January 2008 Archives

I've submitted some patches to D-Bus to allow it to auto-launch on Mac OS X. This should let me remove some completely awful and distribution-specific code from kdelibs.

It's got a few quirks to work out, but on 10.5, it's rockin'! Even scarier, I wrote C code. I think it might even be halfway decent C code. Time to look out, Armageddon is clearly happening any day now. :)

Oh, and as an aside, this is the first time I've actually had to break down and finally learn how to use Git, since that's what dbus uses, and it's friggin' amazing. Lightning fast, and well-suited to sending patches upstream.

If there's one thing I know about people who are involved in network management, it's that they're stats junkies. Case in point. (Hah, I mean, how cool is it to poll the weather in OpenNMS...) I put that to the test in the last week, most definitely.

I got slashdotted (and ars technica'd, and dugg) a few days ago, and despite being under the weather, it fired me up to do 2 things.

First of all, it got me excited about working on KDE more. I had a great time at the KDE 4.0 release event and for the first time got strong feedback from KDE folks on what I've been working on. I got a little bit of that at aKademy but I also still felt quite a bit like the outsider there. This time around there were a number of people who gave me great feedback, encouragement, and all-around made me feel like a part of the community.

As a result, the thing I'd hoped would happen most after getting the press did happen -- the kde-darwin IRC channel is hoppin' with people not only willing to help test things and give bug reports, but willing to dig into the code, and help out in other ways. (One guy is designing a sweet web site that will hopefully be at mac.kde.org when we can get the administrative stuff handled.) And as for testers... well, there've been at least 1200 people who have completed downloading the "everything" torrent!

Second of all, I obsessively watched my web page and download stats. I can't help it, I love watching the graphs go crazy.

We, of course, monitor my web site with OpenNMS. However, I've recently switched to a new server at my hosting provider and I hadn't noticed that I wasn't monitoring the new machine. So thanks, ars technica, for getting me to monitor my new server. The cobbler's children finally got some shoes. ;)

I also use Google Analytics for web-site tracking. You can see in the graph on the right the difference between last week and this week. (Last week is the little green bit at the bottom of the graph...) This week I've had over 13,000 unique visitors, when about 1,500 is the norm. That's just crazy!

And on that subject, Tarus and I were talking about a bug reported to the discuss list related to my recent changes to the OpenNMS RPM packages. Tarus joked that "at least two people are running nightly snapshots" which, of course, got me thinking, "Hmm, our Yum downloads aren't recorded on SourceForge, I wonder how many snapshot users we do have..."

I figured it would be maybe 20 or 30 people brave enough to run the nightly version of OpenNMS. Boy was I wrong. A quick grep through the logs shows that since we started doing snapshots, we've had almost 8 thousand snapshot downloads, from 900 unique hosts. That's not people running the latest release, that's people running whatever nightly code got checked in the day before. Granted, we do a pretty good job of making sure trunk is always usable, but "usable" is not the same as "regression tested" nor "proven in the field."

All I can say is, thanks to everyone willing to try things out, it's great to see that we've got that many people willing to be on the front lines making sure our software works.

The future, Ranger Rick?

That's right, dear reader. Let's look to the future, all the way to the year 2000!"

So, in preparation for working on becoming an officially-supported part of KDE, I'm starting to move "my" project information into someplace that makes it easier to get the community's involvement.

First, I've gone ahead and moved the wiki stuff to KDE techbase.

Next up is starting to offer up the torrents on ftp.kde.org, but I need to get access to it again.

And hopefully soon, we can get a proper KDE mailing list set up, rather than the occasional post to kde-nonlinux.

Just in time for the KDE release event (grin) -- a new KDE/Mac snapshot is available. I will be demoing it at the release event, thanks to Google and the KDE release coordinators for arranging free lodging, and my employer, OpenNMS, for covering my travel!

On to info about the snapshots.

Qt is updated to 4.3.3, and my build tools have been updated to use the KDE 4.0 branch now that 4.0.0 has been tagged. This does mean that kdepim and kdevelop are no longer being built (for now). Also, I'm not building Amarok right now since it has some compile issues, and I need to get with the Amarok folks to figure out what to do about some architectural issues (no Plasma on OSX).

Nothing huge code-wise has changed from a Mac point of view, other than all of the general updates that have gone on in the KDE codebase since the last snapshot. It appears that kdeinit4 and kded4 both have some crashing issues related to something deep in Qt, I will be investigating it when time permits. In the meantime, a lot of apps still work. Notably, KOffice apps appear to work now! In fact, KSpread is looking pretty darn good.

The torrents are still in the process of uploading to my seed servers, I've got most of them finished but a few are still going, and the "everything" torrent is still going, so if you're impatient, grab the individual packages of the stuff you want for best results. Note that I will be traveling to San Jose for the release event today, so you may see the torrents stop updating for a while but I will resume them as soon as possible.

As always, comments and questions are welcome, just send me an e-mail or reply in the comments here.

So this is a bit off-topic, but I am addicted to Rock Band. One of the things that makes it so great is the huge amount of downloadable content available to expand the game with new songs, and stuff comes out weekly.

However, it's hard to tell what a song is, just from the title sometimes. Turns out you may know it but not realize you know it. I wanted to be able to hear the song before deciding whether it was worth downloading. I suspected that there were plenty of other folks who had a similar itch which needed scratching. So, I did something about it. =)

I've been looking for an excuse to do something "real" with rails, and this was it. In just a week of spare time, I've thrown together this:

     rockband.racoonfink.com

It's not yet very pretty, but it does the job, you can preview the original artist tracks for each of the songs available through XBox Marketplace and the PS3 Online Store.

If you notice any issues, please let me know.

FYI, the "finkproject.org" domain name is down -- turns out it had expired and we didn't catch it. We're working on getting it fixed, just wanted to get the word out. Fink Is Not Kaput ;)

I've gotten all of the dependencies of OpenNMS packaged up on Fedora Core 8 now, and have our yum repository up-to-date.

If you're looking to install on FC8, you should be able to follow the usual instructions (substituting "fc8" for the distro) and it should work fine.