VMWare Workstation 6.0

General

I’m now happily using VMWare Workstation 6.0 to check some build errors in Ubuntu Gutsy without risking an upgrade of my actual system.

I have used VMWare Workstation 5.5 lots, but the need to rebuild the kernel module with vmware-config.pl every few weeks (when the Ubuntu kernel was updated automatically) tended to break my habit, particularly when there are build errors due to changed Linux kernel headers. And I couldn’t get either Ubuntu Feisty or Ubuntu Gutsy to boot in Workstation 5.5 after installing them inside a virtual machine. Maybe that’s something to do with the hack that’s needed to build the vmware kernel module on an up-to-date Ubuntu Feisty. There was no such problem with 6.0, at least for now.

I noticed that Ubuntu has vmware kernel modules available via Synaptic/apt-get, but I couldn’t get them to install without errors, maybe because I already had them installed manually. I don’t know if vmware’s installation script has any way of using or getting them from the Ubuntu repository instead of building them.

Travel in August

Uncategorized

I’m back from GUADEC in Birmingham, but I have some more recreational travel ahead of me:

  • August 3rd-10th: Edinburgh and North Berwick, Scotland
  • August 11-12th: Bucharest, Romania
  • August 18th-25th: Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy

We had also planned a trip to Hong Kong and Taiwan, but had to cancel. I learned some Cantonese (10 Pimleur lessons), but now I don’t have a use for it.

Going to GUADEC

General,

This evening I fly to Birmingham, UK for the GUADEC Gnome conference. I’ll arrive around 23:00.

I’ll be there for the core days – Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I’m staying at the Etap hotel, where Johannes Schmid and Daniel Elstner from Openismus also have rooms. Unfortunately, Christian Kellner had to cancel due to an unavoidable exam date. I’ll miss him.

I’ll be giving a talk at 11:30 on Tuesday morning on libgnomedb: Database UI Widgets. This is my first time doing a talk about a project that I don’t maintain. My slides are mostly finished. I wish Vivien Malerba could be there for the more difficult questions.

Openismus T-Shirts for GUADEC

General, ,

The days are busy right now, but I found time to Inkscape up a design and get just a few Openismus T-Shirts printed in time for GUADEC in Birmingham. The conference is gradually becoming as much a T-Shirt swap meet as a developer conference, so it’s obligatory.

Hopefully it’s simple and eye-catching and a little retro. I got them done at georgefrank along the road, in a furry 70s-style texture print. They weren’t cheap but the quality is great, the colors are warm, and they won’t shrink in the wash.

IMG_2682_001

IMG_2668

IMG_2674I’d really planned to have time by now to gather together my ideas and get a proper designer to do a company image, inspired by the quarter where I live here in Munich, but that must wait. Luckily, I already wanted the visual image to keep changing, because the name itself is distinctive enough. While I expect some consistency of elements at any one time, I don’t expect anything to remain the same from year to year, and I hope people can enjoy the changes. We’re a small company and our customers know us personally, so we can have some fun along the way. An unchallenging anonymous corporate image with the same old shiny fakeness would bring us nothing.

prepare-ChangeLog.pl for git?

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cairomm has switched to git. I have no need for what git offers, being quite happy with svn, and I’m generally annoyed at having to change the tools I use unnecessarily, but Jonathan Jongsma does most of the cairomm work so he gets to choose. So far I’m learning how to do the basic stuff:

Check it out:
git clone git.cairographics.org:/git/cairomm

Get a diff of my changes:
git commit -a -m “a paste of my changelog entry”
git pull
git diff origin HEAD > my-changes.patch

I know that’s probably not how I’m meant to work with git but I don’t currently want to change how I work. I like to make patches, and it annoys me that even that is so involved. I might use other stuff later, but I’m not going to be forced to do it now.

But I’d really like a git version of the prepare-ChangeLog.pl script, which currently only supports CVS and SVN. Does anyone have one?

Update: MOAP‘s “moap changelog prepare” command does this wonderfully, and supports cvs, svn, and maybe others too. It makes me happy.

Just a ChangeLog and none of your nonsense

I also know that various mad people think that ChangeLogs are unnecessary and/or should just be generated from commit logs. This is silly and doesn’t ever work. I’ve seen it fail again and again. Why don’t your dangerous optimism LEDs flash just at the thought of it?

I’d be just slightly persuaded if anyone could show an http URL of even one ChangeLog in one git project that listed files changed and functions in those files changed, instead of the vagueness that you normally get when you tell people just to say something in a commit message with no review of what they’ve changed or how they are explaining it. Your tool isn’t better than a ChangeLog yet.

Please think before you post examples. Just because you have a URL of a generated ChangeLog, that doesn’t mean that the content is any good. And it’s not enough that I could theoretically write some scripts or click all over a website to see what was changed in what function, which I could theoretically understand without any comments about the changes (don’t get me started about lack of code comments in general). A nice ChangeLog would just explain what was done and get out of my way and I could even read it in the tarball. I’ve been to ClearCase and I’m not going back.

Bugs I CC, and how to be a hero.

General

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a large list of bugs to which I’ve added myself as CC in bugzilla. I do this when someone mentions something (in a mailing list, blog, or IRC) that looks like it should affect lots of people or will affect one of my own projects when it’s fixed. This helps me to mention them in the Gnome release notes when they are fixed, and to provide useful information when someone mentions the problem again. Your CC list is probably interesting too.

A downside is that I get bugzilla email whenever someone else adds himself as CC. By far the most CCed bug in my list is GTK+ bug #56070 – “Can’t click button after setting it sensitive”. I think I get email for this, or the Ubuntu bug #22930 “Newly-sensitive button ignores clicks until cursor re-enters it” almost every day. I guess that roughly 1 in 1000 people who have a problem try to report a bug, and I guess that 1 in a 1000 people who try to report a bug actually find the original bug report and CC themselves. So fixing this would make several million people happy. Even if it’s only a few thousand people that you make happy, you’d be a hero.

It looks like Matthias Clasen will be that hero. He might like some help testing or reviewing the patch.

GNOME Event Box: New stuff

General

I finally found the time to go into the cellar and see what came back from the Berlin LinuxTag in the GNOME Event Box. Here are some pictures of what I found. They are available to all the events organizers who request the box, along with the LCD screens, wireless keyboard/mouse, wireless router, cables, etc:

A generously donated Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo Q mini PC, thanks to Josh Kress‘s persuasive skills:
IMG_2640

A Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, thanks to Quim Gil of Nokia:
IMG_2648

Two new GNOME foot posters to replace the ones that DHL lost, thanks to Sven Herzberg (Don’t forget to send me the bill, Sven):
IMG_2650

Self-Improvement Projects

General

In a month or so, I should have more time. There’s a couple of things I want to do.

  • Buy a Playstation 3 and get a clue again about how kids use technology now. I doubt that anything has really changed in the last ten years, compared to Quake and Unreal, but there’s a chance, and I don’t want to become outmoded.
  • Get the latest edition of Thinking In Java and play with Google’s Web Toolkit. It might be what I need to implement the Glom web UI. Nobody else is doing that so I might as well try it slowly.

Ubuntu on Thinkpad X61s?

General,

After a couple of weeks of working away from home, I have a renewed hatred for the back-twisting weight of my cheap Acer laptop. I’m thinking of getting a Thinkpad X61s with Intel on-board graphics. But the X61 models are quite new, and I can’t find reports from people who have installed Ubuntu on them.

Or is there anything even lighter that’s easy to find? It’s rather annoying that there’s no IBM/Lenova online shop in Germany, and that the dealer prices seem to be twice the U.S. dollar price for the same models.