Sinzui

Today I decided to take a few pictures of the area I work in. Innocent enough, but life abhors innocence like nature abhors a vacuum. This is a map of the area I work, posted by the local government I assume.

Both the US Patent and Trademark office and the Alexandria US Federal Court House are across the street from the Time Life building
where I work.

If you are accused of treason or terrorism, you may be tried in this Court House; Both Robert Hanson and Zacarias Moussaoui have been here. The snipers on the roof tops will remind you that something is going on inside. I found a nice picture of the Federal Court House, taken shortly after it was built.

The US PTO is a huge complex that is under construction, and only a third of it is open right now. You'll have to take my word that this is the entrance to one of the building. The guards will not permit any pictures of the lovely etched glass signs. Don't enter with a camera and ask “may I take a picture of the sign”, because the guards will want to confiscate your camera. Saying “No”
to the guards will not endear you to them. They are no doubt on high security alert because the European patent debate happening right now.

PS. If anyone spots a job needing Web service/site design and programming skills in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, or the UK please let me know. I may need to make a get away.

Some people can just be difficult…and you know who you are Luis.

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Issues 19 and 20 of Five Star Stories arrived for my weekend reading. I love this manga series. I struggled to read it in Japanese, with little success. It's a grand story of the last age of humanity, wars, chivalry, and awesome machinery, but I read it for the romance.

My DOAP Dealer work was interrupted today by a friend who would like me to review the architecture of his corporate/state/federal grant application service. I told him I would rather spend my time working on free software to free my soul, but he guilted me into a review of the site. Picking a page a random, the ever so critical Tidy found 73 errors and warnings, many are accessibility issues. I understand that these are prototype pages, but honestly, if the tools that made the simple prototype cannot make valid accessible pages, they have little chance of getting the more complex final pages right. I can see by the generator mark that page was made using FrontPage; Why buy a tool if it wont do the job right? So why am I helping him? Because he is in the business of selling governments solutions, and he thinks he can sell my ideas about desktop and user metadata to a government. I hope, but I doubt much will come of it.

I'm making a repository and publisher tool that will replace the aging and crippled GNOME software map. Edd Dumbill is working on DOAP that will allow projects to publish their vital information so that it can be aggregated by sites like GNOME and Freshmeat. By registering a public DOAP file/feed with the relevant sites, the project maintainer will only need to update the feed to send updates to all the sites.

After the initial registration with the GNOME DOAP repository (redland), the tool will check for periodic updates from the project's public DOAP file. When an update is found, the tool will use XSLT to regenerate the GNOME directory of apps, as well as the application summary pages. This will give the Web site a consistent presentation for the GNOME apps that should be easier for users to explore. We could consider adding search capabilities to the Web site in the future.

But what to name the tool? It's difficult to stay politically correct when dealing with DOAP: 'Dealer', 'Stash', 'Junkie' the bad allusions go on and on. I like 'Dealer', no DOAP, because its job is to server the project data to the users.

I just upgraded to FC2 T3, for no better reason than I wanted to get GNOME 2.6 without building a second desktop with jhbuild. I really enjoyed spatial nautilus and templates before I had to rebuild my notebook. I hoped that my small orinoco_cs problem would also disappear too.

Damn if that wasn't inconvenient. I know it's a test, but I was surprised by the number of things that did go wrong.

1. x.org X11 mangled my screen resolution. I want to blame nVidia, but the nv driver for xfree86 did let me have 24bit XGA. I've settled for 16 bits, and I had to edit the config file in vi to get the monitor freq right.
2. During the refresh of the FC2 packages, I lost network. I traced that to the yenta_socket module wasn't inited. I found a patch in RH's bugzilla to fix the init script. I'm happy to say the network card doesn't block me starting the desktop anymore.
3. My CDROM also disappeared after the refresh. I had to remove the ide_scsi bridge passed to the kernel. I lost gtoaster, not that I'll miss it. I'll be using command line until I get Coaster working.
4. My sound card disappeared. I have run detect sound card after each reboot to enable it. But Rhythmbox finally works for me.
5. Mono was crippled. I didn't expect it to work after the upgrade, but I did expect to dead packages to be removed. I used the Mono yum repository at go-mono to get it back, but Muine is gone; it isn't compatible with my current configuration. Saddly, monodoc wont start anymore. It complains that “System.DllNotFoundException: gtkhtml-3.0″, but /etc/mono/config is right and I have both the lib and devel pakages.

During these trials I thought, why is this still happening to me. I had video, sound, and network problems during my first install. Then I remembered.

Ten years ago this month, I got my first Internet connection, a SLIP on a dedicated phone line with static IP from digex.net. I telneted into my shell account and realized I could not do a single thing. I wasn't a stranger to command line, but I knew absolutely nothing about UNIX. Well that wouldn't do I thought; three days later I replaced the Windows 3.1 partition with Slackware 1.2. A stupid decision for sure, but it was a great incentive to learn UNIX and the Net.

I swear I had the same configuration problems, but at least the desktop wasn't messed up while I was trying to fix them. That is to say, what desktop? My OS/2 partition had a sweet desktop, and as Windows 3.1 did not have one, switching X11 + Lestif + FVWM was hardly a loss. Even then, Linux could mount HPFS drives so I was never at a loss for my data, only some key apps and a decent way to use them were missing. What I missed most while working on the desklesstop was spatial folders, document templates, context menus, and a network filesystem browser.

Now I have G2.6 as my primary desktop; I have all that I missed from OS/2! It took 10 years.

The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions

He had discovered a pile of ancient clay tablets – shattered, scattered, and illegible – and he had set himself the impossible task of piecing them together.

Last week I was struck down my allergies. I started making mistakes converting developer.gnome.org to UTF-8 and XHTML. Nor could I focus in my day job.

I spent a lot of time in Bugzilla reviewing patches. By Sunday morning, we had gone from 1703 to 978 unreviewed patches. I don't think there are many obsolete or incomplete patches in the db now. On Friday I started using jhbuild to list the modules I should patch review, and by Saturday night I started going through my own menus.

I came across this remark while doing the patch review:

OK, perhaps you've proved that short-circuiting that improves performance is possible, but you've done much violence to the Pango code base in the process.
–Owen Taylor 2003-02-28 10:26