Planet GNOME

One browser too many

2009-06-24T00:38:28Z

It struck me this morning that I end up using too many browsers. For example, at this precise moment, I have Firefox, Chromium, Seamonkey, Epiphany and Opera being used for all the content that I need to take a peek at.

And, all because at some point in time I had a kickstart that pulled in Firefox, Epiphany and Seamonkey. Chromium looks to be a decent enough browser in spite of that annoying bit about not being able to handle Complex Text Layout. Remember to read this fine blog post if you want to set it up for Leonidas/Fedora 11.

Speaking of Firefox, at some point recently, I was using a boatload of add-ons to aid my browsing habits. The one that did come in handy was the Tree Style Tab add-on. It did reveal interesting patterns in the paths that I follow while browsing. Another nifty add-on is the Split Browser one, couple it with Tabs Open Relative and, you have a much more intuitive experience while browsing.

+ http://libsoup.rocks/so/much/ + + One post too many +

woo [...]

Looking for two roommates to move in on September 1st

2009-06-23T23:49:36Z

Hey everyone, my two roommates are moving out to be closer to the city. Those who have been to my place know it is an amazing apartment in North Cambridge, MA with a five minute walk to the Alewife T station. If you are looking to move or know someone who needs a place let me know. The lease is for a year and is super inexpensive at $635 a month per person plus utilities.

Oh and you will have to like dogs since Ty is staying too

-[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

2009-06-23: Tuesday.

2009-06-23T21:43:13Z

- Up early; to work, installed a recent image; trotted off -to Cambridge on the train - pottered about enjoying the sun. -Caught up with the Collabora crowd. Pizza lunch, good to see -Christian again. -
- Train back; dug at mail, entertained babes while J. went -to a parent's evening. Dinner, Tony came over to talk - good time. -Amazed by the staggering ignorance of basic accounting in this -solar -rave - if you spend $38000 now, and expect to get slightly less -than $38000 back over twelve years, you are loosing money. -Payback -needs to be compared in net present value terms; still, a >10% -return anually seems reasonable in today's market with ten year -treasuries at sub 4%. Anyhow, despite the numbers not adding up -he's hit on my new favorite solution for sustainable energy - Solar: -numbers, -perspective. -

23 Jun 2009

2009-06-23T21:21:17Z

It's now been over 6 months since Poulsbo hardware with Intel's GMA500 graphics core started shipping in volume. And we're still utterly lacking in any sort of worthwhile driver. It's an impressive turnaround from the recent days when the straightforward recommendation for mobile Linux hardware was "anything that has lots of Intel stuff in lspci", and while the Poulsbo situation in itself doesn't change that hugely it's potentially symptomatic of a worrying trend within parts of Intel.

The first thing to realise here is that, like most large companies, Intel consists of a large number of business units with different priorities. Their open-source technology center has historically had responsibility for providing Linux support for hardware, but this obviously depends on other business units cooperating with them. And there's strong evidence that many of those business units don't get it.

There's been signs of this for some time. Back before the days of the Intel X.org driver gaining native modesetting support, some people ran the Intel embedded graphics driver. This was (is?) a closed X driver that was able to provide native modesetting on platforms that could only otherwise be run at incorrect resolutions. One business unit was shipping a driver that was more functional than the official Intel Linux driver. To the best of my knowledge, none of that code was ever used in the rewritten Intel driver that now provides the same features.

Poulsbo is another example of this. Intel wanted a low-power mobile graphics chipset and chose to buy in a 3D core from an external vendor. IP issues prevent them from releasing any significant information about that 3D core, so the driver remains closed source. The implication is pretty clear - whichever section of Intel was responsible for the design of Poulsbo presumably had "Linux support" as a necessary feature, but didn't think "Open driver" was a required part of that. There's not a lot any other body inside Intel can do once IP-limiting contracts are signed and the hardware's shipping, but it ends up tarnishing the good reputation that other parts of Intel have built up anyway.

And while Poulsbo is the most obvious example of this to date, it's not the only one. Intel recently decided to make the EFI development kit discussion lists private. Various drivers for Moorestown (the followup platform to Poulsbo) have been submitted to the Linux kernel, and while they have the advantage of being GPLed they have the disadvantage of being barely above the level of typical vendor code. Objections that chunks of them simply don't integrate into Linux correctly has done little to get these problems fixed - I still have no real idea how the runtime interface to power management on the SD driver is supposed to be used, but I suspect the answer is probably "badly".

This all makes sense if you assume that there are large groups of people in Intel who don't talk to each other. But to the casual observer it just looks schizophrenic. Explaining to an irate user that the Intel who shipped a closed Linux graphics driver is only barely the same Intel who contribute so much to architectural improvements in the Linux graphics stack doesn't make their hardware work. And while all of this confusion is going on, Intel's competitors are catching up. Atheros are now making significant contributions to the state of Linux wireless. AMD are releasing graphics chipset documentation faster than Intel, and radeon support is improving rapidly.

Is the future going to be one where we can no longer simply say that Intel hardware will Just Work? Is their work on Moblin (easily the most compelling Linux UI for netbooks) going to be wasted on the broader Linux community because it'll mostly end up running on hardware that's not supported by the mainline Linux kernel? Does Intel have a real commitment to open source, or is that being lost in the face of short-term requirements?

Intel need to demonstrate that they have a company-wide understanding of what Linux support actually means or risk losing much of what they've earned over the past few years. I'm desperately hoping that Poulsbo and what we've seen so far of Moorestown are the exception, not the future norm.

Berlin Day 0

2009-06-23T21:05:49Z

St. Colmcille brought me from Boston to Dublin.

Dublin’s terminal A isn’t great. In fact, I only found one functional power outlet, and it conveniently spanned the entrance of the ladies’ room. I arrived at 5 AM and fought to stay awake as to not miss my flight!

St. Ibar took me from Dublin to Berlin:

Over 24 hours awake now. A comfortable 1 hour train ride to the hotel.

By some very very good luck and happy chance, I ran into the FUDcon dinner train. They very kindly and patiently waited for me to drop my things off and we headed out for yummy (and veggie-friendly thankfully) food!

I think I’ve been awake for something like 34 hours now. Time to sleep!

-Posted in Uncategorized

Libgda’s progress

2009-06-23T20:48:21Z

Long time no blog…

I’ve been busy lately working on adding a UI extension to Libgda: merging the good parts of Libgnomedb and Mergeant (which have not been kept up to date) into Libgda. This new UI “extension” will remain optional (built only if GTK+ is found) and includes:

some data bound widgets (grid anf form views)
some “administrative” widgets such as a login widget to enter credentials when opening a connection
a reworked control center where one can manage named data sources (DSN) and check the list of installed database providers (drivers)
a re-write of the browser tool usefull to analyse the structure of a database and run some statements; this a a kind of merge with the one which existed in Libgnomedb and Mergeant but with a much improved user interface.

This is now all in the master branch in git.gnome.org, works (except for some DnD) on Windows and MacOSX. Here are some screenshots of the new browser, taken using a PostgreSQL database. One can open several connections at the same time in the browser, and for each connection, several windows can be opened. Each window displays a “perspective” (similar to Eclipse’s perspectives), and currently the schema browser perspective is implemented, which is shown below, more will come later (statements execution, reports, etc).

The shot above shows the index page where all the database objects are displayed (tables only for the moment), and the favorites bar on the left where one can drag n drop tables (or later other objects types) for quick access (the trashcan at the bottom is to remove favorites by dragging them on it). Clicking on a table opens a new tab as shown:

The shot above shows the details of table “products” with the traditional fields list and the constraints below (here clicking on the “warehouses” link opens yet another tab for the warehouses table). You can note in the bottom that when showing a table, it is also possible to display the table’s relations, ie. which table are referenced by the current table and which tables reference the current table, as show:

The shot above cleary shows that the “customers” table references the “locations” and “salesrep” tables and is itself referenced by the “orders” table. The canvas is drawn using GooCanvas and can be exported to PNG and SVG or printed.

That’s all for now, more later…

Attention-to-detail ’till you bleed

2009-06-23T20:46:05Z

It’s amazing what you can spend half a day on. But in the end it meant bugs got squashed and text in notifications should look more sound now. Now the interaction designers need to make up their mind what’s the best default width for a notification-bubble. So I provide them with a gazillion screenshots. Clicking on any one gives you the full screenshot, so one can see the bubbles size in relation to a typical desktop-screen size. Doing that for other form-factor screens (e.g. netbooks) they can do themselves
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po.vim is up for adoption

2009-06-23T19:23:42Z

The po.vim syntax file and the corresponding ftplugin file make Vim an efficient translation tool, with the pros and cons of showing the “gory details” of the file format. While the ftplugin still lives in the Vim.org scripts repository, the syntax highlight file is already distributed with Vim itself. In the last years I made Vim spell check only translated text and improved the highlight and spell check of XML tags, but now I don’t have the time or interest in further development. If anyone wants to add a feature or fix a bug in the syntax file, please send a patch to bram at moolenaar net. Thanks!

Pidgin 2.5.7 in Kiwi Linux 9.04

2009-06-23T19:15:00Z

Copied over Pidgin 2.5.7 that fixes the recent Yahoo protocol connection problems from the Pidgin PPA to the Kiwi Linux 9.04 archives, so if you have the latter an upgrade will get it. Nice work Pidgin upstream and Ubuntu packagers :)

Until this version needed by YMSG users gets through ubuntu-updates (or backports) it's a good way to stop confused newbies.

GNOME Docs Hackfest Part II

2009-06-23T02:47:20Z

Day three of the Writing Open Source conference was our hackfest. I previously showed off Milo’s work in Part I, but it’s probably best to start at the beginning.

We started day three by applying some of what we had learned over the first two days. When writing, especially documentation, it is best to plan your work. This includes knowing your audience, their personas, and understanding their needs.

Lynda Chiotti, with help from Janet Swisher, led us through a brainstorming exercise. Using a mind mapping tool, we brainstormed what users want to do (and might need help with) when using their computer.

This was important for a few different reasons. For GNOME 3.0, we want to re-write the GNOME User Guide as topic based help using Mallard. Re-creating might be a better word, as we are going to switch licenses from the GFDL to CC-SA 3.0, and it’s probably easier to re-write it from scratch than to contact all the previous authors over the years to get permission. More importantly, we need to think like our users. How many times do we, as GNOME power users and developers, talk to ourselves, and not think like the average computer user? If this user needs help, does our documentation help them? Do they get frustrated and stop using GNOME or GNOME applications? We have a unique opportunity to use both our tools and the launch of GNOME 3.0 to radically improve our documentation and help our users.

After that, Phil, Milo, Shaun and I spent some time talking about how we could improve the GNOME Documentation Project. There were no sacred cows, and we’ve launched an effort to overhaul the docs team, including:

Adding simple tasks that new contributors can do and then build on (thanks Emma!)
Focusing the docs team on writers, editors, and translators. Each perform different, but similar roles, including crossover. We need to improve our tools for each team, and communication.
Holding more regular meetings, including a monthly project meeting, and weekly community sessions to encourage participation
Developing a roadmap of tasks we want to accomplish, including both the documentation itself and the tools
Understanding Shaun’s role as our fearless documentation project leader, and how we can help him to free him up and not having the team be blocked on any one person.
Make a significant effort to coordinate with downstream distributions, including meetings and communication, introducing Mallard, and better comments within documentation.

And that’s just the recap! Our wiki space is going through a revamp as we bring this to life, and there is a lot more to come.

Lastly, while Phil and Milo started hacking on Empathy docs using Mallard, I jumped into Bugzilla. Almost half of our open bugs in gnome-user-docs were touched (36 of 80), and of those 36, 23 were closed. Finally, 16 commits were made to update the current User Guide, including reviewing and patches from contributors. Fun fact (or embarrassing) - the oldest bug fixed was from July, 2006.

Overall, woscon was an amazing experience, and we all learned a lot. A few years from now, we’ll be able to look back and say: “We were there when this began”.

I think I speak for all of the GNOME Docs team members who were there, including Phil, Milo, and Shaun when I say we are sincerely thankful for the GNOME Foundation’s sponsorship of our travel to the Writing Open Source conference. This conference was the brain child of Emma Jane Hogbin, and we are very grateful for all the time and effort she put in to organizing and hosting woscon.

Wordpress Upgrade

2009-06-23T02:05:23Z

I just upgraded to the latest Wordpress release (2.8!) let me know if you have any issues viewing the site!

Mon 2009/Jun/22

2009-06-22T23:38:33Z

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- We now have some ultra-simple documentation on - the policies - which GNOME uses to handle the RANDR extension. - What happens when I hit Fn-F7 to switch displays? What - happens when I plug in a monitor? How does GNOME manage - to remember your RANDR configurations? -
-
-
- I have been toying with the idea of holding a really - informal BoF - during GCDS - for the hippie treehuggers among us. It would be a - mish-mash discussion of peak oil, urbanism, - architecture, gardening, permaculture, urban - agriculture, and all that. What do you think? - Mail me to - see if we would have a suitably-sized group. - Think informal, as in people sitting on the - beach talking about how to make their compost heap work, - not a session in an air-conditioned auditorium. -
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I just stole $5 from Amazon

2009-06-22T19:20:35Z

Amazon MP3 on the Android

Amazon claims “We’re Building Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company” and they deliver. Every time I have had a problem, they jump through hoops to resolve it immediately.

Unfortunately, I am unable to make myself understood by the Amazon tech support team, which leads to lots of problems.

This weekend I purchased about $6 worth of music downloads from my phone. (3 tracks, and a CD) One of the tracks didn’t download correctly, and Amazon incorrectly charged my credit card and not my gift certificate balance. I sent this message:

I just ordered a CD and 3 tracks through my T-Mobile Android G1 phone. The third song, “Crazy Love” did not download. (The CD was purchased while not on a wi-fi network, so I’m not sure if it worked yet.)
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My second problem is a billing issue. My account has a gift card balance of $29.01, but my credit card was charged. Please refund my card and remove the balance from my gift certificate. I would like future purchases to come out of that balance as well.

So what did they do? They refunded me the full $6 and told me to re-download. Nice, but not quite right…

GSoC Week 4: The Tubes are Alive!

2009-06-22T19:20:00Z

Awesome week! Just yesterday, my mentor and I opened up a transatlantic tube and exchanged our Banshee music libraries! Very cool seeing it in action over the Internet. So, I accompished what I wanted to this week and got the data delivering asynchronously without blocking either the producer or consumer's UI. Banshee will display tracks to the user as the download progresses. I've also got playlists coming across too. Screencast:

Other happenings:
Found a bug, confirmed the bug in #telepathy, and reported it.

Also, I found out that Empathy is soon to be ported to Misson Control 5 (MC5). Maybe around GUADEC time. So, this brings a dilemma to my project. See below for a Q and A style explanation.

Q: Why is MC5 important to my SoC project?

A: Because the next release of Empathy is going to depend on it, and MC4 is basically being thrown out. No backwards compatibility.

Q: What is the minimum amount of work required to get this project working with MC5?

A:
1) Port connection detection (ie. ConnectionLocator class) from MC4 API to MC5.

2) Port presence setting code (ie. Announcer class) from MC4 API to MC5.

3) Use the Empathy TubeHandler hack (register an object by dbus name org.gnome.Empathy.DTubeHandler.myservice) to tell MC5 that Empathy is handling the tube.

Q: What about the rest of the project's code?

A:
1) Leave the rest of the code as is (with minor tweaks, I'm sure), as I'm pretty sure it will still work.

2) Port the code to use the org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Client interface MC5 provides.

Q: If we have option 1), then why port anything?

A: I am using a bit of a hack, at the moment, for advertising the Banshee music sharing tube service.

The Telepathy API provides a method called SetSelfCapabilities on the ContactCapabilities interface which is kind of weird to work with without MC5. For example, to add a new tube service, the existing services have to be queried, saved, merged with the new service, and then sent to the SetSelfCapabilities method. To remove the new service, the existing services must be queried, saved, our service must be removed from the existing services, and then sent to the method. So, in other words, the method does a replace and not an add/remove operation. MC5 provides a higher level layer that does all this extra work. However, it is quite a bit of work to use that "extra layer." ie. port project code to use the org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Client interface. On the other hand, my hack introduces a race condition where the capabilities could change during the process.

I've posted on the telepathy mailing list about this MC5 stuff and have already received some helpful replies.

So, I'll have to discuss all this with my mentor and decide on our course of action. To add to the TODO list, I may still tweak my playlist provider, I've got some GUI bits to work on and after that I'll probably start playing with file transfers.

Mobile Broadband Assistant makes it Easy

2009-06-22T19:08:53Z

: -
Yay! Mobile broadband with NetworkManager is so simple!
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(credit mandolin davis)
-

Easier than your… well, you probably know where I was going with that. It’s a great leap forward for NetworkManager usability. Other operating systems either don’t have one, or your network operator gives you the software so of course you don’t have to configure it. On Linux, we like to work for everyone, so we get to make it easy to get connected to the operator of your choice.

Antti does the base

Antti Kaijanmäki did some work last summer (2008) to put together the mobile broadband provider database and write a library and assistant to use that data. That was a great start, and Ubuntu started shipping it as a patch in 8.10. Seems to have worked fairly well there, but since we were deep in the middle of getting the NM 0.7 release out at that time, it wasn’t possible to integrate then. Antti’s patch didn’t get committed to 0.7.1 for mostly licensing and scope-related reasons, but he built the database which the assistant that just hit git uses, and he proved that it was something users wanted.

Tambet the wrote a compatibly-licensed library to parse the database for network-manager-netbook, which means I didn’t have to, which was nice.

Implemented with Máirín-induced goodness
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So a few weeks ago I started rewriting the pitiful GSM/CDMA chooser dialog in network-manager-applet into a full GtkAssistant-based helper. I’m not an interaction expert, so I tricked Máirín Duffy into helping me get the flow and design planned out. Then we iterated over my implementation and fixed what sucked, and came out with something that works pretty well. Starting from the user’s perspective is incredibly important, and that’s what we did with the mobile broadband assistant.

Why do you want this? (or, WTF is an APN?)
-

Because you probably have no idea what a GPRS APN is, or why you need the right one to make things work. Nor should you have to. At least CDMA got this right by not having one, they are an interaction nightmare. Your provider knows exactly what you’re paying for, so they know exactly what to bill you for when you use various services they offer. But when connecting to GPRS data services, you need to tell your phone or device what APN you’d like to use when connecting which in turn tells the provider how you’d like to be billed for it. But this sort of access control is simply at the wrong level, and having it a the GSM level instead of the application level sucks for users.

There are different APNs for everything; for example T-Mobile USA splits it up as follows:

wap.voicestream.com - for T-Zones, the WAP-based walled-garden for dumbphones ($6/mo)
internet2.voicestream.com - Unblocked access to anything using a NAT-ed IP address ($20/mo)
internet3.voicestream.com - Unblocked access to anythign using a public, routable IP address for certain VPN clients (also $20/mo)
epc.tmobile.com - new, nobody’s quite sure what its for

Some providers have a separate APN that downsamples JPEGs to save data costs, others have separate APNs for pay-as-you-go versus contract (they already know whether your IMSI is contract or not, so this baffles me), others have separate APNs per region they serve (BSNL India). It’s a freaking mess.

Sanity through NetworkManager

APNs don’t really change that often, so it’s easy to build up a crowdsourced database of current providers and their APNs. Which is what Antti did, and that worked out really well. Máirín decided to loosely map the APN to a provider’s billing plan, which usually maps to brand name or service that users actually care about. So I reorganized the mobile broadband provider database to allow multiple “services” (ie, APN or CDMA) for each provider. This almost gave me carpal tunnel since its not easily scriptable.

Second, I added all the MCC/MNCs (network identification numbers) that I could find, so that in the future we can read you IMSI off your SIM card and automatically suggest your provider when you plug in your phone or data card the first time. That’s pretty hot.

Hot Pics

When you first insert your card, it shows up in the applet menu. Ubuntu has a patch that will nag you with a notification that you’ve just plugged in new 3G hardware; they’re welcome to port that to the new code and submit. For now, it looks like this:

When you click that, you’ll get the Assistant’s intro page:

This page explains some of the information you’ll need. Hopefully you know what provider you signed up for, but if you don’t, you seriously need to stop getting drunk before 3 in the afternoon. You probably also know what country you’re in, if not,seriously, get a GPS. I can’t help you with that.

Now it gets a little tougher, but since you’re filling a wheelbarrow with your money and dumping it on your provider’s doorstep, you’ll probably also know what provider you signed up with. But maybe you got shanhai-ed into signing a contract, I don’t know.

But if your provider isn’t listed, we need your help. File a bug in Gnome Bugzilla, tell us your provider name, your country, the common name of your plan, and the APN you use. We’ll update the provider database with that information, and thank you profusely for making life easier for everyone else too. We could, in the future, allow users to automatically send their manually entered settings to a server somewhere, and make the provider database update process less manual. Patches for that greatly appreciated. Now you get to choose your plan:

Again, if your plan (ie, APN) isn’t listed, file a bug. But since you signed up, and they probably have some sort of FAQ for that sort of thing, you’ll probably be OK. Lastly, we have:

and if all looks well, you hit Apply, and NetworkManager will activate the connection you just set up. You can also change the APN easily through the connection editor. Much rejoicing was heard.

Future Improvements

There’s a few things we can do in the future… If the connection fails for some reason, re-display the Assistant. We can autodetect your provider based on the first 5 or 6 digits of your IMSI on your SIM, skip the Country page, and automatically select that provider in the Provider page, saving you a step or two. Unfortunately, we can’t autodetect the plan/APN because that’s not stored anywhere (well it is usually preloaded into your phone, but all the APNs are, and there’s no indication of which one is the one you really want). So there’s room to make it even more awesome.

Your help is required

Again, the mobile broadband provider database is incomplete. Help fix it up for your country and your provider by filing a bug with your information. Include your provider name, your country, your plan’s marketing name if you know it, and of course the APN you’re using for data. If you have a CDMA provider, just tell us your country and provider name. Username and password are generally ignored by the network and the device, so they aren’t useful. It’s your help that makes this effort work better for everyone.

2009-06-22: Monday.

2009-06-22T18:28:20Z

- Up early, to work; battling the build system, amazed by -the under-thought Malthusian -pessimism -coupled with supposed eugenic solution. At least Malthus had the exuse of -not having a large published literature on the subject to study first. -
- OPS call with Markus. Pizza with the family; read stories, put babes -to bed & back to work. -

Open Video Conference an Amazing Step Forward

2009-06-22T17:22:24Z

The Open Video Conference just ended yesterday. I attended the first two days and just stopped in briefly during the hack-fests yesterday before having brunch with some old highschool friends and heading back to my parents house where my dog and car were stashed.

I can say without a doubt the turnout was amazing and even though not everything I heard all weekend was positive it was a giant leap forward in then understanding of the importance of Open Video and culture. I won’t put a figure on how many people attended but some of the upstairs talks were standing room only and after the first day some of the organizers were lamenting that then needed to get bigger rooms (consequently some of the talks were swapped the next day). Speaking about the organizers, they ran an incredibly smooth ship and should be thanked and praised for their efforts.

The Good

Apps

I was mainly there looking to see what video producers wanted from FOSS application developers and to support the PiTiVi/GStreamer teams on behalf of the GNOME Foundation. It is amazing to see the PiTiVi non-linear video editing app at such a usable state. While Edward Hervey (bilboed on irc) gave his mini presentation on PiTiVi I was busy hacking up a “How To Make Chocolate Truffles” video from pictures and clips I had laying around.

Afterwards I showed him some of the bugs I encountered in the 0.13.1 release and he just rattled off, fixed in git, fixed in git, fixed in git…etc. Sadly the releases are tied to GStreamer releases (which is a good thing from a development/bugs standpoint but not so good from a user standpoint given the early stages of PiTiVi) so we won’t see an official release soon. I plan on trying to automate a Fedora Repository at some point just to be able to view the progress without breaking my system.

The point is PiTiVi is about 90% there (and perhaps 100% in git) to be able to support my needs for basic video editing in terms of stability and basic tools. That should be pretty reflective of those who need to do things like screen casting and interview style video blogs. Some advanced features like effects (look at Cheese for some examples of this already working in an app) already exist in GStreamer and just need to be integrated in PiTiVi’s UI and rendering pipeline.

There was also a show of Cinelarra but more interesting is the GTK+ fork Lumiera which unfortunately is not usable yet but the direction they are going in (GTK+ interface and some GStreamer integration) looks like a great re-start in the case of pro level editing tools.

Also of interest in the pro level space was Blender which seems to be the pro project with the most momentum and features for pro’s. At least that was the initial reaction from some on the Red Hat media team. The dev’s did admit that the functionality is limited to what they needed during production of Big Buck Bunny (and other productions currently in the queue) but that in those areas it is rock solid. It is interesting to see a UI designed with different usability profiles. For instance one of Blender’s usability criteria is the avoidance of repetitive strain injury. To combat RSI mouse clicks are evenly divided between left and right mouse clicks.

Bassam Kurdali, one of the Blender developers and animators, came up to me later in the conference and said he had noticed me using PiTiVi to edit my video. He was impressed at the simplicity and slickness of the interface and how far along it is. There is plenty of room for different approaches and a real potential for cross pollination between the pro tools and the every day end user tools.

What Content Producers Want

Speaking of end users we got to hear from a bunch of them who let us know how we could support them. One of the biggest themes was that Windows tools suck and those who taught others couldn’t just tell them to go out and buy a mac (praises were heaped on iMovie and Final Cut Pro). They really want an easy to use tool, with the unfortunate note that it would have to run on Windows. One really good thing is that a lot of the non-tech content producers understood the need for free codecs. However in the end they just want a simple way to render down to DVD, You Tube, Daily Motion, iPhone, etc. and don’t want to deal with formats.

I ended up collecting a bunch of buisness cards and am toying with the idea of starting a feedback group with content producers which would get them involved in improving GNOME App usability from the perspective of those who are not yet familiar with the GNOME workflow. If we are serious about expanding our reach we need to go beyond our current self selecting internal feedback loops. The goal wouldn’t be to get these people using GNOME (though giving them a way through the apps wouldn’t be a bad thing). It would be more about getting groups outside of GNOME/Linux to be part of the process of improving GNOME. Will it be fruitful? I don’t know but it is an interesting experiment with a potential huge payoff for a little bit of effort.

Sita Sings the Blues

This good section wouldn’t be complete without the mention of Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley which is a feature length (82 minutes) animated film released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You have complete rights to watch, screen, remix and redistribute the film as long as you abide by the license. I do suggest you watch it and if you like it buy the DVD or simply donate to encourage more works like this (I bought the DVD for $20). Not only is Nina a content producer but she is heavily involved in advocating her distribution methods, going as far as documenting the process that went into releasing Sita under a creative commons license and in her work with QuestionCopyright.org.

Mozilla and the Open Video Contest

I was very impressed with Mozilla’s involvement and their push for Ogg Theora to become a base line codec for the HTML 5 video tag. They are also helping launch the upcoming Open Video Contest which would see the winner flown to the 2010 South by Southwest conference. We should probably run some sort of sister contest to encourage GNOME users to submit entries.

The Bad

It wasn’t all roses. While I feel we are reaching independent content producers way more than I would have though at this point, some of the big companies still don’t get it or are afraid of Open Video implications.

Adobe

It must be said that Adobe has been somewhat good at working with the community over long periods of time but that they just never get around to resolving key issues. What really surprised me was when on one of the industry round tables the Adobe representative pointed to their release of the Flash documentation as a shining example of this relationship. After checking with a developer of an alternative flash implementation I was told those documents are pretty much useless. Due to bugs, some of the spec just doesn’t work as written and other issues makes it impossible to write a third party Flash player.

YouTube/Google

While reportedly Chrome will ship with Ogg Theora support their flagship video site YouTube seems afraid to do so. Their rep at the round table stated some pretty audacious things such as continuing the myth that Theora wasn’t good enough when clearly that argument was directly debunked (the side by side comparisons were even playing on HDTV’s at the conference).

Even more of an issue was the representative’s idea on what Open Video meant. He declared that they would love to support Open Video but that it meant letting anybody do whatever they wanted and that doesn’t work from a buisness perspective.

Open Video isn’t about wild west, trample on rights. If anything it is about balancing the rights of content producers, end users and fair use. From what I read, YouTube’s position is that they are the 1000 pound gorilla in video distribution and at the end of the day they only believe in a user’s and content producer’s freedoms if it is walled behind their own servers. “All the world’s video” indeed.

The solution there is to drive traffic to sites like Daily Motion and Blip.tv which understand the issues involved.

Conclusion

Nothing is perfect, but we are off to a really good start. In the end it is up to us to keep the momentum going and eventually produce a better experience within the complete Open Video stack, from content production to delivery. The web was built and exploded around the concept of open technology. Let’s continue to make sure this is the case going forward. The last thing we want is the web to become the domain of a few, with creativity being stifled by restrictions in the non-open parts of the stack.

-[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

Guadalinex v6 is out!

2009-06-22T16:31:13Z

I am pleased to announce that the final version of Guadalinex v6 is out

The official news are at the Guadalinex website. But it’s in Spanish, so I’ve decided to explain a bit (in my poor English) what is all about.

Before to start I like to thank to all those people who help to develop, test, fix, translate and document all those great projects which Guadalinex is based on. I really do. They make this possible and deserve most of the credits.

This is the 6th edition of Guadalinex which is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. The distribution is paid by the local government of a big region at the south of Spain, which is Andalusia.

There are a lot of people who think this is waste of public money, but I think quite the opposite. And I think so because we don’t just make Ubuntu booting in Spanish and change the wallpaper, we try to listen to real end users from this region of the world and bring them the closer system to what they need and demand.

The distribution is oriented to the regular citizen, but it is being used at schools for few years. Thousands of children have been using Guadalinex (ergo Ubuntu/Debian/Gnome and much more free software stuff) everyday at the schools for about four years now.

But also people from very low populated areas of Andalusia have been using Guadalinex at centers with computers where they can learn computers skills and use internet for free. Now there are around 700 centers working from Monday to Friday for them.

Even the public libraries are using now Guadalinex.

Because of that, Guadalinex is more than a few technical or artistic changes. It’s a social project.

I think the changes we have made in this version are useful no just for Andalusian, but for all the people who feels more comfortable reading and writing in Spanish. And there also some interesting stuff for a normal Ubuntu user.

We like to push those improvements to Ubuntu, Debian, GNOME and all the wonderful projects we touch. And also new small tools we develop because our users need them. We think those are also useful for everybody.

I have to say that Guadalinex don’t try to compete with any distro. Guadalinex have its owns users with their needs and we just want to give them what they need. And in the process (if we can) to help the community and other people.

Our goals are really different from Ubuntu’s ones. Ubuntu need to be for everyone. Need to be universal and be useful and “compatible” with every person and culture.

We are the opposite. We need to target to specific people, with specific language, culture, needs and resources. That’s why Ubuntu is so useful for us, but Guadalinex is more useful for our users.

We have to deal with users who barely know how to write and know nothing about computers. Ok, we have also real good IT people or people who really know all this stuff, but our threshold is the user who less know.

We like fancy things on our desktops but sometimes we have to wait a bit to get them into Guadalinex because our users aren’t ready for them. And we know because we have professional helpdesk services, forums, feedback from teachers, from our technicians at the tele centers. So it’s not something we figure out by ourself and then take “conservatives” decisions, it’s something we do, because we know well to our users and we are here for them.

What I was trying to say is that Ubuntu (or any other generalist distribution) has a very important mission and there are a lot of smaller and more focused derivatives distributions that need to be there. This is an ecosystem and everyone grown and learn on this interaction.

Sorry for been so tedious, I’ll promise to tell shorter and funnier stories next time

Well, actually my next post probably will be the list of things that are different between Ubuntu Jaunty and Guadalinex v6. The list is in Spanish now, so I want to explain it in English.
-

And If anyone like to try Guadalinex, we have a DVD version (the full edition) and a minor version on CD.

Thanks for reading

Happy hacking!
-

GLADEs

2009-06-22T14:23:32Z

This week I started exploring the wild world of GLADE!! After losing a day to the fact that I hadn't done a 'make install' after changing the API in some way (the plugins were still being loaded from PREFIX/lib/glade3, so all hell was subtly breaking loose), I managed to implement the following provisional UI for binding settings to properties:

Most properties can be bound, including many that you would never want to - but the 'Bind to' widget is normally hidden for these. It defaults to shown on the 'data' properties you'd normally bind to, such as GtkEntry.text and GtkCheckButton.active.

A bonus of this is you get 'guards' (where one toggle affects the sensitivity of an area of the dialog) basically for free. Just bind the 'sensitive' property of the container widget to the same key as the toggle, and all of its children will be disabled/enabled appropriately.

Last week I stayed a few days with my parents in Wales. Generously the sun came out and I got out a bit.

This week I am headed to Glastonbury! I like to get to lots of festivals every year and Glastonbury is far and away the best in the country. I often work at them but I'd hate to do that at Glastonbury, there's already not nearly enough time to see the whole of the festival. It just so happens there are several recently reformed big-name bands playing this summer, I think it is going to be one to remember!

multi-process firefox

2009-06-22T11:46:52Z

Chris Jones has put together a demo video of a super-early stage Gecko-driven browser that’s multi-process. It’s super-duper early and realizing that we’re only in Phase I of the roadmap is important but it’s great to see such speedy progress. Release early, release often!

Sadfaces. Your browser doesn’t support the tag with open video formats. Try clicking here instead.

maemomm API reference

2009-06-22T11:21:30Z

We have cleaned up the maemomm API reference and put the result online. Here’s an example for the Hildon::TouchSelector widget. Pages such as that are linked often from the “Programming with maemomm” book.

Like the gtkmm API reference, the maemomm API reference is partly autogenerated from the C API reference, with some clever automatic changes, and some manual overrides, so it will improve as the hildon C API reference documentation improves.

Visual results of recent work

2009-06-22T10:52:50Z

What the urgency-level bar-display looks like (see also here):
-

-
(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~470 KBytes)
-

Corrected throbbing and proximity-fade in action:
-

-
(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~ 670 KBytes)
-

Last but not least here is a sneak peak of work-in-progress on better and faster blurring:
-

-
(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~9 MBytes)
-

Catalina

2009-06-21T22:05:33Z

I've written another library, Catalina. It started as an example for using the threading library Iris and turned into what I think is a useful library. Catalina is an object data-store for glib and gobject. It provides access through a natural key/value pair interface.

Transparent serialization is supported to and from storage for types that can be stored in GValue's. A tight binary format is provided with the library. It supports basic types such as integers, doubles, floats and strings as well as GObjects in an endian-safe manner. However someone should go double check to call my bluff (and verify its correctness). A JSON serializer would be a quick hack if someone was interested.

In addition to serialization, Catalina supports buffer transformations to and from storage. Included is CatalinaZlibTransform which can apply compression using zlib. It will avoid compression on buffers smaller than the watermark property. This will help on data-sets that are occasionally small and compression would in fact enlarge them.

Catalina is an asynchronous data-store by design. The optimal way of accessing it is the same.

Everything is built upon Trivial DB (TDB) from the samba project. It was chosen over Berkeley DB because of its license. Like Catalina, it is LGPL and does not impose extra restrictions on linking applications such as BDB.

However, the one downside to using TDB is its lack of concurrent transactions. This means that if you have multiple threads doing work and updating storage the transactions would interleave. Since we are using iris, we can use message passing as a way to manage concurrent transactions. (This is done by queuing messages until the commit phase.)

Here is a short example using Vala to asynchronously open, serialize and store a bunch of "Person" GObjects. All the while compressing each buffer with zlib. Don't be scared by the mutex/cond, it's there to negate the need of a main loop.

I intend to add indexes soon, however that is going to take a bit of planning.

So there you have it, my newest hack.

git clone git://git.dronelabs.com/catalina

Clonezilla - Linux and Windows imaging

2009-06-21T21:36:00Z

In VMware, Palo Alto, we evaluated Clonezilla for Imaging different Linux distributions like openSUSE, SLED, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, Madriva. Some success stories:

Took Ubuntu image on DELL 390 Intel single processor, first hard disk and restored it in HP AMD Athlon Dual processor, second hard disk using Clonezilla Live CD and worked awesome ! The restore times took approx 2 minutes 12 seconds. The system is usable now ! wow !! I didn't expect this to work, to be frank :) This is with regular partition.

Also, tried with Fedora LVM image, with different hard disk size, this failed, I assume this is due to LVM, though I'm not sure.

Next tried creating Windows XP SP2 32bit image from DELL 390 and deployed it on DELL 3400 based on the info available here and here and it worked amazingly !

Great work Clonezilla team

Midsummer!

2009-06-21T20:35:33Z

Glad midsommar! Hauskaa juhannusta!

Best Midsummer wishes to all my Scandinavian friends and family!

Kristine and I are having a wonderful time visiting the crazy Swedish-Finn contingent of Monty Program. The food, songs, camaraderie, and 24 hours of daylight. Being with a close-knit group feels like they are a family, and their most excellent hospitality made us feel immediate part of that family. Our deepest thanks to Monty, Anna, Ralf, and Nina; our hosts and hostesses.

Here’s a nice photo of the Baltic near Nauvo (Nagu). Lots of water, but the sea, so no små grodorna.

Hello Planet Ubuntu

2009-06-21T14:28:14Z

This is a short post just to say hello to everybody at the Ubuntu Planet
-I’ve been around Ubuntu since its first version (back in the 2004) and now my work got me closer again to Ubuntu, so I’ve decided become a member of this community and start my process of developer in here.

I was always a very Debian guy, but for different reasons I found Ubuntu interesting and a project that I had to keep eye on. I still like Debian, but I use Ubuntu for my work and my home (well, actually I use Guadalinex).

I hope my work let me keep pushing bugs, translations, patches, branches and more no just to Ubuntu but Debian, GNOME and more interesting projects out there that we use.
-That’s it for now. Soon, some news about the last Guadalinex version. Stay tuned

Where the mind is without fear

2009-06-21T13:19:55Z

The world seems to be a very clouded place today. One day, when India was facing its struggles, Tagore wrote this:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
-Where knowledge is free;
-Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
-Where words come out from the depth of truth;
-Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
-Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
-Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action…
-Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

It’s easy to take freedom for granted, when a person has had it all his life. Some sit by and watch it fade away. Others manipulate it and make it fade away. Some struggle to hold on to it, or to get it back for everyone.

History shows that when you lose freedom, it is very difficult to get it back.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Learning from others mistakes and successes

2009-06-21T12:36:50Z

I seriously hate writing overly long blog posts, but this turned into one. You are forewarned.

What can Linux and the Free Desktop learn from recent marketing campaigns by Apple and Microsoft? Let's quickly take a look at a few of the campaigns over recent years from Apple.

"There's an app for that"
Seamless hardware support with built in drivers
Built in applications for digital media (iLife)
Does not crash (quite debatable it seems)
No malware or viruses

I was surprised how well they were able to comfort users about switching to OS X. The same qualms exist for Linux and in very similar ways.

Rather than worry about migrating existing applications to OS X, (iPhone really, but it still applies,) Apple comforted the user in knowing that anything they want to do can be achieved. With Debian, for example, there are tens of thousands of applications. Do we have an app for that? Probably.

The first commercials that came out for OS X talked about how hardware just worked when you plugged it in. No extra installation of drivers or finding installation cd-roms was needed. Of course, now that more hardware vendors are supporting the platform, it is no longer the case. Linux has an advantage here due to frequent release cycles. The consistent releasing of new software and drivers gives a leg up for supporting current hardware sooner. Granted, someone still needs to be writing those new drivers. But if GkH is right, then Linux also has more drivers than any operating system ever written.

Apple talks about their iLife applications a lot. They are good and all but we have acceptable alternatives for them. Providing a full Office compatible product is quite important and you don't see either bringing that up. Granted, I would love to see an application as sleek as Apple's Keynote or Pages.

They also made hardware that developers wanted to play with such as the airtunes device. Has anyone made an airtunes-like device (airport express) with just F/OSS software. I'd think that pulseaudio could do most of what is needed.

Each of the framework libraries perform a single task well. Yet, they all still integrate together. For example, an application can control external windowing animations. Say that I'm writing a book reader and when the user turns the page I want the page to actually tear off the application window and fly across the screen. This is just not possible in a practical way today. Now that X has compositor support, shouldn't it be available to the application to provide custom control? I would love to make Marina have a native newspaper interface and do exactly that. This is just an example, many facets of the system layer need fresh innovation.

There are tools to write to make our daily lives easier. Streamlining development will only make our time-to-market sooner.

How is Microsoft reacting to the marketing campaigns from Apple? They have a few failed attempts at using celebrities such as Seinfeld. But more recently, are the "Laptop Hunters" ads. These are quite funny as you will notice they get laptops that don't match what they claimed to have wanted at all. Most importantly, though, they are attacking Apple on price and trendiness. I guess they tout gaming on PC's too. Gaming, however, is a strange problem since the total market share of PC gamers relative to PC users is quite small. It's also shrinking as the Xbox, Wii, and PS3 continue to expand their coverage. Regardless, they are both beat on price.

Additionally, I thought the slogan "Life without walls" was funny since without walls you can't have windows.

Many pundits, myself included, have talked about how netbooks can totally change the game. The iPhone was similar in the phone market. Do you think it would have been as successful without the developer platform and thousands of applications?

So finally, how can we replicate the positive results Apple had? What is missing from our platform today (can linuxhator kick our asses into shape)? What are our weaknesses (and how can we fix them to become strengths). What story do we have to tell developers? What do we really enjoy about our platform?

Review Board 1.0 Released!

2009-06-21T07:47:36Z

Tonight, we hit a milestone in the Review Board project that we’ve been working toward for over two years. We finally pushed out our 1.0 release. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into this release (okay, so not literally, but it was A LOT OF WORK!). The last few months in particular have been challenging, as we’ve had to solve some tricky bugs and scalability problems, but the end result is pretty great.

Just a short while ago, we announced the release and put up an overview of the entire release and product. We’ve already had some nice congratulatory e-mails and tweets, which is really nice :)

Some stats for this release:

2 years, 9 months, 25 days have passed since our first commit.
120 contributors have contributed to Review Board so far (in terms of code contributions).
2,019 commits were made.
899 review requests have been posted to our project’s actual Review Board server. 1,650 users are registered on there.
Our demo server, in comparison, has 2,082 review requests filed and 10,154 users.
938 bugs were filed. 812 were fixed.
232 feature requests were filed. 101 were implemented. Most remaining ones are scheduled for releases.
An estimated 200+ companies are now using Review Board. 26 have let us list them publicly.
The largest known Review Board install has over 83,000 filed review requests and over 2,000 users, doing upwards of 10GB of traffic per day.
5 presentations on Review Board are known to have been given, 3 by us, 2 by others.
552 users have joined our main mailing list, and 3,674 e-mails have been sent.

Now that Review Board 1.0 is out, we can get started on some awesome new features we’ve had planned. I have a little notebook full of ideas for our 1.1 and 1.5 releases (which may become 1.5 and 2.0, respectively, as this list grows). Some of the new features are actually ready to be committed within the next couple of days, so those of you using nightlies will start to see them soon.

We were accepted into this year’s Summer of Code, and have three students working on exciting projects for us, so hopefully we’ll start to see these trickle into the upcoming nightlies as well. Among these projects include diff viewer improvements (moved region detection, better whitespace-only change detection), IDE integration with Eclipse, and improved notification hooks and e-mail support.

We’re also working on providing support for third-party extensions, which will allow developers to extend Review Board in new, exciting ways without having to modify Review Board itself. This is especially handy for companies who wish to integrate better with their sandboxes, bug trackers or unit testing services. This will likely land in 1.5 (2.0?) at the earliest, as it’s a large change, but the code for this mostly works today. It’s just a matter of getting the codebase ready and figuring out what APIs we want to stabilize and expose.

As I mentioned in the release announcement, we’re planning a release party, tentatively on July 11th, 2009, in the Bay Area (somewhere around Palo Alto, CA). If any Review Board users want to join us, please RSVP!

Iran is

2009-06-21T06:16:00Z

ON STRIKE

RE: Finite resources, infinite growth

2009-06-21T00:40:14Z

Philip proposes that we should modify the entire human race for them to have fewer possibilities to reproduce as a measure of birth control. As a prerequisite you will need to modify every single newborn, if we had the resources to influence how every single new person is born, we would actually be at the point where we could stop thos non desired borns in a much simpler way...

Anyway, there's an easier way that actually has many other upsides. Philip, let's solve poverty instead of proposing sci-fi :-)

Fedora Packages for Kill-Bonobo

2009-06-20T23:09:33Z

Fedora 12 ("Rawhide") packages for Evolution's kill-bonobo branch are now available. Install this repo file to get updates through yum. The branch is currently synced with Evolution 2.27.3.

As stated previously, not everything is functional yet. Please file bugs for the parts that are. I'll try to post updates at least weekly.

AbiWord 2.7.5 Released!

2009-06-20T20:27:19Z

This is starting to get boring, as I’m turning the planets into freshmeat. But let’s just pretend we have some actual users that care about this news: there is another AbiWord release! With improved printing support (landscape printing actually works again, how 1992!), working copy/paste on Windows, and improved OpenDocument support, this seems like a very nice development release. We’re inching closed to 2.8.0 every day.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Comment number 1000

2009-06-20T20:23:55Z

I just noticed Ross Burton published the 1000th comment to my blog, making an average of a few more than 5 comments per article. My spam count grew from 10 thousand to almost 50 thousand, and that’s because Bad Behavior is avoiding many spams from even being blocked by Akismet.

Yet Another Kit

2009-06-20T19:29:00Z

A while -back I was celebrating that arrival of secure realtime scheduling -for the desktop. As it appears this was a bit premature then, since (mis-)using -cgroups for this turned out to be more problematic and messy than I -anticipated.

- -

As a followup I'd now like to point you to this announcement I -posted to LAD yesterday, introducing RealtimeKit which should fix -the problem for good. It has now entered Rawhide becoming part of the default -install (by means of being a dependency of PulseAudio), and I assume the other -distros are going to adopt it pretty soon, too.

- -

Read the full announcement.

Announcing Gio# and Gtk#Beans

2009-06-20T16:32:00Z

For a handful of good reasons (see Mike's mail), gtk-sharp, the gtk bindings for Mono and .NET, lately chose not to follow the hectic 6 months release plan of both gtk and glib teams but leverage on the almost perfect 2.12.x releases we have now (binding gtk 2.12 and glib 2.16) for a few extra months.

F-Spot, that small photo app everyone like, was, in its SVN/git latests versions, using a lot of the new API additions of gtk-sharp. You probably figured that already if you're following its developments.

So I branched out some of the code I needed from Gtk# svn to 2 new standalone projects, Gtk#Beans and Gio#. Both projects aims to fill the gap between the API mapped by Gtk#2.12 and the capabilities provided by gtk 2.14/glib 2.16.

The code is maintained on gitorious http://gitorious.org/gtk-sharp-beans, http://gitorious.org/gio-sharp and is already usable (and used in f-spot). Feel safe to use them as the API introduced over there will be merged with the fewest possible changes to the next Gtk# release.

I voted, did you?

2009-06-20T15:15:06Z

Friendly reminder: the days left to vote to select foundation board members are running down!

Make it happen here: http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/vote.php?id=13

Photo (cc) by caribb: a typical sight during elections in Montréal, Québec.

It is my first participation in a such an online election, non national election. Of course I am exited to be part of it. Unfortunately, electronic voting makes a quite boring “Election’s night”. I am used to the 3 or 4 hours of febrile waiting before the people’s choices are announced. Where are the exit polls?

Spykee GStreamer element

2009-06-20T15:09:00Z

So this aftermoon, I spent the time starting a GStreamer source element for Spykee. I have made it respond to key press navigation events coming upstream from say xvimagesink and move forward, back, left and right and d for dock. The code so far is here: http://github.com/zaheerm/zspykee/commits/master/flumotion-spykee/flumotion/component/spykee/gstreamer.py

Video with Spykee moving controlled through navigation events coming from xvimagesink: http://zaheer.merali.org/spykee_gstreamer.ogv

GNOME 3 status.

2009-06-20T14:49:26Z

This is an update about cleaning up the GNOME stack for GNOME 3. This has also been posted to the desktop-devel mailing list.

This status report refers to the aims listed in the 2.27/2.29 schedule and the automatic statistics available (which now also covers the Mobile section, hence results can be worse than last time).

Maintainers: I have listed available PATCHES AWAITING REVIEW.
-Please take a look if your module is listed and review/commit NOW so the changes can receive enough testing for 2.28.

THE PROBLEMS: What migration paths are missing?

libgnomeui provides retrieving thumbnails of files. There is no substitute yet. This blocks deskbar-applet, gnome-mag, evolution and probably many others. -
-Currently EggSMClient gets copied into all apps. That’s not cool but the way to go until Session Management support in gtk+ gets resolved.
-See Thomas’ blog for a current list. -

This list is of course not complete. Also see LibgnomeMustDie.
-Feel encouraged to add your issues.

ZERO modules with Glib-Deprecated-Symbols

NOT COMPLETED (”Reopened”) now that we also check external deps and the Mobile set:

Still to do: gconf-dbus, evolution-data-server-dbus.
External deps to do: dbus-glib, hal, libnotify, mono. PATCHES available: dbus-glib, libnotify. FIXED: farsight2, libnice, poppler.

Officially ANNOUNCE libglade as deprecated in favor of GtkBuilder

DONE.

Less than 35 modules depending on libglade.

COMPLETED.

low: 25
average: 5 (dasher, gnome-media, gnome-panel, gok, zenity)
complex: 2 (gnome-control-center, evolution)
PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gdm, gnome-nettool, gnome-mag, gnome-media, gnome-menus, gnome-panel, gnome-session, gnome-system-tools, gtkhtml, sound-juicer, zenity, tracker. Maintainers please review/commit.

Clear a11y plan and schedule for 3.0

NOT COMPLETED.

Less than 12 modules depending on libgnome

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 22->15).

low: 10
average: 4 (Evolution, gnome-media, yelp, anjuta)
complex: 1 (gok)

Please share experiences and knowledge.

Less than 12 modules depending on libgnomeui

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 15->12).

low: 9
average: 2 (Evolution-Exchange, gnome-panel)
complex: 1 (Evolution)

Please share experiences and knowledge.

ZERO modules dependening on gnome-vfs

NOT COMPLETED (Reopened):

average: 1 (gst-plugins-base)

Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

low: 8
average: 7 (gnome-control-center, evolution, gedit, metacity, glade3, gconf-dbus)
complex: 2 (gnome-games, gnome-media)
PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gedit, metacity, yelp, glade3, policykit-gnome

Evolution-Data-Server must be migrated to D-Bus by default

NOT COMPLETED. Evolution schedule currently under discussion.
-A Git branch is available.

WebKit status report for 2.27.5

IN PROGRESS. WebKitGTK+ has been proposed as an external dependency.
-See d-d-l for the status.

Evolution to get rid of Bonobo by 2.27.3

NOT COMPLETED and postponed for 2.29.1.
-See KillBonobo for the status. Testing and reporting bugs is HIGHLY welcome. See Matthew’s blog for more information.

Complete migration from HAL to DeviceKit-* by 2.27.3

NOT COMPLETED.
-According to “jhbuild rdepends hal –direct” the following modules still depend on HAL:

More important stuff to take a look at:

Not yet covered in the stats but required to fix are also:

GTK+/GLib Single includes (Metabug): -
- -To Do: gdm, gail -
- -PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-mag, gtksourceview -
-
GSEAL: -
- -To Do: A lot. Developers please start taking a look at this. -
-
LibSexy deprecation: -
- -To Do: Vino -
- -PATCHES awaiting review/commit: anjuta, tracker, PolicyKit-gnome -
-

Nice to fix:

Adding Introspection support.
AM_SILENT_RULES / shave bugs
Porting to PolicyKit 1.0: PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gdm, gconf, gconf-editor, gnome-applets, gnome-panel, gnome-session

GNOME Showstoppers

For GNOME 2.26/2.28, I have posted a Showstopper Review earlier this week. Feel free to take a look, test & help out, get things done.

Other activity

Kudos to the progress that has been made so far!
-Getting rid of Popt is basically DONE.
-ZERO modules dependening on Esound is DONE.
-ZERO modules dependening on Gnomeprint is DONE.
-The Website revamp front is rocking, and the Documentation team also has some great momentum currently.

Finite resources, infinite growth

2009-06-20T12:48:02Z

For some people this post can be controversial. I added a category “controversial” to my blog for people who prefer to filter it.

We start a imaginary experiment where we start with a bottle filled up with food and room left for exactly two worms. We assume worms replicate at a doubling time of one minute. We observed in a previous experiment that the bottle is filled up in exactly one hour. They eat the food as they double themselves, etc (use your imagination).

At 11′O clock in the morning we place two worms in the bottle. At what time will the bottle be full (easy)? At what time will the bottle be half full? At what time is the bottle only 3% filled up?

Humans have a global population growth of about 1.2% per year. It’s about 1% in wealthy countries and about 2-3% in poor countries. If you want to calculate a doubling time you take 70 and you divide it with the growth percentage. Which means that at our current growth rate, we’ll double our total population in 60 years.

In 1950 we were with about 2.7 thousand million people, in 1990 we were with 5 thousand million people. In 2050 we will be with 10 thousand million people. Infinite growth isn’t possible with finite resources. In 2400 years, at current growth rate, the earth’s mass will in theory be roughly equal to the total amount of human flesh.

The main question is, how big is our bottle? Let’s go back to the worms. For the worms the bottle is about 3% filled up at 11:55. It’s half full at 11:59. It’s overpopulated at 12:00. When three new bottles are found and pipes are connected with the first, the three new bottles will be filled up at 12:02. After that will four new bottles be filled up at 12:03. After that you need eight new bottles to survive minute 12:04. In minute 12:05 it starts getting crazy proportions.

Even if our bottle is only 3% filled up now, then still at our retirement age we will inevitably be at 50% capacity. During those retirement years we’ll see the population grow at an enormous speed to maximum capacity within a few years.

I’m among the people who believe that we’re already at 70% capacity of our planet. I think we have about 30 years of finite resources left: doubling the population to 10 thousand million people, is impossible (not unreasonable to think). Moving to another bottle will take us at least several more centuries of top notch space science (so this solution is not applicable). And that’s assuming we can leverage the resources of another planet. Moving to another star is simply out of the question unless we invent technology that allows us to let a huge mass travel at the speed of light (again, the solution isn’t applicable).

A solution that I have in mind? Genetically modifying newborn humans to have an annual fertility frequency and having their fertility enabled at a mature age. Instead of based on the phase of the moon would women be fertile only once per year. And instead of at the average age of 12 would women start becoming fertile at the average age of, for example, 25.

Is genetic modification immoral? Being an atheist I don’t have any believe system that forbids me to tamper with species. It’s indeed still immoral because we don’t know what we are doing, yet. No, morality is not divinely injected by a God. Atheists are born with morals, too.

But if we have to choose between living with each other under the condition of having insufficient resources, or making a change to our species, I know which of the two I will prefer.

Now, if you do believe in a God, then you must also acknowledge that your God’s intention was for us to become intelligent enough to genetically modify our species. If not, why ain’t it stopping us? We, for example, have successfully been genetically selecting dogs for centuries. And we have started genetically modifying them (active modification: interfering with the egg and sperm cells).

Mankind will have to open this difficult discussion sooner or later.

Shame on us all!

2009-06-20T01:39:51Z

Check out this 1991's video, starting minute 23. We are in 2009 now. After you've watched it, repeat with me:

To everyone building open source desktop development tools:
SHAME ON US ALL!

Try out OpenSolaris… in your browser

2009-06-19T17:32:37Z

This is a neat idea (if not technically all that novel)… log in to Sun Learning Services portal, and you can play with a virtual instance of OpenSolaris for up to an hour.

It does require Java, there are only 8 slots available at any one time, and right now they’re still provisioning OpenSolaris 2008.11 rather than the newer and shinier 2009.06. But if you want to give OpenSolaris a quick whirl, you might find it more convenient than downloading the LiveCD.

More info in Brian Leonard’s blog entry.

"The Wall"

2009-06-19T17:15:00Z

To the friend or friend-of-friend in Toronto who borrowed my "Pink Floyd The Wall" DVD please return it ASAP. It was gift, and I want to watch it again this weekend. Thanks.

retrospective

2009-06-19T17:07:09Z

Was talking about photos. Sometimes I do take photos that I like (sometimes they're not food). Here are seven:

Worked a lot of hours this week. Especially during the first half. Should make an effort at reading through my reading list, rather than staring at a screen this weekend.

Maemo Summit - help make it great

2009-06-19T16:50:58Z

This year, I’ve been asked to help with the content selection for the Maemo Summit, which will be held in October, in Amsterdam. We’re aiming for a very cool conference with lots of tips, tricks, hacks and general hardware coolness over 3 days.

Nokia is organising the first day, and the second and third days are entirely organised by the community. After a round of discussion, myself, Valerio Valerio and Jamie Bennett will be choosing content for the summit from among presentations proposed by the community. We’re aiming for presentations which will target three main audiences: tablet users, application developers and platform developers.

You can read more about the call for content or how to submit a presentation on the Maemo wiki. We’ve agreed on a fairly novel way of filling the schedule - we are starting from an empty grid, with three tracks, a couple of plenary sessions, and some lightning talks. As great talks come in, we will add them directly to the grid. If we don’t think that talks are up to scratch, they will be rejected, the submission will move to the Talk page for the Submissions wiki page, and if we are hesitant, the proposals will stay in the Submissions queue.

This has some great benefits over the usual call for papers/deadline/selection/publish the entire schedule scheme of things. Most proposers will know straight away whether their talk has been accepted, rejected, or converted into a lightning talk. Attendees will see the schedule building up and be able to propose sessions to account for topics that are not yet accounted for. And we will be able to keep some small number of slots until quite late in the organisation cycle for “late breaking news” - those great presentations that arrive too late for your deadline, but which you would really love to see get onto the schedule. And it is a kind of auction system - you have a great interest in getting your presentation proposal in early, rather than waiting for the last minute.

Anyway - let’s see how it works. You can follow the progress of the schedule on the wiki as well.

Good luck to all!

CouchDB contacts in Evolution

2009-06-19T16:27:49Z

Continuing with my CouchDB on the desktop series, here’s the 1st screenshot:

It’s Evolution addressbook components showing contacts from a CouchDB database. As stated in previous posts, all contacts in that database would be automatically replicated to a remote CouchDB instance, so, for instance, you could just see and edit/delete/whatever them from a web interface, and the changes would show up in Evolution.

Code is in GNOME git, under couchdb-glib and evolution-couchdb modules.

Lanedo sponsors GNOME at LinuxTag

2009-06-19T15:34:40Z

Lanedo has only been running since January and we have been lucky enough to be able to sponsor the conferences we usually attend this year.

So far, these include the Desktop summit and Linuxtag and we are also looking into sponsoring FSCONS later in the year. For LinuxTag we are sponsoring by sending Tim and Sven and by donating to the cause.

This year as usual, Sven will be propping up the GNOME booth for us, so if you are in that vicinity, don’t forget to come by and say hello!

Lockpicking and Security

2009-06-19T15:24:00Z

No doubt in the past day or so people have seen on boing boing a Wired article about Marc Tobias picking Medeco's "high security" locks. From the article, the claim high security means something specific in the industry, being able to withstand compromise for 10 or more strictly 15 minutes. These locks have been specifically hardened to resist attacks and you have no doubt been wondering about the security of the lock on the front door of your home.

Before you run out and buy a more "secure" lock for your home, let's discuss some security concerns that affect your purchasing decision.

Do you have windows made from bullet proof glass on your home? If so, the lock on your front door may be your weak point. If not, consider that a non-savy criminal can defeat your multi-hundred dollar/pound/euro lock with a cheap brick or a rock from your landscaping (maybe you want to reconsider leaving break in tools around your front yard). This goes double if you have another exterior door that's glass or that a similar high security lock can't be affixed to. Remember that unless you have a facade constructed entirely of thick, well mortared masonry, a persistent attacker could easily cut through your wall with tools available at any home improvement store. Any system is only as secure as its weakest point.

Let's also consider the rate of home break ins. The US Department of Justice provides statistics on historical trends of household burglery defined as "Unlawful or forcible entry or attempted entry of a residence." The following chart shows the national rate of burglery per 1000 homes from 1973 - 2005 (clicking through will take you to the numerical data).

Since this is a national average, you can reduce the rate of incidence by your choice of neighborhoods/areas to live in.

If we assume that your chances of actually being broken into are small, 29.5 per 1000 homes in 2005, and your locks and windows are actually insecure and only useful for keeping the honest honest, is your money better spent upgrading insecure locks, windows and walls or limiting the consequences of such an unlikely event? By all means, lock your doors and windows, but also make sure you carry an appropriate home or renters insurance policy and have documented what you own and their approximate value. This evidence should be stored, like your backups, in a secured off-site location such as a safe deposit box. You could also opt to store this material in a heavy, fire and flood proof safe in your home. Keep in mind that safes can also be cracked, but the walls of the safe are more hardened than the walls, windows and locks of your home and you're trying to raise the cost of acquiring the contents beyond the value of the contents (much like the premise behind using digital encryption). If you opt for a "fire proof" safe keep in mind that many of them work by removing oxygen from the enclosure with a foam or such and not by limiting the heat delivered, which can erase magnetic media.

In closing, "Don't Panic." Be prudent, but keep in mind the actual rate of such attacks on your home's security and take appropriate steps that will aid you in the event of any catastrophic event in your home.

The obscure world of spam

2009-06-19T14:32:54Z

After updating to Fedora Core 11 I noticed a new feature, the automatic font download system. Essentially it works like the automatic codec download system we have in GStreamer, but for fonts.

So judging by how often the font download box pops up the spam I am getting these days seems to be mostly in 3 languages Coptic, Syriac and N’Go I have to assume the spams are using random character sets to confuse spam filters, as I doubt that for instance either the ancient egyptians or their Coptic descendants of today are a big enough demographic for the spammers of the world

GNOME Docs Hackfest (Part I)

2009-06-19T14:07:28Z

(A duck at Inglis Falls, in Owen Sound, Ontario, home of woscon09. If only it had been a mallard…)

Milo Casagrande, who attended woscon09 with the GNOME Docs team last week, has written an introduction to Mallard.

Milo and Phil spent Sunday’s hackfest creating the first Mallard document for use as a help file within an application. We chose Empathy, for a few different reasons, including: it will be in GNOME in 2.28; the current documentation is not completed; we want to re-license it from GFDL to CC BY-SA 3.0 and Milo and one other collaborator were the only ones who had worked on it previously (though we fulfill our obligations in re-licensing by the exercise below).

Using the information we learned Friday and Saturday, we spent time planning the document and brainstorming what users want a messaging application to do, and what questions they might have: “How do I….?”.

From there, and with great gusto, Phil and Milo spent the sprint creating a proof of concept help file for Empathy. Not only is it written in Mallard, which can dynamically link the pages, we are focusing on creating topic based help, rather than tasks that take a user step by step in performing an action. Phil and Milo will probably have words with me, but you can follow along on the empathy-mallard branch in Gitorious.

You will need Yelp 2.27.1 and gnome-doc-utils 0.17.1 to see a Mallard doc in Yelp. And now I have to go figure out why Yelp isn’t cooperating with me.

Home test, and tftp bits

2009-06-19T12:13:55Z

After some situations at work this week where I lost time where I really shouldn’t have had to, combined with the observation that I get more useful strategic work done at home in Belgium, and because practically speaking going to Barcelona next week would be silly given that I can only leave on Monday and Wednesday is a day off (which I loathe - San Joan, the most dangerous night in Barcelona), I decided to stay home next week and compensate by fixing my phone setup.

You see, the only really annoying thing is that any conference call I end up in is terrible because I have a really hard time hearing the other side through either my mobile or my fixed phone, as the audio cuts out several times a second.

So, I spent a few hours yesterday first setting up the VPN, which aside from some minor issues seems to be working fine now. This was apparently a prerequisite for setting up asterisk because asterisk needs a fixed IP address or something I’ve been told.

After that, I started setting up Asterisk so that I could use the same THOMSON phone we have at work from home and call people in the office over it.

All of that is not what this post is about though.

This post is about the TFTP tricks and things I always need to re-learn any time I meddle with tftp. I’m putting them here because Google usually doesn’t find the problems and solutions I come up with, so maybe they’re of use to you if you play with TFTP. They will definately be of use to me next time I mess with tftp.

TFTP runs over UDP on port 69
on Linux TFTP typically runs from xinetd. Do yourself a favour, edit /etc/xinetd.d/tftpboot and add -v -v -v to the server_args line. These lines should end up in your /var/log/messages
For some reason xinetd is fidgety with tftp. It doesn’t restart in.tftpd properly when you reload or restart xinetd, and so your verbose changes might not happen. Check with ps aux. You can kill it, but then xinetd doesn’t seem to start up in.tftpd properly for a while either. Strange stuff - please tell me if you know what’s going on here -
Keep a tcpdump running on your tftp server to see requests actually make it in: tcpdump | grep tftp
Start by trying a tftp transfer on the server to localhost:tftp localhost -c get testIdeally, you should get Error code 1: File not found back immediately.
Now try an nmap from another machine: nmap -sU -p 69 server which should come back with 69/udp open|filtered tftp. If it doesn’t, you probably didn’t open 69/UDP on your server’s firewall. You can confirm by just turning off your firewall on the server for a quick test.
If it shows as open|filtered, try tftp server -c get test. This should error out immediately as well. If it doesn’t, it’s probably because your test machine does not allow tftp in. Confirm simply by turning off your firewall. The simplest way to fix this is to load the tftp connection tracking module: modprobe nf_conntrack_tftp. This makes sure that your machine knows to accept the reply tftp request coming in on a random port. On Fedora/RedHat systems you can make this permanent by adding it int /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config to the IPTABLES_MODULES variable. This is the number one thing I keep forgetting when debugging tftp troubles.
After that, try with actually existing files. Make sure you have the SEcontext correct; you can run restorecon -vR /tftpbooton the server for that. You can always confirm or deny whether SELinux is giving you trouble by temporarily turning it off. My auditd (the process that logs SELinux violations to /var/log/audit/audit.log) sometimes stops logging properly to the log file, and I need to restart it in that case. It’s easy to spot when auditd is misbehaving because by default it even logs replies to calls like setenforce 0.
Be careful with symlinks in /tftpboot if you use them. On your system they should actually be broken, because the tftp server will serve from /tftpboot and treat that as its root, as if it were chroot’d. So, if you have a file /tftpboot/phone/phone.inf, and you want a symlink to that file to exist and work in /tftpboot, you actually need to create a broken symlink like this: ln -sf /phone/phone.inf /tftpbootso that the symlink will work for tftpd.in This is one of those steps that I completely forget every time too.

Well, that should be it for the next time I have tftp troubles!

Using CouchDB to store contacts

2009-06-19T11:36:47Z

One of the things I’m looking at is using CouchDB to store data for applications on your desktop as part of the desktop data/settings idea that Rodrigo’s already written about. Obviously one of the great things here is that applications can collaborate on data stored in there; obviously one of the pre-requisites for collaboration is that everyone’s speaking the same language! So various people working on a number of different mail clients for the Linux desktop and so on are working out what the schema for contact records in CouchDB should look like.

Being able to browse around your database with a web browser is dead handy for writing this sort of thing, I have to say :-)

At the moment, this is the sort of direction we’re heading in. A CouchDB document is JSON, and an example contact looks like this:

{
-   "_id": "362cbeae5f408d6863bb70892d5ba345",
-   "_rev": "1-182987891",
-
-   "record_type": "http://example.com/contact-record",
-   "record_type_version": "1.0",
-
-   "first_name": "Joshua",
-   "last_name": "Molby",
-   "birth_date": "1945-07-04",
-
-   "addresses": {
-       "85cf156f-fcf6-4901-9201-82ee90859213": {
-           "city": "Bedford",
-           "state": "",
-           "description": "home",
-           "country": "Scotland",
-           "postalcode": "cw12 3hi",
-           "address1": "Nicol Street",
-           "address2": "",
-           "pobox": ""
-       },
-       "d20f7364-e80b-47a2-a7e7-0677cb293745": {
-           "city": "Bedford",
-           "state": "",
-           "description": "work",
-           "country": "England",
-           "postalcode": "dk12 3av",
-           "address1": "Rush Street",
-           "address2": "",
-           "pobox": ""
-       }
-   },
-   "phone_numbers": {
-       "f0bac2a0-83a3-46f9-b079-d41533b87391": {
-           "priority": 0,
-           "number": "+84 63 6220 9178",
-           "description": "work"
-       },
-       "cf01fc9c-703b-4ae4-b303-fcc6f8ce5a53": {
-           "priority": 0,
-           "number": "+91 99 6920 2837",
-           "description": "home"
-       },
-       "f0c05bf4-de4a-48f2-bbaf-f9698e52d491": {
-           "priority": 0,
-           "number": "+97 52 9211 6455",
-           "description": "other"
-       }
-   },
-   "email_addresses": {
-       "6e3178d8-fee6-45b1-b95a-2c76be090e2b": {
-           "description": "home",
-           "address": "Joshua1.Molby@uck.com"
-       },
-       "adb1fc2a-0468-4deb-bb6c-974db23ef7fd": {
-           "description": "work",
-           "address": "Joshua1.Molby@vkc.com"
-       }
-   },
-   "application_annotations": {
-       "Funambol": {
-             "jobTitle": "Director",
-             "company": "ACME Ltd"
-       }
-   }
-}

Fields in this are as follows:

CouchDB fields

_id: Unique document ID, provided by CouchDB (or you can choose it explicitly if you want)
_rev: revision number for this document. Managed by CouchDB.

Contact schema fields

The contact schema is the list of fields that are stored for a contact. Since this is a shared schema, everyone can rely on it. Fields that aren’t in this list can be stored by applications in application_annotations, if an application cares about extra stuff.

first_name (string)
last_name (string)
birth_date (string, “YYYY-MM-DD”)
addresses (MergeableSet of “address” dictionaries) -
- city (string) -
- address1 (string) -
- address2 (string) -
- pobox (string) -
- state (string) -
- country (string) -
- postalcode (string) -
- description (string, e.g., “Home”) -
-
email_addresses (MergeableSet of “emailaddress” dictionaries) -
- address (string), -
- description (string) -
-
phone_numbers (MergeableSet of “phone number” dictionaries) -
- number (string) -
- description (string) -
-

Basic “record schema” fields

The record schema is the basic format we’re talking about for storing any data in CouchDB; it’s a couple of fields that are in every record that everyone can rely on.

record_type: A URL which is a unique identifier for this type of record. It would be good if that URL had a page at it describing the record schema, but (importantly) this is not a reference to some sort of JSON DTD or anything
record_type_version: Version of this record type schema (so you can make updated versions if you want to make changes to field names, etc)
application_annotations: - The application_annotations section of the document is where apps put their own data that isn’t part of the schema. For example, Funambol knows about “company” for a contact, but the contact schema doesn’t directly include that field. So Funambol stores it on the contact record in a Funambol-specific section, so it can happily get it back later. If it turns out that everyone’s storing their own version of the same field, then that field is probably a good candidate for being in the schema (making this sort of change is what the record_type_version field is for :)) -

Quick script to drop contacts in this schema into a CouchDB database: createCouchContacts.py. Requires python-couchdb (and Couch, obviously).

New MonoDevelop installer for Windows

2009-06-19T10:07:00Z

A new MonoDevelop installer for Windows is available. This release has many fixes and improvements:

Performance of the text editor greatly improved, thanks to a new text rendering logic cooked by Mike Krüeger.
The debugger is now more reliable, it properly handles enum values, and it now has an 'immediate' console.
The NUnit add-in now works.
Version Control now has a new Create Patch command, thanks to Levi Bard.
A new C# formatter, with support for per-project/solution formatting options.
MD now logs debug and error output to a file located in your AppData/MonoDevelop/log.txt, so if you get a crash or something you may find some info there.
Many other bug fixes.

The new installer is available here. Worth trying!

LiveJournal

2009-06-19T09:23:14Z

I finally got a livejournal account in January to be able to comment, and now I get this email...

Hi pterjan,

-pterjan's birthday is coming up on June 21!

-You can:

-    * Post to wish them a happy birthday
-    * Send them a virtual gift
-    * Gift them with a paid account
-

So nice of them... They don't wish me a happy birthday but ask me to do it myself...

Maemo: APIs and Porting

2009-06-19T07:51:29Z

This post is a general ramble about the limits of keeping API the same on significantly different platforms. It uses Maemo’s Hildon and Maemo’s Qt as examples, but don’t get offended. Hildon’s new UI in Maemo 5 is wonderfully appropriate for small touch-screen devices, and the API is the best that the developers could do in the short time available, in their circumstances. Not much can be changed in Hildon now anyway until a theoretical Maemo 6. And Maemo’s Qt is only just getting started.

Hildon: Secret, Then Public, Then Secret, Then Public

The first version of Maemo’s Hildon API added lots of API to hildon itself, and to the Maemo version of GTK+. It also made some inappropriate changes to default behavior. These things happen when work is done in secret, because people can’t complain until too late. Much of this was corrected in Maemo Diablo, as changes were sent upstream to GTK+.

Then Nokia made Hildon’s development secret again and added lots of new API. That’s now public again. Some simple things should be patches to GTK+ that can eventually be accepted in upstream GTK+. For other things, it’s debatable whether we would want the change in functionality to be obvious in the code (via #ifdefs), or if the standard GTK+ widgets should just behave differently when the same code runs on Maemo. For various things, both opinions are valid. But that discussion never happened because the API was not published until it was too late to change it significantly.

Too Much Simple New API

I think the new Maemo 5 Hildon API leans too much towards extra API. For instance:

You must use HildonButton, HildonEntry and HildonTextView instead of GtkButton, GtkEntry, and GtkTextView. These have extra features, but they could be added to the GTK+ widgets.
You must use HildonCheckButton instead of GtkCheckButton or GtkRadioButton, though that’s really just to get a slightly different appearance.
You must use HildonWindow instead of GtkWindow.
HildonNote and HildonBanner add timed behaviour and convenience API that could just be in GtkDialog.
HildonAppMenu is just a glorified grid container, needing significant changes to application code, instead of the regular GTK+ menu APIs being changed to behave differently on Maemo. Now you can’t use GtkMenu, GtkUIManager or Glade for menus. Menus really must be made simpler for Maemo applications, but that’s no reason to completely change the menu API.
You must use HildonTouchSelector (via a HildonPickerButton) instead of a GtkComboBox. Admittedly it would be particularly difficult to make GtkComboBox act like a (pannable) HildonTouchSelector, and GtkComboBox would need extra API to allow multiple-selection. But there would be great benefits for application coders from that hard work.
You must use HildonWizardDialog instead of GtkAssistant. This dates from before GtkAssistant existed, but the Hildon developers seem to have forgotten to deprecate it and adapt GtkAssistant for Maemo 5.
You must use HildonFileChooserDialog instead of GtkFileChooserDialog or the other GtkFileChooserWidgets. These hildon-fm widgets have almost no documentation, so there’s no obvious reason for their existence.

Note that extra API is not just annoying when porting (requiring ifdefs) but also makes existing generic GTK+ documentation and skills less relevant to Maemo. Just because a UI has a wonderful new look and feel, that doesn’t mean you need a lots of arbitray new API to make things feel new and different for the developer too.

Too Much Surprising New Behavior

Where Hildon _has_ changed the GTK+ implementation instead of adding new API, it’s done it for situations that are too complex or where the changed behavior is annoyingly arbitrary. This is particularly annoying because there are reasonable uses of the original widgets even in a Maemo application. For instance:

The GtkTreeView’s selection and activation behavior is apparently entirely different, though I admittedly don’t know all the details yet. It apparently feels like a different widget so it probably should be a different class. Column headers are off by default too.
GtkEntry (ignoring that you should use HildonEntry) still defaults to auto-capitalization. I don’t think this is the common case. Most text in entry widgets is not a sentence or a name.

In these cases, the developers have justified the annoying new defaults by saying that it’s what the Maemo UI guidelines demand, ignoring that those guidelines do not say how the UI should be achieved in terms of API. Simply telling application developers to call extra API when using Maemo would have the same results without the annoyance.

Will Qt Make Better Choices?

Qt has long touted the similarity of its API across three major desktop platforms (Linux, Windows, Macintosh), though the nativeness of the results is debatable. At least Windows applications have no consistency anyway.

The Maemo Qt developers insist that they will stick to this even when porting to Maemo – probably the first popular Qt platform with a significantly different UI and desktop environment, requiring new concepts that are not yet in the Qt API.

I think that’s a good idea, though I doubt that it will really be possible. When I asked (threaded view) them, I discovered that they really hadn’t thought much about it yet and weren’t able to address my specific examples with anything other than a repeat of the Qt “deploy without rewriting the source code” mantra. Surprisingly there are not that many people working on Maemo’s Qt and it’s obviously far from ready for Maemo 5’s new UI. Nokia acquired all the Trolltech/”Qt Software” developers but if they have been redirected to work on Maemo then it’s not happening in public.

Hopefully they will at least choose to lean more towards maintaining API compatibility while adding API only where absolutely necessary. I think it must be a little of both.

Ubuntu One 0.90.2

2009-06-19T04:24:58Z

We've been in a controlled beta of Ubuntu -One now for a little more than a month. Recently, I've been hacking on the -client a fair bit, porting our Nautilus extension to C, to avoid the dependency -on python-nautilus, and for the extension to perform better, and not slow down -desktop start up times by loading up Python. As part of this, the build system -for ubuntuone-client was -switched over to autotools for most stuff. We still generate a setup.py, and -use it to perform a few tasks, but that should be going away soon as well. -Keeping it around requires some funky magic in the build system, to pull all -the necessary pieces into a release tarball correctly, and get Python pieces -installed to the system. But now we have a way to build reproducible tarballs, -and should be doing regular releases on Launchpad. You can find them here:

Ubuntu -One Storage Protocol

Ubuntu One -Client

We encourage people to build packages for their favorite distros as well, -and are glad to answer any questions about how things should be packaged. If -you have any questions, feel free to come bug us in #ubuntuone on FreeNode -(irc.freenode.net). Enjoy!

-
তুমি কেমন করে গান করো হে গুণী, -আমি অবাক্ হয়ে শুনি কেবল শুনি ।। -সুরের আলো ভুবন ফেলে ছেয়ে, -সুরের হাওয়া চলে গগন বেয়ে, -পাষাণ টুটে ব্যাকুল বেগে ধেয়ে -বহিয়া যায় সুরের সুরধুনী ।। -মনে করি অমনি সুরে গাই, -কন্ঠে আমার সুর খুঁজে না পাই । -কইতে কী চাই, কইতে কথা বাধে – -হার মেনে যে পরান আমার কাঁদে, -আমায় তুমি ফেলেছ কোন্ ফাঁদে -চৌদিকে মোর [...]
-
তুমি কেমন করে গান করো হে গুণী,
-আমি অবাক্ হয়ে শুনি কেবল শুনি ।।
-সুরের আলো ভুবন ফেলে ছেয়ে,
-সুরের হাওয়া চলে গগন বেয়ে,
-পাষাণ টুটে ব্যাকুল বেগে ধেয়ে
-বহিয়া যায় সুরের সুরধুনী ।।
-মনে করি অমনি সুরে গাই,
-কন্ঠে আমার সুর খুঁজে না পাই ।
-কইতে কী চাই, কইতে কথা বাধে –
-হার মেনে যে পরান আমার কাঁদে,
-আমায় তুমি ফেলেছ কোন্ ফাঁদে
-চৌদিকে মোর সুরের জাল বুনি
- - 2009-06-19T00:23:17Z - - - - - - - sankarshan - - - http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog - - - A collection of jottings on various issues that excite no one else - Random thoughts and serendipity</h1> <p>2009-06-19T00:23:17Z</p> <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p style="text-align: center;">তুমি কেমন করে গান করো হে গুণী,<br/> -আমি অবাক্ হয়ে শুনি কেবল শুনি ।।<br/> -সুরের আলো ভুবন ফেলে ছেয়ে,<br/> -সুরের হাওয়া চলে গগন বেয়ে,<br/> -পাষাণ টুটে ব্যাকুল বেগে ধেয়ে<br/> -বহিয়া যায় সুরের সুরধুনী ।।<br/> -মনে করি অমনি সুরে গাই,<br/> -কন্ঠে আমার সুর খুঁজে না পাই ।<br/> -কইতে কী চাই, কইতে কথা বাধে –<br/> -হার মেনে যে পরান আমার কাঁদে,<br/> -আমায় তুমি ফেলেছ কোন্ ফাঁদে<br/> -চৌদিকে মোর সুরের জাল বুনি</p></div> - </article> <article> <h1>Cubed Mail</h1> <p>2009-06-19T00:11:10Z</p> <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Lately I’ve been working a lot on the <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/">Thunderbird add-ons</a> developers user experience. Often times designers don’t get to work on developer experiences because developers tend to do those pieces themselves without much design. With a lot of others I’ve spent a good amount of time working on the whole experience of development, docs, and extension types so hopefully the Thunderbird 3 add-on developer experience will be significantly better.</p> -<p>To get into the user experience of an add-on developer I recently made a Jetpack, <a href="http://clarkbw.net/blog/2009/06/08/the-pattern-is-not-full/">Bugzilla Air Traffic Control</a>, to examine what it is like to develop inside <a href="https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/">Jetpack</a>. I’ve also been creating a number of example extensions that take advantage of the new code that has landed in Thunderbird recently and learn the pitfalls of extension development.</p> -<p>So in honor of the <a href="http://hacks.mozilla.org/">hacks.mozilla.org</a> recent article called <strong><a href="http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/3d-transforms-isocube/">3D transforms in Firefox 3.5 – the isocube</a></strong> I added a similar hack to my <a href="http://hg.mozilla.org/users/clarkbw_gnome.org/tabbedmessage/">tabbed message example extension</a>. I give you…</p> -<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Cubed Email Messages</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://clarkbw.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/messages-in-a-cube.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">To demonstrate the awesome interactiveness that I <strong>didn’t</strong> add to my email extension I also have a pure HTML demo available. Try out the <strong><a href="http://hg.mozilla.org/users/clarkbw_gnome.org/tabbedmessage/raw-file/tip/src/example/index.html">email cube test demo</a></strong> for yourself. This demo requires <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html">Firefox 3.5, go get it</a> if you don’t have it.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;">If you’re asking “why email in a cube,?” then I’ll ask you why not? This demo reminds me that Thunderbird has all the same Firefox goodness that’s coming out in 3.5 but we have yet to take advantage of much of it. Hopefully as we make more progress in the coming months we’ll do just that.</p> -<p>And if you’re asking yourself… Is this what Bryan gets paid to do? Well then we’re asking ourselves the same question; though I don’t think I’m referring to myself in the third person.</p></div> - </article> <article> <h1>Anjuta Plugin for OpenEmbedded SDK</h1> <p>2009-06-18T23:50:55Z</p> <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><div class="snap_preview"><br/><p>I have always liked the idea to have an <a href="http://www.anjuta.org">Anjuta</a> plugin that simplifies the use of cross toolchains in order to develop for all sorts of mobile and embedded devices. Personally I do not rely on an IDE but I have worked with a lot of developers in the past who are not used to do application development with vi. The same applies to cross toolchains, but there are reasons why people compile natively or why tools like Scratchbox are developed.</p> -<p>Some time ago OpenedHand published an Anjuta plugin for Poky that almost fits these needs – apart from minor lacks and the fact that you can’t use it with an <a href="http://www.openembedded.org">OpenEmbedded</a> build tree because it relies on the Poky directory layout. It didn’t take me long to modify the Poky plugin to fit the needs for OpenEmbedded: I have added automatic detection of the toolchain host prefix and some functionality to deal with the (not 100% fixed) directory layout of OpenEmbedded. So what does it do?</p> -<ul> -<li>Select a toolchain or OpenEmbedded build directory to use</li> -<li>Configure and build a project</li> -<li>Deploying of binaries to a target device using rsync and ssh</li> -<li>Some debug and remote device features from the original plugin I didn’t test so far</li> -</ul> -<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_171" style="width: 470px;"><a href="http://fl0rian.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/anjuta-plugin-sdk.png"></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Anjuta OpenEmbedded SDK Plugin</p></div> -<p>It is easy to install (and build if necessary). I have created an initial website for it at <a href="http://labs.kernelconcepts.de/Tools/Anjuta-OE-SDK-Plugin/">KC Labs</a>. You can find both source archive and binary packages for Ubuntu (9.04) and Debian Lenny. Once you have it installed it you should be able to design your GUI, fill it with functionality and deploy the application to a target device withouth leaving Anjuta.</p> -<p>Feedback is very welcome – if you have ideas about new features or what you would like to see for cross development please let me know!</p> -<p>Have a nice time…</p> -<p>PS: LinuxTag is approaching – visit the Embeded Area with projects like OpenEmbedded and Coreboot!</p> - <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> </div></div> - </article> <article> <h1>The Twitpocolypse! Do plugin updated</h1> <p>2009-06-18T22:51:18Z</p> <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>The other day Twitter status IDs overflowed, and as such the GNOME Do plugin was broken. Maybe this kind of thing is why people should use identi.ca? I know I’m a hypocrite and use Twitter, but maybe I’ll switch someday, now that most of my friends have stopped using it in general. Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that this is fixed in bzr, and we’ve pushed an update to jaunty proposed. If you’re getting annoyed at Do telling you that your post failed when really it didn’t, please enable the proposed repository and comment on this bug saying that it works for you. <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/do-plugins/+bug/387525">https://bugs.launchpad.net/do-plugins/+bug/387525</a>. Instructions for testing are in the bug report. Thanks!</p></div> - </article> <article> <h1>Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: One browser too many</h1> <p>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:38:28 +0000</p> <p>It struck me this morning that I end up using too many browsers. For example, at this precise moment, I have Firefox, Chromium, Seamonkey, Epiphany and Opera being used for all the content that I need to take a peek at.</p> -<p>And, all because at some point in time I had a kickstart that pulled in Firefox, Epiphany and Seamonkey. Chromium looks to be a decent enough browser in spite of that annoying bit about not being able to handle Complex Text Layout. Remember to read <a href="http://spot.livejournal.com/308900.html">this fine blog post</a> if you want to set it up for Leonidas/Fedora 11.</p> -<p>Speaking of Firefox, at some point recently, I was using a boatload of add-ons to aid my browsing habits. The one that did come in handy was the <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890"></a>Tree Style Tab add-on. It did reveal interesting patterns in the paths that I follow while browsing. Another nifty add-on is the Split Browser<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4287"></a> one, couple it with Tabs Open Relative<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1956"></a> and, you have a much more intuitive experience while browsing.</p> </article> <article> <h1>John Palmieri: Looking for two roommates to move in on September 1st</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:49:36 +0000</p> <p>Hey everyone, my two roommates are moving out to be closer to the city. Those who have been to my place know it is an amazing apartment in North Cambridge, MA with a five minute walk to the Alewife T station. If you are looking to move or know someone who needs a place let me know. The lease is for a year and is super inexpensive at $635 a month per person plus utilities.</p> -<p>Oh and you will have to like dogs since Ty is staying too </p> -[read this post in: <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Car">ar</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Cde">de</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Ces">es</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Cfr">fr</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Cit">it</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Cja">ja</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Cko">ko</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Cpt">pt</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Cru">ru</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/23/looking-for-two-roommates-to-move-in-on-september-1st/&langpair=en%7Czh-CN">zh-CN</a> ] </article> <article> <h1>Michael Meeks: 2009-06-23: Tuesday.</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:43:13 +0000</p> <ul> - <li> - Up early; to work, installed a recent image; trotted off -to Cambridge on the train - pottered about enjoying the sun. -Caught up with the Collabora crowd. Pizza lunch, good to see -Christian again. - </li> - <li> - Train back; dug at mail, entertained babes while J. went -to a parent's evening. Dinner, Tony came over to talk - good time. -Amazed by the staggering ignorance of basic accounting in this -<a href="http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/06/23/191230/Switching-To-Solar-Power-One-Year-Later">solar</a> -rave - if you spend $38000 now, and expect to get slightly less -than $38000 back over twelve years, you are loosing money. -<a href="http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2349174,00.asp">Payback</a> -needs to be compared in net present value terms; still, a >10% -return anually seems reasonable in today's market with ten year -treasuries at sub 4%. Anyhow, despite the numbers not adding up -he's hit on my new favorite solution for sustainable energy - Solar: -<a href="http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_38.shtml">numbers</a>, -<a href="http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c19/page_114.shtml">perspective</a>. - </li> -</ul> </article> <article> <h1>Matthew Garrett: 23 Jun 2009</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:21:17 +0000</p> It's now been over 6 months since Poulsbo hardware with Intel's GMA500 graphics core started shipping in volume. And we're still utterly lacking in any sort of worthwhile driver. It's an impressive turnaround from the recent days when the straightforward recommendation for mobile Linux hardware was "anything that has lots of Intel stuff in lspci", and while the Poulsbo situation in itself doesn't change that hugely it's potentially symptomatic of a worrying trend within parts of Intel.<br /><br />The first thing to realise here is that, like most large companies, Intel consists of a large number of business units with different priorities. Their open-source technology center has historically had responsibility for providing Linux support for hardware, but this obviously depends on other business units cooperating with them. And there's strong evidence that many of those business units don't get it.<br /><br />There's been signs of this for some time. Back before the days of the Intel X.org driver gaining native modesetting support, some people ran the <a href="http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/swsup/graphics_drivers.htm">Intel embedded graphics driver</a>. This was (is?) a closed X driver that was able to provide native modesetting on platforms that could only otherwise be run at incorrect resolutions. One business unit was shipping a driver that was more functional than the official Intel Linux driver. To the best of my knowledge, none of that code was ever used in the rewritten Intel driver that now provides the same features.<br /><br />Poulsbo is another example of this. Intel wanted a low-power mobile graphics chipset and chose to buy in a 3D core from an external vendor. IP issues prevent them from releasing any significant information about that 3D core, so the driver remains closed source. The implication is pretty clear - whichever section of Intel was responsible for the design of Poulsbo presumably had "Linux support" as a necessary feature, but didn't think "Open driver" was a required part of that. There's not a lot any other body inside Intel can do once IP-limiting contracts are signed and the hardware's shipping, but it ends up tarnishing the good reputation that other parts of Intel have built up anyway.<br /><br />And while Poulsbo is the most obvious example of this to date, it's not the only one. Intel recently decided to make the <a href="http://edk2.tianocore.org">EFI development kit</a> discussion lists private. Various drivers for Moorestown (the followup platform to Poulsbo) have been submitted to the Linux kernel, and while they have the advantage of being GPLed they have the disadvantage of being barely above the level of typical vendor code. Objections that chunks of them simply don't integrate into Linux correctly has done little to get these problems fixed - I still have no real idea how the runtime interface to power management on the SD driver is supposed to be used, but I suspect the answer is probably "badly".<br /><br />This all makes sense if you assume that there are large groups of people in Intel who don't talk to each other. But to the casual observer it just looks schizophrenic. Explaining to an irate user that the Intel who shipped a closed Linux graphics driver is only barely the same Intel who contribute so much to architectural improvements in the Linux graphics stack doesn't make their hardware work. And while all of this confusion is going on, Intel's competitors are catching up. Atheros are now making significant contributions to the state of Linux wireless. AMD are releasing graphics chipset documentation faster than Intel, and radeon support is improving rapidly.<br /><br />Is the future going to be one where we can no longer simply say that Intel hardware will Just Work? Is their work on Moblin (easily the most compelling Linux UI for netbooks) going to be wasted on the broader Linux community because it'll mostly end up running on hardware that's not supported by the mainline Linux kernel? Does Intel have a real commitment to open source, or is that being lost in the face of short-term requirements?<br /><br />Intel need to demonstrate that they have a company-wide understanding of what Linux support actually means or risk losing much of what they've earned over the past few years. I'm desperately hoping that Poulsbo and what we've seen so far of Moorestown are the exception, not the future norm. </article> <article> <h1>Máirín Duffy: Berlin Day 0</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:05:49 +0000</p> <div class="snap_preview"><br /><p>St. Colmcille brought me from Boston to Dublin. </p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3653672978/" title="St. Colmcille - Aer Lingus by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3653681492/" title="Vegetarian Airplane Food by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3652893185/" title="Welcome to Dublin! by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p>Dublin’s terminal A isn’t great. In fact, I only found one functional power outlet, and it conveniently spanned the entrance of the ladies’ room. I arrived at 5 AM and fought to stay awake as to not miss my flight!</p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3652890525/" title="Sunrise over Dublin by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3652909249/" title="An inconvenient power arrangement by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p>St. Ibar took me from Dublin to Berlin:</p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3654428141/" title="St. Ibar to Berlin by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3654448425/" title="Schonefeld Airport by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p>Over 24 hours awake now. A comfortable 1 hour train ride to the hotel.</p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3655260320/" title="Tickets by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3655270482/" title="Train Stations by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3654477181/" title="Berlin subway by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p>By some very very good luck and happy chance, I ran into the FUDcon dinner train. They very kindly and patiently waited for me to drop my things off and we headed out for yummy (and veggie-friendly thankfully) food!</p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3655281306/" title="Jesse's Green Beer by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3655290340/" title="Linguine, Mozzarella, and Tomato with Basil by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3654494593/" title="Jesse and Spot by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3655294794/" title="Peoples! by momomomo, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p>I think I’ve been awake for something like 34 hours now. Time to sleep!</p> -Posted in Uncategorized <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/mairin.wordpress.com/645/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/mairin.wordpress.com/645/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/mairin.wordpress.com/645/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/mairin.wordpress.com/645/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/mairin.wordpress.com/645/" rel="nofollow"></a> </div> </article> <article> <h1>Vivien Malerba: Libgda’s progress</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:48:21 +0000</p> <p>Long time no blog…</p> -<p>I’ve been busy lately working on adding a UI extension to Libgda: merging the good parts of Libgnomedb and Mergeant (which have not been kept up to date) into Libgda. This new UI “extension” will remain optional (built only if GTK+ is found) and includes:</p> -<ul> -<li>some data bound widgets (grid anf form views)</li> -<li>some “administrative” widgets such as a login widget to enter credentials when opening a connection</li> -<li>a reworked control center where one can manage named data sources (DSN) and check the list of installed database providers (drivers)</li> -<li>a re-write of the browser tool usefull to analyse the structure of a database and run some statements; this a a kind of merge with the one which existed in Libgnomedb and Mergeant but with a much improved user interface.</li> -</ul> -<p>This is now all in the master branch in git.gnome.org, works (except for some DnD) on Windows and MacOSX. Here are some screenshots of the new browser, taken using a PostgreSQL database. One can open several connections at the same time in the browser, and for each connection, several windows can be opened. Each window displays a “perspective” (similar to Eclipse’s perspectives), and currently the schema browser perspective is implemented, which is shown below, more will come later (statements execution, reports, etc).</p> -<p></p> -<p>The shot above shows the index page where all the database objects are displayed (tables only for the moment), and the favorites bar on the left where one can drag n drop tables (or later other objects types) for quick access (the trashcan at the bottom is to remove favorites by dragging them on it). Clicking on a table opens a new tab as shown:</p> -<p></p> -<p>The shot above shows the details of table “products” with the traditional fields list and the constraints below (here clicking on the “warehouses” link opens yet another tab for the warehouses table). You can note in the bottom that when showing a table, it is also possible to display the table’s relations, ie. which table are referenced by the current table and which tables reference the current table, as show:</p> -<p></p> -<p>The shot above cleary shows that the “customers” table references the “locations” and “salesrep” tables and is itself referenced by the “orders” table. The canvas is drawn using GooCanvas and can be exported to PNG and SVG or printed.</p> -<p>That’s all for now, more later…</p> </article> <article> <h1>Mirco Müller: Attention-to-detail ’till you bleed</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:46:05 +0000</p> <p>It’s amazing what you can spend half a day on. But in the end it meant bugs got squashed and text in notifications should look more sound now. Now the interaction designers need to make up their mind what’s the best default width for a notification-bubble. So I provide them with a gazillion screenshots. Clicking on any one gives you the full screenshot, so one can see the bubbles size in relation to a typical desktop-screen size. Doing that for other form-factor screens (e.g. netbooks) they can do themselves <br /> -</p><center><a href="http://macslow.net/images/18-ems-new-2-full.png"></a><p></p> -<p><a href="http://macslow.net/images/20-ems-new-2-full.png"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://macslow.net/images/22-ems-new-2-full.png"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://macslow.net/images/24-ems-new-2-full.png"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://macslow.net/images/26-ems-new-2-full.png"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://macslow.net/images/28-ems-new-2-full.png"></a></p> -<p><a href="http://macslow.net/images/30-ems-new-2-full.png"></a></p></center><p></p> </article> <article> <h1>Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle: po.vim is up for adoption</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:23:42 +0000</p> <p>The <a href="http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/syntax/po.vim"><tt>po.vim</tt> syntax file</a> and the <a href="http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=695">corresponding ftplugin file</a> make Vim an efficient translation tool, with the pros and cons of showing the “gory details” of the file format. While the ftplugin still lives in the Vim.org scripts repository, the syntax highlight file is already distributed with Vim itself. In the last years I made Vim <a href="http://leonardof.org/2007/08/25/improved-spell-checking-of-gettext-message-catalogs-for-vim/en/">spell check only translated text</a> and <a href="http://leonardof.org/2008/01/05/syntax-highlighting-and-spell-checker-for-gettext-in-vim/en/">improved the highlight and spell check of XML tags</a>, but now I don’t have the time or interest in further development. If anyone wants to add a feature or fix a bug in the syntax file, please send a patch to <tt>bram at moolenaar net</tt>. Thanks!</p> </article> <article> <h1>Jani Monoses: Pidgin 2.5.7 in Kiwi Linux 9.04</h1> <p>noreply@blogger.com (janimo) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:15:00 +0000</p> Copied over Pidgin 2.5.7 that fixes the recent Yahoo protocol connection problems from the <a href="https://launchpad.net/%7Epidgin-developers/+archive/ppa">Pidgin PPA </a>to the Kiwi Linux 9.04 archives, so if you have the latter an upgrade will get it. Nice work Pidgin upstream and Ubuntu packagers :)<br /><br />Until this version needed by YMSG users gets through ubuntu-updates (or backports) it's a good way to stop confused newbies.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Paul Cutler: GNOME Docs Hackfest Part II</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:47:20 +0000</p> <p>Day three of the <a href="http://www.writingopensource.com">Writing Open Source</a> conference was our hackfest. I previously <a href="http://www.silwenae.org/blog/?p=1167">showed off Milo’s work in Part I</a>, but it’s probably best to start at the beginning.</p> -<p>We started day three by applying some of what we had learned over the first two days. When writing, especially documentation, it is best to plan your work. This includes knowing your audience, their personas, and understanding their needs.</p> -<p><a href="http://www.chiotti.com/">Lynda Chiotti</a>, with help from <a href="http://www.janetswisher.com/">Janet Swisher</a>, led us through a brainstorming exercise. <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2009-June/msg00006.html">Using a mind mapping tool, we brainstormed</a> what users want to do (and might need help with) when using their computer.</p> -<p>This was important for a few different reasons. For GNOME 3.0, we want to re-write the GNOME User Guide as topic based help using Mallard. Re-creating might be a better word, as we are going to switch licenses from the GFDL to CC-SA 3.0, and it’s probably easier to re-write it from scratch than to contact all the previous authors over the years to get permission. More importantly, we need to think like our users. How many times do we, as GNOME power users and developers, talk to ourselves, and not think like the average computer user? If this user needs help, does our documentation help them? Do they get frustrated and stop using GNOME or GNOME applications? We have a unique opportunity to use both our tools and the launch of GNOME 3.0 to radically improve our documentation and help our users.</p> -<p>After that, Phil, Milo, Shaun and I spent some time talking about how we could improve the GNOME Documentation Project. There were no sacred cows, and we’ve launched an effort to overhaul the docs team, including:</p> -<ul> -<li>Adding simple tasks that new contributors can do and then build on (thanks Emma!)</li> -<li>Focusing the docs team on writers, editors, and translators. Each perform different, but similar roles, including crossover. We need to improve our tools for each team, and communication.</li> -<li>Holding more regular meetings, including a monthly project meeting, and weekly community sessions to encourage participation</li> -<li>Developing a roadmap of tasks we want to accomplish, including both the documentation itself and the tools </li> -<li>Understanding Shaun’s role as our fearless documentation project leader, and how we can help him to free him up and not having the team be blocked on any one person.</li> -<li>Make a significant effort to coordinate with downstream distributions, including meetings and communication, introducing Mallard, and better comments within documentation.</li> -</ul> -<p>And that’s just the recap! Our wiki space is going through a revamp as we bring this to life, and there is a lot more to come.</p> -<p>Lastly, while Phil and Milo started hacking on Empathy docs using Mallard, I jumped into Bugzilla. Almost half of our open bugs in gnome-user-docs were touched (<a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&product=gnome-user-docs&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=substring&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_contact2=1&emailcc2=1&emailtype2=substring&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&chfieldfrom=2009-06-14&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=">36</a> of 80), and of those 36, 23 were closed. Finally, 16 commits were made to update the current User Guide, including reviewing and patches from contributors. Fun fact (or embarrassing) - the oldest bug fixed was from July, 2006.</p> -<p>Overall, woscon was an amazing experience, and we all learned a lot. A few years from now, we’ll be able to look back and say: “We were there when this began”.</p> -<p>I think I speak for all of the GNOME Docs team members who were there, including Phil, Milo, and Shaun when I say we are sincerely thankful for the GNOME Foundation’s sponsorship of our travel to the Writing Open Source conference. This conference was the brain child of <a href="http://www.emmajane.net/">Emma Jane Hogbin</a>, and we are very grateful for all the time and effort she put in to organizing and hosting woscon.</p> -<div class="feedflare"> -<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/silwenae?a=rpJnYUc_H-Q:x_59LgrU1z4:yIl2AUoC8zA"></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/silwenae?a=rpJnYUc_H-Q:x_59LgrU1z4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/silwenae?a=rpJnYUc_H-Q:x_59LgrU1z4:D7DqB2pKExk"></a> -</div> </article> <article> <h1>Kevin Kubasik: Wordpress Upgrade</h1> <p>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:05:23 +0000</p> <p>I just upgraded to the latest Wordpress release (2.8!) let me know if you have any issues viewing the site!</p> </article> <article> <h1>Federico Mena-Quintero: Mon 2009/Jun/22</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:38:33 +0000</p> <ul> - <li> - <p> - We now have some ultra-simple documentation on - the <a href="http://live.gnome.org/RandR">policies - which GNOME uses to handle the RANDR extension</a>. - What happens when I hit Fn-F7 to switch displays? What - happens when I plug in a monitor? How does GNOME manage - to remember your RANDR configurations? - </p> - </li> - - <li> - <p> - I have been toying with the idea of holding a really - informal BoF - during <a href="http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/">GCDS</a> - for the hippie treehuggers among us. It would be a - mish-mash discussion of peak oil, urbanism, - architecture, gardening, permaculture, urban - agriculture, and all that. What do you think? - <a href="mailto:federico@gnome.org">Mail me</a> to - see if we would have a suitably-sized group. - Think <em>informal</em>, as in people sitting on the - beach talking about how to make their compost heap work, - not a session in an air-conditioned auditorium. - </p> - </li> - </ul> </article> <article> <h1>Ben Kahn: I just stole $5 from Amazon</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:20:35 +0000</p> <div style="width: 490px;" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://www.androidtapp.com/amazon-mp3-for-android/"></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Amazon MP3 on the Android</p></div> -<p>Amazon claims “We’re Building Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company” and they deliver. Every time I have had a problem, they jump through hoops to resolve it immediately.</p> -<p>Unfortunately, I am unable to make myself understood by the Amazon tech support team, which leads to lots of problems.</p> -<p>This weekend I purchased about $6 worth of music downloads from my phone. (3 tracks, and a CD) One of the tracks didn’t download correctly, and Amazon incorrectly charged my credit card and not my gift certificate balance. I sent this message:</p> -<blockquote><p>I just ordered a CD and 3 tracks through my T-Mobile Android G1 phone. The third song, “Crazy Love” did not download. (The CD was purchased while not on a wi-fi network, so I’m not sure if it worked yet.)</p> -<p>My second problem is a billing issue. My account has a gift card balance of $29.01, but my credit card was charged. Please refund my card and remove the balance from my gift certificate. I would like future purchases to come out of that balance as well.</p></blockquote> -<p>So what did they do? They refunded me the full $6 and told me to re-download. Nice, but not quite right…</p> </article> <article> <h1>Neil Loknath: GSoC Week 4: The Tubes are Alive!</h1> <p>noreply@blogger.com (nloko) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:20:00 +0000</p> Awesome week! Just yesterday, my mentor and I opened up a transatlantic tube and exchanged our Banshee music libraries! Very cool seeing it in action over the Internet. So, I accompished what I wanted to this week and got the data delivering asynchronously without blocking either the producer or consumer's UI. Banshee will display tracks to the user as the download progresses. I've also got playlists coming across too. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w31de2K2orA">Screencast</a>:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Other happenings:<br /> Found a <a href="https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22337">bug</a>, confirmed the bug in #telepathy, and reported it.<br /><br />Also, I found out that Empathy is soon to be ported to Misson Control 5 (MC5). Maybe around GUADEC time. So, this brings a dilemma to my project. See below for a Q and A style explanation.<br /> <br />Q: Why is MC5 important to my SoC project?<br /><br />A: Because the next release of Empathy is going to depend on it, and MC4 is basically being thrown out. No backwards compatibility.<br /><br />Q: What is the minimum amount of work required to get this project working with MC5?<br /> <br />A:<br />1) Port connection detection (ie. ConnectionLocator class) from MC4 API to MC5.<br /><br />2) Port presence setting code (ie. Announcer class) from MC4 API to MC5.<br /><br />3) Use the Empathy TubeHandler hack (register an object by dbus name <i><i>org.gnome.Empathy.DTubeHandler.myservice</i></i>) to tell MC5 that Empathy is handling the tube.<br /><br />Q: What about the rest of the project's code?<br /><br />A:<br />1) Leave the rest of the code as is (with minor tweaks, I'm sure), as I'm pretty sure it will still work.<br /><br />2) Port the code to use the org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Client interface MC5 provides.<br /> <br />Q: If we have option 1), then why port anything?<br /><br />A: I am using a bit of a hack, at the moment, for advertising the Banshee music sharing tube service.<br /><br />The Telepathy API provides a method called SetSelfCapabilities on the ContactCapabilities interface which is kind of weird to work with without MC5. For example, to add a new tube service, the existing services have to be queried, saved, merged with the new service, and then sent to the SetSelfCapabilities method. To remove the new service, the existing services must be queried, saved, our service must be removed from the existing services, and then sent to the method. So, in other words, the method does a replace and not an add/remove operation. MC5 provides a higher level layer that does all this extra work. However, it is quite a bit of work to use that "extra layer." ie. port project code to use the org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Client interface. On the other hand, my hack introduces a race condition where the capabilities could change during the process.<br /><br />I've <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2009-June/003533.html">posted</a> on the telepathy mailing list about this MC5 stuff and have already received some helpful replies.<br /><br />So, I'll have to discuss all this with my mentor and decide on our course of action. To add to the TODO list, I may still tweak my playlist provider, I've got some GUI bits to work on and after that I'll probably start playing with file transfers.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Dan Williams: Mobile Broadband Assistant makes it Easy</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:08:53 +0000</p> <dl style="width: 378px; text-align: center;" id="attachment_174" class="wp-caption aligncenter"> -<dt style="text-align: center;" class="wp-caption-dt"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/43546149@N00/222403868/"></a></dt> -<dd style="text-align: center;" class="wp-caption-dd"> -<h4>Yay! Mobile broadband with NetworkManager is so simple!</h4> -<p>(credit <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mandolinn/" rel="dc:creator cc:attributionurl">mandolin davis</a>)</p> -</dd> -</dl> -<p style="text-align: left;">Easier than your… well, you probably know where I was going with that. It’s a great leap forward for NetworkManager usability. Other operating systems either don’t have one, or your network operator gives you the software so of course you don’t have to configure it. On Linux, we like to <strong>work for everyone</strong>, so we get to make it easy to get connected to the operator of your choice.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Antti does the base</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.kaijanmaki.net/blog/">Antti Kaijanmäki</a> did some work last summer (2008) to put together the <a href="http://git.gnome.org/cgit/mobile-broadband-provider-info/">mobile broadband provider database</a> and write a library and assistant to use that data. That was a great start, and Ubuntu started shipping it as a patch in 8.10. Seems to have worked fairly well there, but since we were deep in the middle of getting the NM 0.7 release out at that time, it wasn’t possible to integrate then. Antti’s patch didn’t get committed to 0.7.1 for mostly licensing and scope-related reasons, but he built the database which the assistant that just hit git uses, and he proved that it was something users wanted.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;">Tambet the wrote a compatibly-licensed library to parse the database for network-manager-netbook, which means I didn’t have to, which was nice.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Implemented with Máirín-induced goodness<br /> -</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">So a few weeks ago I started rewriting the pitiful GSM/CDMA chooser dialog in network-manager-applet into a full GtkAssistant-based helper. I’m not an interaction expert, so I tricked Máirín Duffy into helping me get the flow and design planned out. Then we iterated over my implementation and fixed what sucked, and came out with something that works pretty well. Starting from the user’s perspective is incredibly important, and that’s what we did with the mobile broadband assistant.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Why do you want this? (or, WTF is an APN?)<br /> -</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">Because you probably have no idea what a GPRS APN is, or why you need the right one to make things work. Nor should you have to. At least CDMA got this right by not having one, they are an interaction nightmare. Your provider knows <em>exactly</em> what you’re paying for, so they know exactly what to bill you for when you use various services they offer. But when connecting to GPRS data services, you need to tell your phone or device what APN you’d like to use when connecting which in turn tells the provider how you’d like to be billed for it. But this sort of access control is simply at the wrong level, and having it a the GSM level instead of the <em>application </em>level sucks for users.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;">There are different APNs for everything; for example T-Mobile USA splits it up as follows:</p> -<ul style="text-align: left;"> -<li>wap.voicestream.com - for T-Zones, the WAP-based walled-garden for dumbphones ($6/mo)</li> -<li>internet2.voicestream.com - Unblocked access to anything using a NAT-ed IP address ($20/mo)</li> -<li>internet3.voicestream.com - Unblocked access to anythign using a public, routable IP address for certain VPN clients (also $20/mo)</li> -<li>epc.tmobile.com - new, nobody’s quite sure what its for</li> -</ul> -<p style="text-align: left;">Some providers have a separate APN that downsamples JPEGs to save data costs, others have separate APNs for pay-as-you-go versus contract (they already know whether your IMSI is contract or not, so this baffles me), others have separate APNs per region they serve (BSNL India). It’s a freaking mess.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Sanity through NetworkManager</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">APNs don’t really change that often, so it’s easy to build up a crowdsourced database of current providers and their APNs. Which is what Antti did, and that worked out really well. Máirín decided to loosely map the APN to a provider’s billing plan, which usually maps to brand name or service that users actually care about. So I reorganized the mobile broadband provider database to allow multiple “services” (ie, APN or CDMA) for each provider. This almost gave me carpal tunnel since its not easily scriptable.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;">Second, I added all the MCC/MNCs (network identification numbers) that I could find, so that in the future we can read you IMSI off your SIM card and <strong>automatically suggest your provider</strong> when you plug in your phone or data card the first time. That’s pretty hot.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Hot Pics</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">When you first insert your card, it shows up in the applet menu. Ubuntu has a patch that will nag you with a notification that you’ve just plugged in new 3G hardware; they’re welcome to port that to the new code and submit. For now, it looks like this:</p> -<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/files/2009/06/hotplug.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">When you click that, you’ll get the Assistant’s intro page:</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/files/2009/06/intro.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">This page explains some of the information you’ll need. Hopefully you know what provider you signed up for, but if you don’t, you seriously need to stop getting drunk before 3 in the afternoon. You probably also know what country you’re in, if not,seriously, get a GPS. I can’t help you with that.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/files/2009/06/country.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">Now it gets a little tougher, but since you’re filling a wheelbarrow with your money and dumping it on your provider’s doorstep, you’ll probably also know what provider you signed up with. But maybe you got shanhai-ed into signing a contract, I don’t know.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/files/2009/06/provider.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">But if your provider isn’t listed, <strong>we need your help.</strong> <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=NetworkManager">File a bug</a> in Gnome Bugzilla, tell us your provider name, your country, the common name of your plan, and the APN you use. We’ll update the provider database with that information, and thank you profusely for making life easier for everyone else too. We could, in the future, allow users to automatically send their manually entered settings to a server somewhere, and make the provider database update process less manual. Patches for that greatly appreciated. Now you get to choose your plan:</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/files/2009/06/plan.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">Again, if your plan (ie, APN) isn’t listed, <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=NetworkManager">file a bug</a>. But since you signed up, and they probably have <a href="https://www.wireless.att.com/support_static_files/KB/KB517.html">some sort</a> <a href="http://developer.t-mobile.com/loadKbaseEntry.do?solutionId=1159">of FAQ</a> for that sort of thing, you’ll probably be OK. Lastly, we have:</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"> -</p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/files/2009/06/summary.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">and if all looks well, you hit Apply, and NetworkManager will activate the connection you just set up. You can also change the APN easily through the connection editor. Much rejoicing was heard.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Future Improvements</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">There’s a few things we can do in the future… If the connection fails for some reason, re-display the Assistant. We can autodetect your provider based on the first 5 or 6 digits of your IMSI on your SIM, skip the Country page, and automatically select that provider in the Provider page, saving you a step or two. Unfortunately, we can’t autodetect the plan/APN because that’s not stored anywhere (well it is usually preloaded into your phone, but <em>all</em> the APNs are, and there’s no indication of which one is the one you really want). So there’s room to make it even more awesome.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Your help is required</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">Again, the mobile broadband provider database is incomplete. <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=NetworkManager">Help fix it</a> up for your country and your provider by filing a bug with your information. Include your provider name, your country, your plan’s marketing name if you know it, and of course the APN you’re using for data. If you have a CDMA provider, just tell us your country and provider name. Username and password are generally ignored by the network and the device, so they aren’t useful. It’s your help that makes this effort work better for everyone.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Michael Meeks: 2009-06-22: Monday.</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:28:20 +0000</p> <ul> - <li> - Up early, to work; battling the build system, amazed by -the under-thought <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus">Malthusian</a> -<a href="http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2009/06/20/finite-resources-infinite-growth">pessimism</a> -coupled with supposed eugenic solution. At least Malthus had the exuse of -not having a large published literature on the subject to study first. - </li> - <li> - OPS call with Markus. Pizza with the family; read stories, put babes -to bed & back to work. - </li> -</ul> </article> <article> <h1>John Palmieri: Open Video Conference an Amazing Step Forward</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:22:24 +0000</p> <p>The <a href="http://openvideoconference.org">Open Video Conference</a> just ended yesterday. I attended the first two days and just stopped in briefly during the hack-fests yesterday before having brunch with some old highschool friends and heading back to my parents house where my dog and car were stashed.</p> -<p>I can say without a doubt the turnout was amazing and even though not everything I heard all weekend was positive it was a giant leap forward in then understanding of the importance of Open Video and culture. I won’t put a figure on how many people attended but some of the upstairs talks were standing room only and after the first day some of the organizers were lamenting that then needed to get bigger rooms (consequently some of the talks were swapped the next day). Speaking about the organizers, they ran an incredibly smooth ship and should be thanked and praised for their efforts.</p> -<p></p><h3>The Good</h3><p></p> -<h4>Apps</h4> -<p>I was mainly there looking to see what video producers wanted from FOSS application developers and to support the <a href="http://pitivi.org">PiTiVi</a>/<a href="http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org">GStreamer</a> teams on behalf of the GNOME Foundation. It is amazing to see the PiTiVi non-linear video editing app at such a usable state. While <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/edwardrv/">Edward Hervey (bilboed on irc)</a> gave his mini presentation on PiTiVi I was busy hacking up a “How To Make Chocolate Truffles” video from pictures and clips I had laying around. </p> -<p>Afterwards I showed him some of the bugs I encountered in the 0.13.1 release and he just rattled off, fixed in git, fixed in git, fixed in git…etc. Sadly the releases are tied to GStreamer releases (which is a good thing from a development/bugs standpoint but not so good from a user standpoint given the early stages of PiTiVi) so we won’t see an official release soon. I plan on trying to automate a Fedora Repository at some point just to be able to view the progress without breaking my system. </p> -<p>The point is PiTiVi is about 90% there (and perhaps 100% in git) to be able to support my needs for basic video editing in terms of stability and basic tools. That should be pretty reflective of those who need to do things like screen casting and interview style video blogs. Some advanced features like effects (look at <a href="http://projects.gnome.org/cheese/">Cheese</a> for some examples of this already working in an app) already exist in GStreamer and just need to be integrated in PiTiVi’s UI and rendering pipeline.</p> -<p>There was also a show of <a href="http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php">Cinelarra</a> but more interesting is the GTK+ fork <a href="http://lumiera.org/">Lumiera</a> which unfortunately is not usable yet but the direction they are going in (GTK+ interface and some GStreamer integration) looks like a great re-start in the case of pro level editing tools.</p> -<p>Also of interest in the pro level space was <a href="http://www.blender.org/">Blender</a> which seems to be the pro project with the most momentum and features for pro’s. At least that was the initial reaction from some on the Red Hat media team. The dev’s did admit that the functionality is limited to what they needed during production of <a href="http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/">Big Buck Bunny</a> (and other productions currently in the queue) but that in those areas it is rock solid. It is interesting to see a UI designed with different usability profiles. For instance one of Blender’s usability criteria is the avoidance of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury">repetitive strain injury</a>. To combat RSI mouse clicks are evenly divided between left and right mouse clicks.</p> -<p><a href="http://orange.blender.org/bassam-kurdali/">Bassam Kurdali</a>, one of the Blender developers and animators, came up to me later in the conference and said he had noticed me using PiTiVi to edit my video. He was impressed at the simplicity and slickness of the interface and how far along it is. There is plenty of room for different approaches and a real potential for cross pollination between the pro tools and the every day end user tools.</p> -<h4>What Content Producers Want</h4> -<p>Speaking of end users we got to hear from a bunch of them who let us know how we could support them. One of the biggest themes was that Windows tools suck and those who taught others couldn’t just tell them to go out and buy a mac (praises were heaped on iMovie and Final Cut Pro). They really want an easy to use tool, with the unfortunate note that it would have to run on Windows. One really good thing is that a lot of the non-tech content producers understood the need for free codecs. However in the end they just want a simple way to render down to DVD, You Tube, Daily Motion, iPhone, etc. and don’t want to deal with formats.</p> -<p>I ended up collecting a bunch of buisness cards and am toying with the idea of starting a feedback group with content producers which would get them involved in improving GNOME App usability from the perspective of those who are not yet familiar with the GNOME workflow. If we are serious about expanding our reach we need to go beyond our current self selecting internal feedback loops. The goal wouldn’t be to get these people using GNOME (though giving them a way through the apps wouldn’t be a bad thing). It would be more about getting groups outside of GNOME/Linux to be part of the process of improving GNOME. Will it be fruitful? I don’t know but it is an interesting experiment with a potential huge payoff for a little bit of effort.</p> -<h4>Sita Sings the Blues</h4> -<p>This good section wouldn’t be complete without the mention of <a href="http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/">Sita Sings the Blues</a> by Nina Paley which is a feature length (82 minutes) animated film released under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>. You have complete rights to watch, screen, remix and redistribute the film as long as you abide by the license. I do suggest you watch it and if you like it buy the DVD or simply donate to encourage more works like this (I bought the DVD for $20). Not only is Nina a content producer but she is heavily involved in advocating her distribution methods, going as far as documenting the process that went into releasing Sita under a creative commons license and in her work with <a href="http://questioncopyright.org/">QuestionCopyright.org</a>.</p> -<h4>Mozilla and the Open Video Contest</h4> -<p>I was very impressed with Mozilla’s involvement and their push for Ogg Theora to become a base line codec for the HTML 5 video tag. They are also helping launch the upcoming <a href="http://openvideoconference.org/2009/06/upcoming-open-video-contest-win-a-trip-to-sxsw-2010/">Open Video Contest</a> which would see the winner flown to the 2010 <a href="http://sxsw.com/">South by Southwest conference</a>. We should probably run some sort of sister contest to encourage GNOME users to submit entries.</p> -<p></p><h3>The Bad</h3><p></p> -<p>It wasn’t all roses. While I feel we are reaching independent content producers way more than I would have though at this point, some of the big companies still don’t get it or are afraid of Open Video implications.</p> -<p></p><h4>Adobe</h4><p></p> -<p>It must be said that Adobe has been somewhat good at working with the community over long periods of time but that they just never get around to resolving key issues. What really surprised me was when on one of the industry round tables the Adobe representative pointed to their release of the Flash documentation as a shining example of this relationship. After checking with a developer of an alternative flash implementation I was told those documents are pretty much useless. Due to bugs, some of the spec just doesn’t work as written and other issues makes it impossible to write a third party Flash player. </p> -<p></p><h4>YouTube/Google</h4><p></p> -<p>While reportedly Chrome will ship with Ogg Theora support their flagship video site YouTube seems afraid to do so. Their rep at the round table stated some pretty audacious things such as continuing the myth that Theora wasn’t good enough when clearly that <a href="http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html">argument was directly debunked</a> (the side by side comparisons were even playing on HDTV’s at the conference).</p> -<p>Even more of an issue was the representative’s idea on what Open Video meant. He declared that they would love to support Open Video but that it meant letting anybody do whatever they wanted and that doesn’t work from a buisness perspective.</p> -<p>Open Video isn’t about wild west, trample on rights. If anything it is about balancing the rights of content producers, end users and fair use. From what I read, YouTube’s position is that they are the 1000 pound gorilla in video distribution and at the end of the day they only believe in a user’s and content producer’s freedoms if it is walled behind their own servers. “All the world’s video” indeed.</p> -<p>The solution there is to drive traffic to sites like <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/">Daily Motion</a> and <a href="http://blip.tv/">Blip.tv</a> which understand the issues involved.</p> -<p></p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p></p> -<p>Nothing is perfect, but we are off to a really good start. In the end it is up to us to keep the momentum going and eventually produce a better experience within the complete Open Video stack, from content production to delivery. The web was built and exploded around the concept of open technology. Let’s continue to make sure this is the case going forward. The last thing we want is the web to become the domain of a few, with creativity being stifled by restrictions in the non-open parts of the stack. </p> -[read this post in: <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Car">ar</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Cde">de</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Ces">es</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Cfr">fr</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Cit">it</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Cja">ja</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Cko">ko</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Cpt">pt</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Cru">ru</a> <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.j5live.com/2009/06/22/open-video-conference-an-amazing-step-forward/&langpair=en%7Czh-CN">zh-CN</a> ] </article> <article> <h1>Juanje Ojeda: Guadalinex v6 is out!</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:31:13 +0000</p> <div style="text-align: left;" id="result_box" dir="ltr">I am pleased to announce that <strong>the final version of Guadalinex v6 is out</strong> </div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr">The official news are at the <a href="http://www.guadalinex.org/noticias/noticias/lanzamiento-de-guadalinex-v-6-la-definitiva/" target="_blank">Guadalinex website</a>. But it’s <em>in Spanish</em>, so I’ve decided to explain a bit (in my poor English) what is all about.</div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr">Before to start I like to thank to all those people who help to develop, test, fix, translate and document all those great projects which Guadalinex is based on. I really do. They make this possible and deserve most of the credits.</div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr">This is the <em>6th edition</em> of Guadalinex which is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. The distribution is paid by the local government of a big region at the south of Spain, which is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalusia" target="_blank">Andalusia</a>.</div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr">There are a lot of people who think this is waste of public money, but I think quite the opposite. And I think so because we don’t just make Ubuntu booting in Spanish and change the wallpaper, we try to listen to real end users from this region of the world and bring them the closer system to what they need and demand.</div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr">The distribution is oriented to the regular citizen, but it is being used at schools for few years. <em>T</em><span class="q"><em>housands of children </em>have been using Guadalinex (<em>ergo</em> <em>Ubuntu</em>/<em>Debian</em>/<em>Gnome</em> and much more free software stuff) <em>everyday</em> at the schools for about four years now.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">But also people from very low populated areas of Andalusia have been using Guadalinex at centers with computers where they can learn computers skills and use internet for free. Now there are around <em>700 centers</em> working from Monday to Friday for them.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">Even the public libraries are using now Guadalinex.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">Because of that, Guadalinex is more than a few technical or artistic changes. <strong>It’s a social project</strong>.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q"><br /> -</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">I think the changes we have made in this version are useful no just for Andalusian, but for all the people who feels more comfortable reading and writing in Spanish. And there also some interesting stuff for a normal Ubuntu user.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q"><br /> -</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">We like to push those improvements to Ubuntu, Debian, GNOME and all the wonderful projects we touch. And also new small tools we develop because our users need them. We think those are also</span><span class="q"> useful</span><span class="q"> for everybody.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">I have to say that Guadalinex don’t try to compete with any distro. Guadalinex have its owns users with their needs and we just want to give them what they need. And in the process (if we can) to help the community and other people.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q"><p></p> -<p></p></span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q"><strong>Our goals are really different from Ubuntu’s ones</strong>. Ubuntu need to be for everyone. Need to be universal and be useful and “compatible” with every person and culture.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">We are the opposite. We need to target to specific people, with specific language, culture, needs and resources. That’s why Ubuntu is so useful for us, but Guadalinex is more useful for our users.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr">We have to deal with users who barely know how to write and know nothing about computers. Ok, we have also real good IT people or people who really know all this stuff, but our <span class="clickable">threshold is the user who less know.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="clickable">We like fancy things on our desktops but sometimes we have to wait a bit to get them into Guadalinex because our users aren’t ready for them. And we know because we have professional helpdesk services, forums, feedback from teachers, from our </span><span class="clickable"><span class="q">technicians at the tele centers. So it’s not something we figure out by ourself and then take “conservatives” decisions, it’s something we do, because we know well to our users and we are here for them.</span></span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="clickable"><span class="q">What I was trying to say is that Ubuntu (or any other generalist distribution) has a very important mission and there are a lot of smaller and more focused derivatives distributions that need to be there. This is an ecosystem and everyone grown and learn on this interaction.</span></span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="clickable"><span class="q"><p></p> -<p></p></span></span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="clickable"><span class="q">Sorry for been so tedious, I’ll promise to tell shorter and funnier stories next time </span></span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="clickable"><span class="q"><br /> -</span></span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="clickable"><span class="q">Well, actually my next post probably will be the list of things that are different between Ubuntu Jaunty and Guadalinex v6. <a href="http://forja.guadalinex.org/webs/guadalinexv6/doku.php?id=diferencias_entre_ubuntu_jaunty_y_guadalinex_v6" target="_blank">The list</a> is in Spanish now, so I want to explain it in English.<br /> -</span></span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">And If anyone like to try Guadalinex, we have a <a href="http://www.guadalinex.org/descargador/index.php?nombre=guadalinex-v6-desktop-final.iso" target="_blank">DVD version</a> (the full edition) and a <a href="http://www.guadalinex.org/descargador/index.php?nombre=guadalinex-v6-desktop-cd.iso" target="_blank">minor version on CD</a>.</span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">Thanks for reading </span></div> -<div style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr"><span class="q">Happy hacking!<br /> -</span></div> </article> <article> <h1>Sam Thursfield: GLADEs</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:23:32 +0000</p> This week I started exploring the wild world of GLADE!! After losing a day to the fact that I hadn't done a 'make install' after changing the API in some way (the plugins were still being loaded from PREFIX/lib/glade3, so all hell was subtly breaking loose), I managed to implement the following provisional UI for binding settings to properties:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/39609117@N04/3650711672/" title="GLADE with GSettings integration #1 by samthursfield, on Flickr"></a><br /><br />Most properties can be bound, including many that you would never want to - but the 'Bind to' widget is normally hidden for these. It defaults to shown on the 'data' properties you'd normally bind to, such as <tt>GtkEntry.text</tt> and <tt>GtkCheckButton.active</tt>.<br /><br />A bonus of this is you get 'guards' (where one toggle affects the sensitivity of an area of the dialog) basically for free. Just bind the 'sensitive' property of the container widget to the same key as the toggle, and all of its children will be disabled/enabled appropriately.<br /><br />Last week I stayed a few days with my parents in Wales. Generously the sun came out and I got out a bit.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/39609117@N04/3641582122/"></a><br /><br />This week I am headed to <a href="http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/">Glastonbury</a>! I like to get to lots of festivals every year and Glastonbury is far and away the best in the country. I often work at them but I'd hate to do that at Glastonbury, there's already not nearly enough time to see the whole of the festival. It just so happens there are several recently reformed big-name bands playing this summer, I think it is going to be one to remember! </article> <article> <h1>Christopher Blizzard: multi-process firefox</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:46:52 +0000</p> <p>Chris Jones has put together a <a href="http://blog.mozilla.com/cjones/2009/06/21/multi-process-firefox-coming-to-an-internets-near-you/">demo video</a> of a super-early stage Gecko-driven browser that’s multi-process. It’s super-duper early and realizing that we’re only in <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes#Phase_I:_Bootstrap">Phase I of the roadmap</a> is important but it’s great to see such speedy progress. Release early, release often!</p> -<p>Sadfaces. Your browser doesn’t support the <video> tag with open video formats. Try <a href="http://people.mozilla.org/~cjones/ff-mp-demo.ogg">clicking here</a> instead.</video></p> - </article> <article> <h1>Murray Cumming: maemomm API reference</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:21:30 +0000</p> <p>We have cleaned up the maemomm API reference and put the result <a href="http://maemomm.garage.maemo.org/docs_unstable/">online</a>. Here’s an example for the <a href="http://maemomm.garage.maemo.org/docs_unstable/reference/hildonmm/html/classHildon_1_1TouchSelector.html">Hildon::TouchSelector</a> widget. Pages such as that are linked often from the “Programming with maemomm” book.</p> -<p>Like the gtkmm API reference, the maemomm API reference is partly autogenerated from the C API reference, with some clever automatic changes, and some manual overrides, so it will improve as the hildon C API reference documentation improves.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Mirco Müller: Visual results of recent work</h1> <p>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:52:50 +0000</p> <p>What the urgency-level bar-display looks like (see also <a href="http://macslow.net/?p=311">here</a>):<br /> -</p><center><br /> -<a href="http://macslow.net/clips/urgency-debug-display.ogv"></a><br />(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~470 KBytes)<br /> -</video></center><p></p> -<p>Corrected throbbing and proximity-fade in action:<br /> -</p><center><br /> -<a href="http://macslow.net/clips/correct-throbbing-debug-bar-proximity-fade.ogv"></a><br />(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~ 670 KBytes)<br /> -</video></center><p></p> -<p>Last but not least here is a sneak peak of work-in-progress on better and faster blurring:<br /> -</p><center><br /> -<a href="http://macslow.net/clips/fast-blur.ogv"></a><br />(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~9 MBytes)<br /> -</video></center><p></p> </article> <article> <h1>Christian Hergert: Catalina</h1> <p>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:05:33 +0000</p> <p>I've written another library, <a href="http://git.dronelabs.com/catalina/about">Catalina</a>. It started as an example for using the threading library <a href="http://git.dronelabs.com/iris/about">Iris</a> and turned into what I think is a useful library. Catalina is an object data-store for glib and gobject. It provides access through a natural key/value pair interface.</p> -<p>Transparent serialization is supported to and from storage for types that can be stored in GValue's. A tight binary format is provided with the library. It supports basic types such as integers, doubles, floats and strings as well as GObjects in an endian-safe manner. However someone should go double check to call my bluff (and verify its correctness). A JSON serializer would be a quick hack if someone was interested.</p> -<p>In addition to serialization, Catalina supports buffer transformations to and from storage. Included is <a href="http://git.dronelabs.com/catalina/tree/catalina/catalina-zlib-transform.c">CatalinaZlibTransform</a> which can apply compression using zlib. It will avoid compression on buffers smaller than the watermark property. This will help on data-sets that are occasionally small and compression would in fact enlarge them.</p> -<p>Catalina is an asynchronous data-store by design. The optimal way of accessing it is the same.</p> -<p>Everything is built upon <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/tdb/">Trivial DB</a> (TDB) from the samba project. It was chosen over Berkeley DB because of its license. Like Catalina, it is LGPL and does not impose extra restrictions on linking applications such as BDB.</p> -<p>However, the one downside to using TDB is its lack of concurrent transactions. This means that if you have multiple threads doing work and updating storage the transactions would interleave. Since we are using <a href="http://git.dronelabs.com/iris/about">iris</a>, we can use message passing as a way to manage concurrent transactions. (This is done by queuing messages until the commit phase.)</p> -<p>Here is a <a href="http://git.dronelabs.com/catalina/tree/examples/beatdown/beatdown.vala">short example</a> using Vala to asynchronously open, serialize and store a bunch of "Person" GObjects. All the while compressing each buffer with zlib. Don't be scared by the mutex/cond, it's there to negate the need of a main loop.</p> -<p>I intend to add indexes soon, however that is going to take a bit of planning.</p> -<p>So there you have it, my newest hack.</p> -<blockquote><p>git clone git://git.dronelabs.com/catalina</p></blockquote> </article> <article> <h1>Nagappan Alagappan: Clonezilla - Linux and Windows imaging</h1> <p>noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:36:00 +0000</p> <p>In <a href="http://vmware.com/">VMware</a>, Palo Alto, we evaluated <a href="http://clonezilla.org/">Clonezilla</a> for Imaging different Linux distributions like openSUSE, SLED, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, Madriva. Some success stories:</p><p>Took Ubuntu image on DELL 390 Intel single processor, first hard disk and restored it in HP AMD Athlon Dual processor, second hard disk using <a href="http://clonezilla.org/download/sourceforge/stable/iso-zip-files.php">Clonezilla Live CD</a> and worked awesome ! The restore times took approx 2 minutes 12 seconds. The system is usable now ! wow !! I didn't expect this to work, to be frank :) This is with regular partition.<br /></p><p>Also, tried with Fedora LVM image, with different hard disk size, this failed, I assume this is due to LVM, though I'm not sure.</p><p>Next tried creating Windows XP SP2 32bit image from DELL 390 and deployed it on DELL 3400 based on the info available <a href="http://lupus.wikidot.com/use-sysprep-to-reset-sid">here</a> and <a href="http://techtalkplus.blogspot.com/2008/08/using-sysprep-clonezilla.html">here</a> and it worked amazingly !</p><p>Great work Clonezilla team<br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Kurt von Finck: Midsummer!</h1> <p>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:35:33 +0000</p> <p>Glad midsommar! Hauskaa juhannusta!</p> -<p>Best Midsummer wishes to all my Scandinavian friends and family!</p> -<p>Kristine and I are having a wonderful time visiting the crazy Swedish-Finn contingent of Monty Program. The food, songs, camaraderie, and 24 hours of daylight. Being with a close-knit group feels like they are a family, and their most excellent hospitality made us feel immediate part of that family. Our deepest thanks to Monty, Anna, Ralf, and Nina; our hosts and hostesses.</p> -<p>Here’s a nice photo of the Baltic near Nauvo (Nagu). Lots of water, but the sea, so no små grodorna. </p> -<p></p> </article> <article> <h1>Juanje Ojeda: Hello Planet Ubuntu</h1> <p>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:28:14 +0000</p> <p>This is a short post just to say hello to everybody at the Ubuntu Planet <br /> -I’ve been around Ubuntu since its first version (back in the 2004) and now my work got me closer again to Ubuntu, so I’ve decided become a member of this community and start my process of developer in here.</p> -<p>I was always a very Debian guy, but for different reasons I found Ubuntu interesting and a project that I had to keep eye on. I still like Debian, but I use Ubuntu for my work and my home (well, actually I use <a href="http://www.guadalinex.org" target="_blank">Guadalinex</a>).</p> -<p>I hope my work let me keep pushing bugs, translations, patches, branches and more no just to Ubuntu but Debian, GNOME and more interesting projects out there that we use.<br /> -That’s it for now. Soon, some news about the last Guadalinex version. Stay tuned </p> </article> <article> <h1>Mukund Sivaraman: Where the mind is without fear</h1> <p>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:19:55 +0000</p> <p>The world seems to be a very clouded place today. One day, when India was facing its struggles, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore">Tagore</a> wrote this:</p> -<blockquote><p>Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;<br /> -Where knowledge is free;<br /> -Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;<br /> -Where words come out from the depth of truth;<br /> -Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;<br /> -Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;<br /> -Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action…<br /> -Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.</p></blockquote> -<p>It’s easy to take freedom for granted, when a person has had it all his life. Some sit by and watch it fade away. Others manipulate it and make it fade away. Some struggle to hold on to it, or to get it back for everyone.</p> -<p>History shows that when you lose freedom, it is very difficult to get it back.</p> - -<span class="slashdigglicious"> -<a href="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=basic&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F&title=Where+the+mind+is+without+fear" title="Slashdot It!"></a> -<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F&title=Where+the+mind+is+without+fear" title="Digg This Story"></a> -<a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F&title=Where+the+mind+is+without+fear" title="Reddit"></a> -<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F&title=Where+the+mind+is+without+fear" title="Save to del.icio.us"></a> -<a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F" title="Share on Facebook"></a> -<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F" title="Post to Twitter"></a> -<a href="http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F&title=Where+the+mind+is+without+fear" title="Save to Google Bookmarks"></a> -<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.banu.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F06%2F21%2Fwhere-the-mind-is-without-fear%2F&title=Where+the+mind+is+without+fear" title="Stumble it!"></a> -</span> </article> <article> <h1>Christian Hergert: Learning from others mistakes and successes</h1> <p>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:36:50 +0000</p> <p>I seriously hate writing overly long blog posts, but this turned into one. You are forewarned.</p> -<hr /> -<p>What can Linux and the Free Desktop learn from recent marketing campaigns by Apple and Microsoft? Let's quickly take a look at a few of the campaigns over recent years from Apple.</p> -<ul> -<li>"There's an app for that"</li> -<li>Seamless hardware support with built in drivers</li> -<li>Built in applications for digital media (iLife)</li> -<li>Does not crash (quite debatable it seems)</li> -<li>No malware or viruses</li> -</ul> -<p>I was surprised how well they were able to comfort users about switching to OS X. The same qualms exist for Linux and in very similar ways.</p> -<p>Rather than worry about migrating existing applications to OS X, (iPhone really, but it still applies,) Apple comforted the user in knowing that anything they want to do can be achieved. With Debian, for example, there are tens of thousands of applications. Do we have an app for that? Probably.</p> -<p>The first commercials that came out for OS X talked about how hardware just worked when you plugged it in. No extra installation of drivers or finding installation cd-roms was needed. Of course, now that more hardware vendors are supporting the platform, it is no longer the case. Linux has an advantage here due to frequent release cycles. The consistent releasing of new software and drivers gives a leg up for supporting current hardware sooner. Granted, someone still needs to be writing those new drivers. But if GkH is right, then Linux also has more drivers than any operating system ever written.</p> -<p>Apple talks about their iLife applications a lot. They are good and all but we have acceptable alternatives for them. Providing a full Office compatible product is quite important and you don't see either bringing that up. Granted, I would love to see an application as sleek as Apple's Keynote or Pages.</p> -<p>They also made hardware that developers wanted to play with such as the airtunes device. Has anyone made an airtunes-like device (airport express) with just F/OSS software. I'd think that pulseaudio could do most of what is needed.</p> -<p>Each of the framework libraries perform a single task well. Yet, they all still integrate together. For example, an application can control external windowing animations. Say that I'm writing a book reader and when the user turns the page I want the page to actually tear off the application window and fly across the screen. This is just not possible in a practical way today. Now that X has compositor support, shouldn't it be available to the application to provide custom control? I would love to make Marina have a native newspaper interface and do exactly that. This is just an example, many facets of the system layer need fresh innovation.</p> -<p>There are tools to write to make our daily lives easier. Streamlining development will only make our time-to-market sooner.</p> -<p>How is Microsoft reacting to the marketing campaigns from Apple? They have a few failed attempts at using celebrities such as Seinfeld. But more recently, are the "Laptop Hunters" ads. These are quite funny as you will notice they get laptops that don't match what they claimed to have wanted at all. Most importantly, though, they are attacking Apple on price and trendiness. I guess they tout gaming on PC's too. Gaming, however, is a strange problem since the total market share of PC gamers relative to PC users is quite small. It's also shrinking as the Xbox, Wii, and PS3 continue to expand their coverage. Regardless, they are both beat on price.</p> -<p>Additionally, I thought the slogan "Life without walls" was funny since without walls you can't have windows.</p> -<p>Many pundits, myself included, have talked about how netbooks can totally change the game. The iPhone was similar in the phone market. Do you think it would have been as successful without the developer platform and thousands of applications?</p> -<p>So finally, how can we replicate the positive results Apple had? What is missing from our platform today (can linuxhator kick our asses into shape)? What are our weaknesses (and how can we fix them to become strengths). What story do we have to tell developers? What do we really enjoy about our platform?</p> </article> <article> <h1>Christian Hammond: Review Board 1.0 Released!</h1> <p>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:47:36 +0000</p> <p><a href="http://www.review-board.org/"></a></p> -<p>Tonight, we hit a milestone in the <a href="http://www.review-board.org/">Review Board</a> project that we’ve been working toward for over two years. We finally pushed out our 1.0 release. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into this release (okay, so not literally, but it was A LOT OF WORK!). The last few months in particular have been challenging, as we’ve had to solve some tricky bugs and scalability problems, but the end result is pretty great.</p> -<p>Just a short while ago, we <a href="http://www.review-board.org/news/2009/06/20/review-board-10-released/">announced</a> the release and put up an <a href="http://www.review-board.org/docs/releasenotes/dev/reviewboard/1.0/">overview</a> of the entire release and product. We’ve already had some nice congratulatory e-mails and tweets, which is really nice :)</p> -<p>Some stats for this release:</p> -<ul> -<li>2 years, 9 months, 25 days have passed since our first commit.</li> -<li>120 contributors have contributed to Review Board so far (in terms of code contributions).</li> -<li>2,019 commits were made.</li> -<li>899 review requests have been posted to our project’s actual <a href="http://reviews.review-board.org/">Review Board server</a>. 1,650 users are registered on there.</li> -<li>Our <a href="http://demo.review-board.org/">demo server</a>, in comparison, has 2,082 review requests filed and 10,154 users.</li> -<li>938 bugs were filed. 812 were fixed.</li> -<li>232 feature requests were filed. 101 were implemented. Most remaining ones are scheduled for releases.</li> -<li>An estimated 200+ companies are now using Review Board. 26 have let us <a href="http://www.review-board.org/users/">list them publicly</a>.</li> -<li>The largest known Review Board install has over 83,000 filed review requests and over 2,000 users, doing upwards of 10GB of traffic per day.</li> -<li>5 presentations on Review Board are known to have been given, 3 by us, 2 by others.</li> -<li>552 users have joined our main mailing list, and 3,674 e-mails have been sent.</li> -</ul> -<p>Now that Review Board 1.0 is out, we can get started on some awesome new features we’ve had planned. I have a little notebook full of ideas for our 1.1 and 1.5 releases (which may become 1.5 and 2.0, respectively, as this list grows). Some of the new features are actually ready to be committed within the next couple of days, so those of you using nightlies will start to see them soon.</p> -<p>We were accepted into this year’s <a href="http://review-board.org/summer-of-code/">Summer of Code</a>, and have three students working on exciting projects for us, so hopefully we’ll start to see these trickle into the upcoming nightlies as well. Among these projects include diff viewer improvements (moved region detection, better whitespace-only change detection), IDE integration with Eclipse, and improved notification hooks and e-mail support.</p> -<p>We’re also working on providing support for third-party extensions, which will allow developers to extend Review Board in new, exciting ways without having to modify Review Board itself. This is especially handy for companies who wish to integrate better with their sandboxes, bug trackers or unit testing services. This will likely land in 1.5 (2.0?) at the earliest, as it’s a large change, but the code for this mostly works today. It’s just a matter of getting the codebase ready and figuring out what APIs we want to stabilize and expose.</p> -<p>As I mentioned in the <a href="http://www.review-board.org/news/2009/06/20/review-board-10-released/">release announcement</a>, we’re planning a release party, tentatively on July 11th, 2009, in the Bay Area (somewhere around Palo Alto, CA). If any Review Board users want to join us, please <a href="http://tinyurl.com/rb1-release-party">RSVP!</a></p> - </article> <article> <h1>Behdad Esfahbod: Iran is</h1> <p>noreply@blogger.com (behdad) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:16:00 +0000</p> <p align="center"><span style="font-size: 500%; color: green;">ON STRIKE</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Alberto Ruiz: RE: Finite resources, infinite growth</h1> <p>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:40:14 +0000</p> <p>Philip <a href="http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2009/06/20/finite-resources-infinite-growth">proposes</a> that we should modify the entire human race for them to have fewer possibilities to reproduce as a measure of birth control. As a prerequisite you will need to modify every single newborn, if we had the resources to influence how every single new person is born, we would actually be at the point where we could stop thos non desired borns in a much simpler way...<br /><br />Anyway, there's an easier way that actually has many other upsides. Philip, let's solve poverty instead of proposing sci-fi :-)<br /><br /></p> </article> <article> <h1>Matthew Barnes: Fedora Packages for Kill-Bonobo</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:09:33 +0000</p> Fedora 12 ("<i>Rawhide</i>") packages for Evolution's <i>kill-bonobo</i> branch are <a href="http://mbarnes.fedorapeople.org/kill-bonobo/RPMS">now available</a>. Install <a href="http://mbarnes.fedorapeople.org/kill-bonobo/kill-bonobo.repo">this repo file</a> to get updates through yum. The branch is currently synced with Evolution 2.27.3.<br /><br />As stated <a href="http://mbarnes.livejournal.com/2606.html">previously</a>, not everything is functional yet. Please file bugs for the parts that <i>are</i>. I'll try to post updates at least weekly. </article> <article> <h1>Marc Maurer: AbiWord 2.7.5 Released!</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:27:19 +0000</p> <p>This is starting to get boring, as I’m turning the planets into <a href="http://freshmeat.net/">freshmeat</a>. But let’s just pretend we have some actual users that care about this news: there is another <a href="http://abisource.com/release-notes/2.7.5.phtml">AbiWord release</a>! With improved printing support (landscape printing actually works again, how 1992!), working copy/paste on Windows, and improved OpenDocument support, this seems like a very nice development release. We’re inching closed to 2.8.0 every day.</p> -<p>[ <a href="http://abisource.com/release-notes/2.7.5.phtml">Release Notes</a> | <a href="http://abisource.com/changelogs/2.7.5.phtml">ChangeLog</a> | <a href="http://abisource.com/download/development.phtml">Download</a> ]</p> </article> <article> <h1>Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle: Comment number 1000</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:23:55 +0000</p> <p>I just noticed <a href="http://leonardof.org/2009/06/19/how-do-i-keep-multiple-contact-lists-synce/en/#comment-3286">Ross Burton published</a> the 1000th comment to my blog, making an average of a few more than 5 comments per article. My spam count grew from <a href="http://leonardof.org/2008/05/28/10-thousand-spams/en/">10 thousand</a> to almost 50 thousand, and that’s because <a href="http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/">Bad Behavior</a> is avoiding many spams from even being blocked by <a href="http://akismet.com/">Akismet</a>.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Lennart Poettering: Yet Another Kit</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:29:00 +0000</p> <p><a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/cgroups-and-rtwatch">A while -back</a> I was celebrating that arrival of <i>secure</i> realtime scheduling -for the desktop. As it appears this was a bit premature then, since (mis-)using -cgroups for this turned out to be more problematic and messy than I -anticipated.</p> - -<p>As a followup I'd now like to point you to <a href="http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2009/06/0191.html">this announcement I -posted to LAD yesterday</a>, introducing <a href="http://git.0pointer.de/?p=rtkit.git">RealtimeKit</a> which should fix -the problem for good. It has now entered Rawhide becoming part of the default -install (by means of being a dependency of PulseAudio), and I assume the other -distros are going to adopt it pretty soon, too.</p> - -<p><a href="http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2009/06/0191.html">Read the full announcement.</a></p> </article> <article> <h1>Stéphane Delcroix: Announcing Gio# and Gtk#Beans</h1> <p>stephane@delcroix.org (Stephane) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:32:00 +0000</p> <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rihgl8Kfuew/SiJ4RvICNMI/AAAAAAAADHs/Dp8ER0ioCz4/s1600-h/dsc_3047+%28Modified%29.jpg"></a>For a handful of good reasons (see Mike's mail), gtk-sharp, the gtk bindings for Mono and .NET, lately chose not to follow the hectic 6 months release plan of both gtk and glib teams but leverage on the almost perfect 2.12.x releases we have now (binding gtk 2.12 and glib 2.16) for a few extra months.<br /><br />F-Spot, that small photo app everyone like, was, in its SVN/git latests versions, using a lot of the new API additions of gtk-sharp. You probably figured that already if you're following its developments.<br /><br />So I branched out some of the code I needed from Gtk# svn to 2 new standalone projects, Gtk#Beans and Gio#. Both projects aims to fill the gap between the API mapped by Gtk#2.12 and the capabilities provided by gtk 2.14/glib 2.16.<br /><br />The code is maintained on gitorious <a href="http://gitorious.org/gtk-sharp-beans">http://gitorious.org/gtk-sharp-beans</a>, <a href="http://gitorious.org/gio-sharp">http://gitorious.org/gio-sharp</a> and is already usable (and used in f-spot). Feel safe to use them as the API introduced over there will be merged with the fewest possible changes to the next Gtk# release.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Pierre-Luc Beaudoin: I voted, did you?</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:15:06 +0000</p> <p>Friendly reminder: the days left to vote to select <a href="http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Elections2009">foundation board members</a> are running down!</p> -<p>Make it happen here: <a href="http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/vote.php?id=13">http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/vote.php?id=13</a></p> -<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/caribb/434065911/"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: center;">Photo (cc) by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/caribb/">caribb</a>: a typical sight during elections in Montréal, Québec.</p> -<p>It is my first participation in a such an online election, non national election. Of course I am exited to be part of it. Unfortunately, electronic voting makes a quite boring “Election’s night”. I am used to the 3 or 4 hours of febrile waiting before the people’s choices are announced. Where are the exit polls? </p> </article> <article> <h1>Zaheer Abbas Merali: Spykee GStreamer element</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:09:00 +0000</p> <p>So this aftermoon, I spent the time starting a GStreamer source element for Spykee. I have made it respond to key press navigation events coming upstream from say xvimagesink and move forward, back, left and right and d for dock. The code so far is here: <a href="http://github.com/zaheerm/zspykee/commits/master/flumotion-spykee/flumotion/component/spykee/gstreamer.py">http://github.com/zaheerm/zspykee/commits/master/flumotion-spykee/flumotion/component/spykee/gstreamer.py</a></p> -<p>Video with Spykee moving controlled through navigation events coming from xvimagesink: <a href="http://zaheer.merali.org/spykee_gstreamer.ogv">http://zaheer.merali.org/spykee_gstreamer.ogv</a></p> </article> <article> <h1>Andre Klapper: GNOME 3 status.</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:49:26 +0000</p> <p>This is an update about cleaning up the GNOME stack for GNOME 3. This has also been <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-June/msg00059.html">posted to the desktop-devel mailing list</a>.</p> -<p>This status report refers to the aims listed in <a href="http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentyseven">the 2.27/2.29 schedule</a> and the <a href="http://www.gnome.org/~fpeters/299.html">automatic statistics available</a> (which now also covers the Mobile section, hence results can be worse than last time).</p> -<p><b>Maintainers</b>: I have listed available PATCHES AWAITING REVIEW.<br /> -Please take a look if your module is listed and review/commit NOW so the changes can receive enough testing for 2.28.</p> -<h3>THE PROBLEMS: What migration paths are missing?</h3> -<ul> -<li>libgnomeui provides retrieving thumbnails of files. There is no substitute yet. This blocks <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=573639">deskbar-applet</a>, <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574174">gnome-mag</a>, <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580895">evolution</a> and probably many others. -</li> -<li> -Currently <a href="http://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/EggSMClient">EggSMClient</a> gets copied into all apps. That’s not cool but the way to go until <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79285">Session Management support in gtk+</a> gets resolved.<br /> -See <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/phomes/2009/05/25/session-management-clients/">Thomas’ blog</a> for a current list. -</li> -</ul> -<p>This list is of course not complete. Also see <a href="http://live.gnome.org/LibgnomeMustDie">LibgnomeMustDie</a>.<br /> -Feel encouraged to add your issues.</p> -<h3>ZERO modules with Glib-Deprecated-Symbols</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED (”Reopened”) now that we also check external deps and the Mobile set:</p> -<ul> -<li>Still to do: gconf-dbus, evolution-data-server-dbus.</li> -<li>External deps to do: dbus-glib, hal, libnotify, mono. PATCHES available: dbus-glib, libnotify. FIXED: farsight2, libnice, poppler.</li> -</ul> -<h3>Officially ANNOUNCE libglade as deprecated in favor of GtkBuilder</h3> -<p>DONE.</p> -<h3>Less than 35 modules depending on libglade. </h3> -<p>COMPLETED.</p> -<ul> -<li>low: 25</li> -<li>average: 5 (dasher, gnome-media, gnome-panel, gok, zenity)</li> -<li>complex: 2 (gnome-control-center, evolution)</li> -<li>PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gdm, gnome-nettool, gnome-mag, gnome-media, gnome-menus, gnome-panel, gnome-session, gnome-system-tools, gtkhtml, sound-juicer, zenity, tracker. Maintainers please review/commit.</li> -</ul> -<h3>Clear a11y plan and schedule for 3.0</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED.</p> -<h3>Less than 12 modules depending on libgnome</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 22->15).</p> -<ul> -<li>low: 10</li> -<li>average: 4 (Evolution, gnome-media, yelp, anjuta)</li> -<li>complex: 1 (gok)</li> -</ul> -<p><a href="http://live.gnome.org/LibgnomeMustDie">Please share experiences and knowledge</a>.</p> -<h3>Less than 12 modules depending on libgnomeui</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 15->12).</p> -<ul> -<li>low: 9</li> -<li>average: 2 (Evolution-Exchange, gnome-panel)</li> -<li>complex: 1 (Evolution)</li> -</ul> -<p><a href="http://live.gnome.org/LibgnomeMustDie">Please share experiences and knowledge</a>.</p> -<h3>ZERO modules dependening on gnome-vfs</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED (Reopened):</p> -<ul> -<li>average: 1 (gst-plugins-base)</li> -</ul> -<h3>Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols</h3> -<ul> -<li>low: 8</li> -<li>average: 7 (gnome-control-center, evolution, gedit, metacity, glade3, gconf-dbus)</li> -<li>complex: 2 (gnome-games, gnome-media)</li> -<li>PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gedit, metacity, yelp, glade3, policykit-gnome</li> -</ul> -<h3>Evolution-Data-Server must be migrated to D-Bus by default</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED. Evolution schedule currently under discussion.<br /> -A <a href="http://git.gnome.org/cgit/evolution-data-server/log/?h=dbus">Git branch is available</a>.</p> -<h3>WebKit status report for 2.27.5</h3> -<p>IN PROGRESS. WebKitGTK+ has been proposed as an external dependency.<br /> -See <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-June/msg00047.html">d-d-l</a> for the status.</p> -<h3>Evolution to get rid of Bonobo by 2.27.3</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED and postponed for 2.29.1.<br /> -See <a href="http://www.go-evolution.org/KillBonobo">KillBonobo</a> for the status. Testing and reporting bugs is HIGHLY welcome. See <a href="http://mbarnes.livejournal.com/2606.html">Matthew’s blog</a> for more information.</p> -<h3>Complete migration from HAL to DeviceKit-* by 2.27.3</h3> -<p>NOT COMPLETED.<br /> -According to “jhbuild rdepends hal –direct” the following modules still depend on HAL:</p> -<ul> -<li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581742">brasero</a></li> -<li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583640">cheese</a></li> -<li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565867">gnome-power-manager is FIXED</a></li> -</ul> -<h3>More important stuff to take a look at:</h3> -<p>Not yet covered in the stats but required to fix are also:</p> -<ul> -<li><a href="http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/CleanupGTKIncludes">GTK+/GLib Single includes</a> (<a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563413">Metabug</a>): -<ul> -<li> -To Do: gdm, gail -</li> -<li> -PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-mag, gtksourceview -</li> -</ul> -</li> -<li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=585391">GSEAL</a>: -<ul> -<li> -To Do: A lot. Developers please start taking a look at this. -</li> -</ul> -</li> -<li><a href="http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/DropLibsexy">LibSexy deprecation</a>: -<ul> -<li> -To Do: Vino -</li> -<li> -PATCHES awaiting review/commit: anjuta, tracker, PolicyKit-gnome -</li> -</ul> -</li> -</ul> -<p>Nice to fix:</p> -<ul> -<li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=585444">Adding Introspection support</a>.</li> -<li><a href="http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/NicerBuilds">AM_SILENT_RULES / shave bugs</a></li> -<li>Porting to PolicyKit 1.0: PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gdm, gconf, gconf-editor, gnome-applets, gnome-panel, gnome-session</li> -</ul> -<h3>GNOME Showstoppers</h3> -<p>For GNOME 2.26/2.28, I have posted a <a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-June/msg00051.html">Showstopper Review</a> earlier this week. Feel free to take a look, test & help out, get things done.</p> -<h3>Other activity</h3> -<p>Kudos to the progress that has been made so far!<br /> -<a href="http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/PoptGOption">Getting rid of Popt</a> is basically DONE.<br /> -ZERO modules dependening on Esound is DONE.<br /> -ZERO modules dependening on Gnomeprint is DONE.<br /> -<a href="http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/TwoPointTwentyseven">The Website revamp front is rocking</a>, and <a href="http://www.silwenae.org/blog/?p=1167">the Documentation team also has some great momentum currently</a>.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Philip Van Hoof: Finite resources, infinite growth</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:48:02 +0000</p> <p><small>For some people this post can be controversial. I added a category “controversial” to my blog for people who prefer to filter it.</small></p> -<p>We start a imaginary experiment where we start with a bottle filled up with food and room left for exactly two worms. We assume worms replicate at a doubling time of one minute. We observed in a previous experiment that the bottle is filled up in exactly one hour. They eat the food as they double themselves, etc (use your imagination).</p> -<p>At 11′O clock in the morning we place two worms in the bottle. At what time will the bottle be full (easy)? At what time will the bottle be half full? At what time is the bottle only 3% filled up?</p> -<p>Humans have a global population growth of about 1.2% per year. It’s about 1% in wealthy countries and about 2-3% in poor countries. If you want to calculate a doubling time you take 70 and you divide it with the growth percentage. Which means that at our current growth rate, we’ll double our total population in 60 years.</p> -<p>In 1950 we were with about 2.7 thousand million people, in 1990 we were with 5 thousand million people. In 2050 we will be with 10 thousand million people. Infinite growth isn’t possible with finite resources. In 2400 years, at current growth rate, the earth’s mass will in theory be roughly equal to the total amount of human flesh.</p> -<p>The main question is, how big is our bottle? Let’s go back to the worms. For the worms the bottle is about 3% filled up at 11:55. It’s half full at 11:59. It’s overpopulated at 12:00. When three new bottles are found and pipes are connected with the first, the three new bottles will be filled up at 12:02. After that will four new bottles be filled up at 12:03. After that you need eight new bottles to survive minute 12:04. In minute 12:05 it starts getting crazy proportions.</p> -<p>Even if our bottle is only 3% filled up now, then still at our retirement age we will inevitably be at 50% capacity. During those retirement years we’ll see the population grow at an enormous speed to maximum capacity within a few years.</p> -<p>I’m among the people who believe that we’re already at 70% capacity of our planet. I think we have about 30 years of finite resources left: doubling the population to 10 thousand million people, is impossible (not unreasonable to think). Moving to another bottle will take us at least several more centuries of top notch space science (so this solution is not applicable). And that’s assuming we can leverage the resources of another planet. Moving to another star is simply out of the question unless we invent technology that allows us to let a huge mass travel at the speed of light (again, the solution isn’t applicable).</p> -<p>A solution that I have in mind? Genetically modifying newborn humans to have an annual fertility frequency and having their fertility enabled at a mature age. Instead of based on the phase of the moon would women be fertile only once per year. And instead of at the average age of 12 would women start becoming fertile at the average age of, for example, 25.</p> -<p>Is genetic modification immoral? Being an atheist I don’t have <i>any</i> believe system that forbids me to tamper with species. It’s indeed still immoral because we don’t know what we are doing, yet. No, morality is not divinely injected by a God. Atheists are <a href="http://themoralbrain.be/">born with morals</a>, too.</p> -<p>But if we have to choose between living with each other under the condition of having insufficient resources, or making a change to our species, I know which of the two I will prefer.</p> -<p>Now, if you do believe in a God, then you must also acknowledge that your God’s intention was for us to become intelligent enough to genetically modify our species. If not, why ain’t it stopping us? We, for example, have successfully been genetically selecting dogs for centuries. And we have started genetically modifying them (active modification: interfering with the egg and sperm cells).</p> -<p>Mankind will have to open this difficult discussion sooner or later.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Alberto Ruiz: Shame on us all!</h1> <p>Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:39:51 +0000</p> <p>Check out <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8495483285864450495&ei=0S48SvvLGYvr-Aaukuy4Cg">this <b>1991's</b> video</a>, starting minute 23. We are in 2009 now. After you've watched it, repeat with me:<br /><br /></p><center>To everyone building open source desktop development tools:<br /><b>SHAME ON US ALL!</b></center><br /><br /><p></p> </article> <article> <h1>Calum Benson: Try out OpenSolaris… in your browser</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:32:37 +0000</p> <p>This is a neat idea (if not technically all that novel)… log in to <a href="https://learning.sun.com/">Sun Learning Services</a> portal, and you can <a href="https://learning.sun.com/solc/course/sandbox-1">play with a virtual instance of OpenSolaris for up to an hour</a>.</p> -<p>It does require Java, there are only 8 slots available at any one time, and right now they’re still provisioning OpenSolaris <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/features/whats-new/200811/">2008.11</a> rather than the newer and shinier <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/features/whats-new/200906/">2009.06</a>. But if you want to give OpenSolaris a quick whirl, you might find it more convenient than <a href="http://www.opensolaris.com/get/index.jsp">downloading the LiveCD</a>.</p> -<p>More info in <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/learning_on_demand_service">Brian Leonard’s blog entry</a>.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Behdad Esfahbod: "The Wall"</h1> <p>noreply@blogger.com (behdad) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:15:00 +0000</p> To the friend or friend-of-friend in Toronto who borrowed my "Pink Floyd The Wall" DVD please return it ASAP. It was gift, and I want to watch it again this weekend. Thanks.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Davyd Madeley: retrospective</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:07:09 +0000</p> Was talking about photos. Sometimes I do take photos that I like (sometimes they're not food). Here are seven:<br /><center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/2879403202/" title="ruin #2 by penguincakes, on Flickr"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/3015926050/" title="dollface by penguincakes, on Flickr"></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/3104442934/" title="Untitled by penguincakes, on Flickr"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/2652128008/" title="tiny bird believes in values you believe in by penguincakes, on Flickr"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/2891200295/" title="flight by penguincakes, on Flickr"></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/3454880566/" title="like men from that book we saw that one time by penguincakes, on Flickr"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/3626928543/" title="Warp speed, Mr Sulu by penguincakes, on Flickr"></a><br /></center><br />Worked a lot of hours this week. Especially during the first half. Should make an effort at reading through my reading list, rather than staring at a screen this weekend. </article> <article> <h1>Dave Neary: Maemo Summit - help make it great</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:50:58 +0000</p> <p>This year, I’ve been asked to help with the content selection for the Maemo Summit, which will be held in October, in Amsterdam. We’re aiming for a very cool conference with lots of tips, tricks, hacks and general hardware coolness over 3 days.</p> -<p>Nokia is organising the first day, and the second and third days are entirely organised by the community. After a round of discussion, myself, Valerio Valerio and Jamie Bennett will be choosing content for the summit from among presentations <a href="http://maemo.org/community/council/maemo_summit_2009-call_for_content_now_open/">proposed by the community</a>. We’re aiming for presentations which will target three main audiences: tablet users, application developers and platform developers.</p> -<p>You can read more about the <a href="http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009/Call_for_content">call for content</a> or <a href="http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009/Submissions">how to submit a presentation</a> on the Maemo wiki. We’ve agreed on a fairly novel way of filling the schedule - we are starting from an empty grid, with three tracks, a couple of plenary sessions, and some lightning talks. As great talks come in, we will add them directly to the grid. If we don’t think that talks are up to scratch, they will be rejected, the submission will move to the Talk page for the Submissions wiki page, and if we are hesitant, the proposals will stay in the Submissions queue.</p> -<p>This has some great benefits over the usual call for papers/deadline/selection/publish the entire schedule scheme of things. Most proposers will know straight away whether their talk has been accepted, rejected, or converted into a lightning talk. Attendees will see the schedule building up and be able to propose sessions to account for topics that are not yet accounted for. And we will be able to keep some small number of slots until quite late in the organisation cycle for “late breaking news” - those great presentations that arrive too late for your deadline, but which you would really love to see get onto the schedule. And it is a kind of auction system - you have a great interest in getting your presentation proposal in early, rather than waiting for the last minute.</p> -<p>Anyway - let’s see how it works. You can follow the progress of <a href="http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009/Schedule">the schedule</a> on the wiki as well.</p> -<p>Good luck to all!</p> </article> <article> <h1>Rodrigo Moya: CouchDB contacts in Evolution</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:27:49 +0000</p> <p>Continuing with my <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2009/06/11/couchdb-glib-01/">CouchDB</a> <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2009/06/03/desktop-datasettings-replication/">on the desktop</a> series, here’s the 1st screenshot:</p> -<p><a href="http://www.gnome.org/~rodrigo/couchdb-contacts-in-evolution.png"></a></p> -<p>It’s Evolution addressbook components showing contacts from a CouchDB database. As stated in previous posts, all contacts in that database would be automatically replicated to a remote CouchDB instance, so, for instance, you could just see and edit/delete/whatever them from a web interface, and the changes would show up in Evolution.</p> -<p>Code is in GNOME git, under couchdb-glib and evolution-couchdb modules.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Martyn Russell: Lanedo sponsors GNOME at LinuxTag</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:34:40 +0000</p> <p><a href="http://www.lanedo.com">Lanedo</a> has only been running since January and we have been lucky enough to be able to sponsor the conferences we usually attend this year.</p> -<p>So far, these include the <a href="http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/">Desktop summit</a> and <a href="http://www.linuxtag.org/2009/">Linuxtag</a> and we are also looking into sponsoring <a href="http://fscons.org/">FSCONS</a> later in the year. For LinuxTag we are sponsoring by sending <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/timj/">Tim</a> and <a href="http://herzi.eu/">Sven</a> and by donating to the cause.</p> -<p>This year as usual, Sven will be propping up the <a href="http://www.gnome.org">GNOME</a> booth for us, so if you are in that vicinity, don’t forget to come by and say hello!</p> </article> <article> <h1>Adam Schreiber: Lockpicking and Security</h1> <p>adam.schreiber@gmail.com (Adam) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:24:00 +0000</p> No doubt in the past day or so people have seen on <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/31/profile-of-the-lock-.html">boing boing</a> a <a href="http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/ff_keymaster?currentPage=all">Wired article</a> about Marc Tobias picking <a href="http://medeco.com/">Medeco's</a> "high security" locks. From the article, the claim high security means something specific in the industry, being able to withstand compromise for 10 or more strictly 15 minutes. These locks have been specifically hardened to resist attacks and you have no doubt been wondering about the security of the lock on the front door of your home.<br /><br />Before you run out and buy a more "secure" lock for your home, let's discuss some security concerns that affect your purchasing decision. <br /><br />Do you have windows made from bullet proof glass on your home? If so, the lock on your front door may be your weak point. If not, consider that a non-savy criminal can defeat your multi-hundred dollar/pound/euro lock with a cheap brick or a rock from your landscaping (maybe you want to reconsider leaving break in tools around your front yard). This goes double if you have another exterior door that's glass or that a similar high security lock can't be affixed to. Remember that unless you have a facade constructed entirely of thick, well mortared masonry, a persistent attacker could easily cut through your wall with tools available at any home improvement store. Any system is only as secure as its weakest point.<br /><br />Let's also consider the rate of home break ins. The <a href="http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/burg.htm">US Department of Justice</a> provides statistics on historical trends of household burglery defined as "Unlawful or forcible entry or attempted entry of a residence." The following chart shows the national rate of burglery per 1000 homes from 1973 - 2005 (clicking through will take you to the numerical data).<br /><a href="http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/proptrdtab.htm"></a><br />Since this is a national average, you can reduce the rate of incidence by your choice of neighborhoods/areas to live in.<br /><br />If we assume that your chances of actually being broken into are small, 29.5 per 1000 homes in 2005, and your locks and windows are actually insecure and only useful for keeping the honest honest, is your money better spent upgrading insecure locks, windows and walls or limiting the consequences of such an unlikely event? By all means, lock your doors and windows, but also make sure you carry an appropriate home or renters insurance policy and have documented what you own and their approximate value. This evidence should be stored, like your backups, in a secured off-site location such as a safe deposit box. You could also opt to store this material in a heavy, fire and flood proof safe in your home. Keep in mind that safes can also be cracked, but the walls of the safe are more hardened than the walls, windows and locks of your home and you're trying to raise the cost of acquiring the contents beyond the value of the contents (much like the premise behind using digital encryption). If you opt for a "fire proof" safe keep in mind that many of them work by removing oxygen from the enclosure with a foam or such and not by limiting the heat delivered, which can erase magnetic media.<br /><br />In closing, "Don't Panic." Be prudent, but keep in mind the actual rate of such attacks on your home's security and take appropriate steps that will aid you in the event of any catastrophic event in your home.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Christian Schaller: The obscure world of spam</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:32:54 +0000</p> <p>After updating to Fedora Core 11 I noticed a new feature, the automatic font download system. Essentially it works like the automatic codec download system we have in GStreamer, but for fonts.</p> -<p>So judging by how often the font download box pops up the spam I am getting these days seems to be mostly in 3 languages Coptic, Syriac and N’Go I have to assume the spams are using random character sets to confuse spam filters, as I doubt that for instance either the ancient egyptians or their Coptic descendants of today are a big enough demographic for the spammers of the world </p> </article> <article> <h1>Paul Cutler: GNOME Docs Hackfest (Part I)</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:07:28 +0000</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/silwenae/3633166450/" title="dsc02277.jpg by silwenae, on Flickr"></a></p> -<p><em>(A duck at Inglis Falls, in Owen Sound, Ontario, home of woscon09. If only it had been a mallard…)</em></p> -<p>Milo Casagrande, who attended <a href="http://www.writingopensource.com">woscon09</a> with the GNOME Docs team last week, has <a href="http://milocasagrande.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/taming-the-duck/">written an introduction</a> to <a href="http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/mallard/spec.html">Mallard</a>.</p> -<p>Milo and Phil spent Sunday’s hackfest creating the first Mallard document for use as a help file within an application. We chose Empathy, for a few different reasons, including: it will be in GNOME in 2.28; the current documentation is not completed; we want to re-license it from GFDL to CC BY-SA 3.0 and Milo and one other collaborator were the only ones who had worked on it previously (though we fulfill our obligations in re-licensing by the exercise below).</p> -<p>Using the information we learned Friday and Saturday, we spent time planning the document and brainstorming what users want a messaging application to do, and what questions they might have: “How do I….?”.</p> -<p>From there, and with great gusto, Phil and Milo spent the sprint creating a proof of concept help file for Empathy. Not only is it written in Mallard, which can dynamically link the pages, we are focusing on creating topic based help, rather than tasks that take a user step by step in performing an action. Phil and Milo will probably have words with me, but you can follow along on the <a href="http://gitorious.org/empathy-mallard">empathy-mallard branch in Gitorious</a>.</p> -<p>You will need Yelp 2.27.1 and gnome-doc-utils 0.17.1 to see a Mallard doc in Yelp. And now I have to go figure out why Yelp isn’t cooperating with me.</p> -<div class="feedflare"> -<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/silwenae?a=DYbn8_t_CV8:IORJV_I4SG8:yIl2AUoC8zA"></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/silwenae?a=DYbn8_t_CV8:IORJV_I4SG8:F7zBnMyn0Lo"></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/silwenae?a=DYbn8_t_CV8:IORJV_I4SG8:D7DqB2pKExk"></a> -</div> </article> <article> <h1>Thomas Vander Stichele: Home test, and tftp bits</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:13:55 +0000</p> <p>After some situations at work this week where I lost time where I really shouldn’t have had to, combined with the observation that I get more useful strategic work done at home in Belgium, and because practically speaking going to Barcelona next week would be silly given that I can only leave on Monday and Wednesday is a day off (which I loathe - San Joan, the most dangerous night in Barcelona), I decided to stay home next week and compensate by fixing my phone setup.</p> -<p>You see, the only really annoying thing is that any conference call I end up in is terrible because I have a really hard time hearing the other side through either my mobile or my fixed phone, as the audio cuts out several times a second.</p> -<p>So, I spent a few hours yesterday first setting up the VPN, which aside from some minor issues seems to be working fine now. This was apparently a prerequisite for setting up asterisk because asterisk needs a fixed IP address or something I’ve been told.</p> -<p>After that, I started setting up Asterisk so that I could use the same THOMSON phone we have at work from home and call people in the office over it.</p> -<p>All of that is not what this post is about though.</p> -<p>This post is about the TFTP tricks and things I always need to re-learn any time I meddle with tftp. I’m putting them here because Google usually doesn’t find the problems and solutions I come up with, so maybe they’re of use to you if you play with TFTP. They will definately be of use to me next time I mess with tftp.</p> -<ul> -<li>TFTP runs over UDP on port 69</li> -<li>on Linux TFTP typically runs from xinetd. Do yourself a favour, edit /etc/xinetd.d/tftpboot and add -v -v -v to the server_args line. These lines should end up in your /var/log/messages</li> -<li>For some reason xinetd is fidgety with tftp. It doesn’t restart in.tftpd properly when you reload or restart xinetd, and so your verbose changes might not happen. Check with ps aux. You can kill it, but then xinetd doesn’t seem to start up in.tftpd properly for a while either. Strange stuff - <strong>please tell me if you know what’s going on here</strong> - </li> -<li>Keep a tcpdump running on your tftp server to see requests actually make it in: <code>tcpdump | grep tftp</code></li> -<li>Start by trying a tftp transfer on the server to localhost:<code>tftp localhost -c get test</code>Ideally, you should get <code>Error code 1: File not found</code> back immediately.</li> -<li>Now try an nmap from another machine: <code>nmap -sU -p 69 server</code> which should come back with <code>69/udp open|filtered tftp</code>. If it doesn’t, you probably didn’t open 69/UDP on your server’s firewall. You can confirm by just turning off your firewall on the server for a quick test.</li> -<li>If it shows as open|filtered, try <code>tftp server -c get test</code>. This should error out immediately as well. If it doesn’t, it’s probably because your test machine does not allow tftp in. Confirm simply by turning off your firewall. The simplest way to fix this is to load the tftp connection tracking module:<code> modprobe nf_conntrack_tftp</code>. This makes sure that your machine knows to accept the reply tftp request coming in on a random port. On Fedora/RedHat systems you can make this permanent by adding it int /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config to the IPTABLES_MODULES variable. <strong>This is the number one thing I keep forgetting when debugging tftp troubles.</strong></li> -<li>After that, try with actually existing files. Make sure you have the SEcontext correct; you can run <code>restorecon -vR /tftpboot</code>on the server for that. You can always confirm or deny whether SELinux is giving you trouble by temporarily turning it off. My auditd (the process that logs SELinux violations to /var/log/audit/audit.log) sometimes stops logging properly to the log file, and I need to restart it in that case. It’s easy to spot when auditd is misbehaving because by default it even logs replies to calls like setenforce 0.</li> -<li>Be careful with symlinks in /tftpboot if you use them. On your system they should actually be broken, because the tftp server will serve from /tftpboot and treat that as its root, as if it were chroot’d. So, if you have a file /tftpboot/phone/phone.inf, and you want a symlink to that file to exist and work in /tftpboot, you actually need to create a broken symlink like this: <code>ln -sf /phone/phone.inf /tftpboot</code>so that the symlink will work for tftpd.in This is <strong>one of those steps that I completely forget every time too</strong>.</li> -</ul> -<p>Well, that should be it for the next time I have tftp troubles!</p> </article> <article> <h1>Stuart Langridge: Using CouchDB to store contacts</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:36:47 +0000</p> <p>One of the things I’m looking at is using CouchDB to store data for applications on your desktop as part of the <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2009/06/03/desktop-datasettings-replication/">desktop data/settings</a> idea that Rodrigo’s already written about. Obviously one of the great things here is that applications can collaborate on data stored in there; obviously one of the pre-requisites for collaboration is that everyone’s speaking the same language! So various people working on a number of different mail clients for the Linux desktop and so on are working out what the schema for contact records in CouchDB should look like.</p> -<p>Being able to browse around your database with a web browser is dead handy for writing this sort of thing, I have to say :-)</p> -<p>At the moment, this is the sort of direction we’re heading in. A CouchDB document is JSON, and an example contact looks like this:</p> -<pre>{ - "_id": "362cbeae5f408d6863bb70892d5ba345", - "_rev": "1-182987891", - - "record_type": "http://example.com/contact-record", - "record_type_version": "1.0", - - "first_name": "Joshua", - "last_name": "Molby", - "birth_date": "1945-07-04", - - "addresses": { - "85cf156f-fcf6-4901-9201-82ee90859213": { - "city": "Bedford", - "state": "", - "description": "home", - "country": "Scotland", - "postalcode": "cw12 3hi", - "address1": "Nicol Street", - "address2": "", - "pobox": "" - }, - "d20f7364-e80b-47a2-a7e7-0677cb293745": { - "city": "Bedford", - "state": "", - "description": "work", - "country": "England", - "postalcode": "dk12 3av", - "address1": "Rush Street", - "address2": "", - "pobox": "" - } - }, - "phone_numbers": { - "f0bac2a0-83a3-46f9-b079-d41533b87391": { - "priority": 0, - "number": "+84 63 6220 9178", - "description": "work" - }, - "cf01fc9c-703b-4ae4-b303-fcc6f8ce5a53": { - "priority": 0, - "number": "+91 99 6920 2837", - "description": "home" - }, - "f0c05bf4-de4a-48f2-bbaf-f9698e52d491": { - "priority": 0, - "number": "+97 52 9211 6455", - "description": "other" - } - }, - "email_addresses": { - "6e3178d8-fee6-45b1-b95a-2c76be090e2b": { - "description": "home", - "address": "Joshua1.Molby@uck.com" - }, - "adb1fc2a-0468-4deb-bb6c-974db23ef7fd": { - "description": "work", - "address": "Joshua1.Molby@vkc.com" - } - }, - "application_annotations": { - "Funambol": { - "jobTitle": "Director", - "company": "ACME Ltd" - } - } -}</pre> -<p>Fields in this are as follows:</p> -<dl> -<dt>CouchDB fields</dt> -<dd> -<dl> -<dt><code>_id</code></dt> -<dd>Unique document ID, provided by CouchDB (or you can choose it explicitly if you want)</dd> -<dt><code>_rev</code></dt> -<dd>revision number for this document. Managed by CouchDB.</dd> -</dl> -</dd> -<dt>Contact schema fields</dt> -<dd>The contact schema is the list of fields that are stored for a contact. Since this is a shared schema, everyone can rely on it. Fields that aren’t in this list can be stored by applications in <code>application_annotations</code>, if an application cares about extra stuff.</dd> -<dd> -<ul> -<li><code>first_name</code> (string)</li> -<li><code>last_name</code> (string)</li> -<li><code>birth_date</code> (string, “YYYY-MM-DD”)</li> -<li><code>addresses</code> (MergeableSet of “address” dictionaries) -<ul> -<li><code>city</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>address1</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>address2</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>pobox</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>state</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>country</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>postalcode</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>description</code> (string, e.g., “Home”) - </li> -</ul> -</li> -<li><code>email_addresses</code> (MergeableSet of “emailaddress” dictionaries) -<ul> -<li><code>address</code> (string), - </li> -<li><code>description</code> (string) - </li> -</ul> -</li> -<li><code>phone_numbers</code> (MergeableSet of “phone number” dictionaries) -<ul> -<li><code>number</code> (string) - </li> -<li><code>description</code> (string) - </li> -</ul> -</li> -</ul> -</dd> -<dt>Basic “record schema” fields</dt> -<dd>The record schema is the basic format we’re talking about for storing <em>any</em> data in CouchDB; it’s a couple of fields that are in every record that everyone can rely on.</dd> -<dd> -<dl> -<dt><code>record_type</code></dt> -<dd>A URL which is a unique identifier for this type of record. It would be good if that URL had a page at it describing the record schema, but (importantly) this is not a reference to some sort of JSON DTD or anything</dd> -<dt><code>record_type_version</code></dt> -<dd>Version of this record type schema (so you can make updated versions if you want to make changes to field names, etc)</dd> -<dt><code>application_annotations</code></dt> -<dd> - The <code>application_annotations</code> section of the document is where apps put their own data that isn’t part of the schema. For example, Funambol knows about “company” for a contact, but the contact schema doesn’t directly include that field. So Funambol stores it on the contact record in a Funambol-specific section, so it can happily get it back later. If it turns out that everyone’s storing their own version of the same field, then that field is probably a good candidate for being in the schema (making this sort of change is what the <code>record_type_version</code> field is for :)) -</dd> -</dl> -</dd> -</dl> -<p>Quick script to drop contacts in this schema into a CouchDB database: <a href="http://www.kryogenix.org/code/createCouchContacts.py.txt">createCouchContacts.py</a>. Requires python-couchdb (and Couch, obviously). </p> </article> <article> <h1>Lluis Sanchez: New MonoDevelop installer for Windows</h1> <p>noreply@blogger.com (Lluis) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:07:00 +0000</p> A new MonoDevelop installer for Windows is available. This release has many fixes and improvements:<br /><ul><li>Performance of the text editor greatly improved, thanks to a new text rendering logic cooked by Mike Krüeger.</li><li>The debugger is now more reliable, it properly handles enum values, and it now has an 'immediate' console.</li><li>The NUnit add-in now works.</li><li>Version Control now has a new Create Patch command, thanks to Levi Bard.</li><li>A new C# formatter, with support for per-project/solution formatting options.<br /></li><li>MD now logs debug and error output to a file located in your AppData/MonoDevelop/log.txt, so if you get a crash or something you may find some info there.</li><li>Many other bug fixes.</li></ul>The new installer is available <a href="http://monodevelop.com/Download/Windows_Preview">here</a>. Worth trying!<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Pascal Terjan: LiveJournal</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:23:14 +0000</p> <p>I finally got a livejournal account in January to be able to comment, and now I get this email...</p> -<pre>Hi pterjan,<br /> -pterjan's birthday is coming up on June 21!<br /> -You can:<br /> - * Post to wish them a happy birthday - * Send them a virtual gift - * Gift them with a paid account -</pre> -<p>So nice of them... They don't wish me a happy birthday but ask me to do it myself...</p> </article> <article> <h1>Murray Cumming: Maemo: APIs and Porting</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:51:29 +0000</p> <p>This post is a general ramble about the limits of keeping API the same on significantly different platforms. It uses Maemo’s Hildon and Maemo’s Qt as examples, but don’t get offended. Hildon’s new UI in Maemo 5 is wonderfully appropriate for small touch-screen devices, and the API is the best that the developers could do in the short time available, in their circumstances. Not much can be changed in Hildon now anyway until a theoretical Maemo 6. And Maemo’s Qt is only just getting started.</p> -<h3>Hildon: Secret, Then Public, Then Secret, Then Public</h3> -<p>The first version of Maemo’s Hildon API added lots of API to hildon itself, and to the Maemo version of GTK+. It also made some inappropriate changes to default behavior. These things happen when work is done in secret, because people can’t complain until too late. Much of this was <a href="http://live.gnome.org/Maemo/GtkContributions">corrected</a> in Maemo Diablo, as changes were sent upstream to GTK+.</p> -<p>Then Nokia made Hildon’s development secret again and added lots of new API. That’s now <a href="https://garage.maemo.org/projects/hildon">public</a> again. Some <a href="https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4673">simple</a> things should be patches to GTK+ that can eventually be accepted in upstream GTK+. For other things, it’s <a href="https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4578">debatable</a> whether we would want the change in functionality to be obvious in the code (via #ifdefs), or if the standard GTK+ widgets should just behave differently when the same code runs on Maemo. For various things, both opinions are valid. But that discussion never happened because the API was not published until it was too late to change it significantly.</p> -<h3>Too Much Simple New API</h3> -<p>I think the new <a href="http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/beta/hildon/index.html">Maemo 5 Hildon API</a> leans too much towards extra API. For instance:</p> -<ul> -<li>You must use HildonButton, HildonEntry and HildonTextView instead of GtkButton, GtkEntry, and GtkTextView. These have extra features, but they could be added to the GTK+ widgets.</li> -<li>You must use HildonCheckButton instead of GtkCheckButton or GtkRadioButton, though that’s really <a href="https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4598">just</a> to get a slightly different <a href="https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4578">appearance</a>.</li> -<li>You must use HildonWindow instead of GtkWindow.</li> -<li>HildonNote and HildonBanner add timed behaviour and convenience API that could just be in GtkDialog.</li> -<li>HildonAppMenu is just a glorified grid container, needing significant changes to application code, instead of the regular GTK+ menu APIs being changed to behave differently on Maemo. Now you can’t use GtkMenu, GtkUIManager or Glade for menus. Menus really must be made simpler for Maemo applications, but that’s no reason to completely change the menu API.</li> -<li>You must use HildonTouchSelector (via a HildonPickerButton) instead of a GtkComboBox. Admittedly it would be particularly difficult to make GtkComboBox act like a (pannable) HildonTouchSelector, and GtkComboBox would need extra API to allow multiple-selection. But there would be great benefits for application coders from that hard work.</li> -<li>You must use <a href="https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4584">HildonWizardDialog instead of GtkAssistant</a>. This dates from before GtkAssistant existed, but the Hildon developers seem to have forgotten to deprecate it and adapt GtkAssistant for Maemo 5.</li> -<li>You must use <a href="http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/beta/hildonfm/HildonFileChooserDialog.html">HildonFileChooserDialog</a> instead of GtkFileChooserDialog or the other GtkFileChooserWidgets. These hildon-fm widgets have <a href="https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4583">almost no documentation</a>, so there’s no obvious reason for their existence.</li> -</ul> -<p>Note that extra API is not just annoying when porting (requiring ifdefs) but also <strong>makes existing generic GTK+ documentation and skills less relevant</strong> to Maemo. Just because a UI has a wonderful new look and feel, that doesn’t mean you need a lots of arbitray new API to make things feel new and different for the developer too.</p> -<h3>Too Much Surprising New Behavior</h3> -<p>Where Hildon _has_ changed the GTK+ implementation instead of adding new API, it’s done it for situations that are too complex or where the changed behavior is annoyingly arbitrary. This is particularly annoying because there are reasonable uses of the original widgets even in a Maemo application. For instance:</p> -<ul> -<li> The GtkTreeView’s selection and activation behavior is apparently entirely different, though I admittedly don’t know all the details yet. It apparently feels like a different widget so it probably should be a different class. Column headers are off by default too.</li> -<li>GtkEntry (ignoring that you should use HildonEntry) still <a href="https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1227">defaults to auto-capitalization</a>. I don’t think this is the common case. Most text in entry widgets is not a sentence or a name.</li> -</ul> -<p>In these cases, the developers have justified the annoying new defaults by saying that it’s what the Maemo UI guidelines demand, ignoring that those guidelines do not say how the UI should be achieved in terms of API. Simply telling application developers to call extra API when using Maemo would have the same results without the annoyance.</p> -<h3>Will Qt Make Better Choices?</h3> -<p>Qt has long touted the similarity of its API across three major desktop platforms (Linux, Windows, Macintosh), though the nativeness of the results is debatable. At least Windows applications have no consistency anyway.</p> -<p>The Maemo Qt developers insist that they will stick to this even when porting to Maemo – probably the first popular Qt platform with a significantly different UI and desktop environment, requiring new concepts that are not yet in the Qt API.</p> -<p>I think that’s a good idea, though I doubt that it will really be possible. When I <a href="http://maemo.org/community/maemo-developers/does_maemo-s_qt_look_like_hildon/?org_openpsa_qbpager_net_nemein_discussion_posts_page=1">asked</a> (<a href="http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/maemo/developers/48775?do=post_view_threaded">threaded view</a>) them, I discovered that they really hadn’t thought much about it yet and weren’t able to address my specific examples with anything other than a repeat of the Qt “deploy without rewriting the source code” mantra. Surprisingly there are not that many people working on Maemo’s Qt and it’s obviously far from ready for Maemo 5’s new UI. Nokia acquired all the Trolltech/”Qt Software” developers but if they have been redirected to work on Maemo then it’s not happening in public.</p> -<p>Hopefully they will at least choose to lean more towards maintaining API compatibility while adding API only where absolutely necessary. I think it must be a little of both.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Rodney Dawes: Ubuntu One 0.90.2</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:24:58 +0000</p> <p>We've been in a controlled beta of <a href="https://ubuntuone.com/">Ubuntu -One</a> now for a little more than a month. Recently, I've been hacking on the -client a fair bit, porting our Nautilus extension to C, to avoid the dependency -on python-nautilus, and for the extension to perform better, and not slow down -desktop start up times by loading up Python. As part of this, the build system -for <a href="http://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client">ubuntuone-client</a> was -switched over to autotools for most stuff. We still generate a setup.py, and -use it to perform a few tasks, but that should be going away soon as well. -Keeping it around requires some funky magic in the build system, to pull all -the necessary pieces into a release tarball correctly, and get Python pieces -installed to the system. But now we have a way to build reproducible tarballs, -and should be doing regular releases on Launchpad. You can find them here:</p> -<p><a href="http://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-storage-protocol/+download">Ubuntu -One Storage Protocol</a></p> -<p><a href="http://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client/+download">Ubuntu One -Client</a></p> -<p>We encourage people to build packages for their favorite distros as well, -and are glad to answer any questions about how things should be packaged. If -you have any questions, feel free to come bug us in #ubuntuone on FreeNode -(irc.freenode.net). Enjoy!</p><br /> </article> <article> <h1>Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:23:17 +0000</p> <p style="text-align: center;">তুমি কেমন করে গান করো হে গুণী,<br /> -আমি অবাক্ হয়ে শুনি কেবল শুনি ।।<br /> -সুরের আলো ভুবন ফেলে ছেয়ে,<br /> -সুরের হাওয়া চলে গগন বেয়ে,<br /> -পাষাণ টুটে ব্যাকুল বেগে ধেয়ে<br /> -বহিয়া যায় সুরের সুরধুনী ।।<br /> -মনে করি অমনি সুরে গাই,<br /> -কন্ঠে আমার সুর খুঁজে না পাই ।<br /> -কইতে কী চাই, কইতে কথা বাধে –<br /> -হার মেনে যে পরান আমার কাঁদে,<br /> -আমায় তুমি ফেলেছ কোন্ ফাঁদে<br /> -চৌদিকে মোর সুরের জাল বুনি</p> </article> <article> <h1>Bryan Clark: Cubed Mail</h1> <p>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:11:10 +0000</p> <p>Lately I’ve been working a lot on the <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/">Thunderbird add-ons</a> developers user experience. Often times designers don’t get to work on developer experiences because developers tend to do those pieces themselves without much design. With a lot of others I’ve spent a good amount of time working on the whole experience of development, docs, and extension types so hopefully the Thunderbird 3 add-on developer experience will be significantly better.</p> -<p>To get into the user experience of an add-on developer I recently made a Jetpack, <a href="http://clarkbw.net/blog/2009/06/08/the-pattern-is-not-full/">Bugzilla Air Traffic Control</a>, to examine what it is like to develop inside <a href="https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/">Jetpack</a>. I’ve also been creating a number of example extensions that take advantage of the new code that has landed in Thunderbird recently and learn the pitfalls of extension development.</p> -<p>So in honor of the <a href="http://hacks.mozilla.org/">hacks.mozilla.org</a> recent article called <strong><a href="http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/3d-transforms-isocube/">3D transforms in Firefox 3.5 – the isocube</a></strong> I added a similar hack to my <a href="http://hg.mozilla.org/users/clarkbw_gnome.org/tabbedmessage/">tabbed message example extension</a>. I give you…</p> -<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Cubed Email Messages</strong></p> -<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://clarkbw.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/messages-in-a-cube.png"></a></p> -<p style="text-align: left;">To demonstrate the awesome interactiveness that I <strong>didn’t</strong> add to my email extension I also have a pure HTML demo available. Try out the <strong><a href="http://hg.mozilla.org/users/clarkbw_gnome.org/tabbedmessage/raw-file/tip/src/example/index.html">email cube test demo</a></strong> for yourself. This demo requires <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html">Firefox 3.5, go get it</a> if you don’t have it.</p> -<p style="text-align: left;">If you’re asking “why email in a cube,?” then I’ll ask you why not? This demo reminds me that Thunderbird has all the same Firefox goodness that’s coming out in 3.5 but we have yet to take advantage of much of it. Hopefully as we make more progress in the coming months we’ll do just that.</p> -<p>And if you’re asking yourself… Is this what Bryan gets paid to do? Well then we’re asking ourselves the same question; though I don’t think I’m referring to myself in the third person.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Florian Boor: Anjuta Plugin for OpenEmbedded SDK</h1> <p>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:50:55 +0000</p> <div class="snap_preview"><br /><p>I have always liked the idea to have an <a href="http://www.anjuta.org">Anjuta</a> plugin that simplifies the use of cross toolchains in order to develop for all sorts of mobile and embedded devices. Personally I do not rely on an IDE but I have worked with a lot of developers in the past who are not used to do application development with vi. The same applies to cross toolchains, but there are reasons why people compile natively or why tools like Scratchbox are developed.</p> -<p>Some time ago OpenedHand published an Anjuta plugin for Poky that almost fits these needs – apart from minor lacks and the fact that you can’t use it with an <a href="http://www.openembedded.org">OpenEmbedded</a> build tree because it relies on the Poky directory layout. It didn’t take me long to modify the Poky plugin to fit the needs for OpenEmbedded: I have added automatic detection of the toolchain host prefix and some functionality to deal with the (not 100% fixed) directory layout of OpenEmbedded. So what does it do?</p> -<ul> -<li>Select a toolchain or OpenEmbedded build directory to use</li> -<li>Configure and build a project</li> -<li>Deploying of binaries to a target device using rsync and ssh</li> -<li>Some debug and remote device features from the original plugin I didn’t test so far</li> -</ul> -<div style="width: 470px;" id="attachment_171" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://fl0rian.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/anjuta-plugin-sdk.png"></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Anjuta OpenEmbedded SDK Plugin</p></div> -<p>It is easy to install (and build if necessary). I have created an initial website for it at <a href="http://labs.kernelconcepts.de/Tools/Anjuta-OE-SDK-Plugin/">KC Labs</a>. You can find both source archive and binary packages for Ubuntu (9.04) and Debian Lenny. Once you have it installed it you should be able to design your GUI, fill it with functionality and deploy the application to a target device withouth leaving Anjuta.</p> -<p>Feedback is very welcome – if you have ideas about new features or what you would like to see for cross development please let me know!</p> -<p>Have a nice time…</p> -<p>PS: LinuxTag is approaching – visit the Embeded Area with projects like OpenEmbedded and Coreboot!</p> - <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> <a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/fl0rian.wordpress.com/170/" rel="nofollow"></a> </div> </article> <article> <h1>Alex Launi: The Twitpocolypse! Do plugin updated</h1> <p>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:51:18 +0000</p> <p>The other day Twitter status IDs overflowed, and as such the GNOME Do plugin was broken. Maybe this kind of thing is why people should use identi.ca? I know I’m a hypocrite and use Twitter, but maybe I’ll switch someday, now that most of my friends have stopped using it in general. Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that this is fixed in bzr, and we’ve pushed an update to jaunty proposed. If you’re getting annoyed at Do telling you that your post failed when really it didn’t, please enable the proposed repository and comment on this bug saying that it works for you. <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/do-plugins/+bug/387525">https://bugs.launchpad.net/do-plugins/+bug/387525</a>. Instructions for testing are in the bug report. Thanks!</p> </article> </main></body></html>