Was reading The Divine Invasion by Pillip K. Dick last night and thought this quote was pretty good:

“High art was for those who saw death rather than lived death. For the dying creature a cup of water was more important.”

Wow. Ok, what a week.

So Friday was fun and I had to get 4 stitches on the top of my head. Ok, enough said about that!

Yesterday, after reading a /. article, I installed qemu and its accelerator module.

After playing with it quite a bit, I officially dub it ‘very freaking cool’ but not ‘completly unfathomably amazing.’ That is, I can’t nuke my windows partition I use for a few work projects just yet.

I followed the HOWTO here for the most part. Just extract the kqemu tarball into its subdirectory within your untarred qemu CVS tarball’s dir. Then just ./configure && make && make install as normal. Also, make sure your kernel source/headers are available. If not, configure will complain.

Then fire up the kernel module (modprobe kqemu) and you’re ready to rock.

This morning, I overslept and then was pulled over trying to make it to campus on time.

Me: rolls down window “This isn’t going to be a warning is it.”

Cop: “No.”

To be fair, I only ran over 3 underage schoolchildren while talking on the phone, smoking a square, and juggling flaming tennisballs!

Incoming super geek blog post … in 3, 2, 1 …

Starting things off with a sexy twist, this site is amazingly cool: http://panic.com/goods/. It’s really amazing how far client side web tricks are progressing.

Jesse: Following ifolder’s dev process, it seems as if Novell is fractured when it comes to OSS development (which can be expected when working within a collosal company like that, with many levels of management and understanding of the free software philosophy).

Of course it’s common knowledge now that there are 2 commonly used ways to make money using OSS as a business model.

1* Open all code and development. Other people can reap all benefits of the software freely, but in turn everyone wins as work done by individuals is (hopefully) pushed back into the product.

2* Open part of the code and development, but keep a key portion of it propriatary so that businesses have an incentive to pay you mucho dinero.

In my opinion, 1* rocks the house, *2 sucks the big one. Keeping parts of the code, and especially the development process closed just frustrates potential developers, and you might as well just keep the entire system propriatary from the getgo.

I hope that as more people in the Novell ranks ‘just get it,’ we’ll see more 1* (opening Ximian connector, placing Evolution within Gnome base, etc) and less *2 (ifolder/netware). I’m with you in hoping that Hula attracts some community involvement!

Ok switching gears … (I should really break this up into two posts. Oh well.)

Seth Nickell made an awesome post which anyone interesting in ooh-la-la desktop effects should read. He brings up a very interesting point that has worried me quite in the past concerning coordinating efforts between multiple vendors (mostly Novell and Redhat). I first saw this when Novell announced NetApplet and Redhat in turn suddenly announced all the in-house work they had been doing on NetworkManager, which had no press prior to that date that I had seen. This isn’t to say that there was no mention of it at all; please correct me if I’m wrong here.

Seth’s concerns are right on.

I think the solution is pretty simple though, and I never thought I’d say this, but the guys working on these in-house technologies need to blog, blog, blog! Get the guys on planet.gnome for cryin out loud! Also, it probably couldn’t hurt to have more of this work discussed on the fd.o listservs.

Whew, I just noticed I’ve been typing all this in gedit, when I really should be using Tomboy (and of course you should to if you aren’t already!). What Tomboy really needs is to be able to export a note via XMLRPC to a blog. Maybe I’ll look at the Rails code Tobias just released to hack something into the bliki Jesse and I are working on.

Today was Addi’s first doggie training class! Well, actually it was Addi’s first people training class. As the trainer Dan said, and I agree: it’s harder training people than it is training dogs. I didn’t take any pictures because it was a ‘just people’ orientation style day, so instead, here’s her with a bone hanging out of her mouth!

Also … Windows sucks less to develop under at work now!

XFCE4! Check it out: http://www.oliwen.com/bamanzi/cygwin/xfce4/