eric’s extremeboredom

adventures into and out of extreme boredom.

Author Archives

Thanks for sending Synapse off to a great start!

I’d like to extend huge thanks to the hundreds and hundreds of people who have showed interested in Synapse these first few weeks. This project is a huge undertaking, and all the support really means a lot. I’ve read every tweet and nearly every comment on Reddit, Lifehacker, and other blogs, and the message is [...]

Announcing Synapse!

Today I’m extremely happy to officially announce the project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s called Synapse, and while it may look like just yet another instant messaging client, it’s actually much more than that. The web has changed a lot over the past few years. Web applications now offer rich [...]

Qt to be LGPL!

A few months ago, I asked the question Why didn’t Nokia change Qt’s licensing model? As it turns out, the reason was very simple: they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Yesterday it was announced that Qt 4.5 will be available under the LGPL. I’ve been working on a project recently using Qt/C# and [...]

Caught

View Larger Map (That would be me in the green)

DNS SRV Lookups on Linux from C#

The .NET framework’s System.Net.Dns class is incredibly lacking. It only supports the basic name to address and address to name functionality, while I needed to do an SRV lookup. Looking around, I only found windows-only C# examples that used dnsapi, so I wrote a quick wrapper around glibc’s libresolv library. http://gist.github.com/27591 $ gmcs -out:srv.exe -unsafe [...]

Mono 2.0 Packages for Ubuntu Intrepid

I was disappointed to read that Intrepid will not include Mono 2.0, so I created packages. They’re available for download from my PPA.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/firerabbit/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/firerabbit/ubuntu intrepid main

Please let me know if you find them useful!

Note that these packages are unofficial, if you have any problems, please let me know directly. Do not file an ubunu bug.

Also, here’s the diff against the pkg-mono repository which is currently at v1.9.1.

Why didn’t Nokia change Qt’s licensing model?

Background Licensing issues have always surrounded Qt. The GNOME project was started partially because at the time, Qt was closed-source and there was a need for a free software desktop. Today, Qt is dual-licensed: GPL and commercial, so KDE is certainly a free software desktop just as GNOME. However, the GTK/GNOME library stack has one [...]

Roombacide

My roomba tried to commit suicide today. It managed to line up the two shoes and box you see here trapping itself, then went around in circles until it’s battery died. Sadly, this Roomba has hated life from the very beginning. The day after I got it, it forced it’s way under my couch scratching [...]

SCALE 2008 Wrapup

I had a great time at SCALE, here’s a wrap-up of some of the things that went on: The first day had two tracks all about open source in healthcare. Speakers included Scott Shreeve (co-founder of Medsphere, and founder of Crossover Health) who gave a very motivating talk about the importance of transparency in healthcare, [...]

SCALE 2008

I’m heading down to LA tonight for SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo. I’ll be volunteering at the GNOME booth in the Exhibition Hall, so if you’re in the area, stop by and say hi!