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Archives: August 2006

28/08 Planning Bonsoir 2.0

In true developer fashion, I've just barely gotten Bonsoir 1.0 out, and I'm already planning Bonsoir 2.0.

After a good bit of discussion in #barcamp on the Freenode network, I've decided to embark on a Windows, and possibly a Linux version of Bonsoir. Unfortunately, there will be some snags, and it definitely won't be as easy as Bonsoir 1.0 :)

The current design for Bonsoir 2.0 will be based around a C# core, using the same concepts I intend on displaying in my presentation at CocoaDevHouseTexas. Which will mean the core will need to be re-written, and all of the logic code will need to be separated from the UI code, as to allow me to strap a Cocoa UI, a Windows Forms UI, or a GTK# UI atop the existing C# code.


So, what do I need is the key question. I've discussed this a bit in #barcamp, and I think I've relegated it to a few things that I need to write the next open source (BarCamp Licensed) version of Bonsoir, which will run on almost every platform.
  • A Mac License for Parallels so I can develop the Windows Forms UI
  • A full version of Visual Studio .NET would be amazingly cool, but not needed, the free "express" edition should suffice.
  • lots and lots of tacos and Coke :)
  • Graphical design help would be great, Bonsoir needs an icon, and some more UI ideas


Can anybody help me write some cool software with a donation or three? :D

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26/08 BarCampTexas, meet Bonsoir.

Yesterday I decided to drive to Austin from San Antonio on a whim to come to the night-before-event-with-free-beer for BarCampTexas, while cool, I didn't quite plan ahead for staying anywhere, so...I just lurked in a coffee shop all night and hacked out an entire application in around 6 hours.

Thusly, I am pleased to introduce "Bonsoir." Bonsoir takes advantage of Cocoa Distributed Objects, Bonjour, and the Address Book API for allowing the quick and easy sharing of vCards on a local network. The basic idea was that everybody could grab Bonsoir here at BarCampTexas, select their vCards, and we could all add each other (into Address Book) to help keep in touch for the next BarCamp, etc. I've released the source to Bonsoir 1.0 under my special "BarCamp License". It's not the cleanest code in the world, there's a gratuitous amount of swearing in the comments, and the application doesn't even have an icon. Regardless, here it is, as a universal binary: Bonsoir 1.0. Enjoy!



For the record, I also gave a terrible presentation on Cocoa, boooo, hisss.

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24/08 you can call me the exterminator

I've been working on consulting code for a company that will rename nameless. They contracted some of their software development out of firm a while back, and have been hampered with this set of code ever since, and brought me in to fix their Mac and Linux code. The code has been a true exercise in futility, I've had sub-processes SIGSEGV shortly after attaching gdb(1) to them, and watched as modules would die out for no apparent reason.

After days and days of staring at code, screaming, watching logging output, pagan rituals, and general debuggery, I finally found the bug.

I isolated the bug to a specific module, and then to a helper process that is run along side that module, and eventually found the problem, about 8 or 9 lines of code that resemble this:

someToken = strtok(NULL, "\t ");
someVar = atoi(someToken);


Yikes.

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20/08 that daemon is filling the tubes!

&While researching OpenAFS recently, I found a need for some freshly minted ISOs for both FreeBSD and OpenBSD, since my ISP isn't the most reliable, I wanted to be sure that if my network dropped my connections (!) that I could resume a large (~600MB - ~1.2GB) file transfer if need be. To do so, I fired up Transmission and set about finding some fresh torrent files, and figured I'd share:

I am currently seeding:debian-31r2-i386-netinst.iso (Debian)
  • MIR60625.iso (MirBSD)
  • 6.1-RELEASE-i386-bootonly (FreeBSD)
  • 6.1-RELEASE-i386-all (FreeBSD)


    • Hooray for BitTorrent!

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    15/08 i have no will power

    I've come to the conclusion that I am interested in far too many subsets of Computer Science, and I have zero will power. Taking a trip through bleep.'s mantis installation is always entertaining, that, or starting to prod through my perforce repository on the FreeBSD perforce repository (actual L4::BSD repo here), and of course, not to mention, my contract and consulting work as well.

    I started yesterday, while waiting for a few clients to get back to me, working on bringing some of TrustedBSD up to speed on Darwin. Starting specifically with OpenBSM which implements Sun's 'Basic Security Module' Audit API, bringing the ability to have audit records of transactions to FreeBSD, and Darwin. "Wtf?" I am sure you're thinking to yourself, 'who the hell cares?' The importance of audits will be lost on most, but the real advantage of auditing is it allows an administrator to really know what is "going on" to a very detailed aspect, allowing an admin to selectively log certain security-centric system events, etc, to be analyzed after the fact; as it turns out, if you're really curious about the audit system, you can read a good chapter of the FreeBSD handbook written by Tom Rhodes: Chapter 16: Security Event Auditing.

    TrustedBSD, or TrustedLinux are by no means silver bullets in terms of security, they simply allow an attentive administrator fine grained control over what's happening on their machine at any given time, etc. The audit trail is important, yes, but the TrustedBSD project includes a great many more enhancements, some that have been merged into the FreeBSD mainline tree, and some haven't. Access Control Lists made it in before the 6.xx branch, and allow for finer-grained file system security (as do all ACL implementations). The MAC framework is another bit that interests me the most, MAC being short for Mandatory Access Control, allows the proverbial attentive administrator to enforce security rulesets on a great many things such as sockets, processes themselves, and even nodes in the venerable sysctl(8). While you cannot interface with the MAC framework directly, from the best of my understanding, there are a few modules that implement various security policies to provide for more security and greater control over "what's going on" inside the bowels of the Daemon.

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    11/08 Add a bit of Salsa to your Cocoa at CocoaDevHouseTexas

    A couple texas-based Mac developers and I have started to discuss the biggest thing to come to Texas since Sam Houston, CocoaDevHouseTexas. CocoaDevHouse follows in the foot steps of SuperHappyDevHouse and aims to bring Mac developers and Mac enthusiasts together to mix ideas, code, and in this case, mexican food; all to this lovely little town you may have heard of "Austin."

    We have not yet decided on a venue, or a date, CocoaDevHouseTexas is really in a more metaphysical stage right now, a sort of limbo, like Duke Nukem Forever, but more likely to happen this decade. Christopher Forsythe of Growl, Adium, and more recently, Foom Software fame, will most likely be presenting something...about something; he still hasn't disclosed details, but we're certain it will be fantastically amazingly awesome. Dustin Bachrach and I will most likely be carpooling from San Antonio, rumour has it that Blake Burris will be travelling from Dallas as well.

    If you feel like joining in, add yourself to the wiki over here.

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    08/08 From the front lines

    So I've just received an email from somebody at WWDC, an event I'm too poor (silly "college" and "moving to San Antonio") to attend, letting me know that BuildFactory doesn't run on Leopard.

    Shit.

    If anybody can confirm this and provide crash logs, details, etc, that'd be fantastic. :(

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