Finally I found the time to sort my photos from Australia, when I vistited the country after linux.conf.au, in January this year. Some photos are quite good, many are not. However one panoramic view of the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains NP is particularly beautiful:

Just perfect as a desktop background on your Xinerama setup!

A while back there has been a lot of noise about the GNOME "platform" and what GNOME 3.0 should be. Personally -- while I certainly like the progress GNOME makes as a "platform" -- I must say that the platform is already quite good. In my opinion, what is lacking right now are more the tools and utilities that are shipped *with* the GNOME platform than the platform itself. More specifically there are a set of (rather small) tools I am really missing in the standard set of GNOME tools. So, here's my wishlist, in case anybody is interested to know:

<wishlist>

• A simple, usable VNC/RFB client as counterpart to the VNC server vino that has been shipped since early GNOME 2.0 times. Isn't it kind of awkward that we have been shipping a VNC server since ages, but no VNC client? What I want is a client (maybe called vinagre as a pun on vino) that is more than just a simple frontend to xvncviewer, but not necessarily too fancy. Something that integrates well into GNOME, i.e. uses D-Bus, gnome-keyring, avahi-ui. There seems to be a libvncclient library that might make the implementation of this tool easy.
• I am one of the (apparently not so few) people who run their GNOME session with LANG=de_DE and LC_MESSAGES=C, which enables german dates and everything else, but uses english messages. Right now it's a PITA to configure GNOME that way. It's not really documented how to do that, AFAIK. The best way to do this I found is to edit ~/.gnomerc and set the variables in there. A simple capplet which allows setting these environment variables from gnome-session would be a much better way to configure this. Nothing to fancy again. Just two drop down lists, to choose LANG and LC_MESSAGES and maybe a subset of the other i18n variables, and possibly G_FILENAME_ENCODING (although I might be the only one who still hasn't switched his $HOME to UTF-8)
• There's no world clock in GNOME. Sure, there are online tools for this, but I am not always online with my laptop.
• There is no simple tool to take photo snapshots or record short videos from webcams. I want to see something like camorama in gnome-media. Nothing too fancy again. No filters, no TV functionality. Just a small but useful GStreamer frontend.
• I'd like to see a simple BitTorrent client shipped with GNOME, which is integrated well into the rest of GNOME/Epiphany, so that downloading files from FTP or HTTP looks exactly like downloading them from Bittorrent.

</wishlist>

I'd love to see proper Avahi support in the Nokia N800 (just think of proper file manager integration of announced WebDAV shares!), but until now Nokia doesn't ship Avahi in Maemo. However, there's now a simple way to install at least basic Avahi support on the N800. The INdT includes Avahi in their Canola builds. Hence: just install Canola and your N800 will register itself via mDNS on your network.

In related news: I am happy to see that Avahi has apparently been included in the just announced GNOME Embedded Platform.

I have just released new versions of a few of my packages:

1. Avahi 0.6.18: The most interesting change is probably the addition of avahi-ui, our new GTK library which implements a standard dialog for browsing for Avahi services. A quick (albeit slightly out-of-date) introduction into avahi-ui (including screenshots) may be found in this old blog story of mine. If you are a developer of a GNOME application that acts as network client in some way, please consider adding support for avahi-ui to your project. Examples where adding support for avahi-ui makes sense are:
   • Mail applications such as Evolution may use it to browse for POP3, POP3S, IMAP, IMAPS and SMTP servers.
   • VNC applications may use it to browse for VNC/RFB servers
   • Database clients such as Glom may use it to browse for PostrgreSQL servers
   • FTP clients may use it to browse for FTP servers
   • RSS readers may use it to browse for local RSS feeds
   • And lots of others
   There are lots of other small and not so small changes in Avahi 0.6.18.
2. mod_dnssd 0.5: Mostly an update for Apache 2.2
3. mod_mime_xattr 0.4: dito

Es ist vollbracht! Today, at 10:54 am -- 66 min before deadline -- I handed in my diploma thesis ^[1]. In a few weeks time you may call me Diplom-Informatiker... Herr Diplom-Informatiker.

That's all.

Footnotes:

[1] Thesis title is Diensteverwaltung in Ad-Hoc-Netzwerken (which roughly translates to Service Discovery in Ad-Hoc Networks). Basically, the thesis is about "Mesh-DNS", a protocol akin to Multicast DNS (mDNS), which scales better, fixes a few things and takes Mesh network architectures into account. It is intended to be integrated into Avahi and to be used as service discovery protocol in OLPC. It is compatible with DNS-SD, but replaces mDNS. Due to that all existing software linking against Avahi can make use of it without any major changes. It adds a zone .mesh which is organized by Mesh-DNS side-by-side to the mDNS-maintained zone .local. You will be able to enable support for Mesh-DNS at Avahi compile time. Most likely most distros won't enable it in their default builds, although it offers quite a few features even outside OLPC, such as automatic, idiot-proof router transparency.

Does anybody know what's going on with LinuxTag? I submitted a presentation proposal a few months ago. I haven't yet received an email whether my talk has been accepted or not. According to their website notification emails should have been sent out on march 13th. Which is nearly a month ago now. When I login to the "virtual conference center" I see that my paper is still "In Review". They didn't respond to my emails (twice).

Does anyone have an idea what is going on?

Does anyone know what I can do to get psfrag work with PostScript files generated from Gnumeric (i.e. Cairo) charts?

Oh, and why does Gnumeric insist on using .ps as suffix for exported charts, although the files written are perfectly valid .eps files and presumably everyone uses them as such?

Thanks!

As an experiment to test how much people are willing to pay for big big pile of old paper, I am selling my collection of old editions of the german computer magazine c't on ebay.de. Do yourself something good and buy yourself a piece of (german) computer history. It's a unique chance because if noone wants it I am going to give it into recycling, or maybe make a big, big bonfire.

I heard that you can attract girls by reading old german computer magazines from the late nineties. Not that this would have worked for me, but maybe it works for you? There is nothing more attractive to a girl than old computer magazines, especially if they are in a foreign language you don't understand.

No, I am not kidding!

As it seems, the Avahi project has not been accepted as Google Summer of Code organization, much like the GStreamer project.

Grr, I cannot say I really understand why three wiki engines ^[1] got accepted, or a UI frontend for nmap - but not important infrastructure projects like GStreamer or Avahi. Mhmm, maybe I am just envious, and considering these two projects important is just hybris...

Anyway, we had already prepared a list of exciting ^[2] GSoC project ideas for Avahi. If anyone is interested to work on one of these there might be a small chance to get this done under the GNOME umbrella. Feel free to contact either me or Trent if you are interested!

Footnotes:

[1] If there is something we already have enough of in Free Software - then it is Wiki engines. just check the output of apt-cache search wiki | wc -l on a recent Debian system.

[2] In our definition of exciting, of course - which doesn't seem to be the same as Google's. Grrrh!

I was one of the lucky ones to get a Nokia N800 developer discount code, and am now a proud owner of one of these toys. Thus I decided to sell off my old Nokia 770 at Ebay.de. This is your one-time chance to buy a 770 previously owned by one of the Avahi and PulseAudio developers! Wooow! Don't miss this chance to add this exclusive device to your memorabilia collection!