tag: Planet UWCS

Increasingly I am asked how things are going at work. Unfortunately, I struggle to give a meaningful answer in conversations with "normal" people - I don't know how to begin to explain that this afternoon I set up a pbuilder environment that lets me build Debian packages for our customised etch-with-backports i386 distribution using my amd64 machine running Debian sid. Or that this morning I ran into some interesting problems with dpkg-shlibdeps and symbol versioning in lenny when trying to downgrade some dependencies to 'Suggests'....

Another potential response to online complaints about free software is "FSFI", meaning "It's free software, fix it". This is the next level up from asking someone to link to their bug report - it places the sole responsibility for fixing the bug onto the shoulders of those who complain. Sometimes this can be reasonable - but expecting every user to be able to fix every problem themselves is not. There was a link today on LWN to an article claiming that it is strictly the software which is free, not the users - the users must abide by the restrictions of the licence, so cannot distribute proprietary derivatives, for instance....

With the rise of the blogosphere, a greater number of people are now free to post their thoughts to the world - and because of the nature of the medium, there are a fair number of people writing about their experiences with computer software. Most software is not perfect, so some proportion of those experiences will be negative. In the special case of free software, all end users have the freedom to study and modify the source code....

Following my awesome coding on Pidgin yesterday, my brother has switched to aMSN. I had let slip at some point that his laptop's webcam would probably work with aMSN. The drivers themselves are included with the Ubuntu kernels, so that has never been a problem; however, because of some abstraction problems with Pidgin, there is still no webcam support with the MSN protocol. It almost worked with aMSN out of the box, but I had to open a port in the firewall to let people connect to him....

At the request of my brother, looked at Pidgin's mail notification dialog this evening. The Ubuntu package takes ages to build, unfortunately. The reported bug was that the 'Open Mail' button didn't work - looking at it, it's possible to select the mail you want to open on some services now, but by default nothing is selected. There's some code to desensitize the button in that case, but the initial state isn't set....

Who needs eclipse?

The bank holiday formed a welcome break after a hard week at work writing and fixing a Linux kernel module. On Friday afternoon version 0.4.3.1-1 of f-spot was uploaded to Debian, and then yesterday a new version of postgresql-autodoc. We've found a release-critical bug in f-spot already, of course. Most of the rest of my time was spent hacking on Angel, a project which we haven't formally announced yet....

Last night, I was granted permission to edit/close bugs on GNOME's bugzilla. Because of the logarithmic way in which the points system works, I now have three more bugzilla points than I did this morning. :)

A while ago, I mused on how network latency affects my email usage - one other cause of slowness in my mail client has been GPG key verification. Occasionally, when Evolution wants to check a signature, gpg takes 30 seconds or more to run, and the text of the message is not displayed until the end. The reason gpg runs so slowly is that it sometimes checks its trust database to make sure it's up to date....

Just over a year ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux Driver Project - companies could get Linux drivers written for their hardware free of charge, if they provided specifications (possibly under NDA). There is now an April 2008 Status Report for the project - they are short of companies and hardware to write drivers for. This is probably because Linux hardware support is excellent in all but a few specific areas - there is some interesting discussion of the efforts being made to support wireless devices and graphics cards later on in the thread....