Older blog entries for ted (starting at number 1)

I gave my talk about Ubuntu Desktop Technologies at OSCON, and the slides are all online. You can get the source here or follow the pretty picture bellow to get to the binaries:

Overall the talk was well received. Many people liked the slides especially, and I loved being able to say that they were both done and Inkscape, and use features that Illustrator doesn't support.

A comment that Miguel made is that I should have called it "GNOME Desktop Technologies" instead of "Ubuntu Desktop Technologies." He followed that with "perhaps I should only talk about Mono on SuSE." While it makes me laugh to think how many people would be happy with him doing that, he does make a good point. There are a few reasons that I titled the talk the way that I did:

• One of the technologies that I highlighted is Telepathy which isn't yet a GNOME technology. I hope that it will be soon, but it currently isn't.
• I also talked about DBus which is more of a GNOME dependency rather than a GNOME technology.
• The number of people that come up to me, want to help with Ubuntu and are surprised when I mention they could work on GNOME. No seriously.
• The talk was originally scheduled for Ubuntu Live, and then migrated to OSCON.

The third point there always befuddles me. But I'm learning to deal with it. Since the talk was targeted to new users and developers, I wanted to draw as many of them as I possibly could. Using the "Ubuntu" name seems to do that better than the "GNOME" name today, for better or worse. A new contributor is a good thing no matter what project name draws them in. As Ubuntu, we need to always ensure that we continue to inform people of our roots even though they seem plainly obvious to us.

When I saw Robert's interesting and fun Bazaar search plug-in I had a few thoughts:

Wow, that's cool!

It would sure be awesome if I could say that I've written as many Bazaar plugins as Robert this month.

That sounds like work.

Perhaps I can do this with, like, 6 lines of Python.

I've now written a plug-in to provide desktop power management support to Bazaar. You can install it like this:

mkdir -p ~/.bazaar/plugins
bzr branch lp:~ted-gould/+junk/bazaar-power-management ~/.bazaar/plugins/power_management

This hack-ish plug-in uses the initialization of the plug-in to call the DBus interface for power management to inhibit the power manager. It then relies on the fact that the power manager will drop an inhibit request from a client that disconnects from the bus which happens when the process exits. Both are relatively unsupported, and mostly undocumented ways to use the systems, but it works.

Why would you need something like this? Well if your trying to create a repository from a really slow SVN server which takes longer than the sleep timeout of your laptop (not that I've done this) you can end up really wishing your laptop hadn't gone to sleep. Yes, things restart, and you don't loose everything, but you'd really rather your laptop was awake the whole time. With this plug-in your laptop won't go to sleep while Bazaar is running.

The only thing left to consider is: What is Robert going to do to retaliate? 7 lines of Python?