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Blog postings by Operational Dynamics partners and staff
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Mon, 30 Apr 2007
Fascinating thread: GtkCanvas requirements
A discussion has been taking place on gtk-devel-list this month as a number of GNOME hackers discuss the requirements that a future GtkCanvas widget might have.
A canvas widget is all about drawing; while many requirements for customized user interface don’t need such a thing (because you can always pack together various other widgets into a new composite widget that achieves the effect you’re aiming for), in the more general case you need to start drawing lines and shapes — and this is where people usually run into trouble. For one thing, drawing of any kind is generally fairly complicated, but most of the pain comes as a result of drawing things at bitmap (pixel by pixel) level — later on, anything that needs to scale (zoom in, zoom out) the resultant pixmaps is bound to look terrible.
That, of course, is what vector graphics are all about, and so the obvious thing is to use such mechanisms to do the low level drawing. For a while now, we’ve had an outstanding vector drawing library in freedesktop land, and that’s Cairo. And while Cairo is already used for quite a number of things in GTK, and while there are various higher level Canvas widgets floating around, the most interesting part of the whole thread to me was when it was pointed out that if a new GtkCanvas (in the form of a slightly lower level artifact) was used to render all the [standard] Widgets provided by GTK, then suddenly the zooming, resizing, and other warping that accessibility tools need would all be fait accompli in the toolkit itself. And it’s not just accessibility: someone pointed out that if we made it this far, then at last we’d have high resolution screen shots to paper which would make printed documentation look stunning.
Fascinating thread.
AfC
Wed, 18 Apr 2007
Meeting OpenMoko running on the Neo1973
It’s not every day you get to see a disruptive new technology that’s going to change the world.
Last week I was lucky enough to be in town when my good friends at the Bangalore Linux User’s Group (many of whom are the organizers of the great foss.in Free Software, Open Source & Linux conference) were holding a special meeting to host Sean Moss-Pultz and Harald Welte demonstrating the OpenMoko project running on the forthcoming Neo1973.
Sean has an amazing vision, and it is all the more impressive that he has marshaled the resources of a major company to support him in his effort to create a completely open source mobile telephony platform.
Yes, there have been Linux phones before, but this one is doing it right:
- tracking mainline kernel;
- no binary drivers allowed, period; which implies
- complete and deliberate standards adherence (USB spec, interfaces to all components, etc); which means
- using existing kernel drivers wherever possible, and when new code has to be written, doing so in a way that is most likely to be accepted by the kernel as a whole
Other awesomeness:
- the debug board they came up with is a full JTAG adaptor that’s so with-it that people have started using it to debug other devices;
- a build service whereby you can submit code and they will build you an image you can test immediately — no need (at first, anyway) to go through the immense pain that usually goes along with setting up a build & cross compile environment;
- a hardware emulator that runs in QEMU, so you can even get on with testing code without having to wait for a build
And, of course, near and dear to my heart:
- runs the GNOME stack: that’s GTK running up in that picture there!, and
- there are GObject APIs to talk to the device libraries, GLib main loop integration, all the goodies.
Hooray!
The device itself is really awesome. It has an amazingly high resolution screen, and it just feels nice in the hand.
Having worked in the mobile industry, I can attest to the fact that this is going to be revolutionary. A phone that you can upgrade and not have to throw away? A phone that you can create applications that you want to run and have them run on it? Most of all, this is a device that will open open new markets by the simple fact that people will be able to conceive of their own uses for it.
The fact that there are no binary drivers and that all the specs are open is amazing; even the audio codec is downstream of the radio and under Linux’s control — I know of no other device that if you wanted to prove that the microphone is off and not under third party control, you can. And as a personal note, I especially respect the fact that the device does not have a camera in it. After all, any self respecting photographer already has a real camera, why waste space and power in my phone for it?
It’s an awesome open source play. The interest of the company manufacturing the phones, FIC, is clear: what do they care what’s running on it? They just want to sell more phones, and sell ‘em they will. And yet with the momentum of the distro running on the device behind them, they will be hard to beat.
FIC is doing a production run of phones expressly for developers now; mass market release should be September sometime. Meanwhile, if you’re interested, check out openmoko.org, mailing lists, bugzilla, planet, etc. Among other gems on their wiki: a step by step guide of how to disassemble the device. Wow. Show me a conventional phone manufacturer encouraging you to do that.
AfC
Fri, 13 Apr 2007
Learning Linux?
I was amazed and indeed almost disappointed at the number of people that have approached me this week and asked “how to get started in Linux?”. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t actually have a ready answer. Conference wise I tend to hang around with people who long ago found their way [to Unix and from there] to Linux, and so had not given a lot of thought to answering the baseline question of where to start!
Luckily I had another keynote to give on the next day of the conference, so I had time to get my shit together. I prempted the beginning of my second presentation to try and address the question. I told them this:
- Read a book about Linux
- Install Linux on your computer
- Talk to people, and ask for help
- Not necessarily in that order
Install Linux
I drew up a graphic to give an overview of the lay of the land distro-wise, throwing in a few other flavours of Unix as well:
[The trend line shown there is something that occurred to me a while ago. It seems for a long time there was a clear inverse relationship between how easy something is to install versus how easy it is to maintain and upgrade over time. Ubuntu, of course, breaks the mould by making Debian easy to install, but it still isn’t as easy to maintain (from the standpoint of a power user) as a Gentoo system is. This graphic actually worked quite well as a backdrop to discussing the emergence of distros over time and the evolution of network aware dependency based packaging systems]
Read a book about it
And suggested a book for them to look up. The best one I could think of was Matthias Kalle Dalheimer and Matt Welsh’s Running Linux, now 5th edition, published by O’Reilly [one thing that’s great about Bangalore is that there are like seventeen million bookstores all full to the brim with O’Reilly books].
To the blogoverse I ask: what book would you recommend to someone to a young university student who has caught the fire of enthusiasm and wants to get started in open source?
AfC
Get used to thinking for yourself
Bernard Golden writes:
Fifth, open source. This doesn’t mean occasionally considering it. And it definitely doesn’t mean evaluating it by the standards of how you’ve done things with proprietary software … People criticize open source because it doesn’t “deliver business value.” What they typically mean is that they’re used to letting the vendor do their job of deciding what their infrastructure should look like, then providing them a roadmap of their infrastructure development plans, and then pre-integrating the solution with the vendor’s favored software partners. So, naturally, when you look at open source, it fails to do that. No open source vendor is going to do a dog-and-pony show and then build your proof-of-concept [for you] to get you committed to their solution. Instead of asserting that open source doesn’t deliver business value, run an experiment. Find out for yourself what the costs of doing open source are. And besides, as open source economics eats away at the margins of proprietary vendors … they’ll do less of the legwork for you. So get used to thinking for yourself.
I really like this. For all the FOSS cheerleading I do, I don’t normally get embroiled in proprietary vs open source debates, and I hadn’t really thought of the point that Bernard makes here: one of the biggest reasons that people will resist change is because there are many who want their answers handed to them on a silver platter.
AfC
Sat, 07 Apr 2007
Convincing students
I have a somewhat unusual challenge ahead of me next week: I have to convince a conference full of students that they should participate in and pursue open source. This will strike many readers as somewhat strange since an enormous number of the people contributing to the global free software phenomenon today are students. But from my many trips to India over the last few years I have come to understand that the university system there does not promote the sort of individual initiative that involvement in open source requires — but there are people trying to do something about it.
One such is the Linux User Group at the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India. They run an annual conference about open source, called “Mukthi”. This is a fascinating group of people. For one thing, they run their own in-house Linux conference! For another, they manage to convince the entire computing faculty to cancel classes that week so that students can attend the conference. This is exceedingly cool.
I’ve been invited to open this year’s conference. This will be great fun; there are few things I like more than standing in front of a crowd encouraging them to go wild about open source.
But that in and of itself is not exactly a topic, of course. One of the things I try to do with speaking engagements is to get a sense from the organization of what sort of impression they want me to leave. “Is there a message you want conveyed to the audience? A tone that you want me to set for the rest of the event?” That sort of thing. (I will, of course, do whatever it is I want anyway, but it’s always nice to at least try to make your hosts happy)
This one will not be easy, though. When I talked back and forth with the organizers about what they wanted to hear, they said that what it really boiled down to was that they were all exasperated about one thing: “We’ve always got people telling is how great open source is. But what good is it, really?” That made us laugh, so, I turned that around and made trying to answer that the title of my talk.
An audience of really talented young computer scientists and engineers, all about to enter the workforce: tough crowd. The conventional proprietary path is well trodden and a safe bet in most local IT industries. But it is a global marketplace and the traditional route is about getting work out of you, not about empowering you to succeed. The key to their professional future will be their ability to succeed as individuals in the global economy. The magic of the open continuum is that it changes the game: the only barrier to entry is contribution, and for those willing to risk it, there is the chance to really make a difference, and in so doing not only do they lift themselves up, but too their companies, their communities and their nation.
AfC
Mon, 02 Apr 2007
Tsunami Warning
There was a “tsunami warning” here this morning. This was initiated after an 8.1ish earthquake caused a tsunami wave to spank the Solomon Islands. Here in Sydney [which is a) a long way away, and b) around the corner from the Coral Sea and sheltered, by, well, Queensland], they closed the beaches, cancelled the ferry services, and sent large ships out to sea. My goodness. You’d think that the emergency services would have had sirens and alarms going to evacuate everyone up to high ground and safety.
Nope.
I was able to sleep right through the sirens and alarms. Because there weren’t any. Yup. Good job, there.
As it happens the disturbance that finally reached us here was 15 cm high. Get your surfboards, dudes, we’re gonna go catch some waves.
They cancelled the ferry for this?
It turns out that despite its ominous name, tsunami warning actually means “oh, there might possibly be something that you might need to know about sometime later today.” Of course, by the time anyone found that out, the media were in a feeding frenzy. Apparently, tsunami warnings get issued several times a week in various places whenever there is a rumble somewhere in the hemisphere. It is supposedly followed on the danger scale by tsunami alert and then tsunami alarm. (How anyone is expected to tell the difference between these three is beyond me. It’s right up there with the American terrorism threat levels: “Oh no! We’ve switched from orange to amber to sodium-yellow! The evil-doers are coming! Quick, Martha, get out the shotgun!”)
There are a number of places in the Pacific that do have tsunami alarms, like, as in, real alarm sirens. They practice it every month on (for example) Tuesday morning at 10:00. The point is, and everyone there gets this, that if the alarm goes off at anytime other than 1st Tuesday at 10:00, you need to be running like hell up the mountain.
Meanwhile, back in our little corner of the industrialized world, the only alarm we have here is the shark alarm. And indeed, when you hear that, it’s generally considered a good time to get out of the water. I can only hope that someone clues in that if you expect people to respond to an emergency alarm of slightly greater gravity, you need to tell people what it is first, and maybe even rehearse it once in a while so people recognize it. Otherwise, the never-cry-wolf factor will kick in and some day when there really is cause for alarm, it will be ignored — and that sorta defeats the purpose of having ocean warning systems.
AfC
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