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There are lots of pictures at Flickr. There are some below, interspersed throughout the words, too...
Say what?!
On Saturday, just after 10PM, Delta flight 6372 from JFK to BTV landed on the tarmac in Burlington, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief! I was finally home, after my first solo trip, my first trip across the Atlantic, and my first UDS.
I was in Barcelona attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the next release, Karmic Koala (that's 9.10, for those of you counting)... talking (mostly listening, actually) about GNOME, fast boot, X, mobile stuff (Android and Moblin), NM, prettiness, and who knows what else! I met lots of awesome people, saw lots of awesome sights and ate lots of awesome food (sometimes). I don't think it's possible to properly describe the last week, so I'm just going to write bulleted bits to the best of my ability, separated into UDS-things and Barcelona-things.
UDS
- Scott/Mark want boot in 10/12/15 seconds on a Mini 9.
- It's not clear if all of gnome-games is going to be in main (partially my fault; oops).
- Ekiga isn't going to be in main anymore, but WebKit will!
- GDM Face Browser? Maybe! (just like every year) That would mean Clutter in main, too.
- Non-KMS systems and wake-from-hibernate lose bootsplash.
- "OS switcher" during boot and GDM.
- Running a demo (Moblin) on alpha hardware is not a good idea, but it looked shiny anyway.
- KMS by default on Intel and ATI. Damn NVidia. (nouveau KMS maybe someday)
- Canonical has a design team; they all seemed very cool!
- Someone (design team?) wants to have a theme that has both dark and light bits which applications can request.
- Ryan wants windows to be able to display whether they have escalated privileges or not (PolicyKit).
- Client-side window decorations!! Also, discussions about what happens if you draw to (0, 0) now, and how to solve that...
- Some talk about putting Wayland between X and the video card, mostly for fast-user-switching and the like. Probably not Karmic? I really just want a system where Wayland is easy to install...
- 10.04 or 10.10 is going to be LTS, so we can't expect to change anything drastically after Karmic and before then... so this release is probably going to be very experimental..
- Compiz, gnome-panel, and nautilus (was it nautilus?) are the big problems with GNOME startup. Has anyone tried anything more intelligent and useful than printf? DTrace? If not, I'll do it, later this week...
- gobject-introspection is going to be packaged; I don't remember exactly what we decided on but it was mostly "make upstream get typelib generation out of gir-repository and into projects themselves".
- I started a Seed+Clutter+Cairo+DBus nm-applet mockup based off of a blog post about NM 0.8 which I can't find right now... just for fun!
- Got lots of work done on LO3 in the airports and stuff.
Barcelona
- The region around the airport is slightly frightening compared to the rest of the city; I was a little uneasy until I got off the metro at Zona Universitària. The fact that I'd just been dumped somewhere where it was really hard to understand everyone (even with 4 useless years of Spanish) certainly didn't help any either.
- The power is a lie. You need the grounded plug or it doesn't work, unless you're in the rooms (not the lobby) of the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos. The Palau and my hotel both require the big plug, somehow. This is a problem; a brand new 15" MBP battery only lasts 3-4 hours in a fresh install of Karmic.
- There's a train to Valencia about 2 minutes before the train to the airport, from the same platform. Far too tempting...
- Universitat de Barcelona students are significantly more kind and helpful than the average RPI student.
- It's a poor choice to schedule a conference during what is practically a national holiday (the Barça vs. Manchester United soccer game). The city was insane that night and the night after...
- Parc Güell is beautiful and crazy; Gaudi must have been insane, but that makes it all the more worth a trip.
- Apparently carrying around a DSLR suggests to people that you're qualified to use their strange point-'n-shoots; I took quite a few pictures for other people while wandering around the Parc.
- Sagrada Família is actually still under active construction (I didn't believe it until I got there)... going to finish in 2026!? But it's one of the most ridiculously complex and beautiful buildings I've ever seen...
- It's really hard to find Casa Batlló (I failed).
- The Mediterranean is pretty much the same as any other harbor-bearing sea, at least from the Paral•lel region. The sunset from down there is really nice, though!
- There are lots of street musicians, especially around the touristy parts, like Parc Güell. A good number of them were pretty good; then there were these subset who make the strangest noises with their mouths... they sound like irritating birds or something :-)
- The whole philosophy of tapas seems like a much better way to do dinner than what we do here in the States. I much enjoyed the various tapas bars, especially the night of the game, out with the GNOMEites.
I probably have a lot more things to say, but I can't keep writing in this post! Too many words! I'll probably tell more stories as the days go on or something...
Transportation
I walked a lot more than I usually do during the trip; I also rode the metro to many different places around the city. I totaled the distances of the walking and public-transit parts of my trip with Google Earth last night (approximations, of course), and discovered that I'd walked about 41 km (26 miles), and ridden (on the ubiquitous trams and metro) somewhere in the vicinity of 101 km (63 miles). I took notes while I was measuring, too, detailing the trips of each day to the best of my ability.
Today more or less officially starts coding for GSoC; however, I'm leaving for Barcelona (for UDS) at 10AM. To offset the fact that I'm going to be missing for the first week, I started hacking on the clutter-0.9/modern-seed version of Lights Off. You can check it out [Ed.: merged into gnome-games Git] if you want, you'll need a recent version of Seed and a patched Clutter (the patch is in the Seed repo, under /patches). I'd suggest you wait, though, because all of the shiny (animations and such) is currently broken (looooong airplane flight tomorrow, we'll see what happens!).
Anyway; the Lights Off tiles from the video are from six months ago, and were made in a matter of minutes in Inkscape, designed to look as much like the physical copy of the game as I could achieve (I am not an artist). Robb has since been trying to convince me to try again, suggesting that they might not be the most Gnome-y tiles in the world. I decided to grab the nicer, Tango-colored tiles I made for my Seed port of Same Gnome, create a black tile, and see how that looked (redesigning most of the rest of the somewhat-minimal UI in the process)...
In any case, I'm not sure what to use! I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a few swappable themes, but I don't know what to use as the default... or even if either of these were the best we can do. In the meantime, I figured I'd let you guys vote between the two, and if you have any ideas for improvement (or, even better, SVGs!), send me a note!
Newer style is on the left, the originals (from January) are on the right. Click away (your last vote is the one that counts, and voting is immediate when you click the link)!
[Ed.: voting is closed]
Quite often, my background on Kaylee is a picture I've recently taken... here's twenty of my favorite past backgrounds that I took (including the squirrel in Albany which I'm currently using), all CC-BY-NC-SA, so you can have fun:
P.S. There's Seed-y, Cluttery, shiny stuff coming soon, hopefully! Then, Barcelona!
It would appear that I've been added to Planet GNOME as a result of my summer job working on GNOME Games as a part of Google Summer of Code, so I figured it would only be appropriate if I introduced myself!
I started out as a lurker in this community almost a decade ago, when I was deciding what DE to use on my hand-me-down 100MHz IBM desktop my parents got me so I'd stop breaking their computer by installing a different distro every week. I was still in elementary school at the time, so I was (reasonably) encouraged to not participate in the community for privacy and maturity reasons, and eventually I drifted off to OS X for a few years.
Over the course of the last two years, however, Robb has dragged me to a FOSSCamp and a GNOME Summit Boston (and, we're going to UDS Barcelona, too!), and I've been quite reintroduced to the community. Being off at University (I'm at RPI, studying Computer Science) means I can participate all I want.
Anyway... Robb, Matt (another friend of ours from RPI), and I are the developers of Seed, which many of you have probably heard of (if not, try it out!). I'm using Seed this summer in order to port Mines to Clutter, as well as to complete my port of Same Gnome, and the new game, Lights Off, both of which I wrote during the development of Seed as examples.
I have a feeling that I have a good bit more time in the summer than is required to finish and polish these three things, so I expect to end up doing more; I'm currently in the middle of sending an email to my mentor, Thomas Andersen, to say hello and start to form a course of action (perhaps, once all I've promised to do is done, he'll have some ideas to move forward with!).
In any case... hello, Planet!, and I hope to see you all again, soon.
2009.05.03 in school
I'm leaving RPI today, so I'm pulling an all-nighter to get my side of the room back into proper working order and move all of my stuff into the lounge. Sehrish is coming at 10, so I have six more hours to clean. I seem to have made a mistake, because I don't have a vacuum, Robb's asleep, and I still have more cleaning to do (the bed isn't even back together, mostly because of the lack of a vacuum, actually).
I moved this site to Dreamhost last night, so it'll probably act a little differently. Also, stuff like the Aperture archive, Git, SSH, Planet, etc. won't be back up for a few days, and I'll post about what's up when that comes to pass.
For now, I'll just say that I've had a great semester and I hope that the summer is even better.
P.S. As noted here, when everything comes back, Git, SSH, and things like that will be on jayne.hortont.com, instead of hortont.com directly, since they require more Jayne-eyness than Wordpress and stuff...
I was just thinking about how I'm going to make the move to FreeBSD+ZFS for Jayne, and decided to write down a few things I want to fix with my computers and stuff this summer. That turned into a rather extensive set of instructions for getting Jayne transitioned, so I figured I'd post it here so I don't lose it! I'm not sure why the lists look so crappy, but whatever.
Kaylee and Simon
Reinstall OS X and Jaunty, and install Windows 7 RC on Kaylee.
Get Steam and friends working in 7. No more Wine!I'm currently consuming 245GB in OS X. This can be reduced to 200GB.
Don't install FCS/CS4 content, this time.
I think a 260/10/50GB split (OS X, Linux, Windows) should do it.Install 2.6.30, pray that WiFi works now. (still no WiFi)
Install Fedora 11 final on Simon.
Jayne
- Move racarr.me to Dreamhost.
Move hortont.com to Dreamhost.
Get better DNS control, put Jayne-services and stuff jayne.hortont.com.Archive and remove Ease wiki.
Install three additional disks (750GB, 1TB, and 160GB), at about 230$ cost.
1TB, 750GB, 160GB, following my usual choices...- Move all content we want to persist to the 1TB disk (use ext3).
- Don't persist backups (maybe Matt's); don't persist Star Trek.
- In theory, without those things we're under 1TB.
- Otherwise, start harassing Amy + CYGNUS for storage.
- We now have 3x750GB + 3x1000GB + 1x160GB (5.41TB total).
- Install FreeBSD-8-CURRENT on the small disk.
- Quickly make sure that all hardware, AFP, git, Apache, etc. work.
- Recreate users, groups (share, www-data, etc).
- Create a RAID-Z pool across the 750GB disks (2.25TB zpool).
- Create filesystems:
- /srv/share/public (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/public
- /srv/share/www (setgid=www-data,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/www
- /home/* @ /tank/home/*
- /git (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/git
- Copy the data from the single 1TB disk to the zpool.
- Add a second RAID-Z pool (consisting of all of the 1TB disks) to the zpool.
- This brings the global zpool to approximately 5.25TB. For all intents and purposes, that should last us through the next two years with no problem, even with me taking video classes...
- Backup Kaylee to Jayne, see what happens. Fix, rinse, repeat. Win.
About a month ago, I bought a Nikkor 135mm f/2.8 pre-AI lens. It turns out that my D80 doesn't accept pre-AI lenses — oops! — but, luckily, Robb's D40 does! So, I (with some sadness) gave the lens to Robb... it was cheap, and it's pretty awesome, so he might as well have it, rather than go through the hassle of modifying it or trying to sell it.
Fast forward another week. I've won a Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 AI-s: one of Nikon's sharpest lenses ever, the flagship of their 80s prime telephoto collection (and was still produced, though in limited runs, through 2006). Now, I'll note to you that this lens still regularly sells new for well over 700$, and used for not much less than that, so acquiring it for less than a seventh of that was quite a bargain (not to mention comparing that to what it must have cost originally, in 1983, a number I can't seem to acquire)... luckily, it's in absolutely outstanding condition, practically like new except for minor external scars.
The picture above is of the diaphragm of this lens, at f/32. I had a bit of trouble getting both my flash and my camera at an angle appropriate to take this picture, but it came out OK. The colors are cool, too. Below, you can see this lens all the way on the right, next to my macro (next from the right), my normal zoom lens (left of middle), and my 50mm f/1.8 (all the way to the left). As you can probably tell, it's rather heavy, and even dwarfs my camera.
This lens poses a few challenges for me. Actually, all of the challenges. Since I have a D80, and not one of the über-high-end Nikons, I don't get metering, so I'm all alone with full-manual there (I don't mind that so much); in addition, the lens is pre-AF, so I have to manually focus. This is posing more of a challenge than I'd initially anticipated; I don't really think I can get my eye close enough to the viewfinder to do a satisfactory manual focusing job very quickly. I think it'll come with practice — I'm planning on taking it out some day soon and trying to take, say, 50 completely-in-focus pictures in a row, just to try to train myself as to how to focus!
That image of adorableness is one of the first successful pictures I managed to get out of this piece of glass; the pictures that follow it in my Aperture library make it clear that I can't refocus while walking very well (yet!), as they're all rather out-of-focus in comparison. Still, it proved to me that the thing works, at least, and can produce pretty awesome bokeh while it's at it!
One night, I went down to the first floor Davison lounge, stopped this lens all the way down to f/32 (making for a miiiighty slow picture, so I had a tripod), and took a shot of the chalkboard, just to see what would happen. A lack of formal training makes experiments quite required, as well as being entertaining!
Later, Matt got a red fedora (yeah, yeah, make all the Red Hat/Fedora jokes you want, that was only partially the intent!). The first few shots were crappy, owing mostly to the fact that I have to stand in China to take a picture of a person, but this one came out wonderfully:
Finally, at PJ's opening day (which Matt, a good deal of my family, and myself attended, to quite happy stomachs), I cranked up the ISO for a film-grain-y shot of PJ hard at work. When I get back to my computer, what do I see? Exactly what I was looking for... (except the hard at work part... he enjoyed posing!). Awesome.
In any case, I hope to have a great deal of fun with this lens in the future. I might be helping (or at least trying) to take Amy's senior picture, so who knows — maybe it'll get some use then! She doesn't have that big of a nose, though, so it's not really necessary over the (faster, lighter) 50mm f/1.8 :-) teehee.
The last day of Sophomore year (for me) just ended; instead of thinking any more about that, I thought I'd write about a handful of material(ish) possessions of mine that came at small monetary cost (to me or my family), but have since proved to be worth it time and time again. Most things don't stand out in this regard; they integrate themselves into my life, but they aren't something that I actively remember and enjoy every second of. These three, however, are things which have a value far greater than their price for the entertainment and experiences I've derived from them:
 Firstly, our Firefly box set. At the time, it was a somewhat off-the-cuff purchase. Dad, Amy, and I had seen an episode or two on TV, had heard about it on the internet, and were awaiting the movie, but had no emotional attachment to the show. Now, a few years later, I can't begin to count the number of times I've watched and rewatched these fourteen episodes, nor can I possibly estimate the enjoyment I've received both during and between these watchings. Mom commented long ago, while the three of us were quite quietly caught up in the world of Malcolm Reynolds and Co., that those four DVDs were possibly the best 40$ she'd ever spent. I can't say I disagree. (Indeed; all three of my main computers at the moment are named after Firefly characters!)
 Next, the Orange Box. I know this is a strange one, because I'm not a gamer; in fact, I only just finished playing through Half-Life 2 and the two episodes for the first time within the last week or so. However, this collection is more or less my only connection to the gaming world that many of my friends and colleagues so adore; I was introduced to it about a year ago by Mike and Nate, who insisted I play Portal. I sat, for five or six hours, without moving from the chair once, and finished the game — my first introduction to gaming post-PacMan, WASD+Mouse, and probably my single most enjoyable computing experience until Half-Life 2. Now, the story of Gordon and Alyx echoes in my head quite constantly (possibly because I only finished episode two a few days ago, but I hope it stays this way), and provides me yet another world in which to construct thoughts (both in my head, and in my occasional screwing around with the Source SDK, which I hope to soon resume after a few-month hiatus). In any case, this is another 40$ very well placed.
 Finally, my Arduino. I've progressed on to breadboard- or PCB-mounted ATmega designs at this point, but this is where I got started again. About a decade ago (what!?!), Dad and I spent great deals of time playing around with Parallax's Basic Stamp, making various small devices, teaching me how to program with the then-obvious choice of language, and providing a platform for a young me to experiment. Robb convinced me to pick up electronics again last semester so we could build guitar-related stuff; while this particular reason didn't come to fruition, I invested a significant amount of money getting together anything I would need to complete any sort of small electronic project. I chose to grab an Arduino Diecimila while I was at it, so I had a microcontroller to tie things together. Since then, I've spent loads of time learning the ins and outs of the platform, building small things (and designing larger things), and in general trying to get acquainted with the internet's favorite microcontroller. More importantly than my own work, though, I've helped a countless number of people here at RPI on various little Arduino-based projects, providing experience, parts, or programmers — most significantly, Connor, with his various IED projects (one of which is turning into a summer job!). All for 20$.
Yesterday, I got a wonderful email from Google telling me that my proposal for Summer of Code was accepted! So, this summer, I'm going to be working with Thomas Andersen on GNOME Games. I'm going to finish polishing Lights Off and the Seed-Same Gnome rewrite, make it easier to write games in Seed (by making libgames-support available), and (primarily) port Mines to Seed+Clutter. I have a feeling the work encompassed in my proposal might not take the whole summer, so I'm keeping my mind open for anything else that might be interesting to do towards the end. We'll see!
Anyway; thanks, again, to Google, GNOME, Thomas, and everyone, and I hope we all have a great summer!
P.S. A little birdie told me that Mike and Matt both also got GSoC projects this summer! Congrats!
2009.04.18 in school
This is my second-to-last weekend at RPI for this semester; things are wrapping up quite nicely. Nearly half of my grade has yet to be determined in two classes (LITEC and SD&D), but overall this is shaping up to be my best semester so far, by a long shot... I'm much, much happier now, in Computer Science (and Engineering) classes, rather than Physics with a side of CS...
RCOS
Robb, Nate, Matt, and I presented on Ease and Seed today at the Rensselaer Center for Open Software, finishing our final requirement for this semester. Many thanks to Moorthy and Sean O'Sullivan for the opportunity!
Nate and Robb are planning on working with RCOS this summer, I believe; Nate is going to write a pretty, not-chintzy, G*-based typing tutor/testing application. I'm not sure what Robb's planning to work on — probably Ease or Seed.
SD&D
A significant portion of Software Design & Documentation involved the design, documentation, and construction of an application of our choice. We created groups on the second day of class — I latched on to Andrew (who I didn't know at the time), who proposed that those of us comfortable with Objective-C and interested in developing for either the Mac or the iPhone should stick together... I really didn't want to be stuck working on some buzzword-infused web application, hosted on Windows, stuck in a SourceSafe repo, written in a combination of Java and ASP and Ruby... I really don't take kindly to such projects :-)
We eventually decided that we'd put together some sort of iPhone application — Andrew had an application that made it onto the App Store within a week or two of class starting (Notecards), so he had plenty of experience; I'd spent a good bit of time with Objective-C in the past; Sarah had spent a lot of time with straight C, as she's been a LITEC TA for at least the last two semesters; and Cheng had a good bit of experience with C++ and the other languages espoused by RPI. Both Sarah and Cheng were quite open to learning whatever they needed to, so we had our group of four!
I believe it was Andrew who originally brought up the idea we eventually took to designing and implementing: a location-based task application. Basically, your generic to-do list, with the ability to tag a task with locations; when the phone detects that it's near that location, it gently reminds you that you have something to do. We named it Tasc, after noticing the obvious pun based off of our first initials.
Unfortunately, we didn't have quite enough time to finish the location part of the application — another week probably would have done it, but between me having no experience with UIKit and half of the team having never used Objective-C, there simply wasn't enough time... so, you can tag locations, but auto-detection is not implemented. It's really not that interesting without the ability to background applications, anyway.
We all had fun — I certainly consider the three of them new friends, now — and managed to succeed to a great extent. There's still a significant amount of documentation to complete in the next week, but the Construction phase is over... luckily, since the class is mostly about design and documentation, the fact that we didn't quite finish won't affect us too much...
This experience also led me to buying into the iPhone Developer Program. I'm going to write another app or two and see if I can't make my 100$ back (or more, who knows?!) over the summer... but that's a story for another day!
P.S. We released Seed 0.5 on Wednesday. There's a Bugzilla product for us in GNOME Bugzilla now, and Robb pushed our documentation to his GNOME webspace.
P.P.S. I moved Carol and Matt's blogs to a Dreamhost server last week; if anyone has any trouble, let me know. Planning on moving Robb there or to b.g.o at some point in the future. There's no reason other people's stuff should depend on Jayne's uptime.
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