Aidan Delaney’s weblog

Lori and I watched Farenheit/911 on Saturday night. A guy that we worked with in Florida was one of the soldiers talking to Michael Moore. Kinda strange. I emailed him to see how he’s getting on, but I’ve not heard anything back yet. Hopefully he’s alright, he’s probably finished his tour at this stage considering the film is so old.

I switched from Gentoo to Fedora last night. I had one or two hiccups because I did the install arseways. I only burned one CD, so I decided to buld the system by manually installing all packages. Fun It’s working fine at the moment, just one problem which will get fixed tomorrow.

I was running Gnome 2.8 on Gentoo, but it feels snappier on Fedora. My OpenGL foo is also better under Fedora. 3D stuff rocks. Especially when it’s all Free Software. Not a propritery driver in sight.

I made some changes to Planet MiNDS>. It now uses some hackergochis, which are the little pictures of the authors. I had some trouble trying to distinguish beard from neck shadow when editing mine. It’s not as good as those found on Planet Gnome or Planet OpenOffice, but I am sufficiently decapitated.

I want to add blogs from NUI Maynooth clubs and socs to Planet MiNDS>, so if your club or soc has a blog email me.

Update:
I also only display the last 7 days of posts. I was noticing that the list was getting too long

Durham is a pretty fantastic town. It’s got some decent bars and we got dragged to a nightclub one night which was *cough* better than the Glenroyal. Because Lori is studying hard and I’m working hard we only get to go out once a week, but it’s usually fun.

Last Friday we ended up in Durham students union. Which puts our Union (and even ULs ) to shame. We started off in “the hogshead” which was playing Smiths and Foo Fighters videos so it got my vote. We proceeded to St. Cuths bar (Durham uses the old oh-so-posh collegiate system, in fact Durham uni outdates the term POSH) which was hot, very very (1.80 for a gin and tonic and a pint) and full of freshers. We then went to the union.

I blagged my way in with my Irish ID and was really surprised to find three separate bars and a proper night club. The DJ was even good. He was a dance DJ, not really my taste, but he was good all the same. Anyway we left early because we were too damn tired. Hopefully we’ll do better this weekend; that’s if we go out at all.

Paul: I believe the reason that the GNU libc was LGPL’ed (originally GPL with linking clause) was to allow X and several BSD applications run on the GNU system. Mainly because there was no point in starting a project that competed with XFree86 considering they shares most of the same goals of software freedom.

Stallman is always critical of the X licence. Stating that their licence does not defend freedom but instead tries to accomodate as many users as possible. From his point of view Free Software is primary, users are secondary as given all software users will gravitate towards Free Software.

The licence has had a nice (possibly unintentional) side-effect though. It’s made the GNU platform truly free. If you want to run propritery software on the GNU system you can. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. It’s all about choice. Free Software gives it to you, whereas many propritery applications require you to sign strange licences to use their APIs.

I personally only run Free Software. Unless I’m teaching, then I don’t believe I should burden students with my personal preferences.

Baruch: Why are you lacking motivation to work on your free software projects. Is it because these particular projects don’t interest you right now or that you have little motivation to work on free software after a long days’ kernel hacking?

I’m very excited about working on Free Software at the moment. The Gnome desktop environment is really shaping up. Darragh could probably tell us about improvements in OpenOffice.org, due for a version 2.0 next spring. Most of all, I think we’re getting towards standard interfaces on all GNU/Linux distributions for common configuration jobs, like network configuration. No more distro dependant tools

There’s a lot of work to be done on a political end. Software patents in Europe should be stopped and we’ve to educate the music industry on DRM. I’ve never purchased a DRM’ed CD (nor have I downloaded the tracks illegally). We’ve got to hit them where it hurts, in the pocket. If they see no demand for DRM’ed product then they won’t sell it.

Lastly, the vision that Des and I had for zero-configuration GNU/Linux is just around the corner. But there’s a bit of work to do on it yet. Particularly in regard to LAN shares. We’ve to convince users/developers to use a standard sharing mechanism for LAN shares. Or probably two standards. One will possibly be called a “Windows share” i.e. samba and the other a “Linux share” i.e. Webdav over DNS-Based Service Discovery, also known as Rendezvous.

I went to Newcastle yesterday for Tyneside LUG’s “Bring a box” day. It wasn’t what I expected, but it was something interesting to do for a while. Only one guy, Andy, went to the pub afterwards. However, the pub had fantastic ale. Nelug’s meeting is on Tuesday evening, hopefully that’ll be fun.

Lori broght me to a party last night. There were a good few people at given the size of the house and the fact that a lot of Lori’s classmates go home for the weekend. Everyone was friendly and interesting to talk to. One of the guys is doing somthing with a business degree (or masters, I can’t remember) and is convinced that open-source software is the way to go. Two of the other guys are doing masters in computer science and were telling me that they were getting interested in Linux.

I didn’t actually bring up the subject; for once. There must be somthing going on if I go to a party and other people tell me about Linux Anyway I had a few beers and made an ass of myself. Par for the course really!

Over the past week my lunch has consisted of sardines and reading papers I’m “not allowed to”

I’m trying to get through a vast quantity of literature. Thus, if I see an interesting paper like C.A.R. Hoare’s paper “Incomputability” it goes on a “not allowed to” list. Which means that I’d love to read the paper but it’s not pertinant. So like a good geek I sit around at lunch times reading papers I shouldn’t. Which is pretty lame….

As I previously mentioned. I’ve started to do a bit of hacking in the evenings. It’s a fun way to unwind after a hard days’ study.

For the past few days I’ve been working on a GNOME VFS module to extract contacts from an Evolution address book. It works
balor@navi ~/MonoDevelopProjects/GnomeVFSContacts $ gnomevfs-ls contacts:///
Delaney, Declan (Directory, x-directory/normal) size 0 mode 0000
Dully, Diane (Directory, x-directory/normal) size 0 mode 0000
O’Riordan, Ciaran (Directory, x-directory/normal) size 0 mode 0000
Dully, Lorraine (Directory, x-directory/normal) size 0 mode 0000
Delaney, Aidan (Directory, x-directory/normal) size 0 mode 0000

There’s the obligatory screenshot too

I’ll probably write an application in C# instead of continuing with the VFS module in C.

I made bread last night and a lamb & spinach curry. The bread is good, the curry was ok. I’ve used all the fresh spinach at this stage so I’ll have to think of somthing else to cook tonight.

I should really explain all this cooking. Lori and I decided that because both of us have a hard year ahead that we have to eat well. This will hopefully stop us getting sick or tired. Also, Lori has acquired a revulsion for products containing additives, which is a good thing.

I’ve also noticed that working from home gives me a lot more time. For instance, I generally start work before 09:00 and have a 30 minute break for lunch. I work straight through untill 17:00, at which stage I’m usually tired. I can spend a good 2 hours cooking and washing up before doing another few hours work.

In reality I don’t work on PhD stuff after dinner, this allows me to work on my languishing coding skills. I hacked somthing together last weekend, which I may release next weekend, when it’s stable enough to compile

I spent the weekend reading, writing and eating. I was reading “The design and implementation of the BSD4.3 operating system” but am still only half way through it. I attempted to finish the corrections on a paper but got nowhere near finished. In fact I only got it corrected on paper and typed up three lemmata.

As for the eating, this is where I excelled. On Saturday Lori and I made a spinach and feta cheese pizza. It was really nice. We wanted to have a good Sunday roast but failed to get to the shop before it shut. So, we made a spinach and chilli pizza on Sunday which was fantastic. Just the right amount of chilli to leave your mouth tingling.

Anyway, it’s back to the grindstone today