For the first time, I am participating in a St. Baldrick's event for cancer research. It's a great cause; I have family members and friends who are either battling with cancer, or are themselves survivors.

My goal is to reach $1000 in donations towards cancer research through the St. Baldrick's Foundation. If there's anything you can do to help, I would very much appreciate it, and there are many others out there who can benefit from your help.

Donate Here!

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First, there's the fun of 10.6 making it even harder to have code that forks without it accidentally exploding on the CoreFoundation fork-without-exec prohibition. I was able to solve this with a combination of fixes from macports' kdelibs4, and some of my own code which changes things to use low-level POSIX APIs instead of Qt APIs for some bounds-checking before execution.

Next, there's the fun of Phonon. KDE 4.4 requires a newer version of Phonon than what ships with Qt (even Qt 4.6). On OSX it gets even hinkier, since the QuickTime plugin for Phonon requires private Qt headers, so the only sane way to build it is to build the Phonon included with Qt, rather than building it as a separate project.

I ended up adapting a patch the Kubuntu folks use to inject a modern Phonon into Qt 4.6. In the process, I finally got around to learning my way around Git (and gitorious), and have set up my own Qt branch which includes my (binary incompatible outside of Fink) patch to Qt to fix plugin-building, Phonon from kdesupport, the kde-qt (formerly qt-copy) changes, and my patches to Qt that splits OSX into two platforms, Q_OS_DARWIN (i.e. use raw UNIX APIs, no Core*), and Q_OS_MAC (standard Qt/Mac).

Long story short, I'm getting there. I've gotten about half of KDE 4.4 RC1 built and apparently running reasonably. RC2 was just released to packagers, and I'm testing out my move to Qt 4.6.1 from 4.6.0, but once I get everything test-built on 10.6, I'll go validate everything on 10.4 and 10.5 (including making some DBus fixes for 10.4).

After that, the next thing to tackle is Mono, and then eventually I'll see if I can get KDE3 building/working on 10.6.

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(Payam Minoofar on Feb 1, 2010 12:44 PM) I would like to let you know that your efforts are greatly appreciated. I will be donating to your charity shortly. I hope the value that you are providing to the community is returned upon you tenfold.

Some notes on popular stuff:

• KDE3: There were a number of annoying things blocking KDE3, but with the approval of some of the other maintainers, I've got a lot of the deps that were failing fixed up, and I'm working my way through a full KDE build and hope to have everything hunky-dory in unstable in the next few days.
• KDE4: First of all: there will not be KDE4 on x86_64 in the near future. Qt4/Mac 64-bit does not have the Qt3Support framework, which plenty of KDE4 bits still depend on. I'll definitely be making sure that KDE4 builds fine in 32-bit mode, and in 64-bit X11 though, and after that, well, we'll see how much work it is to excise Qt3Support from at least the base libraries. In the process, I'm going to try to update it to KDE 4.3.1.
• Java packages: When I packaged a lot of Java stuff for 10.4 and 10.5, I tried to build them targeting the 1.4 JDK, so it was more likely that built jars would work for most people. Unfortunately, Snow Leopard removes the 1.4 JDK, so I'm updating everything to build with the 1.5 JDK. Most stuff is handled, I'll be fixing up other stuff as I run into them.

If you have packages that you use day-to-day, let me know, I'll try to get to them first. I've been fixing things up on a first-come, first-serve basis based on reports to my maintainer email address(es).

I'll post here on my blog if I hit any other major milestones. In the meantime, happy Finking. :)

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(marcof on Jan 11, 2010 10:17 AM) Hi, any news about KDE4 packages for 10.6 ? Thanks for the hard work ! Cheers

I've debugged many a bad header, but up to this point I could count the number of lines of code I've actually written where I need to manage my own memory on erm... well, 20 hands? OK, bad analogy.

Still, it was with much trepidation that I approached finally hunkering down and learning Objective C. The verdict is: not bad. I did have to go through some growing pains learning how scoping and memory management works, but it's not as troublesome as I'd feared -- and the class libraries are pretty robust. In a couple of weeks, it's nearly feature-complete for what I wanted to get working for a 1.0 release. All that's left is the alarm detail page, and being able to acknowledge alarms from the app.

The biggest thing I learned was Instruments and the LLVM static analyzer are you friends! The Clang Static Analyzer is friggin' awesome -- it wraps your build and then analyzes the resultant binaries and outputs a report that tells you whether you've passed ref-counted data, allocated without deallocating, and other spiffy things.

I'm stopping to work on getting an OpenNMS 1.7.6 (and next week, 1.6.6) release out the door, but hopefully I'll have a chance to pick it back up and finish it off soon. I'm still waiting for the OpenNMS corporate iPhone development paperwork to go through anyways.

Without further ado... screenshots:

It's open-source, so if you want to see my awful code, you can check it out from SourceForge.

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(Johan Edstrom on Jul 29, 2009 9:30 PM) Looks awesome!

(monipol on Jul 30, 2009 3:37 PM) Brilliant! You truly are unstoppable! :-D

KDE4/X11 Plasma Desktop on Mac OS X in Xephyr

Working KOffice file asociations

Actually, that was just the text saying that I was going to have big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff. Here's the real thing:

It breaks stuff!

But let me explain: it makes things better! Because of some esoteric stuff relating to case-sensitivity, existing packages, and bugs in Fink dpkg, there were issues on a number of people's systems with the existing KDE packages and conflicting paths. Of course, the root of the issue is that Fink didn't have a proper "/opt" type directory, so a number of packages for quite some time have been using "/sw/lib" for that purpose (/sw/lib/qt4-x11, /sw/lib/flex, etc.)

Since I was going to have to move things around anyways to fix this issue, I decided to do it right. As of Fink 0.29.7, the package validator accepts "/sw/opt" as a valid path to root packages. All of the KDE4 packages have been changed to use this new path, so when you upgrade to KDE 4.2.4, you will end up with a nice fresh clean KDE in /sw/opt/kde4/x11 or /sw/opt/kde4/mac (or both).

But wait, there's more!

I've also spent a lot of time fixing bugs and tweaking some fink-specific behaviors so that KDE integrates better with your Fink experience.

• Fink's kdelibs4 automatically knows about the usual locations for kde4 files, so all KDE4 apps will start properly without needing /sw/opt/kde4/{x11,mac} in the path. This includes KDE4 apps launched from the Finder.
• The kdebase-workspace package is now supported for KDE4/X11. That means you can start a full KDE desktop!
• As a test, I created proper Info.plist files for KOffice, so file associations actually work. Till Adam has been working on a more robust way of doing this in the future, but if I find the time I might work on setting up more associations for common KDE apps in the mean time. (Kommon apps?)

So, for those of you who have already tinkered with KDE4 in Fink, I'm sorry to say it all needs an upgrade. But, on the bright side, once you do, you'll have a much nicer KDE.

As always, if you run into any issues, please let me know.

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(Diego on Jun 10, 2009 11:54 AM) What about updating the website? The informations are a bit outdated... http://mac.kde.org/?id=download

(Benjamin Reed on Jun 10, 2009 12:15 PM) Yeah, that's been on my TODO list for a while. I'll try to get that updated soon.

(Deryk Agnew on Jun 10, 2009 11:10 PM) Is there anyway to get a source package in unstable for kdevelop 4.0? I'd love to start running a native KDevelop even if it's just beta quality right now.

(Zeke Connor on Jun 11, 2009 2:39 AM) Thank you so much for updating the packages for KDE-4.2.4 :D. I noticed that there is a border around plasma-desktop. Does it replace the Mac desktop completely yet? And thank you much again for it ^_^ and everyone else :D

(www.kde4.de on Jun 11, 2009 8:01 AM) Nice to see 4.2.4 in fink. That are great news for my Mac OS visitors.

(Benjamin Reed on Jun 11, 2009 10:15 AM) Deryk: I hadn't really looked into it, but for such things I generally wait for at least a beta release. Zeke: You can't replace the Finder with it, if that's what you mean. I was running the plasma desktop in Xephyr (a nested X11 server) for convenience of taking a screenshot, but you can run it with X11 in full-screen mode. If you do it in rootless mode, it ends up behind the dock, which is kind of weird, but it does still work. ;)

(Deryk Agnew on Jun 14, 2009 7:33 PM) First off thank you so much for all the work you do to support these packages I'm sure it occupies a lot of your time. I am able to make due with Kdevelop 3.5.8 through X11 but for what it's worth Kdevelop 4 is already in Beta 3. From the Kdevelop site: www.kdevelop.org "2009-May-24 - KDevelop 4.0 beta3 released KDevelop 4.0 beta3 (3.9.93) and KDevPlatform 0.9.93 were released today and can be downloaded via public ftp. They fix more than 83 bugs from the previous beta1 version. Before updating make sure to see the feature comparison with KDevelop3 and install the required software dependencies. " I can easily understand if you want to wait until an official release due to the amount of time that would be required to support such beta releases. Thank you again for all your work to support these packages.

(Sultanio on Jun 17, 2009 6:46 PM) Could you please give an installation guide for all newbies like me who would like to run kde on macos?

(andrew on Aug 1, 2009 2:45 AM) >I created proper Info.plist files for KOffice, so file associations actually work Could you describe, how to create plist file in order to make file associations work? I installed Okular viewer and I want to associate in with djvu files. I associated it with djvu using properties menu in Finer. But when I double-click on djvu file, Okular just launches without opening the file. Thanks

(Benjamin Reed on Aug 3, 2009 10:21 AM) Yeah, see the Info.plist.template and the CMakeLists.txt bits in: http://websvn.kde.org/branches/koffice/2.0/koffice/kspread/

(andrew on Aug 3, 2009 2:03 PM) I modified okular info.plist file (added djvu file type) and saved it. Now okular is associated with djvu files, but when I'm trying to open any djvu file, okular just starts without opening the file. Also when I'm trying to open it from console like this "open -a okular file.djvu", it doesn't work either. I can open file with okular only using this command "/sw/opt/kde4/mac/bin/okular.app/Contents/MacOS/okular file.djvu" Looks like okular executable doesn't get file name parameter. My plist file: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ahh115h/n/Info_plist PS: kate has the same issue with file opening Could you resolve this problem? Thanks

Benjamin,

A question for you (and Tarus). Is this topic important to you because:

1. You believe it's an important marketing differentiator for the software you work on vs. competitors
2. You believe it's an important philosophical / moral issue worth evangelizing
3. both

Tackling a) involves traditional marketing objectives around branding, awareness, messaging, positioning, etc. Not necessarily a cake walk, but certainly possible to make progress.

Tackling b) involves changing the way people think and behave, which is much much more challenging.

My response is:

Definitely both.

From a personal point of view, I've been involved in open source software since before the phrase was coined, so I do feel that it is at least a personal philosophical issue. BUT I'm also a pragmatist, and I know that arguing purely for philosophy's sake will not convince anyone.

That said, that philosophy drives me to support the companies that I think are doing it "right." I work for OpenNMS not just because I think the software's great, but also because I love that we can compete with "the big guys" by having a better community.

Part of the reason that we get so passionate about it is that a lot of these "does it really matter?" conversations start with the implication that we're already failing to compete, which is just plain wrong. I'm sure that's why we probably often sound defensive when we are hoping to sound convincing. ;)

I'm the first to roll my eyes at the "true believers" -- while I think that in the end open source is a better way to do things in a "pay it forward" kind of way, I believe it's better from a philosophical and pragmatic way. It won't work for everyone, but it can work for open source projects as an alternative to big-money funding.

I am a child of the VC tech industry. I've worked at startups and I know what it feels like to work on software you think is great only to be shut down and have the IP sold off, just because the VP of sales didn't do his job. It's refreshing to work for a company that starts with community first, and grows by being truly profitable, rather than by incurring massive amounts of debt. (See: current economy.) It's refreshing to not be one of 10 companies the VC bets on, and if 9 of them fail, "eh, oh well, that's statistics."

Since we grow as we have profit, rather than funding, the biggest investment we can make is in our time, improving the software, and growing the community. There is nothing wrong with the "fauxpen source" companies' business model, they are welcome to write good software as best they can, and get market share, but in the end, we do differentiate by our openness and our interaction with the community. When they co-opt the phrase that was meant to be equivalent to "free software" to now mean "kind of free software," it does pure open source companies a disservice and it is a lie by omission that they equate their software to be "just as free" as ours.

Sure, that's competition, but that's why it's important for us to get the word out that there is a difference.

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(Benjamin Reed on May 8, 2009 8:28 AM) And that's enough tilting at windmills for now. ;)

(Tarus on May 8, 2009 12:12 PM) Oh, God. Which one of us is Don Quixote and which is Sancho Panza?

(Benjamin Reed on May 8, 2009 12:17 PM) Well, I was hoping we could work our way up to being the Windmill. ;)

Alright, folks, the bearding has commenced.

Now's your chance to make a pledge for the Carolina Hurricanes Kids 'n' Community Foundation. Just hit the "Pledge a Friend" button, and put in "Benjamin Reed".

If you know me, you know my dedication to never exposing my unfortunate double-chin to the horrors of sunlight. Don't let this sacrifice be in vain! Pledge now!

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(Triluna on Apr 13, 2009 12:37 AM) And to think he wouldn't shave it ALL OFF for even his wife, so you know this is for a very special cause!

(mpusateri on Apr 13, 2009 9:18 AM) Man, without the beard I just realized, I know this guy he owes me money! :)

(Tanner Lovelace on Apr 13, 2009 10:19 AM) Whoa! I haven't seen that face in a long time.

(Moonraker1492 on Apr 14, 2009 5:49 PM) slightly less ominous in the buff. just slightly.

In the '05-'06 Stanley Cup run, I grew a pretty substantial playoff beard, just for the heck of it. (see fig. 1, pictured right)

This time, the Hurricanes are doing a great charity event for the Kids 'N Community Foundation: the Beard-A-Thon!

When the regular season games are over, I'm going to shave, and then grow a playoff beard as hard as I can.

Now, as I mentioned, it's a charity event, and I need you folks to help me out, by pledging at the Beard-A-Thon page. Don't forget to enter "Benjamin Reed" where it says, " There's a specific beard grower I'd like to support."

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(wvmac on Apr 10, 2009 10:05 AM) The penguins are doing the same thing. Are you only supposed to grow the beard as long as the Hurricanes are in the playoffs? If so, your beard won't get very long. :)

(Benjamin Reed on Apr 10, 2009 11:35 AM) Funny, since the Hurricanes/Penguins series this year was 2 and 2, I guess you're saying the Pens won't make it very far either? Also, you clearly hate children, since you don't want them to get help from a charity. FOR SHAME.

(wvmac on Apr 10, 2009 12:08 PM) I like puppies. Does that count? Anyways I hope you get some donations.

(bobby on Apr 10, 2009 3:49 PM) you use the gif format? yuck -10

(Benjamin Reed on Apr 10, 2009 6:12 PM) Yeah, because browser support for MNG is so awesome? What else does animation reliably nowadays without embedding a movie or flash or something?

(Louie on Apr 11, 2009 8:41 PM) Is that Little Bobby Tables (http://xkcd.com/327/) I see? Oh, I agree with him! GIF is so distasteful due to the drunken vagaries of its past. YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE THAT FORMAT HAS BEEN! I prefer using a rapid automatic page refresh and a specially crafted daemon that replaces the image file to increment the frame. I've been using it to animate erotic images on my Golden Girls fan page for ages! So far, no one has complained.

There's still a lot of rough edges, but it's definitely at least beta quality, and a lot of apps work great. It includes a number of fixes, including updated scripts to register all of the desktop files properly with ksycocoa on post-install, case-sensitive filesystem fixes, and a number of other packaging fixes. I've also finished packaging all of the "core" KDE distribution.

I've got Amarok working in my experimental tree, I just need to do a little more testing before I can release it (It's based on a snapshot of what will become Amarok 2.1.0, since 2.0.x has some build issues on Mac OS X that are difficult to resolve). Also, the KOffice folks just put out a release candidate that I'm working on finishing up packaging on. Hopefully I will have that out soon.

As always, please let me know if you run into issues. I've test-built on 10.5/i386 and 10.4/ppc so I'm sure some 10.4/i386 and 10.5/ppc users will give bug reports soon. ;)

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(anon on Apr 4, 2009 4:09 AM) This is very cool :) But what exactly do you mean with "Fink"? There's nothing in incoming.debian.org... can you help me out?

(Benjamin Reed on Apr 4, 2009 9:21 AM) Fink is a distribution for Mac OS X. If you're looking for debian packages, you'll have to wait for debian to update them. :)

One of the places my music is available for download is bandcamp.com, who offers up a nice little download/portal service where you can make your music available. You can get my music there for free at 128kbit, or if you want to support my music, or get a higher-quality format (all the way up to FLAC and Apple Lossless!), you can name your own price.

I was looking at my download/listen statistics, and I saw something strange. They do 60-day, 30-day, week, or daily graphs, along with defender graphs.

Defender?!

So I clicked on it, and I saw the coolest most useless statistics graph ever. You can play defender in your graphs. The little UFO flies around, there's people on the ground, and you can move your ship back and forth and shoot them. Awesome!

60-day graph:

Defender graph:

How cool is that!!?

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(Tanner Lovelace on Apr 1, 2009 10:02 AM) Awesome! How soon until we see this in OpenNMS? :-)

Please give them a shot, let me know if you have any issues, if things don't work as expected. I know one major thing to look into still is to get document-opening working. Right now the KDE desktop files describe which apps should open different document types, but that is not being translated to OSX's document-opening APIs.

The following packages were released to unstable today:

• digikam-mac and digikam-x11
• kdeaccessibility4-mac and kdeaccessibility4-x11
• kdeadmin4-mac and kdeadmin4-x11
• kdeartwork4-mac and kdeartwork4-x11
• kdeedu4-mac and kdeedu4-x11
• kdegraphics4-mac and kdegraphics4-x11
• kdemultimedia4-mac and kdemultimedia4-x11

Big ones left on the hitlist are amarok2 and koffice2. Amarok2 I'm starting work on again as a snapshot of the 2.1.0 build, since there are some issues with 2.0.x building on OSX. KOffice is actually working pretty well in my experimental tree, but 2.0 release candidate is due out in the next week or so, so I'm going to wait to update to that before doing a release.

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Without further ado, I present to you: This Week in OpenNMS. Same bat-time, different bat-channel.

RSS is still available, but the url has moved here, rather than getting everything through my blog.

Please, update your links!

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As you can tell, I've been pretty busy having fun hacking on OpenNMS lately. While I have been keeping up with my Fink work to some extent, one major thing was still looming: finally getting all the work I did on KDE/Mac released in Fink, now that things have stabilized.

If you've been watching the commits for the last few months, you've seen the beginnings of that work. Updates to Qt, releases of support things like strigi and soprano... The big hurdle was getting D-Bus in a state where it plays well with KDE/Mac. After some initial hiccoughs, the D-Bus updates have been released to Fink now, and seem to be working well for people.

Today, I released the base packages for KDE 4.2.x into fink: kdelibs4, kdepimlibs4, and kdebase4.

Because of the cross-platform nature of KDE, I've released them in 2 variants: mac and x11, so you can run konqueror as an X11 app, or as a mac app. :)

Some things will only be present in one or the other, for various reasons (X11-specific features, etc.) One thing that will be in the X11 variant that is not there now is kdebase-workspace, so no plasma desktop as of yet. I've built it, but it doesn't act right currently, so I'm waiting to release until it's in a usable state.

This is still early test stuff, so if you run into issues with it, please feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I can't thank enough Orville Bennett and the other KDE/Mac folks. They have picked up the early work I did on porting and ran with it, helping polish it into a nice, buildable, and solid set of code while I was on my "hiatus" from KDE packaging. :) They have done a lot of great work in helping bring native mac KDE from "freakish mutant" to "used every day by KDE developers."

In the coming weeks I hope to get more of the base KDE packages done. I'm in the testing phase for koffice, amarok, kdeartwork, and a couple of others, and working my way through packaging more. I'll post as I get anything interesting.

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(John on Mar 11, 2009 6:54 PM) So is the recommended or preferred install method now Fink, or MacPorts, or the standalone packages from mac.kde.org? It's all a bit confusing to a Mac newbie like me :-)

(Benjamin Reed on Mar 11, 2009 11:35 PM) Dunno if there's a "recommended" way -- the macports packages are a little more out-of-date I think, but more complete (more stuff packaged). The goal, once the packaging is done, is to get together and try to get everything working with CPack, which would bring native installer .dmg packages back into the mix, too.

(Klaas Gadeyne on Mar 23, 2009 3:18 PM) I don't know wether this is the appropriate place (should I use fink-users?), but I (macbook, os x 10.4.11, latest fink) get some link errors while trying to build qt4-mac /usr/bin/ld: warning can't open dynamic library: /sw/lib/qt4-mac/lib/phonon.framework/Versions/4/phonon referenced from: /sw/src/fink.build/qt4-mac-4.5.0-3/qt-copy/lib/QtWebKit.framework/QtWebKit (checking for undefined symbols may be affected) (No such file or directory, errno = 2) /usr/bin/ld: warning can't open dynamic library: /sw/lib/qt4-mac/lib/QtDBus.framework/Versions/4/QtDBus referenced from: /sw/src/fink.build/qt4-mac-4.5.0-3/qt-copy/lib/QtWebKit.framework/QtWebKit (checking for undefined symbols may be affected) (No such file or directory, errno = 2) /usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols: Phonon::createPath(Phonon::MediaNode*, Phonon::MediaNode*)referenced from QtWebKit expected to be defined in /sw/lib/qt4-mac/lib/phonon.framework/Versions/4/phonon Phonon::AudioOutput::setMuted(bool) referenced from QtWebKit expected to be defined in /sw/lib/qt4-mac/lib/phonon.framework/Versions/4/phonon Phonon::AudioOutput::setVolume(double)referenced from QtWebKit expected to be defined in /sw/lib/qt4-mac/lib/phonon.framework/Versions/4/phonon [snip]

I've decided to do This Week in OpenNMS on Mondays, instead of Fridays, since it's more likely that people will be around to read it on Monday, and since then I don't have to furiously write under a deadline Friday afternoon when I could be sitting out on the porch, sipping drinks and relaxing. Or something.

Anyways, welcome to This (well, Last) Week in OpenNMS!

Project Updates

• Stable: Current Release is 1.6.2

  1.6.2 is still the current release, and while there are a few fixes pending since it's release, there are no immediate plans for a 1.6.3 yet.

• Unstable: Current Release is 1.7.0

  Trunk continues to move at a furious rate. We're still hoping to get 1.7.1 out soon. Stay tuned for updates on that. In the meantime, feel free to try the nightly snapshots (if it's not on a production system, of course).

• Trunk: Build System Updates

  Work has begun on refactoring our Maven build system. We've been trying to move a lot of things out of the main build, to speed up building and to componentize things that should be "external" dependencies. The new structure has been introduced, and we're looking at eventually moving all of our code into this structure:

  • core: OpenNMS core. This will include event handling, basic daemon support, and other support code needed by all of OpenNMS.

    • api: Interfaces and basic APIs

    • lib: "Library" code (the majority of the core code)

    • runtime: Runtime code, ie, things only needed in a running OpenNMS instance

    • web: Web application code common to all of OpenNMS

    • doc: Documentation

  • features: Any feature of OpenNMS that can be modularized, and isn't part of the Core. This will include most of the daemons (Notifd, Provisiond, etc.) Each feature gets it's own directory, and will have a similar structure to the core module.

  • extensions: Any feature of OpenNMS that does not need to be built by default for a basic running OpenNMS installation (ticketing integrations, etc.) Each extension gets it's own directory, and will have a similar structure to the core module.

  • lib: Support "library" code used by any part of OpenNMS, which can be a standalone package. The lib directory is not built by default, but instead deployed to the maven repository as they are updated as if they were individual projects. Examples include the service-registration framework (DNS-SD advertising), our version of JoeSNMP, and the SNMP strategies.

  • assemblies: Assemblies in maven describe how all of these various components get packaged up together. The plan is to make multiple assemblies for a minimal system, full install, and so on so you can choose how much OpenNMS you want when building from source. Having multiple assemblies will also make it easier to run just a portion of OpenNMS for development and testing.

• Trunk: Provisiond

  Provisiond is solidifying, the only major word to be done is support for the newSuspect events to fully replace Capsd's functionality. Lots of performance work has been going on in it as well, so it should be able to very quickly scan networks that took a long time under Capsd.

• Trunk: RANCID

  Antonio and Guglielmo have been working hard on the RANCID adapter. I'm told the RANCID map integration is very cool, but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. It's in the latest snapshots.

• Trunk: DNS Provisioning Adapter

  I worked on Dave's provisioning adapter some, and got it working. Now whenever a node is added/updated/deleted, we can update a dynamic DNS server with the new hostname -> IP address mapping based on the node label in the provisioning group node configuration. It's a good example of how to make a provisioning adapter.

• Trunk: UI Enhancements

  Donald continues to make our UI more interactive, and handle large numbers of elements sanely. The node page is looking pretty sweet. :)

• Trunk: Event Parameter Name Extraction

  Jeff did a useful little feature to be able to use parameter names in %parm% expansions. See bug #3061 for details.

About the Inventory Scanner

Matt Raykowski has been working on a very cool feature in a branch called the inventory scanner. I asked him to send me a quick summary of what his goals are for the inventory scanner, and here's what he said:

Very cool stuff, Matt!

Upcoming Events

Note: April training has been pushed back to May.

• March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

• May 4th-8th, 2009: OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.

• June 14th-19th, 2009: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 2009, the annual OpenNMS developers conference, will be in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year.

If you have anything to add to the events list, or you wish to be a Dev-Jam sponsor, please let me know.

That's It!

That's it for this week. As always, questions, comments, non-sequiturs, gifts, and bribes are always welcome, feel free to e-mail me. And if you have a question about OpenNMS that you think would be a good topic in TWiO, please, let me know!

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(Aaron Shackelford on Mar 12, 2009 1:41 AM) I heard rumors that reporting features would improve. Any updates or comments on that?

(Benjamin Reed on Mar 17, 2009 10:00 AM) I'm not aware of any major reporting features, although there is someone who's been working on Jasper integration. It's not in a state where it's releasable yet, though.