Growing Family

I’ve just finished including baobab, the disk usage analysis tool written by Fabio Marzocca (and others), into gnome-utils HEAD. Everything seems to build fine, and make distcheck has just confirmed that gnome-utils-2.15.0 is ready to be released. I plan to give the final touches before the deadline of tomorrow, so that the first unstable release of Gnome will ship the growing family of gnome-utils.

Now Listening: The Decemberists, Picaresque

Dancing Barefoot

Marta, as an early (a week early) birthday present, bought me Dancing Barefoot, the first book written by Wil Wheaton. It arrived today, and I literally devoured it in an hour.

Wil writes gorgeously. I found myself smiling, grinning or plain laughing out loud while reading it. As a trekker, and a geek, I can’t but relate to the stories he wrote; I really can’t wait for Just a Geek to arrive (Marta bought me that too).

[]
[wil+wheaton]

Cleaning up

life: after the “exam craze” (two in five days) that took the best part of the week, me and Marta have resumed cleaning up the house. Since I have moved in with her, there has been so much work to do that we haven’t really felt the whole “moving in” part; but I assume it will get us, sooner or later. Next week we’re going to visit my parents, and get some of my books/DVDs/whatever that I left behind.

hacking: after moving the RecentManager to new new BookmarkFile parser/writer object, I resumed working on the actual separation of the recently used resources viewer widgets (implementing the RecentChooser interface) and the list controller (the RecentManager object). Last week I removed every trace of sorting and limit handling code involving the manager object from the widgets, and recoded them directely into the widgets themselves. Thus, it’s now possible to have a single manager instance and multiple viewers bound to it, instead of creating a manager object per widget:

RecentChooserWidgets
Two widgets, one manager

Sorting, filtering and the list limit property are still present in the RecentManager object; this way you could have a custom sorting and filtering functions set into a manager, and then multiple views attached to it.

Separation was a job the the current EggRecentModel/EggRecentView objects didn’t handle well enough; basically, you could feed you own model to a EggRecentViewGtk widget, but every other widget using the same model would display the same data, with the same sorting, filtering and list size. This behaviour doesn’t really match the MVC paradigm; for instance, using the same TreeModel you could set up many TreeView widgets, each of them showing only some part of the data stored in the model. Filtering, sorting and size are handled by the TreeView code, not by the model.

The same should happen with the recently used resources list; also because this could lead to the creation of a default singleton instance of the manager object, in order to reduce memory and locking issues due to the on disk storage.

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 Lego®, 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.

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)