Month: July 2004

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Late Night Hacking

Another night of late hour hacking session.

Trash applet

I’ve hooked up a working version of Michiel’s trash applet; it now has a stub menu entry that recalls the online help, and I also added the possibility to open up a Nautilus window with the trash: URI.

GNOME Trash Applet
Uh oh, time to empty the trash bin…

libgnomepim

I’m still learning ORBit2 implementation of CORBA, in order to write the user daemon serving the GnomePimClient object. I thought about dumping the entire concept of the user daemon and using FAM to watch and update the XML files.

JavaScript

I’ve never learned proper JavaScript programming; I always dissed it, maybe beacuse of the bad habit, in the DotBomb era, of using it for everything (especially when not needed), making web pages practically unusable. Last night I had to write a simple countdown function which periodically updates the content of a XHTML entity; in just ten minutes I grasped the basics of the Document Object Model structure exposed inside the language interpreter, and had my function basically being written by itself. JavaScript (or, better, ECMAScript) surely has come a long way to finally being usable for serious client-side web programming.

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Trash Applet

Skimming through the gnome-devel list, I found the announcement of a simple Trash applet for the GNOME panel, made by Michiel Sikkes (here‘s the site, with a screenshot).

I think it’s a great idea: sometimes the Trash icon is simply buried under screen clutter, especially with the new spatial paradigm that Nautilus uses. The panel, on the other hand, is always on top.

Since Michiel’s code is something short of a proof of concept, I fleshed it out, adding state recognition, and some menu shortcuts which will open a Nautilus window showing the trash contents, or empty the trash bin. It works pretty well, for a two hours hack. ;-)

This actually is the first time I touch some C code, besides a project for a class final exam, in a very long time – I had almost forgot how much fun is hacking just for fun.

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Gnome2::Print (and future plans)

Gnome2::Print

It’s been a long way, but in the end the Perl binding for libgnomeprint (and libgnomeprint-ui) has been finally completed. Hurray for me. :-)

I’ve just committed the code that binds Gnome2::Print::Paper and its methods, inside the 0.93 release of the Gnome2::Print module. I began maintaining this module the past august, soon after this email; soon after that, I began the Gnome2::GConf binding, that ended up inside the modules included inside the GNOME Platform Bindings. I’m proud of both, even though I rarely used the Gnome2::Print binding – I’m not really into printing data.

Future

As soon as I return to own my life, after this semester’s finals, I’ll be able to begin working on a GStreamer Perl binding set. I already gave a preliminary look on this library, but didn’t really dig into it. I will also try and complete the GTK2-Perl tutorial, which is still missing a large chunk of chapters.