March 30th, 2009
I am very pleased to announce the availability of the Mono 2.4 VMware Appliance and LiveCD. The new image is based on openSUSE 11.1 and every known appliance-specific bug has been fixed. There are many software updates as well:
- Banshee 1.4.3
- gbrainy 1.1
- GNOME Do 0.8.1.3
- MonoDevelop 2.0
- Monsoon 0.20
- Tasque 0.1.8
- Tomboy 0.14.0
By some accounts this is definitely the best Mono Appliance release yet. Get if from the mono downloads page and report any bugs you find.
If you have a nice open source .NET (or ASP.NET) application you’d like to see added to the appliance please leave a comment.
Posted in Mono, Technology, openSUSE | No Comments »
February 26th, 2009
Solved: I noticed the other day that Scott Reeves, who works just down the hall from me, owned most of SUSE’s PulseAudio bugs. He gave me the answer to this perplexing problem. The cause is the new “glitch free” code in pulse (ironic? yes!) which can be disabled by adding tsched=0 to the load-module module-hal-detect line in /etc/pulse/default.pa.
load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0
I need help! For the Mono 2.4 VMware Appliance we have upgraded to openSUSE 11.1 but for some reason audio plays to fast. It seems to have something to do with PulseAudio. If we remove pulse then audio plays at a normal rate but then Moonlight doesn’t play audio at all. If we can’t get this all fixed before release we will have to revert to openSUSE 11.0.
Sound in Linux has never been great and it never will be if we don’t work through these problems and plunge forward. If you care about Mono or openSUSE or PulseAudio or VMware please help me fix this bug.
Posted in Mono, Technology, openSUSE | 1 Comment »
January 17th, 2009
The ingredients list is from the recipe our family uses, titled “Grandma King’s Hot Cakes.” The instructions are based on my own experience. It’s from my Grandma Jorgensen’s ward cookbook so there was probably someone living in Salina who had a Grandma King who made these. That’s as well as I can do for attribution.
1 Egg
3 T Sugar
3 T Oil
½ t Vanilla
1 C Milk
1 C Flour
1 T Baking Powder
½ t Salt
Mix flour, baking powder, and salt. Beat egg, sugar, and oil in a larger bowl. Add milk to wet ingredients. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Let stand a while while you heat the griddle.
There’s almost no point telling you what temperature to cook them at. The recipe at my parent’s house says 450° but this morning I cooked them at closer to 300°. I suspect there isn’t a close correlation between the temperature you set your griddle to and the actual temperature of the surface. Or maybe it really doesn’t matter much and it just changes the cooking time. As a kid I was taught to cook the first side until a bubble popping on the top leaves a hole that doesn’t close. Experience tells me this is only good advice if you cook them at a lower temperature. I cook by color and smell.
The baking powder was listed as 3 t in the original but that’s exactly the same as 1 T. I suspect that might be too much baking powder but I haven’t tried it with less yet. Vanilla is not in the original. The order I’ve set for mixing should allow you to dirty only one tablespoon and one cup.
I used to think that mixing technique was important and I’ve experimented with various over the years, including two cake methods and the muffin method. The muffin method (roughly what I listed) is probably the right one but the results seem to be about the same any way you do it if the batter is not too thick. Today, for instance, I mixed my batter with a hand mixer. Normally this would result in a very bready, even rubbery texture, but with a thin batter it doesn’t make much of a difference.
Anyone who bakes much knows that one cup of flour is a useless measurement because the density of flour varies widely depending on how you put it into the cup. I have a can of flour which I always shake before opening and then I try to make sure I don’t pack the flour while measuring. Obviously it would be better to measure by weight. The amount of flour determines how thick the batter is.
I like to top mine with butter and cinnamon sugar.
Posted in Family, Food | No Comments »
January 13th, 2009
The Mono 2.2 LiveCD and VMware Appliance images have been released and contain a number of improvements over previous version. Aside from the improvements in Mono itself the new appliance includes the following:
- Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 – the open source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.0, installed in such a way that when 1.0 Final is released the update mechanisms in Firefox should allow you to update it.
- MonoDevelop 2.0 Alpha 2 – including integration with the Mono debugger and many other new features.
- Smuxi 0.6.3 – an excellent Mono-based IRC client, configured to log you into the
#mono channel.
- GNOME Do 0.6.1 – the super-slick launcher thing we love, already running on your desktop.
The best thing about this version (for me mostly, but you enjoy some of the benefits) is that it was built using SUSE Studio. Studio is a service that allows people like me to customize and build appliance images easily and inspiringly quickly. It’s hard to put into words how much I love SUSE Studio.
Studio not only makes the process of building an appliance faster and easier, it makes things possible that weren’t possible before. See, the development cycle for appliances is normally long and painful. You have to make a change manually, modifying overlay files or writing first-boot scripts, then build the appliance image (which can take hours depending on how you are set up), test the change, and start all over again. You can try to do a bunch of changes at once but you have to go through that whole cycle several times. It can be very frustrating and costly so you end up choosing to not make the improvements you’d like to make. We made many of those choices in previous releases. But Studio is so fast and so easy that you can really just play! Try various approaches to solving your problem and see what works best.
Studio also facilitates customizing the appearance of your appliance.
How does Studio make building appliances so easy? Mainly, but not exclusively, through a feature called Testdrive. Testdrive allows you to test your changes immediately by running your appliance in a virtual machine, viewing the console in your web browser. You can also make changes inside Testdrive and then click on the Modified Files tab where you can see what what was changed and add it to the list of overlay files.
If you find a problem with the Mono 2.2 Appliance please file a bug and I will try to fix it. Thanks to SUSE Studio it won’t be so difficult to fix those bugs!
Posted in Mono, Technology, openSUSE | 13 Comments »
January 6th, 2009
If you’re lucky enough to have a GrandCentral account and use Linux you’ll likely be very pleased with a little application called DialCentral. Originally written for the Nokia Internet Tablet, DialCentral lets you use your GrandCentral account to make calls to arbitrary numbers. You can already do that through the web interface but a dialer is much more convenient, especially on an Internet Tablet or Netbook. It also supports your GrandCentral and Evolution contact lists and your call history.
If you use openSUSE there are packages of DialCentral available in my home repository in the openSUSE Build Service. If you use Ubuntu or Debian the Maemo package should work for you. Source code is also available, of course.
And because everyone loves speculation: I think Google intends to integrate GrandCentral with both GoogleTalk and Android some day. It’s odd that the only VoIP supported by GC for now is GizmoProject, but this is clearly just an artifact of the pre-google years. Some day soon you will be able to make POTS phone calls from Google Talk, and probably from Gmail.
Posted in Technology, openSUSE | 3 Comments »
October 15th, 2008
Okay, it’s not quite that bad but that’s how I feel. It’s been a long and dusty road fixing the major bugs in the Mono 2.0 VMware Appliance and LiveCD.
Fixed in 2.0-1: mono-debugger was missing. This is a big deal because this is the first release where the debugger is released at the same time as, and with guaranteed* compatibility with, the mono release.
* no guarantees, implied or otherwise, unless you have some other agreement with Novell 
Fixed in 2.0-2: No sound support. This took a while to fix. Why is hal-resmgr not required by any package or pattern?
Fixed in 2.0-3: Absolutely no scalable (truetype) fonts installed. You wouldn’t have noticed probably but it breaks Moonlight which, though not included (until the 1.0 release probably), we definitely want to work properly.
Those of you who had problems with ftp.novell.com should find that it’s working much better now. Please use the torrents.
Since I’m not at all confident that nothing else will go wrong I’m not going to link directly to anything this time. Find the LiveCD or VMware Appliance at the Mono download page. Bonus points to whoever finds the next bug serious enough that I have to fix it and re-release… again.
Coming soon for Mono 2.2…
Posted in Mono, Technology, openSUSE | 8 Comments »
October 13th, 2008
Dear Lazyweb,
Some time ago I read on planet gnome that someone wrote some code that would take an existing color scheme and adjust it automatically such that where a pink is too close to white it would get darkened so that there was enough contrast, and if you changed the background to blue or whatever it would change the scheme to cope with the new background. I think it was proposed that this code go into xchat at least but would be useful in vte and other terminal and IM applications. Can someone please find me that article? My google-powers have utterly failed me here so far.
Thanks in Advance,
Andrew Jorgensen
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
