Author: carlosg

A plea for help

After some months of apparent inactivity in gnome-system-tools, during the last couple of weeks I’ve been moving to HEAD the changes done in the experimental branches and closing heaps of bugs. Finally today I’ve been able to make releases for system-tools-backends 1.9.0, liboobs 0.1.0 and gnome-system-tools 2.15.0.

These releases mean a significant step forward, s-t-b now features a DBus interface (Thanks to Net::DBus, courtesy of Dan Berrange, thanks!), liboobs provides a GObject interface totally abstracted of the communication layer, and g-s-t takes advantage of it.

This also means that lots of code have been refactored/deleted, this specially concerns me in the backends. Given the wide range of distros it supports [1], and my impossibility to test them all [2], I’d thank if anyone could test the tools in their favorite distro. For the record, I’ve already tested them in Debian/Ubuntu and everything worked as expected :). If you want to help, I’ve setup a wiki page explaining how to compile & test g-s-t HEAD, so please if you find something that doesn’t work as expected in your distro, file a bug or send me a mail (carlosg at gnome dot org), I’ll take care of fixing it.

[1] Really, lots. But testing with latest Ubuntu/Debian, SuSE, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Fedora, … should cover 99% of the code paths

[2] Liboobs eases the creation of automated tests, but I’m also lacking enough HDD space

Pacing deserted roads to find a seed of hope

Life

Said and done, I’m leaving my job in a couple of weeks.

Concert!

Quite fun overall again, lots of friends came to see us and it seems they’ve enjoyed too (unless they lied to us! ;).



/me singing (badly), Merche to the right



Merche and I again



Merche, David at the drums and Kike at the bass guitar

Too bad that there isn’t any good photo of Felix (the other guitarrist)!

BTW, Ploum, thanks a lot for the feedback and for the links! I’ll have to search more sites like these :).

Ready to break through the prison wall

Hmm, 7 months without posting, I’m beating all records…

Life

Work-wise, sucking, I badly need a break, and I think I’ll take it soon.

Besides that, since last post I joined a music band [1], recorded a demo and played once in concert, which was actually really really fun, I loved the experience :).

In fact, we’re playing again this saturday (4th Feb), so if you live anywhere near Madrid, don’t forget to drop here!

[1] Spanish only ATM (sorry) and missing a recent/decent photo, that one is with the former guitarrist…

GNOME and hacking stuff

I haven’t been giving much love to the gnome system tools lately, unsurprisingly, I missed the schedule for including all the features I wanted for 2.14 (mainly liboobs, with improved communication, error control, etc…), but there were much progress in this and I hope to see it in 2.16.

Instead, during the last months I’ve been focusing mainly in GtkAssistant (now in CVS! sweet!) and in GtkNotebook drag and drop support (still ongoing, but progressing nicely), it’s been very entertaining and instructive.

Should do this more often

Finally moved my butt and made some system-tools-backends and gnome-system-tools releases (2 of the latter, don’t ask why), they mainly include the new services-admin UI, besides some other goodies and squashed bugs.

There have been some changes in the services backend, none of these should cause any harm, but if you use gentoo, SuSE, slackware or FreeBSD and want to help, don’t hesitate to test the new tool and tell me how it went :)

that’s all, thanks!

Finally got some time to work on new possible features for GST 1.4, I’m giving (at last!) some love to the services-admin tool, so maybe could be an option for the Ubuntu people or for GNOME itself.

It’s still in some need of coding love, and I should add categorise at least the most used services for providing useful descriptions, so there’s still work to do.

Calum: Maybe what I missed when adding accessibility support to the gnome-control-center shell were some docs about where to begin when adding accessibility support to custom widgets. The better source of information I could find was other widgets’ code, as the API may look quite raw if you’re unfamiliar with it :)

Finally had time to apply NotZed’s suggestions (Thanks!) to the small evo plugin I wrote to remove duplicates, and as of evo 2.3.2, plugins can be compiled independently, eliminating the need of patching evo sources, really good stuff :)

IMHO, the next great step would be to create a small repository for plugins (i.e.: a evolution-plugins-extras VCS module), cluttering evo sources with plugins that will be barely used might not be very desirable, and OTOH cluttering the CVS with small software pieces like this would be crazy.

So, while I don’t know where to put the thingy, the code is here. Enjoy!

Kudos to evolution developers

It’s all I have to say, they have created an excellent development platform with e-d-s and the plugins stuff:

The other day, while evo was downloading mail, I managed to break download operation, leaving me with about 1000 duplicated mails. Thanks to the cool work of the evo people, making a plugin for removing duplicated mails has surely taken me less time than removing the mails by hand (the code is barely 100 lines). There are still some issues to sort out, but they’re mostly ui-wise.

You can get the code and the glue patch with evo here.

Getting a name

The plan I’ve briefly talked about in other ocassions (more details in the wiki) is getting a good shape, now I have a dbus-ified backend object for the shares list [1] and a library that allows just doing:

int
main (int argc, char *argv[]))
{
  GMainLoop  *loop;
  StbSession *session;
  StbObject  *shares_list;


   g_type_init ();


   session = stb_session_new ();
  shares_list = stb_shares_list_new (session);


   g_signal_connect (G_OBJECT (shares_list), "changed", G_CALLBACK (foo), NULL);


   ...
}

just to get a list of shared folders, sadly the hardest part right now is being to get a good name before creating a CVS module (libSTB isn’t neither nice nor descriptive), so I brought up the issue in the #gst channel and some ideas for the name came up:

  • BackWrap (from Backends Wrapper)
  • GarBack (something about my back? I swear I didn’t tell it! :)
  • LibNacho (again my surname got mixed, but this name is tasty)
  • GoBack (GObject backends?)
  • LibOObs (Object Oriented backends system)

Honestly, I have to admit that I like the last one, it’s fun and descriptive, and I don’t get disturbed if I read “boobs” somewhere (nor to touch them, if the carrier allows me to do so), but people may find it offending [2], so I guess that I’ll have to keep thinking in a name and fall back on this one if I don’t find anything better… any suggestion? :)

[1] Of course, in an experimental branch
[2] remember the “pair of testicles” issue?

Other GNOME stuff

both Guadec-ES and Guadec are getting nearer, I’m impatient :)

Concerts

It seems to be a good season for Heavy rock concerts in Madrid/Spain!, I’ve already got tickets for Porcupine tree + Anathema, Soul Sirkus, and Lorca rock Festival (in Murcia, featuring Dream Theater, Iron Maiden, Running wild and others), I’m missing another good music festival in favour of Guadec, and had to refund the In extremo ticket, due to their concert being cancelled…

Congrats to Jeff and Pia!

GNOME

At last (with the rest of the 2.10 packages) the gnome-system-tools 1.2.0 have been released, lots of hard work and bugfixing have gone in this release cicle, so I hope that people will appreciate it.

Software Patents

What can I say… it’s a shame to live in the banana republic these days :(

And the big thanks goes to…

  • The GNOME hackers, translators, documenters and artists, they’ve done an awesome work in the last 6 months
  • Daniel P. Berrange, who has created all I was missing for experimenting with my crazy plans, I really hope that these bindings will be in FreeDesktop someday soon