I have been desperately attempting to contact anyone from facebook to help figure out the best way to solve the problem and have been mostly ignored.  I did get one reply from their developer relations stating that they don’t “support embedding video content in our website at this time”.  Clearly they didn’t even read my email

I understand their need for allocations and to throttle as needed, however the numbers really don’t add up.  They are really skewed, there is one API request that we make which is way over the allocation, but the others are barely even on the chart.

Facebook just announced “Operation Developer Love” where they state they will stop ignoring developers and triage bugs.  Please help us get to the bottom of this by voting on this bug.

Enough with the feel good stuff… What do I “really” do?

My role with Ubuntu is described as an Integration Engineer, what the heck does that mean?  Glad you asked, I work on the Ubuntu Desktop team, to help integrate the amazing work going on in the Design, Desktop Experience, and Ubuntu One teams into Ubuntu.  I help package their software, distribute updates, and advise and assist with design/architecture as it applies to how the software will be consumed by the user.  I care very much about how new features will affect existing and new users and how they will discover the new features.

As you can probably imagine, this is a lot of fun for someone like me.  I get to play around with new stuff that isn’t ready for the distro yet, helping out with testing and figuring out how it impacts our users.  Being a naturally born tinkerer, this is simply an awesome experience for me.

I also drive the Social from the start initiative in Ubuntu, trying to bring social experiences closer to the desktop, making the integration of their daily computer usage and their social life feel more natural.  I have very strong beliefs about web technologies and experiences, buy me a beer sometime and I can rant for a while.  Long story short, to provide the best possible experiences we need to remove the need to use the browser.  I don’t hate the browser, we can’t live without it.  But the best way to interact with your friends on social networks needs to be more contextual.  For example, you see a friend posted some new photos in an album.  You should be able to view that album in your local photo album viewer, as well as tag friends and comment on photos.  Why not do it in the browser you ask?

1. Your browser probably already has a dozen tabs open doing anything from shopping for new shoes to making a reservation for dinner this weekend.  Do you really need another tab viewing photos?  What does that have to do with anything else your doing in that browser session?
2. Perhaps your viewing photos of a friend’s kid’s first birthday party, you might want to view photos of your own child’s first birthday to reminisce.

Trying to make this possible, I spend as much time as I can contributing to Gwibber, trying to generalise as much as I can to make it a desktop service that can be easily used by any application.  Gwibber is a natural fit for this, since it aggregates multiple services, which is key to pulling this all together as a central service to handle this for the user.  Gwibber is also a great upstream project to contribute to, lead by the always awesome Ryan Paul.  He’s very open to my ideas, and easy to work with.  At the beginning of each development cycle I get to brainstorm ideas with him and figure out how I can best contribute to making the road map a reality.

For someone like me, it is pretty easy to have fuzzy lines between what I do during my day job and what I do just for fun.  In the evenings or over weekends, when I am not off hanging out with the family, I usually end up hacking on Gwibber or libgwibber for fun.

A brief introduction to libgwibber, a library (C, vala, mono, and python) for using the Gwibber Service as well as provide some GTK widgets to easily embed into existing GTK applications.  Bindings for as many languages as possible was very important to me, I really want to make it as easy as possible for any desktop application to use Gwibber as a desktop service.

The API currently provides access to the common things an application developer might care about:

• signals for service availability and account changes
• refresh
• start and stop gwibber-service
• retrieving accounts
• toggling send_enabled status on an account
• looking up an account
• posting a status update
• URL shortening
• retrieving the version of the current running gwibber-service

I just finished porting the MeMenu from the Ayatana project to use libgwibber, which will be in the next release.

So far libgwibber-gtk includes just one widget, a posting entry.  This widget includes:

• A TextView
  • with an overlay character counter
  • built in URL shortening
  • integrated with NetworkManager, disabled when in offline mode
• AccountTargetBar
  • includes toggle buttons for each account, connected to signals to track the current status globally
• Send button

Some examples of the Gwibber entry widget can already be found embedded in the Ubuntu Software Center and the Ubuntu One Music Store plugin in rhythmbox.

Other widgets I hope to add in the future include:

• stream view (message view of any stream)
• stream navigation
• search
• friend browser (browse friends based on type of content, like friends with images that can be displayed in shotwell or f-spot)
• profile (view your own or someone else’s profile)
• comment (comment on various types of shared content, photos, links, etc)
• image uploader

I would love suggestions for these or others, please let me know!

Some GTK examples:

C example

entry-c.c
To build entry-c.c:

gcc `pkg-config --cflags gwibber-gtk` entry-c.c `pkg-config --libs gwibber-gtk` -o entry-c

Vala example

entry-vala.vala
To build entry-vala.vala:

valac --pkg gtk+-2.0 --pkg gwibber --pkg gwibber-gtk entry-vala.vala

Mono example

entry-mono.cs
To build entry-mono.cs

gmcs -target:exe -out:entry.exe -pkg:gwibber-gtk-sharp-0.0 entry-mono.cs

Python example

entry-python.py
Nothing to build, so just run it with:

python entry-python.py

Here are some examples of using libgwibber with python and gobject introspection:

# Import Gwibber using introspection
from gi.repository import Gwibber

# Get a service object
service = Gwibber.Service()

# Get the current Gwibber version
version = service.version()

# Make the Gwibber service refresh
service.refresh()

# Post a status update to all your enabled accounts
service.send_message("Something very interesting here, blah, blah, blah")

Some applications I would love to see use libgwibber:

Shotwell and F-Spot: Browse online photos from your social networks from right inside you existing photo library tool.  Including the ability to comment, tag, like and share.

gnome-utils: Add image upload support to gnome-screenshot

Evolution: Display the last status update from a contact when viewing an email or browsing contacts.

GTG: Status updates when tasks are complete

I am generating gtk-doc docs for libgwibber, but they aren’t very useful yet.  libgwibber is written in vala and I haven’t figured out a way to get docstrings to pass from vala to the generated C.  If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know.

Hopefully people find libgwibber useful, please let me know if you have suggestions, bug reports, or want to contribute!

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

I am trying to resist the urge to make predictions for 2009.  Let’s just say we’ll kick ass in 2009, and leave it at that.