ken’s blog

XChat-Indicator

I recently released a plugin for XChat-GNOME (and XChat) which adds support for the messaging menu in Ubuntu. This was a fun little side project of mine, I use xchat-gnome very heavily and have really been craving integration with the messaging menu.

When I started working on this, I wanted to make sure it was a standalone plugin that didn’t need to be built inline with xchat sources and didn’t require changes to xchat. In the process I ran accross a couple pieces of the XChat plugin API that hadn’t been implemented in xchat-gnome yet. This meant of course I needed to patch xchat-gnome, and send those patches upstream.

Both of these were trivial changes to xchat-gnome, and I didnt expect any problem getting them accepted. I had to implement the “GUI FOCUS” command which has been merged already (bug).   And I had implement the win_ptr argument to xchat_get_info, which lets the plugin get a pointer to the GtkWindow (bug).

Overall I am very impressed with the plugin API for XChat, it is really awesome to be able to get access to the GtkWindow.

If you are running Lucid or Karmic, you can install it from from my xchat-gnome PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ken-vandine/xchat-gnome
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xchat-gnome-indicator


If you use xchat instead of xchat-gnome, just change the package name in that last command:

sudo apt-get install xchat-indicator


To get the source, file bug reports or feature requests, check out the project page on launchpad.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009

I really enjoyed my week in Gran Canaria with all the desktop hackers, it was a great event. Such a great location for a conference. It is great to see such innovative stuff going on for the desktop. This year it was a joint event between GNOME and KDE, which I think was a great idea. However, I really don’t feel like I had enough opportunity to mingle with KDE folks and attend their sessions. I hope we can do more in the future to encourage that.

I think the most interesting thing for me was Telepathy. The telepathy sessions were very impressive, and I spent some great time with the awesome team at Collabora, keep up the great work! I’ll just say it… tubes just make me drool, so much potential to be tapped into. Hopefully after this week, more people are inspired to go out and create amazing stuff that uses telepathy.

Zeitgeist really interests me as well, I have been wanting an easier way for users to interact with their data. Personally I think all interaction with data should be contextual, present the data to the user based on what they most likely want. I can’t wait to see Zeitgeist become integrated in the desktop and really start to blow the socks off of our users.

GNOME Shell is certainly interesting, I am very excited to see people trying to really change they way the desktop behaves. Lets not be afraid to shake things up a bit. However, I am not sold on it yet though. I think there are many issues that still need to be worked out, can’t imagine it can be designed properly and implemented in time for 2.28. I know it won’t be default in 2.28, but I think some of the basic work flow stuff needs to be nailed down before it can be released. It really seems far from that now. It will be exciting to watch it evolve and see how it ends up.

Last but certainly not least, CouchDB. There was some cool demos showing live bookmark syncing in firefox as well as contacts shared between both GNOME and KDE applications (evolution and akonadi). Using CouchDB as a common desktop database for storing configuration and application data makes it very easy to synchronise that data between multiple computers. Just imagine having the same bookmarks, contacts, photos, music, etc all shared between all your computers automatically.

Of course there were plenty of great parties and hacking sessions. The Igalia and Collabora parties were a blast, and two nights we spent hacking on stuff in the hacking room all night. Who needs sleep?

GNOME Dev Kit gets more help!

The GNOME Developer’s Kit is still alive, thanks to Zhang Sen. My free time has been getting tight, and I am very pleased to have been getting some great help from Zhang. In fact, he is doing the daily maintenance now. I am still wrangling isos and virtual images, and Zhang is doing the daily triage of build failures (the hard work .

Not only has he picked up the daily maintenance, but he has also converted the recipes to use git. He has also packaged gnome-shell, very cool stuff.

NC Jaunty Release party

The NC Loco has planned a Jaunty release party at the Flying Saucer in Raleigh next week.  If you live close enough to Raleigh, please join us.  Let celebrate, Jaunty is going to be a great release.

What: Jaunty Jackalope Release Party

Where: Flying Saucer
328 West Morgan Street@Harrington
Raleigh, NC 27601
919-821-PINT (7468)

When: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 6-9pm (or until we just can’t party anymore)

Please RSVP to akgraner [at] gmail [dot] com so we can let the Saucer know if they need rope off more space or not.

And don’t forget… bring your friends!

GNOME Journal Needs You!

I am very excited to see GNOME Journal getting some traction again, come join us and make GNOME Journal great again!  Check out Paul Cutler’s post for details.

We need a hug!

Tomorrow (April 2, 2009) is the next Ubuntu Hug Day, focusing on xorg-server and xserver-xorg-video-intel bugs.  Jaunty is really shaping up to be a great Ubuntu release, but there are still some intel driver related bugs we really want to squash.

If you have a little time to help out, your hug can help improve Jaunty.  Here are some stats going into this week’s hug day:

* 49 New bugs need a hug.
* 103 Incomplete bugs need a status check.
* 81 Confirmed bugs need a review.
* 16 Bugs with patches that need to be reviewed.

Remember, every hug counts!

GNOME 2.26, live demos available!

GNOME 2.26 is out, including live demos. We have an assortment of virtual machine formats as well as installable DVD isos. Come and get em’!

Pidgin sucks less for IRC

Now that we have the message indicator applet in Jaunty, I decided to give pidgin another try as an IRC client. A little background for those that have not had the pleasure of hearing my constant complaining about how pidgin just isn’t an IRC client, I love xchat-gnome for IRC. I have tried pidgin on many occasions, mostly because I would really prefer use a single app for IM and IRC. Pidgin just never felt right to me, mostly because I felt like it was impossible to follow as many channels as I am generally in.

This has changed now, not because pidgin has gotten better at IRC, but because of the message indicator applet. The message indicator grabs notifications from notify-osd that are based on human to human interaction, and stores them in a little applet in the panel that indicates what might need your attention. Currently only evolution and pidgin support it, but hopefully many more soon (gwibber, please gwibber!). Now when people highlight me in a chat, IM or private message me I see the nice little indicator with a star showing it needs attention.

I am very happy to say I can use Pidgin for my daily IRC use… Yay for a single client finally!

I am sure nobody will be surprised to hear that the indicator-applet is included in Foresight as well, just add it to your panel.

It’s a journey

No, not Journey the hit band from the 80s… wow that takes me back to damn near (or not that near) the beginning of my journey!

I have spent a wonderful 3 years working at rPath, which ended in January. Having made some great friends at rPath, of which I am thankful, and having had some great experiences too. I will miss my rPath family, but will surely stay in touch. Tomorrow I start the next leg of my journey, with Canonical. I will be a Desktop Integration Engineer, working on the desktop team to integrate the fine work being done by the Desktop Experience team into Ubuntu. This is a very exciting opportunity for me, I have really been doing this for the past 4 years working on Foresight Linux. Taking cool stuff people have been working on and integrating it into a distro for broader consumption.

Over the years working on Foresight I have formed some great relationships with our Ubuntu brothers which has lead me to join their team. Joining the Ubuntu Desktop team will change my day job yes, but it won’t change my role or participation in the other work I do outside of that day job. I will still be maintaining Foresight Linux, the GNOME Developers Kit, PackageKit, and whatever other upstream projects I can cause trouble with.

Python 2.6 has landed!

Our favorite snake has found his way in to the QA branch of Foresight. Everyone running QA, please update, test and file bugs in FITS.

This was by far the biggest task associated with the upcoming 2.1 release, so things are shaping up nicely.