GUADEC notes
20. July 2007
So GUADEC is absolutely rocking. OK, we do not talk about British weather but the rest is absolutely awesome!
Some notes:
- Gtk+ 3.0 (or 4.0) seems to be necessary to make the work for maintainers easier. Anyway, until now I see no real reason for breaking two much of the API. Just break all this stuff which is crap and leave the rest as close to the current API as possible. BTW, the GTK+ developers/maintainers really rock – thank you!
- GOD is definitly a bad acronym for Gnome Online Desktop but we might still have lots of advantages by making all those popular web techniques available for the Desktop. Not really making everything like web but giving the people the choice to use the things they want in an easy to use fashion (Google stuff, YouTube, Flickr, whatever…)
- There are really many people out there fixing the platform and making it ready for the next generation desktop (gvfs, dconf for example)
Unrelated notes:
- danilo persuaded me to join the i18n-list and he definitly made the hardest party on tuesday.
- Vincent seems to be a very important member of the community but nobody really knows what he is doing 🙂
- Behdad should start fixing the bugs if he wants his hat back
- Met lots of other rockstars like Murray, Naba, Philip, Jens, Andreas, MacSlow to mention some
- I am waiting for the power in the ETAP hotel to break down completely because all those people put their notebooks in the same socket and they already broke three.
- For next GUADEC we need l10n for the name plates and they need to contain nicknames
- My talk was not that great, at least IMHO. But people seem to be interested in the project so I hope things will improve!
Anjuta ubuntu repository
20. July 2007
So, as requested in the talk:
1) Add ‘deb http://anjuta.org/apt ./’ in your /etc/apt/sources.list
2) Create a file called /etc/apt/preferences and enter the following:
Package: anjuta
Pin: version 2.*
Pin-Priority: 990
Package: anjuta-common
Pin: version 2.*
Pin-Priority: 990
Package: anjuta-dev
Pin: version 2.*
Pin-Priority: 990
3) sudo apt-get update
4) sudo apt-get install anjuta
(anjuta-dev, if you want to write anjuta plugins)
More to come soon…
GUADEC
16. July 2007
So, I am finally there after lots of air travel security paranoia and the quite difficult exercise to make your way through Birmingham when there are nearly no street signs. That makes any maps (online and offline) quite useless.
Soccer was really funny today, thanks for organizing this and congratulation to the blue team!
BTW, if you are in the ETAP lobby, just turn around, I sit right in the middle 😉
Preparing GUADEC
12. July 2007
So, I finally got most things done:
- Exchange some pounds
- International Student ID card
- Flight, Hotel
- Presentation (well, at least half-way)
So, still to do is packing, book train to flight in case they decide not to be on strike on monday. Search for some alternative otherwise :(.
Anyway, dear Ex-White team, I will be a bit late because I will arrive in Birmingham not until Monday noon. I hope to be at the pitch at about 2:30 pm, but maybe it will take longer to find my way through Birmingham!
Robot
2. July 2007
Some of you may have been wondered that I haven’t blogged for weeks. Well, it has been a quite busy time working on a robot for university:
The challenge was to follow a double-line on a DIN A4 sheet and to draw a line in between with a pen. The budget was limited to 200 Euro and time was from mid of April until end of June. We worked in group with 8 persons. Nothing else was given except the optional chance to get a ready to use AVR board for controlling.
So, the first choice was if we wanted to create a plotter/printer like device or rather a mobile one. We decided to take the mobile approach because it simply seemed more fun. Mechanics were rather simple as we used two stepper motors without any gearing. The wheels are put on each side to be able to do a 360° turn without moving the pen in the centre:
For detecting the lines we used three CNY70 infrared sensors after we failed with line sensor. The currents from the sensors are converted using a simple op-amp circuit and connected to the digital ports of the ATMega16 processor. Most of the electric stuff on the photo is just used to drive the step motors.
Programming all this was rather tricky because a simple microcontroller with 1 KB SRAM and 16 KB Flash is really different to the normal desktop programming I am used to. Luckily there is a gcc for this AVR processors.
In the end we took a too high risk at the presentation and lost the track at the last curve. We had to use a slower program to reach the end. So we did not get the price for the fastest solution but at least the subjective price for the most beautiful robot.
You can watch our presentation video on YouTube!
Scratchbox support for anjuta
25. May 2007
Today, I added a very simple feature to anjuta which makes it possible to build your project inside a scratchbox environment. It does not take care about execution and debugging yet but that’s not so important for me at the moment.
The last weeks I mostly hacked on drag-and-drop layout support for glom. It is far from finished at the moment and anyone is free to make suggestions how improve the whole dnd handling.
Today, I heading for the German Cup-Final in Berlin tommorow and I hope Nuremberg will win it’s first title after 39 years (including several years in the second and even one in the third league).
Heading for Birmingham
29. April 2007
Well, I have been lucky and my proposal was accepted for the after hours of GUADEC.
To be honest, I have no idea how to get there and how to stay but I guess I will figure this out later. It is also my first presentation outside school/university and definitly the first in English but it’s going to be interesting.
The travel information on the GUADEC website is not yet very detailed. I miss some information about hostels or hotels for example but I hope it will improve.
Some new packages for maemo bora
18. April 2007
There are new packages availible for maemo bora:
- Update: Packages for glibmm/gtkmm: These packages fix a nasty bug that will cause a crash when using Gtk::TextBuffer so everybody is encouraged to upgrade
- New: Package for libgda3 which brings the GNOME database power to maemo. Please note that this is not yet the final release of libgda and that the packages may have some rough edges.
Both packages are available from the bora-extras repository:
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ bora free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ bora free
Anjuta 2.1.2 (beta) released
29. March 2007
Yet another beta version with much improved plugin handling and better docking together with lots of bugfixes. Grab it at Anjuta.org.
There is still much to do but we are on a good way. I have been busy with exams for the last weeks and will be until 4th April so I did not contribute really much to this release. But expect more improvements from my side for the next.
Thanks to everything who contributed or submitted bugs.
More maemo-launcher improvements for 2.10
23. March 2007
So, I finally got to hacking on the cairo support for maemo-launcher. Thanks to Behdad and Owen for pointing me in the right direction.
My patch adds a method to booster_preinit which draws some demo text (“Maemo launcher”) to a image surface using pangocairo. Obviously this is enough to init most of the font stuff of pango and thus speeds up the application start-up for my test-case, the hello-world example from the GTK+ tutorial, by 50%. Again, I may be totally wrong with my results of course as times tend to be very small on a normal PC. I would be glad to hear from poeple using embedded devices if this is a real performance gain.
The only problem with the patch currently is that I use “Sans 10” as hardcoded value for the font. I have not yet figured out a good way to get the default font without opening a display.
Update: Obviously the font is totally irrelevant! I just removed the line and everything was as fast as before which means the upon layout drawing as font initialisation is done!
All this was done for Openismus in case anyone did not know!