Nat Friedman

Archive for October 2005

Keep It Simple Stupid

Today over beers with some of the Novell hackers I wrote a new session manager for GNOME. It goes like this:

 #!/bin/sh
 eval `ssh-agent`
 gnome-settings-daemon &
 gnome-panel &
 nautilus -n &
 beagled --bg &
 gnome-screensaver &
 exec metacity

Login time on my machine, as measured with a stopwatch, has been reduced from 10 seconds to 3 seconds (warm buffer cache in both cases), and my computer now has more free memory.

The panel draws itself in one second, and two of those seconds are just waiting for Nautilus to draw the desktop. With preloading during boot and a fix for the slow Nautilus desktop rendering, I think it’s probably possible to have a 1-2 second login on most hardware.

4 October 2005

where the sidewalk ends

Check out my awesome new bike.

3 October 2005

Serious About Service

2 October 2005

This company has After School Special written all over it

Two weeks ago, a made-for-TV movie about Miguel aired on prime-time Mexican television. It featured actors playing Miguel and his cohorts, including someone playing me. Apparently we all wear suits and I speak Spanish with a British accent.

In one scene “I” dramatically proclaim, “You realize this means selling the company to Novell!”

Miguel is embarrassed by the whole thing and is refusing to cooperate with my efforts to secure a copy of the film and host a viewing here in Boston. Therefore, I am reaching out to the readership to see if anyone has a recording they could make available for this good cause.

:-)

2 October 2005

J is for JOEY assaulted by bears

2 October 2005

Happy October

1 October 2005
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