I’ve been doing some maintaineresque bashing at Alacarte recently (with the maintainer’s permission.) This means the bug list is down to four. Two of which are enhancements and two of which are quite mischievous little critters: #364080, which has something to do with the completion stuff but I can’t reproduce and #372477, which seems to be a bug with gnome-menus or the Python bindings perhaps. Any help would be most welcome! Update: Rogue space broke the links. Fixed now.

This is so true.. Today on the other hand I wrote a few patches for alacarte and deskbar. It seems that quite a few modules are missing the magic values in their .desktop files which Bug Buddy needs to send bugs to the right place. See #348827 for details. Perhaps this should be the next GNOME goal? (Doh. I alway forget to publish my blog entries with Wordpress. So this was supposed to appear yesterday.)

Somebody on desktop-devel-list asked for a “gconf-diff” which should tell them the settings they have in gconf that are different to the defaults. So I wrote it, you can get it in the list archives or by following this link: gconf-diff.py. As well as giving the keys that are different it also gives keys without a matching schema. I think this should also be helpful with troubleshooting upgrades and the like.

I have just submitted by first research paper to a leading networks conference. I wish I could have been in Boston but alas there was no time to spare with this deadline. Now i’m going to get some sleep.

Today I started reading High Fidelity and am having trouble putting it down. So far I have read three other of Hornby’s novels: About a Boy, How to Be Good and A Long Way Down (in that order). And to be honest after the insightful intrigue of the former I found the other two lacking in anything of any interest. A Long Way Down was massively predictable and a tad morbidly bland and How to Be Good failed to say anything interesting, at all. Ever. A couple of weekends ago I was visited by some close friends from Cambridge, Steve and Noirin, and we did the usual Berlin things. Sunday Fr hst ck, shopping, eating ice cream and a helluvalot of walking. We did however see Thankyou For Smoking at the Original Version cinema at the Sony Center. It was witty and clever and all the things a good film should be. Noirin commented afterwards that in the whole film that you don’t see anybody smoking in the whole thing. I’m looking forward to Starter for Ten. I doubt anyone outside the UK will really grok a film about a cult television series (if Countdown is cult, University Challenge must be up there with the Today Programme.) (Pardon the cheesy pun on the name of a chain of book shops long since subsumed into the now ubiquitous Borders.)

Yesterday myself and a work colleague went to the Olympic Stadium here in Berlin to see Hertha play Hannover in the Bundesleague. Since I’d never been to a football match before I wasn’t really sure what to expect. When we got onto the S-Bahn the train was full of optimistic fans drinking beer and rehearsing their football chants. Once we had found our seats in the overwhelmingly agoraphobic stadium we got to see quite a lot of action, in fact Hertha scored 4 goals to, uhm, Hannover’s, nil point. By the third goal my initial anticipation and scepticism had been replaced by an optimistic tension as I attently tracked the ball around the somewhat distant field. Ready to cheer along with the rest of the Hertha fans who surrounded us. Once the game was over we were submerged in the stream of blue and white as it left the stadium, their expectant optimism happily satiated. I think I now have some idea of what it feels like to be a football fan.

Just in case you missed it before…Fernando Herrera and Lorenzo Gil came up with a lovely bit of code that allows the parts of the GNOME experience written in Python to send traces via bug-buddy when something goes wrong. Pessulus will soon have this and i’m working on doing it for Deskbar. Update: Forgot the link to the code…bug-buddy-integration.py.

This weekend was quite a social razzmatazz. On Saturday night myself and two of the other interns I share an office with went to see the Laugh Olympics (they don’t appear to have a website) an English speaking improvisation show. In which the “Eastside” compete against their “Westside” counterparts in a series of improvisation sketches. The referee seeks various suggestions from the audience that are then incorporated into the act, all vaguely reminiscent of Radio 4 panel games. It was a fantastic experience (and very good value too, just 5), I intend to insist on taking everyone who comes to visit me to see it. It is on every Saturday, 9pm just off Rosenthaler Str. Full details can be found in the July edition of New Berlin Magazine. On Sunday we went to see Pirates of the Carribean at the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz. It was rubbish. Don’t bother. It was just a setup for the third movie, very Matrixesque. After the film I cheered myself up by eating a Teutonic D ner, much much nicer than the British variety. And much much cheaper too ( 1.30- 2.80).

FOSDEM 2006 This year, the days before FOSDEM were the stressful ones, as I got to organize accomodation. Initially, we wanted to have similar appartments as last year, but by the time I was less busy at uni to actually look into it, most of them were already booked, so we had to put up with a youth hostel instead. The positive sides of this were the much lower expenses and a location in the city centre, making us actually look at Bruxelles a bit in detail this time. "Us" were the Hurd people, including Martin "earliest Hurd adopter present" Michlmayr. I got to FOSDEM by car again, picking up Marcus Brinkmann, Neal Walfield and Olaf Buddenhagen on the way in Cologne. Finding the youth hostel seemed to be pretty hard as we just had a street address and a map without street names, but we managed to find it pretty quickly to my great surprise (driving around in Bruxelles usually ended up being a complete disaster over the last years). After a strange encounter with a Guillem Jover lookalike in front of the hostel, we met the other guys (Thomas Schwinge, Marco Gerards, Stefan Siegl and Ognyan Kulev) and had a discussion about Neal's and Marcus' plan to move to a persistent system. After dinner, I met the other Debian people in the Roi d'Espagne and hat some longer chats with Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Rob Bradford, Martin Michlmayr and Jordi Mallach, who I finally met for the first time and who did not cop out of FOSDEM this year as usual... The pub is getting more and more crowded each year, all the hackers barely fit even though they opened the balustrade this time as well. It was great to see everybody again and have a few beers. Martin and I then managed to find the way back to the hostel by foot. We had no developer room, and no talks in the Debian room either, so FOSDEM was a pretty relaxed event this year. I met some more familiar faces like Noel Koethe and Andreas Mueller and listened to a couple of talks, most notably Richard Stallman's and Jeff Waugh's keynotes and Hanna Wallach's talk about FLOSSPOLS. Stefan Siegl also managed to get GNU Mach working for both my 3Com PCMCIA NIC and my Orinoco PCMCIA WLAN card, confirming his title as Hurd "hacker of the month". On Saturday evening, we (at this time, Guillem Jover, Gianluca Guida, Bas Wijnen and Jeroen Dekkers had joined) had dinner with the french Hurd guys (Manuel Menal, Marc Dequenes, Richard Braun, Arnaud Fontaine and others) in an italian restaurant. At 10:40 PM, the waiter told us in a rather unfriendly tone that they would close at 11 and presented us with the bill, along with handing out the menu again so that we could look up our share. By the time the bill arrived the french part of the table (at 10:55 PM), the guys were pretty surprised by this whole business and complained loudly that they did not have a dessert yet and insistent on having one. After some more minutes of discussion, the waiter gave in and served their desserts, after which each of them paid his share with his carte bleue. I believe we left the restaurant around 11:30. On Sunday evening, we had dinner again (the french guys had left Bruxelles already) and then drove back to Germany after having desserts and coffee in a bar. We left Bruxelles at around midnight and arrived in Duesseldorf at 2:30 PM, so we were glad that Neal offered us to stay at his place. We had breakfast the next morning with him and Isabel and then I proceeded to drive back to Frankfurt in the early afternoon. FOSDEM rocked, as usual. After being with the Debian crowd for the first three years or so, and mostly sticking with the Hurd crowd last year, I think I managed a pretty good balance between the two this year. This will not have been my last FOSDEM.