Well, the other day I got a nice email from Tim O’Reilly with an invite to EuroFoo (foo meaning Friends Of O’Reilly). I am really looking forward to getting over there, and I got my plane tickets last night. The event is being held in the Netherlands and it should be a lot of fun. Speaking of O’Reilly, Beyond the dimension seems to have been fairly popular and is currently number 6 in the Top 25 weblogs. Cool. For the record, it has had 7380 reads and is ranked 296 on the O’Reilly Network. Nice. 🙂

I managed to fix some Project Looking Glass problems that I have been having recently. The cause of the problems was a classic case of me being a gold plated muppet. I was logged into my Powerbook in Debian and I was trying to get my X server working a little better. To get some ideas for tweaking XF86Config-4 I decided to log into my main Linux box and have a look at my configuration on there. I then went to get a drink, came back and started editing the wrong XF86Config-4 file. It took me a while to figure out why the file had the wrong graphics driver, and then the glorious bolt of sense shuddered through my body. The problem was that I then accidentally deleted the XF86Config-4 on my main Linux box, and I had to restore it by using the XF86Config-4~ backup file that the editor leaves behind. I was delighted to find that only half of the configuration was in there and I reveled in trying to restore it. This promptly buggered up Looking Glass, and today I figured it all out. Now it works great.

LUGRadio Episode 12 is now online by the way, and the response seems to have been good so far. It was great fun to record. I have also added a new song to this site called Groove It. This was my first tune with me playing real drums on it along with the other instruments. It should also be noted that this was recorded on my old guitar with old strings; a true testament to how the mixing process can make things sound better. Speaking of music, I am going to be doing a bunch of UK dates with Seraphidian before we record our album in September. It would be great to see some of you at the gigs.
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Well, it seems that my blog feed is working fine with the new updates. Which reminds me, it is about time I encourage you all to go and take my feed and load it into your fave RSS reader such as Bloglines or Liferea. For more information, see this page. Oh, and do let me know if you subscribe to the feed. Speaking of feeds, it appears that I am on two Planet sites at the moment; FOSS Planet and Planet Wolves. Cool. 🙂

Some cool hacking has gone on with the GNOME VFS by David Zauthen (HAL maintainer). I sent a mail to the Utopia list asking about icons representing devices and partitions. David was already hacking on some of this and last night patched the GNOME VFS. He provided a few screenshots:

(click to view bigger)

Everything really is coming together now. I am just looking forward to the day we can hopefully avoid configuring X due to the presence of a bunch of device information files and a HALified X.org server. Who knows, in this game the sky is the limit.

Based upon some of my discussions on the Project Looking Glass mailing list, I decided to write an article on my O’Reilly Blog about some use cases and ideas for a 3D desktop environment. The article is called Beyond the dimension and some interests comments have been posted on there. The article is also linked from OSNews. Another interesting link is the interview with Hideya Kawahara.

The response from the article has been an interesting mix of skepticism and positivity. Although many of the comments have some valid points, I don’t think the challenge is in proving that a 3D interface is a suitable replacement for a 2D interface; that is not going to happen for a good while yet, but I think it gives us a means to explore and play with new concepts and ideas. One of the cornerstones of the free software community is to take what initially seems like a silly idea and make it work. Look at the strange yet useful projects that are available and used by lots of people all the time. A weather applet is of no worth to me, but it seems to appear in lots of applications and it is firmly implanted on my desktop. If I am curious to see what the weather is and I I live in a lead box with no windows, I can see. Not amazingly useful, but it serves a purpose.

I do think that some useful functionality could be gleaned from the further development of Looking Glass, and this functionality could be prototyped and tested before being migrated to other systems. Sun are taking a risk if they expect to get something useful out of Looking Glass for their JDS distribution, but while the code is GPLed it will prove to be an interesting playground for ideas. I am not saying that any of this may eventually be useful, but at least we have a playground to test it in.

On another note, we recorded LUGRadio Episode 12 last night. It was a good show and it was a lot of fun to record. We also included a phone interview with LUGRadio listeners Russ and Jen, and another interview with a chap called Austin who is a Mac fan. Part of the show included some discussion of a desert island disc’s submission about a program called Cowsay. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that this little nugget of worthless code allows you to type in something and an ASCII cow says it in a speech bubble. Here is an example:

jono@tea:~$ cowsay "This opens up a new world of pointlessness"
 ______________________________
/ This opens up a new world of \
\ pointlessness                /
 ------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
jono@tea:~$

Oh, it doesn’t stop there. If you check the man page (yes, I know) of the program you can see that much more functionality exists. Just look at the SYNOPSIS:

SYNOPSIS
       cowsay  [-e  eye_string] [-f cowfile] [-h] [-l] [-n] [-T tongue_string]
       [-W column] [-bdgpstwy]

There is more. For all those people who look at the cow and have a burning desire to change the cows eyes; a desire fueled from a lifelong ambition to change the way society sees cow eyes, you should read this passage:

The user may specify the -e option to select the appearance of the cow's eyes, in which case the first two characters of the argument string eye_string will be used. The default eyes are 'oo'. The tongue is similarly configurable through -T and tongue_string; it must be two characters and does not appear by default. However, it does appear in the 'dead' and 'stoned' modes. Any configuration done by -e and -T will be lost if one of the provided modes is used.

This is a professional piece of software and even has a $COWPATH environmental variable. Right. Although utterly pointless, it is great to see something such as this in the Linux world. Cowsay’s author Tony Monroe obviously has a sense of humor and it is great to see little programs such as this. I just can’t believe there is a $COWPATH. Mad.

Oh, I have just added some changes to my blog formatting by the way – there may be a few hiccups here and there but I think everything is fixed.
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After months of intending to get around to it, I have finally got Debian installed on my Powerbook, and swanky it is too. I first of all used Jigdo to build an ISO image of the PowerPC version of the distribution, then I installed and it worked without a hitch. I now have everything pretty much installed and ready. You don’t really appreciate the multi-platform support in Debian until you try to install it on a non-x86 platform; great stuff. There are still a few loose ends, but it is nice to have yet another Linux box, and this one will pretty much replace my aging laptop. The next job with this is to get 2.6 compiled and get HAL installed. Part of the reason that pushed me to install it was to test the new HFS label sniffing support in HAL that was hacked by Kay Sievers. Speaking of HAL, the GNOME VFS was patched with HAL support a while back to bring in comprehensive device handling, and there is now a Debian package for this. Thanks must go out to Sjoerd Simons for this. I am yet to test it, but I will have a look soon. It is impressive to see the work going on here. On a slightly related note, I was impressed to see that in GNOME when you right click on an ISO file you can select a Write to CD option. Never noticed that before, but this is just the kind of little enhancements we need. 🙂

I managed to get the CVS copy of the Project Looking Glass working. After working out some awkward elements in the build process (thanks to the good people on the Looking Glass mailing list), everything seems to be working well. There is obviously little difference to the stable build from the day it was released to the CVS build from the day after it was released, but I am pleased I am in a position to build it.

There are a bunch of interesting things that are going on with Looking Glass at the moment. Apart from the natural improvements to the actual interface and functionality, various hackers are separating out chunks of the functionality to make it available to other environments. Some of this has included some special extensions with the X.org server that support things such as translucency and other features. I read something somewhere that said that some of the underlying 3D infrastructure may be made available as a low level X.org extension. This could be very cool – I would much prefer people work 3D support into existing platforms if possible as opposed to creating a whole new desktop.

I have been working hard this week. I sent off a bunch of articles to Linux User & Developer and I have just been confirmed some more work for Linux Format. I also have two articles on the cards for the O’Reilly network and a new three-part series for MacFormat. Somewhere nested in all this I plan on watching the West Wing. 🙂

Well, well, well, Project Looking Glass is now out in the wild and fully GPLed. Although pretty pointless at the moment, I think Project Looking Glass is going to provide a great means of experimental R+D to go on in a collaborative manner; if nothing else, it will provide a breeding ground for ideas and concepts. The really interesting work will be when people apply true 3D space to different applications. Just imagine how you could apply a 3D workspace to a file manager. Theoretically you take the concept of file management into the fully object based spatial approach, but in true 3D. Aq pointed me in the direction of John Siracusa’s Spatial Finder article, and although the idea of real world interactions are applied to files in the finder, I think some similar concepts could truly be applied with Project Looking Glass. Exciting stuff.

After seeing the release of the code, I headed over to the Sun site and got it running tonight. This was fun as I needed to get Java working in the first place. Installation was fairly smooth though; I did most of it over SSH while laid in bed. I did try to VNC to test out the interface, but I figured it would be easier to walk 3ft and sit in front of my Linux box. Aside from a few permissions issues that are left over from my udev install, it all works great.

Project Looking Glass has two methods of running. First, you can run lg2d-dev which is the interface within a window. With this method you cannot load normal X applications, so it is fairly limited. The other option is lg3d-session which works like a normal window manager. This is going to be the intended route for the interface, but it fails to work for me at the moment. I tested the stable release and the daily build (of which there is only one of course) and it is not working. I will investigate the CVS tomorrow to check out the code and see if I can get it working. Do I need to compile Java applications? I assume I just run them.

Overall, the interface feels smooth and efficient. I am running on a 2.5Ghz Intel with 512MB RAM and an NVidia card, and it works well. Here is my desktop running lg3d-dev:

Here are some more screenshots. Click on them to see them larger.

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Good LUG last night. Plenty of interesting discussion, lots of beer, one happy trig and a stupidly hot curry.

Today I finished off the second part of my XUL series for Linux Magazine and then got cracking on a Speedy Hire case study article for Linux User & Developer. Speedy have moved over 550 desktops over to a Debian based system running GNOME, OpenOffice.org and the LTSP. I interviewed Mark Johnson who made the whole thing happen.

I found out a pretty horrifying fact yesterday; something that I was unsure of until recently – the kernel really does not keep any kind of ABI/API compatibility at all. A module running on 2.6.1 may not work on 2.6.7 and I think this is a really serious problem. This is going to cause some nasty headaches for having something such as a driver on demand system working. It is not reasonable to ask our users to have a complete system ready for compiling kernels with; they should just be able to download a binary driver and run it.

Whatever your thoughts on binary drivers are, I am convinced that there is a reason for us to consider realistic binary driver support. I have no objection to closed sourced binary drivers being excluded from many peoples systems, but shutting off binary support due to the fact that people may write closed drivers also cuts of the vein from experiencing the joy that is driver on demand. It strikes me as a little irresponsible in some ways to not enforce this kind of compatibility, and many people who I have spoken to feel the same way.

What I am interested in finding out is how Andrew Luecke has managed to write Driver On Demand without such a binary interface present. I am going to send him an email as soon as I have posted this blog entry.
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Sorry for the lack of updates. I have been super busy.

We went to visit family over the weekend and had a great time. It was good to see everyone, and on Saturday night we went to the Arena in Newcastle to a metal night. Good fun. 🙂

Linux User & Developer is now out with some articles that I wrote in the magazine. I have added the details to the published work section. I also have the second part of a series in What Guitar? magazine, there is a bunch of things in the latest Linux Format and I am just waiting for an article to be published on Newsforge at the moment.

Yesterday I went along to the Microsoft Get The Facts show in Manchester. It was an interesting day, and I had lunch with two of the main men from Microsoft UK to interview them for Linux User & Developer magazine. Some interesting discussion was had, and it was also good to meet up with John Southern too. I think we have a lot we can learn from Microsoft, both in ways to improve and also ways we can get better. If have written some of these observations and others down in my latest O’Reilly Weblog article. It is called The attitude of openness. Comments are always welcome as usual. 🙂

It seems that Sun are going to be open sourcing Project Looking Glass. This is great news other than one slight hitch, Java. Due to the reliance of Java for the code, I suspect that this is going to cause some issues sustaining the growth of the code. Aside from the general sense of dislike of Java which is often echoed around the web, the fact that Java is not Open Source will no doubt cause some problems for some hackers, and it could prevent it going into Debian. You just know that Sun will open source Java at some point though. Schwartz has been off bragging about the potential of Open Source but not actually nailing any promises down. I think Sun know that Java is their key technology and they could really push it further if they open it and offer a good services and sales model to reflect it. I doubt it will be forked if Sun have a good infrastructure for maintaining an open Open Source Java. We will have to see…

Congratulations must go out to Trig who is getting hitched. Quite possibly the loudest cockney I have ever known (“ere, Jono, your ‘aving a larf mayte, its laaandon taaaawn”), I am chuffed to bits that he is getting wed. My god, the stag do is going to be a heavy night.

Oh, and let us not forget that LUGRadio Episode 11 is online!

Went to see Testament play last night. Incredible, incredible band. Awesome gig, truly impressive. Can you tell I enjoyed it?

Thanks to Ikke for sending me over a GMail invite. Also, thanks to Matt Revell and Sam Williams for doing the same. I have now signed up and given it a bit of a whirl. All looks fairly bog-standard to me, and shockingly similar to the old Yahoo Mail design. I have not had time to give it a proper poke, so I will pass more detailed comments at a later date.

Well, it seems the plot is thickening with regards to device handling in Linux. Not only is HAL heading towards a 1.0 release fairly quickly and GNOME Volume Manager pushing for GNOME 2.8, but work is underway to automate the driver identification an installation process. Firstly, Zenaan Harkness is working on a hardware database that can be used to store information about hardware and automatically generate the HAL device information files on the fly. This will hopefully hook in with HAL and the desktops so a minimal number of users are pestered for missing device information. In my last blog entry I mentioned Andrew Luecke’s plans for automated driver installation when a new device is detected without a driver. Well, being the muppet that I am, much of this code already exists and is on the Driver On Demand website. Andrew openly admits that the current implementation is not ideal, and HAL will solve many of the problems. This is after all, what HAL was intended for.

Good news came through yesterday. On the 29th June I am heading to Manchester for the Microsoft Get The Facts tour. I am going to be interviewing the creator of the tour about their views on Linux and other issues. This article will be appearing in Linux User & Developer magazine. In other news, I just submitted an article to Newsforge about the Mozilla project and an interview with Chris Hofmann, the Mozilla Foundation Director Of Engineering. The article should be online soon.

Can you believe it, I actually uploaded a new recording to the site tonight. Nothing to amazing, it is just a simple drum test recording that made earlier today to test my Yamaha DTXPress III drums. I think it sounds quite cool. It is in the Music section.

We recorded LUGRadio Episode 11 tonight and it went well. Good fun as usual, and it will be released on Monday. Keep your eyes on the Forums for its release announcement.

Some interesting things are happening over on the HAL mailing list. There has been some discussion recently about the creation and distribution of special device information files automatically. There seems to be a loose knit consensus that the access of these files should be automated in some way, and creating these files should be preferably automated too. The key is not bothering the user too much. To add some more petrol to the fire that it utopia, Andrew Luecke has suggested some driver automation too. This could really make the whole process much easier. There are challenges ahead with this kind of automatic module loading, but if these can be practically overcome, it could greatly enhance device support. I ranted about this idea some time back to a number of people, and it is great to see it happening.

I am really impressed with the HAL team. There is some incredible work going on there and I am pleased to see it all bearing fruit. The future of Linux device support is much rosier than it used to be.

Thanks for the GMail invites people. I will be in touch about them. 🙂

Oh, one final word. If you use Bloglines and Mozilla, go and get the Bloglines Notifier for Mozilla. I never saw that before and it is rather nifty. 🙂
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Phew, busy day today. Uploaded a new site that I have completed for a client, and then I worked on some parts of my own site. These new additions are coming along nicely, but I don’t know when they will be online; there is still quite a lot to do.

I was chuffed to bits yesterday when I wandered onto the O’Reilly Network and discovered that my latest article; The end of imitation has risen to be the number 1 web log post this month. The article has had 8346 views at the moment, and it is number 228 in the rank of all O’Reilly posts. I am really pleased – thanks for reading folks. 🙂

I am impressed with some of the work Ikke is doing with IVMan. Not had much time recently to give it a go, but this is heading in an interesting direction and I am curious as to how it compares to the Gnome Volume Manager that the Rt.Hon Robert Love is hacking on. Fingers crossed all this will end up in Gnome 2.8, as is being furiously discussed.

Oh, and I seem to have missed out on the free GMail invites that everyone seems to be getting. Anyone want to send one this way?