Apr 2 2005

Beagle, QEMU, and the week in review

Got Beagle installed on the laptop. So far so good. We’ll see if it makes bug hunting easier. I don’t notice it scanning my web history. But, it’s installed and I can fiddle with it more later, that’s what linux is all about right? =)

Running two+ builds at the same time, updating ubuntu, browsing the web, and indexing with beagle is really punking my poor Cel 466 laptop. Maybe after little Locke is born I’ll pick up a new laptop. Yeah…. riiiiight. =)

Tried out QEMU at work and was really surprised at how well it worked. But I grabbed the latest beta of VMWare (5) to run XP on the AMD64 when I get things switched. I’ve still got a few things to do first.. like get my SVN repository off there. Fortunately I did the flat file storage rather than berkley DB.

Brandon left this week. Fortunately my pro-active of my two demi-bosses took the week off so I wasn’t immediately overwhelmed with requests. Oh.. but the one I did get made me want to follow Brandon to his new gig. They asked me if I could quickly extend MSI’s functionality so that it would let you roll back our installs on an uninstall. So say someone installs an update to our product.. they want to be able to remove the update and have it put the original files back – by the next release – July 1st.

While this might seem like some cool functionality and handy… it’s not the way MSI works. You install a patch to a product and you’ve got to remove it all and reinstall the original package to go back. But yeah.. it’s not trivial.. and I’m already trying to finish the System Management application I’m working on and make all the changes to the current installs. And find time to switch the build system to NANT and all the installs to WiX.

Okay.. enough boring MSI/Install stuff.

No real forward movement on ReadyReply this week. I got maybe a couple methods in. But now I’m into the meat of defining data handling methods and the UI rewrite. I’m thinking I’ll get a large chunk of work done at the Mono Meeting this Sunday. This twice a month thing is a good idea simply because it’ll get me to focus more.

Oh and it doesn’t help that I’d rather spend all my time booted into ubuntu when the project is on the win partition of the laptop.

Ever since I installed netapplet I’ve had problems with wireless in ubuntu. I’ve since ditched netapplet..but it’s now a chore everytime I boot the system. It’s not persisting key information at all (should it be?). And to get things connected I find myself having to throw it in by hand with iwconfig. Not such a big deal.. but it takes for ever for it to take and actually get up and running. This kind of “this can’t be that hard” problem makes one feel like a real feeb.

So I installed KWifiManager after reading about it in Linux Magazine… sucked. Wouldn’t even bring up the configuration menu. And, even though it showed I was connected to my AP… when I ran a scan for AP’s.. it said there weren’t any. Hmmm. SO I scrapped that. Anyone have any suggestions for wireless managment? It can’t be that Windows handles this better.

Oh and Chris and Eric are right.. KDE ui blows.

And, I’ve yet to grok the multiple desktop system. I just don’t tend to use it even though I’m obsessed with desktop realestate. I like to have enough room to see everything in one window. If it’s off the screen I run the risk of forgetting about it. But perhaps that speaks more to my scatter brained approach to things.

There’s an app called Skippy which apparently spaces out all the windows so you can pick one and then collapses them back with your selected window top most. Kind of like in Nat’s demo at BrainShare this year. Maybe I’ll install that and check it out.

Oh well.. I’ve babbeled enough.. MonoDevelop is done building… time to start hunting bugs with Beagle. =)

By RevFry • Uncategorized • 4 • Tags: , , ,