August 2005 – Context Switch

August 31, 2005

xavier

xavier

Originally uploaded by ebassi.

A couple of weeks ago, me and Marta had some spare time on our hands, and since I had “retired” my old server (wolverine) before leaving for Amsterdam, I needed a new linux box doing all the dirty stuff for my home network.

I also had a personal project of doing a case mod, so I decided that this was the perfect occasion to try and do something neat and geek.

I retrieved two boxes full of various bricks of LegoÂ®, an old motherboard with a P2@233MHz and 128 MB of RAM, the old 15GB hdd from wolverine[1] and the ISO image of the first Debian Sarge disk.

After a full afternoon for building the case, and another day for configuring the whole thing, here’s xavier, the new server for my home LAN.

[1] which got upgraded to a 80GB disk and declared as a “workstation” when I switched from a poorly updated Debian Unstable to a brand new Ubuntu Hoary Hedgeog.

August 24, 2005

GoogleTalk

Seems that this is the new hotness.

I’ve had a GMail account for some time now, and GMail really changed the way I use email everyday – at least until Google added POP/SMTP support, then I got back using a MUA (at least when I can use either my notebook or my workstation). Now, with GoogleTalk supporting Jabber, I registered a new account on Gaim, and here it is:

ebassi@gmail.com

(which, incidentally, is also my main email address for all the development-releated issues)

August 18, 2005

RecentChooserWidget/1

The EggRecentChooserWidget code is in CVS since a bunch of minutes, complete with a context menu allowing the removal of items from the list, the ability to add a custom RecentManager instance instead of using its own (still requires some polishing, but the interesting bits are there), and filtering based on a custom function. Also, I’ve fixed a nasty bug in the parser library that left garbage at the end of the storage file when removing items.

The next step is to allow the creation of RecentManager objects (maybe using runtime loadable modules) so that Gnome could use a GnomeVFS enabled resource monitoring in order to track location/file changes. This would require the implementation of RecentManager as a GInterface, as a plausible approach.

Anyway, now I’ll work on an applet/technology demonstrator, in order to have more to show to the Gtk people.

August 15, 2005

RecentChooserWidget

I’ve pretty much finished my EggRecentChooserWidget widget, which (I noticed) is roughly modelled on the Document History window of the Gimp:

Also, as you can see, I’ve enable the filtering code, so that you can now filter the contents of the recently used resources list on the fly:

Display all recently used resources.

Display today’s recently used resources.

The EggRecentChooserWidget will also have a dialog window (EggRecentChooserDialog) and a button widget (EggRecentChooserButton), much in the same philosophy of the GtkFileChooser widget set. In the source tree I’ve put a simple test program which basically recreates the same Open Recent menu of the Gimp (except for the little preview, which is replaced by the icon bound to the file’s MIME type).

There are some rough edges I’d like to address before committing the code, but I plan to have the widget and the dialog inside CVS by this week.

On a related news, I’ve began porting the panel to the RecentChooser and RecentManager code; other than changing the Open Recent menu widget with the EggRecentChooserMenu one (complete with a menu item launching the EggRecentChooserDialog dialog in order to display all the recently used resources), I plan to add a list of recently used applications inside the Run Application dialog; using this list as a default, we could hide the currently used entry.

August 9, 2005

Wild life

You can’t say to have done any good deed, unless you saved a week old cat from death.

August 9, 2005

Check out

I’m back from Amsterdam with a ton of pictures (most of them really ugly: I’m not much of a photographer), that will be uploaded on Flickr, if and when I find the time/bandwidth.

Since my parents first, and my brother next are leaving for their holidays too, me and Marta are going to stay at my parents place for a week or so; unfortunately, here I don’t have a broadband connection but just a 56k one – and that is paaaainfully sloooooow: how on earth did we use it and survive after using it? And mind you me: I’ve used any connection from a 14.4k to a T3 connection, only that now I have a couple of CVS trees to look up and a box to maintain up to date.

Anyway, I’m preparing coffee and chocolate for a long night of downloads – just like when I dist-upgraded my old Potato to Unstable, three years ago.