Older blog entries for murrayc (starting at number 108)

I will hunt down and kill the next person who emails me directly with some technical question. It's bad enough when people email me directly about projects that I happen to be the maintainer of, or one day sent an email about, instead of asking the whole mailing list. But why the hell do people think it's a good idea to ask me generic software development questions instead of using a newsgroup or mailing list. Am I really likely to help some student write his whole thesis or do a free requirements and design analysis for some system architect? It's pure lunacy - they should be locked up for their own good. It's like a highly-targeted form of spam, but still spam. And then they get offended when I tell them to go away. Somewhere my email is listed as a technical support contact for the world and people are not satisfied with the level of service. Fuck 'em.

Loss of time

I am now 30 and it does not please me. I plan to be in an even worse mood for the next decade as I was for the last 10 years. You have been warned.

GNOME

We had an interesting release-team meeting about the new 2.4 modules. We normally release the meeting minutes, but we would prefer to give a proper united decision when the time comes. And it's not for us to decide - it's just for us to decide what the GNOME community wants. We are extending the arbitrary deadline a couple of weeks so that some new issues can be discussed properly in public.

WLAN

I finally found a decent WLAN card - an ELSA Vianect MC-11 from freebird in Berlin, via ebay. With the extra antenna it's now even better than the impossible-to-buy Cisco card. It seems to be a true classic Orinoco card. I had to add the hermes.conf file to my /etc/pcmcia/ to make it recognise the card, as described here. And I had to recompile, patch, and install the orinoco driver to get a monitor mode for kismet, as described here. Also, unlike the cisco card, I have to start kismet_hopper to actually detect any WLANs. It all sounded scary but it really was as simple as those documents say. Well, I had some strange "eth0 device not found" errors from ifup but deleting some old files in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ fixed that. After all, I have tried 5 WLAN cards in this machine now.

GNOME

I hope people don't hate me for criticising all their proposed 2.4 modules. I really wish other people were trying stuff out so I didn't have to get the conversations started. We only have 1 more week and it'll be a lot harder to have these conversations afterwards.

When it came to GnomeMeeting we had some of the "What is the desktop?" conversation sooner than I had expected.I'm surprised that more regular GNOME contributors aren't stepping up to say that GnomeMeeting should be in account of its coolness. I generally do not represent the consensus.

I'm trying out some of the accessibility stuff now. It's surprisingly obscure. There's something fundamentally wrong about that.

There's so much happening with GNOME now, and I think it's all remarkably directed and cohesive while still being fun. The future is big because people are not waiting for other people to do stuff for them.

gtkmm

I was wrong about the STL-style API problem I mentioned before - it was just a one-off and not a general problem. I also solved a lifetime bug that had been scaring me for a while, but it turned out to be another one-off. So all is well in the gtkmm part of my brain again.

GNOME

I've been encouraging the GNOME 2.4 new modules discussion. Ignorance is no obstacle. We have 2 weeks left to agree. So far, I'd bet battfink, gpdf, gucharmap, fontilus, nautilus-cd-burner, and themus will be in GNOME 2.4. I have yet to try out a few more of the modules. Talk on desktop-devel-list if you have opinions or questions.

gnome-vfsmm

I thought nobody was looking at this, but Bryan Forbes and Per Kristian Gjermshus fixed up some gnome-vfsmm stuff, so I put out a new verion.

I want someone to patch regexxer to use gnome-vfsmm.

I found a map of WLANs in Linz. (I live in the middle-left, by the river.) I think I've picked up this guy's WLAN from across the water.

I'm not just playing with this wireless stuff. I am using the moments of connectivity to prune the gtkmm bug list a bit.

garnome

I noticed that wget works through proxies, so I tried out GARNOME for the first time in a while. This is probably a good idea, because it's an important de-facto part of our release process. I had more success than the last time, but hit the RedHat 9 bonobo-activation problem.

RedHat 9

Maybe I had forgotten what a default RedHat was like before I'd messed it up by installing a development GNOME on top of it. Other than a few oddities here and there it really does seem like a very usable desktop system. It's certainly no more difficult than a standard Windows desktop, and it's a lot simpler. Every now and then I look at KDE, most recently on SUSE 8.1, and I find it ridiculously cluttered, as if someone thought the Windows people knew what they were doing. It's nice to see GNOME and RedHat use the old prove-by-doing principle.

I explored the underlying RedHat network scripts a bit and realised that lots of this underlying stuff is a bit heath robinson. But it does work very well, and seems to be well understood. I don't know how the not-yet-part-of-GNOME GNOME System Tools compare, or whether this is similar on other distros.

Now that I have Kismet working, my search for a WLAN hotspot was successful. I found an open net just a few metres from my front door. I don't know exactly where it's coming from but I hope they mean it to be open. While the weather is good this should allow me to at least cvs update, work offline, then cvs commit.

I'm amazed at how many WLANs there are. At the end of the road, there's a high lookout over the Donau/Danube, in a park, and there seem to be several networks available there. They seem to be coming from the other side of the river.

It turns out that my borrowed Cisco Aeronet 350 was probably one of the best cards I could have had, but they seem to be hard to buy in Austria and Germany. I tried all 3 cards in the local Saturn shop - The US Robotics 2210 and a Belkin one didn't show up in RedHat 9's network control panel. The slightly-more expensive Netgear MA401GR did so I'm trying it out.

It's really a MA401AR apparently. I've read that the regular MA401 has an orinoco chipset but the MA401AR has a Prism2 chipset. Well, RedHat 9 is setup to use the orinoco driver with it. It works, but it's incredibly slow, and there's no monitor mode so Kismet doesn't work with it. I read that you could use the wlan-ng drivers (normally for Prism2 chipsets) with it instead so I installed them from rpm I wonder why RedHat doesn't ship/configure the wlan-ng drivers. That works - it's far faster and Kismet works again. But the Redhat Network control panel doesn't recognise the card anymore and can't be used to configure/activate the connection. You have to edit /etc/wlan/ configuration files manually and do a manual /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart. That's dull and might make it more difficult to glom onto random open WLANs.

If I can find someplace that'll sell me a Cisco card then I think I'll take this one back to the shop.

gtkmm

While I'm cut off from CVS Ole Laursen has been helping out by applying patches once I've approved them.

Actually I'm beginning to think this might not be such a bad situation for me - it forces people to do more work themselves because they know I can't integrate half-done patches myself.

People are beginning to do API addition patches for gtkmm 2.4, but it's nothing major so far.

I might have found a silly-but-major problem with most of our STL-style widget child interfaces. If so then it can only be fixed in gtkmm 2.4. It's a good thing we have non-STL-style interfaces too.

WLAN

Still without a real internet connection, I've been playing with a WLAN card recently. It's interesting, but not as easy as I had hoped. I found lots of networks with a windows laptop with netstumbler, but I can't seem to connect to any. There's a bunch of 10-euro-per-hour metronet hotspots in Linz, but I couldn't even connect to one of these. I could get an IP address but couldn't do anything more than ping their DNS server.

I found lots of WLANs around the university and I think some of them are open.

I've been trying to set up some wireless sniffer tools on Linux instead, and I think I've finally got kismet working. The following technical bits might be helpful to someone googling in future:

• RedHat 9 has kernel version 2.4.20, so, as mentioned here, you need to specify cisco_cvs instead of cisco as the capture_cardtype in the kismet.conf file.
• And when using cisco_cvs, you need to specify wifiX instead of ethX for the capture_interface. Both seem to exist, but wifiX is used for "raw packet capturing". Kismet needs to use the ethX interface to enable "monitor mode" for the WLAN card, but unfortunately it just seems to infer the ethX number from the wifiX capture_interface name and they are not necessarily the same. So I had to juggle my network settings a bit so that my WLAN card was on eth0, causing the wifiX to be on wifi0.
• For instance, this is my line in /usr/local/etc/kismet.conf: source=cisco_cvs,wifi0,Kismet
• When you su to root to run kismet_monitor, you'll need to add /sbin to your PATH, so it can find /sbin/ifconfig.
• As mentioned here, I had to do a manual /sbin/ifconfig wifi0 up

This cisco card is borrowed. I think I'll get some more standard card for myself.

airsnort now seems to work too, when I specify wifi0, but I don't know how useful it is yet. airfart doesn't seem to work with cisco cards at all.

So now I'll go wandering again and see if I have more success with these new toys.

RedHat 9

RedHat doesn't feel all that different than RedHat 8, but the fancy animated hourglass cursor is surprisingly slick.

pfremy: Thanks, that's interesting. I said I didn't know, but I suspected. I didn't try to state it as fact. That's one way I find stuff out.

For some reason this showed up as a diary edit rather than a new addition. I'll try again. I'm inlined to blame our dodgy proxy.

gtkmm

Lost of people use gtkmm for in-house stuff so we don't get to see it. But I recently found this screenshot of a gtkmm-based GUI that controls an animatronic puppet in this article about Jim Henson's Creature Shop (muppets, etc). It's old so maybe people have seen it before.

gc announced that gtkmm will be in the next release of Mandrake Linux - it's already in the unstable "cooker" thing. I'm still hoping that RedHat will respond to a little desperate customer demand - please don't "me too".

My DSL is delayed again, and might never happen, so patches are building up in bugzilla. The more this goes on the more people will help. Some people are already. At least it encourages people to submit finished patches knowing that I won't have time to fix things for them. danielk, the other gtkmm maintainer is resurfacing, so that should help.

At least I have somewhere to live now - a cute little Haueschen near the centre of Linz.

Rabid Qtism

I can't seem to post to LinuxToday without Guillaume repeating the same old arguments - see the comments. He'll reply to this now. I generally stop replying to his replies after a while but I think it might be fun to see just how much he's willing to repeat himself. I still don't know why he bothers. His conclusions are interesting, because I also have lots of experience with lots of proprietary APIs and I've generally found that they are inept - so I concluded that stuff goes bad if nobody looks at it. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Actually I think that one of Guillaume's main problems is that he's still working with old memories of GTK+ 1.2, and doesn't realize that, unlike Qt, GTK+ and gtkmm were able to improve their APIs over time instead of stagnating.

I do get pissed off when Guillaume or others say that he's someone who knows all about gtkmm and decided that it couldn't work. Firstly, gtkmm 2 clearly did work. But more importantly (and I've tried to avoid saying it until this provoked), Guillaume wasn't ever all that involved. It wasn't his fault because gtkmm 1.2 wasn't that clear, but he really didn't understand gtkmm - none of us did. It's all better now. He did maintain the libgnomeui bindings (the old, smaller, gnomemm) but he didn't do a good job, and I brought that API to stability.

Ars Electronica

I visited this techy museum thingy in Linz. It has some fun, simple, stuff in it, but the experience is ruined by the dot-com-era descriptions of the exhibits. Sometimes things are just fun things. And sometimes things are just pretty colors. Their VR Cave is a bit dismal. It would have been quite impressive 5 years ago but a laptop can do a lot more these days.
And anyway, I was expecting a giant electronic arse.

gnome-vfsmm

I wrapped a bit more of gnome-vfs for C++, added a directory-listing example, fixed the distcheck and released a first version. People had better help out with finishing this instead of waiting for others to do it for them. I mean it this time.

libsigc++ 2

Martin Schulze and some others are doing great work on the next-generation libsigc++, He's dealing well with a barrage of uninformed questions from me. We are having some of those big-but-essential discussions about API that involve several exhaustively-explored possibilities. He's doing a good job of directing it towards eventual, justified, decisions.

I really hope I don't have to maintain libsigc++ in future. There's so much other software I want to write and I have so little time these days.

Linz

After living in a Pension outside of town for a month, I just discovered a big climbing wall in the building next door. Next week I move into an apartment on the other side of town. Oh well.

German

My new work environment is all German all of the time. This is the first time that I've had to speak German at work. I don't know what changed. I make lots of mistakes, but people seem to tolerate it. I am often surprised that I am capable of doing it.

I do still get lost in sentence structure when trying to explain some abstract, possible, concepts - the things that are difficult to explain even in English. In the past I often used Die instead of Der for nouns, thinking that I'd be right as much of the time, but it would then look like I did it on purpose. I have extended the idea and now also decline nouns, adjectives, and pronouns almost at random.

War

The war is about as fucked-up as it could be. Such cynicism. The future was supposed to be better than this.