Righteous Anger

Phillip, I'm sick and tired of how you are going on and on about Americans as if we're some homogeneous group. Not every American likes Bush or voted for him (I've voted against him twice now). We don't all like the war in Iraq, and not just because we're having trouble there now. We also are not universally for the death penalty.

You blame the government we "re-elected", but the government we just elected that is sweepingly different from the current one hasn't taken office yet (It will in January). I don't expect Bush will ever see the inside of a court room in the Hague, but he should be investigated, impeached and tried criminally here.

I can't speak for all of GNOME Planet's denizens, but probably a fair share of the Americans that belong here agree with your sentiment. I just hate how you're expressing it.

Financial Independence

After reading jamin's blog post with links to desperate measures to get out of debt, I had a discussion with one of my office mates about how one gets into that kind of trouble in the first place. It turns out it is really easy to make the mistakes that get you there. If you aren't there already, there are some things you can do to avoid it.

• Pay off your credit cards in full every month. Making only the minimum payment will result in you paying for that geek gadget or shiny object long into the future.
• Save for your big purchases. If you have been lusting over some new toy that you simply can't live without, set aside money every month until you can afford it. You've been living without it this far and will avoid interest charges when you do buy it. In fact if you put your savings in a high yield money market account such as ING Direct's (disclosure: I have been very happy with my account there.) you could actually make money on the deal.
• Establish a safety cushion. Sock away at least 3 months worth of living expenses if you're single and more if you're not. If you have the cushion and hell breaks loose, you will be able to rely on savings instead of credit cards while you weather the storm.

There are plenty of more things you can do, but those are some of the biggies. Just remember that as the compound interest of the credit cards can work against you, if you have the money invested it can work for you.

Code of Conduct

I've been following the discussion concerning the Code of Conduct on the foundation-list and agreed with one poster that is concerned about "signing" something on a wiki. I have now signed the Code of Conduct and made sure there is no question about what exactly I was signing.

I invite my fellow Gnomies to do likewise using Seahorse's Epiphany plugin, panel applet or Gedit plugin or gnupg on the command line (If that's the way you roll).

Looking Back

... at this past rowing season it went rather well. In my first year rowing my single, I took 1st in the lightweight single at the Chattanooga Head Race, Head of the Tennessee and Head of of the South. At the Head of the Tennessee, my first place contributed to a Clemson Crew sweep of the lightweight men's events including the four and eight. At the Head of the South my roommate Matt and I beat our roommates, the Chris's, in the Champ Double event to take second in the maiden race of the team's new WinTech double (bragging rights are to be assumed). I'm a bit disappointed that racing season for me won't resume until Masters events begin in the summer, but have decided on training for a marathon in the meanwhile. Hopefully, I'll be able to increase my ability enough to feel comfortable entering next year's Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston.

I'm proud of all of the club's rowers work this semester and look forward to seeing some fast times from everyone in the spring.

Seahorse 0.9.6

We kicked a new release of the Seahorse development branch out the door last night. This is the first release with our Epiphany plugin and management of gnome-keyring passwords. There were some usability fixes committed and several crashers fixed as well. You can read the full release notes here and grab the source from CVS or GNOME FTP. A Slackware package is already available in Dropline GNOME's 2.16.1 Pre-Release.

Good day Sir! I said Good Day!!

Today was indeed a good day. I confirmed results from code that computes radial and angular prolate spheroidal functions (fixing several bugs along the way) which moves me one step closer to performing computations. My new sculling oars from Concept II shipped today, a whole 12 days before the predicted ship date. That's the kind of thing that makes me have warm fuzzy feelings about a company. Never you mind that all oars ordered from them are custom made.

Food Science

Yesterday and today have been spent in the kitchen.

Yesterday I finally brewed up a batch of Raspberry Hefeweizen that I've been meaning to. The partial boil went swimmingly and the yeast started actually started this time, but fermentation was a bit slow to start. I can only assume I didn't get the temperature of the wort down to 70 degrees Fahrenheit quickly enough. The airlock was cheerfully bubbling away this morning though and the out gas smells good, so I'm hopeful for a good batch of beer in the end. I'll get around to posting pictures of my kegerator for homebrew at some point.

Today I decided to try my hand at pasta; specifically ravioli. So far the pasta and the filling are made (so far so good). I was going to serve them for dinner tonight, but a roommate asked me to switch dinner nights with him so they're on the menu for tomorrow night. I'll probably finish making the ravioli sometime this afternoon.

Keg-a-who

After much drama with the FedEx man, I have finally received the CO2 regulator that was holding up completion of the kegerator I've been not-so-secretly building on my porch. I still require the ability to attach my second 5 gallon cornelius keg, but at the moment it's empty any way. Hopefully in a few days I shall sample the fruits of my labor with a freshly carbonated glass of birch beer. Cheers!!

Epiphany Goodness

Those of you paying attention to d-d-l would have noticed that Seahorse was proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.18 recently. One of the concerns brought up was that it wasn't integrated enough and to that effect an Epiphany plugin should be created.

Such a plugin now exists! Jean-François Rameau of #epiphany did the majority of the work by creating a framework for adding items to the context menu and handling mozembed calls to change the text in entry fields. After struggling a bit with build magic and sprinkling with libcryptui and dbus calls I checked it in this afternoon.

More work needs to be done but it's usable. Future work includes decrypting, verifying and signing the contents of text fields. At the moment the plugin works with the additional comments field on b.g.o but doesn't handle the message body field on GMail.

I've created an Epiphany component under Seahorse on b.g.o. Please file bugs there.

Welcome Seahorse Fans!

As those of you paying attention to g-a-l have seen Seahorse had two releases today, 0.9.2 followed quickly by 0.9.2.1. Even with that slight hiccup, today's been a good day for the project. There were 17 CVS commits and 11 bugs were marked as fixed. Thanks goes out to slomo and chpe in #gnome-hackers for their patch contributions! :)

The release announcements are here and here for 0.9.2 and 0.9.2.1 respectively.

Here's today's outrageous ChangeLog.

Gentle Giant

I'm glad to see Luis using Gentle Giant to move. They support the olympic dreams of rowers by giving them jobs while they train and Giants have won more olympic medals than Ireland.

Gaim Plugin Update

Since I've abandoned creating my own plugin and have been working with Bill Tompkins to add OpenPGP support to gaim-encryption there has been a good amount of progress. All of the functions have been completed but I'm still chasing some nigling little bugs. I've also been working to HIGify some more of g-e while I'm messing around with the internals. I'll release some code when I can start encrypting back and forth.

T-Mobile Eats Babies

Not really, but they have succeeded in making my trip to Albuquerque a real pain. Their hot spots charge $9.99/day for internet access, roughly 1/4 the cost of my connection at home per month. They only "provided" internet at two places I visited, but spent a substantial amount of time at. The following details where internet was and wasn't available.

• Greenville/Spartanburg Airport (GSP): Free internet. Postage sized airport.
• Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (DFW): T-Mobile Hotspot. Enormous sized airport.
• Albuquerque Sunport (ABQ): Free Internet. Provided by the city of Albuquerque, that's how you roll out the welcome mat.
• Hyatt Regency Hotel: T-Mobile Hotspot. This is a luxury hotel. All said, I paid $US 174 per night for a triple occupancy room. Every cheap hotel near the airport has free wifi, but the conference hotel for a conference of Electrical Engineers can't? I think there should be a rule that if you don't give away internet access, you can't answer the question "Do you have wireless internet?" in the affirmative or use WIFI as a marketing term on your hotel's website.
• Albuquerque Conference Center: Free internet in public areas where you could get away from people spamming the spectrum with Ad Hoc networks and Ad Hoc phishing schemes.
• Just about every restaurant and cafe in Albuquerque: Free internet, not that I sacrificed conversation with friends and colleagues to surf.
• Grand Canyon National Park: A glorious dead zone without cell phones. You get one bar right up to the entrance of the park and then nothing. I hope the National Forest Service makes this possible at many more of their parks.
• Holiday Inn Express: Free internet with login. Better than the Hyatt on this one.

The point being I'm a spoiled kid who likes his body permeated by 2.45 GHz waves providing free internet.

The rest of the conference ...

My presentation was last Tuesday morning in a session with the rest of the MURI group we work with. The day before I attended a session with some gents from Sweden who were doing similar work testing GPS receivers against a wideband magnetron source (*drool* I use a heavily modified microwave oven). They were pumping a maximum of 700 V/m from their source. The oven was rated at 1300 W which gave me a maximum in the 10's of V/m. Magnetron envy aside, my presentation went well. I received a lot of positive feed back and collected some business cards as lovely parting gifts. Wednesday a professor from JMU presented similar work performed by undergrads with a less heavily modified microwave oven than mine. Bottom line: Beware your electronics are subject to testing by intentional EMI if you leave them lying around. :)

Warp Whistle

Instead of implementing my own Gaim plug-in as I had planned, I've been concentrating on implementing a D-BUS based crypt protocol for the gaim-encryption plug-in. I have 2 or 4 functions yet to implement then I'll put it through some testing before leaving for Albuquerque tomorrow.

Grocery Shopping the Way It Should Be

Today I had one of the best grocery store experiences ever. Food Lion has opened 2 new stores, called Bloom, in my area. Today I visited their new Seneca store. If you like self checkout, hold on to your hat!

Bloom's "bonus card" allows you to check out a handheld UPC scanner at the front of the store. This scanner and a hanger of bags (available at the same location as the scanner) allow you to wander the store scanning your items and bagging them as you shop. When you complete your shopping, at any of the self checkout kiosks you scan an end trip barcode, your "bonus card", your order is automagically loaded into the register and you then pay. The techno-dweeb inside of me jumps for joy with the introduction of Bloom. Also, who doesn't like wandering the aisles pretending to be a gun slinger with your scanner?

<Clint Eastwood>Do you like shopping? eh? Do ya punk?</Clint>

In the produce section, the scale prints a sticker ready to be scanned with the weight and price of your selection. Discounts are tabulated directly on the scanner, where you can check prices, scan the list of items already in your cart, and see the total damage of your current trip. I must report that very few people, if any, over the age of 30 appeared to be using the scanners and "traditional" checkout is available. Given the looseness of scanning and checking out your own items, the ToS specifiy they will randomly spot check 1:10 carts and verify that some of the items in your cart are listed on your receipt. I found this out in response to wondering about the lack of omnipresent CCTV cameras.

While overall the experience was positive, there are some "corporate practices" that unnerve me a little. For instance the following was over heard on the PA system, "Attention All Associates, Cuddle Time in the Produce Section." This was followed by several associates converging on the aforementioned section for what appeared like a cross between a staff meeting and an evangelical tent revivial complete with staff members cheering as data was reported by the managers. Later in that same section, the "Chicken Dance" song was played. I cannot report whether spontaneous dancing then occured. At times the atomosphere seemed a bit too much touchy-feely for a grocery store. I can only surmise that a focus group of "target shoppers" told Bloom they wanted to be close personal friends with their local grocery store employees.

Beep Beep Beep - Go ahead and dump it

I've finally posted some the code so far for the Seahorse Gaim plugin as 2 Bugzilla attachments. It doesn't do any thing terribly useful so far but hopefully will soon.

Off with his head

P.G.O seems to have lost my hacker-gotchi. Here it is again:

More tortoise than hare

Slowly but surely I'm making progress on Seahorse's Gaim plugin. At the moment it loads and has working preferences. I fixed a memory corruption bug on loading and unloading the plugin multiple times. It seems the plugin_destroy method was getting called instead of the plugin_unload method so a private structure wasn't being cleaned up properly. Crisis averted.

I'll move on to adding the necessary UI to the conversation window next. This might get delayed because instead of holding my prof's hand through MATLAB for our third paper at the upcoming APS/URSI International Symposium I'll be doing the interfacing from MATLAB to FORTRAN and back myself. <deity> bless reusable code.

OpenPGP IM

I'm finally getting around to implementing the fabled Seahorse plugin for Gaim. Things have moved far enough along that Seahorse now has an easy to use DBUS interface for handling keys(OpenPGP and SSH) and crypto operations as well as a separate library for providing consistant UI (libcryptui) across multiple applications that I can start without pulling our internal library (libseahorse) into the fray.

A year ago I touched base with Alan Humpherys of the Fire project to make sure that our implementations would be compatible. He provided this handy dandy reference via the way back machine. At the moment, very little is complete except for the build magic and plugin bits required by Gaim. I have chronicled my thoughts so far on l.g.o. I hope to make some progress between now and the second week of July when I will be attending the APS/URSI/AMEREM International Symposium.

Dear Lazy Web ....

What's the "proper" way to request the network status from NetworkManager? dus_g_proxy_*? nm-glib? Some combination of the two?