Yearly Archives: 2004

I decided to go ahead and write the code to allow Zenity to listen for commands on stdin. It was pretty easy to add, and Glynn accepted the patch so it is in the latest CVS version. The main difference between the implementation and what I described earlier is that you need to pass the --listen argument to Zenity to activate this mode (without it, it acts as a one-shot notification icon where it exits when the icon is clicked on). The easiest way to use it from a bash script is to tie Zenity to a file descriptor like this:

exec 3> >(zenity --notification --listen)

You can then feed commands to the notification icon by echoing things to that file descriptor. For example:

echo "tooltip: a new tooltip" >&3

The available commands are icon, tooltip and visible. When you’ve finished and want to kill off the icon, you can simply close the file descriptor:

exec 3>&-

Some things that would be good to add are message balloon support (although the Gnome system tray doesn’t seem to support them right now) and support for animated images (useful to get the user’s attention while message balloons don’t work).

One of the reasons for adding this functionality to Zenity was for use in jhbuild. Davyd did the initial prototype for this, but the idea for the notification icon seemed fairly generic and useful outside of jhbuild. Also, by putting it in Zenity there is less to maintain in jhbuild itself 🙂

Foundation Elections (continued)

bolsh: as I said, many real elections make modifications to an idealised STV system to simplify vote counting. The counting for the .au senate elections sounds like it takes a random sample of votes when transfering preferences too.

Also, in my description a candidate needed to get more votes than the quota and the quota could be fractional. In contrast, the Australian senate elections say candidates must reach the Droop Quota, which is the smallest integer greater than the quota formula I used. If you are using random sampling for preference transfers so that each ballot has a weight of either 0 or 1, then this is equivalent. However, if you count fractional votes, then it does make a difference.

Since the votes are all collected electionically for the foundation elections, it shouldn’t be any more difficult to count the votes exactly (which the pSTV software you pointed out trivial).

I agree that it would be interesting to get people to list preferences on the ballot even if we don’t switch to STV for the election (I mentioned this in one of my foundation-list emails). The top 11 preferences could be used to perform the existing vote counting algorithm.

Work

The preview release of Ubuntu will be coming out later today. While most of the work I’ve been doing is in some of the backend infrastructure rather than packaging, for the past half week I’ve been helping out with some of the Gnome modifications. I doubt all of the changes will be accepted up stream, but I think a number of them would be welcome changes for Gnome 2.10.

I also now realise how bad the battstat_applet code is, and can understand why Glynn started from scratch. It seems like a good thing to improve for 2.10. Davyd mentioned on IRC that it would be nice if it could work with UPSs as well as laptop batteries. NUT can easily provide all the info that the applet gets from the APM or ACPI code, so this shouldn’t be too difficult. I wonder how useful sysadmins would find such a feature?

Thunderbird

The new version of thunderbird looks quite nice. As well as the usual incremental improvements, this release can also act as an RSS reader. It converts items from the feeds into email messages and puts them in the chosen folder. You can then manage them as you would your mail. It’s an interesting way of reading sites like planet gnome. If the feeds provide full content like the PG does, then you probably want to turn on the “Show the article summary instead of loading the web page” option. For feeds without much content you can leave that option off and it will load the linked web page instead.

Foundation Elections

There has been talk on the foundation list about changing the vote counting procedure to something more fair. The method being proposed is Single Transferable Vote, which is the same system used within a single electorate for the senate vote in the Australian Federal Election. As with the Australian elections, some people have some trouble understanding exactly how it works, so here is a description.

1. Each voter orders every candidate on their ballot in order of preference. Each ballot is assigned a weight of 1.
2. The ballots are grouped by the first preference.
3. If any candidate’s total reaches the quota, then they get in. The quota is chosen such that if there are s seats, then at most s candidates can reach the quota. So a candidate must get more than n/(s + 1) first preference votes in order to reach the quota.
4. If any candidate gets over the quota, then the highest vote getter is elected, and their votes are redistributed at a reduced strength. If x people voted for the candidate, then the weighting of each of the votes is scaled by (x – q)/x where q is the quota (x – q is the number of votes over the quota). The winning candidate’s name is removed from all ballots and we go back to step 2 and repeat to find the next winner.
5. If no candidate reaches the quota, then the candidate with the least first preference votes is removed from the election. Their name is removed from all ballots, and we go back to step 2. The votes for the removed candidate are redistributed at the same strength, since they didn’t help elect a candidate.

Note that this vote counting system is identical to Instant-runoff voting when there is only a single seat. The quota calculation shows that the winning candidate needs to get more than 50% of the votes to win, as expected.

Some of the nice properties of this system include:

• If you vote for a losing candidate, your vote is transfered at the same strength, so is not wasted. This reduces the risk of voting for a candidate that is unlikely to win.
• Voting for a popular candidate doesn’t waste your vote. The portion of your vote that wasn’t needed to elect the candidate is redistributed to the next preference. For example, if 50% of people vote for dcamp, but the quota is 10% of the votes, then all his votes will be redistributed to second preference at 80% strength.
• If there are two similar candidates, they shouldn’t split the vote in such a way that neither wins. If one candidate gets knocked out, their votes will transfer to the other.

There are some differences between what I described and what is used in the Australian elections. This seems to be to make the process more discrete and easier to count (mostly rounding the various quotas and transfer values). For the foundation election though, I can’t see any reason not to use a more exact version.

Zenity Notification Icon

Yesterday Glynn posted about notification icon support in Zenity. His current implementation really only handles one-shot notifications, since the icon disappears and zenity exits when you click the icon.

I talked with him on IRC about adding support for a different mode where you send commands to zenity via stdin, similar to the jhbuild notification icon prototype Davyd did. This would allow you to write bash scripts like this:

exec 3> >(zenity --notification)
echo "icon: someicon" >&3
echo "tooltip: doing some important work" >&3
# do stuff
echo "icon: someothericon" >&3
# do some more stuff
exec 3>&-

This could be very useful for many scripts in addition to jhbuild, which is why I suggested adding it to zenity. Now it just needs implementing …