expander.gtk.org

I read Havocs post on embeddable languages with great joy. I very much agree that this is a good model for writing a larger application. I.E. you write the core of your application in C/C++ and then do the higher levels in an embedded dynamic scripting language. All the reasons Havoc lists are important, especially for the Gnome platform (a swarm-of-processes model where we want to avoid duplicating the platform in each language used).

There are a lot of dynamic scripting languages around, but only a few of them really qualify as embeddable languages in the form Havoc proposes. I would say the list is basically just: lua, JavaScript and some of the lisp dialects.

I’m far from a JavaScript lover, but it seems pretty obvious to me that from these alternatives it is the best choice. For a variety of reasons:

• Its a modern dynamic language
  Its dynamically typed, it has precise gargabe collection, lambda functions, generators, array comprehension, etc
• Its object oriented (sorta)
  We want to wrap the GObject type system which is object oriented, so this is important. The JavaScript prototype-based model is a bit weird, but its simple and it works.
• It has no “platform” of its own
  If we inject the Gnome platform (Gtk+, Gio, etc) into JavaScript it doesn’t have to fight with any “native” versions of the same functionallity, and we won’t be duplicating anything causing bloat and conversions. (JS does have a Date object, but that is basically all.)
  
• Lots of people know it, and if not there are great docs
  Chances of finding someone who knows JS is far higher than finding someone who knows e.g. lua or scheme, and having a large set of potential developers is important for a free software project.
• Lots of activity around the language and implementations
  The language continually evolves, and there is a standards body trying to shephard this. There is also a multitude of competetive implementations, each trying to be best. This leads to things like the huge performance increases with TraceMoney and Google v8. Such performance work and focus is unlikely to happen in smaller and less used languages.

To experiment with this I started working on GScript (gscript module in gnome svn). It is two things. First of all its an API for easily embedding JavaScript (using SpiderMonkey atm) in a Gtk+ application. Secondly its a binding of GObject and GObject-based libraries to JavaScript.

Here is a quick example:

GScriptEngine *engine;
GScriptValue *res;
engine = g_script_engine_new ();
res = g_script_engine_evaluate_script (engine, "5+5");
g_print ("script result: %s", g_script_value_to_string (res));
g_object_unref (res);

If you want to expose a gobject (such as a GtkLabel) as a global property in JS you can do:

GtkLabel *label = gtk_label_new ("Test");
GScriptValue *val = g_script_value_new_from_gobject (G_OBJECT (label));
g_script_value_set_property (g_script_engine_get_global (engine), "the_label", val);

Then you can access the label from  javascript by the name “the_label”. You can read and set the object properties, connect and emit the signals and call all the methods that are availible via introspection.

You can also easily call from javascript into native code.

static GScriptValue *native_function (int n_args, GScriptValue **args);
GScriptValue *f = g_script_value_new_from_function (native_function, num_args);
g_script_value_set_property (g_script_engine_get_global (engine), "function", f);

The JavaScript wrappers are fully automatic, and lazily binds objects/classes as  they are used in JS. The object properties and signal information are extracted from the GType machinery. Method calls are done using the new GObject-Introspection system.

More work is clearly needed on the details of the JS bindings, but this is already a usable piece of code. I’m very interested in feedback about interest in something like this, and discussions about how the JS bindings should look.

• Today's harvest, green beans

  This is about 240 grams of green beans that we grew out of eight plants, on more or less 40x40 cm of soil. The plants should yield about three times that amount, once the younger beans and flowers mature.

  

  I don't know if that kind of yield is low or high, but it definitely feels good to get something edible out of a little patch in the sidewalk. No fertilizers or anything, just soil from our little compost heap. This is the sidewalk in question; the beans are the ones with the large leaves. There is also epazote (anti-flatulent aromatic herb for cooking beans), garlic, mint, a couple of watermelon seedlings, rosemary, petunias, roses, rue, and a couple of plants whose names we don't know.

  

  Our gardening book is How to grow more vegetables, by John Jeavons (acutally, a slightly newer edition than the one presented there).

buzztard

Out of some irc conversation, I gave implementing synced meters a go. Until so far level and spectrum meters in buzztard were ahead of time. The reason is that gstreamer tells me about the values once they are computed, but that's not when the actual data segment gets played. Luckily the message has a timestamp. So all it needs is to sync drawing with the audio sink. MikeS gave me some good pointers on irc. It wasn't that straight forward. I found and fixed a bug in level meter plugin so that it now puts useful timestamps on messages when it play loops. It works really great now.

gtk_widget_grab_focus() is a nasty function. It asserts when the widget is not mapped/realized and steals the focus in any case. This is problematic if you have tabs and update widgets when things changed. I now have a wrapper added that does the extra checks. Wonder if that would be a good change for upstream.

I did lot of testing with real buzz songs and machines. I have now about 80 original plugins in use. Real testing always leads to some good fixes :) We now add an empty pattern by default when adding new source machines (like buzz did). I also noticed that bpm/tpb information was not loaded from buzz songs. This is now fixed (also master volume was missing). After that I spotted that most bpm tempi did not work well. Now timing precision is much better.

project namespaces

A big recommendation to everyone. Pick a decent prefix for your project. I've been a bit blue eyed and had chosen 'bt'. Part of my package is a core library called libbtcore. Now unfortunately ktorrent did the same mistake and have a libbtcore (bt stands for bittorrent there). As neither of them are really general purpose they should be uniquely named. I analyzed all files I install and went thought the great pains of renaming everything - libs, binaries, docs includes, pkg-config files, desktop files and so on. Hope I never have to do that ever again. I also filed a bug for ktorrent so that they can fix it before its causing problems. Interesting how they dealt with the report - "I was first with libbtcore - RESOLVED AS WONTFIX". Interestingly I was 1.5 years earlier, but that wasn't the point at all.

Last week I visited Berlin to look at offices and found one that’s perfect. I’m signing the contract now. It’s in Kastanienallee (recent Flickr photos), a lively main street in hip Prenzlauerberg. I’m excited. The location and office couldn’t be better.

There are 5 large offices, plus a beautiful large central area, with bare brick, stone tiles, and lots of light, and even a patio for summer meetings. It’s peaceful and secure in a building to the rear beyond the inner courtyard.

I’m now ordering lots of furniture and equipment. Hopefully we’ll have it mostly set up before the Maemo summit on the 19th/20th September so we can proudly show it to our friends. I’m even thinking of having a little GNOME/Maemo party there before we have moved in properly.

I hope that Berlin, and this amazing part of Berlin, and this wonderful office will help to attract new employees, maybe from outside of Germany.

Sound Juicer "Stab Stab Stab! This Is More Than A Message" 2.23.3 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• Don't crash when exiting
• Don't distribute full GFDL with docs
• Correctly parse CDDA URLs (#550131, thanks Matthew Martin)

Same as. But more times.

So today I finally realized that C is not only less convenient than modern programming languages, it's also genuinely less powerful than modern languages: In garbage collected (and reference counted) languages you can easily write:

if (attr_list != priv->cached_attr_list ||
    0 != list_compare (attr_list, priv->cached_attr_list)) {
    priv->attr_value = parse_attr (attr_list);
    priv->cached_attr_list = attr_list;
}

In modern languages this snipped works as expected: As soon as attr_list changes in some way it will be parsed again. In C this code doesn't work, since all pointers are just weak references: malloc/free don't know which memory address still are referenced, and therefore malloc easily will return some still referenced memory address. So destroying and rebuilding attr_list can easily lead to the new attr_list pointing to the same memory address as the old list:

old_list = g_list_append (NULL, "foo");
cached_list = old_list;
g_list_free (old_list);

new_list = g_list_append (NULL, "bar");

g_assert (new_list != cached_list); /* usually will fail! */

With C there are good chances that old_list and new_list both point to the same memory address. This clearly sucks.

Didn't expect that there are algorithms you can implement with modern languages, but not with C. Well, but obviously strong references/garbage collection do not only add convenience, they also allow new algorithms.

Yes, old news for the smarter among us, but not common knowledge I guess.

Update: I definitly should use a better phrase than "algorithms you can [not] implement", as I am definitely not here to challenge turing completeness of C.

This year I’ll help out at the World Port Days in Rotterdam. It is an event where the various things related to the port are shown. They’re expecting around 350.000 visitors. I’ll help at the Maersk stand on Sunday afternoon (2 pm onwards). The stand is located next to the Dutch Navy at the Parkkade (right hand side). It should be easy to locate as there will be a ship from Norfolkline alongside which people can visit (stand is about 60m wide).

Stuff at the stand:

• Info about how Maersk brings seawater from the Pacific Ocean to Rotterdam for the Oceanium. Apart from a cinema there will be a few people from Blijdorp to answer questions. The Oceanium is really nice (I went to a ‘behind the scenes’ tour at the Oceanium a while back).
• A working reefer container (not sure which temperature it will be set at)
• Solar boat from TU Delft (Maersk sponsors this). Apart from the boat there will be a flat screen with more info, etc.
• Other stuff like a free ringtone (Bluetooth), APM Terminals stand next door, picture board, etc (there are just too many things to list).

As the observant Daniel already noted, I had a small hackfest at my apartment in Gothenburg this weekend.
The attendees was Kalle Persson, Clemens Buss and myself + this odd fellow that Clemens brought along.

We had quite a nice time. Discussed some ideas around GNOME, Clemens did some Emblem hacking and Kalle and I designed a website and drew some icons. We’re definitely doing this again soon and I hope more people will be interested in joining.

I hate September because it is in September that I finally get my mobile phone bill from GUADEC.

Total of 5 Calls while abroad 00:23:20 £31.402

Money grabbing tight fisted evil bastards. This includes a rate of £1.25 a minute to receive a call.

NP: Los Angeles, Flying Lotus

I’m at this annoying stage with Orc and Liboil where I need to add a feature to Liboil to support a new feature in Schrödinger, except that the new feature would be really easy to write if Orc was further along. Sigh. So I continue to muddle along not working on either.

In other news, jirac, the Java Dirac decoder written by Bart Wiegmans as a Google Summer of Code project, is pretty much feature complete and integrated into Cortado. There are a few showstopper bugs remaining, but I’m hoping for a release soon.

And in yet other news, I will be attending IBC in Amsterdam in a few weeks to meet up with various people to talk about Dirac and GStreamer. If you would like to meet up, let me know. There will be at least 3 booths related to Dirac: the BBC will be demonstrating Dirac as used for high-definition video distribution, NHK will be demonstrating Super Hi-vision with Dirac compression (that’s 4320p, kids), and Numedia will be demoing their hardware that handles Dirac Pro (SMPTE VC-2), which is Dirac for studio compression.

I’ve been seeing comments on teh Internets about “when Dirac is ready…” Just wanted to let you all know that Dirac is ready now.

• Predefined desktop items for Nautilus

  Back in the Summer of Code 2007, Sayamindu Dasgupta worked on adding support for predefined desktop items to Nautilus. This is so that system administrators can set up desktop links that will appear on users' desktops. A university could set up an icon to take people to the university's intranet, for example.

  Basically, I'm reviving Sayamindu's patch and bringing it up to date for the current Nautilus. The idea is that you set up a GConf key, /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir, and point it to a directory which holds .desktop files. This kind of indirection through a GConf key is what makes the scheme work nicely for deployments with Sabayon: sysadmins can have predefined items for various groups of users, and select among those by simply changing a mandatory GConf key for each user. This wouldn't be so easy if there were a hardcoded directory like /var/nautilus/global-desktop-items.

  Sysadmins should be able to define mandatory items, which users cannot change or delete, and also "normal" items, which users can tweak or remove. Mandatory ones would be ones like "Company Intranet" or "Link to Helpdesk". Distros could use normal items for their marketing materials; the perenially hacky "Welcome to FooLinux" icons that currently are hard to do properly.

  The problem I'm having is how to make non-mandatory items work. You want this behavior:

  1. The sysadmin defines a non-mandatory item.
  2. The user sees the item in his desktop. He doesn't want it anymore, so he deletes it. Where do we mark this deletion?
  3. The user decides that he wants the item back after all. How does he restore it?
  4. The sysadmin updates the non-mandatory item and he wants it to show up again in people's desktops. How can this override what the user had done?

  I'm leaning toward having two extra boolean values in .desktop files: an X-GNOME-Mandatory and X-GNOME-Deleted. If the "mandatory" value is false, then the user may change or delete the item. For changes, the item is copied from the predefined_items_dir to the user's ~/Desktop and that version is modified. For deletions, the item is copied there as well, but then the "deleted" flag gets turned on.

  If the user wants an item back, he turns on "show hidden files" and those files get shown again. (Or we could hack the Trash to restore the item by turning off the "deleted" flag...)

  If the sysadmin updates an item in the predefined_items_dir, this item will override items of the same name in users' desktops, based on the item's timestamp.

  Does this make sense? Am I overlooking something?

[Note: if you don’t care about sports, just skip this post]

Another Olympic games over, and, as always, I enjoyed them a lot, even though now I miss a lot having top level sport events all day on TV. But good things always last too little. So, here are the things I’d like to highlight:

• As always, coverage on the public TV was a not as good as I expected, since they just follow competitions where there are Spaniards (fortunately with some exceptions, like the athletics and gymnastics). While this is good for some sports (ie, live coverage of all Spain’s basketball games), it sucks for others. Luckily, I got Eurosport, which had a better coverage of some sports, like swimming, gymnastics and volleyball.
• While there are lots of bad things around professional sports (dopping, corruption, etc), there are many more good things about it, like the case of Aelemayehu Bezabeh, a guy from Africa (sorry, can’t remember the country) who came to Spain, like thousands of other poor and desperate people, in a little boat, risking his life, and ended up in an inmigrants’ detention center where someone from the Spanish Athletics Federation saw him running and got him to get into the Spanish Athletics team (after being naturalised) and to an 11th place in the 5000 meters final of the Olympic Games. Sport helps a lot in integrating cultures, and this is a very good example.
• Depending on how you look at the medal table, China has won the Olympic Games, with an insulting superiority in some sports, like Gymnastics (9 golds out of 14 events), table tennis (100%), weighlifting and diving (7 golds in 8 events). They have indeed prepared very well the games, even though they did win very few medals in the most important sports, like athletics and swimming.
• Spain’s performance (18 medals, 5 golds, 9 silvers and 3 bronzes) was good IMO, even though the big media here are talking about total failures in some sports (0 medals in athletics and swimming). But, let’s be serious, in Spain 90% of the money and media attention goes to football, so it’s quite funny to see people, who don’t care about other sports the rest of the year, demand medals on those sports, and talk about total failure when there are no medals. It’s true though that the performance in athletics and swimming has been quite inferior to what was expected, but at the end, except for a few surprise medals, medals were won in the sports that get some attention here, like cycling (4 medals), team sports (3 medals) and tennis (2 medals, with the gold for Rafael Nadal). Of course, we would all have liked to have a performance like countries similar to us (economically), like Italy, France and Great Britain (great improvement by the Britains, btw), but in those countries, it seems to me, much more money is spent in sports, and thus the different results, I think.
• I’ve read lots of comments and articles about some Chinese gymnasts having fake passports for being able to participate in the games. While I’m not an expert and can’t really comment on whether having a child (or teenager) prepare for top level competitions is good or not, I really think the Olympic games should have the best in each sport, and if some child is the best, why can’t he/she participate? Also, it’s funny to see all the attention to this case because it was a Chinese athlete, but I saw nobody complain about the youngest athlete in these games, Thomas Daley, an English diver (very good by the way, a pleasure to watch him) who is 14 years old, and who became European champion a few months ago, when he was 13. If the English can have 14 years old athletes, I guess the Chinese should be able to also
• Even though basketball is clearly my favorite sport, I never have really enjoyed women’s basketball, mainly because even though women are usually smaller than men, they play with the same baskets (3.05 meters height), which make them play totally different when playing inside the paint than what I’m used to. Why the hell don’t they use a smaller height for the baskets? There are a few women that can slam dunk, but just a few, so the women’s games lose that part of the game, which is, IMO, a very needed thing for this sport. When shooting from outside, I see no differences, the women score as good as men, but the inside the paint playing makes it look a bit more boring.

And now for some stars of these games:

• The Spanish basketball team have done, once again, a perfect performance, even putting the USA team under some problems during the final (118-107). As the Eurosport commentators said, we changed from being happy about the silver medal before the game to feel sad for having lost the gold medal. And this was because Spain played at the same level, face-to-face, against one of the best basketball teams in history (still eons behind of the 1992 USA dream team, of course), demonstrating, once again, the good health of Spanish basketball (with followers like myself, how can it not be healthy ). European media even said this Spanish team was the best European team in history. But anyway, I’m a bit happy about the USA team winning the gold medal, because Kobe Bryant said he would not come back to the US if they didn’t win the gold medal, which would have been a very bad thing, provided we want him back at Los Angeles Lakers, with Pau Gasol.
• Nastia Lukin is one of the stars, IMO, of these games. She’s one of the best gymnastics I’ve ever seen (along my favorite Svetlana Boginskaia), and it was a real pleasure to watch her performing awesome things. The same for some of the Chinese gymnasts, although, I think, in some cases, they got higher points than what they deserved. In most cases they didn’t need any help from the judges, they were simply the best, but there were a couple of gold medals that, I think, were not deserved by the Chinese. But this always happens in gymnastics, even after having found a quite good scoring system, there are always this kind of things for helping the local athletes.
• What to say about Michael Phelps that hasn’t been said? I’ll just mention how he does the turns. He was, in some races, a few meters behind the leader, and after the turn, he was the leader, with a few meters distance between him and the 2nd one, just amazing! I’ll also mention the 4×100 freestyle relays, one of the best (if not the best) swimming races I’ve seen in my life, with 5 teams swimming under the previous world record. It’s been amazing to see so many world records (26!) in the swimming competitions.
• Britta Steffen was another amazing performer, she won 2 gold medals (50 and 100 m freestyle) at the very last millisecond, in one of them she didn’t even know she had won, since she was behind the leaders by a few meters.
• Kenenisa Bekele and the Ethiopians and Kenyans in athletics are just amazing also. And made me think about a good way of convincing racist people about the white people not being superior. On the contrary, the black people are the ones that are superior, at least in sports (and music, I might add ), and specially in Athletics. It’s quite unusual to see some white athlete in the first places in some events, and the medals won by European countries in those events are from naturalised Africans.
• The Jamaicans did a great performance in the speed races (100, 200 and 4×100 relays), both men and women, and specially worth mentioning is Usain Bolt, who won 3 gold medals with 3 world records. Worth mentioning also is the case of the 4×100 relays USA team, who, year after year, even though they have some of the best athletes, they end up dropping the relay and losing all chances to win a medal. After watching the replays and hearing the commentators, it was clear that they don’t train passing the relay, which is a very basic and needed thing if you want to do something in this event

Now, just looking back to London 2012, which, I hope, I might be able to feel live, since my sister lives in the UK, so a visit to her during the Olympics is a must.

• People who use git-mirror.gnome.org may have noticed that SVN tags don't get fetched automatically when they get their daily fix of updates with "git fetch" or "git pull" (that is, you run "git tag" and it doesn't list new tags that appeared since you did your original clone). Within your repository, take a look at .git/config:

  [remote "origin"]
  	url = git://git-mirror.gnome.org/git/gtk+
  	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
  	fetch = +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*      ### <---- Add this line!

  The first "fetch" line is already in your .git/config and it means, "every time I fetch from the origin, get all the branch heads in the origin's refs/heads and stuff them in the refs/remotes/origin namespace" (i.e. update all the branch heads).

  The second "fetch" line is what you need to add. It means, "every time I fetch from the origin, also get all the tags and stuff them in my own namespace".

  After that, just do "git fetch origin" and all the tags will be downloaded to your repository.

• Mike Wolf has been working madly on rpm2git to make it easier to use. He has made some very cool changes:

  Rpm2git no longer requires you to have an environment suitable for rpmbuild (e.g. specfiles in /usr/src/packages/SPECS, patches in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES). If you have a single directory with a specfile and patches, you can simply run rpm2git on that.

  You don't need to have all the BuildRequires from the specfile, either.

  Perhaps most importantly, you don't need to mess with your $PATH anymore nor install helper scripts. Rpm2git now works out of the box after "make install".

  All of these changes are now merged in the rpm2git repository.

We’re arranging an introspection hackfest at the Boston Summit! Thanks to the nice lads at the foundation we can have most of the participants flown over. Colin Walters, Jürg Billeter, Philip Van Hoof, I and hopefully Havoc Pennington is going to be there.

If you’re interested in language bindings or other uses of the introspection data, come by and help us out.

Oh, I almost forgot to say hi to Planet Python. Andrew was kind enough to add me there. My name is Johan Dahlin and I’m mostly working on Python related to GNOME, especially, Python bindings for GObject and Gtk., and Kiwi + Stoq of course. The introspection project is intended to make it easier to write language bindings for the Gnome stack, not only Python ones.

Just want to mention some small and rough tools I've written recently to easy my daily hacker's life:

• gdb-wrapper: gdb doesn't know what to do with libtool generated wrapper scripts. Quite strange that over the years nobody felt annoyed enough to tell gdb about those wrapper scripts. At least I was sufficiently annoyed to write this tiny wrapper script, which redirects gdb to the debuggable .libs/lt-program binary when gdb is invoked on some libtool generated wrapper script. It also takes care about generating that binary if it shouldn't exist yet. Be warned: The script really just does the bare minimum.

• mergetool: Yes many of git's commands support some interactive mode. Expect maybe for 'git-rebase --interactive' they all have poor usability. So here is my graphical version of 'git-add -i'. This tool allows picking patch hunks from other branches. You also can edit the hunks if you figure out that one of them should be split into separate commits.

Both tools are quite rough, but maybe some of you find them useful.

Update: Seems that "libtool --mode=execute cmdline..." works similar to my wrapper script. Thanks for pointing me on this.

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of fixes from the Amazing Matthew Martin:

• Stop playback when the disc is re-read (Matthew Martin)
• Only eject the disc if tracks were ripped (MM)
• Don't try and move the non-existant temp file when skipping (MM)
• Free the option context (Pierre Benz)
• Don't block until n-c-b quits when copying discs
• Fix playback track switching (MM)

 Before

 

Note how the regular grid layout is destroyed by the long file name, which can make its row very large.

 After

             

Note how the grid layout is preserved, while the whole filename is still visible as the file is selected or hovered.

Take that five year old bug report! Thanks to the incredible Pango grand master Behdad. Many play the Banjo, but only few master the Pango.

Update

I received lots of feedback. Many appreciations were given, some usability concerns were raised and some people just didn’t like the change. Therefore, I added GConf keys that allow you to control in detail (i.e. for all zoom levels, and for the desktop) how many lines of text you want.

Another proposal was that file extensions should never be truncated. This will be implemented as Pango supports it. There is also an interesting recent user request to ellipsize file names depending on the other displayed file names (assuming you have “alongfilename-01-continuin-hereg.jpg”, “alongfilename-02-continuing-here.jpg” the result is supposed to be “along…e-01-…ere..jpg”, “along…e-02-…ere..jpg”.

• Sometimes Oralia boils water in the kettle, and adds a stick of cinnamon to make an infusion. The other day I heard the kettle boiling and I thought, "time for some green tea!". I didn't notice that the water was actually cinnamon, and made my tea as usual.

  Well, hot damn, green tea made with cinnamon water turned out to be *good stuff*. I think I could grow an addiction to this.

• Labels for RANDR monitors

  When you configure multiple monitors, it is useful to know which physical monitor corresponds to each element in the configuration GUI. Both KDE and MacOS display cute labels on each monitor.

  I implemented pretty much the same thing for GNOME, with the addition of color-coding. Hello, sexy:

  

  This is in the following Git repositories (look at the monitor-labeling branches in all of them, and also tray-icon-rotation for gnome-settings-daemon):

  • gnome-desktop
  • gnome-settings-daemon
  • gnome-control-center

  This is just awaiting approval from the the release team to be committed to SVN :)

Red Hat's Rob Tiller, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP, writes in a blog post:

The Federal Circuit not only corrected the error of the trial court, but also provided a short primer on open source projects and licensing. It explained that such licensing “has become a widely used method of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades ago.” The appeals court acknowledged that with open source “software programs can often be written and debugged faster and at lower cost than if the copyright holder were required to do all the work independently.” The court also wrote about the substantial economic benefits associated with free and open source software, including product improvements from independent sources.
...
As to the licensing issue, the Federal Circuit correctly determined that the Artistic License was enforceable through copyright law, because the relevant restrictions were conditions rather than mere covenants. The more important point is the general one that “copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material.” The court found that an open source licensor’s choice to impose requirements such as disclosure and an explanation of changes, instead of requiring monetary payment, was entitled to legal recognition.

Congrats to all involved.

I have been looking at the compiler framework llvm/clang recently in order to do automatic refactoring and code rewriting. One use case for this is to move code that does things like:

gdk_window_foo (widget->window);

to

gdk_window_foo (gtk_widget_get_window (widget));

automatically, to get code working with a sealed GTK+.

Another useful thing that can be done automatically is to change code so that only gtk/gtk.h is included, which is the recommended way, instead of many individual header files. There are more examples of things that can help developers clean up their code, such as spotting common mistakes like not chaining up in finalizers etc etc. Clang makes it quite easy to implement those ideas.

I have started working on a tool to do the accessor and header file rewriting as a first step. Please check it out and let me know if there are any issues or if you want to help out!

In the last months I’ve been pretty busy and time for gedit, gtksourceview and GNOME in general has been particularly small. The lack of posts on this page pretty much reflects that.

When reading discussions about decadence I could not help but feel a bit guilty, especially since gedit user base has never been more healthy: new plugins are released, users partecipate on irc and mailing lists, blog posts  about customizing gedit pop up daily on the interweb.

It seemed inevitable that gedit 2.24 would have been pretty much exactly the same as 2.22, but Jesse came to rescue. He first ported the filebrowser side pane to gio and last week he completed the work by also reworking all the gedit internals (especially remote file loading and saving) to use gio instead of gnome-vfs. As of today I committed that work to svn and I will try to make a tarball release as soon as possible.

Since Jesse was on a roll, he also ported all the dialogs from libglade to gtkbuilder, killing yet another dependency.

Please test it, test it, test it and test it again and then report bugs!

• Why I want to have the children of git rebase --interactive

  Sometimes you are hacking madly and committing often. Your commit log looks like this:

  * Add some fields for a popup menu
  * Create the popup menu
  * Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands
  * Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
  

  Then you type make and of course your code doesn't compile. So you do one-liner commits, one for each build error:

  * Add missing include gtkmenu.h
  * Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
  * Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
  * Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function
  

  But you don't want you submit all of those patches upstream! You only want to send perfect patches which are either additions or refactorings to the upstream code. You don't want the maintainer to know that you are a fallible human being who forgets include files and variable declarations; instead, you want him to believe that you are a coding god who sends a perfect series of patches every time.

  git rebase --interactive allows you to pretend you are better than you really are. This is a good thing.

  We have 8 commits in total (4 "good" ones that don't compile, and 4 "embarrassing" ones that are little fixes). So, run git rebase --interactive HEAD~8. This means, "let me fix any fuckups since 8 commits ago".

  Git will drop you in an editor where you edit this:

  pick ab365cf Add some fields for a popup menu
  pick 2478bac Create the popup menu
  pick 9180ffe Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands
  pick a6c2467 Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
  pick 289cf1a Add missing include gtkmenu.h
  pick 378ac2b Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
  pick 821ac6f Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
  pick 24acf67 Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function
  
  # Commands:
  #  p, pick = use commit
  #  e, edit = use commit, but stop for amending
  #  s, squash = use commit, but meld into previous commit

  Now let's reorder the lines there, and replace some pick commands by squash. I've put in some comments about what each moved line does.

  pick ab365cf Add some fields for a popup menu
  squash 289cf1a Add missing include gtkmenu.h
  # Oops, forgot to "#include <gtk/gtkmenu.h>" to have a field declared "GtkMenu *popup_menu"
  	      
  pick 2478bac Create the popup menu
  squash 821ac6f Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
  # Oops, while creating the menu items I forgot to declare my menu_item variable
  
  squash 24acf67 Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function
  # Oops, while creating the menu I also missed an argument to this function (how couldn't anyone?)
  
  pick 9180ffe Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands
  
  pick a6c2467 Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
  squash 378ac2b Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
  # ... and I also mistyped popup_menu in a signal handler

  When you are done, save that temporary file and exit your editor. Git will rewrite your commit history so that you have a clean log, with no commits like "fix this little thing". When you send that patch series to the maintainer, he'll have an easier time reading your code, and he'll be amazed at your meticulousness.

  The important thing here is to do one commit per compilation error. Then it's very easy to reorder your commits, where you squash each fix with the corresponding "real" commit.

Noticed that I got a bounce message from dict-notifications at fsa-bg org after a commit to SVN. This triggered an email to svn-commits-list which this address was subscribed to. Of course, such bounces are very annoying so I’ve unsubscribed that address. I do wonder why I didn’t see any complaints in a place meant for this (gnome-sysadmin, gnome-infrastructure, support@, mailman@, …).

Up to today LDAP replication was done using slurpd-style replication. In this setup the LDAP master pushes changes to the various slaves. For this to work the slave must be accessible by the master. This was setup using encryption (self signed certificates). This replication method is deprecated as of OpenLDAP 2.3 in favour of ’syncrepl’. OpenLDAP 2.4 doesn’t even have slurpd-style replication. Changing the replication method is important as I want to be able to upgrade to RHEL6 without being forced to do other changes at the same time.

The biggest drawback about slurpd is that it only replicates the changes. Meaning: If you have a new slave, you first have to stop the master, dump the database, then load this database on the slave, then start the slave and the master. Really annoying and during this time your master LDAP server is down!

With syncrepl-style replication the slaves contact the master. Slaves are now called consumers and the master is the provider. I don’t like consumers contacting the provider as I don’t want a security issue on some external host to cause security problems on the LDAP master db. I’ve tried to minimize the risk by using encryption (self signed certificates, server won’t accept any other certificates), using iptables, restricting the LDAP logon to just one user (to ensure brute forcing userPassword entries by logging in often will not work), not replicating the userPassword attribute, not allowing database modifications from external clients and some ACL restrictions.

There are two things I like about syncrepl.

1. After it connecting with the provider it checks the consistency of the database. At one point the SVN machine missed just one uid entry. That person couldn’t log in. With sycnrepl such a problem is not possible (ignoring possible config errors like ACLs).
2. You can restrict what is replicated to the slave using ACLs on the master.

Syncrepl has two ways of working, using refreshOnly it checks for LDAP changes every x minutes (configurable). This isn’t as nice as slurpd as I want all LDAP changes to be propagated instantly (even if the SSH sync script only runs once an hour). Fortunately it also has a refreshAndPersist, where it first checks and then waits for change notifications from the provider.

Tips to ensure a working syncrepl:

• Make sure the DNS entry points to the right server
• Make sure that DNS entry has not been manually added in /etc/hosts
• Make sure the userid running slapd can actually access the various certificate files
• If you test using ldapsearch, make sure /etc/openldap/ldap.conf has a TLS_CACERT entry
• Make sure the TLS_CACERT file can actually be read by the user running ldapsearch
• slapd (etc) -d 1023 contains the debug messages, you won’t find them anywhere else (by default)
• Kill any running nscd and wipe it off the system
• etc etc etc

cluttermm

There are now C++ bindings for the various clutter-0.8 libraries. That’s cluttermm-0.8, clutter-gtkmm-0.8, and clutter-cairomm-0.8. The tarball versions are 0.7.x because they are not ABI-stable yet. Armin Burgmeier did most of the work for Openismus to update cluttermm for clutter-0.8 and make it mostly complete.

I’d still like to find the time to do a C++ version of my Clutter tutorial.

clutter-box2d

I really wanted to look at clutter-box2d. It’s the clutter-with-simple-2D-physics thing created by Øyvind Kolås. His Moblin Playground Clutter prototype (watch the screencast) shows how it might be used. For instance, it makes it easier to implement the spinning circular menus you see at the left and right, and to implement the photo “table”. Since I wrote the clutter tutorial, I’ve thought we need abstractions such as this.

So I wrapped it as clutter-box2dmm and made C++ versions of its examples to get familiar with it.

clutter-box2d provides a ClutterBox2D (or Clutter::Box2D::Box2D in C++) container actor, which has child properties for its child actors. For instance, you can say whether the actor should be static (not moving) or dynamic (moving and colliding according to some simple physics), and you can say whether the actor should be manipulatable by pushing it around with the mouse. You can also specify its velocity. These are explicit methods on the Box2D class in the C++ binding.

You can then start the simulation on the ClutterBox2D. By default there is normal gravity (a bug, I think), which makes examples fun. The examples create a static box around the edges of the ClutterStage so the actors don’t fall out of it.

You can also specify some joints to connect actors in certain ways, such as a distance joint to put an invisible rod between them, or a revolute joint, as used to link the sections in the chain example. The joints are a bit difficult to understand.

This is all useful apart from some minor bugs that seem fixable, maybe together with the Box2D project that clutter-box2d uses. (Can’t stop damping and Can’t stop rotation.) It would be even more useful if applications could respond to collisions between objects and objects arriving at locations, which is apparently also doable.

However, I think clutter-box2d provides only some of the abstractions that I’d like. I particularly still miss the ability to simply define a rail and put an actor on it so its motion is restricted to that path. The actor would then be moved programmatically (maybe just by specifying an end point to reach) or by the user. clutter-box2d could do that by defining a rail and some runners, but it’s not a high level concept, and it’s probably not efficient.

I’d also like the idea of actors falling into locations as you move them, like those ball bearing maze games, and maybe it would be useful to have some ability to connect actors by elastic, and to let them bounce and compress.

1 part federico + 1 part marnanel-musings + 1 part tango experiment + a couple of hours

= icanhasedit.py (very rough concept)

also in git at git.desrt.ca (git-clone git://git.desrt.ca/icanhasedit).

for best effect, set it as the default application for opening text files.

be warned: its saving is non-atomic.

guadec 2008: I’m late, but I wanted to thank everyone in the GUADEC team for making this edition of the conference really rocking. thanks to everyone.

clutter: well, after the 0.8.0 release during GUADEC things have slowed down — but just a little bit; we’re fixing bugs in trunk and preparing for a 0.8.2 release of Clutter core. we also released the various integration libraries, and I’m trying to find more time to fix up the bindings. at the moment, the only bindings that have been officially released are the Perl bindings, the C++ bindings (thanks to Murray Cumming), the C# bindings (thanks to Thomas Machelen) and the Ruby bindings (thanks to Neil Roberts). I plan to release the Vala bindings really soon now — just some finishing touches to make the API nicer to use.

pyclutter: I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the Python bindings for Clutter have been, let’s say, problematic. taking a week or so away from them seems to have worked well enough, though, and now trunk is in a much better shape. unfortunately that have been some reports of segfaults and weird memory allocation issues — so any help in terms of testing is much, much appreciated. I also finally got around and generated the API reference for pyclutter using a slightly modified script coming from pygobject — but the content is missing sections like the object properties and signals. it just needs editing and some kind Python developer to start contributing documentation and fixes. again: any help is much appreciated.

travel: next week I’m headed to Sunnyvale for work; I’ll be there from the 17th to the 22nd. after I get back I’ll finally get a couple of weeks off, which I’ll spend with my wife travelling between New Haven and New York.

gnome-utils: finally found some time to do bug triaging and applying some old patches. nothing stellar: for what I have in mind I’d need a lot more time, or a lot more contributions (and less drive-by patches). for instance:

• gnome-screenshot needs a maintainer, badly. preferably somebody with a dual screen set-up, that can test the behaviour on multiple screens;
• gnome-system-log either needs a rewrite and a maintainer or needs to be dropped from gnome-utils and moved into its own module and its presence in the desktop suite re-evaluated; as it is, it’s mostly a liability and a relic of the past; if somebody comes up with a maintained replacement, we can talk about integrating that;
• gfloppy needs to go. seriously: it’s useless. I had hopes for gnome-format, but now David Zeuthen is planning for a complete disk manager using the DeviceKit-disks API and PolicyKit so we can either wait for that, or write something really simple using those two APIs.

as you can see, gnome-utils is not at all dead — it just lacks manpower sticking around enough to get a SVN account and an entry in the MAINTAINERS file.

buzztard

Wow, July went fast. I spend most time with my family. Still a few news from the development front. I worked mostly on wavetable view. It now features more proper sample playback. I wrote a memory audio source for GStreamer. It supports forward and backward playback. This is needed for e.g. ping-pong loops. Also now changing things takes effect while a sample plays. Our waveform widget also shows a playback pointer and loop markers. I also got around to unify and merge duplicated note conversion code. You know, when you've copied something the 3rd time, its time to refactor.

Earlier this month I refactored the song-io plugin API a bit. It has now more metadata. This helps the UI to setup file and recent filters. Unfortunately I had to find out that the mime-type detection in glib was broken. Its at least fixed in trunk. No idea since when it actually worked. As a workaround I am now adding "*.xml" to the filters.

• Two-stone handicap for me on a 9x9 go board, and the birthdayful HPJ still manages to kick my ass by twenty-something points.

  They must have put something in the cake, as I had two big slices while HPJ had a single tiny one.

With the Olympic Games about to start, here’s what I hope to see:

• While I fully support the protests for a Free Tibet (and against the Chinese regime), Beijing was chosen 6 years ago, and if people did want to boycott the Olympic Games in China, it would have been wiser to do it so 6 years ago. Of course, I’m not saying all protests should stop, it is nice to have the dictatorial regime get nervous by all the international media’s attention to protests, but I really hope nothing like this (skip to 4:30) happens again. That is, please protest as much as you want, but please pretty please, don’t ruin the years of preparation of the sportsmen and women that have dedicated a big part of their lifes to get here. Doing so would be like having someone remove all the GNOME (or any other free software project) subversion code, for instance, to protest against the Chinese regime. I’m sure we wouldn’t like that at all, even if we support the protests.
• No dopping cases please.
• I really hope to see a USA-Spain final in basketball, for a Los Angeles 84 revenge. Although it’s going to be hard, with Argentina, Russia and Greece being part also of the favorites for the medals.
• In cycling, the Spanish team is one of the best in history for this kind of race (Freire, Samuel Sánchez and Valverde, accompanied by Contador and Sastre, the 2 last Tour de France winners), so, like every year in the World Championships, it seems it’s going to be a very nice race, specially since the Italians are very strong also (with Paolo Bettini). Also, mountain bike/BMX competitions are quite funny to watch on TV.
• I hope to see as many (and as long as possible) Cuban women volleyball team games as possible. If you want to know why, just watch their games
• Won’t miss any of the Athletics, Swimming and Gymnastics competitions.
• After my experience in the river Sella, I’m willing to watch also some rowing/canoeing action.

Anyway, good luck to everyone, and please, try to not stay too much time in the sofa watching the games You can just do some exercises while you watch the sports or when going to the sofa to somewhere else and back, so as to feel the Olympic spirit also

Today, I saw Girnomous being used on TV. I felt dirty.

• How to use rpm2git

  Here is a second screencast on rpm2git (Ogg Theora, 69 MB). This one tells you how to use rpm2git to take the patches from a SRPM and put them in a Git branch.

  

• During GUADEC in Stuttgart and in Dublin, Evangelia Berdou was interviewing people about how they contribute in GNOME. She used this information for her dissertation, Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects. Over 100 people from the GNOME Foundation contributed to her study!

  

  There is very valuable information in this work: how many core-platform hackers, core-desktop hackers, secondary-desktop hackers, translators, and peripheral contributors do we have? Which of them are employed to work only on GNOME, on GNOME and other free software, or are not paid for their contributions? How do people move from being peripheral contributors to core ones?

  For people thinking about which sub-group of GNOME needs better tools (translators!) and support from GNOME at large, this is exactly what they need to read.

• Two things that made my day today.

  First, Andrew Jorgensen packaged Meld for openSUSE 11.0, based on Pavol Rusnak's version, which makes git-mergetool awesome.

  Two, Ivan Zlatev packaged git-merge-changelog (README), which makes merging ChangeLog entries surprisingly painless. You can even cherry-pick from other branches, where the ChangeLog's diff would not apply cleanly to the destination branch, and git-merge-changelog Just Works(tm) without any manual intervention. This *is* magic.

• rpm2git screencast

  Here is a little screencast about the problem that rpm2git tries to solve (Ogg Theora, 12.5 MB):

  

  You can also watch the rpm2git screencast in opensuse.blip.tv.

  (Screencast recorded with recordMyDesktop. Man, my voice sucks. I swear it sounded better inside my head.)

Christopher, this kind of insanity and the arrogance with which related feedback is handled, is exactly the reason, why people want alternate browser UI's. Sometimes I really wonder if Mozilla's UI designers serve the users, or if they just serve their ego.

Combine this need for custom UIs with the uglyness of Mozilla's bloated XPCOM APIs and the inability to keep them stable - some people even perceive the situation as sabotage - and you know why developers turn their back to your project.

PS: Colin, you totally forget that FOSS land doesn't only consist of big companies! Expect for big companies nobody, really nobody is paying for certificates. Only alternative seems to be CACert, but their website and the short-livingness of their certificates also make it a pain to use.

• I'm no security expert, but the Firefox guys keep saying that the new "this SSL certificate is funny" scheme in Firefox 3 is actually a good thing, but that is just bullshit.

  Certificates are broken as designed because every web browser (including Firefox 3) has a button that says "let me access the site anyway", and that's what everyone, including yours truly, does all the time. People just do not know, nor care, how to ensure that a certificate is valid. "What's a certificate, anyway? The site says it is secure!"

  If anything, the new scheme for funny certificates in Firefox 3 is worse than it was before, because the warnings are more frequent. So, you get really well-conditioned to hitting the button that says, "begone, stupid warning, and let me access the fucking web site already".

Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Nothing that amazing here, sorry:

• Fix play+pause+play (#523182, thanks Matthew Martin)
• Add %ay, album year (#522909, Juan F. Giménez Silva)

I’m in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to visit my girlfriend’s family.

Today, we went for a touristy ride to visit the Batu Caves (which contain an in-cave Buddhist Hindu temple and monkeys), Kuala Lumpur itself and a butterfly garden. Tomorrow, we go shopping in Kuala Lumpur before heading off to the Redang resort.

A while ago, Máirín blogged about creating print originals in Inkscape and Scribus, and I can only chime in on her praise of these tools. Since I joined Imendio, a large amount of what I’ve done on a daily basis have been print work (stickers, t-shirts, rollups, tattoos etc.) and all of it have been done using a free software workflow!

A common obstacle you run into when using Scribus for print is the lack of support for predefined spot colors from Pantone, something that usually comes handy when you need more exact colors that you looked up in a color swatch. The reason that Scribus can’t include these is, as usual, because of legal reasons.
Luckily there exists a small howto in the Scribus Wiki how to get hold of and use these in your designs.

Seven years, 157 comments later.. IT IS DONE!

In Whistler for Mozilla Summit. The summit ends today. Original plan was to do some cycling in the mountains tomorrow morning, and head back to Vancouver at 3pm, spend the weekend with friends in Vancouver.

BUT! The night before last one there was a massive rock slide blocking the main road from Whistler back to Vancouver (aerial photo, news story, interesting blogpost) and it takes at least five days to clear it up. The alternate route is 8 hours long, so they have rescheduled all the buses. I'm now on the 3am bus on Friday, which hopefully means I can sleep on the bus after the party. Beats having to wakeup and catch the 8am one and be bored on the bus for a good part of the day.

So I thought I attend my sessions this morning and head out in the afternoon to do some cycling, be back in time for the party. BUT! Woke up this morning to learn that power is out for at least a few hours. A laundry truck hit the
transformer. Yay! Got a couple more hours of battery life. Funny thing is that wifi works.

Finally, I didn't notice that the schedule for today starts half-hour earlier than previous days. So missed breakfast too. Have to run out, get breakfast, get real coffee, and plan the rest of my stay here. But found some nagging first quite refreshing :).

Anyway, having tons of fun. I'm sure if the summit was in the winter, we could expect lots of The Shining flashbacks at the hotel. :-D

Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun."
"Why?", he was asked.
"Because at night we need the light more."

Regularly applaud myself for changing my prepare-changelog script to yield a random fortune cookie with each changelog entry:

`/usr/games/fortune -s wisdom`

Quite entertaining.

Just take care to remove those cookies before commiting: Some people might get offended by this unexpected and often unrelated wisdoms.

Marco: You can also use the libffi CClosure marshaller I wrote for PyGObject. If you use you don’t need to generate the marshal.list at all, it’ll figure out the signature and call the callback just by looking at the signals GValues.

I originally wrote it so that Edward could prototype playbin2 in gst-python and still being able to connect to signals created in python from GstElements written in C. I know that a couple of other projects are using that file by copying and pasting it while waiting for bug 401080 to be solved.

Make sure your application's setup uses GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS in configure, and has WARN_CFLAGS in the CFLAGS... I just wasted too much time doing fixing a bug that wasn't.

• People like were thinking of a document-centric desktop before my GUADEC talk. W00t. It's nice to see people tuned in to the same channel.

  (There is a lot of material in that blog post. Digest it slowly, bit by bit. I don't agree with the parts about needing to dump the fundamentals of our platform, but that's perhaps better seen from an implementator's perspective.)

• Nemo is a file manager for GNOME which displays your files based on time, not on folder hierarchies. It also handles categories for files, like tags in F-spot. I had not seen it before GUADEC, and it's a pretty cool concept — much more developed than the simplistic timeline-of-days that I showed in GUADEC. Maybe we can embed the Mono VM into Nautilus and reuse Nemo's super-sexy widgets for time-based displays.

• rpm2git — an easy way to publish distro patches

  Various GNU/Linux distros have developed different, ad-hoc ways of publishing the patches they put on top of "pristine" released tarballs from upstream projects like GNOME. openSUSE lets you download full SRPMS from an FTP site, or in a slower but more elegant way through the openSUSE Build Service. Fedora has a CVS repository where they put specfiles and patches. Back in the Ximian days, we had a pretty cute web page, patches.ximian.com, where you could ask for the patches for a specific module, for one or more distros.

  Since every distro publishes its patches in a different way, the following happens.

  First, upstream developers have a hard time actually looking for those patches to review them and see if they are fit for inclusion in the mainline releases. Where does $distro publish its stuff? How do I know what its latest version is? How do I know what bugs they were trying to fix? Upstream developers should not have to learn the idiosyncrasies of each distro just to get code from them.

  Second, distros themselves end up doing a lot of duplicated work. I just found out that both Fedora and openSUSE have patches in their gtk package to do the same things: one for GtkEntry to change the "*" into a "●" when the entry is being used for password entry; another one to let 64-bit builds install the 32-bit and 64-bit libraries in the correct places. If there had been an easy way to share those patches, maybe they wouldn't have duplicated the same work.

  I am pleased to give you rpm2git. This is a little tool that you can use as follows:

  First, you get a Git clone of an upstream repository, for example, something out of git-mirror.gnome.org.

  Second, you get a SRPM and unpack it. You look at the version of that package (say, Nautilus 2.22.2).

  Third, you find the Git tag for that version (svn/NAUTILUS_2_22_2).

  Fourth, you call rpm2git with that tag name, your specfile, and a destination branch name.

  Rpm2git will create a branch starting at the tag you specified, and it will apply the patches from the SRPM as individual commits. The commit messages come from the patch comments.

  The idea is that you can later just publish this Git repository, and upstream developers or other distros will be able fetch your branches into their own base repositories. Then, they can cherry-pick patches at their convenience.

  You can get rpm2git like this:

  git clone git://gitorious.org/rpm2git/mainline.git rpm2git

  Over the next few days I hope to start publishing Git repositories of the GNOME packages we ship in openSUSE, with branches for the patches we use.

  Note that rpm2git is not the same as VCS-PKG, a really interesting project to go directly from source code under revision control to compiled distro packages.

Hmm, so I never did blog a GUADEC roundup. In two words: it rocked. Congratulations to Baris and everyone else who organised it!

In other late GUADEC news I finally reviewed the rest of my GUADEC photos and uploaded them to Flickr. I'll try and not take a month to upload next time, honest!

• Here is a fantastic presentation of how the Office 2007 user interface was redesigned (full blog post). Miguel already talked about this presentation when he went to the MIX08 conference.

  Obligatory snarky comments: the presentation's slides look like ass. Garish backgrounds. Three different fonts on a slide. Bullets. Anyway, that's the visual material. The actual content of the presentation is very interesting.

  Microsoft was in this situation: with Office they had a tremendously powerful piece of software with which people no longer felt comfortable. It's too complex. I don't know all the features anymore. I'm sure it has the feature I want, but I cannot find it. This fucking paper clip never gives me good advice and just gets in my way.

  The thing is, designing or improving user interfaces is Real Work(tm). You have to watch people work and see where they get stuck. You have to make prototypes and see how people react to them. Microsoft did that for Office 2007.

  On a much smaller scale, this is why I think that the plan for document-centric GNOME has a good chance of being successful. We can show Apple and Microsoft that free software has the balls to change the toplevel way in which people interact with their files. We can definitely turn our desktop into a more comfortable environment than what those proprietary environments gave us twenty years ago.

• Speaking of comfortable environments, this is a street cafe one or two blocks away from the grand bazaar in Istanbul. I had the pleasure of having apple tea and coffee with HPJ and JPR on one of those tables, getting relaxed and ready before terrorizing the grand bazaar with our extreme haggling skills.

  

  Let's see how many patterns of good urbanism there are in that place:

  • Pedestrian street whose width does not exceed the height of the surrounding buildings, so you feel cozy.
  • Public outdoor room which makes you feel sheltered and is nicely decorated.
  • Filtered light from the trees, so you can enjoy a cool shade on a sunny day.
  • Street cafe to talk and relax and see people go by.
  • Four-story limit so that buildings don't overpower people.
  • Positive outdoor space so that you have a sense of place.

• I would love it if our Human Interface Guidelines were closer in spirit to A Pattern Language (book) than to Apple's HIG.

• One of the most pleasurable things about GUADEC is the chance to find out that hackers share common interests outside of programming.

  Andy Wingo was telling me about Richard Gabriel's book, Patterns of Software. Christopher Alexander wrote the preface — he's the main guy who defined those architectural and urbanism patterns from above.

  JPR, HPJ, and myself were talking about peak oil. Will free software even be relevant if we can't keep the Internet running?

  It turns out that our baby and Chris Blizzard's as well have the same kind of baby chair and swing.

  It's fun to talk about camera-nerding with Hub.

• Today I'm 0x20 years old. Yay.

GNOME is fun. Proof below:

The GIMP was featured in Click, a tech show on the BBC. They got the license wrong though.

Seems Jakub already spotted it.

I was out last week on vacation in Asturias, in the North-West of Spain. Asturias is one of the few regions in Spain I had never visited, so it was time, and what a good idea indeed. Asturias (or at least the East part of it, where I’ve been) is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in my life. With the sea in the North, and a land full of huge mountains (totally covered with forests or with land full of cows and horses), it is indeed a paradise (that’s what they say when you get into Asturias, ‘Welcome to Asturias, a nature paradise’).

We went to Cangas de Onís, a very nice village close to the river Sella (the real reason we came here, more later), just a few kms close to the Picos de Europa national park, and with lots of things to do around.

First mandatory thing to do was to visit the Lagos de Covadonga, mytical finish of lots of stages of the Vuelta a España (cyclism’ Tour of Spain), with the sanctuary of Covadonga in the way to it:

The road to the lakes, which goes from less than 200 meters to more than 1000 meters above the sea level, is indeed perfect for a cycling race, except for the cows, which just hang around the road and the mountains around without caring about the cars, just laying down in the middle of the road

At the top of the road, the landscape is really wonderful:

But as I said, we came to Cangas de Onís because we wanted to do some canoieng in the river Sella, famous because of the International Descent of the River Sella, a race, to take place on August 9th, where 1000s of people participate, racing and in the different celebrations in all the villages and towns along the river bank. I don’t have many photos of this, since I didn’t want to ruin my camera if my canoe got sinked So the first day we did it, I didn’t take any photos, the 2nd one, I took my cell phone with me and just got a few photos.

You just need to pay 25 € per person, and you are given a single/double/triple canoe, and then you can go on your own, stop in any of the many beaches around the river to eat the snadwiches you are given, or just relax. And then there are different places where you can stop, at 7, 10 or 12 kms. We got, although quite tired, both days to the last exit, and, believe me, we would have continued for more time, since just being in the river, surrounded by mountains, without seeing any civilization apart from the (lots of) people canoeing also and the few bars around the river bank is indeed a very funny thing to do, which, hopefully, I’ll be doing again around here, if I can find a place to do it (there are lots of rivers around here, but not sure if you are allowed to navigate them, and also, I wouldn’t like going on my own without knowing if a place is safe or not).

Also, while I don’t fancy much going to the beach in summer (I love it in winter), I have to confess I’ve changed a bit my mind after being in some beaches in Asturias. First of all, the weather is ok, not too hot (as in the Mediterranean, where I’ve almost always been when going to the beach in Summer), and there are just a few people, and finally, but most important, the beaches are just spectacular. We found one, called Playa de las Cuevas del Mar, which was a perfect place to just sit down and contemplate.

We also did lots of walking around the countryside, some tourism sightseeing, and, every day, we ate wonderful stuff like Chorizos a la Sidra, Escalopines al Cabrales, etc, and, specially, Fabada:

I’ll be back to Asturias soon for sure.

I’d like to open an Openismus office in Berlin in the next couple of months, for about three of our people. I don’t have much idea where office rental is advertised in Berlin. What’s the equivalent of the Süddeutschezeitung’s small ads there?

I’d love us to have something in Kreuzberg, near Schlesiches-Tor, maybe by the river there, but it looks like Prenzlauerberg will be more convenient for Mathias to get to. I’d like to avoid being in one of the anonymous office buildings in the centre of town. It’s much nicer to have something with character in a lively residential area like Kreuzberg or Prenzlauerberg which is still close to everything by public transport.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately on PyGObject, the python bindings for GObject. This blog post will summarize the recent activies.

Code Generator move

One of the most important parts of the gtk python bindings lies within the code generator. This piece of software which was mostly written by James Henstridge, Gustavo Carneiro and I takes an API definition file (in scheme s-expression style) and output C glue which tell Python how to call the API in a library. For various reasons the code generator is mostly intended to be used by a GObject based library. It was originally written for PyGTK but has since been used in a number of other placs, most noticable gst-python contains a fork which various modifications. It has recently moved from the PyGTK package to PyGObject and can now easily be used by GObject based library which wishes to use it without depending on GTK+.

GIO

The principal motivation for moving the code generator from PyGTK to PyGObject was to be able to create GIO bindings. An initial set of bindings has been created for GIO. They are not complete yet, quite a bit of the API which takes async result parameters has not yet been written, but it should be perfectly usable by applications already. Please use it and let me know if there is any methods missing and I will gladly wrap them for you

GLib

One of the complaints over there years has been that it’s kind of weird to type gobject.MainLoop(), gobject.io_add_watch() etc, since these functions are not really related to GObject. Complain no more, they have now moved to a new module called just glib. It’s been quite hard to come up with any reasonable use cases for third party packages using glib but not gobject. I guess one of them is python bindings for Qt wishing to integrate with the python bindings for Gtk+. Qt already provides (optional) glib/mainloop integration, so perhaps this would be useful to them.

Porting to Python 3

This weekend I ported the glib and gobject modules over to be compilable against Python 3.0b2. It has been done in such a way that the source code is compatible with both the 2.x and 3.0 APIs of Python. To be able to do that I was forced to add a number of quite intrusive macros which takes care of the hard work. I’ve only managed to reach the point where it is possible to import the gobject module. The code generator and the gio bindings has not yet been ported. Even less has the testsuite been run, so this is just moderatly useful at this point. As part of porting this I had to make the python support in automake be compatible with python 3. Patches against git head of automake can be found here.

Details in bugzilla. Bugs go to bugzilla as well. Death to esound!

PS: robster is a sucka, fixing bugs in dead code.

Philip will be happy. The author of this article for Linux Magazine UK is full of praise for the YouTube plugin. Good work Philip!

Everyone knows the problem that seemingly each project uses its own code style. So here is my solution for that problem:

$ cat ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/c.vim 
if filereadable('.project.vim')
    source .project.vim
else
    set sw=2 sta et
endif

Maybe you had some better ideas already - I'd like to read about them.

• Yes I should use something reasonable like Anjuta...
• Modelines are easy to forget and need changes to the existing code.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

• Document-centric GNOME

  Here is my presentation from GUADEC: Document-centric GNOME (ODP).

  

  The code for document-centric Nautilus consists of the journal view and the Nautilus extension interface for journal providers. This code is not finished yet (nothing gets displayed to the screen; it's all engine code), but you can take a look here:

  git clone git://gitorious.org/nautilus/mainline.git nautilus-document-centric

  The master branch contains the document-centric code, which is built on top of nautilus-2.22.2. You can also visit the Gitorious repository for document-centric Nautilus and create your forks there.

• John Anderson has posted a great little tutorial on Nautilus tips and tricks. Life-savers for me: the list of keyboard shortcuts and enabling the "advanced permissions" view.