By RangerRick, on January 22nd, 2010%
I’ve been making good progress on getting KDE 4.4 (release candidates) working. It’s been quite an interesting ride, in both a good and bad way. =)
First, there’s the fun of 10.6 making it even harder to have code that forks without it accidentally exploding on the CoreFoundation fork-without-exec prohibition. I was able to solve this with a combination of fixes from macports’ kdelibs4, and some of my own code which changes things to use low-level POSIX APIs instead of Qt APIs for some bounds-checking before execution.
Next, there’s the fun of Phonon. KDE 4.4 requires a newer version of Phonon than what ships with Qt (even Qt 4.6). On OSX it gets even hinkier, since the QuickTime plugin for Phonon requires private Qt headers, so the only sane way to build it is to build the Phonon included with Qt, rather than building it as a separate project.
I ended up adapting a patch the Kubuntu folks use to inject a modern Phonon into Qt 4.6. In the process, I finally got around to learning my way around Git (and gitorious), and have set up my own . . . → Read More: KDE4 Progress
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By RangerRick, on September 8th, 2009%
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, with Snow Leopard out, people are scrambling to fix packages that haven’t been already. I was a slacker in running the seeds this time around, and haven’t really had much chance to give my packages a serious look until recently, but FYI, I am working on getting everything building everywhere I can.
Some notes on popular stuff:
KDE3: There were a number of annoying things blocking KDE3, but with the approval of some of the other maintainers, I’ve got a lot of the deps that were failing fixed up, and I’m working my way through a full KDE build and hope to have everything hunky-dory in unstable in the next few days. KDE4: First of all: there will not be KDE4 on x86_64 in the near future. Qt4/Mac 64-bit does not have the Qt3Support framework, which plenty of KDE4 bits still depend on. I’ll definitely be making sure that KDE4 builds fine in 32-bit mode, and in 64-bit X11 though, and after that, well, we’ll see how much work it is to excise Qt3Support from at least the base libraries. In the process, I’m going to try to . . . → Read More: Fink and 10.6
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By RangerRick, on July 29th, 2009%
I’ve been spending some spare time working on an OpenNMS iPhone app, and things are coming along just great. As many of you know, I do a lot of work with porting various UNIX C/C++ applications to Mac OS X, but despite now having many years of practice doing such things, I actually have very little knowledge of writing C/C++ code from scratch.
I’ve debugged many a bad header, but up to this point I could count the number of lines of code I’ve actually written where I need to manage my own memory on erm… well, 20 hands? OK, bad analogy.
Still, it was with much trepidation that I approached finally hunkering down and learning Objective C. The verdict is: not bad. I did have to go through some growing pains learning how scoping and memory management works, but it’s not as troublesome as I’d feared — and the class libraries are pretty robust. In a couple of weeks, it’s nearly feature-complete for what I wanted to get working for a 1.0 release. All that’s left is the alarm detail page, and being able to acknowledge alarms from the app.
. . . → Read More: Getting My Feet Wet: The OpenNMS iPhone App
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By RangerRick, on June 10th, 2009%
Just a note to say that I’ve released KDE 4.2.4 to Fink unstable. And now it’s time for the fun part: big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff.
KDE4/X11 Plasma Desktop on Mac OS X in Xephyr Working KOffice file asociations
Actually, that was just the text saying that I was going to have big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff. Here’s the real thing:
It breaks stuff!
But let me explain: it makes things better! Because of some esoteric stuff relating to case-sensitivity, existing packages, and bugs in Fink dpkg, there were issues on a number of people’s systems with the existing KDE packages and conflicting paths. Of course, the root of the issue is that Fink didn’t have a proper “/opt” type directory, so a number of packages for quite some time have been using “/sw/lib” for that purpose (/sw/lib/qt4-x11, /sw/lib/flex, etc.)
Since I was going to have to move things around anyways to fix this issue, I decided to do it right. As of Fink 0.29.7, the package . . . → Read More: KDE 4.2.4 Released to Fink Unstable
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By RangerRick, on May 8th, 2009%
The conversation has continued over at the 451 CAOS Theory blog. In response to my musings on intent, David Dennis asked a great question:
Benjamin,
A question for you (and Tarus). Is this topic important to you because:
You believe it’s an important marketing differentiator for the software you work on vs. competitors You believe it’s an important philosophical / moral issue worth evangelizing both
Tackling a) involves traditional marketing objectives around branding, awareness, messaging, positioning, etc. Not necessarily a cake walk, but certainly possible to make progress.
Tackling b) involves changing the way people think and behave, which is much much more challenging.
My response is:
Definitely both.
From a personal point of view, I’ve been involved in open source software since before the phrase was coined, so I do feel that it is at least a personal philosophical issue. BUT I’m also a pragmatist, and I know that arguing purely for philosophy’s sake will not convince anyone.
That said, that philosophy drives me to support the companies that I think are doing it “right.” I work for OpenNMS not just because I . . . → Read More: The Open Source Philosophy (Continued)
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By RangerRick, on May 7th, 2009%
There has been a lot of discussion recently on the Open Source Definition, and the use (and abuse) of the term “Open Source.” One of the things that has been missing from this discussion is a higher-level overview of where the friction between “open source” and so-called “fauxpen source” comes from: intent.
The Open Source Definition arose out of the ambiguity of the word “free” in “Free Software,” as defined by the Free Software Foundation.” In the English language, “free” is a loaded term that has two meanings: “freedom”, and “costing nothing.” It was created to get rid of some of the emotional baggage that came with the intense philosophical point of view of the FSF, but just because the OSD is more “business-friendly” does not mean that it doesn’t have the philosophy and intent of openness behind it.
This friction comes from two very different approaches to open source that I think have been missing from a lot of the discussion regarding how open source applies to business models. I’m going to call these “community value” and “monetary value.”
In some ways, this dichotomy reminds me of the . . . → Read More: The Open Source Philosophy
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By RangerRick, on April 12th, 2009%
Alright, folks, the bearding has commenced.
Now’s your chance to make a pledge for the Carolina Hurricanes Kids ‘n’ Community Foundation. Just hit the “Pledge a Friend” button, and put in “Benjamin Reed“.
If you know me, you know my dedication to never exposing my unfortunate double-chin to the horrors of sunlight. Don’t let this sacrifice be in vain! Pledge now!
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By RangerRick, on April 9th, 2009%
In the ’05-’06 Stanley Cup run, I grew a pretty substantial playoff beard, just for the heck of it. (see fig. 1, pictured right)
This time, the Hurricanes are doing a great charity event for the Kids ‘N Community Foundation: the Beard-A-Thon!
When the regular season games are over, I’m going to shave, and then grow a playoff beard as hard as I can.
Now, as I mentioned, it’s a charity event, and I need you folks to help me out, by pledging at the Beard-A-Thon page. Don’t forget to enter “Benjamin Reed” where it says, “ There’s a specific beard grower I’d like to support.”
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By RangerRick, on April 3rd, 2009%
I’ve just committed all of KDE 4.2.2 to Fink Unstable.
There’s still a lot of rough edges, but it’s definitely at least beta quality, and a lot of apps work great. It includes a number of fixes, including updated scripts to register all of the desktop files properly with ksycocoa on post-install, case-sensitive filesystem fixes, and a number of other packaging fixes. I’ve also finished packaging all of the “core” KDE distribution.
I’ve got Amarok working in my experimental tree, I just need to do a little more testing before I can release it (It’s based on a snapshot of what will become Amarok 2.1.0, since 2.0.x has some build issues on Mac OS X that are difficult to resolve). Also, the KOffice folks just put out a release candidate that I’m working on finishing up packaging on. Hopefully I will have that out soon.
As always, please let me know if you run into issues. I’ve test-built on 10.5/i386 and 10.4/ppc so I’m sure some 10.4/i386 and 10.5/ppc users will give bug reports soon. 😉
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By RangerRick, on March 31st, 2009%
If you’ve followed this blog for a bit, you know that I write music and (finally) released an album last year.
One of the places my music is available for download is bandcamp.com, who offers up a nice little download/portal service where you can make your music available. You can get my music there for free at 128kbit, or if you want to support my music, or get a higher-quality format (all the way up to FLAC and Apple Lossless!), you can name your own price.
I was looking at my download/listen statistics, and I saw something strange. They do 60-day, 30-day, week, or daily graphs, along with defender graphs.
Defender?!
So I clicked on it, and I saw the coolest most useless statistics graph ever. You can play defender in your graphs. The little UFO flies around, there’s people on the ground, and you can move your ship back and forth and shoot them. Awesome!
60-day graph:
Defender graph:
How cool is that!!?
Share on . . . → Read More: Best Useless Stats Ever
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