from a new Sony VAIO VGN-SZ56GN (aka SZ110 or something later, I’m sure). Very sexy, just installed Debian. Basically everything but wireless worked out of the box (had to install a kernel module, just a simple apt-get).

Edit: OK, so I lied. Not everything worked as well as I had hoped:

• Had to install the icky NVIDIA driver (and kernel-headers, etc..).
• Create an init script to switch between the Intel and NVIDIA xorg.conf files depending on what the switch was set to on boot.
• Update ALSA kernel modules, so that the PC speaker would mute itself when I plugged headphones in. Haven’t testing the microphone yet, but I suspect that’s been fixed too. Debian came with 1.0.14, and this was fixed in 1.0.15rc3 (which has been released). Also needed to force the vaio version of the driver. A newer version of ALSA has been uploaded by the Debian ALSA maintainers and is waiting to be accepted into sid.
• ACPI events via sony-pi are buggered - need to apply a patch so that the laptop gets detected correctly instead of falling back to an incorrect default. Either that, or use sony-laptop, I forget. (This appears to be patched in the latest kernel release - will get back to you on this one).
• A patch exists to make the Motioneye Camera on this machine appear at /dev/video0, so that other apps can access the webcam, but I haven’t tried nor bothered to get it working yet. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but it’s not really high priority for me at the moment. (Note: might be fixed by getting the above issue resolved)
• Cannot easily adjust backlight values. If I’m running on the Intel graphics adapter, I can jump into gnome-terminal/xterm/whatever, and run xbacklight -set 50; the NVIDIA card does not have an obviously apparent way to adjust the backlight brightness - it can adjust the screen brightness, but this does not equate to less power used. Using the screen brightness applet causes it to crash. (Related to sony-pi driver).
• Haven’t tried out the fingerprint reader, but I suspect I’ll need to install a driver or two to get that working properly too.

The amount of custom hardware on this machine makes the software issue worse than most other brands though; but the machine itself is pretty hard to beat - nice and light, long battery life, looks good, feature-full, and a full-sized keyboard.

I did also manage to remove the “Windows Vista(tm)” sticker; pretty damn hard mind you. :D

Edit x2: More detailed information will now live here forever.

It’d probably be useful to explain to everybody briefly what all the codenames we’re on about actually mean, seeing as there’s probably going to be much discussion regarding them fairly soon. Hopefully I haven’t missed anything.

I should probably also mention this reflects my perfect view of the world, and mine only. Some of the stuff mentioned here I haven’t really discussed with many, so it may hit the trashcan quickly. I’ll also avoid getting into technical details - you can check out the wiki and try to piece together how it works if you’re so keen, or you can catch me on IRC.

• Dragonfly: The current web UI implementation, duh.
• Crystal: What I intend to be the core for our new web bits - Flasher and Avocado (see below). Basically, Crystal will consist of a pluggable backend, message transport API thingy, and the base client made from Javascript. Both Flasher and Avocado would be able to plug into the Crystal’s client bit with their own (X)HTML and Javascript to make it look and do like whatever it needs to, while still being able to have access to all the helpers, communcation libraries, shared APIs, etc. Less duplicated code, FTW. Please note that some of the stuff on the wiki isn’t the latest version of what’s in my head/doesn’t make sense. Note to self: don’t write wiki entries very late at night.
• Flasher: Alex Hudson’s proposal for a web interface that can be accessed by users without a Bongo account (either on the current server, or generally). We want to be able to interact with them, share events etc., without having to register them. Primarily, people will gain access to Flasher in two ways: either by having a link sent to them via e-mail (e.g., an invitation), or by following a link from a website. Flasher will probably end up being a very cut down version of the calendaring component in Avocado, with some extra Flasher-only bits built on top.
• Avocado: the sexy, new web UI for Bongo (hopefully). Would have it’s own neato interface, and be mainly plugin-based. Mail, calendars, contacts would be part of the ‘core plugins’ shipped with Avocado. Developing/adding new plugins should be relatively trivial. APIs will be provided from both Avocado itself (for stuff like widgets, etc) as well as Crystal (networking, basic plugin stuff, …).

Comments, please!

More Javascript hacking!

I’ve been working a little utility class called TemplateBit that enables you to create little template things out of HTML elements in Javascript. There are several advantages for using TemplateBit instead of doing things the traditional way:

• Keeps your code seperated and neat. Don’t mix up your HTML and Javascript.
• Easy to modify and theme.
• Less code required to write your web application.

You can check out the source of TemplateBit, the demo source (useful if you want to know how it worked) and the demo itself. Be sure to view the demo JS source, as its easier for you to see than for me to explain.

You can also check out a version created without using TemplateBit here.

Hopefully we can utilise this for Avocado and Flasher at some stage.

Speaking of Bongo, I’m planning to do some Bongo work at some stage during the next week or two, and will be spending most of my break working towards the stuff I didn’t finish for M3. I’ve had been fairly busy of late, as (for those who didn’t already know), I had a lot of work dumped on my plate at the last minute, and the fact that my internet went down for a bit didn’t make things any better.

I also want to get the finalised planning for Crystal underway, probably after a meeting with probably the Chief Moo, and who ever else wants to come along. I’ll give out proper details as to when we’ll be discussing it so you can come and join the fun. I’m not sure if we should use IRC or the -devel.

I think that’s enough blogging for one day by my standards.

Wanting to try out some of the cool new stuff in MooTools 1.2, I’ve written a radial/pie menu in Javascript. Seeing as I’ll probably need one in the near future, I thought I might as well spend my time doing something useful.

Pie menus are actually quite useful. Shamelessly copied from Wikipedia:

Pie menus are faster and more reliable to select from than linear menus, because selection depends on direction instead of distance. The circular menu slices are large in size and near the pointer for fast interaction (see Fitts’ law). Experienced users use muscle memory without looking at the menu while selecting from it. Nested pie menus can efficiently offer many options, and some pie menus can pop up linear ones. Pie menus are shown only when requested, resulting in less distraction and clutter than toolbars and menu bars that are always shown.

You can check out a demo page (hastily put together with a full MooTools download uncompressed, eek) I’ve put up, as well as the source. You’ll probably need to remove one or two lines from the show/hide functions if you’re not building your MooTools download with Fx.Tween. The only other requirement(s) are the Array stuff, the Class stuff, as well as the CSS Selectors module.

I’ve also included proper event handling in the code, so you can have listeners for when the menu is popped up; eg: var menu = new PieMenu('containerclass', 'menudiv'); menu.addEvent('onShown', function() { alert('Menu shown!'); });

Any improvements/comments/suggestions welcome!

Dear Sydney Buses,

You suck.

1. Having about four buses come all at the same time is not cool. Also, at least have the buses spread the load of passengers, instead of having everyone hopping onto the first bus, with the remaining three completely empty.
2. Drivers who don’t know where the bus stops are isn’t cool either, especially if they’re the second-most used on that route.
3. Is it hard to provide more buses to services which are obviously overcrowded? Closing an eye to the situation isn’t going to help.
4. Can’t you fucking respond to ‘good morning’? If I can be bothered to say it when I’m half-awake, you better be able to at least say something. This doesn’t apply to all bus drivers - there are some real champs out there - but most of them are just plain dickheads. In addition to being rude, some can’t even drive (including instances where drivers will drive into trees and smash the side mirror off, requiring passengers to get off the bus - it’s illegal to drive without a side-view mirror).

Also, to those who think that travel passes permit ‘free’ travel, it’s not free. It’s subsidised travel. Not free.

I honestly believe CityRail is doing a better job with their trains. I mean, morning peak hour is absolutely ridiculous, more so than buses, but the rest of the time they’re generally equal or better. At least you can get a damn seat and they come on time. Though, I do live pretty close to the city, so I’m not sure if it’d be the same if I were travelling from Hornsby or Granville.

State-government-provided transport in Sydney is an utter disgrace. Especially you, Sydney Buses. Actually, to be honest, infrastructure in Sydney is generally poor(er) of that of other states/cities. I refrains from inserting political views about the current (Mr. Iemma’s) state government.

Kind regards, Alex Hixon

Hmm, it’s been a bit of a while since I last blogged anything Bongo-related.

I’ve been working on a bit of wiki bling lately, and as of tonight, I think I’ve got the general layout and look pretty much squared away. Seems to work great in Firefox, Epiphany, IE7, IE6 (albeit without transparent PNGs at the moment), Opera, and Safari. I’ve also been trying to do a bit of cleanup generally around the place on the wiki. Hopefully I’ll get a bit more of that done tomorrow (and possibly some Dragonfly hacking before M3).

If you’d like to enable the theme yourself and have a play, log into the Bongo wiki, click open your preferences, and scroll down until you see ‘themes’. Select the “bubblegum” theme from the list, and click OK. Tada!

Of course, this wouldn’t really be a proper blog post from me without a screenshot or something, so here’s what the skin currently looks like:

Please remember that this skin won’t necessarily become the new wiki skin; we’ll sort that out shortly, probably with a vote or something if there’s any disagreement.

If you notice any rendering issues or have any suggestions or complaints, please ping me on IRC or email me.

Rock always wins.

For those of you who have been running off trunk for the last couple revisions, it’d probably be useful to clear out your prefs for Dragonfly now that we have working code back in SVN as of this afternoon. If you haven’t - this blog post probably doesn’t apply to you. :)

Basically, you’ll just need to delete your /preferences/dragonfly file in the store. Instructions are provided with this entry, so if you’re reading this post via a Planet, you’ll need to click to ‘read more’, if you need to read them.

I’m generally hopeless when it comes to vector art, but hopefully I can get a bit better after I get the basic shapes of things going. I’m still absolutely crap at 3D objects. Well, here’s what I’ve been up to:

Awesome, or what? :D

I should probably mention that if you get a pony, it is indeed redeemable for a beer. :)

Doing what I do best, I’ve taken a good idea and stolen it. =) OK, actually I really did build upon it, honest!

Basically, I’ve come up with a system that lets you recognise the people who work on Bongo. You’re given ‘Pony power’ which allows you to either add or remove a Pony point from a Bongo contributer, say, for example, they’ve added some awesome new feature that you’ve been waiting years for, or they just screwed up an agent. After a certain period of time (possibly at the end of the year), I’ll get the top few contributers, and send them all their very own Little Pony - you too can be this happy.

So, without further ado, I present to you all: OMGPONIES. If you contribute to Bongo (yes, packagers and the like included), go on, sign up! To everyone else, give pony points where they’re deserved!

Edit: changed the way the entire post sounded.

Im in ur bongo, finding ur bugz. Jonny and Chris Lamb at Lug Radio Live 2007, hacking on something (it better be Bongo).

Edit: apparently not. Seems like the Lambs were reading emails/working on Debian.

Congratulations to all Bongo contributers/coders/clowns on the big TWO ZERO ZERO! While probably more than half of these make up missing files from my commits, it’s great to see Bongo heading in such a great direction after such a short amount of time. A great community at work, folks!

Why has nobody told me about this movie?

It’s probably the coolest thing on the planet! Daft Punk’s best album IMHO (Discovery; however, Homework is still up there) as the soundtrack for a beautiful retro-looking anime. No speech, just awesome music and limited sound effects. Go on, watch it!

Very neato new feature in Google Maps now - “interactive rerouting”. Check out the Google folk explaining it: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPOOWvP_dd8)

All I have to say is: “Damn, they type fast!”

I’ve just commited a patch to enable the use of Hawkeye under Apache. You’ll need to setup Apache as per the wiki.

I also think I may have fixed the double-login issue that was occurring, where you’d have to enter your login information twice before you could gain access to Hawkeye. If you’re still getting this problem, email me/comment so I know I still have some more work to do. Otherwise, hooray!

Now, to utilize the exposed user-management interface! Note for packagers: Fix src/www/bongo.conf.in to use similar values as those from wiki.

to me.

OK, I’ve finally bit the bullet and decided to create a GPG key (yes, I need to sign things too).

To import it into your keyring, use: gpg --keyserver gpg.mit.edu --recv-key 505ED974

or manually import it (remember to use --armor), using the public key available at http://mediati.org/pubkey.gpg.

We now have a shiny new admin panel in trunk, commited last night! Woohoo! Since we all love pictures, here’s one of the login:

Thanks to so_solid for fixing my nasty Mac OS line endings, and some of my Python coding.

After spending a few days tweaking the Hawkeye layout, it seems to be coming along rather nicely. Here’s a before and after, the left being the mockup, the other the current implementation (in Epiphany):

The Python code calculating the current memory usage is a nice touch. Plus it works fairly well in most browsers, such as IE7, Firefox, Opera, Epiphany, and Konqueror, unless you’re running IE6, which we discovered looked completely yucky (thanks Jonny).

It should also be simple enough to fully deck out the admin interface with the different tasks - the real issue is going to be getting agent pages dynamically entered into the system, and possibly getting the task group panes fixed up a bit more by sorting them into a tile view.

I’ll hold off on a patch until tomorrow, when I can hopefully get one or two more issues sorted, then hopefully post it to -devel.

A final thanks to Alex Hudson for adding me to the Planet - and to the Bongo devs for working on such a great product!