Planet GNOME

Philip Van Hoof: Russia

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:57:01 -0700

My naive opinion on the current strategy for dealing with Russia

Maybe Cold War organizations like NATO don’t see it, as their people are indoctrinated by the need for a unified strategy against a common enemy (keep Russia out, Germany down and the United States in).

But the world has changed since 1989.

Whenever the Soviet Union was stubborn, it was also predictable. Today’s Russia is not predictable. It is and has been pushing its real goals in a rather subtle way (even if you think the Georgian crisis was not subtle, the real Russian goal is). You can no longer just contain Russia. Neither can you easily engage with them. You need to ‘negotiate’ your relationship with it.

By kicking Russia out of treaties and organizations, all you will achieve is that Russia will start doing business with individual European countries rather than with the European Union. Which means different market rules will play. Less control over mutual interests in Europe: more competition among the individual European countries over Russia’s resources and market, sharper differences between Western -and Eastern Europe.

In the long run the result of that will be a split of Europe into Western -and Eastern Europe. This would be followed by a decline of Western power over Eastern European countries. Strategically seen, this would be a perfect outcome for Russia. A dream come true, for them.

Without the wealthy Western Europe, both the economy and industry of many of Eastern Europe’s countries are still underdeveloped and not yet ready to compete, on their own, against three major economic powers. As a result would Eastern Europe become yet another unstable region in the World.

Russia conducting the Orchestra of opposition politics in those countries, and Russian media influence, will for many sound like an answer to their dissatisfactions.

I think it’s for that reason that keeping Eastern Europe within the group called “Europe”, is something you want to strive for. A split with Western Europe would inevitably mean major influence from Russia in these Eastern European countries and regions.

It’s in fact already taking place here and there. If you take off your by propaganda blinded glasses and go look for the facts, you’ll see.

My own naive proposal

Russia’s regime is doomed the moment the Russian elite looses its European legitimacy. Russia’s future wealth depends on Europe’s willingness to continue doing business with them. This business must be in both directions. Just selling gas yet remaining isolated from the World markets means that for example your currency can easily be devaluated outside of your borders. Meaning that you are selling your resources too cheap or that the actual price that you got for it depends on the politics of other nations (like petrodollars). Replace currency with any other valuable resource located within your own borders.

The Russian elite who keep people like Vladimir Putin in power are the same people who are doing business selling Russian gas to Europe. If we want a peaceful world, we can seize the opportunity of doing business with these Russian elites to convince them of at least certain of European’s values. Values like free markets. Especially as we integrate our European businesses into Russia and especially if Russian elites start seeing the benefits of that (wealth), will European values further influence Russian politics.

If we kick them out of our organizations, they’ll just continue doing business with individual European countries. Making it harder to keep Europe united. They very well know that Europe needs energy. They know individual European countries will continue buying gas from Russia.

It would be insane because if we don’t, China will. And then China instead will get a strategic partnership with Russia. Pushing their values and culture. Rising new economies are the circumstances of today. Containment is not an answer to changed circumstances.

Europeans want a multipolar World, right? This is the opportunity to have Russia, China, United States and Europe as different economic powers (I simplified it, I of course know there are more economic centers).

My naive conclusion

A new kind of World is coming towards us. Although the history book on the shelve is always repeating itself, all we can do is learn from the past.

Learning however, is not the same as maintaining a strategy designed for completely different past circumstances. We are called humans because unlike many other species we can intelligently adapt ourselves. Let’s consume that capability.

In order to succeed as a people, as a nation and as a culture you have to synchronize your strategy with today’s circumstances.

It’s our time and our generation, to cope with them.

Stormy Peters: It's not even going in one ear ...

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:42:33 -0700

My stepson is a very bright kid but he doesn't always listen. I'm convinced it's because he doesn't even hear us right the first time, not because he isn't obeying.

I now have proof he doesn't really hear us. Here's this morning's conversation: (There are no lapses or pauses.)

J:    There's almost a full moon!
Me: Yes, do you know how often we have a full moon?
J:    How often?
Me: Every 28 days. (Which isn't actually right, I know.)
J:    EVERY 20 YEARS!?
Me: No, every 28 DAYS.
J:    Oh.
Me: So, how often do we have a full moon?
J:    Every 25 days.

The doctors say his hearing is fine. His teacher is going to have fun with him this year!

Alberto Ruiz: Font selection mockup: Proposal #2

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:42:33 -0700

After collecting some feedback and following some of the threads that have been started up, I've decided to do a second thought about my first proposal.

It had too much uncovered use cases, and still it didn't solved some major problems from the current one. To save some time and try to focus on the UI design issue, I decided to just do an inkscape mockup instead of a working solution.

This proposal tries to solve a few problems, and it's somehow inspired by gnome-specimen from uws. First, it gives an overview on how each style would look like without the need to click on each of them, and it grants more space for the preview. It also adds a way to search for certain typeface classes, monospaced, language specific using a thunderbird like search box.

Some problems that I'm not sure how to solve here is, how to properly let people edit the preview text, I think that the entry box on top is fine, but I have the gut feeling that it could have problems. Also, I'm not sure how hard to implement the search box would be.

Anyway, feedback, again, is welcome.

Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle: msgctxt for GNOME 2.26?

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:40:28 -0700

December 2007 I wrote about GNOME adopting gettext’s msgctxt feature (and so did Andre Klapper). 8 months latter, this still is considered a proposed GNOME Goal. I really hope we can get this official, and as a translator I would certainly enjoy translating (and reviewing) message catalogs without that awful pipe.

By the way, if GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0, then GNOME 2.26 = GNOME (3.0 - 0.4)?

Share!

Adam Schreiber: Back from Chicago

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:04:11 -0700

I'm back from the URSI GA in Chicago and back in the office. While I was in Chicago, I wrote a little program to auto-generate a bingo board in LaTeX for a little game I dreamt up. While that program will probably not see the light of day, it inspired me to write something else.

I've been frustrated with the user un-friendliness of existing scripts to generate a sheet suitable for use at a key signing party. This frustration led me to write a program that uses libcryptui to select keys for the sheet and inserts them into a table in LaTeX. It's now at a usable point so I thought I would make it available:

signingparty.c

Compile with:

gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` -D  LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall

An example of the output is party.tex

And the processed PDF party.pdf

Obligatory Screenshot:

TODO:
* Strip comments from display names (what's in parenthesis normally)
* Fix table grid lines (Help from a LaTeX guru would be appreciated)
* Auto-process LaTeX to PDF (via Rubber)

Alvaro Lopez Ortega: Cherokee 0.8.1 benchmark

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:04:11 -0700

Today, after releasing Cherokee 0.8.1 I decided it was time to test again how it was doing about performance. In the last months we have got a great new I/O cache layer and a couple of structural changes that were supposed to have a positive impact on the general server performance, although nobody checked whether those changes were as effective as we aimed them to be.

So, once again, here I am bringing good news. We have done it. Cherokee is actually the fastest web server among a set of the most common servers nowadays: Apache, Cherokee, Lighttpd and Nginx!!

The benchmark consisted on half a million requests of a 1.7KiB static file, with 20 concurrent clients, using a 1Gbit/s local network. The results (fastest to slowest) were:

Cherokee:

Server Software:        Cherokee/0.8.1
Server Hostname:        10.0.0.102
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        1795 bytes

Concurrency Level:      20
Time taken for tests:   17.819725 seconds
Complete requests:      500000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    500000
Total transferred:      999007442 bytes
HTML transferred:       897506630 bytes
Requests per second:    28058.79 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       0.713 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.036 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          54747.93 [Kbytes/sec] received

Lighttpd:

Server Software:        lighttpd/1.4.19
Server Hostname:        10.0.0.102
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        1795 bytes

Concurrency Level:      20
Time taken for tests:   21.248000 seconds
Complete requests:      500000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    470598
Total transferred:      991856958 bytes
HTML transferred:       897503590 bytes
Requests per second:    23531.63 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       0.850 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.042 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          45585.94 [Kbytes/sec] received

NginX:

Server Software:        nginx/0.5.33
Server Hostname:        10.0.0.102
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        1795 bytes

Concurrency Level:      20
Time taken for tests:   23.741872 seconds
Complete requests:      500000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    500000
Total transferred:      1006000217 bytes
HTML transferred:       897500000 bytes
Requests per second:    21059.84 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       0.950 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.047 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          41379.30 [Kbytes/sec] received

Apache2.2:

Server Software:        Apache/2.2.8
Server Hostname:        10.0.0.102
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        1795 bytes

Concurrency Level:      20
Time taken for tests:   35.438605 seconds
Complete requests:      500000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    495064
Total transferred:      1043777896 bytes
HTML transferred:       897500000 bytes
Requests per second:    14108.91 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1.418 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.071 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          28762.81 [Kbytes/sec] received

For the record: I did my best configuring all the servers in the very same way. In all the cases I removed unnecessary rules that could have slowed down the server (checks for htpasswd files and so on). And all the binaries came from the Debian repository, except for Cherokee 0.8.1 that hasn't been packaged yet.

Anyway, this benchmark has been just a quick test. It is not certainly representing the result that these servers would have handling real traffic though. So, in the following days I will try to do a new a more accurate benchmark with static and dynamic content, compression, redirections, etc. I'm pretty sure the results will be even better.

Andre Klapper: Maemo Bugnews.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:04:11 -0700

The Maemo Bugsquad is now in place. For triagers we have a Triage guide, general and product generic Stock answers that can be copied & pasted into bug reports, and for reporters an updated (maemo’fied & and shortened) Bugwriting How-to. We also decided on a policy when to close rotting moreinfo bugs.
There will be a Maemo Bugsquad BoF at the Maemo summit on Saturday, 16h30. Everybody also interested in managing the Maemo bugs is highly welcome.
Being part of the current 100 Days plan, the Maemo crew has five sprints (and open IRC meetings too) à 20 days with defined tasks. For those who haven’t seen it yet, we also log our daily activities so our work becomes more transparent.
As a first step to Get Nokia more involved into Maemo Bugzilla, I’m currently looking into Reorganizing components in Bugzilla to make it easier for Nokia’s developer teams to be able to track those reports that affect their scope.

David Zeuthen: DeviceKit presentations

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:16:54 -0700

Earlier today Richard and I did a DeviceKit (the set of projects replacing HAL) presentation for some other group here at Red Hat. You can see the slides here and here.

Perhaps of interest to the GNOME community, there’s also screenshots of Palimpsest, an upcoming Disk Utility library and application for GNOME. Most of this is already available in Fedora’s development branch, dubbed Rawhide, but won’t be installed by default in Fedora 10. Right now I’m busy with PolicyKit stuff but the plan is definitely to get a gnome-disk-utility mailing list going soon and get this stuff integrated throughout GNOME (I’ve already made sure it’s easy to plug into gvfs for example).

For example, I learned the other day that my disk is failing (actually, as mjg59 pointed out, it’s wrong to use the word FAILING since it’s Old-Age. Easily fixed.). Now, it would definitely be useful to have a notification bubble indicating this. This is pretty trivial to write using the DeviceKit-disks API; just monitor the org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks.Device:drive-smart-is-failing property. Of course the gnome-disk-utility libraries (there’s one at the GLib level and one at the GTK+ level) wraps this nicely. In fact the gnome-disk-utility library at the GTK+ level should probably provide the code for doing this status icon. Something to discuss. Hence why a mailing list and more community involvement in the gnome-disk-utility project is needed.

Anyway, the goal is to port the most of the Fedora desktop to use DeviceKit instead of HAL for the Fedora 11 time frame.

Charlotte Curtis: C Version of In the Mood

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:16:54 -0700

GSoC has officially come to a close, and in a very short time I have managed to make a more or less working version of In The Mood in C. On the plus side, it does seem to be more efficient, using less memory, and it gets rid of any possible command-line-parsing errors. Also, I've re-done the vector file storage so that it's in subfolders, so there's guaranteed to be unique names (basically the complete path for each song is copied over into ./gnome/rhythmbox/inthemood), and I've left the .mp3 or .ogg extension to make them easier to locate in the database (might be a little confusing if you ever look at those files, but they are indeed text). On the down side, anyone who tried the python version, you'll have to re-analyze your database, due to this reorganization of vector files. Sorry!

You can check out the source by running "svn checkout http://rhythmbox-predictive-playback.googlecode.com/svn/branches/c_rewrite inthemood". Since C plugins have to be built from within the Rhythmbox source code, I've created a diff file that can be used to patch the svn version of Rhythmbox (it just modifies configure.ac and plugins/Makefile.am), and from there you can just put the entire "inthemood" folder into rhythmbox/plugins/. Make sure you have all the dependencies described in the original install instructions, and then just run ./autogen.sh --enable-inthemood (along with whatever other flags you usually use) in the rhythmbox top level directory. After that, the usual make && sudo make install should do the trick.

There's a few bugs that I have yet to iron out, but they didn't seem important enough to prevent me from sharing this with the world. You can add multiple songs to the "In The Mood" playlist, but only the last one will be used to append new songs, which will only occur while it is playing. Also, if you add songs that haven't been analyzed, they'll be added, but ignored when choosing a new song (i.e. you need to play an analyzed song to get a new one added). Basically, the best way to keep it safe is just to pick one song and go from there (deletions should be fine) - for some reason I couldn't get rhythmbox to remove an entry from the playlist, so I'll keep working on that.

I'm sad to say that the summer is over, I've had a great time working with Philip Van Hoof and the rest of the GNOME community. I don't really plan on stopping anytime soon - my project has a ton of things I'd like to add/fix, and there are many other things that I have resisted working on due to the need to finish this one up. The next couple weeks will be super busy as I get ready to move across the country - ditch enough stuff so that I can fit my apartment into a Honda Civic, tie up loose ends in Ontario, and figure out where I'm going to sleep in various locations along the way. However, I'll still be hanging out on irc from time to time (Charbucks is the name), and I'm sure I'll pop up on Planet GNOME and various mailing lists. Thanks again for a great summer GNOME!

Aaron Bockover: Dumping to the Internets

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:26:26 -0700

I am constantly uploading files and pasting people URLs to said files hosted on some web server. After many years of typing the scp command and then manually transcribing the resulting URL, I finally made my life easier.

I shared it with some friends on IRC and everyone seemed to find it the most revolutionary script of 2008, so maybe it's useful to the rest of the world.

In addition to printing the URL on the terminal, it also copies the URL into the primary X clipboard. This allows me to run the command upload foo and then quickly middle click the URL into IRC or a browser.

#!/bin/bash
user=username
host=host.org
[[ $# -lt 1 ]] && { echo "Not sure what to do..." 1>&2; exit 1; }
scp -r $* $user@$host:public_html && {
	URL="http://$host/~$user/$(basename $1)"
	echo "$URL"
	xselection -replace PRIMARY "$URL"
}

It assumes you have your ~/public_html directory on the server being shared over HTTP at /~username. In openSUSE 11.0, the xselection command is provided by, you guessed it, the xselection package.

Enjoy!

Johannes Schmid: Anjuta 2.5.90 released

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 05:43:17 -0700

Anjuta team proudly announces the first unstable release Anjuta
DevStudio 2.5.90 that will eventually lead us to stable 2.6.0 release,
code named Cyclone. This is an unstable release, so be sure to adjust
your expectations accordingly. This is release is for upcoming GNOME
2.23.90 release.

There has been a huge changes done in this release from the last one,
both in terms of adding new features and improving existing ones. Also
large amount code cleanup to remove use of deprecated APIs was done.

Most important changes:

New git plugin
Improved build plugin allowing out of source builds and different configurations for debugging and profiling
Autocompletion for the gtksourceview editor

Thanks for this release to (alphabetically):
Halton Huo
Sabastien Granjoux
Massimo Cora
Arun Raghavan
Marc Lorber
Johannes Schmid
Ignacio Casal Quinteiro
Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne
Yuriy Penkin
Abderrahim Kitouni
James Liggett

and on Localizations:

Clytie Siddall,
Ignacio Casal Quinteiro
Jorge Gonzalez
Yannig Marchegay
Djihed Afifi
Yuriy Penkin
Yannig Marchegay
Johannes Schmid
Ihar Hrachyshka
Jovan Naumovski
Duarte Loreto
Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
Yair Hershkovitz
Nickolay V. Shmyrev
Ilkka Tuohela

Download: ?http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/anjuta/2.5/
Screenshots: http://anjuta.org/screen-shots
Features: http://anjuta.org/features

Dependencies:
=============
gdl: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdl/2.23/
gnome-build: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-build/2.23/

Translations updates:
=====================
ar, be@latin, de, es, fi, gl, he, mk, oc, pt, ru, th, vi

Updates and bugfixes:
=====================
* Fix #536372: Write __MAX_BAUX instead of __MAX_BAUD
* Fix a crash when GNOME Terminal is not installed
* now search for symbols can be done also in global tags. Added a new
parameter
to search function and adjusted dependencies on different plugins.
* Put tables.sql into distribution
* Fix #536889 anjuta doesn’t pass “make check”
* Fixed #537398 – crash in Anjuta IDE: Closed project
* Fix #537134: critical warnings tools->plugin_deactivate
* Fix #534523: anjuta parses filenames from make wrong
GMatchInfo need to be freed even when regex fail in build_get_summary
* Fixed a possible bug where the project-manager plugin is deactivated
twice.
* Fix #536375: libsocket not included cause build fail on Solaris
* Add new scratchbox 1 plugin implementing IAnjutaEnvironment
* Enabled tooltips for recent files to identify full paths.
* Ported file-manager to gio
* Fix #530215 – Have a message area like gedit
* Using glib/gi18n.h instead of libgnome/gnome-i18n.h
* Fixed a crash on file selection. Gave enough buffer for the formated
time print.
* Restore text focus on switching editor with ALT+X and
navigating from local-symbols view.
* Fixed #528699 – Auto-indent ignores spaces-per-indent settings
* Fix #538798: UI selected tab document differs from real one
* Fix again #538798: UI selected tab document differs from real one
* Fix #538921 – Duplicated folders
* Fix #539726 – Completing port to GIO
* Fix #513156 – Get rid of libgnome(ui)
* Fix #538443 – Missing files in POTFILES.in
* Fix #538906 – Enable state “Max actions” when “No limit” toggled
* Fix #449620 – Implement autocompletion for gtksourceview editor
* Fix #540731 - Port editor to gio
* Fixed loading of files from the command line
* Fixed crash when double-clicking on a breakpoint.
* Change (nearly) all interfaces to use GFile* instead of uris
Document all shell variables
* Fixed #541313 – Crash on saving file
* Fix #515954 – create_global_tags.sh: wrong anjuta-tags path
* Fixed global tags loading
* Fix bug #538217: Run in terminal option isn’t remembered
* Fix bug: Debugger sources directories isn’t remembered neither
* Fixed “Hide binary files”
* Fix #539551 – AutoComplete doesn’t work
* Fix #539551 – AutoComplete doesn’t work
* Fix #357697 – readonly file can be edited
* Fix #511762 – Multiple selection don’t work well when hitting enter
* Fix #535173 – UI isn’t updated on closing all documents
* Fix #500962 – Further icons
* Fix #475244 – AC_SUBST() not needed after PKG_CHECK_MODULES()
* Fix #518594 – Get rid of .anjuta and follow fd.o specifications
* Fixed #541689 – Filter buttons added
* Fixed symbol-db plugin for threaded libgda calls
* Show all completions even when the editor makes own suggestions
* #541941 – Crash on searching with regular expression
* Fixed #542838 – create_global_tags.sh is creating tags in root
directory
* Added ‘continue global tags scan after abort’ feature.
* Allow to build project outside source directory (fix #540782)
* Fix crash on closing project due to the previous patch
* Add more options for build command: parallel make, keep going on error
and keep message untranslated
* Fix another crash on closing project with a file outside project
* Fix #375640: Allow user to stop a build in progress
* Fix #534566: expand shell variable in configure parameters
* Fix #543889: Crash typing in configuration field
* Fix #522825: Opening files from shell disable build->compile menu
* Fix configuration name not displayed, error when compiling target
outside project
* Fix #543978: GPL license shown in COPYING file irrespective of
which license selected
* Fix #544190: Crash double click on item in stack trace
* Fix #530630: Scintilla hand up after hit return
* Fix #544841 – Cursor set on a wrong line when I click
* Fix several memory leaks in build plugin
* Keep all command data in one object
* Fix #544495: Memory leak
* Avoid using the same function name in interfaces implemented
by the same object to avoid trouble with bindings
* Fix crash on 64bits machine due to the previous change (thanks
Ignacio)
* Fix #543149 Project doesn’t rebuild when file is changed
* Bug #529270 - GSoc: Git Plugin, alpha release 3.
* Add header file to expose libanjuta versioning information.
* Add a preference for the new visible whitespace feature of
gtksourceview
* Pull GIO into the libraries that libanjuta links against. (Bug
#546394)
* Fix #542432 – Svn diff doesn’t work correctly
Convert the output of svn diff from localce to utf-8
* Fix #545673 – A bug in isymbol_get_file function
Use g_file_new_for_uri() instead of g_file_new_for_path
* Fix #546620 – Build- and make dist fixes (with some small changes)
* Fix #420279 – INS and OVR do not immediately change in status bar
* Save files in their original encoding
* Use a fallback dialog if the document was not added to the
document-manager
yet (#545557 – Crash pressing on message view)
* Fix #493818 Close project with opened target properties dialog opened
crash Anjuta
* 545624 – Toolbar broken
* Lots of improvements to symbol-db
* Use uf8_strlen instead of strlen to avoid selection problem with
non-ASCII search strings (see #440637 comment 15)
* New git plugin (Anjuta GSoC project)

Happy coding!

Stormy Peters: Are volunteers more dedicated than paid staff?

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 05:43:16 -0700

As many of you know I'm fascinated not only with how the open source software model works but how companies are unintentionally influencing the model by injecting money. I've shared my research and thoughts in my "Would you do it again for free?" talk.

So when I saw Volunteer staff are surprisingly committed, I was not surprised to see that volunteers were more committed on average than paid staff. I was surprised to see that the study authors decided that it:

could have to do with the fact the volunteers tended to be older. "Older people are motivated to volunteer because of their wish to fulfil an obligation or commitment to society,"

They forgot a few things like:

Were the paid staff volunteers before they got paid? Or were they recruited to the organization with a paycheck?
Do the volunteers get more (or less) say in what they work on?
Are the work conditions and hours the same for volunteers and paid staff?
Do they do the same types of tasks?

...and so on. I would bet that not all of the paid staff were volunteers first, and that while volunteers are drawn to an organization because they believe in the cause, paid staff are drawn because of the cause and the paycheck. Some might do it more for the cause and others more for the paycheck, but it's not so clearly for the cause like the volunteers.

(Disclaimer: I was not intrigued enough to pay $28 to read the original article, so I just read summaries and abstracts.)

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: …

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:08:08 -0700

From here:

[…]

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

[…]

Andrew Cowie: Things to do after you’ve won gold at the Olympics

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:36:50 -0700

Australians Nathan Wilmot and Malcolm Page won the gold medal sailing in the 470 class yesterday. Wilmot announced that he would be retiring (from racing that class, anyway).

When asked his immediate plans, the Sydney sailor replied “getting fat”

— as quoted by Alex Brown in “One pair just had to turn up, the other had to finish breakfast”, The Sydney Morning Herald, Tue, 19 Aug 08, Olympics section, page 1.

Maybe he should try the Michael Phelps diet.

AfC

Andrew Cowie: java-gnome 4.0.8 released!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:36:50 -0700

This blog post is an extract of the release note from the NEWS file which you can read online … or in the sources, of course!

java-gnome 4.0.8 (15 Aug 2008)

Cleanups and fixups.

This release is mostly to push out bug fixes and internal improvements, setting the stage for some major new feature development. We’ve also taken the opportunity to introduce a major change to the way we connect handlers for signals.

New coverage and continuing improvement

With thanks to new contributors Stefan Prelle and Andreas Kuehntopf we have a number of small improvements to the TreeView/TreeModel APIs. As always, Widget and Window saw a bunch of work, with Window.ConfigureEvent now being available and a number of additional property setters and methods relating to window type. Widgets that scroll around a view of a broader underlying canvas have seen a fair bit of activity related to controlling that scrolling.

New features include refinements and new coverage of methods in a variety of lower level classes including that further support drawing operations. Bug fixes, debugging improvements, and defencive enhancements to our thread safety measures have also featured largely.

Signal naming change

The names of the inner interfaces used to specify the prototypes of the methods which receive signal callbacks have changed to the pattern Button.Clicked, this being more appropriate to Java type naming conventions and providing better consistency between the signal name, the method to be implemented to receive the callback, and the method that can be used to emit this signal.

API compatibility to previous releases in the 4.0 series has been preserved. The old signal interfaces and connect() methods are @deprecated. Developers are encouraged to migrate quickly; new coverage will of course all follow the new pattern. Making the transition is is easy, especially in an IDE. Most of the people we’re aware of using the library have already ported their code. Just turn assertions on to double check.

Build changes

java-gnome now defines C compiler flags like GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED to ensure we are not linking against code that will be unavailable in GTK 3.0. Many thanks are due to new contributor Kenneth Prugh for having done some terrific grunt work to prune deprecated classes and methods from our .defs data so that java-gnome compiles without using these APIs.

The build system internally now ensures that multiple runs don’t occur simultaneously, fixing a number of annoyances that cropped up when using IDEs which tend to like trying to frequently re-run the build even if a previous one hasn’t finished.

Documentation, examples, and testing

Our API documentation and the growing set of example code have all been updated to reflect the new signal interface names. Doing so forced us to review a wide swath of the documentation, and so along the way a huge number of minor improvements were made. Given how detailed our JavaDoc is, this sort of painstaking work really makes a genuine contribution to overall quality.

There has been steady growth in our test suite, which is great. When combined with the snapshots used to illustrate our documentation, the coverage level is substantial.

Error handling continues to improve. In the (hand written) public API wrapper layer we do our best to catch misuses of the library before they get sent to the native code. But that’s not always possible, and in 4.0.7 we introduced a mechanism whereby GLib error messages get translated into Java Exceptions and thrown. As of 4.0.8, in addition to ERROR and CRITICAL, we also throw WARNINGs as Exceptions. Getting a stack trace this way has proved very useful in helping developers track down where they are making mistakes in using the library.

Conclusion

You can see the full changes accompanying a release by grabbing a copy of the sources and running:

$ bzr diff -r tag:v4.0.7..tag:v4.0.8

Because of the API changes to signal handling this release touches just about every public class in the library and so isn’t quite as clean (as a summary) as in previous releases — but it does show you everything that changed. :)

Looking ahead

Most of the contributors to java-gnome are working on branches that didn’t reach sufficient maturity to be merged in time for 4.0.8; that’s the way it goes sometimes. Major effort continues on implementing coverage of GTK’s powerful TextView/TextBuffer APIs, along with further drawing capabilities in Cairo and Pango. There have also been a surprising level of interest on other areas of the GNOME stack, with new contributors working on adding support to java-gnome for Nautilus, GStreamer, and even WebKit. Exciting stuff!

You can download java-gnome from ftp.gnome.org or easily checkout a branch from ‘mainline’ using Bazaar:

$ bzr checkout bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline java-gnome

AfC

Hylke Bons: Five new roomies!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:36:49 -0700

A bit of a late post, but I couldn’t get my hands on a camera.
Last week my cat gave birth to seven kittens. :)
Unfortunately two of them didn’t make it, they were very weak from the start. :(
All are well now.

Pictures:

“Mother with five kittens” and “Dad”.

John Carr: A Revelation

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:36:49 -0700

After a long talk with a friend, I felt the need to dig out an old quote that I’m particularly fond of. For my own future reference:

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.” — Agent Smith

Sandy Armstrong: Minor releases: Tomboy 0.11.2 and Tasque 0.1.7

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:36:48 -0700

Hi everybody! Today I made two minor software releases:

Tomboy 0.11.2 features build fixes, a fixed crasher or two, and improved HTML Export functionality.

Tasque 0.1.7 makes translations actually work, and adds cool tooltips to tasks that show associated notes.

Due to time constraints, these releases do not have any silly names attached to them. I'll make up for this next time. ;-)

Christopher Blizzard: building the complete browser for everyone everywhere

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:09:07 -0700

Since Stuart landed the Qt port into mozilla-central the other day and Ryan Paul wrote an article on Qt and Mozilla I thought it might be worth it to add some context to that work.

Ryan’s article contains this quote from Nokia developer Oleg Romaxa:

“Nokia will use the best browser for the job,” he said. “Currently, we cannot make a full-featured and integrated browser with WebKit in mobile. But with Mozilla, we do not need to do anything, we can take existing models and API’s which are available. Also, NPAPI support is already in the Gecko web rendering engine. They are also concerned that WebKit is, to some extent, controlled by Apple, who are in competition to Nokia with their iPhone.”

There are a few important things to note here. First, that Mozilla is the complete package. We’ve got everything that you need to implement a browser. Disk cache, integrated (and well tested!) networking, a super-fast JS implementation, an XML UI markup language (XUL) and a brand that regular humans recognize. Those things mean you can get to market faster as a mobile integrator or developer instead of having to create them yourselves again.

Second, our neutral stance. We believe in the web over any particular platform. From Nokia’s standpoint if you’re building on the same technology that one of your major competitors is leading vs. working with someone who absolutely wants a web browser to succeed across all of Nokia’s platforms - which partner would you choose? I’ve often said “pick your partners carefully” and this has to be an important part of any technology decision making process.

There’s also another interesting flip side to this: who is WebKit’s other major competitor? Apple itself. Just like Microsoft’s push to get Silverlight out in the world, Apple wants people to write apps to their native platform. In this case, the iPhone. Given the strategic value of the native platform as part of Apple’s offerings, their investment in WebKit will (or at least should) always lag behind. We’re investing everything we have in the web and our platform and it’s starting to pay dividends.

And since I have your attention here are two other very interesting checkins: GTK+ and directfb (which people are actually building products on) and worker threads (ala Gears.)

Look at our current (and planned) platform support: win32, windows mobile, win32 + qt, mac OSX, linux + gtk2, linux + qt, qt embedded, linux + gtk2-directfb, x86, ppc, arm. We’re bringing the web to everyone and we’re doing it with a single coherent project with regular releases. That’s what I mean when I say “for everyone everwhere.” The web is bigger than any platform and we’re the embodiment of that mantra.

Mozilla is moving. It’s fast and furious now. And I think we’re just getting started.

[ Update: It was pointed out to me that what I wrote above might be misinterpreted as announcing that Nokia had picked a platform or something similar. Just to be clear that wasn't what I was doing, and as far as I know they haven't. I don't have knowledge about that decision inside of Nokia. Only they know. I was just pointing out what a decision making process might look like and the importance of picking well-aligned partners. And the fact that we're running on more and more platforms these days which is cool as hell. ]

Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen: To Eat or Not to Eat?

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:09:29 -0700

The other day Liv walked up to her day care mom arms stretched forward as if holding a plate: “Du skal smage”/“You must taste”. Like any other would do the day care mom pretended to grab something from the plate and stuff it into the mouth.

This resultet in Liv bursting out in tears. “Nooooo! Don’t eat the kitten!”. Apparently she had said “Du skal ae“/”You must pet“[1].

[1]: The Danish words “smage” (taste) and “ae” (pet) are quite close in pronounciation

Sven Pfaller: libsoylent v0.5.0 “let’s talk about…”

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:09:29 -0700

Version 0.5.0 brings online-functionality to libsoylent. Want to launch a chat with someone? One function call. Want to see who’s online? One function call. Want to see someone’s online-status? You get it.

This release is also the last one for Google Summer of Code 2008. It’s the result of about four months of work. Phew.

The plan for the next release is that it will be a pure documentation and bug-fixing release. Also in that version: libsoylent will stop taking control of strings passed to it.

Changes

implemented Telepathy / Mission-Control / Empathy support
implemented various functions / methods for IM-information (get online-people, get presence etc.)
added communication functions (e.g. launching a chat with someone)
added an example for online-functionality
enhanced documentation
fixed some bugs

Download

libsoylent is available for download at:

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

Contact

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

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

If you found a bug please report it at:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=soylent

More

More information on libsoylent is available at:

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