I am the man that arranges the blocks
final checks and the usual ohmygodwhycan’tIfindanything mode before I take the flight to Boston for the User Experience hackfest organized by Owen, Federico and Vincent. Neil and I will be talking about Clutter, what it does, and what it can do to enhance the user experience on a modern desktop.
then, it’s Boston Summit time! it’s going to be my first summit, but given the past editions and the people attending I just know it’s going to be awesome.
see you in Boston!
day two of the gtk+ hackfest.
yesterday was devoted to the Imendio vision of a better toolkit, and how to get out of the hole we dug for ourselves with the current API/ABI contract – but others have written about it better than I could possibly do.
today was introspection day; Johan Dahlin showed the current state of the GObject introspection code by using a Vala widget, subclassing a GtkDrawingArea, from a Perl script — which was beyond cool. kudos to everyone that has been working on it.
today it’s also six years since the gtk+ 2.0.0 release, so happy birthday gtk+ 2.x!
At the end of this week I’ll be in Copenhagen for the Nordic Perl Workshop. I’ll give two talks about GNOME and Perl: the first one is about binding GObject-based libraries in Perl and using the Perl bindings in order to write GObject-based native Perl modules (and get all the GObject features); the second one is a GTK+ tutorial-slash-faq-slash-best practises for Perl developers. I’ll be around in the city from the 27th till the afternoon of the 29th (I have to get back early, unfortunately).
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.
Long time, no blog.
Here’s a brief recap of what happened in the last three weeks:
Again at home, after a week in Berlin.
The city is wonderful – now I understand why Marta loves it that much: the place is gorgeous, the people is warm and they really make you feel at home. Me and Marta were both a bit sad to leave – but we plan to return there as soon as possible, maybe even in summer, even though with the GUADEC 2006 moved at the end of June we’d already have our summer holidays covered. Time will tell.
We’ve done a ton of photos – but the last day’s worth of them (mostly about and from the dome on top of the Reichstag/Bundestag) were eaten by F-Spot; it was an older version of it, and I did the stupidest thing by deleting them from my card too, but F-Spot shouldn’t lie about having done the import and then really having finished just the thumbnailing.
While in Berlin we’ve met for a couple of hours Torsten Schoenfeld, another gtk2-perl hacker – well, he is the gtk2-perl Release Master and the Test Suite God, other than being more than Just Another Perl Hacker; he is a real pleasure to talk with and a great guy. If you ever come to Italy, you’re up for a beer, or more than one. ;-)
Now that the winter holidays are really over, let’s get back to work.
The gnome-utils release went fine (even though there’s a typo in the NEWS file I’ve submitted – dang!), and a bunch of bugs have been filed in Bugzilla. Keep them flowing, so I can know what doesn’t work. I’m off to add the window-size-saved-across-session feature that was added to the search tool, and to make the icon in the applet become a toggle button, instead of a plain icon.
Another project I’m working on is the build environment for the Glib Perl module and Glib-based Perl extensions; I began looking at Module::Build while in Berlin, but in the end, I came up with another solution – which will be easier to port to Module::Build later on, when that module enters the standard Perl base distribution. Anyway, I’ll talk about this issue later in a (lengthy) post, so stay tuned.
There are a bunch of fixes due for the libegg/recentchooser code, the main one being the sorting functions duplicated from the RecentManager object into the RecentChooser object; in the end, I’d like to remove all the sorting/filtering stuff from the RecentManager, and let all the UI built upon the RecentChooser interface provide their own sorting/filtering stuff. This would make the RecentManager object a thin layer upon the BookmarkFile object, and would really make things easier to be included into the GTK library. In the end, all the sorting a filtering is something that has to do with the display of the data that the RecentManager holds, so they do not belong into the manager itself. Other than this fix, I’ll begin working on a patch for the BookmarkFile object in order for it to land inside Glib, and a patch for the FileSystem object to use it for its bookmarks.
packing again, me and Marta are leaving tomorrow for Berlin. we’ll get back in seven days, with a ton of photos.