Older blog entries for gicmo (starting at number 20)

Google Talk
So I am going to hop on this bus and also post my google mail addy here so people that like to can add me: kellner@gmail.com. Using jabber for this rocks and I hope that the voice part will work soon.
GnomeVFS
One little sidenote: I released GnomeVFS 2.11.92 yesterday night (1:00 am for me). I spent like 2.5 hours to fix sftp symlinks for that release but I figured that I should do it in a more cleaner way, so it is not in that release, but I promise it will be in the 2.12 :)

Going to California
I will work for Scalix during my university summer vacation again. I am really looking forward to seeing all the cool Scalix guys (e.g. cguenther) again. I am probably flying over sometime near the 26th of July. Actually I don't wanna stay in the hotel again for at least 6 weeks, so if somebody out there knows a place (flat share or something) somewhere near San Francisco or San Mateo where I could stay (paid of course) for that time it would more then rock. Mail me! :)

Summer of GNOME
I became mentor for one of GNOME's Summer of Code Google projects. It's about adding encrypted folder support to nautilus (well gnome-vfs indeed) done by Jon Manning. We think uri chaining is the way to go so I am now polishing up the gernal uri chaining support in gnome-vfs. I hope to get this done until feature freeze is here although I am kind of busy with university the next two weeks.

Ahh and btw I really like Jack Kerouac's On The Road and the Radical constructivism (I have to give a lecture about that) is a really spacy but actually very interesting philosophical theory. I should blog about the latter some time soon.

"He calls it Reason, only to pollute Its use by being brutaler than any brute."
And about London I am just shocked and speechless. I just don't get why such things have to happen ...

CalDAV
Wooohh! I commited to very first version of the Evolution-Data-Server CalDAV backend to CVS some minutes ago. I had to fake the CalDAV server requests since I don't have a real server to test against at the moment. It should already provide full read-only support although notice this warning:

/* WARNING! MUCH OF THIS CODE IS TOTALLY UNTESTED! */

The obligatory screenshots: Terminal running e-d-s and Evolution
And yes what you see on the screenshot is true, so I am getting myself some well deserved beer now ...

GUADEC
I am off to GUADEC soon! Yieepiee! I am driving from here Passau to Stuttgart. It's *just* 400 km and I am planning to be there until late afternoon. If are also already in Suttgart and want to hang out, have diner or something feel more then free to e-mail me. Ohh if you don't know what for clothes to bring to Suttgart here is the link to a weather forecast site.

Summer. Finally!
So it's really summer now. Ohh I really love summer. I already had some really great BBQs and yesterday I opend the swimming-in-lake session. Just great! I am still considering to go to Rock Im Park which is a big festival and this year's lineup is really interesting. I am not sure if it's a good idea to go there though, because I should probably do more for University. Well, let's see ...

Philosophy
I have been reading Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel the last couple of days. They are really good books and I have to say that I really really like his ideas. Maybe it's because I really feel the same way. I am coming to that question about the meaning of life. I though about this quite a few times and as far as I see it there isn't such a thing. Well to be honest I am not sure if there is a meaning or not but I definitely can't see it. (By meaning I of course mean something as "deep meaning". The simple answer to the "purpose of life" question would be reproduction, but is that really satisfying as *the* meaning of life for us humans?). So I am really often feeling like being Sisyphus, fighting with that stupid summit/source-code/grils/life/the universe and everything. But oh well, to say it with Camus himself: "The fight itself towards the summits[source-code/grils/...] suffices to fill a heart of man; it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy." So be it! I am happy! Hope to see you all at GUADEC soon! :)

Long time no blog! :) Well I am back (blog-wise I mean).

So here is the massive catch-up with my life:

GNOME
I did quite some work on gnome-vfs. Mostly bug fixing. The biggest new thing on HEAD probably is that I merged Tor's win32 patch. The merging took me almost a whole day but I think it was worth it. Although I have to admit that I don't like the tons of new #ifdefs G_OS_WIN32 too much. Oh well you can't have everything. I hope to get at least some more features in until GUADEC and to get more patches reviewed. Manny did some good bugzilla cleanup!

Work
I have been to the USA in March to work for Scalix again. It was even better then the last time! We moved to a new office and it totally rocks! There were also some new faces - very cool people. I am really more than happy I could work there together with such nice guys. You rock! Work is really fun this way....
Not to mention that the Bay Area itself was more than great. I got to see Sin City in this big movie theater called Metreon (or something). A friend of mine was also at San Francisco so we hung out this one weekend. Going out in SF totally rocks!
Oh and not to forget the nice pictures I took at Half Moon Bay. Especially this one!

University
As some may already know I switched my majors from CompSci to Philosophy and now after already 4 weeks of university I have to say it really was one of the best desicions I made the last years. It just is *feels* so much better and you wouldn't believe how much more fun university now is. CompSci as a major was totally boring. Especially in Passau (Germany?). I bet it would rock more at Berkeley :)
Apropos Passau. It just rocks to study here when it's summer. I already did some BBQ and I can't wait until it's warm enough to go swimming again. I also wanna finish my paragliding license this summer.

Philosophy
I have one Popper class this year. I really liked Popper since I first read some of his books after my old-greek teacher told me about him in the 11th grade. I kinda changed my mind a bit about him now. I think his theory called Critical rationalism (CR) has some flaws. In CR he states the falsifiability is one of the major criteria of any theory. BUT the CR is kinda self-immunizing itself by beeing hardly falsifiable. I will give a lecture about Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions at this very class. I got to say I find his theory really interesting. The lecutre will be fun I hope. I will put the outline and presentation online if it's ready. Thanks Seth for telling me about him some time ago and I am looking forward to having some discussion at this year's GUADEC.
The other very interesting class I have is about Existentialism. Sartre and Camus. Very interesting. I will post some more about that later (including a nice list of books to read).

Ok enough for today! Comments per mail since advo still doesnt have a comment system :)

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.