Entries from January 2012 ↓

Breaking with the “every six months or so maybe” release tradition, here’s the second Bustle release of the month. What’s the new hotness this time? You can record D-Bus traffic by just clicking File → New, and watch the diagram being drawn before your very eyes. After years of on-off development, Bustle can finally liberate you from needing to open a terminal to monitor D-Bus traffic¹. Here’s a super-brief video tour.

Grab it for x86_64 or i486 today! Unlike the previous release, these work on both Debian and Fedora and have a strong change of working on pretty much anything with a modern-ish Glib and Gtk+2². (Thanks to my fellow Collaboran Guillaume for testing these tarballs, and to Scott Tsai for his suggestion.) Source and so on at the usual location.

Today’s surprising Bustle-assisted observation is that switching to and from the Shell overview causes the Shell to retrieve /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout from GConf 29 times. (Presumably that number is proportional to the number of windows I have open?) This was extremely useful for testing the live-logging feature, but is perhaps not ideal in many other ways.

1. “Occupy dbus-monitor” is arguably an unexciting slogan. [↩]
2. …inasmuch as any version of Gtk+2 can be called “modern”, that is. [↩]

It’s a cold evening here in Cambridge, but I’m being kept warm at Collabora Towers, sipping a revitalizing mug of fresh applicative functor soup.

A mere five months after I demoed its features at the Desktop Summit in Berlin, here’s Bustle 0.3.1. Whereas previous versions of Bustle only recorded and showed you the names, senders and destinations of D-Bus messages, this version also records and shows you the contents of the messages.

The statistics page also takes advantage of this new information: you can now get statistics about the sizes of messages in the log. Grab your copy today from the usual location. Beside the source, I’ve also uploaded a 64-bit binary tarball to save you some compilation time. Give me a shout if you have trouble with it. 32-bit version to follow when I get my chroots straightened out.

I have good news and bad news. Good news: here’s a 32-bit binary tarball. Bad news: seems like Debian and Fedora have differently-sonamed libpcaps. Why is distributing software so tedious?

I have been experimenting with using Yesod to throw together a web application or two. My experience so far has been broadly positive—if you like computers to check things for you, I recommend it.¹ That said, watching the full chain of dependencies fly past was moderately entertaining:²

parsec-3.1.2

An excellent parser-combinator library, widely imitated. This wouldn’t be funny, except…

attoparsec-0.10.1.0

Another excellent parser-combinator library, inspired by parsec.

base-unicode-symbols-0.2.2.3

This defines a bunch of Unicode aliases for standard functions with boring ASCII names. Why write:

x `elem` xs

when you could write:

x ∈ xs

Invaluable!

utf8-light-0.4.0.1 and utf8-string-0.3.7

Two UTF-8 encoding libraries!

semigroups-0.8

“In mathematics, a semigroup is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with an associative binary operation. A semigroup generalizes a monoid in that there might not exist an identity element. It also (originally) generalized a group (a monoid with all inverses) to a type where every element did not have to have an inverse, thus the name semigroup.”

1. assuming you like deciphering compiler error messages when the computer says no, that is [↩]
2. for a quiet Wednesday morning… [↩]