Fri, 10 Jun 2011

CodeCave 2011 wrap-up
After a hectic two evenings preparing for CodeCave 2011 and a morning that seemed full of reasons to stay at work, I picked up James and Rusty and we headed up to Yarrangobilly Caves with Tridge and Ian in convoy. After a small panic of me not remembering the landscape (and trusting my memory rather than e.g. a map or a GPS) we arrived. Andreas had got there beforehand and unlocked so we moved in.

I was immediately very pleasantly surprised - Caves House is really well appointed, with an excellent kitchen, nice wide corridors, plenty of heating and great facilities all round. I had been worried about finding a forty year old oven and one knife (I brought my own favourite cleaver and carving knife just in case) but it was excellent.

The other thing that was good was that everyone pitched in and helped in the cooking and cleaning. I wasn't surprised by this - I think open source people generally expect to pull their weight and contribute, and I think everyone understood that I was only passing on costs rather than making a profit. But I had been a little worried that I'd have to set up rosters and roust people out from under their laptops to help me, and that wasn't the case at all. I had planned a group menu that pretty much everyone joined in with, and I really enjoyed having help as I cooked (as much as I also enjoyed the process of cooking for friends). Another win.

We had quite a variety of projects being worked on. Andreas was working on an Arduino home alarm system, Ian was continuing to work on his password manager integrating with the arcane complexities of XWindows' clipboard, Andrew and Tridge worked on getting SaMBa to talk to various Windows servers via IPv6 (you can guess where the problems lay), James continued ironing out the wrinkles in Zookeepr, and Rusty took up Tridge's challenge to write an algorithm that could find a bright dot reliably in a picture, not easy when the actual source is a quarter of a pixel wide - this was for the UAV Challenge: the bright dot is an infra-red light source, the picture is a IR-bandpass image of a field with that source in it, and each quarter of a second a new picture is taken, during which time the plane can move over twenty metres.

I was learning Go, something I had wanted to attempt at the previous CodeCon but had failed to get the compiler correctly installed before leaving contact with the internet. This was a general theme in the background of the weekend - nice as it was to be away from all the quotidian distractions of life, including those of the internet, it would have been rather useful in certain circumstances: looking up Wikipedia articles, for example. While Tridge's grand plan of taking his quad-copter up high enough to get his phone in contact with the 3G network, and then to use it as a wifi access point for emergency internet access, didn't eventuate, it was wished for on more than one occasion.

In between hacking and feeding ourselves, we watched Tridge fly his quad-copter (briefly) and went for tours through the three main cave systems at Yarrangobilly. I'm always left in wonderment at the amazing beauty and delicacy of the cave formations: flowstone, straws, helictites (which grow against gravity), shawls, and more, all solid, real examples of the amazing processes of crystals, physics and time. Fractals so perfect in their execution they make computer-generated ones look fake; persistent, unfathomably patient processes eroding away and building up in intricate, complex sculptures. Places where you can see these geologically slow processes already subsuming the man-made fittings that have been there for a blink of an eye. Caves really do have an aura of wonder to me that awakens the scientist in me.

Tridge had the good idea of each of us giving a talk about what we'd learnt so far and what we were working on and still to overcome, in a convenient spot in the self-guided cave. We didn't disturb anyone else and it was quite wonderful to have that completely different setting for something as interesting and familiar.

We packed up by about 11AM on Sunday to go on the final cave tour, and then to have lunch at the thermal pool. Sadly it wasn't warm - it was tolerably cool; with a cold Winter upon us there was nothing about it to entice one to stay in. Still, it was kind of fun to do something different again. And there was still one treat in store - we found an open place on the snow plains south of Kiandra and Tridge flew his model plane. It went very well despite the wind, which would have been at gale strength in scale and had the motors struggling to keep it going upwind.

Overall it was a really great weekend, full of interesting talk, cogently argued ideas, personal insights and wonder-generating surroundings. I was really glad to have been a part of it and I hope to run another one next year!

posted at: 09:18 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

GNOME 3 improved
As part of starting at my new place of employment, I've installed the beta of Fedora 15 (because the real thing comes out tomorrow, curse it). With it comes GNOME 3, the latest update of the GNOME window manager.

So far my experience is pretty good. Yes, it's different, but no, it's not that different that I can't learn how to use it. It's a case of not thinking "why can't I do that the old way" but "I wonder what the new way is", and for the most part it's not that painful. Of course, there were a few things that I did want to make work the same as my previous GNOME setup and the main one was focus following the mouse pointer. After a bit of research on the net, I found the necessary command and will post it here for reference:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode -t string mouse

Another thing that's changed is that Alt-TAB now groups all windows by application - all Firefox windows are treated as one group for the purpose of tabbing around, for example. When one application has multiple windows open, a little down-arrow appears at the bottom of its icon and, by mousing over it, you can then select the sub-window you require. This, however, is inconvenient if, like me, you use the keyboard a fair bit - moving to use the mouse takes time and effort. I discovered, with a bit of experimentation, that you can use the arrow keys for this as well - press Alt-TAB and use either TAB and Shift-TAB or left and right to navigate; when an application with sub-windows is selected, use down to show a list of its sub-windows and left and right to select from there.

Maybe there are other ways of using this; that's what worked for me. But it shows that a bit of experimentation can take less time than grumbling about how everything's changed and it no longer matches what you see.

And I think it's going to be a surpreme bit of irony that there'll be all these Linux experts complaining about how GNOME has broken everything and they want their old GNOME look and feel back - the same people who keep on looking down on their friends for not wanting to move from Windows or OS X to GNOME because "it's a different look and feel". Take it on the chin, people.

posted at: 00:01 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry

LWN Professional Supporter
Today I subscribed to Linux Weekly News for another 11 months at the new Professional Supporter level. Rusty asked for a higher level of subscription to be available a while back, and Jon (with his characteristic gentle, wry humour) implemented it recently.

It took me a little time to actually raise my subscription level - I had spent a bit of money on bike parts and other stuff and, though I could still have afforded it, just didn't feel like watching all my money escape in one go. (I'm still recovering from my somewhat exuberant donation to the flood relief funding at LCA 2011). But finally the stars aligned, the checksums matched and I paid for the shiny stars on my name.

Why? For two reasons. One, as Rusty says, is that Jon and the team at LWN are doing huge, exemplary, and difficult work condensing all the news that's important in the FOSS gamut into one easy-to-read site. If I had to buy a magazine for that I'd be paying at least half that. The second reason is congruent to my decision to support webcomic artists: that I love supporting anyone who is getting to do the thing they love. I love working with computers and I'm lucky enough to have found companies that employ me for my skills. If you want to be a journalist who writes about FOSS, it's much more difficult to find a company that gives you the freedom you need to write about the things you love. Being able to support them in that is a good thing.

Plus, I can write it off as an educational expense on my tax, and I get Jon owing me a beer rather than me owing him one :-). So it's good all round.

I'm not calling it maniacal. It's a perfectly sensible judgement in my opinion. There are lots of people who read LWN who are paid well and could easily afford to support them at that level. Hearing Jon's talk about running LWN for thirteen years was an insight into the trials and obstacles confronting anyone that wants to do as LWN has done. Given that there are well-known but not particularly well-respected IT news websites out there that also send their reporters to LCA - usually, it would seem, to stir up trouble - having LWN around to provide an intelligent, reasonably even-handed report on what goes on in the FOSS community is a great, unsung boon to us all.

Jon's philosophy in setting the prices for subscriptions - and allowing mostly unrestricted access for free - has been that Linux users like things to be free. I would argue that they like their software to be both zero-cost and unencumbered, but I don't think that necessarily extends to them expecting a free ride from other people. I'm sure there are lots of people that can afford to support LWN, even in a small way, for the service it provides. It maybe not at the professional support level, but having this option gives people like myself to support it at an appropriate level for our income.

posted at: 00:01 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry

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