Advogato blog for gicmo

Liquid Schwarz

Wed, 4 Mar 2009 11:23:14 GMT

Taken by my old buddy yella.

VBoxMount is public

Thu, 6 Nov 2008 20:07:39 GMT

VBoxMount is a little tool for providing virtual disk images from VirtualBox as linux block devices. It uses the linux kernel’s network block device driver to do it in userspace (otherwise we’d have to bring vbox code into kernelspace which is a no-go).
I have been developing it for Topalis. From the very beginning of the project it was clear that it should become open, and maybe integrated into VirtualBox itself later. It is currently hosted on Launchpad, including all its awesomeness (bazaar branches, releases, bug-tracker).
Grab the first release here. File bugs here. Have fun!

The next item on the ToDo is snapshot support.

P.S.: It is a bit ugly to build right now, mostly because the VirtualBox’ SDK doesn’t include the necessary headers, nor a package-config file. I will file a “bug” about that at their bug tracker and hope that this will change.
If out-of-tree building doesn’t work, you could try the old in-tree branch here. The in-tree version is not as up-to-date as the out-of-tree since I only use the latter one for developing.

The Travelling GNOME in Passau

Sat, 9 Aug 2008 18:13:42 GMT

OMG, The Travelling GNOME was here …

… he met the gang …

… enjoyed the view …

… and watched the humans coding.

The other human on the photo is Clemens Buss, my SoC Student, who visited my to hack on GEmblem and GEmblemedIcon. Which landed upstream. His first code in GNOME, already at the very heart of it! I am a proud Monkey - aeh Mentor! :-)
Next step is to make use of it in the HAL volume monitor in gvfs and patch nautilus to use it. Of course its also the foundation for the general use of Emblems ins gvfs/gio - which of course needs lots of thinking and coding.

Weave

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:11:29 GMT

Weave is the new Google Browser Sync. Weave also seems to be really open. Maybe we can have our own http://services.gnome.org and an Epiphany extention. ;-)

Krautsalad

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:07:30 GMT

The Gtk+ Hackfest was good in many ways. Not only did I see a lot of cool people that I haven’t seen for a long time (since I missed GUADEC last year) but I also met a few new ones, that I only knew from IRC before, like e.g. hpj. Having those clever people around is also a good way to learn new tricks and steal some useful scripts. It was really motivating for me. I used most of the time in Berlin to do some real hacking and the result of it was the implementation of GtkMountOperation which hit svn yesterday. My first (major) patch to Gtk+. Yay! Of course I also spent time hacking on the webdav backend and gvfs in general which is also my main job these days since we have spring break and canonical is contracting me, until university starts again in mid April, to hack on gvfs to make it stable for the next ubuntu release, i.e. Hardy. I also became maintainer of gvfs, thus continuing the tradition to co maintain the virtual file system for GNOME. I checked when that all started the other day: Dave Camp committed my re-write of the http method for gnome-vfs at the 22nd July of 2004. Its going to be 4 years soon. I also noticed the first patch I *reviewed* and committed was from Ryan. Beginning in April I will also try to do the impossible and fill in the big, big whole that will be there when Alex takes his well deserved break to be there for his little daughter Alice. Its going to be hard when there is no alex__ to ask for advice, but I am pretty confident that we will be fine, since there seem to be a lot of energetic and motivated new gvfs hackers, like Cosimo Cecchi, Carlos Garcia Campos, A. Walton and Wouter Bolsterlee. And of course the old guys like Bastien, Benjamin and David. Everybody is also very welcome to join the excitement and make gio/gvfs even more rocking! Start by joining the new gvfs mailing list. :-)
Last but not least, I had the job to sent “invitation” mails to mentors for this year’s SoC but Ryan already announced on planet that everybody should just sign up and I think that makes more sense to do it that way, so I just repeat that invitation here: Help students and apply as a mentor if you are a member of the GNOME foundation. I have done it the last few years and its also a great experience.

WebDAV Server

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:11:01 GMT

Dear Lazyweb,

I am currently writing the dav backend for gvfs and I use apache + mod_dav for most of my my testing. I was now wondering if there is open webdav server out there that supports more features of the various webdav RFCs then mod_dav does. (E.g. ACL [RFC3744] or Redir [RFC4437]). An non-free but open server that I could use for testing would be fine as well.

Remember, remember …

Sat, 5 Jan 2008 14:07:01 GMT

“Fear became the ultimate tool of this government.”

Ich verliere zur Zeit viele Freunde; oder sie wechseln die Hochschule; oder aber sie geben sich komische Namen. Und das ist gut so! Die Rede ist natürlich von einer, anscheinend immer größer werdenden, Zahl an StudiVZ Mitgliedern die dem Dienst nicht mehr glauben wollen, er gehe mit ihren persönlichen Daten sorgfältig um. Ausgelöst durch den Versuch die AGBs so zu ändern, dass man mit den Daten der Benutzer endlich auch mal richtig Geld machen kann. Dafür gab es so gar Rüge vom Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten. StudiVZ hat nach der ersten Welle des Protestes die AGBs natürlich umgehend entschärft und mit der jetztigen Version, und damit der Möglichkeit zum “Opt-Out” in so gut wie allen kritischen Punkten, könnte man wohl schon leben. Aber der Strom von Mitgliedern, die ihre Namen bis ins Unkenntliche ändern, reißt -jedenfalls bei meinen “Freunden”- nicht ab. Vielleicht liegt es ja daran, dass viele erst durch die große Protestwelle bei der ersten Änderung begriffen haben, wie wertvoll ihre persönlichen Daten sind; gleichzeitig auch wie gefährdet diese gerade auch im StudiVZ, ja im “Interweb” und eigentlich überhaupt sind! Das Herz eines Technikenthusiasten wagt das jedenfalls zu hoffen.

Stasi 2.0 von skep (used under CC-SA)

Und vielleicht ist für den Menschen Freiheit doch etwas sehr kostbares und mehr wert als eine, nur versprochene totale Sicherheit, die mit großer Überwachung und Kontrolle erkauft wird. Wenn es wahr ist, dass man Freiheit, und auch Demokratie, immer wieder auf’s Neue erkämpfen muss, so freut es mich jedenfalls doch sehr, dass es offensichtlich eine nicht geringe Zahl an Leuten gibt, die genau dies tun. Mann muss natürlich immer ein Mittelmaß finden. Aber in Zeiten in denen das Pendel zwischen Freiheit und Kontrolle -Vorratsdatenspeicherung und Online-Razzien sei Dank- ganz klar zu sehr in Richtung Kontrolle und Überwachung zeigt ist Widerstand doch sehr wichtig. Vor allem dann wenn man, auch aus guten technischen Gründen, nicht an die Wirksamkeit dieser Maßnahmen glauben kann. Es sollte schon zu denken geben, dass gerade die Leute, die sich am besten mit den technischen Hintergrund auskennen, nicht müde werden vor den Folgen solcher Maßnahmen zu warnen.

Ganz davon abgesehen dürfte es nur eine Frage der Zeit sein bis die im Rahmen der Vorratsdatenspeicherung erhobenen Daten auch Zivilrechtlich benutzt werden. Die Musik und Filmindustrie werden daran jedenfalls großes Interesse haben.

Hoffen wir, dass ich auch weiterhin auf das Bundesverfassungsgericht stolz bleiben kann und es die Fehler der Politik wieder gut macht. Ich für meinen Teil hab das StudiVZ jedenfalls auch aufgegeben und bin wie viele andere jetzt bei kaioo.de.

Zum Schluss könnte man natürlich auch, wie in diesen Tagen so oft, 1984 zitieren, aber ich zitiere lieber einen Comic. Eigentlich dessen Verfilmung:

Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well, certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

We can’t stop here, this is wine country …

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:09:01 GMT

The Google SoC Mentor summit was great fun. I realized how may different OpenSource projects are out there. The other thing that I did notice and that made me think a bit was that there were many OpenSource developers using Mac OS X or Windows. So while for me OpenSource is more the idea that software (and thus all the software stack I am running) should be not only free for everybody but also its code should be it seems that there are a lot of people that do think different. Or does Linux on the Desktop still suck so much? Oh, and the KDE guys rock. I recently overheared a KDE vs. GNOME discussion at my University and I think it is really ironic that the developers seem to get along quite well with each other while the users are fighting. ;-) All in all the summit restored a good deal of my hacking mojo. One last note: Leslie has so much energy, I believe she has coffee instead of blood in her veins.

As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top:
(note quite true, it was his idea)

We also had original American food …

… which I should totally regret since I had to throw up 3 times during this night. I am now sooo looking forward to that 12 hour flight to Munich.

The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

(N.b. yes that is me on the picture and yes my hackergotchi is totally outdated, but Vincent loves it)

Freedom of Speech

Tue, 2 Oct 2007 17:10:23 GMT

Andre, if you really want free speech and you do indeed like people which have strong opinions then I really don’t all understand what all the fuzz is about anyway; because on that basis Matthias’ complains fall under free speech in exactly the same way as david’s post. If you want freedom of speech then you get the full package including people complaining about other peoples writings. And if the solution is that one just ignores posting that one disagrees with then we don’t get any discussion at all and everybody just gives monologues.

burst pipe

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 12:07:21 GMT

564.1 MB! I think there may be a small leak somewhere in Novell’s Main-menu. ;-)