What’s up?
3. February 2012
So as usual I need an excuse for not blogging for so long. This times it’s work, moving to Berlin and some other things.
Anjuta
While I haven’t contributed that much code in that cycle apart from minor bug-fixing there have been a couple of nice contributions:
- Sébastien Granjoux did amazing work to improve our project management which is now much easier to use and more powerful
- Marco Diego Aurélio Mesquita (what a name) improved the glade integration by allowing to automatically connect widgets and code
- But I guess I should cover all this in a “What’s new in Anjuta 3.4″ post pretty soon
Gdl
The often forgotten but still heavily used docking library…Inkscape forked that library into their repository and added some fixes for them that were never magically contributed back and at some point (especially with the gtk+3.0 transition of gdl) I became very hard to merge between the projects. However, lately Alex Valavanis stepped up and ported most of the Inkscape patches back into gdl master and hopefully Inkscape will be able to use stock gdl (or probably better gdlmm) really soon.
Gnucash
As I tried to organize all my banking stuff I made some contribution to the best linux banking software in the area of HBCI/FinTS which is a german standard to securely initiate online transactions with your bank. I hope to find some time to actually implement SEPA (read EU- or international transactions using IBAN and BIC) at least originating from german accounts. But I have to think about how to compute (98 – (x mod 97)) for x being larger than a 64-bit integer and while I found some strategies on the web this was too much math for a late evening. Before you ask, this is part of the way an IBAN checksum is computed and I need this checksum because at least for Germany the IBAN can be generated as a combination of account number and bank-code.
Brno Hackfest
/me will be there saving the world or drinking beer, maybe both.
Laptop
After having been for a couple of hackfests which my much loved white netbook (read: “Oh, it’s so cute…”) I though it’s time for a real (male 
laptop. It doesn’t seem very easy to get a reasonably priced laptop without a Windows license or preferably with a preinstalled and working Linux. After some searching I ended up buying a ThinkPad Edge 320 from linux-laptop.de which arrived pretty quickly (apart from some problems with the postal service). I ordered it preinstalled with Linux Mint after having only used Fedora for a while.
The installation was complete but the fan was constantly running which annoyed me but can be fixed by installing the thinkfan utility and now things are quite again! I reported this back as I kind of assume things like that installed when I order a laptop with operating system.
Code-In time!
27. October 2011
It is time for Google Code-In again! In short, this is the little sister of Summer of Code for high-school students. Instead of one big task for a student it consists of many small tasks that can be finished in a couple of hours/days. From the experience of the last years we can expect highly motivated and skilled students there, that are eager finishing as many tasks a possible.
This is a great opportunity for GNOME to invite new contributors and it also helps us to fix all these small things we don’t have time for usually.
But…
We need tasks!
In order to participate we need to provide
at least 5 tasks in all of the 8 categories sorted by difficulty level
and therefore we have already setup a wiki page that is slowly filling up with tasks. There are categories for Code, Documentation, Outreach, Q&A, Research, Training, Translation and UI therefore everybody should be able to contribute something.
Deadline is Monday, 2011-10-31!
For more details, please check Andre’s post on DDL and if you have any questions, please ask Andre, me or preferably post on gnome-soc-list.
Montréal – shit…
8. October 2011
So the Boston Summit happens in Montréal between 8th and 10th of October and I arrive in Montréal on…11th of October…
Well, sometimes things just go wrong but I couldn’t change my travel plans easily and when I left home Montréal summit was still in planing stage.
Anyway, if somebody is still around in Montréal, drop me a note…
Leaving on a jet plane
25. July 2011
On August 3rd I will leave for a two and half months round the world journey. This is also the reason why I won’t attend Desktop Summit this year 
In case you still want to reach me there might be some chance to catch me by mail but don’t expect and immediate reply.
Some places I will visit include the Australian east-coast (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane), southern Japan (Tokia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) and briefly the U.S. (San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York). In case you feel I should say hello to you and some point you may of course drop me a line. Interested parties might find some photos on Facebook (or Google+?) at some point.
These are my last months as an official student! In November I will start my first “real” job as a system engineer in Berlin building trams and trains!
Have a nice summer (or winter for those on the southern hemisphere)!
Opt-Out of LinkedIn
5. July 2011
As I tend to get LinkedIn invitations but are generally not interested in joining that network and/or make connections with somebody I found a good article how you can stop LinkedIn from sending you messages:
http://www.electrictoolbox.com/opting-out-linkedin-invite-emails/
I would definitly prefer if they had an opt-out link in the e-mail footer like about everybody else has but I hope this it least works. Hope this is useful for some people!
Fixing suspend on Samsung NC10
26. June 2011
In case you (still) own a Samsung NC10 netbook and suspend stopped working with Fedora 15 there is a pretty simple workaround:
Enable “EDB (Execute Disable Bit)” in the Advanced BIOS options which will enabled DEP and as a side-effect magically make your NC10 wakeup currently after suspend.
I personally also updated to the latest BIOS version but it is not sure if that is necessary. See the bug report for details.
GNOME 3 and beyond
5. May 2011
Actually I am been pretty busy writing my diploma thesis so after the Toronto hackfest there wasn’t much activity from my side regarding GNOME. However, as I finally unsubscribed from gnome-shell-list it’s time to write something about my personal experience with GNOME 3 and the feedback that was mentioned on the list.
Personally, I use GNOME 3 on my Desktop and Netbook for some weeks now, both with Fedora 15 Alpha/Beta. It took me some minutes to get used to the concept and reorganize my workflow a bit but overall the experience was quite good. I especially like the way multiple monitors work, so I can always have empathy with IRC and chat on my secondary monitor. This is particularly useful as I definitely use much more work-spaces now than before to organize my tasks. There are still some rough edges, especially when it comes to all the “Finding and Reminding” stuff and the chat integration. Actually, I really don’t want to have both empathy and the shell displaying my chat messages and I don’t want to have the “Contact List” around all the time. But luckily some discussion started on desktop-devel-list to improve the situation. The point annoying me most is that I always have to press Alt/Meta key to switch off my computer as I have connected it to a plugbar to save the energy consumed in standby normally by the computer and the monitors and my secondary monitor doesn’t go into sleep mode when connected via HDMI. Another reason for not using standby is that I cannot sleep when the blinking “Standby-LED” of my desktop is lighting the room. I want a “Power Off” menu item – Period!
Besides my personal experience I followed gnome-shell-list for quite a while until the signal-to-noise-ratio became much too low. I would really like to have some kind of gnome-shell-devel-list that just summarizes all the technical discussion that only seems to happen on IRC currently as IRC is hard to follow normally. Anyway, I want to summarize some of the more interesting feedback:
- Window title bars seems to be too big for many netbook users and are seen as a waste of space. Allan has a blog post explaining the reasoning behind this though but it might not be ideal for small screens. I know that I reduced the font size on my netbook to have more space.
- Merge title bar of maximized windows into the top panel. This goes in the same direction as the first one and seems to be useful for smaller screens especially as the top panel is quite empty usually in GNOME 3.
- Dont’ hide stuff in “System Info“: Actually this control-center panel groups a lot of stuff like “Favourite Applications”, “Fallback mode” and (guessed?) “System information”. Seems this is poorly labeled and people are actually not finding what they want to change. Things should be grouped differently here.
- Persistent notifications are difficult for external developers that are used to the old-style notification system. That probably would be that bad if it would be easier to reach developers by mail as it is quite hard for external people to ask on IRC (in the right time-zone). As mentioned before, it would be important to have developers read & answer at least the technical posts on gnome-shell-list which doesn’t seem to happen. (See this thread).
The rest was a lot of noise in the style “I don’t like it”, “Fedora vs. Ubuntu”, “GNOME vs. Unity vs. KDE”, “But *I* want a task bar“, “I still don’t like it”, etc.
GNOME3 – for the developers
7. April 2011
Together with the release of GNOME 3 the new GNOME developer center was launched today. This is just the first step to make GNOME 3 a great developer platform but I hope it is already a big step!
There is still a bunch of things missing, like proper API documentation for languages using introspection (Javascript, Python) but things got a lot better with the new platform overview and will certainly improve in the future.
I have to especially thank Fréderic Peters who did all the dirty backend work on the infrastructure in the last days & weeks so everything could be launched on time.
However, this wouldn’t have been possible without many amazing people (in no particular order): Andreas Nilson, Julie Pichon, Phil Bull, Shaun McCance, Daniel g. Siegel, Patricia Santana Cruz, Ekaterina Gerasimova, David King, Jon Nordby, Chris Kühl, Jonh Wendell, Andre Klapper, Germán Poo and P. F. Chimento, hoping I didn’t forget anyone. And of course the beautiful cities of Berlin and Toronto!
Thanks!
Toronto Hackfest
22. March 2011
Tomorrow will be the last day of the Toronto Documentation Hackfest so I would like to summarize what happened to the developer documentation:
developer.gnome.org
A bunch of tutorial-style demos (online preview) have been added to the gnome-devel-docs though I would wish there were even more. If your favourite programming language is missing demos it would be great if you could add them following the style of the existing demos. P. F. Chimento did a great review of these demos. Thanks!
Germán worked on updating the platform overview and I guess he will blog about the results himself. The website that is currently shown as image on developer.gnome.org should be mostly in a good state though some links need to be checked and I hope the marketing-team will review it once the awesome F?ederic Peters gets around setting up an instance for testing somewhere.
Help on setting up the development environment
Furthermore I created a bunch of wiki pages explaining how to install a decent development environment for GNOME 3. It currently contains information on Ubuntu and Fedora that has to be tested and I would love to see people adding more distributions.
Those installation instructions are linked from developer.gnome.org and the demos itself so we should take care that they always work and install the versions required.
Related to that, Michael Terry from Ubuntu made sure that the gnome3 ppa will have new version of Anjuta, Glade and Devhelp so that people can follow the tutorials and have an easy start on GNOME 3 Development. Thanks a bunch!
Anjuta Help
The Anjuta manual is quite outdated so I stubbed out a new task-based help for it. Unfortunately I won’t have time to fill that with content but it would be great if people would fill this with live. It is really easy with the mallard format and the help of the GNOME Documentation Team.
These and that
Of course, there are plenty of things discussed in a hackfest between the lines like Ubuntu/GNOME relations and GNOME3 in general. As we have people from all side involved it is always amazing how sane everybody is about all this and how few practical problems exist despite all this flame-war.
We switched to the hotel today as the internet connection at the university broke down (they apparently fixed that already…):
Drag and Drop signal handlers
19. March 2011
For people closely following the development of Anjuta that feature is actually quite old as I presented it on GUADEC but it didn’t get included until the upcomming 3.0 release.
Thanks to GtkBuilder signal autoconnection you actually don’t need to care about manually connecting signal anymore but can defer that job to glade. And as glade is integrated pretty much into Anjuta you also don’t have to care about creating correct prototypes for the signal handlers as you can just drag them into your code:
Before:
This does not only work for for C but also for Vala and Python. It is actually even clever enough to detect if the handler is already present and to add the handler to the header file if the header file is open.
Documentation Hackfest
Apart from that I am sitting at the documentation hackfest in Toronto fixing up the developer demos we started in Berlin and fighting with various programming languages and bugs.
