System Configuration

So once again the topic of system configuration and Elektra (aka LinuxRegistry) has come up on fedora-devel-list and since I know most people even on the list don’t keep up because of the sheer volume, I’m going to use my blog to link to my response.

Denmark vs. Japan at WCC 2006 - EOS 20D and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens @ ISO 400

It shouldn’t be a surprise to people knowing me that I consider myself a UNIX hater. In fact, this whole thread on f-d-l made me realize that the with regards to system configuration you really only want two things: session-wide and site-wide configuration. Maybe it’s time to open a CafePress store and pimp shirts and stickers with the mottos a’la # rm -rf /etc. Seriously.

Received my MacBook Pro last week and I’m psyched. Now to get Fedora installed .

New Old Blog

Decided to use this blog instead of my journal at advogato. I need to be able to post photos

Life

Been living in Lyngby, just 10km north of Copenhagen, for about 5 months

The view from my kitchen

The apartment is kind-of nice, spacious and stuff, but the commute every day is boring. And the neighborhood is kind of for settled people. I miss the city.

Curling

Went to a curling tournament not too long ago in Oberstdorf, Germany. It was a 15 hour drive, about 1300 km south. That was tough. It was not a serious tournament, the theme of the trip was “Don’t you hate pants?”

These people hate pants. They hate them so much

I played with a friend we call Shuffle (don’t ask) and these three norwegian girls I met for the first time

Amazed at the price differential on beer between Norway and Germany

Camilla is on the right, she’s very nice. I got her number

Work

After Germany I had to go to the UK for two consecutive weeks, pulling 12 hour days. That was not a lot of fun. Went to the pub a few times with good collegues though. Then I went to Seoul in Korea

From the Marriott looking north

It was my second time going, I was there in late January for the first time. It was also long days.

Somewhere in Seoul

I managed to see the first game that Denmark played in the EURO 2004, live by satellite. Nice.

GVADEC

GUADEC was nice, I wrote about that here. Good to finally meet Joe after having exchanged a lot of mail with him.

Joe has made up his mind about wireless scanning and HAL

It was also nice to meet Kay

Kay in front of the dodgy ‘Centrum Motel’

and other great hackers

Smoking outside on the last night

HAL

Got my patch for integration HAL and GNOME VFS merged. Also, Jimmac already produced icons for gnome-icon-theme. Way cool!

The patch on my Powerbook running GNOME from CVS

Christmas Season

Woov, long time without any updates; typically me :-/.

Curling

I was in Karlstad, Sweden just more than a month ago playing curling

with the team. We (barely) made it to the quarter finals but got beaten by once-world champion Peter “Peja” Lindholm. Hmm.. We played the danish world championship qualifiers back in DK the subsequent two weekends and managed to only win a single game. Bad..

Moving

I thought I was going to move into Joeys (Joey wouldn’t be living there though) really nice apartment out in Lyngby but we still to complete some paperwork. There is a good chance it may happen Jan 1st. Stay tuned.

Work

I’m finally working on some research stuff / speculative development (which is what I should be doing full time) while at the same time acting as a consultant / lead tech on a few delivery projects and it’s difficult to balance. So I’ve started to log each and every hour in a detailed ChangeLog-ish format. It’s actually a good tool for prioritising stuff and saying no to some people.

HAL

I was interviewed, together with other freedesktop.org contributors in an OSNews.com article here. There was a typical, yet a bit amusing, slashdot comment about the pictures.

HAL is actually starting to look good

It’s quite rewarding doing the GUI bits. The Linux 2.6 sysfs tree is being used extensively to gather information from. Both the device tree at /sys/devices and the class-devices are being inspected. It’s also seems stable; I can plug in a USB hub with my IBM USB hub keyboard and more devices and it works every time. I even started writing monitoring bits for /etc/mtab and I’ll add network link detection real soon now probably based on netplug. I’ll make a release in a week or so; most of the basics are working well enough now..

Powerbook, finally

Oh, I also bought a Powerbook G4 12″ on which I’m writing on right now. It’s sweet, Mac OS X Panther is sweet, I’ll have to write a blog entry about it.

Andorra trip

Just back from my trip to Andorra

to see Stacy and Shuffle get married

I also had a great time with other friends of Shuffle

See all the pictures, and others, here (by invitation only).

Curling season started, technology

So it’s that time of the year again - the curling season has started! Even though I have tried this numerous times, I always seem to be amazed at the shift in temperature when entering the curling rink. At this time of year the temperate difference is slightly less than ten degrees celcius. Well, in a few months it’s the other way around.

This year, Joel, Torkil and myself have developed some cool new technology to help our respective teams. We call it Robocurl… Well, at least until we find a new and better name for it!

Robocurl is to be used during practice sessions by providing three delayed AV feeds (one from the front, one from the side and one from behind) and other information we can collect and capture. The primary use is to look at the captured AV just after you have completed a shot. Basically, it’s a set of entry-level PC’s running Linux with AV capture cards in them, three analog cameras and some motion sensors. The initial setup will only feature a 15 second delayed video signal, but more advanced stuff will be added later.

This is a screenshot of the software running on one of my development boxes at home:

It is still a bit CPU hungry, even on a dual Athlon MP 1800+! Check back for updates!