gajim song notifications

So now the PyGTK based open source Jabber client Gajim has song notifications, thanks to yours truly ;-)
Unfortunately my MSN gateway doesn't convert the status message from Jabber to MSN, so only my Jabber contacts (all two of them) can see what music I'm playing right now :P

Mesh Networks vs Adhoc Networks

The concept, or wording, of mesh networks is only recently emerging, or at least given major focus, so there is not official and clear definition yet of what distinguishes mesh networks from adhoc networks. Interesting that the wikipedia mesh networks article has recently been enhanced with a clarification of the differences between adhoc and mesh networks. According to the (anonymous) modifications, mesh networks are adhoc networks in which "the component parts [...] generally are not mobile". Another possible definition would be that mesh networks are adhoc networks, but in L2 rather than L3.

Personally, I would rather go with a modification of the first definition, though. For me, mesh networks are adhoc networks in which most or all the component parts are infrastructure nodes, mobile or not, as opposed to classical adhoc networks in which all nodes are terminals. In other words, mesh network nodes are dedicated exclusively to routing traffic from outside the network, while adhoc network nodes are primarily terminals that are also willing to route traffic from other terminals nearby. In both cases, however, the topology of nodes is expected to be more or less dynamic, and could even use the same protocols.

reading, numexp, phd

Reading: finished Miles Errant of the Vorkosigan Saga. Fortunately, there are still 3 more books to read in this excellent SciFi series. But first I have three more books in line: one of Honor Harrington series (David Weber), one more Juliet Marillier dark fantasy book (dark mirror), and another dark fantasy book by Anne Bishop, the second one of the dark ring series.

gNumExp: is a bit more polished now:

• one can control startup modules from gnumexp and have numexp-client honor these settings;
• gnumexp now is able to manually spawn numexp-kernel if bonobo-activation fails to find it for some reason. A nice side-effect of this is that one can see numexp-kernel stdout in the shell that launches gnumexp, when the kernel is manually launched, so I just might one day make this method the default and redirect kernel output for better debugging.

PhD: my first year PhD report is beginning to take shape, and is proving a good exercise to settle down ideas and force me to search for citations that support the facts I think I already know. Plus, I hope I can reuse this text when I start writing my thesis in two and half years, so it is not wasted work and it makes me write the text more carefully, like in a paper.

Running

Using www.gmap-pedometer.com, I decided to track my running sessions.

This one is my favorite lap, near home. This is another favorite route. Another one, taken only once so far.

Yet another popular route is this one, which I take right before leaving the gym where I work out in Famalicão. Sometimes this one instead; they both start just outside the gym. Only once I did this route. There are other routes that I take less often, of course.

gNumExp almost ready for a release

This is it. After todays' commit, gNumExp's port to goocanvas and gtk+ 2.10 (for printing) is more or less complete, and we have feature parity with the 0.10 release made about one year and a half ago.

So, code-wise the hardest part is done, but I'd like to do some polish first, before the release:

1. Include a copy of goocanvas and pygoocanvas;
2. Don't rely on bonobo-activation to startup numexp-kernel, instead do our own custom activation, using a hardcoded path to the binary discovered during configure state;
3. [Maybe] stop using libgnome*, use only gtk2, libxml2, and gnomevfs.

Even next release won't be 1.0, I'd still like it to be more polished than usual.