December 18th, 2009 by patrys
Disclaimer: before you call me a freak, keep in mind I do know none of this is possible. At least not now and not without hacking half of the desktop. Nonetheless it was an awesome dream.
That’s right, I’m blogging about my dream from last night. Seriously. And it sure was an awesome dream too!
Imagine a daemon playing a number of tracks in perfect sync. Think old trackers here (ah, the times of .MOD, .S3M, .IT, .XM etc.) with — say — 8 tracks, all muted for now.
Now teach the little daemon in your head how to track window focus. Have it know if you’re editing a file or if you’re doing voodoo in your terminal. Make it whistle different tracks depending on what is happening at the moment. What I mean is make it slowly fade the current track into the next one.
Now teach your little pet how to track long running background tasks. Make it whistle an additional tune while you’re burning a CD, compiling a kernel or downloading a large file. So if you have a long lasting operation, you have 2 tracks playing at the same time.
Now add notification icons. Say having a non-dismissed notification adds an additional track that slowly fades in when the first icon appears and slowly fades out as the last icon goes.
Like it? I thought it was an awesome dream. And an awesome idea too. Sort of how LittleBigPlanet’s dynamic music tracks work.
Posted in GNOME | No Comments »
December 16th, 2009 by patrys
What I want for Christmas is simple:
an awesome Python completion module for gedit.
KTHXBAI
Tags: gedit, gtksourcecompletion, gtksourceview, python
Posted in GNOME, gedit | 1 Comment »
July 12th, 2009 by patrys
Guys and girls, stop picking on non-technical aspects of RMS’s recent speech, pretty please. We’re the ones who fight for freedom every day. Let’s try to give people the freedom of speech even if we think they are wrong.
I do agree that RMS is not the voice of us all. In fact during recent years I’ve found myself in disagreement with his statements just as often as I appreciated the rest of his talks. I also don’t see Mono as a threat to any of us (and especially not us here in Europe).
Now to the sexism. While RMS is certainly not the most polite person on Earth, girls and ladies among the crowd should be perfectly capable of complaining themselves if they see fit. You know what is sexist? Treating all the women among us as a weaker sex. As another species. Now that’s sexism. It sure makes one feel special. But special as in that cute retarded kid next door everyone says hi
to.
We’re software engineers, artists and writers, not wrestlers. Girls do know how to use words and if you want them to feel at home, let them protect that home.
And for $deity’s sake, RMS is not an effing pope. You can just e-mail him directly with your complaints, you don’t have to start a public campaign against him. If all fails you can just not invite him next year or something.
Peace 
Update: Oh, Christian is right too.
Tags: gcds, rms
Posted in Uncategorized | 34 Comments »
September 29th, 2008 by patrys
Today we got a report for bug #554256 in Hamster. The first day of week was reported as Sunday for some locales that certainly used Monday. I did some research and found that before Hamster relied on a simple check to determine the result:
- Run
locale first_weekday (by the way, we have to use os.popen here as these don’t seem to be accessible from Python)
- If the result is 1, use Sunday, else use Monday (literally, it would treat 2 and 6 as Monday)
That seemed to work at least for some countries but was wrong which became apparent when more people started using Hamster (and to put myself in shame: I didn’t notice this before but it was also broken for me). It seems the correct version is:
- Run
locale first_weekday week-1stday
- Parse
week-1stday as date with %Y%m%d
- Move the result
first_weekday - 1 days forward
- Check the weekday of the result
Rationale:
While locale manual pages are horribly outdated, all web searches point to week-1stday as the beginning of the first week of tracked Unix time. first_weekday is the 1-based offset of that week’s start day. It seems it’s only there so you can specify first_weekday=2 and first_workday=1 for the rare cases where working days span across two weeks.
Please do correct me if this is wrong as all of the above are assumptions based on glibc code and Google results. Hope the above helps someone in the future.
Update: vuntz was kind enough to point me to gtkcalendar.c, part of GTK+. It does the same thing described above so it seems the method is correct.
Tags: l10n, locale
Posted in GNOME, Project Hamster | Comments Off
August 5th, 2008 by patrys
Project Hamster is now part of GNOME! Along with Empathy and some blessed external dependencies. Do not underestimate them however for they are some truly powerful libs including libcanberra, Clutter, Conduit and PolicyKit.
Some new pains are now (temporarily) part of my life. As PH’s father, Toms, is away I am the one responsible for the SVN migration, releasing 2.23.6 and cooperating with i18n and a11y teams. I think we should start by making the stats accessible but I’ll concentrate on moving to GNOME infrastructure for now. Hope the rest of the team gets their SVN accounts up and running soon.
As for Empathy, great stuff. If you like it as much as I do, you can help me convince Xavier to make it a bit prettier and more readable. Hooray for lobbying!
Edit: hamster-applet 2.23.6 is out, following the upcoming GNOME 2.23.6 release.
Posted in Empathy, GNOME, PolicyKit, Project Hamster | Comments Off
July 16th, 2008 by patrys
PLD Linux finally moved to the awesomeness called Launchpad. Back in April it was a beautiful green site with a slick interface. Now we get an acid-propelled trip to the Mac OS 9 era:
Seriously, WTF is the blue bar? The ugliest tabs ever. And where did the action box go? Now you can probably get used to it but here comes the beta:
Guys, the 1995 is calling and wants to have its sites back. WTF? It’s not only ugly, what the hell happened to all the navigation? Hope it never makes it into production. Please, I can has the green Launchpad? Kthxbye.
Posted in Launchpad | 1 Comment »
July 14th, 2008 by patrys
Jimmac’s post got me thinking. His script did the job for a single icon. Why not improve upon it to allow multiple icons sharing a single SVG file? Immediately decided to give it a go and after a few iterations the result works as follows:
- You start by creating a template SVG.
- For each icon (not size) you create a layer
and set its name to context/icon-name. You can use a different syntax but it has to contain at least one slash. The rest of the layers are treated as drawing aids.
- For each layer you create a sublayer and give it a name starting with
plate
. Inkscape requires you to have distinct layer labels so a simple plate won’t do for multiple icons but you are free to use names such as plate for foo.
- The plate consists of a set of rectangles. Each rectangle will result in a separate PNG and the size is taken verbatim from the rectangles (so make sure you don’t end up with ten decimal places in width or height).
- The plate also needs two text objects: one with label set to
context and one with label set to icon-name. The text you put there is used to create the directory structure.
- Save your template to a directory called
svg. Make sure you hide the plate layers before saving.
- Download the Split Icons script.
- Run the script. If you pass a path (or several paths), it will only process the files from the command line. If you don’t pass anything, it will process the whole
svg directory.
- Draw art!
Here’s a template example.
PS: b.g.o upload sucks. It will only accept .gz files and then will strip the dot from the original extension.
Update: updated the script to handle the new format invented by jimmac. See the example above for details.
Posted in GNOME, icons | 2 Comments »
June 27th, 2008 by patrys
These days most of the buzz is around choosing an appropriate DVCS for GNOME. Like, dude, what the hell?
It’s not like we’re choosing between CVS and SVN where one is the other plus cool features minus broken design. Today we should concentrate on using the most widely adopted DVCS, not on one with the cutest syntax. Features across the board are actually pretty much the same, the rest is just sugar coating.
Just take git and wrap it, add plugins, make it look like Bizarre or Peculiar. We certainly don’t want to tell new contributors to download and build 20+ source control tools just to build a single GNOME app from trunk. I can tell you for sure most of the devs want to get stuff done and they don’t give a poo about repository storage formats. We want to be able to easily commit changes and generate diffs, having a bunch of PostIt notes with various DVCS incantations is far from desired.
Tags: bazaar, dvcs, git, GNOME, mercurial
Posted in GNOME | 1 Comment »
June 24th, 2008 by patrys
To add an example to my last note, here’s what happened recently.
One user posted the following:
I’ve noticed FOO desktop is no longer able to mount removable drives. I get the following:
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable no <-- (action, result )
What do I do?
And here’s the proposed solution:
Just edit /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf and add the following part:
<match action="org.freedesktop.hal.*">
<return result="yes"/>
</match>
And they lived happily ever after, right? Wrong. This is a great example of why asking the uneducated crowd to help you solve technical challenges is the best way to shoot yourself in the foot.
I doesn’t take rocket surgery to figure out that PolicyKit won’t allow certain actions to be accessed by certain users. In this case it only allows active local sessions to mount removable volumes. What constitutes an active local session? A session logged in locally (which is the case) and connected to ConsoleKit (which is not the case since FOO desktop environment does not seem to use ConsoleKit).
Now if the user asked in the proper place (file a bug or send the question to the proper mailing list) instead of the forums there would be two good answers:
- Teach FOO desktop how to register itself with ConsoleKit (by fixing the code or using means of
pam_consolekit)
- Tell PolicyKit to allow certain users to access the action (
polkit-auth --user foo --grant org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable)
Now do you see the problem? The original thread in a more illustrative form: if my aunt comes to visit and she does not have the keys, how does she come in?
Oh, that’s easy, just remove the locks.
Posted in ConsoleKit, GNOME, PolicyKit | Comments Off
June 23rd, 2008 by patrys
Many people point to places like Ubuntu forums or Fedora forums or insert-your-distro-here resources as an example of how great Linux support is. It goes like this: if you have a problem just go and ask other people, wait for their replies and assemble the arcane scripting languages to publish a definitive HOWTO. This way if something doesn’t work you have a high chance of finding a thread or two with all the necessary scripts and workarounds. Great, huh? That’s where people fail.
Having a usable desktop system is all about having stuff working out of the box, not about being able to find a good enough workarounds. The latter often add to the confusion and FUD by offering the right console incantation backed up by technical descriptions that are utterly wrong. If you have a problem, file a bug. If something does not work, file a bug. If you see a ghost, call Ghost Busters. Filing bugs means fixing stuff at the proper place and by people with the right knowledge.
If you are afraid to file bugs upstream (where the software authors live), file them in your distro’s bug tracker. Nice developers should be able to forward it to the right place (and Launchpad makes it so much easier by allowing one to track upstream bugs). Just file it. Sure, do check if the exact same bug was reported earlier, do check if you have the latest packages available. But when everything else fails, file a bug. The worst it can get is that some developer will close it as already fixed or ask you for further details.
There’s no other way the developers know about your problems. It’s not like they spend 12 hours a day reading various forums and looking for problems to solve. In other words: if you don’t file a bug you have absolutely no right to complain about how your issue was not solved in the latest release. Be it Linux, GNOME or Windows, we can’t fix stuff unless someone tells us it’s broken.
PS: blog posts are no better than forums.
Edit: I certainly didn’t mean to ditch GIMP HOWTOs and other resources showing you how to use the tools effectively. The point is HOWTOs are not the proper way to get the stuff working as intended.
Posted in GNOME | 1 Comment »
