Not, of course, that anyone should mistake The Register for journalism, but the article on Red Hat's desktop strategy is right about 580 nm on the "yellow" scale. For those of you not keeping score, we haven't released anything that could be called consumer desktop product in over five years. If this counts as "scurrying away" from a market, I wonder how they feel about the rapid decline of OS/2 in recent years.

Tags: fail

I came into the office this morning and wrote four things on the whiteboard. By the end of the day I'd crossed three things off. I could use more days like today.

Going to see Autechre with kernelslacker in about an hour. Woot! Then tomorrow, I leave for XDC2008. I'm not on the schedule this year, mostly because I don't have a lot to talk about. I expect I'll lead an ad-hoc session at some point whinging about releasing and integration and other such boring things. Last XDS featured lots of talk about things ahead, and right now we seem to be well in the middle of getting things done. Which is a pleasant problem to have, all things considered.

Also, I don't fly out of SFO until like 10:30pm on Saturday. Bay area people, you are hereby required to entertain me.

Tags: travel, x
music: god lives underwater - don't know how to be

To whoever made it so you can't /nick when you're in a channel you can't send to: please die in a chemical fire.

Tags: fail
music: outkast - love hater

yeah, we'll get right on that.

Tags: fail
music: combichrist - what the fuck is wrong with you?

1. Enter nationality.
2. Enter rental period and locations.
3. Select desired vehicle.
4. -ETIMEDOUT.

HELLO I HAVE MONEY I WANT TO GIVE YOU. PLEASE HELP ME GIVE YOU MONEY.

But no, these guys are novices:



Give up. Find another industry. Software is clearly not for you.

Tags: fail
music: cracker - i hate my generation

Going to LCA in about seven hours. I absolutely did not lose the code I came in on a weekend to write three days before my flight, forcing a mad rewrite the day before. Nope. Nothing like that ever happens to me.

Fortunately what I've got now looks like it might actually work, and there's enough left to do to keep me occupied on the plane ride. Personal note to Australia: I don't know if this relationship can work. You always seem so distant.

After that I will be heroically uncommunicative, as I take a well deserved vacation. Then, most likely, I get to come back and wrangle both the Fedora 9 X integration, as well as Xorg 7.4. In lieu of postcards, please send your well-wishes written on the label of a bottle of tequila.

Tags: lca, travel
music: fear factory - securitron

At about 1700 last night I went out to shovel snow. This hadn't been done since at least Saturday, and it was raining for most of Sunday, so I had a good five inches of heavy wet snow to move. Took about ninety minutes, all told.

Except then later, at about 2200, I tried to take the trash out to the curb, and noticed that not only had the plows decided to run again, thus dumping about a ton of ice at the end of the driveway, but it had piled up so high that it crested over the snow pile on the curb, dumping another ton of ice on the sidewalk.

My back is rather sore this morning.

Tags: life, winter
music: queens of the stone age - mosquito song

Dual 30" monitors, lit by open source drivers. Note the remote debugging rig, which we used to get this working.

Happy Thanksgiving all. Go home, eat pie.

Tags: pie, x
music: god lives underwater - vapors

Poll #1044751
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

This is happening about a mile from my house. Do I need to be there?

I'm trying really hard to find a monitor with DPVL support, because I'd like to implement support for it in X. And failing. It seems no one wants to tell you the features that their hardware implements, because they don't want you to actually buy the thing based on what it can do. That, or it's just not implemented yet.

Is there actually a monitor out there that can do this?

There's also the semi-lazy way of discovering what devices have this, by implementing enough of the other VESA discovery specs so that I can read the appropriate bits out of the hardware, dump them in the X log, and then wait for google to index them. Which I'm sure I'll get to eventually, but there's less instant gratification that way.

Tags: lazyweb, x
music: daft punk - revolution 909

We failed to sell Jono's backpack on eBay (without his knowledge, let alone consent) from the pub because we couldn't get any semblance of functional internet (despite more than one person with a Bluetooth+GPRS/EDGE phone and an N800). This is not the flying car future I was promised, dammit.

But at least there was Pimm's.

My talk went okay I guess? Most of the people attending it seemed to be way high above the toolkit layer I was hoping for, so there was less feedback than I was hoping for. However, fooishbar did a similar talk on Saturday that was attended by the right set of people. So now we have more stuff to do. Yay!

Flying back to the states was less eventful than flying out, no delays or anything. Going through security three times was pretty awesome (wait, no). Heathrow wasn't bad so much as dated; it's impressive how much traffic they handle given how crap their layout and checkin process are. However they don't tell you your gate until 45 minutes before the flight departs, and - like every place else in the UK - the bagels aren't toasted.

Note for the future: try to live in a country with a less crap currency, lest you leave it for a week and come back a broke-ass ho.

Tags: guadec, travel
music: moloko - the flipside

<mjg59> i can't believe he's never been deported

(updated to fix markup. apparently lj's mobile UI doesn't escape html for you. i shouldn't be surprised.)

Tags: guadec

It's just as well I didn't buy train tickets ahead of time, as my flight was delayed a mere nine hours. At least I have power, and a DS.

Tags: guadec

I'll be talking at GUADEC 2007 about Xorg and Gnome integration. Right now the talk is mostly about new features coming out of X and how Gnome will have to adapt. But that's kind of lame; I'd really like to know what X can do to make Gnome's life easier.

If you have ideas for improvements, or favorite topics in X you want to hear about, hit me up with a comment. I hear there will be video of the talks, so even if you aren't going you can still see what happened. Also there are many other talks from people more interesting than me, so do check it out.

Also I get to experience the joy of international air travel again. Hopefully it will go better than my last attempt, wherein my bags went to Sydney for a week without me.

Tags: guadec, x
music: local h - hands on the bible

I skipped work today.

Update: I redact the entirety of this post because I am a blind idiot.

( (Originally...) )

Tags: livejournal
music: reverend horton heat - jezebel