Project Utopia

31 Jul 2004 · #techtalk

For those of us who have decided to tread the Linux path, a couple of good articles on Project Utopia, a collection of technologies that promise to rid us of our plug and play woes, and then some.

The first is a nice overview of the various pieces of tech that (will) coalesce to help us achieve nirvana while the second article goes deeper into explaining D-BUS, one of those nifty pieces of code. I especially like this usage scenario described in the latter article:

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 it 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; then when your phone rings the music is turned down for you. This is what computers are for!

That’s no wishlist item either, the code to do that is already in a working state. Now all I need is a phone-line, a modem and someone to actually call me and then I can give this thing a spin.