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OLS

Monday, 28 July 2003  |  Zack Rusin

I didn't think that I'm going to write a blog describing OLS, but I wanted to point out a few things:

  • Nat's dashboad presentation - horrible. The man curses more than I, or anyone else I've ever seen does. I don't know if that's the way he is or whether he was doing that only for the talk but that still doesn't explain why "fuck dude, shit doesn't work" or "shut the fuck up dude, let me finish" were the leading ideas of his presentation. Other Gnome developers/users present on the talk served the purpose of cheerleaders for Nat. The whole thing was just stupid. The basic idea is good, unfortunately it's pretty much taken from the Microsoft Longhorn. Like Aaron once noted in his blog, the gui for this thing is unacceptable. It's way too intrusive. Also the quering mechanism that Nat & co. are using is pretty much based on broadcasts of clue packets all over the place which simply will have to change at some point or it will become incredibly slow. My favorite quote from the presentation though is : "Dude, we have like 1000000 threads running at a time, we create a thread for string duplication!", which, I think, was a good thing in Nat's eyes. Heh, good luck...
  • Havoc's freedesktop.org bof - the discussion in itself was limited, but only because the crowd has been mostly composed of kernel hackers who simply don't know that much about the freedesktop.org initiative. After the presentation Havoc, George and I went to a bar to talk a little. I had a horrible headache that day but conclusion I have is : "Havoc is a great guy". You can quote me on that ;) Hopefully we'll see him on n7y
  • Keith's/Carl's Caito tutorial - in one word "impressive". I do like the idea and implementation. The design is clean and api very friendly. I'll be playing with it today, pretty much because I want to play with it on OS X. Porting Xc to OS X will be fun ;)
  • In other news I coded a lot during the whole thing. Some of the things I'll commit today or tomorrow include :
  • AltiVec instruction detection in KCPUInfo,
  • an icon in the KMail email fetching statusbar notifying users whether the connection is ssl/tls encrypted (that one is for George ;) ),
  • some accelerator fixes in KMail that we found,
  • new OSCAR protocol implementation, based on Gaim's libfaim so that Kopete's and Gaim's team can share some code.
  • Anyway, back to coding...