Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

With my laptop on 32% charge (not quite a record for me) and my own internal batteries needing a bit of charging, I looked at the programme after afternoon tea. There wasn't anything that really stood out for me as a must-see, and as Jeff said in the opening speech it's important to conserve one's energy and pace oneself at LCA. So I enjoyed a quiet walk back down the slope to Shalom College, to see if they have Wifi here yet.

I have to say that I do like the UNSW campus. It has the same style as QUT in Brisbane - fairly closely packed, and a mixture of the old and the new with little nooks and lawns of greenery amongst it all to enjoy as one goes past. Passing the John Lions garden outside the Computing Science building is particularly poignant given last year's fundraiser. And, while some people might complain a bit about the walk uphill to the conference in the morning, and even I end up feeling unfit and slightly out of breath after tackling it, it's very pleasant to walk down in the afternoon.

After Jeff's talk was a talk on Conduit, a GNOME subsystem designed to make synchronising data between a source and one or more destinations easy. It looked absolutely awesome, because the guy who gave the talk understood the problem space well and had solved it in a way that allowed both 'headless' sync to happen behind the scecnes and fully GUI-enabled ad-hoc sync with conflict resolution all beautifully handled. This allows any application that uses DBus to facilitate syncing of data, without having to be an expert in asynchronous synchronisation (not, in this case, a contradiction in terms). Jeff's talk was about enabling social networking and putting GNOME on a phone (so to speak), and this talk was about making synchronising that data seamless and easy. Cool!

And now to my afternoon's entertainment: getting my WINE patch to work. I've got all the code working, including the two bits I'd commented out because I didn't quite understand where the data was coming from. It compiles with no errors and only one or two warnings, which as far as I can see aren't caused by my code. Now I have to go through and manually label my build directory so that it has the right SELinux contexts to have execmod permissions. Presumably Fedora's SELinux configuration assumes that any big bunch of libraries compiled quite recently in your home directory aren't guaranteed to be trustworthy to use as libraries. Fine by me.

Maybe I'll find out if Wifi is enabled in Shalom, so I can post this and Google for solutions to the execmod problem.

Update: Nope, Wifi is not working in Shalom. A quick call to my front man Steve revealed that it hasn't worked today, will be ready when the gods have been appeased and the troubleshooters have shaken their voodoo sticks over it, and is only likely to be sporadic even then. I realise that this is as much a question of getting bandwidth down here as getting the time to set stuff up, and I least of all people want to hassle the network guys with requests that they're already trying to handle. But it's not a great way to end the day for everyone staying on campus.