Crispin Flowerday

There seems to be some confusion over the new style epiphany bookmarks, they are not hierarchical in the traditional sense, and are still based on tagging bookmarks in topics. What is new however is that the menu will automagically generate a hierarchy based on the topics selected.

The code has been maintained by Peter Harvey for a while now, and he has an excellent page explaining it.

My Nokia 770 arrived on Thursday, and it is a brillant product. It works wonderfully, although I had a bit of ‘fun’ getting it talking over a WEP encrypted ad-hoc network to my laptop at work (and then using windows’s connection sharing to get the internet).

The most annoying thing I have run across so far is an incompatibility between breezy and the usb connection. Basically there is a patch in the breezy hal that makes gnome-vfs always try and eject USB devices, however the Nokia 770 doesn’t like that and nautilus brings up an error dialog when you unmount it.

To fix this, you can put the following in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-nokia770.fdi

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <!-- Don't eject the Nokia 770 -->
  <device>
    <match key="info.category" string="storage">
      <match key="storage.bus" string="usb">
	<match key="storage.model" string="770">
          <merge key="storage.requires_eject" type="bool">false</merge>
        </match>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

(I’ve raised a bug about this).

Finally after months of waiting, I got my Nokia 770 developer code today, and have put the order in, so hopefully in 2-3 days I should have one of these devices. The timing is excellent as it fits in with the end of my current project at work, so I should have loads of time to hack the thing

Congrats to tko and the rest of the Nokia crew for getting the thing out.

I attempted to demo Mono extensions at the summit, but it seems that I really hate public speaking, and went through everything way too fast.

Basically, Epiphany has extensions, which at the moment can be written
in either python of C. It can also dynamically load new ‘loaders’
which can implement support for other types of plugins. I have now written a loader for Mono extensions. An example extension is:

using Epiphany

namespace Example
{
   public class Plugin : EphyExtension {

   public override void DetachTab (EphyWindow window, EphyTab tab)
   {
      System.Console.WriteLine ("Mono Extension: Detach tab");
   }

   public override void AttachTab (EphyWindow window, EphyTab tab)
   {
      System.Console.WriteLine ("Mono Extension: Attach tab");
   }

   public override void DetachWindow (EphyWindow window)
   {
      System.Console.WriteLine ("Mono Extension: Detach window");
   }

   public override void AttachWindow (EphyWindow window)
   {
      System.Console.WriteLine ("Mono Extension: Attach window");
   }
}

These 4 functions are the callbacks from epiphany to the
extension. Using these, you can insert menu items, and basically do
anything other types of extensions can do. The entire Epiphany public
API is exposed, allowing you to do complex things.

What I tried to demo was a simple plugin that added a menu item that
simply loaded the web page when it was clicked on. This has caused me
all sorts of headaches as the documentation for calling mono from C is
almost non-existent. Miguel has promised to send me what they have
got, so I’ll take a look at that.

There are still some problems with the reference counting, and I think
there may be some memory leaks, but those sort of details can be
sorted out later. In the meantime, you can use the epiphany-mono
module in GNOME CVS to try (and write) the mono extensions.

After months and months of deciding what to do, I finally decided to go to the Boston Summit. Sadly I have to pay for it out of my own pocket, but still, it will be the first gnome meeting I will have been to, so am quite looking forward to it (especially as the entire galeon dev team will be there).

If anyone knows of any cheap hotels that are convenient please let me know!

For ages now, Ubuntu has been failing to apt-get update properly. I have finally tracked down the problem, and it is the useless “transparent” proxy that my ISP (NTL) use. It has totally broken If-Range support. Basically it doesn’t return any HTTP response headers, and so apt gets confused.

I have raised an ubuntu bug in the hope that an option can be added to avoid using If-Range. And I have sent an email to NTL to let them know of the problem. I’m not at all hopefull that NTL will get it fixed, but perhaps the Ubuntu peeps will take pity on me

Sadly, the building work is in pretty much a worse state than when I left, now we don’t have a usable shower, and there was no hot water this morning. It’s now almost 4 weeks, and I am starting to get really annoyed.

On a brighter note, we won the Ashes. Cricket is one of the worlds most misunderstood game, sure they play for 5 days, have a break for tea, and then end in a draw, but it is still a tense game when played between 2 evenly matched teams. A few good balls is the bowling sides needs to make the batting side collapse in spectacular fashion (Australia on Sunday). And the batting side just needs a few dodgy balls to get the score climbing (Pieterson hitting them for 6 today).

All in all, a good summer for the English cricketors.

For the last few weeks, I have been having some building work done in my rented house. We are having a brand new bathroom fitted. Unfortunately the builders keep running into problems, first they found a pipe leaking which mean’t that they needed to replace a ceiling in one of the downstairs room. And now, apparently, they can’t turn off the mains water, so they had to call out the water board.

All this was happening while I was in Monza on holiday, so I got back to a real building site, with mains water turned off, no hot water, no tiles in the bathroom, and builders rubble everywhere. I just hope they get all this sorted by the weekend as I’m off to see my parents now for a few days.

It will be nice when it is all finished, but at the moment I can’t see when that will be

I seem to have a love, hate relationship with evolution. I do like the emailing interface, but it just seems so full of bugs, my most annoying ones at the moment are:

• It crashes picking up my work email (not a problem as I’m on holiday at the moment) – Bug 314199 (Fixed apparently)
• The preferences dialog has a really annoying resize when it appears – Bug 272967
• I can’t find the UI to configure the weather calendar
• It randomly seems to lose the paste buffer when composing emails – Bug 313430 amongst others
• It doesn’t filter for SPAM in unselected folders until you click on them – Bug 257730
• Why if I deselect the “Weather calendar” plugin does “Weather” still show up in the calendar list?
• It fails miserably to appear on the right workspace loaded from a saved session – bug 224608
• Spawning a second instance of evolution doesn’t clear the startup notification prompt when the window appears – Bug 271851

I’m seriously amazed that any companies roll this thing out as standard, it just doesn’t feel ‘polished’

Recently I upgraded to Breezy, which uses gcc 4 by default. Libxml2 uses a type called xmlChar everywhere, which handily is an unsigned char. Previous versions of gcc seems quite happy at silently casting from a char* to an unsigned char*, but Gcc 4 complains. In Galeon, we build with -Werror (only in maintainer mode), the combination of this meant that Galeon failed to build.

The solution, do through and add casts to xmlChar* everywhere, which ended up as about 250 different places. That was one of the most boring things I have done