The laptop I purchased on eBay showed up a few days ago (thanks to a friend who was willing to drive it up from my house). It’s already got Debian Etch running smoothly, and of course XP in case I need it — you know how schools are with Windows. Fortunately I have not needed to boot Windows yet.
Development on the go… fantastic.
Stats:
Over Christmas break I took a test my mom wanted me to — one based on finding out what types of things you’re good at, not your personality. I came out the strongest in “Ideation” which is defined by the book as the creation of new ideas. Looking back on my life I can see this coming out a lot. And I do mean a lot. I’m great at coming up with new ideas, but once I’ve sufficiently explored one to my satisfaction I put it aside. So you are probably going to see a lot of new projects here with little or no closure. Eventually the source code to all of them will be released under the GPL or some other open-source license. It’s my hope that if one of my ideas generates enough interest that it will be taken on by someone else to be developed into a mature project.
Just a few thoughts. On to the main entry, which is another — surprise — idea!
I wrote a while ago about an idea to jail a Linux process, and a few nights ago I finally realized how I would implement it: D-Bus. A security manager installs itself in a well-known location on the session bus, and programs that know about it use it to request authorization before performing actions. I’m calling the D-Bus specification “Fuzz” for now.
The screenshot to the right is a proof-of-concept implementation of Fuzz, using C# for the manager and a C library preloaded into Iceweasel as a client. This is a live screenshot, not a mock-up — the system works, right now!
So I guess we’ll see how long before I tire of this project. Hopefully not before I have an implementation that works for most needs.
I’ve finally put Kaffeeklatsch in a Subversion repository, and a public one at that! Simply check out from https://layla.chrishowie.com/svn/kaffeeklatsch and build… well the build process isn’t that simple, but oh well. You will need Tao, the Lua 5.0 library and development headers (check your distro’s packages), and Mono. Having MonoDevelop around will make the build process a bit easier.
Happy new year, and happy visualizing!
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