Today I spent a good chunk of time going through DBus bugs and pending patches. There are still some major things outstanding – large patches for Mac OS X and Windows integration, Scott’s timeout work, but I have a feeling after those we’ll be at the point where it really is basically done. Now we’re moving on to replacing the init system. Woo.

But, that’s not what is exciting about today. Is there anything exciting about today? Well, today is the day that Unix gained /etc/favicon.png. No, I’m not talking about HTTP, I’m talking about a HotSSH patch that I finished on the shuttle ride back:

Note the tabs have icons

The GNOME sysadmins haven’t yet put /etc/favicon.png on window.gnome.org, and I stole the freedesktop.org favicon for my local machine to test

Basically when you open a connection, we asynchronously run some Python code on the remote machine to test for the existence of /etc/favicon.png and if it exists, its mtime. If the cached favicon we have is old or nonexistent, we (again asynchronously) retrieve it via scp. All of this reuses OpenSSH’s connection sharing so you don’t have to reauthenticate for any of this.

A quick Q&A:

• OMGWTFBBQ! – That’s not a question.
• I’m a system administrator and I have a favicon.ico for our website, how do I set this up? – Run convert /path/to/favicon.ico /etc/favicon.png, copy around to all machines as appropriate, put it in Puppet or whatever.
• Are favicons associated with hosts or keys? – Good question, right now I attempt to associate them with the host key, but OpenSSH’s host key hashing foils that sadly. So probably with the host.
• Why? – Because it’s faster to recognize images than text.