I’m back home and more or less caught up on sleep after this weekend’s Ubuntu Detroit Hackfest. It’s a nearly six-hour drive each way but it’s worth it to hang out with everyone occasionally. We ate good food (thanks to Kattni’s wicked cooking skills) and even did a little keysigning. Thanks again to Kattni for letting everyone crash at her place. Saves money on a hotel, which makes it much more likely I can attend in the future.

In the end, I finally decided to start hacking on Tomboy. Step one is to make it easy to find and connect to other Tomboys on the network.

Thanks to Charlie, who told me about the GnomeVFS bindings for Zeroconf aka Rendezvous aka Bonjour. If you don’t know what that is, in a nutshell, it lets you publish what services are available on a machine. You could, on your mail server, use Zeroconf to announce that you have smtp, imap, and pop3 available. It’s a way to make shit easy when connecting people together.

I’ve started working on Mono bindings for the Zeroconf stuff. I have some of the calls working. Others I’m having some difficulties with and I may need to turn to the gtk-sharp-list group for some advice. One particular struct is giving me headaches

I’ll get the code posted up here soon and hopefully get some working bindings released in the near future. Once the binding is done I can start to do the actual integration work in Tomboy, which will be exciting.

After a while the code began to blur and progress grinded to a halt. Still, I made lots of headway and got to meet some cool new hackers. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it again in the future. After I got home I realized that I never did leave Andrew any money for the food we consumed. Sorry dude! I’ll make it up to ya when you’re in Chicago next month.