AvengerMoJo's Blog

I'm looking for 12 opensource apprentices in 2009

I have been thinking about this topic for a long time. Mainly because of my own personal background, the needs of getting technical "ethic" out to our profession has been my goal for a long time. Lot of people as for my help in this profession, but with my limited two hands, I can only do so much. Doing education take a lot of resource, and my focus may change to money making business instead.
At one point, I'm planning on making a technology professional agent which train and bring up engineers like movie star and trade with different company or industry. But it may end up doing just marketing and missing the idea of making our industry more profession.
Right now I'm working on writing a book of open source and meanwhile I think adopting 12 apprentices will give me some inspiration of topics and direction.
The main idea of the mentoring program is different from intern. My requirement for those apprentices are no older then Freshmen level and willing to join this program for at least one year. Meeting up once a week to communicate with me for assignment and once a month community activity. Blog entry required at least once a week for learning record. ( Hopefully I can keep up myself :) )
This project is still under development and looking forward to hear your input, feel free to contract me if you want to join or know someone may be interested.

Disable Bug Buddy

Since Bug buddy intercepted core dump, you may need to disable bug buddy when you need to perform core dump. Export the following environment variable will able to disable bug buddy.

export GNOME_DISABLE_CRASH_DIALOG=1

Finally get another F-Spot Online Albums working!

I was using PennAve, however my server is complete broken. All my photos are gone, all my update and workaround for the PennAve are disappear. So I would like to try something new this time.
Setting up phpfspot is not as easy as I was expected for SLED10-SP2 :)
Since php5-sqlite3 is not included in SLED10 by default, you will need to do some build service search or you need this one click install for php5 pdo , of course you may download all php5 package one by one as this article online said here . After you install the build service repo, you can install all the php5 packages as needed. Then you want to sync your photos to your server, there is a script in the package you can use. However your user may not has the same permission with the datatbase reside in server for the wwwrun daemon. So you need another script to do a chown after every rsync. After that you can just start using it ... but something wrong with my camera orientation with phpfspot or it is just another bug. Some of my photos are upside down. So I have to go in and fix some code to make the new thumbs look better. Here is the Album. Enjoy!
This is my third time setting my own blog and album. Next time I will pay for some online service :) May be ....

Getting ready for the OOConf

Last night BLUG and RedOffice 2000 join effect having a meeting with all the OpenOffice contributor in Beijing. Basically having a pre-meeting with all the members and contributor and community. It goes pretty well, RedOffice 2000 stay this OOConf will be strongly supported by the government and show how import this project is to china. I'm happy and worry at the same time. If you look at most of the chinese government hosted meeting for open source, most of those high ranking government officer really have no idea what is going on in the real life level. It make the meeting very lousy and unprofessional. On the other hand, when they love to host a "community" event as a "company or government" event and make the community less interested to join the project or even know what they are doing? I hope the government officer and RedOffice 2000 really spend some effort to create this ecosystem of community for this important OOConf meeting in beijing and make this a successful one. Don't turn it into another meaningless trade show.

Gnome Asia Summit

After two days of great gathering in Beijing, the first gnome asia summit is wonderfully finish. I'm very happy that we have such a event in China. I presented a small demo on Dbus, PackageKit and PolicyKit. Here is the presentation . We get a lot of sponsor this time, including Sun, Nokia, Motorola, Mozilla, Lemote and RedHat. Of course BLUG has alot of contributors and as a member of Novell, we have many developers coming to the conference also.
I'm looking forward to see more big event like this in Beijing. If you have any idea please contract me or join BLUG Beijing Linux User Group
I'm very impress with the Sun technology including the input method technology and hand writing input method project. I'm looking forward to work with them more in the future.

Google Summer Of Code ended

I'm just too lazy or too busy to write blog anymore. But here is the link to the project. And if you want to install into openSUSE11.0 you can just go to to search the rpm and OneClick install Have fun.

Google Summer of Code

Come again Google summer of code is here, I'm a little bit late to join being a mentor. Work has been driving me a little crazy here. But I did try to provide myself as mentor for openSUSE project. I will try to get my blog update more in the near future.

Universal Encoding Detector

After looking at all the Python, Rudy port of the Mozilla encoding detection engine. I really want to see a C library which get more flexible way of detecting encoding. So I port this extension to C and make a plugable model out of it. You can find out more in the google project home. Looking forward for you to join in and help.

How VMWare grabing Ctrl-Alt-F1 from X!

From the first look, it seem very simple. since XKB already provide lot of plug to getting in the Keyboard information. However, when you look closer. Ctrl-Alt-Fn key are really handle specially, and when X see this keysym it will not even pass it over to the client. This end up you even grabbing every key, but Ctrl-Alt-Fn will not able to grab by the client.
Then how vmware actually doing this? First look we using xev to check what kind of info we could get while clicking into VMware, we discover there is MappingNotification being send out will getting into VMware and getting out of VMware. Now we look at the XKB spec and see lot of functions is actually generating this Notification. So we need to recreate what vmware could do. Then we find xtrace. Which generate a very high detail and volume X trace log. It does really help alot. But if it could even control start and stop logging which will help even more. Then I'm pretty sure XSetModifierMapping is the functions to use.
What happen is when VMware being clicked, VMware will call XGrabKeyboard and then XGetModifierMapping for restore in future. And XSetModifierMapping to empty, so Ctrl-Alt-F1 will no longer being filter and F1 key will rather the Vmware client correctly.

ChinaFoo Camp

I just get back from the first ChinaFoo Camp, lot of peoples and lots of cool idea. I'm very excited to see so many start up in China, many creative and brave people working hard toward their goal. All in all, it is fun. Even though lot of people don't really know the format and what to do in a Foo Camp, I think next year will be better.