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We’re in San Francisco for a month so that my wife Stephanie can get knee surgery from a really, really good surgeon.

Since I’m in his clinic every day, this morning I asked him to take a look at a nagging pain in my knees.

While he was examining my left knee, it made a “clunk” sound.

“Huh,” he said.

“Yeah, it always does that,” I said, “what is that?”

“It’s a clunk.”

He then gave me a really good explanation of where the clunk comes from, which I had never understood in 20 years of clunking. (Apparently there’s a fat pad underneath the knee cap which the knee cap rolls over, and if the fat pad is too big, the knee cap makes a sound when it slips over the hump and clunks into place.)

And then he pulled out his medical recorder and started dictating. “Thirty-two year old male presenting with medial pain and clunk in left knee.”

I thought it was pretty funny, the way he kept saying “clunk,” but when I got home I googled and it turns out that patellar clunk syndrome is an actual medical term.

So then we go to see the physical therapist, and the surgeon tells him what’s up with my knees, and I lie on the table and wait for the therapist to get some supplies.

And after a few minutes he walks into the room with a plunger. Like this:

Which he situates over my knee so as to form a seal, and starts pumping up and down, as if to clear an American toilet (German toilets never clog. Seriously, I have never seen a plunger in a German bathroom).

So this whole knee-pluging frenzy, right on the heels of all that talk about clunking, was in my view pretty comical and I was enjoying it all as a piece of art well worth the physical therapy fee, as long as it didn’t do any actual damage.

That is, until the plunger succeeded in detaching the fat pad from underneath my patella and my knees suddenly felt better than they had felt in years.

The clunk is still there, but I’m looking forward to my next therapy session with these crazy knee geniuses.

I took a plunger home with me, too.

After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site.

According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block. So it will leave that up to the individuals running the project:

Read the rest on OStatic

We've started building and publishing a core set of multimedia/codec related packages at Packman for openSUSE Factory again, now that 11.3 M1 has been published.Currently available packages include: MPlayer, ffmpeg, fluidsynth, lame, xine, twolame, vlc and xmms, as well as the gstreamer stack and a pile of additional libraries. We don't build all the stuff that's in our 11.2/11.1/11.0

Novell and VMware are making it easier for independent software vendors (ISVs) to optimize their applications for SUSE Linux Enterprise and VMware ESX. Novell is the first operating system vendor to offer Unified Certification for ISVs with VMware.

Unified Certification status means that applications tested and certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise within a virtual machine are automatically certified to run in a VMware virtualized environment with no modifications. Participating ISVs will be able to utilize each company’s partner programs, meaning expanded market opportunities through these extensive ecosystems. This offering complements Novell’s VMware Ready status–a certification that ensures optimal performance for virtual appliances built through the SUSE Appliance Program, the fastest and easiest way for ISVs to create and manage software appliances–and deployed within the VMware virtualized environment.

I spent a little time this weekend doing one of the things I've wanted to do for years - eradicate one of the oldest files in Banshee: banshee-dialogs.glade.

The vast majority of Banshee's UI is custom widgetry that is laid out dynamically at runtime. The main window and the preferences dialog hasn't been restricted by Glade for a couple of years, but all the other dialogs were defined in part in Glade:

• Open Location
• Seek To
• Import Media
• Smart Playlist Editor
• Error list dialog (very unlikely anyone has ever seen this)
• Last.FM Station Editor

These were all fairly simple dialogs in Glade -- mostly consisting of a table, some static labels, and placeholders to pack in custom widgets at runtime (e.g. the import source combo box in the Import Media dialog, or the actual query builder UI packed in the Smart Playlist Editor dialog).

Old Banshee Glade Dialogs

These are now fully defined in code, allowing the dialogs to derive directly from BansheeDialog, which provides extra common functionality for dialogs on top of Gtk.Dialog.

The big take-away here is no longer depending on the deprecated libglade/glade-sharp libraries (well, almost -- later this week Gabriel will port Muinshee -- an alternative Banshee client in the image of Muine, but not a core component). Additionally, I removed our dependency on libgnome/gnome-sharp, which is also deprecated.

This means that Banshee 1.5.4 will be GNOME 3.0 ready. The last thing to do is implement a udev hardware backend. We already have partial DeviceKit support, and GIO support. However, we don't take a hard dependency on HAL. The removal of the last Glade file represents the eradication of any hard obsolete GNOME 2.0 dependencies. Exciting!

As a quick aside: what was really nice about the porting from Glade to C# was the use of C# 3.0 features - specifically type inference and object initializers. This permits interface construction using a more terse syntax than available in C# 2.0, yielding improved readability and organization. For instance:

    var table = new Table (2, 2, false) {
        RowSpacing = 12,
        ColumnSpacing = 6
    };

    table.Attach (new Label () {
            Text = Catalog.GetString ("Station _Type:"),
            UseUnderline = true,
            Xalign = 0.0f
        }, 0, 1, 0, 1, AttachOptions.Fill, AttachOptions.Shrink, 0, 0);

Bring it on, GNOME 3.0. We are ready!

The world greatest FLOSS event take place on 24th of April. openSUSE Ambassadors from LATAM dont forget to participate on FLISOL!

Last week, another ISV announced a software appliance built as part of the SUSE Appliance Program from Novell. ROC Software has released the ROC EasySpooler SUSE-powered appliance, based on the company’s ROC EasySpooler core technology and a fully-supported version of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. ROC Software joins the ranks of GroundWork Open Source and Zmanda, ISVs who also recently announced SUSE-powered appliances.

Paul A. Scripko, ROC’s VP Business Development, said, “Joining the SUSE Appliance Program and having access to the SUSE Studio appliance building tools and marketing support from Novell helped ROC reduce development time to a matter of weeks and release product to market at a fraction of the usual time required.”

• Luciana was munching on sausage slices. She grabbed the curved end of one sausage, looked carefully at it, and exclaimed, "look, a little vault!".

  I guess that's what she learns in this house.

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 rc5 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are release candidates. Though, they have not passed the full QA test and might still include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. See also the list of known bugs.

Other information and plans:

There were more blocker bugs in the rc4, so we needed to release rc5 in the end. The good news is that no new blocker bug has been reported last few days. If nothing bad happen with the next few days, rc5 will be final and I will put it to the OpenOffice:org:STABLE project by the end of this week. Please, keep your fingers crossed

In a previous blog I mentioned I was trying to provide some more advanced containment control concepts to Openoffice.org. As such I have created a cws for it. My main focus is providing these controls to enhance the VBA Userform import experience, hence support in the general Openoffice.org usage case is limited to programmatic access for the moment ( probably a good thing whilst trying to mature this feature )
I do think though that the implementation ( with some minor cleaning up ) is good enough to commit, that way ,the Userform import will immediately benefit from this work and additionally developers can play with the new ‘MultiPage, Page & Frame’ controls. If you can’t wait for the cws to be integrated then you can of course try this feature in the ooo-build master branch where it is already available. The screenshot shows a MSO userform with some multiple levels of nested container controls, then the same useform imported in ‘vanilla’ openoffice and finally how it looks now in the cws. You should notice some other nice improvements that also are included in this cws e.g. the ’spinbutton’ is now imported ( unfortunately this cws does not make use of the spinbutton generally available for normal Openoffice.org Dialogs ) However this cws does enable controls in Openoffice Dialogs to now access embedded images ( note the image control from the MSO Userforms has an associated image, the filter has been modified to create embedded images on import and the Dialog controls now can handle embedded images ) Also some good news regarding the toolbar enhancements mentioned in the last blog these are now integrated in the DEV300 codebase since m70 ( many thanks to Carsten for helping make that happen )

Its been a slow start today, I don't know why? A few of my friends seem to have the same feeling a sort of cant-be-bothered-to-get-out-of-bed mood. I've tried forcing myself to get enthusiastic but for the minute even studying belly button fluff is not holding any interest for me.

I've done a sort of montage of things I need or at least should be doing ho hum!
 

Sometimes some guys are asking, how to submit a Story to the openSUSE Weekly News. In short: This Process are not magic First of all i can say, that EVERYONE can submit an Story. If you have an interesting thing, you can go to: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/Dashboard . Inside the Dashboard we have Subtitles (eg PlanetSUSE, Projects Corner ,…).  In the Document: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/Section_Content we have manifested, which Section to choose. Please read this Document and then you can place your Content into your choosed Section.
BTW: In the Section “Projects Corner” we place just Stuff inside openSUSE. Other not openSUSE related Stuff, like KDE/GNOME or so, we’re using the “On the Web” Section. In the Section “Planet SUSE” we place Stuff inside openSUSE. But not just Posts from PlanetSUSE. We can place other openSUSE related Stuff there.

Which Format we use?

The Title has the following Format:

;[Your URL '''Title''']                                    As Example:    ;[http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE-Medical '''The Medical Team''']
Between the URL and the ”’ is one space. This Format is for all Sections, but not the “On the Web” Section. In “On the Web” Section we’re using the following Format:

;[Your URL'''Hoster/Name of the original Author: Title''']         As Example:     ;[http://www.linux.com/anythig '''Linux.com/Sascha Manns: Now the Title''']

Hoster means the Webside who hosts this Information. Typically this is some like IBMDeveloperNetowork, ghacks or CNET.  Then the Name of the original Author. This means, that sometime an Information is published from two or three People. Mostly in the duplicates we can see that this is just an referer, or the duplicate tells us, which Author it is.

This was the difficult part of this Process. Then we show the Body of the Message. The Body has the following Format:

:”Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent semper quam vel quam blandit ac semper enim aliquam. Pellentesque dignissim sapien id quam hendrerit gravida et id dolor. Suspendisse sapien orci, imperdiet eget mollis ac, pulvinar eu erat. Aliquam et molestie ligula. Vestibulum massa tortor, ullamcorper ut tristique vitae, egestas sit amet ligula. Proin mollis dictum tortor vitae fringilla. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Suspendisse non nunc sit amet lorem lobortis sollicitudin quis nec lacus. Curabitur vehicula nibh lacus, vitae imperdiet orci. Phasellus eget accumsan dolor. Nullam varius aliquam augue, a auctor turpis fringilla vitae. Phasellus quis purus sit amet nulla dapibus blandit vel sagittis erat.”

If you just would like to provide a Link, then you can use the Dashboard too.  Just go to the end of the Side, to the Topic “Links”. There you can place your Link.

In both Options, you have to tell us, who you are. So  you can place after your Post: –~~~~ Then the Wiki sets up a Timestap.

Last but not least we have to say:  Please don’t edit the Issue directly (eg http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/110). It is better to use the Dashboard.

Now we hoping that we clarified all.

When I started Notes from the Metaverse some eons ago on a platform that no longer exists, it was a standard personal blog. I wrote about things that interested me, whether on the web (most posts had at least one link to peruse) or in life. Since most of my interests at the time had to do with writing and Linux (and quite often writing about Linux), those were the things I wrote about. So when I moved my blogging HQ to WordPress.com, my tagline seemed fairly obvious. The blog would be about “Working, Writing and Open Source.” And so it was.

Over time, though, the focus here would be more and more on free and open source software (FOSS), and much less on all the other parts of me. Nothing wrong with that. While I’ve always written here with an audience in mind, the size of that audience was never a central concern. I like to think I’m all about helping people with their computers, and outlining the advantages of open source without being too much of a zealot about it.

Anyway, as a writer, my focus has evolved over the years, and the new book is a part of that evolution. While I’m not one of those folks who believe that desktop computing is going away entirely in the next few years, I’ve always been interested in the tools the Internet provides us with that help build community and expand free speech. WordPress as an endlessly malleable open source tool is a stellar example of these great tools.

This is all to say that Notes from the Metaverse is going to change just the tiniest bit in 2010. First, let’s note that there will be more posts. Really! The goal is to post weekly at a minimum. There may even be more when I go to conferences and such.

Second, posts will remain (perhaps even more) focused on FOSS generally. There will be more stuff about the web and community than there has been, but this will not become just another blog about WordPress. I read a lot of these, and the world probably doesn’t need one from me.

Third, there will continue to be posts about Linux desktop software, as most of my personal computing continues to happen on openSUSE and Kubuntu. Many of these posts will be about KDE 4.x, which I’m coming to believe gets a bad rap from too many folks. Don’t be surprised if I expand on that theme soon.

Fourth, while the size of the audience is still not a primary concern (Confession: Writing the SEO sections of the WordPress book was one of the hardest parts of the book, because I had trouble putting myself into that mindset), I pay enough attention to my visitor stats to  have noticed that y’all really like the how-to posts done here. To be honest, I like reading them too. So there will be more of that too, on both the Linux and WordPress sides.

Finally, with the imminent relaunching of www.MichaelMcCallister.com (OK, some might think it was never really launched the first time), this site will get a little bit of a facelift/theme shift. The tagline will be adjusted. Categories will be pruned, and tags used much more effectively. I’m also going to post more on the writing life at the abovementioned site. More to come on that very soon.

Change is never easy. Let me know what you think about these ideas; nothing’s set in stone yet. Heck, it’s a blog–nothing’s ever set in stone.

Participate in the openSUSE survey 2010 to give feedback to the openSUSE project about the distribution, the openSUSE tools environment and the project in general. Let us know where things are in good shape and areas where improvement is needed. There are also some questions to get some demographic knowledge about our users. The more we know in which direction our project shall move the better we can address this. The survey will take about 8 mins.
The survey will be online till Feb 28, 2010 and we raffle amongst all participants some t-shirts, openSUSE 11.2 boxes and 1 one really neat device (most probably a Chumby). If you wanna participate in the raffle please provide your email address at the end, if not just skip it.

Have a lot of fun! & Thanks for participating

From the Detroit News:

The State Department didn't revoke the visa of foiled terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because federal counterterrorism officials had begged off revocation, a top State Department official revealed Wednesday.

Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab's visa wasn't taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would've foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

"Revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing," Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, "rather than simply knocking out one soldier in that effort."

This is really all that we need to know. But the evidence of the Haskells about how he was helped to get onto the flight by a smartly dressed man (which has not been widely reported) is also of interest:
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_says_at_l.html.

http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2010/02/fedora-webcomic-fosdem-special-lame.html

We arrived, very relaxed, yesterday at 21:00 thanks to our awesome openSUSE Bus. Its a nice to fall out of the Office, into the bus and then crawl out of it again in front of the Hotel. It’s more comfy than any plane i have ever been on and we used the time well. Lot’s of socializing, beer and Pavol even ran a pretzel-stick eating contest (guess who won!). I think this will be our mode of travel for the next FOSDEMs to come. After everybody checked in we went to the FOSDEM beer event. It was packed, as every year but quite a blast. Met up with Michael Meeks, Greg, Pascal and all the other openSUSE people.

And now the talks are underway and the hallway is more and more empty. So I thought its time for a short recap. The first hours today went great. We arrived at the venue at 9 and were setup by 9:30 thanks to our new and shiny TouchSmart desktops. Thank you HP! Apparently people love to touch stuff so the booth is always visited and people play around. We also give out free T-Shirts to everyone participating in our newest survey. So all in all everything is going smoothly. Stay tuned for more updates!

Issue #109 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

• Its here! openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1
• Sirko Kemter: First Art-Team meeting
• OStatic/Joe Brockmeier: Joe Brockmeier: Video editing in Linux: a look at PiTiVi and Kdenlive
• Jeffrey Stedfast: Weird bugs due to gcc 4.4 and strict aliasing
• KDE SC 4.4 RC3 Released

For a list of available translations see this page:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/109/Translations.

Issue #109 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

• Its here! openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1
• Sirko Kemter: First Art-Team meeting
• OStatic/Joe Brockmeier: Joe Brockmeier: Video editing in Linux: a look at PiTiVi and Kdenlive
• Jeffrey Stedfast: Weird bugs due to gcc 4.4 and strict aliasing
• KDE SC 4.4 RC3 Released

For a list of available translations see this page:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/109/Translations.

So you want example sources, cca 100K total. You have to download 15MB
slac341.zip, that extracts into 15MB Chronos-Setup.exe. That in turn
blackmails you into accepting about 20 pages of ugly legaleese
presented in tiny window. You get past that (in wine), select directory, and then InstallJammer tells you that you dont have permissions to the directory, oops.

The first openSUSE-Medical Team meeting will take place tomorrow (Saturday February 6) at 14:00 UTC. As always, the meeting will be held in IRC on the #opensuse-medical channel on Freenode.

Please add your topics to the meeting wiki page at:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE-Medical/Meetings

We using for our Meeting the Meetbot. Please check http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot for the commands.

Please add topics as soon as possible. Also, if you have questions for the meeting, but can’t attend (we know that the meeting times can’t work for everyone) please add them to the agenda as well.

For more on IRC meetings, see: http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About.

As always, we meet in #opensuse-medical on Freenode. Fire up your favorite IRC client and head over to #opensuse-medical.

Not familiar with IRC? A good overview can be found at irchelp.org. This site is not affiliated with openSUSE. For more information on Freenode, see http://freenode.net/.

Wondering what meeting times are? Check the openSUSE Meetings page. All project meetings and team meetings should be listed there.

on IRC meetings, see: http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/About.

SC Magazine has just published its review of ZENworks Patch Management. Backed by Novell’s strong support organization and ZENworks Patch Management’s centralized Web-based administration and ability to scale for any size environment, the review notes, “… we found that Novell’s solution represents a great value for many different-sized enterprises.” SC Magazine gave ZENworks Patch Management five stars in each category and also named its recommended product this month.

Check out the five-star product rating here and learn more about ZENworks Patch Management here.

“Twitter is so lame”

So says one particular 15 year old quoted in a February 4, 2010 USA Today article outlining how teens and young adults are using social media these days. Apparently, teenagers, who have a history of being early adopters on nearly every online activity are not so keen on Twitter.

It’s my job to explore all avenues for marketing effectiveness and the world of social media is perhaps the hottest area for exploration among the Chief Marketing Officers I know. But this survey, with particular emphasis on the less than enthusiastic uptake on Twitter with tomorrow’s decision makers, is giving me reason to pause and ask “Is Twitter the CB Radio of social media?” Perhaps an explanation is in order.

CB Radio. I suspect I date myself. Come back to the 1970’s when CB (closed band) radio was all the rage. CB radio was a way to connect with complete strangers or friends with a reasonable investment and no variable cost to participation. And like Twitter, the value of CB radio was exponential to the number of devices in use. CB radio aficionados were enthusiastic defenders of the medium. Heck they even had their own language, lingo and “handles”. Handles – names they called themselves that protected their anonymity (in a time when protecting one’s privacy seemed to matter – but that’s another blog). CB ”handles” were the equivalent of Twitter ids. The point is there was a period in the 70’s that if you didn’t have a CB radio, you weren’t part of the conversation. But alas, CB radio never reached the promise or potential of its supporters and today it’s a pop culture item and answer to a trivial pursuit question.

Is Twitter heading in the same direction as CB radio? If teenagers have anything to say about it I suspect so. In truth, I’m not yet convinced that Twitter is going to make it either. I may take some criticism for that but from my seat the most prolific users of Twitter today are egotists or marketers – sometimes these are the same people. Yes I use Twitter and encourage my team and company to use it as well. But unless the use broadens and companies begin to understand the linkage between using Twitter (and other social media avenues for that matter) and delivering a better customer experience, I suspect we’ll all move on to the next big thing. After all, who wants to be using something that today’s youth view as “lame”.

John

… and I’m looking forward to meeting you all! I will also give a talk about RPM Packaging Collaboration so remember to show up on Sunday if you are interested!

I started mychronos project on sourceforge. Laurent Arditi asked me what it is about, but I could not write him back, so... let me explain here.

For now I do not have the watch, so I set up
simple emulator... that will also make development easier later. It is extremely hacky, but works well enough to show time and allow you to set it. Just run it with input redirected from /dev/input/eventX -- from your keyboard. And you may want to comment out first few lines of main().

I'd like to make the firmware compilable under Linux, then extend it
with new features ... like time of sunset/sunrise, etc.

BTW...does someone have official chronos firmware in .tar or .zip? All I could find was .exe, and I'd prefer not to install wine.

So the battery firmware not only killed my battery, it also claims it
is very much okay:

root@amd:~# cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present:                 yes
design capacity:         74880 mWh
last full capacity:      74880 mWh

Good news on the accessibility (a11y) front. Mozilla has donated $10,000 to help with GNOME's a11y efforts. This isn't the first time that Mozilla has contributed to GNOME (and hopefully, not the last). The projects have a long history of working together on a11y efforts dating back at least to 2008 when the Mozilla folks gave the first donation to GNOME for a11y, which helped benefit Orca and other a11y technology in GNOME.

Read the full details on the GNOME site.

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project.

Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.

Read the rest on OStatic

We are happy to announce that we reached a state which can be considered as final version of 1.7.0.

No more changes, except for the version number are planned until 1.7.0 final release next week.

We fixed a number of issues since beta 3, esp

• fixed references to static.opensuse.org got removed
• initial Kiwi 4.1 support
• attribute handling fixes
• various runtime error exceptions
• patchinfo handling

The release is available as version 1.6.99 in the openSUSE:Tools:Unstable project for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise platforms.

The OBS-Appliances needed larger changes, due to the fact that we had to switch the used kiwi version to the original version from openSUSE 11.2. Nevertheless they look good right now.

New are the OBS Worker images to run just workers, without the server itself.

I'm happy to go to Brussels again this year: it's been a long time since I didn't eat some really good waffles! Of course, I had to pretend I would do something useful there, so I'm participating in two talks, both in the distributions devroom:

• Working with GNOME upstream: this will really be an interactive session, where upstream and downstream people for GNOME can meet, and discuss what can be improved to make the life of both upstream contributors and downstream contributors. It will probably be a good opportunity to also clarify how GNOME 3 might affect distributors, and to get a first overview of how it will be handled downstream. I hope it will be useful for everybody. I certainly hope we'll have a bunch of upstream people attending, and that we'll have representatives for various distributions there (make sure to tell the GNOME people in your distribution to come!).

• Translations of package descriptions: as you can see, I don't have my name attached to this session, so I can pretend I didn't know about it ;-) But I'm supposed to help Anne there as we've discussed this a bit in the past few months. Translating package descriptions has obvious benefits for the end users, but it's a huge amount of work. And therefore we can seriously wonder if it's really worth duplicating this effort in each distribution (hint: probably not). So this session aims to look at what we can do to work together on this, and what it implies.

I'm also eager to have some insightful discussions with the great people that will come to FOSDEM. The hallway meetings have always been productive there!

GNOME

GNOME will have some strong presence again this year. There's the GNOME devroom on Saturday, that will become CrossDesktop devroom on Sunday, and during the whole week-end, we'll have a booth. If you want to help, that's definitely the place where you should go: we need volunteers to run the booth (see Lionel's mail for more details).

The booth should look great again, thanks to the event box, lovely stickers (they'll be free again!) and, hopefully, t-shirts (we're unsure they'll be ready in time, but let's be optimistic ;-)). On Saturday, you'll also find there some information about what is becoming a tradition: the GNOME Beer Event that will occur on Saturday evening.

Oh, apparently, I was volunteered to organize the GNOME group photo on Saturday, at 15:30. So make sure to be around the devroom at that time!

openSUSE

There will also be a good number of openSUSE people, with the usual booth (looking for some openSUSE DVD or sticker? You'll find them there!). This year, there's no openSUSE devroom because there's one big distributions devroom instead; I believe it's a good thing, though: it should help get more collaboration happen, and it's also a nice opportunity to steal good ideas ;-)

I'm happy that most of the boosters team will also attend; I heard it's a great group of people to hang out with!

In about 30h I will be on the ICE to Brussels to FOSDEM, to have 2 DevRooms there.

The Sportsbag with kit has been packed. The meeting at the customary restaurant tomorrow evening has been pretty much set up. Both my talks should be ready, and just need some studying. And I am now making the posters with the schedules and the fliers (used for possible status changes and directions) for the two devrooms so that they can be printed out later today.

The schedule for the Coreboot DevRoom (on saturday) is unchanged since my last post:

* 13:00 : Peter Stuge - coreboot introduction.
* 14:00 : Peter Stuge - coreboot and PC technical details.
* 15:00 : Rudolf Marek - ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot.
* 16:00 : Rudolf Marek - coreboot board porting.
* 17:00 : Carl-Daniel Hailfinger - Flashrom.
* 18:00 : Luc Verhaegen - Flash Enable BIOS Reverse Engineering.

All seems well, and it seems that we will have everything filmed nicely too!

The schedule for the Xorg DevRoom (on sunday) has seen one last minute change with the addition of Nicolai Haehnle's talk:

* 12.00: Nicolai Hähnle : Towards GLSL in the r300 Gallium driver
* 13.00: Daniel Stone : Polishing X11 and making it shiny.
* 14.00: Luc Verhaegen : The free software desktop’s graphics driver stack.
* 15.00: Jerome Glisse : GPU Userspace - kernel interface & Radeon kernel modesetting status.
* 16.00: Mikhail Gusarov : X on e-Paper.

This addition was very last minute, and did not make the FOSDEM folder. Nicolai was quite lucky as the FOSDEM organisers had already assigned the DevRoom to the openMoko project in the morning, which luckily left a single slot free for Nicolai.

I've finished my slides for my own talk in the X.org devRoom, and it promises to be an interesting one, albeit controversial for some.

It examines some of what we can tell a few years down the road from the modular tree, and goes over the real needs. Then it explains the unification of graphics driver stacks, how to build it for the unichrome driver, and what infrastructural changes it could use.

But before i go into details i will have a small in room survey (Which will probably become a more widespread survey online). One of the questions i will ask is: "For those using, or those who have used, the nvidia or ati closed source drivers: how would you like it if nvidia or ATI told you that you needed the very latest upstream kernel, X, and mesa to be able to run the latest catalyst or nvidia driver, especially when you might need this version for its new hardware support or for bugfixes?"

(and urgh... the msi fuzzy cn700t motherboard i was using as a mailserver just died on me, even the port80 card says that no bios code is being run. Now i stuck in another cn700 board, and it has one of those really noisy fans :()

We have just released our first preview of Moonlight 3.0.

This release contains many updates to our 3.0 support, mostly on the infrastructure level necessary to support the rest of the features.

In the release:

• MP4 demuxer support. The demuxer is in place but there are no codecs for it yet (unless you build from source code and configure Moonlight to pick up the codecs from ffmpeg).
• Initial work on UI Virtualization.
• Platform Abstraction Layer: the Moonlight core is now separated from the windowing system engine. This should make it possible for developers to port Moonligh to other windowing/graphics systems that are not X11/Gtk+ centric.
• The new 3.0 Binding/BindingExpression support is in.
• Many updates to the 3.0 APIs

The above is in addition to some of the Silverlight 3.0 features that we shipped with Moonlight 2.0.

For the adventurous among you, our SVN version of Moonlight contains David Reveman's pixel shader support:

From Silverlight Parametric Pixel Shader.

• Up early, to work - pleased to read Bradley's Not All Copyright Assignment Is Created Equal post; Amen.

I will be arriving in Brussels on Saturday Morning for the FOSDEM conference. We have an activity-packed day on Sunday of all-things-mono.

This is the current schedule, pretty awesome!

Feedback requested: My plan is to do a state-of-the-union kind of presentation on Mono, but if you have a specific topic that you would like me to present on, please leave a comment, I will try to prepare for that.

See you in Brussels!

Has it really been seven months since the last Note from the Metaverse? If there’s anyone left out there, thank you! Let me (briefly!) tell you what’s been up. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what is coming up. Yes, there are changes afoot, but there most definitely is a future!

• Most relevant in the way of offering excuses for my absence is that I have left the world of independent consulting, and gone back to full time work as a technical communicator at PKWARE, Inc.
• Besides that, and this is the lamest excuse for not blogging I’ve ever heard, I’ve been working on WordPress in Depth since last summer. I’ve been working on this project for QUE with Bud Smith, a great (and far more experienced) writer, and the force behind Google Voice Daily. This one is currently at the printer, and should be in a bookstore near you very soon. I’m very proud of this title, and hope it will help more of you get involved in blogging with WordPress, and make those of you already blogging make better use of WordPress. More about this in the days to come.
• I continue being active in the Wisconsin chapter of the Society for Technical Communication, BarCampMilwaukee (had another great, if abbreviated, time last October), and Web414. Milwaukee now has a PHP User Group too!

All I have time for now. More coming…

As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter...

See more ...

Starting with Firefox 3.6 I’ve enabled the Mozilla internal crashreporter for 32-bit builds. Some people have seen that already unfortunately But anyway that is still a good thing as it makes your and my life easier to analyze what’s going on. This is more kind of a testing phase currently but my plan is go that direction because Apport seems to be no efficient solution in openSUSE just yet and Mozilla was interested in helping distributors to use their infrastructure (they also have the advantage of having more crash data available on Linux systems).
There are still some technical issues which are being worked on. There is no full 64-bit support in Gecko 1.9.2 and the breakpad implementation lacks DWARF support so if we support stabs+ debug symbols as used there we loose RPM’s feature of generating correct debuginfo packages.
Both issues are almost fixed but it’s unclear if we can fully support it with Firefox 3.6 already.

• To work, poked more bootcharts, fixed a couple of bugs in bootchart2, and submitted it to Base:System. Implemented horizontal scale zoom in the viewer - to see yet more detail. Dug into a kernel boot time regression, and poked Greg about it.
• Meeting heaven - preload all-hands, customer calls, chat with Guy, JP, etc. what fun.
• Banged away at my desk in the evening, accepting some slightly damp, pre-planed timber in exchange for speed. Amused by the EvoStick water-proof glue, apparently it "dries clear" - where 'clear' seems to have the value 'white'; odd. Assembled the angle-grinder, and had a go at the steel for the front guard - remembered that you get a lot of fun sparks from such an occupation - and that the floor is covered with fine sawdust, hmm. You really get a good feeling for the speed of a 10k RPM hard-disk, with a angle-grinder of the same speed, somehow failed to set light to myself, loose a limb, or burn the house down.

Guest post – Brian Singer, Security Solutions Manager, Novell

Security folks have been saying for some time now  that organizations need to take a long, hard look at how they think about information security. Now that intellectual property is the target of attacks, the stakes are higher. Organizations must start from the assumption that no endpoint is secure and build their security programs around that hypothesis. In this world, authentication is not enough—the underlying activities could still be malicious.

In this podcast, I discuss with Novell security specialist, Ben Goodman, how the Aurora breach has shined a spotlight on the failure of the traditional perimeter security model. The response to these threats must be multi-faceted. Ultimately, we believe the solution may lie in systems that tie together all the information available within an enterprise. Mining that wealth of information for inconsistencies, and putting a lens to the fine-grained activities that are taking place will lead organizations to broad-based user-activity monitoring. Any time a valuable asset is accessed, systems will check to see if that access is consistent with what’s expected – anything out of the ordinary will trigger alarms or could shut down access completely.

What are your thoughts on the Aurora breach? Post your comments and let’s start a discussion.

Guest post - Brian Singer, Security Solutions Manager, Novell Security folks have been saying for some time nownbsp; that organizations need to take a long, hard look at how they think about information security. Now that intellectual property is the target of attacks, the stakes are higher. Organizations must start from the assumption that no endpoint is secure and build their security programs around that hypothesis. In this world, authentication is not enoughmdash;the underlying activities could still be malicious. In this podcast, I discuss with Novell security specialist, Ben Goodman, how the Aurora breach has shined a spotlight on the failure of the traditional perimeter security model. The response to these threats must be multi-faceted. Ultimately, we believe the solution may lie in systems that tie together all the information available within an enterprise. Mining that wealth of information for inconsistencies, and putting a lens to the fine-grained activities that are taking place will lead organizations to broad-based user-activity monitoring. Any time a valuable asset is accessed, systems will check to see if that access is consistent with what's expected ndash; anything out of the ordinary will trigger alarms or could shut down access completely. What are your thoughts on the Aurora breach? Post your comments and let's start a discussion.