SVU's blog

Looking forward, envious

Unfortunately I will be able to join the GUADEC party as late as tomorrow night. For 3 days only. Still, I am going to have a great time in Birmingham.

New Maemo release, now with Skype

While I was traveling through the beauties of Connemara, Nokia released new firmware for n800. Great, of course (gratitude attached). But why is everybody so excited about skype availability? It seems people forget that it is absolutely proprietary technology – from top to bottom. And the saddest thing that skype.com has already put “VOIP=Skype” cliche in many many minds. Just go to the nearest computer store – you’ll find a lot of headsets with the Skype logo over them – and you’ll hardly find a salesman who knows what SIP is. That is dangerous (it is a very hard case of the vendor lock!), and now, with this release, n800 helps these guys. Would it be better if Nokia supplied decent SIP client working out of the box (gizmoproject helps to some extent but it is not installed by default)?

Back in p.g.o

So, thanks to Jeff, planet.gnome.org is using my new blog now and I got my hackergotchi set up.

test

So, first post. Does this mean good bye to advogato?…

07 Jun 2007

GUADEC

So, I got British visa – which means I’ll be there!
Unfortunately, my stay (in the Etap hotel BTW) will be
short: Monday night to Thursday night. But I hope it is
going to be great anyway. Especially, I am looking forward
to meeting some people which I only know by email/IRC.

See you all there!

17 May 2007

GNOME

During discussion with murrayc on IRC, it was found the
position of GNOME regarding the dynamic library versioning
is somewhat wague.
Now I wonder, does GNOME respect libtool
versioning scheme or not?

17 May 2007

Keyboard

Slowly, I am starting to enrich base.xml with additional
meta-information (and use it in gnome-keyboard-properties).
As a first step, I’ve added non-translatable (who would
translate “Microsoft” to Russian anyway?) vendor name. The
model choser on my HDD looks like this:

Thanks to GObject (namely, g_object_set_data), the
libxklavier
ABI will not change, while API will get a set
of #defines.

PS. Richard,
it is not a problem to automate chosing XKB model using HAL.
All you need is a table mapping USB (or any other HIDdy bus)
IDs to XKB model names. And a bit of code in g-s-d.

PPS. And it seems I will never ever ever ever get my
hackergotchi setup on p.g.o.

02 May 2007

DMCA

Did you hear about the number
13256278887989457651018865901401704640? Or its hexadecimal
representation 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88
C0? If you put it on your site, you may be considered
violating DMCA, hehe. Because this number is used in HD-DVD
encryption. If you do not believe me – use Google..

26 Apr 2007

xkeyboard-config

Yesterday I started keyboard
model compatibility page on fd.o. The idea is to have a
list of (all) real models compatible with existing
xkeyboard-config models. People who use (in X configuration)
a model different from the real keyboard name – I kindly ask
you to update that table (only if all keys on your keyboard
work as expected). Please keep the alphabetic order whenever
possible.

Also, from this table it is easy to see that most of the
keyboards do not have geometry descriptions (I know, it is
just a decorative thing but still …). Contributions are
mostly welcome, as always. I realize, creating geometry
description is not a picnic (and I cannot recommend any
tools) – but some people still manage it.

Thanks.

10 Apr 2007

Just in case someone missed it, yesterday I published the text
explaining various libraries involved in the keyboard
handling in X and GNOME.