eric’s extremeboredom

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 clear: [...]

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 user [...]

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 have been [...]

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 srv.cs
$ ./srv.exe _xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com
20 [...]

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.

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 major [...]

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, and [...]

I’ve been working with a few other people to resurrect GSLUG, the Greater Seattle Linux User’s group.
The next meeting is this Saturday (September 1st, 2007) at 12:00pm, here’s the announcement that Ian sent out on the list:

The September 2007, inaugural meeting of the Greater Seattle
Linux Users Group (GSLUG) will be [...]

I’ll be heading down to Portland tomorrow afternoon for Ubuntu Live! and OSCON. I’m really looking forward to meeting up with Chris and Steve, both of whom I haven’t seen in over a year.
Hacking BoF
I’ve organized a “hacking session” BoF at Ubuntu Live, anyone interested in improving Ubuntu and GNOME is invited to attend.
Here’s the [...]

I have a Xen VM set up on my server that I give accounts to friends on, and I thought it would be nice to set up filesystem quotas, so one user couldn’t take down the server for everyone else by filling up the disk.
Enabling quotas is easy, just add usrquota and grpquota to /etc/fstab, [...]