Category: fosdem

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Travelling Band/Back

finally, back at home after FOSDEM 2008. the last leg of the trip back from Bruxelles has been exceptionally longer because the London Metropolitan Network on weekends is, apparently, made of fail.

the Clutter talk on saturday went, in my opinion, quite well; lots of people listened to my ramblings and watched my simple slide show. about the talk: it was my first with a slightly modified Lessig method approach and I have to say that it’s been a very satisfactory experience – nonetheless because it removes the need to put slides online, which I never end up doing anyway ((I’ve got a git repository with the small application I wrote to give the talk with, so if you want it you can always ask me for the URL to clone)).

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Live Wire

Back from FOSDEM 2007, after a little detour in Helsinki.

I’ve opened a bug for the places support in GtkFileChooser: #413076. Attached to it you’ll find a patch; it should be taken with a grain of salt: it’s still a work in progress, but implements the main features and shows how the new API should work. In short, if your application need to use some predefined, user visible folder and you want to provide a link inside the file chooser, you need to create your bookmark file, drop it somewhere and call:

gtk_file_chooser_add_shortcuts_from_file (file_chooser
                                          "/path/to/bookmarks.xbel",
                                          NULL);

We’d need an intltool able to recognise the title (and eventually description) markup elements of the bookmark files and merge them into the translation pool, so that you can have the places already localised (the machinery is already in place in the patch). I’ll keep working on it, and finish up the implementation of the automagic places that applications can install in a common place and have it appear in every file chooser, based on the group or application name used in the bookmark.

I’m also working again on the Application class (the wiki page is really out of date with the current iteration I have been workin on – I’ll update it as soon as possible); now that the session management code has landed in libegg I will add hooks into the application class to have it do The Right Thing®. Other than an application class, GTK+ really needs a desktop abstraction – a simple API to know whether we are connected to a network, or to control the screensaver, or to launch the default browser/mailer/editor/whatever. For that to work properly we should really have a working configuration system like GConf moved below GTK+. I did some prototype API for a configuration engine, mostly stealing^Wtaking inspiration from alexl work on GVFS (which already has a nice and clean API); will probably have something usable soon.

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Come and See

Decemberists: Yesterday evening, The Decemberists were in London, and made a wonderful concert at Shepherd Bush. I’ve fallen in love with the band after vieweing the video of their song Sixteen Military Wives and I started getting my hands on their whole discography (right now, only the singles are missing). They played mostly songs from their new album, The Crane Wife, which is really as good as it can get (so go out and buy it now).

gnome-utils: It seems that my plea for someone to work on GFloppy has been useful; right now, Paul Betts and Riccardo Setti are working on a replacement using HAL and libparted, and are also getting the ball rolling for adding formatting support directly in HAL. Guys, you rock!

GTK+: I’ve been working on fixing some bugs of the GtkRecentChooserMenu widget; specifically, bug #377164 and bug #405696. While I was at it, I finally closed the FIXME I left in code, for supporting both appending and prepending custom menu items in the recent files menu, and finally added a test case for the widget, so I can track regressions.

Recent files menu
Obligatory screenshot of the test application

FOSDEM ’07: Like last year, at the end of February I’ll be in Bruxelles, attending FOSDEM.

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FOSDEM 2006

Next week-end I’ll be in Brussels, at this year’s FOSDEM.

I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to go or not – late flight booking and I had to check at two hostels before actually getting some place to sleep. I mostly plan to attend the GNOME track, especially Philip‘s talk on design patterns using GObject and Kristian‘s talk on Project Ridley; also, the X.org track and the embedded Linux track promise to be really interesting.