LugRadio Live 2008

First off, I want to thank John Anderson (sontek in IRC) for letting me join his motley crew of Utah Linux hackers this weekend. Ellery was a little concerned that I might wake up in a tub of ice, but instead I woke up in a bed with Joe. Who would've thunk? Trevor (heartsbane) was a blast to chill with all weekend. My only regret is that the weekend went by so fast that I didn't have much time to hack. John, however, managed to find the time to completely rewrite Tomboy's printing addin to use GtkPrint, which really rocks considering our cross-platform focus for this cycle. Also, we were possibly violating the GPL with borrowed GEdit code, so I feel a lot more warm and fuzzy about the new code. ;-) Joe started working on classic bug #350990, which has caused a few users to really bork their notes by making a few renames. This is awesome because that bug is evil and Joe went through the pain of reinstalling his laptop and getting the whole Mono stack set up so that he could help.


Banshee 1.0 was a massive hit at LRL. I worked the openSUSE booth for a few hours each day, and lured dozens of people into my Banshee spiel/demo with the new absolutely rocking Banshee tee-shirts. I spread the word that Aaron and Gabriel would be giving a sweet demo, and sure enough, even though they were relegated to the hard-to-find lightning talk room (only 30 minutes, WTF?), we managed to pack in a full house. Watching Aaron and Gabriel is really an experience. I'm not going to use the word synergy because it's against my religion, but I'm amazed at the flow these two have even though they work half a continent away from one another. The talk was a hit, the demo was a hit, and you can check it out on Google Video.

The only thing that sucked, and yes I will call this out, is that network availability at LRL was complete crap. It's pretty hard to demo podcasts, bitchin' Last.fm integration, internet radio, or DAAP support without an IP. Incidentally, it's also hard to submit patches, live blog, or get the latest source from SVN. For shame, guys, isn't there a solution for this? This was the one shitty thing at LRL and I would gladly pay ten times the entrance fee if it would help fix this.

On Sunday, it seemed that half of the people at LRL were wearing Banshee tee-shirts. Hells yeah!


The best thing for me was just meeting everybody and hanging out. I got to talk a lot with Christian Hammond, but I was bummed to miss his Review Board presentation. I finally met Alex Graveley and Miguel, who are such a blast to hang out with. Some people really get it, and it's just refreshing to talk to them. Alex gave a pretty sweet demo of streaming virtual machines, which is actually something I've spent a lot of time thinking about so I was glad to see somebody doing something about it.


I didn't really get to talk to Robert Love, unfortunately, but his Android talk was fairly convincing. I asked him if Android was going to be a real community-driven project, with non-Google folks having commit access, making architectural decisions, etc. I was thinking of the transition Apple has made with WebKit from "here's a code drop" to having a really great community project. Rob assured me that Android would be like that, and I trust him because he knows about economics and hawks and stuff. I'm not much of a Java fan, but I think I'll download the SDK and start messing around a bit. Hell, I may finally be convinced to buy a smartphone.


You can see all of my pictures on my picasaweb.

LugRadio Live Rocked, and UIA progresses

So I'm on the plane back to San Diego after spending all weekend in San Francisco at LugRadio Live, and HOLY CRAP that was an awesome time. It could be that it was my first open source conference, or that I stayed with some awesome Utah hackers, or that I got to meet a ton of colleagues in person for the first time...but man I'm glad I went. Soon I'll post about the details, but for now I'll talk a bit about how the UIA implementation is going.


UIA Continues at a Reasonable Pace (watch out for dangling participles!)

For now we're sticking with the design approach I discussed last week for connecting the Winforms UIA providers to the UIA<->ATK bridge. But I didn't work much on that, because there are some issues with atk-sharp that Andres is busily hacking away at. Instead, I've been writing unit tests against Microsoft's implementation to pull out a ton of constant values that we need. This was really boring so I wrote a little program to automate it, though it's not very general. I think it would be cool to expand it to parse through MSDN documentation for some given classes and generate the boring unit tests for the appropriate fields/constants/etc. As it is it probably took me as much time to write the test generator as it would have to write the tests manually, and it's not terribly reusable. :-P I'll write more about it if it grows.

This week I'll continue writing unit tests, though I have some catching up to do because I spent Friday largely offline, and ditto today, so I've got to see where the team is. There's still plenty of work to be done in the providers and the core; they're just harder to test right now.


Tune In Next Time...

I started writing about LRL but it just got too damn long and I have work to do. But for now, I will fire the first volley in what is sure to be an extensive character debate. Here's young Aaron Bockover to share with you his impressions of LRL, through the magic of the karaoke Rickroll:

Yeah, I think I'll attend LugRadio Live USA

LugRadio Live USA 2008 looks like it's going to rock hard, and Southwest has cheap fares, so I think I'll go this year.

But before I book a hotel room or bother friends in the east bay...does anyone have an open couch, or a hotel room they want to split costs on?

I figured I'd go up Friday morning and leave Monday morning.