Last night, I discussed with Philip about gnome’s api and it’s future.

As you can read in his blogs, there are some problems with wrapping the C API to modern programming languages:

1. Lists (double-linked and single-linked)
2. Trees
3. etc.

For libanjutamm to become a really good wrapper, I would have to copy lots of code from tinymail which is not really a good idea. I was thinking about creating a libtreepointzero which does implement lists, trees and possibly some other stuff in a way that modern programming languages can you it. Philip already wrote most of the stuff for tinymail so the biggest advantage would be that it can be used by other applications.

If there are other people interested in this library, it would be important to have language bindings in a very early stage to be able to change the API in favor of having better language bindings.

This will also give me a nice point to demand a changed gnome 3.0 api.

BTW, Prashanth Mohan, what strange university are you at?

Why and when?
To me, Gnome 3.0 (or ThreePointZero) looks like a phantom. There are several thoughts filed about it in the wiki but it’s completly unclear when work on 3.0 will be started and what will be the real goals. Nobody knows if 3.0 will come after 2.18, 2.20 or 2.22.
I personally think that Gnome 3.0 should come after 2.18 because the platform is mostly cleaned up and it’s really time for a break!

How I would like to see 3.0

• Platform: Developers hate platform changes! So little changes here would be great. There are a few things which need integration for example GUniqueApp, a gnome-vfs replacement and of course all the deprecated stuff will disappear. A little API clean-up here and there would be good but I do not think that the changes should be that big as from 1.4 to 2.0.
  Imporant for 3.0 is that people get more aware that for usual Desktop applications it’s much easier to use Python, C# or C++ instead of C and that (Gnome == C) != TRUE. That would also mean that really all needed libraries are covered by the language bindings.
• Desktop: Most agreement seems to be in using a more document-oriented approach. This does not mean to force the user to use this approach but it should be made easier. There is this very cool gimmie project which might replace the panel somehow.
• Integration: It would be really cool if the user would not know wether an application he uses was made for XFCE, Gnome or KDE. It should simply work and look like any other application on the Desktop. FreeDesktop.org has come a long way but for 3.0 we would have the possibility to throw much incompatible ballast away. Of course this is an not a Gnome-only problem.

These are just my thoughts and don’t give to much about them because I am not a gnome core developer and I may even have missed lots of things that are already planned for 3.0.

BTW (and for me not to miss the link), Maintainer looks really cool!

This is a reply to Rodney Dawes’ post on DRM:

Why DRM cannot work
DRM wants to make people able to hear their music or view their videos without seeing or accessing data. While it is no problem to encrypt data in a save way, it has to be unencrypted if the user wants to do anything useful with it. If it is unencrypted* the user is able to do anything with it that he wants and that’s not what the music industry wants. Houston, we have a problem.

* in the player, the hardware, in the air, wherever

Of course you can try to make it extremly difficult for the user to break your system but this leads to the crappy implementations you see all the time.

Why DRM is obsolete
There is a much better technique as DRM, that is signing the sold music/videos with a secret, unremovable key. This can be done to mp3 for example. Now, the user can do with it’s data whatever he wants but once he does something what law does not permit, the right owner knows who is to judge.

The only music shop where I buy only music using exactly this signing technology which was developed at the Frauenhofer Institut (where mp3 was developed, too). And therefore it is the only webshop where you can listen to legal music on Linux without doing any crap.

After registering at microsoft and downloading Vista RC1 yesterday (2,5 GB) I decided to give it a try today. I had not installed Windows on my Notebook after my harddisk died last time but had left 10 GB free space in the partition table.

Installation
After booting up from the DVD and waiting some time a complete graphical installation wizards starts. You have to fill out your language, your Key and accept the license agreement. There are two installation modes, “Update” and “Expert”. “Update” was not availible as I did not start the installation out of Windows. In Expert mode you have exactly one choice, the partition information. There is an fdisk front-end that looks quite good though it does not know about linux partition types and gave me a bad error trying to format a linux partition with ntfs. Anyway, after deleting my spare partition and letting it create it’s own one, Vista was installed without demanging my other linux partitions while overriding grub.
Two reboots are necessary until the installation is finished, after the first you can enter your username and choose the background picture.

Hardware
As expected, anything worked out of the box like it did with dapper. I have a Centrino notebook which has no special hardware.
- The WLAN drivers seem to be better in Windows because they connect faster. I hope this will improve in Edgy
- Suspend to RAM is also faster on Windows

Software
There is lot of stuff preinstalled I would rather not need, like Media Center. The new Internet Explorer looks interesting but I immediately downloaded Firefox 2.0 Beta which works very good, too. All in all, Windows looks very media centered and wants to lead you to buy DRM-stuff very often.

The “Run…” field in the menu has been replaced with something which is more or less simular to the Deskbar-applet in Gnome.

Look and Feel
If there is some bling in Vista, it seems to be disabled with my graphic hardware. I really look forward to AIXGL in Edgy which hopefully supports my hardware.
The default theme looks much cooler as the ugly used in Windows XP. IMHO Gnome should also use a better default theme, maybe even parts of this suggestion.

Conclusion
I am a bit disappointed so far. I had expected that they would include really cool features in Vista which would really make me think about switchting back to Windows but they did not. There is nothing with is not also availible in Ubuntu Dapper.

Mit Erstaunen habe ich heute bei Heise Online gelesen, dass endlich das erste DRM-freie Musikportal in Deutschland eröffnet hat. Nicht nur das, sie haben auch wirklich gute Musik und lassen den ganzen Chartkram erstmal komplett weg. Die Preise sind zwar auch nicht günstiger als bei anderen Portalen, aber wenigstens kann ich die Musik gemütlich auf eine CD brennen, auf meine iPod überspielen oder auf meinem mp3-Server lagern und das alles völlig problemlos unter Linux. Wenn man die Preise mit denen von Amazon vergleicht, spart man aber dennoch ein paar Euro auch wenn man natürlich keine CD mit Verpackung erhält.

Ich hoffe das Portal wird ein Erfolg, deshalb will ich den Link auch nicht vorenthalten und entschuldige mich schon mal für die Werbung: Akuma.de.

More or less the whole day I improved the gtkmm patch to be able to build without the Atkmm api which is particular usefull on platforms like Maemo.

I had to fight a lot with m4, perl and the bad error messages of the C preprocessor. It only tells you that some #ifdef was not closed but it does not really mention where. After I finally also got the conditional building using automake/autoconf working, the updated patch is now in bugzilla.

Today, I made a patch for Bug #349358. The patch itself is quite trivial but I took me some time to find out why all this happens.

In the meantime im trying to fill my brain with stuff related to production engineering for my exam on monday. There are just 300 pages left I have to learn by rote, so it might become a very funny weekend.

So I am finally here! For those who do not know me, I am a maintainer of Anjuta and work for Murray Cumming’s company Openismus on several GTK/GNOME related things.

Today, I created a new patch for #346896. I have to thank Dodji for his tips and apoligize that it was not at all a gtksourceviewmm problem. I have attached a screenshot for those who need some bling!

So jetzt bin ich endlich komplett in meiner neuen Wohnung angekommen. Wirklich schön bis jetzt und die Einrichtung haben wir auch halbwegs hinbekommen. Zwar noch keinen Tisch, aber wenigstens schon eine Bar!

Das einzige Problem bis jetzt ist der DVB-T-Empfang. Was im vierten Stock 300m weiter noch super funktioniert hat sieht im Erdgeschoss ziemlich mau aus. Aber wir haben immerhin eine Stelle gefunden an der es halbwegs funktioniert.

Meine neue Adresse:
Friedrichstraße 38
91054 Erlangen

I am currently trying to fix Bug 436896 but encountered that gtksourceviewmm has a problem with SourceView::get_source_buffer() because this always fails. I will have to fix that first before I can go on because there is no other way to set the SourceLanguage