Month: June 2006

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GUADEC/Back

I’m back to London after the really amazing days in Vilanova. This year’s GUADEC has been really amazing: lots of interesting talks and great people to meet; there definitely was a great energy in the air. Kudos to everyone involved in the creation and management of this great event: you really rock the world of GNOME.

I’ve put online the slides from my talk, if anyone wants to check them out: just PNGs, so you loose all the Clutter sexyness. I’ve also put on flickr the photos I took with my really crappy mobile phone.

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GUADEC/Request

If there are any liferea developers at GUADEC, I’d like to have a few words about the key bindings used in your application – specifically why did you choose Ctrl+N for “go to new item” and why Ctrl+W doesn’t close the window.

Please, don’t let me patch your application in order to behave sanely.

You can easily recognise me: I’m the one hopelessly trying to read new items using Ctrl+] and trying to close the window using Ctrl+W.

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GUADEC/Day 1

The OH Gang arrived yesterday at GUADEC – just in time for my talk. I think that the tutorial went well – Clutter worked out of the box on the VGA port, which was quite a surprise. About Clutter: it was fun to see Jeff use it for his presenytation too. I’ve met with many interesting people – just hope to remember their names, though: I’m terrible with name memory; so, if OI see you and I’ll look desperatly at your name tag even if we already introduced ourselves, please bear with me.

GUADEC this year is awesome, and kudos goes to Quim and all the wonderful staff that made this magic possible.

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Clutter

Behold the power of Clutter!

Clutter is a pretty raw user interface toolkit for building heavily visually applications for platforms such as media boxes and kiosks. It’s built on various GNOME libraries such as Pango and GObject, uses Gstreamer for media playback, and all this sits upon OpenGL for fast graphics rendering.

Yes, it’ll soon have bindings for Perl (like it already has bindings for another high-level language with funny syntax that begins with P).

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A Sort of Homecoming

Sci-fi – I’ve ordered on Play.com the DVD box of the first (and last) season of Firefly and I think it really was a great show, where Joss Whedon really tried to follow the path of Isaac Asimov, and show that sci-fi it’s not a genre but a device of storytelling, encapsulating a genre; too bad some clueless executives shot it down. I also bought the 2003 mini and the first season DVD box of Battlestar Galactica, and I just can’t express how amazing it is.

GUADEC – Getting everything ready and packed for going to Vilanova. I prepared the slides for my talk (sunday 25th, 18:00) about (guess what?) recent files; it’s a tutorial, so I’ve also prepeared some bits and pieces of code to show how to add places/bookmarks and recent files support, and to port from EggRecent to GtkRecent. After a year, from Stuttgart to Vilanova, from a GUADEC to another.

Security – Thanks to Tim for the reminder about security and laptops; another sane advice is do not put sensitive data on a laptop in the first place. On my laptop I didn’t create a partition for my data, so I can’t use Tim’s advice unless I resize everything – hence, I’ll leave everything on an encrypted volume at home. :-)

Life – The apartment is almost done – only a couple of items missing: a sofa-bed and a coffee table for the living room; I hope to have everything in place after the wedding. From the 3rd of July to the 13th I’m going back in Italy with Marta, in order to get everything ready before and after the ceremony.

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Tap Dancing on a Mine

I’ve just released version 1.031 of the Gnome2::GConf Perl module binding libgconf. In this release, thanks to Laurent Simonneau, I dropped the Gtk2 dependency, making Gnome2::GConf depend only on the Glib Perl module (and the libgconf C library, obviously).

Gnome2::GConf is mostly in maintenance mode these days so, even if this is supposed to be a development release there are no known issues preventing it from working in a stable environment. I don’t plan any more releases in this development cycle (remember that Gnome2::GConf is part of the GNOME Platform Perl bindings and as such it follows the GNOME release schedule) unless upstream API changes.

You can get Gnome2::GConf either from Sourceforge.net or from CPAN (as soon as both update their state).

On a releated note: as the next release of Gtk2 will support GTK+ 2.10, and it’ll have printing support, I plan to discontinue the Gnome2::Print module binding libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui; obviously, I’ll still maintain this module, but I don’t plan making any new releases unless for (serious) bug fixing.

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Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

Today I finally did find time to work on gnome-utils. I applied a whole slew of patches that sit in my development trunk for almost a couple of months now, and that I tested locally. The first thing that went is is the speller widget for Dictionary; it’s still rough on the list of words it displays (no separation between results from different databases), but it works nicely: when you activate a row in the list it’ll only search on the database the word was found in. The spinner is gone – replaced by a progress bar in the bottom right of the status bar; still, the Dictionary looks like a web browser in my opinion. Maybe a more radical approach in the design of the UI is needed, or maybe I’m definitely on crack and this is how a dictionary application should really look like.

Dictionary 2.15.3

By the way, since 2.15.0 the “rounded window corners without alpha channel” bug has been fixed in the Screenshot application. I don’t remember if I wrote it in the announcements of the last release.

Thanks to Lin Ma, the System Log Viewer should Just Work(tm) on Solaris; also, thanks to Joe Marcus Clarke, many of the crashers on 64bit platforms should have been fixed. Kudos to both of them. The plan was to refactor and update the code-base, but I’m afraid it’ll have to wait.

Between GUADEC and wedding, I hope to find time to hack on System Log Viewer and Screenshot. Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to release gnome-utils 2.15.3, in time for the GNOME 2.15.3 dealine.

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How Good It Can Be

Corey, why on earth should we switch from an entire set of system configuration tools written in Perl to another one written in Python? Just for the sake of Python? Just because there are more Python zealots^Whackers on GNOME than there are Perl ones?

I understand that Ubuntu loves Python, but please: rewriting every tool in Python just for the sake of it is totally useless. What Python gives us over Perl, for system configuration backends? (No, it’s not a rethorical question: I’m serious).

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Precious

Saturday, Marta and myself finally went to choose the wedding rings. We asked to get engraved, after our names, the date of the wedding in a format of our choice, and we gave to the puzzled guy a note with this number on it: 1152265200.

Now listening: Depeche Mode, Playing the Angel