fidzu : GNOME

• I'm writing a little utility that generates Git repositories from some unpleasantly-formatted data. The test suite for this was really simple to write: you can simply ask git, "give me the SHA-1 hash that you have for the content" at the end of the test run (i.e. "git-cat-file -p HEAD" and parse out the "tree" hash from there). If the obtained hash matches your expected hash, then you know the test succeeded. This is much easier than comparing all of the expected/obtained content by hand.

24 Jul 2008 12:03am GMT

I have been busy working on the new desktop deployment. I have been training employees and granting permissions for those that will have USB and Sound/Video/Audio access. Those permissions are based on paperwork and signature from their Directors. When we discussed deploying sound to desktops, one of my concerns was employees streaming radio stations which consumes network both on our intranet and on our internet connection. It only took a few days and sure enough that has started. A quick message to those folks halted that practice. I put mplayer and gnome-mplayer into their own group and then set them to 770 so that a Firefox user with some skill won't be able to execute them, even if they find the binaries.

During the training, I found that my hastily designed zenity UIs for weather-wallpaper and xplanet were not robust enough. So today I whipped up a few screens with Glade that are far more user friendly. (shots below).

23 Jul 2008 9:12pm GMT

Already Wednesday! I did not see the time elapse.

So with regard to this week, my mentor (Olivier Crête) has finish to implement the new lib (telepathy-farsight). So I have modify autotools again and "unfortunately" my changes because the API has changed a little.
I want to redo all of this more cleanly.

I believe that now things will go a little faster because so far I have lost a lot of time to understand how work Telepathy/Empathy and the old Stream-engine.

I look forward to end the integration of this new library, and begin to change the frontend of Empathy to make some screenshots and show you them.

Now I must work a bit faster to reach my goals :)

23 Jul 2008 8:48pm GMT

I've pretty much completed implementing the mechanisms in nautilus and gnome-settings-daemon to implement per workspace wallpapers. I've created a short video that shows the current state of the functionality:

As you can see the wallpaper is currently set for whichever workspace the appearance capplet is on.

I've put most of the patches (except the gnome-control-center one) into bugzilla:

gnome-desktop: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543596

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544241

gnome-settings-daemon: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544178

eel: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544223

nautilus: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544242

gnome-control-center patch is available here: http://git.jsharpe.net/ but is still a work in progress.

I'd appreciate feedback on the patches.

23 Jul 2008 8:14pm GMT

Thomas blogged about my nemesis, bug 482354. I've been trying to upstream the fix for unbreaking clicking on links for quite a while now.

In it, Christophe brought up Rhythmbox, which is quite similar to Pidgin in how it acts with the tray icon.

Several years ago I was chatting with Seth about Rhythmbox and he mentioned that he thought it was a fairly special kind of application because it is generally used in a very "transient/background" way. For example, a normal way to use it would be minimized to the tray (not even in tasklist at the bottom); then when you want to switch songs or albums, you click the tray, do a quick search, and then minimize again. This contrasts with "regular" applications like Eclipse, Firefox, Evolution where it's expected that you will often spend a substantial amount of time in them in one go.

The tray icon approach sort of works, but I think we could do better. Following is a potential approach that I'm recording in my blog so I don't forget, and of course to gather comments.

Transient Application

First, for reference here is how Rhythmbox currently looks:

Unmodified Rhythmbox

And here's a mockup of how it could work:

How Rhythmbox could be a "transient" application

The general idea is to treat the application window like a really fancy GtkMenu. Here's a concrete list of user-visible behavioral changes:

• 
  
• Clicking anywhere outside of the window causes it to minimize back to the tray icon.
• 
  
• It does not appear in the task list
• 
  
• There are no minimize/maximize buttons
• 
  
• The close button does not actually exit the app (i.e. stop your music), but just minimizes
• 
  
• There is a visible arrow showing you the association with the tray
• 
  

Overall I think this approach will make the "show Rhythmbox window, choose song/album, start playing, make it go away" task nicer since you'll only have to move your mouse to the tray icon and click once (to open) instead of twice (once to open, once to close). It will make it a lot clearer to the user what's going on (in the current Rhythmbox we have the minimize/maximize animation, but no arrow).

Implementing this would require window manager changes, new GTK+ API for GtkStatusIcon, and updating several applications that fall in this category (Rhythmbox, Pidgin, Banshee, etc.) to use it. Also someone with actual graphics skills would have to draw the arrow. Does that sound like a lot of work just to save you one mouse click? Not when you're applying the forehead mashing method of user experience improvement!

Now to find some time to implement it...

Edit: - I forgot to mention this would also be perfect for the new NetworkManager connection dialog.

23 Jul 2008 6:40pm GMT

I rarely blog these days, doing the Twitter thing instead and all. Anyway. The Call for Papers for the Linux Plumbers Conference in September in lovely Portland, Oregon has been extended until July 31st 2008. It's a conference about the core infrastructure of Linux systems: the part of the system where userspace and the kernel interface. It's the first conference where the focus is specifically on getting together the kernel people who work on the userspace interfaces and the userspace people who have to deal with kernel interfaces. It's supposed to be a place where all the people doing infrastructure work sit down and talk, so that each other understands better what the requirements and needs of the other are, and where we can work towards fixing the major problems we currently have with our lower-level APIs.

I'm running the "Desktop Integration" microconf at Plumbers. I have two goals for the microconf. One is to be informative about what's going on in the dusty hallways between the Kernel and the Free Desktop. Which I think is important at a place like Plumbers where we're going to a lot of people working on similar problems present. The other goal is to actually try and make some headway on actual problems that require people from multiple communities working together. Such as some of the work Jon is focusing on, e.g. how to make fast-user-switching, multi-seat and terminal services Just Work(tm).

The conference is expected to sell out pretty quickly so it's a good idea to go ahead and register for Plumbers Conference instead of procrastinating about doing it!

See you in Portland!

23 Jul 2008 5:46pm GMT

It appears that Google has not found yet the page of the GUADEC 2008 presentation slides.

If you have slides, put them on http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2008/Slides, alphabetically by title.

GUADEC slides.

23 Jul 2008 4:56pm GMT

Yay! Catch me if you can.

23 Jul 2008 4:11pm GMT

Well, my microblogging of GUADEC failed miserably, mainly because I didn't seem to be able to get a DHCP lease

I hope identi.ca gets SMS support by next time. Either that or maybe just one conference where the network doesn't keel over and die at the sight of a few hundred developers.

I was kinda surprised to find quite a few people who didn't know about stow. If you ever need to make install something, use this.

The sides from my talk are now up on wizbit.org. The wiki's pretty empty at the moment, but we're slowly filling it up…

23 Jul 2008 3:42pm GMT

Conary packaging is easy, but there are times where you hit some harder things and you really need to hit the docs. There are plenty of docs now on conary, and a few clicks in a web browser generally can get you what you need. However, there is a very cool command line interface to the packaging docs call "cvc explain". I keep running into people that haven't seen it, so lets get the word out!

You can run "cvc explain [method]" to get the documentation for that method. Here is an example:


$ cvc explain DanglingSymlinks
Conary API Documentation: PackageRecipe.DanglingSymlinks

NAME
====

r.DanglingSymlinks() - Disallow dangling symbolic links

SYNOPSIS
========

r.DanglingSymlinks([filterexp] || [exceptions=filterexp)

DESCRIPTION
===========

The r.DanglingSymlinks() policy enforces the absence of dangling
symbolic links; that is, symbolic links pointing to targets which no
longer exist.

If you know that a dangling symbolic link created by your package
is fulfilled by another package on which your package depends,
you may set up an exception for that file.

EXAMPLES
========

r.DanglingSymlinks(exceptions='%(htconfdir)s/run')

The %(htconfdir)s/run file is a symlink that is intentionally
left dangling within this package, because we know that it will
be satisfied by runtime dependencies at installation time.

23 Jul 2008 1:16pm GMT

The Call for Papers for the Linux Plumbers Conference in September in Portland, Oregon has been extended until July 31st 2008. It's a conference about the core infrastructure of Linux systems: the part of the system where userspace and the kernel interface. It's the first conference where the focus is specifically on getting together the kernel people who work on the userspace interfaces and the userspace people who have to deal with kernel interfaces. It's supposed to be a place where all the people doing infrastructure work sit down and talk, so that each other understands better what the requirements and needs of the other are, and where we can work towards fixing the major problems we currently have with our lower-level APIs.

I am running the Audio microconf of the Plumbers Conference. Audio infrastructure on Linux is still heavily fragmented. Pro, desktop and embedded worlds are almost completely seperate worlds. While we have quite good driver support the user experience is far from perfect, mostly due because our infrastructure is so balkanized. Join us at the Plumbers Conference and help to fix this! If you are doing audio infrastructure work on Linux, make sure to attend and submit a paper!

Sign up soon! Send in your paper early! The conference is expected to sell out pretty quickly!

See you in Portland!

23 Jul 2008 11:39am GMT

Since I'd promised a certain gentleman that given the phone I'll try out Mundu Radio, I went ahead and downloaded it yesterday. Without wasting too many words - it is a cool application to have. The UI was a little bit klunky for me, but got used to it pretty fast. Now if only they had one for the n810 that'd be nice

If you want to listen to nice music on your phone, go ahead and get your account now.

23 Jul 2008 11:11am GMT

Every day we make choices. Often they are made without a moment's thought.
Sometimes those choices shape our lives, even if only for a few years.

You just hope you make the right ones.

23 Jul 2008 10:24am GMT

The second release features the basic functionality one would expect from a people-library. Create addressbooks and add some people to it. And then remove them again. People management at its basic level.

Changes

• creating, opening and deleting addressbooks implemented
• added tests for addressbook functionality
• creating people implemented
• people can be added and removed to / from addressbooks
• added tests for people functionality

Download

libsoylent is available for download at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Contact

Bugs, feature requests, questions and related discussion go to the Soylent mailinglist. You can join at:

http://lists.codethink.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soylent-devel

More

More information on libsoylent is available at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

23 Jul 2008 10:13am GMT

Back in the day, I used my paycheck to buy the top-notch MP3 player that was the Rio500. Unfortunately, I forgot it in the back pocket on my plane seat when flying over to Raleigh for my Red Hat induction. And then I used one of my first new job paycheck to buy a second generation (and very very expensive) iPod.

You could say that hacking on Walk500, a front-end to that great player is the reason why I'm hacking on GNOME these days.


I couldn't bear the thought anymore, and bought a Rio500 on eBay for $5. Hacking on it half-an-hour at a time, I cleaned up the code. The latest release of the modern era is available on SourceForge.

23 Jul 2008 10:13am GMT

g++ just gave me this error message right now:

./JavaScriptCore/kjs/ArgList.h:133: error: extra qualification 'KJS::ArgList::' on member 'operator new'

Would be nice if this language (or its compilers) would have matured that much, that you don't always need exactly the same C++ compiler as the guy writing the code you try to compile. It was just 29 years ago, that C++ was invented...

23 Jul 2008 9:31am GMT