Re: [Syllable-kernel] Arno's kernel patches (part 2)

[Jake H. <jh...@po...>]

The link for EROS in my last e-mail was incorrect.  It should have been:

http://www.eros-os.org/

Since I didn't have a good example of d-bus/GNOME integration, here is 
one from the IBM article:

==
Even though D-BUS is relatively new, it has been adopted very quickly. 
As I mentioned earlier, udev can be built with D-BUS support so that it 
sends a signal when a device is hot-plugged. Any application can listen 
to these events and perform actions when they are received. For example, 
gnome-volume-manager can detect the insertion of a USB memory stick and 
automatically mount it; or, it can automatically download photos when a 
digital camera is plugged in.

A more amusing but far less useful example is the combination of 
Jamboree and Ringaling. Jamboree is a simple music player that has a 
D-BUS interface so that it can be told to play, go to the next song, 
change the volume, and so on. Ringaling is a small program that opens 
/dev/ttyS0 (a serial port) and watches what is received. When Ringaling 
sees the text "RING," it uses D-BUS to tell Jamboree to turn down the 
volume. The net result is that if you have a modem plugged into your 
computer and your phone rings, the music is turned down for you. This is 
what computers are for!
==

Pretty cool hack!  Even cooler would be to detect that your cellphone is 
ringing using some sort of Bluetooth notification, or you could try to 
detect if anyone's phone is ringing using a microphone and an FFT 
analysis to listen for "ringing" sounds.  Then you would only need to 
write a replacement for Ringaling and Jamboree, or in our case Coldfish, 
would continue to work unchanged.  A further hypothetical:  this "ring" 
notification app could be wired by the user to implement an arbitrary 
user or system-wide policy such as lowering the volume on all audio 
output devices, perhaps by triggering a script or a plugin dll.  Or 
there might be multiple apps that want to listen for this event.

On that note, I discovered another article describing a way in which you 
could abstract services using d-bus where it wouldn't matter which 
application you were using to do something.  It sounds somewhat like how 
Amiga apps could be scripting using ARexx or Mac apps could be scripted 
with AppleScript and OSA, but more generic between applications.

http://code.eikke.com/DesktopAbstractionLayer/presentation-1.txt

I had a CS professor at my university, Dr. Craig Rich, who had a pretty 
neat layout of his applications and documents on his Mac (this was 
before OS X).  He renamed all of his applications from whatever their 
original names were to generic names, for example Netscape was renamed 
to "Web Browser" and Eudora became "E-Mail Client".  In the Mac world, 
renaming the executable generally doesn't break anything.  He could then 
change e-mail clients, for example, and of course the icon would change, 
but the name would be the same and so the app would be alphabetized into 
the same place in the Apple quick launch menu.

Also notice that Windows only has user associations for certain types of 
Internet locations (HTML, e-mail, news) plus file extensions and events 
such as inserting a blank CD-R or a DVD movie.  You can choose the 
default audio output device or what happens when you double-click on a 
.mp3 file, but if there is a certain activity that isn't tied to a 
particular data file or URL, for example the default "TV tuner" app, I'm 
not sure how you would specify that except through some special registry 
key or something.

-Jake