Author Archives: admin

telepathy-glib GObject-Introspection and TpBaseClient

Posted on May 3, 2010 by admin

In Telepathy libraries such as telepathy-glib, telepathy-python and telepathy-qt4 there are two kinds of API. There's what we call low-level API, which is a direct wrapping of the D-Bus API exposed by Telepathy components and automatically generated from the Telepathy … Continue reading →

Posted in example code, gobject-introspection, hacking, javascript, telepathy, work | Comments Off

a Telepathy blinkenlights "plugin"

Posted on April 2, 2010 by admin

A request that people occasionally make is that they would like a “blinkenlights” plugin for Empathy, similar to the one for Pidgin. The nice thing about using Telepathy, is that for any case where we simply want to observe the … Continue reading →

Posted in example code, telepathy, work | 1 Comment

empathy: the future's gonna be awesome

Posted on March 26, 2010 by admin

So we've been doing a bit of work on Empathy lately (but too late for GNOME 2.30 I'm afraid), and trying out some crazy new ideas. One of these Favourite Contacts. You can now mark contacts in your contact list … Continue reading →

Posted in empathy, gnome, hacking, work | 1 Comment

tramtracker in maemo extras-devel [plus some crap about Optus]

Posted on January 8, 2010 by admin

Finally got a version of tramtracker (a client for tracking Melbourne trams) and python-suds uploaded to Maemo's extras-devel. There are a couple of issues, the known ones relate to this bug. In my head I was having a race to … Continue reading →

Posted in hacking, maemo, optus, tramtracker | Comments Off

fixing button theming with GtkBuilder

Posted on January 2, 2010 by admin

This is a bit icky. It would be neater if the Python bindings exposed hildon_gtk_widget_set_theme_size(), but not much. So, to fix the button theming if you've created your interface with GtkBuilder, it looks something like this: # these aren't exported … Continue reading →

Posted in hacking, kludge, maemo, python | Comments Off

happy new year

Posted on January 1, 2010 by admin

Had a pleasant day off eating snacks, watching The Pretender with friends and hacking on my tram tracking app. I added geolocation, which meant needing to test on the device, so I had to package up python-suds for Maemo (git-buildpackage … Continue reading →

Posted in hacking, maemo, packaging, python, tramtracker | Comments Off

a hacky way of monitoring messages in Telepathy

Posted on December 29, 2009 by admin

Sometimes people come up with some creative solutions to solve their problems. The correct way to monitor data, such as messages, coming from Telepathy is to write an Observer, however sometimes you just want to get a feed of all … Continue reading →

Posted in hacking, python, telepathy | Comments Off

this is what goes around; and this.. this is what comes around

Posted on December 21, 2009 by admin

It used to be that no applications would compile for 64-bit architectures, because everyone was trying to cram pointers into ints. Today I had the opposite. The head of some code I'm working on wouldn't compile in a 32-bit environment, … Continue reading →

Posted in c, hacking, programming | Comments Off

Melbourne Tram Tracker for the N900

Posted on December 20, 2009 by admin

So Collabora's robotic and non-robotic overlords very graciously bought everyone on staff an N900 for Christmas. In my opinion, it's actually a very nice phone (although possibly a little on the large side); but the let down is there just … Continue reading →

Posted in hacking, maemo, melbourne, python, tramtracker | Comments Off

a threaded processing queue in PyGTK

Posted on December 18, 2009 by admin

I'm currently writing a PyGTK client that needs to make network requests using a library that doesn't integrate with the GLib mainloop (python-suds), so I found myself wanting to be able to make network requests without blocking the mainloop, and … Continue reading →

Posted in example code, hacking, maemo, python, threading | Comments Off