Due to recent events:

PERPETUAL PEACE:

Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper’s sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is not for us to decide. But one condition the author of this essay wishes to lay down. The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman. Such being his attitude, the practical politician–and this is the condition I make–should at least act consistently in the case of a conflict and not suspect some danger to the state in the political theorist’s opinions which are ventured and publicly expressed without any ulterior purpose. By this clausula salvatoria the author desires formally and emphatically to deprecate herewith any malevolent interpretation which might be placed on his words.

Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch

Nein, zum Pferdeschaum gelangt nur der frustrierte, manische, glühende Maler, der, apriori zum Scheitern verurteilt, sein Gemüt soweit aus dem Gleichgewicht zu bringen vermag, vom heiligen Zorne ergriffen den Schwamm an die Leinwand zu schleudern, damit endlich das Schicksal auch seinen Anteil beitragen möge.

Mit einem drei Wörtern: Der absurde Maler.

A. Walton has a good post about ubuntu’s new notification system [mockups]. The mockup for sure looked shiny, but I totally disagree with the idea that you can’t click on them anymore; they instead will get transparent as soon as you move the mouse near them (and they will be click-through-able).
On a second note about the action removal: While I of course agree that it is bad thing if a notification -that you could potentially miss- is the prominent (or even the only) way when a  user interaction is required, I don’t get what is wrong with using actions (that includes clicking on them) as a shortcut to something.

Google food is good, frozen yogurt totally is a win and it is good to see Leslie and the rest of the cabal again. Oh and Michael coind a new phrase!

[Yes, as Jorge pointed out, my hackgotchi is totally outdated.]

“… die Individualisierung des Gewinns und die Solidarisierung des Verlusts.”

VBoxMount is a little tool for providing virtual disk images from VirtualBox as linux block devices. It uses the linux kernel’s network block device driver to do it in userspace (otherwise we’d have to bring vbox code into kernelspace which is a no-go).
I have been developing it for Topalis. From the very beginning of the project it was clear that it should become open, and maybe integrated into VirtualBox itself later. It is currently hosted on Launchpad, including all its awesomeness (bazaar branches, releases, bug-tracker).
Grab the first release here. File bugs here. Have fun!

The next item on the ToDo is snapshot support.

P.S.: It is a bit ugly to build right now, mostly because the VirtualBox’ SDK doesn’t include the necessary headers, nor a package-config file. I will file a “bug” about that at their bug tracker and hope that this will change.
If out-of-tree building doesn’t work, you could try the old in-tree branch here. The in-tree version is not as up-to-date as the out-of-tree since I only use the latter one for developing.

Herren WC

Behinderte Herren WG

OMG, The Travelling GNOME was here …

… he met the gang …

… enjoyed the view …

… and watched the humans coding.

The other human on the photo is Clemens Buss, my SoC Student, who visited me to hack on GEmblem and GEmblemedIcon. Which landed upstream. His first code in GNOME, already at the very heart of it! I am a proud Monkey – aeh Mentor! :-)
Next step is to make use of it in the HAL volume monitor in gvfs and patch nautilus to use it. Of course its also the foundation for the general use of Emblems ins gvfs/gio – which of course needs lots of thinking and coding.

Kai showed me posterous the other day and I signed up yesterday. Voilà! It
allows to post by sending mails to post@posterous.com. The cool thing
is, it will cross post to your blog, twitter, tumblr and even add photos
to flickr at the same time. If you don’t want it to you can control it
by specifying the services in the recipient part of the e-mail address,
e.g. twitter@.. (or combine services by concating them with +). Only
missing service for me is identi.ca.

Cool stuff.

Posted by email from Christian’s posterous