Havoc's Blog

Been offline for a couple days, which is always nice. On Friday night
drove a couple hours into New Hampshire to see a Dylan concert -
pretty good, some new material and he did a few new arrangements on
the old standards since I saw him last. Meadowbrook is a nice venue,
very good sound for an outdoor amphitheater.

Saturday morning on a TV cooking show someone made the following
recipe:

• Chop up two dozen Krispy Kreme donuts
• Pour over them one can sweetened condensed milk and one can fruit
  cocktail
• Stir and bake
• Make a sauce of one stick of butter, gobs of powdered sugar, and
  rum; pour over the top

My previous example of “most absurdly unhealthy dish ever seen on
a cooking show” was a sort of bacon-wrapped-in-bacon-with-bacon-on-top
nonsense from “Two Fat Ladies.” This Krispy Kreme pudding thing is pretty
competitive though. I guess if you use fruit cocktail in light syrup
instead of regular fruit cocktail it might be OK.

Saturday afternoon visited the Shaker village near Concord, and had
some nice dry barbecue ribs with watermelon and all that. Saw Harry
Potter in the afternoon, and tried a Mexican restaurant in Concord.
Relative to New England (this is a huge caveat), the restaurant was a
pretty good Mexican restaurant. At least they had heard of cilantro
and jalapenos. And the new Harry Potter movie was far better than the
first two.

Had brunch this morning at Common Man restaurant which is sort of a
high-end Cracker Barrel (a mix of Irregardless in Raleigh and Cracker
Barrel, for those who know Raleigh). Pretty decent place.

Excited about the new PJ Harvey album on Tuesday, and have been
enjoying the new Magnetic Fields over the last week.

Anyway, a kind of mini-vacation. Back to the grindstone. 😉

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–06.html#6)

While we’re making lists 😉 metacity has a few bugs
and some commonly-requested
enhancements. Here are some I’d love to see people hack on:

• Edge magnetism/resistance
• Special
  cases where raise on click shouldn’t happen (see fairly recent
  wm-spec-list proposal from Lubos Lunak)
• Keep
  new windows from taking focus in cases where they shouldn’t
• Profile and optimize window
  resize and redraw
• Hack on the compositing manager, keep it in sync with the X
  hackers, make it do neat things like smoothly animate
  minimize/maximize/etc., add Expose-type switching, etc.
• Create
  a new version of the theme format
• Unbreak constraints.c; the latest theory on how to do this is to
  use GdkRegion and clipping, i.e. when a window is moved/resized clip
  it to the required constraint area
• Figure out all the focus bugs
  and what to do about them (for the most part they only show up in
  mouse/sloppy modes)

All of these things would have really noticeable impact.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#31)

Our TV of many years died recently, and we found an “open box” HDTV
and discontinued DVD player for good prices. HDTV is pretty fun. Been
a while since I bought any electronic gadgets, my stereo equipment
still dates to high school and the just-broken TV was around 6 years
old I think.

I wrote some trivial D‑BUS code today, haven’t written much code
recently and it’s nice to do something. A bit of a pause in the
manager-type stuff this week. Sadly, I don’t think it will last, I’ve
already lost track of all the meetings next week.

Been trying very hard to avoid the command line. CVS and ssh are
screwing me up. I’ve found solutions to most of the rest of it.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#29)

On
another note.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#21)

Nat, slippery slope
is a fallacious argument here. Yes XML had Microsoft involved, among
many others. I’d say the difference between XML and .NET is pretty
clear so I won’t belabor the point.

Anyway. I didn’t intend to bring this up this week, Seth posted on it
and I thought I’d comment. But I do continue to believe it would be a
huge mistake for the Linux desktop to adopt Mono, so I can’t do
anything but argue against attempts to encourage same. And I think
this issue is plainly causing a de facto Linux desktop fork at the
moment, however noble the goal.

Regarding whether there are patents: respectfully disagree.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#21.2)

Nat says Novell has lawyers and all
software infringes, and this simply highlights the point I already
made. Patent issues are not black and white. They are risk
analysis. And different people and companies face different
risks. What Novell finds acceptable risk may not be acceptable for
individual hackers, or for other companies.

The real point is that Novell is asking everyone to take this
risk. And not everyone finds it acceptable, either legally (patents) or
strategically (Microsoft driving the bus).

If Novell wants to use Mono that’s great. But GNOME should not, and
neither should any of the important desktop apps.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#20)

Seth did a nicer
job explaining the Mono issues than I ever did.

Miguel’s
response I would summarize as “any software could infringe
patents, so we should ignore patents until they become an issue, then
work around.” However, not all patents are the same. Some of the
factors:

• Whether the patent is on an implementation technique or the
  functionality (e.g. you could have to break or remove ABI/features to
  work around)
• Who owns the patent (some are more problematic than others, for
  example Microsoft is maximally problematic)
• How many patents there are in a given area
• How strong the patent is (how much prior art, etc.)
• Perception issues: if you precisely copy someone else’s
  technology, it’s much easier to convince a jury your stuff
  is infringing than if you have something vaguely similar but with
  distinct heritage

The issue here is risk management. Sure, C/C++/Python could infringe
some patents. However, the risk is a heck of a lot lower. Those
technologies are not invented by and driven forward by the single
most powerful and open-source-hostile company in the tech industry.

Miguel uses the Gnumeric analogy, of moving forward and ignoring the
hard problems for a while rather than letting them slow you
down. Great advice for technical problems. For legal and strategic
problems, sometimes but not always the best plan. Let’s find a
course of action where the big hard problem is technical, rather than
beyond our control. Otherwise we’re rolling the dice. Rolling the
dice is a necessary part of life, but to be successful you have to
take the good bets, not the bad bets. Ideally the good bets where
one’s own actions (such as writing code) can affect the outcome.

One point I like that Seth makes is that Novell potentially gets a lot
of advantage vs. competitors in the short term from Mono, but then we
risk sinking the whole Linux boat in the long term. That’s why people
are “whining” as Miguel puts it. Novell is pressuring everyone to take
this huge risk, under threat of forking the Linux desktop. We have
every right to whine about that.

Let me be crystal clear about Red Hat: the technical advantages of
Mono sound great. But technology is not everything, and in my opinion
Mono is not yet a responsible choice all things considered. Maybe Java
is an alternative, maybe it isn’t; if it isn’t, that doesn’t make Mono
more viable.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#20.2)

Tom Tromey
points to
Tom
Fitzsimmons’s explanation of building gcj with jhbuild.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#13)

Nice
post from James Cape on Nautilus. I’ve noticed that I suddenly
really use the file manager instead of the shell in GNOME 2.6,
shamefully I never much did in previous versions. The new Nautilus
feels crisp and predictable and efficient.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#12)

Reading random whine-about-metacity comments on LWN, I noticed someone using KWin with GNOME. And reading the XFCE review on OSNews, the reviewer was using gnome-panel with XFCE’s window manager. Encouraging evidence that the Extended Window Manager Hints are widely used and genuinely interoperable.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–05.html#11)