Portrait of Edd Dumbill, taken by Giles Turnbull

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What I make

expectnation
a conference management web application


XTech Conference
a European web technology conference

Of bunkers, building and Bluetooth

It's been a while since my last update. The pressures of work have been great enough to keep me from being sufficiently interesting to write about it.

Circumstances have, however, conspired to make me a little bit ill, which has the advantage that I don't feel guilty about writing a weblog entry. Despite my efforts to create a bunker of security here in the wilds of the north -- I am safe from the coming winter of Wintel-led DRM hegemony thanks to my Linux/PowerPC/AMD infrastructure -- there are phenomena that are able to penetrate the stability of my environs.

The first of these is sickness: oh for an immune system as hardened as OpenBSD. The second is a building project on our house that has decided to impinge on my office. Hence the network operations centre that is my Wintel-proof office must be shut down, dust-sheeted over, and protected for most of this week.

Someone said that two things are certain in life: death and taxes. To that I will add the inevitable tendency of building projects to expand and interfere with everything around them. The corollary to this is that it will always happen at the most inconvenient time possible.

Enough twittering. The project occupying most of my time recently has been Bluetooth on Linux. Firsly, I've been making some good progress on GNOME Bluetooth, thanks in part to the provocation of Bastien Nocera. GNOME's own Cockney Frenchman has joined me in working on the project, providing me with more motivation.

Bastien encouraged me to get rid of Bonobo, GNOME's component object model, from the code. He was right. I originally added Bonobo support to the core Bluetooth control subsystem in order to make it easy for scripting interfaces to utilise it. In doing this, I overlooked two things:

  • most GNOME application code is still written in C, from which Bonobo access is verbose and clumsy; and
  • scripting language bindings, particularly Python, are very easy to generate for GObject-based code.

So, the Bonobo controller has been replaced by a simple GObject based class, and things are starting to move along again. The main management application is being written in Python, which makes a lot of sense for a GUI app. It's simply quicker to tune and prototype there. I hope we can make a tarball release of the new code soon. It will require a big rewrite of the Phone Manager application, unfortunately. Maybe this is a good time to eradicate the C++ from that application, as much as is possible.

The second project occupying my time is writing a chapter on Bluetooth for a book on wireless Linux. It's fun to consolidate all my knowledge on Bluetooth, and at the end of it I think I'll be able to make some recommendations as to what Linux needs to provide an easier Bluetooth experience for the user. Mostly because of the requirements for a recent or patched kernel, and the early stage of most of the userland tools, you need a certain amount of confidence to use Bluetooth on Linux right now.

The upside of this little activity is that the advance on the writing is funding the purchase of my outstanding wishlist of Bluetooth gadgets: an audio headset, a mouse, keyboard and a printer interface. All of these have Linux support in one form or another.

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