Novell's Open Audio Podcast, part 2

by Miguel de Icaza

Ted has posted some updates on Open Audio: Ogg formats are comming, he discusses high/medium qualities, why they chose the format they did and the music they use. His post is: Next Steps for Novell Open Audio.

Posted on 23 Feb 2006


Novell starts Podcasting

by Miguel de Icaza

Novell has started a podcasting show.

On the first show they talk with Brady Anderson and Calvin Gaisford from the iFolder.

Since iFolder is built on top of Mono, you should listen to this right away.

Posted on 22 Feb 2006


Linux World México

by Miguel de Icaza

I am in México this week for Linux World.

My keynote is open to the public on Thursday at 4pm.

Posted on 15 Feb 2006


Your Politics Update

by Miguel de Icaza

I ran into this article from conservative Paul Craig Roberts. Despite the growing excuses, I believe it spells out a few interesting bits.

Americans have forgotten what it takes to remain free. Instead, every ideology, every group is determined to use government to advance its agenda. As the government's power grows, the people are eclipsed.

We have reached a point where the Bush administration is determined to totally eclipse the people. Bewitched by neoconservatives and lustful for power, the Bush administration and the Republican Party are aligning themselves firmly against the American people. Their first victims, of course, were the true conservatives. Having eliminated internal opposition, the Bush administration is now using blackmail obtained through illegal spying on American citizens to silence the media and the opposition party.

[...]

Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.

The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.

(Emphasis added)

In particular I like his point about the no-fly list. It always felt dumb to have the no-fly list in the first place and all of the side effects we have heard from it are the result of this dumbness. Maybe it was naivete on my part, but this makes sense:

Consider the no-fly list. This list has no purpose whatsoever but to harass and disrupt the livelihoods of Bush's critics. If a known terrorist were to show up at check-in, he would be arrested and taken into custody, not told that he could not fly. What sense does it make to tell someone who is not subject to arrest and who has cleared screening that he or she cannot fly? How is this person any more dangerous than any other passenger?

This is priceless:

If Senator Ted Kennedy, a famous senator with two martyred brothers, can be put on a no-fly list, as he was for several weeks, anyone can be put on the list. The list has no accountability. People on the list cannot even find out why they are on the list. There is no recourse, no procedure for correcting mistakes.

I am certain that there are more Bush critics on the list than there are terrorists. According to reports, the list now comprises 80,000 names! This number must greatly dwarf the total number of terrorists in the world and certainly the number of known terrorists.

He has a follow up article, on the State of The Union, focusing in particular on the economy bits here.

On that note, Bilmes and Stiglitz claim that the actual cost of the Iraq war will end up being between one and two trillion dollars.

In the meantime there is a Sundance short that makes fun at the actual state of the economy. I found it entertaining, but it might not be appreciated by everyone (sorry, requires an updated Flash): here.

Update: Robert's second article goes well with the previous video link:

[...] The US trade deficit in ATP now exceeds the US surplus in Intellectual Property licenses and fees. The US no longer earns enough from high tech to cover any part of its import bill for oil, autos, or clothing.

This is an astonishing development. The US "superpower" is dependent on China for advanced technology products and is dependent on Asia to finance its massive deficits and foreign wars. In view of the rapid collapse of US economic potential, my prediction in January 2004 that the US would be a third world economy in 20 years was optimistic. Another five years like the last, and little will be left.

Posted on 13 Feb 2006


Mono on SkyOS

by Miguel de Icaza

Robert, from SkyOS, ported Mono to SkyOS.

On a separate post he talks about challenges he had in porting Mono to SkyOS. In the end he basically implemented the pthreads API that Mono expects, completed some kernel calls and got signals to behave like Posix signals.

The post is interesting for those considering porting Mono to non-POSIX platforms.

Xgl resources

For those of you which are interested in getting Xgl running on your hardware, check the OpenSUSE Xgl and the Compiz wiki pages for the details.

As I mentioned on the previous post compiz is a new window and compositing manager that must be used instead of your current window manager to get the most out of Xgl.

One of the interesting bits about David's compiz architecture is that the actual decoration for you windows has been moved out of the window manager into a separate process. Today there is one decorator implemented gnome-window-decorator, but hopefully more will come in the future.

apt-get on OpenSuse

I am not an apt-get user, but some of my friends are. Yesterday I found out that OpenSUSE (and SUSE) ship with apt-get, and that they can do their apt-getty-related-program-activities in SUSE just fine.

That being said, I am a Red Carpet/ZLM kind of guy (specially considering that the new ZenWorks client is implemented in, surprise surprise, Mono).

Posted on 09 Feb 2006


Imeem Interviewed at the Mac Market

by Miguel de Icaza

The Imeem founders, Jan and Dalton, were interviewed in Apple's Business Mac Market.

"With Mono" says Jan, "we have a low-cost server environment where everything but the UI for the two clients is the same C# code. Then we can use Visual Studio to create a DLL for the Windows client; and Cocoa, Objective C, and Interface Builder for the Mac client. We think we're the first company to create a cross-platform product with this approach."

They talk about Dumbarton, a framework that they built to create applications that mix Cocoa and Mono.

Thanks to Zac for the link.

Posted on 09 Feb 2006


From our Upcoming Album

by Miguel de Icaza

This picture was taken during our practice sessions for our upcoming Album "Adventures of a Spaniard in Boston", featuring the song "Gonzalo":

Miguel de Icaza and Alan Aspuru Practicing.

Posted on 08 Feb 2006


Url me

by Miguel de Icaza


Nat Friedman: what a beautiful mail danw just sent
Nat Friedman: they should teach from that mail in software classes
Miguel de Icaza: Url me
Nat Friedman: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg00115.html

Nat followed up here.

Oh, and here is a picture of Dan:

Dan

Oh, and one of Nat:

Nat

And this is what a fork looks like:

Oh, and Jakub has a nice XGL Logo.

Update: Alternative link to Dan's post is here.

Posted on 07 Feb 2006


Xgl

by Miguel de Icaza

Today Novell announced the release of Xgl and Compiz, the new window manager/composition manager to go with it. Novell has the release details here.

Videos of Xgl in action:

  1. True transparency .mpg (12MB)| .ogg (3.7MB) | streaming flash
  2. Zoom .mpg (8.5MB) | streaming flash
  3. Desktop Organization .mpg (16MB) | .ogg (5.7MB) | streaming flash
  4. Spinning Cube .mpg (16MB) | .ogg (7.1MB) | streaming flash

Stephen at CNet puts it in context in his Novell seeks to boost Linux graphics article.

Compiz is a new joint window manager and composition manager. David Reveman had to merge these into a single process to provide the kind of functionality that we wanted on the desktop.

Compiz has a plugin framework, many of the visual effects are implemented by independent plugins. We hope to see numerous plugins for new effects that plug into the existing window manager.

Now, the actual decoration rendering was split out into a separate process. Today Compiz has its own internal rendering of the window decorations which uses Cairo and an alpha channel to render its decorations.

But someone could write a Gnome/Metacity decoration renderer or a KDE decoration rendered. Both would allow existing window manager themes to integrate with Compiz.

Xgl has already been checked into the public repositories, Compiz will be checked in after David Reveman's presentation at the X conference.

Check the Novell page for details on downloading the software.

Posted on 07 Feb 2006


Mono in LinuxAsia 2006

by Miguel de Icaza

Hari, which is in charge of Mono's C# compiler, will be representing Mono at LinuxAsia 2006 in New Delhi. He will do a few talks and will also be at the Novell booth.

Posted on 07 Feb 2006


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