don't like this language. Java 1.5 or *cough* 5 may have some improvements but is still behind C# in many places. Mono now! (and good night)

Distributions Update

So after a little talk with seb128 I found out that there is a ubuntu development channel/release which is called hoary. So I changed my apt.sources (through synaptic - it really evolved since the frist time I used it some time ago) to get hoary packages and I have now firefox 1.0 and a very up-to-date system. I still have to kernel crash with acpi enabled but I think I can fix this with a custom kernel. So I think I give ubuntu another chance! One thing left of course is graphical boot but I willing to help out here so I am going to talk to Jeff about it. So it's 2:19 now and I really should go to bed - I kinda drunk to much on our pub-tour today.
P.S.: Logging into gnome takes ages now but everything else is as fast as before .. I already installed the fam replacment so I have no idea whats the problem here.

Distributions

I first installed Fedora Core 1 test X on my computer and then always just upgraded to FC1, FC2-test, FC2, FC3-test and finally to FC3. I also installed some self-compiled packages. So yesterday I decided that now the mess I created is big enough to re-install linux and downloaded NLD 9:
The installation was easy and it took me about 30 mins to get into GNOME (sad enough only 2.6) the frist time. I was hoping that I could use red-carpet for package managment and that there are some channels out there for all the cool mono stuff like tomboy, beagle and f-spot. But I got really furstrated:

• I couldn't install the some packages from nat.org due to some mono package conflicts.
• Beagle wouldn't work because dbus-launch wouldn't run.
• No packages for GNOME 2.9 nore 2.8

So because the idea behind installing NLD 9 was that I no longer would have to build mono on my own but just use the cool packages from Nat I wasn't so sure about if installing NLD was the right idea. I played a bit with the distribution and soon got very annoyed of seeing more and more kde/Qt dialogs. Yast, dialogs asking me if I wanna burn a CD with k3b, the kdesu dialog. To be honest I didn't like yast/SuSEConfig too much in the past and it hasn't changed much so i decided to download and install Ubuntu:
Here the frustration began very early:

• Kernel crash due to ACPI problems (work-a-round with acpi=off)
• No graphical installer! C'mon its 2004! I DON'T wanna see any ncurses stuff anymore!
• I get some modprob warnings during boot and again no graphical bootscreen (that really feels like the 31337-geek-unix for 199x)
• No firefox 1.0 packages only 0.9.x so the firefox industrial theme didn't work and the new find-stuff isn't there
• Due to the kernel ACPI problems NO sound, NO wlan, NO cpuspeed scalix, NO battary information
• I really miss something like NetworkManager

Ok I couldn't get used to that sudo stuff and I am still not so sure if this is a good idea but to be fair I have to say that the GNOME they ship looks really good! Using Gnome System Tools for system administration is a great idea. I also could install f-spot, tomboy and monodevelop (no bealge though). So I think its really a nice distribution but I think it could use some more work. For me it's still to ugly (I love fancy graphical stuff) and to complicated to install/use (the easy plug-and-play of my usb-hdd didn't work). To sum it up: It doesn't give me that "easy to use warm and fuzzy desktop feeling" NLD/Fedora gave me. So I am now downloading the Fedora Core 3 DVD iso and I think I will stick to it for the next few month. It also has some problems like no mp3 without extra packages and no mono packages but You can't always get what you want!

No Time

I didn't blog for a kinda long time now because I was too busy with all the things I have to do for university this year. It's getting better and better and I really hope I can do some hacking now.


Exchaning minor and major?

One thing I find kinda wierd is that the main subject I study which is (ha, how had guessed that?) Computer Science really bores me at the moment. I have lots of practical courses which means lots of UML and Java coding. Java often kinda annoys me and I really would prefer C#. On the other hand Philosophy (my minor) totally rocks! We are talking about evolutionary socioanthropology and if we are just "gene machines" or not and I am looking forward to that big "nature vs. nurture" discussion! If you have time you should really read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene. I'll blog some more about all that later!