Older blog entries for gicmo (starting at number 43)

Krautsalad

The Gtk+ Hackfest was good in many ways. Not only did I see a lot of cool people that I haven’t seen for a long time (since I missed GUADEC last year) but I also met a few new ones, that I only knew from IRC before, like e.g. hpj. Having those clever people around is also a good way to learn new tricks and steal some useful scripts. It was really motivating for me. I used most of the time in Berlin to do some real hacking and the result of it was the implementation of GtkMountOperation which hit svn yesterday. My first (major) patch to Gtk+. Yay! Of course I also spent time hacking on the webdav backend and gvfs in general which is also my main job these days since we have spring break and canonical is contracting me, until university starts again in mid April, to hack on gvfs to make it stable for the next ubuntu release, i.e. Hardy. I also became maintainer of gvfs, thus continuing the tradition to co maintain the virtual file system for GNOME. I checked when that all started the other day: Dave Camp committed my re-write of the http method for gnome-vfs at the 22nd July of 2004. Its going to be 4 years soon. I also noticed the first patch I *reviewed* and committed was from Ryan. Beginning in April I will also try to do the impossible and fill in the big, big whole that will be there when Alex takes his well deserved break to be there for his little daughter Alice. Its going to be hard when there is no alex__ to ask for advice, but I am pretty confident that we will be fine, since there seem to be a lot of energetic and motivated new gvfs hackers, like Cosimo Cecchi, Carlos Garcia Campos, A. Walton and Wouter Bolsterlee. And of course the old guys like Bastien, Benjamin and David. Everybody is also very welcome to join the excitement and make gio/gvfs even more rocking! Start by joining the new gvfs mailing list. :-)
Last but not least, I had the job to sent “invitation” mails to mentors for this year’s SoC but Ryan already announced on planet that everybody should just sign up and I think that makes more sense to do it that way, so I just repeat that invitation here: Help students and apply as a mentor if you are a member of the GNOME foundation. I have done it the last few years and its also a great experience.

Syndicated 2008-03-20 00:49:01 from Christian Kellner - Braindump

WebDAV Server

Dear Lazyweb,

I am currently writing the dav backend for gvfs and I use apache + mod_dav for most of my my testing. I was now wondering if there is open webdav server out there that supports more features of the various webdav RFCs then mod_dav does. (E.g. ACL [RFC3744] or Redir [RFC4437]). An non-free but open server that I could use for testing would be fine as well.

Syndicated 2008-02-18 15:49:56 from Christian Kellner - Braindump

Remember, remember …

“Fear became the ultimate tool of this government.”

Ich verliere zur Zeit viele Freunde; oder sie wechseln die Hochschule; oder aber sie geben sich komische Namen. Und das ist gut so! Die Rede ist natürlich von einer, anscheinend immer größer werdenden, Zahl an StudiVZ Mitgliedern die dem Dienst nicht mehr glauben wollen, er gehe mit ihren persönlichen Daten sorgfältig um. Ausgelöst durch den Versuch die AGBs so zu ändern, dass man mit den Daten der Benutzer endlich auch mal richtig Geld machen kann. Dafür gab es so gar Rüge vom Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten. StudiVZ hat nach der ersten Welle des Protestes die AGBs natürlich umgehend entschärft und mit der jetztigen Version, und damit der Möglichkeit zum “Opt-Out” in so gut wie allen kritischen Punkten, könnte man wohl schon leben. Aber der Strom von Mitgliedern, die ihre Namen bis ins Unkenntliche ändern, reißt -jedenfalls bei meinen “Freunden”- nicht ab. Vielleicht liegt es ja daran, dass viele erst durch die große Protestwelle bei der ersten Änderung begriffen haben, wie wertvoll ihre persönlichen Daten sind; gleichzeitig auch wie gefährdet diese gerade auch im StudiVZ, ja im “Interweb” und eigentlich überhaupt sind! Das Herz eines Technikenthusiasten wagt das jedenfalls zu hoffen.

Stasi 2.0 von skep (used under CC-SA)

Und vielleicht ist für den Menschen Freiheit doch etwas sehr kostbares und mehr wert als eine, nur versprochene totale Sicherheit, die mit großer Überwachung und Kontrolle erkauft wird. Wenn es wahr ist, dass man Freiheit, und auch Demokratie, immer wieder auf’s Neue erkämpfen muss, so freut es mich jedenfalls doch sehr, dass es offensichtlich eine nicht geringe Zahl an Leuten gibt, die genau dies tun. Mann muss natürlich immer ein Mittelmaß finden. Aber in Zeiten in denen das Pendel zwischen Freiheit und Kontrolle -Vorratsdatenspeicherung und Online-Razzien sei Dank- ganz klar zu sehr in Richtung Kontrolle und Überwachung zeigt ist Widerstand doch sehr wichtig. Vor allem dann wenn man, auch aus guten technischen Gründen, nicht an die Wirksamkeit dieser Maßnahmen glauben kann. Es sollte schon zu denken geben, dass gerade die Leute, die sich am besten mit den technischen Hintergrund auskennen, nicht müde werden vor den Folgen solcher Maßnahmen zu warnen.

Ganz davon abgesehen dürfte es nur eine Frage der Zeit sein bis die im Rahmen der Vorratsdatenspeicherung erhobenen Daten auch Zivilrechtlich benutzt werden. Die Musik und Filmindustrie werden daran jedenfalls großes Interesse haben.

Hoffen wir, dass ich auch weiterhin auf das Bundesverfassungsgericht stolz bleiben kann und es die Fehler der Politik wieder gut macht. Ich für meinen Teil hab das StudiVZ jedenfalls auch aufgegeben und bin wie viele andere jetzt bei kaioo.de.

Zum Schluss könnte man natürlich auch, wie in diesen Tagen so oft, 1984 zitieren, aber ich zitiere lieber einen Comic. Eigentlich dessen Verfilmung:

Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well, certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

Syndicated 2008-01-05 12:26:06 from Christian Kellner - Braindump

We can’t stop here, this is wine country …

The Google SoC Mentor summit was great fun. I realized how may different OpenSource projects are out there. The other thing that I did notice and that made me think a bit was that there were many OpenSource developers using Mac OS X or Windows. So while for me OpenSource is more the idea that software (and thus all the software stack I am running) should be not only free for everybody but also its code should be it seems that there are a lot of people that do think different. Or does Linux on the Desktop still suck so much? Oh, and the KDE guys rock. I recently overheared a KDE vs. GNOME discussion at my University and I think it is really ironic that the developers seem to get along quite well with each other while the users are fighting. ;-) All in all the summit restored a good deal of my hacking mojo. One last note: Leslie has so much energy, I believe she has coffee instead of blood in her veins.

As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top:
(note quite true, it was his idea)

We also had original American food …

… which I should totally regret since I had to throw up 3 times during this night. I am now sooo looking forward to that 12 hour flight to Munich.

The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

(N.b. yes that is me on the picture and yes my hackergotchi is totally outdated, but Vincent loves it)

Syndicated 2007-10-09 23:43:03 from Christian Kellner - Braindump

Freedom of Speech

Andre, if you really want free speech and you do indeed like people which have strong opinions then I really don’t all understand what all the fuzz is about anyway; because on that basis Matthias’ complains fall under free speech in exactly the same way as david’s post. If you want freedom of speech then you get the full package including people complaining about other peoples writings. And if the solution is that one just ignores posting that one disagrees with then we don’t get any discussion at all and everybody just gives monologues.

Syndicated 2007-10-02 16:45:11 from Christian Kellner - Braindump

burst pipe

564.1 MB! I think there may be a small leak somewhere in Novell’s Main-menu. ;-)

Syndicated 2007-09-16 11:10:22 from Christian Kellner - Braindump

Vanitas

Codelbog testpost, der gleich wieder verschwindet! ;-)

Syndicated 2007-05-21 10:54:39 from Christian Kellner - Braindump

5:3 - Ausnahmezustand


Passau, one big giant party

But not only in Passau!


Yes, this used to be a street

It was a really hard match - a 120 minutes football thriller with a happy end for us! Too bad some Argentinians seem to be really bad losers. I know it is really hard to for them to fly home. They had higher expectations: some of the players and Argentinian newspapers even thought they "outclassed us" (Esteban Cambiasso) which I don't think is anyway near the truth. I honestly have a bit of Schadenfreude because I totally dislike this person who claims that his unfair football-playing is nothing but the help of God.

Strange things happen at GUADEC ...


All began with some giggeling from behind the fence. There was a group of GNOME Hackers sitting around a table at the GUADEC Camping and hacking for fun and profit when said giggleing was first to hear from across the fence. The source of this turned out to be 3 Irish girls and 1 boy. When I told them to come over may of us belived that they would instantly be scared away by all the laptops and geeks but guess what .. the total opposite happend!
The come over and were uber-excited. "This is sooo cute. ... Ohh look at the cute foot. ... It's called GNOME. This is soo cool!" And all we demoed was gnome-screensaver and gedit :)
Here is the group photo:

There are 3 errors hidden on this photo. Spot them!

The guy really seemed to be interested so we even handed out one of the Fedora Core 5 DVDs that were included within the GUADEC Bag.

Bling, Bling
ChipX86 mentions the post from Mike about Cairo and semi-transaprent windows. I did the same work a while ago to make Gnome Launch box have nice RGBA *bling bling*. Since we some to get a lot of duplicated code here I really whish we had that directly in gtk. Also a gdk_compositor_is_running or something like that would be very very nice. I know there is a way for some window managers (e.g. metacity) to tell you (over selections and stuff) but having that in gdk/gtk would be way nicer. The real reason I blog though is LbFrame. It is basically a frame with round corners which can also handle transparency if the compositor is running. Now with Xgl and AiglX maybe more people are interested to use it or use it as a starting point for their own widgets. Also if you are one of the lucky ones that have fast compositing, you should really give Gnome Launch box another try. I use it as my Alt-F2 replacement. And I have some patches in the queue to make it even more rocking!