Et tu, Cthulhu

We bought a used car. Ford Fiesta 2003 (American cars are cheaper), gray. Four wheels. Now all I need to do is learn how to drive.

Alexander Larsson has been hacking like a whirlwind, bringing us the next generation in VFS services for the desktop, GVFS. By now, a lot of the planned functionality is done, and we even have a partially done FUSE frontend which will let legacy apps that can’t or won’t link with GVFS access the user’s mounts under ~/.vfs/.

Alex’ master repository does not have the FUSE module yet, so you can get it from my repository in the meantime.

Unfortunately, the SMB backend is pretty flaky, frequently locking up when reading directory information or file data from remote shares. So if you’re a debugging hotshot and you want to help bring desktop file browsing to the next level, here’s your chance!

GVFS is pretty easy to set up and test:

• Clone, build, install to $prefix.
• Make sure you have a working D-Bus setup.
• Make sure you have the FUSE kernel module installed.
• mkdir ~/.vfs
• $prefix/libexec/gvfs-daemon
• $prefix/libexec/gvfs-fuse-daemon -f ~/.vfs
• $prefix/bin/gvfs-mount smb://server/share

The new mount should show up under ~/.vfs/, and you can explore it from there.

Last week was a pretty busy one. I spent part of it in Mexico City, seeing friends and looking for some computer gear I needed. Everyone’s talking about the new abortion legislation that will legalize the practice in the Federal District (the state that contains a large part of the city). The progressives, although (arguably) losing the presidential election, hold a majority of seats there and have struck back with legalized gay marriage, and now this. The church and other conservatives have, predictably, made a lot of fuss over being dragged into last century. Even the pope has contributed his share of outrage. I say congratulations, DF - it’s about time.

Paolita and Leo in the DF

Only two days after the above picture was taken, Paolita suffered a burglary in which she lost most of her computing equipment (read: livelihood). Since she’s an independent contractor, she’s counting on finishing her current job to pay for new stuff.

On Thursday, Leo and I set course for Poza Rica, where we’d been invited to give talks at their FLISOL arrangement. The plan had been for Paolita to come with us, but sadly, the above turn of events left her without the time and money to do so. We started out making good time, but found the highway blocked by a trailer crash, and had to backtrack a couple of kilometers for the “scenic route”. It was slow due to ongoing road work, but at least it wasn’t jammed with cars - apparently we were the only ones with a map.

Blocked highway

Alternate route

All in all, getting there took about twice as long as we’d hoped, and once in Poza Rica we found that our talks had been postponed to Friday. We got to know the local Linuxeros - an excellent gang.

Poza Rica gang

From left to right, that’s Leo, Adlair, the waitress, Marco, Christian, Xochitl and Jorge.

Although the event didn’t turn out exactly as hoped, we got to do the talks and there seemed to be some interest. The slides and source for mine are available. It’s a tiny project that illustrates how to get started writing and distributing free desktop software. It’s called “PopoMon”, and is a web-scraping taskbar alert level monitor for the volcano we all know and love, Popocatepetl.

On Saturday I was back home, and on Sunday we were invited to visit our neighbors and friends, Omar and Silvia, at their cabin. It’s located in the woods on the outskirts of Xalapa, less than an hour away by car. Once you leave the city, things change quickly:

Peace and quiet

More Xalapa countryside

Omar and Silvia

Me and Maru

Maru inside of a big ol’ tree

People were raising and serving fish nearby, using water diverted from a river. We ate some. It wasn’t at all bad.

Fish in a pool

Fish in a bucket