Yesterday, the second day of the
summit, was more hacking, less
talk. I did sit in on a few BOFs, and managed to get some hacking of my
own done. Most of the morning was occupied with hacking. Well, observing
others hack. I spent the morning trying to get my laptop’s WiFi
connection to come back to life under Linux. HP helpfully supplies a
little button on my DV1040 for turning off the wireless radio. While in
the Indianapolis airport and having booted into Windows XP, I turned it
off to conserve power. This had the unfortunate side effect of having it
off by default on boot up, and the button only working under Windows.
Sigh. I eventually found some details about iwconfig that claimed to
let me adjust the radio power. When I tried the command, however, I was
informed that it was unsuccessful. Expect that suddenly the wireless
connection started working. I’m curious whether it was really
unsuccessful and the fact that it works now is just voodoo or if its
just incorrect reporting in the software, but frankly I’m too chicken to
try and test it — at least while I’m traveling.
While I was working on that, Scott was sitting across from me, working
on the low level C wrapper for the web services as a precursor to the
license chooser; more on that in a moment. To my right, Aaron was working on adding CC support to
the tagging libraries used by Banshee. He made quick progress, so I’m
hopeful we’ll see CC support in Banshee soon.
Once I had my laptop up and running again, I did some mozCC hacking
before lunch. After lunch I sat in on two BOFs. The first was for ISVs,
the second on building a great community web site. The ISV BOF was
interesting, although not that applicable to what we’re presently doing.
The discussion centered around what the Gnome developers can do to make
the platform Gnome more attractive to ISVs, such as VMWare, Sun and IBM.
I suppose you could include CC in that list once we start shipping
ccPublisher for Linux. If nothing else, it was good to hear about
potential troubles and pitfalls in targeting the Gnome/GTK platform.
Garrett LeSage led the Community Website
BOF, and the discussion there centered on what a project needs to do to
have an informative, useful website that not only delivers information
efficiently, but also helps buld community. Garrett is the mastermind
behind the Beagle,
Mono, Hula and
Banshee websites, all of which are built
on Media Wiki.
wiki.creativecommons.org is also
build on Media Wiki. It’s not as pretty. Steven
Garrity was also in the session.
Steven is the guy behind the new-ish mozilla.org
visual identity, and responsible for rolling out
DevMo, also on Media Wiki. So overall
a really interesting discussion about what it takes to have a good
community-oriented website. And it sounds like Garrett and Steven are
going to try and compile some of the visual design elements for Media
Wiki together with any hacks needed, so that others don’t have to work
so hard. I’m hopeful we can learn something from that and make
wiki.creativecommons.org look better.
Late in the day I caught up with Scott, or rather he caught up with me,
with an update on the low level library. I can only say “it seemed like
a good idea at the time.” Scott was smart enough to talk to Aaron and
Larry, two app authors who were interested in integrating CC with their
apps, to find out how they might want to use such a library. The
response was, “uh, we don’t”. And I can’t blame them. According to
Scott, neither one was really interested in taking on another shared
dependency for a task they could do themselves in a lightweight manner.
That makes sense to me, and I can definintely respect their reasoning.
So the library is shelved. Now that I think about it, if that’s the case
what we need is sample code in lots of languages for using the web
services to create a license chooser. Maybe this is the excuse I finally
need to look closely at Mono.
Today is supposed to be a hacking day, too. There is a libnotify BOF I
want to attend this morning; not that I have a use for libnotify, I’m
just interested in it. My goal is to dust off my Nautilus-CC
prototype
and see if I can actually make it usable. I’ve mentioned it to several
people this weekend and had uniformly positive responses, so I guess
it’s up to me now to really make it happen.
date: | 2005-10-10 07:57:22 |
wordpress_id: | 344 |
layout: | post |
slug: | gnome-summit-day-2 |
comments: | |
category: | gnome2005 |