Danielle's technical stuffs
It turns out I’m really good at putting information into Tomboy and really bad at reading it back out, or changing it.
I was going through old notes today, and besides the mass of phone numbers, promo codes, interesting URLs and backtraces was a ToDo list from around 2008: learn Telepathy.
Something to check off 🙂
In light of OSCON adopting a code of conduct and anti-harassment policy, I was wondering, and even asked today, if the Desktop Summit has adopted an anti-harassment policy. Unfortunately I’m not going to make it to the Desktop Summit this year, but I searched a bit and all I could find was Dave Neary promising that Desktop Summit would adopt one [1, 2].
Can anyone tell me if the Desktop Summit has adopted a code of conduct? and if so, where I can find it? or if not, why the heck not?
Update: I have been contacted by an organiser to say that a draft attendees code of conduct has been written and will be published before the conference. Thanks for getting in touch so promptly 🙂
Update 2: the policy has now been published.
My Thinkpad X200s is playing up, in that it will no longer suspend and sometimes the wireless stops working until I reboot. The suspend issue looks like an issue with the Thinkpad TPM, but that’s meant to be resolved, and I could have sworn it was previously working while I was still running this kernel.
I checked the workaround was enabled (it is). Blacklisting the modules or disabling the Security Chip in the BIOS causes it to sleep, but not wake up. Someone suggested upgrading the BIOS firmware, but I’ve always been wary of doing this, I’ve bricked machines before.
Anyway so that I can put some computation that suspends in my bag, I installed Fedora 15 on the Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 I have. The machine itself is a little slow, but GNOME Shell runs pretty well. The trackpad drivers have improved too. Less weird jumping around and two finger scrolling.
Managed to crash the Fedora installer twice, it crashes when it tries to delete extended DOS partitions (automatically or manually). Had to delete my old Meego-created partition tables by hand for it to work.
After looking at my screenshot of the Empathy accounts dialog yesterday, compared with the GNOME Online Accounts dialog, I realised that the Empathy dialog was missing the attractive GNOME 3 add/remove buttons.
Fixed it using Bastien’s patch from Totem:
Today at the IM, Contacts and Social hackfest we talked about supporting chat accounts in GNOME Online Accounts.
I did some work exposing accounts from GNOME Online Accounts to Telepathy (Bug #652543). It still needs a little bit of work, but from Empathy it looks like this ((ignore the other Google Talk entry, that’s my non-GOA chat account)):
With this work Empathy will prompt for the account password when there is a GOA account. Guillaume is currently working on extending Empathy’s authentication handler to authenticate automatically using the credentials from GOA (#652546).
Bastien is extending GOA to include a Chat account type so that you can control whether to enable chat from Online Accounts (#652574).
Also, I’m not really that wild on electric blue. If someone wanted to do a version of Adwaita in purple that would be really awesome.
I’ll pay you back by adding cool features to Empathy or something 🙂
I am currently sat in Dubai airport on my way to the IM, Contacts and Social hackfest in at Collabora’s office in (real) Cambridge. Hopefully this week will get some cool progress made it integrating Telepathy and Folks into GNOME 3.
My attendance is sponsored by my employer, Collabora.
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In recognition of the occasion, I actually started running GNOME 3. I’m enjoying it, except for missing Cantarell ((maybe I’m just missing a package, I’m running the gnome3-team ppa on Ubuntu natty)) and this focus follows mouse bug. I am looking forward to the reappearance of the world clocks.
Also it seems you can no longer make the screen lock on suspend, which feels like a big deal, because I’m the kind of person to leave a sleeping laptop lying around. If no one already has a good solution to this, I might write a fix using a gnome-shell extension.
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It used to be that you could set different timeouts for screen blanking vs. screen locking. I’ve lived without this feature in recent years by remembering to press the lock-screen button on my keyboard, but I had this strange idea on the plane that screen locking can also be tied-in with IM presence.
At the moment the screen blanks after the idle time, which is equivalent to the away status in Telepathy (the computer is idle, save some power, also if the user has sound turned off, she won’t see your text). Whereas I wanted the screen to lock automatically after an extended period of being away, the xa status in Telepathy?
For the moment (it may change this week) Empathy is responsible for setting the presence in Mission Control, setting away in response to gnome-session and setting xa itself. Either the session could add a concept of extended away, which I could wire up to lock the screen. Or I could listen to the presence change from Mission Control. This could always be another shell extension.
I’m hoping that someone already has a solution to this, but I couldn’t find one via Google Code Search.
What I want is a GtkCellRenderer that can render markup which contains links, exactly like a modern GtkLabel can. If it can also render small 16px inline images, that would be pretty awesome bonus.
Before I write it myself, does anyone already have one of these (with a GPL-compatible license)?
Some time ago, I was asked if I would write a chapter on Telepathy for a new book on software architecture: The Architecture of Open Source Applications.
Finally today, the book as been released. You can read it online (or jump straight to my chapter) or purchase a hardcopy ((If you do purchase a hardcopy, buy it from Lulu. All the proceeds from the sale of this book go to Amnesty International, and they are given more money if you buy it from Lulu than from a vendor like Amazon.)). The work is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, and I believe translation is especially welcome.
I’ve not read the whole thing yet. Some of it I last read in draft. I have to find a quiet evening, but what I’ve read so far has been quite interesting. Authors talk about the mistakes, solutions and workarounds they ran into when putting their software together. It’s nice to know you’re not the only one who occasionally hacks together something you’re just not that proud of.
Thanks should go to the editors, Amy Brown and Greg Wilson, as well as the other authors, reviewers and contributors for making this book real.
It seems there are no utilities around to localise currency (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m writing in C), so I’m having to write my own. Regardless of the system localisation, I want to be able to refer to a currency (for which I have the currency code) in a localised way.
Thus, what I’m looking for is for your 3-letter currency code, how do you refer to positive and negative numbers? For example, in AUD it would be “$1.25” and “−$1.25”.
