I use my email inbox as a to-do list. While an email's in there, it means action is required. Today, for the first time in over a year, I reached the zero-email point. Time to celebrate!

Mono

There are some other reasons for celebration this week, too. One of these is the release of the second beta of Mono. This is the last beta before the final 1.0 release at the end of this month. Happily, Niel Bornstein and I have enough time to check beta 2 out against the examples in our book. We're expecting the book to be out mid-July, a few weeks after Mono 1.0.

Debian

Another happy event is that GNOME 2.6 made it into Debian unstable. My contribution to this is the maintenance of the packages for the Epiphany web browser. I also uploaded the Epiphany extensions package today.

GNOME Bluetooth

I've been making time to work on libbtctl, the underlying GObject-based library that's part of my GNOME Bluetooth project. For a long time I've been needing to rewrite the object-exchange (OBEX) layer to integrate well with the GLib event loop, and not die horribly. The example OBEX application shipped with the openobex project has one or two unfortunate bugs in it, which I'd previously cut-and-pasted into my own code. Through some heavy-duty reading of the libopenobex source code, I now feel more confident about the OBEX support.

In parallel with the C code, I'm maintaining Python and Mono bindings, so Bluetooth functionality should be available to these environments at the time of release. These languages make exchanging files with devices like cellphones a matter of two or three lines of code.

I've been moving more functionality that was previously in the applications alone into the libraries. I'm now far enough on with the underlying libraries that I can bring the application layer up to date, in particular applications like Phone Manager.

Linux Unwired

Still on the Bluetooth front, Marcel Holtmann released version 2.7 of the BlueZ libraries, as I mentioned earlier. This makes some parts of Linux Unwired to be inaccurate, so I published errata on my Linux Unwired page.

Laptop

I foolishly caused my Sony TR1-MP laptop to need to be reinstalled the other day. It was one of those errors which made me decide to reinstall, and then realise later I didn't need to. Too late by then, of course.

I tried out Fedora Core 2, after a night of downloading ISOs. However, after a morning of frustration, I went back to using Debian unstable. The main reason for this is that the process by which new kernels are compiled was unfamiliar to me. Simply compiling a known-good kernel, tweaking the grub configuration and installing wasn't good enough, FC2 managed to oops it on boot. The kernel as distributed takes way too long to boot for my laptop (alas, suspend not yet working) so recompiling was a must.

Something seems strange to me with the font handling on FC2. Bitstream Vera Mono has the right stalk of the "m" cut off in gnome-terminal, and the configuration of freetype gave significantly different letter shapes to those I get from Debian.

It's not all bad, and it's largely a matter of familiarity, I guess. FC2 did have a nice installer.

The other upside to this tale was that I discovered a neat program that allows me to use the 1280x768 resolution of my laptop without a proprietary X server. Though the XiG server used to work just fine, my DFSG-purity is now restored.

What I really need for my laptop is Debian on a 6-month release cycle.

Conferences

I booked my accommodation for this summer's season of conferences: GUADEC, Desktop Developers' Conference, OLS, and OSCON. Phew.