Category Archives for GNOME

Flower Power & Instant Messaging

Busy busy bee, that’s me :)

Chelsea Flower Show ’06

Recently I attended the Chelsea Flower Show for the second time and it didn’t disappoint, I took plenty of eye candy for all to enjoy and you can find it at the usual hot spot (http://www.curlybeast.net). One of my favourites has to be this aqualegia, most spectacular:

Gossip 0.11.1

Over the last 2 or 3 weeks Gossip has really had some work put into it and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Eitan Isaacson for the patches he sent in to get avatar support up and running – it r0cks! Looking good Jeff ;)


During this time we have also spent time fixing some of the little things and adding general polish to make it sparkle, this has meant that Richard has upgraded his status from party hacker to real hacker!

Thanks again to all that has helped with the latest release, it is appreciated and your patches most welcome!

Oh – and I am in the middle of moving house at the moment too, woohoo, busy busy busy!

Gossip 0.10

Gossip Roster

I managed to finally get Gossip 0.10 out!

I vowed to Kris I would do releases more often, for one thing, people kept telling my about bugs fixed over a month ago. So from now on, I will try to release monthly on average.

Everything was pretty smooth except for the first crash in a long time from Evolution (which is why I sent the mail announcement twice).

Update: The announcement with a list of changes can be found here: http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/gossip-dev/2006-February/008508.html

Glib Threadpools & Canon EOS 350D

GLib Threadpools

I have spent some time working on Glib recently to get sorting functionality working in async queues so that thread pools can be sorted by a user specified function. The main reason for this work was to remove the *very* old thread pool code that GnomeVFS was using (which was duplicated to some extent in gthreadpool.c).

I also added support threads to exit when they have been idle in the thread pool for a duration customisable by the application. This is an optimisation that was wanted to save resources on the Nokia 770.

Canon EOS 350D

OK, so for a while now I have been using an Olympus C460ZdelSol which is nothing special and I wanted to upgrade it to something more powerful, so I decided to get the Canon EOS 350D. I spent most the holidays with the laptop, manual and camera playing with the settings and understanding how it works. Now I think I will read it again :)

Gossip 0.9 & Wedding

New Release – Today Mikael and I released Gossip 0.9. After a large refactor of the foundation code, further development has been made easier and overall we feel it is much more stable. It has been some time since the last release back in December last year.

There have been many changes, some of these include:
– A spell checker
– Updated contact information dialog
– Much better Drag & Drop usage

Generally just more polish everywhere :)

I have been working on getting multiple accounts working again in Gossip since the refactoring. Some of this work will be in CVS very shortly. I have taken things a bit further this time by actually allowing the user to select which account they do certain actions from:

Wedding – Things are heating up with only 3 weeks to go.

Sue had her Hen night lastnight. The girls really do know how to have fun, you just have to look at their costumes on the night and all the party things they bring back home with them.

My stag do is this weekend coming, should be a good fun, I tried to arrange it for the night before the wedding but Sue threatened to call it off :)

Post-GUADEC Photos & Libtool

GUADEC Photos – So Ross managed to capture my evil twin at the GUADEC party standing next to Dave Malcolm (who looks worse for ware) :D

Some of the photos showing up post-GUADEC are cool. It is a shame Mikael and I didn’t have a camera to capture Glynn running from the German police at the end of the party really :) – when you got to go, you’ve got to go!

libtool on Windows – So I have been trying to get libltdl work on Windows to automatically load libraries at runtime for plugin support. This stuff is not nice, I was trying to use libltdl from a library and found out that you can’t do that until v2.0 of libtool (on Windows) and that there are problems particularly with MSYS. It is all going now, I had to use libltdl from an executable instead. Thankfully, after speaking to Tor at the GUADEC party, he told me about libtool-cache which speeds things up considerably. This is really needed since creating processes on Windows is expensive and given the number of times that happens when using GNU’s auto tools you can imagine how slow things get :/

Blog move – Jeff has now moved my blog over from Advogato onto planet.gnome.org, cheers dude :)

GUADEC & Google Gnome Bounties

GUADEC – So my first year at GUADEC was so amazing. Had a superb time. Some of the talks I found especially interesting, cool and funny were:

– Robert’s talk about Gnome, memory, and some new kernel abilities we should be using
– Owen’s talk about Cario
– Nat’s lightning talks
– Glynn’s 101 things to know about Gnome.

So I met so many really cool hackers at GUADEC this year and as Ross points out, Bastien needs a new hackergotchi. I like Ross’s knocked up replacement – it seems much more fitting :)

I need a hackergotchi – perhaps you could do the honors Ross? :)

Also, managed to bag a Nokia 770 – they are uber cool!

While at the GUADEC, I managed to get some bugs fixed during the hackfest too. Overall a wiked conference.

Gnome Bounties – Good news about Google splashing out for Gnome bounties.

Hacking Gossip

Gossip Updates: I have spent some time scratching a few of those itches with regards to the Gossip user interfaces recently. Most notably the group chat join dialog and the status presets dialog:

I have been looking for an excuse to try out the new GtkCellRendererCombo and thought this might be a good exercise for the reader. This is not the final cut, still needs some work…

As for the “Join Group Chat” dialog, I have been thinking long and hard about the best way to do it and really am still not happy with what I came up with.

The result is not a much different from what Mikael originally had it is just a little cleaner and smarter. This is what I came up with:

So basically these are the things we might do in the future[*] and things that we currently support:

– Join a group chat favourite
– Join multiple group chat favourites *
– Add/Edit/Delete a favourite
– Browse chat rooms *

What would be really nice is if you could do all this on one dialog. Typically applications tend to have a list on one window somewhere and another dialog to add or edit entries on the list. While this might be OK, I can’t help but think it there must be a way to use the same entries (for Server, Room, etc) when joining a custom group chat too. If you use a GtkTreeView to show favourites or possibly a list of rooms on a server (when browsing) then how do you fit a set of entries to join into a custom group chat on the same window? Perhaps that is a separate dialog?

The whole point is, from a usability perspective, how do we best present this to the user?

Gossip Co-maintainer

WOW – Well Mikael sprung the question to me on Sunday – would I like to co-maintain Gossip with him and I could hardly resist. There have been a lot of crazy things going on in the code repository over the last few months and we are starting to see things stable out a bit.

It was good to see Davyd Madeley show off a cool shot of Gossip in action.

Some of the cool stuff going into Gossip at the moment includes drag and drop support (being added back and more), basic functionality for group/user renaming, creating, etc has been put right. One of the most important implementations is the subscription handling (which was borked along the way) bug has been worked out and the result is this.

Overall we are looking good for a new release soon hopefully.

Next thing to sort out is the generic interface for the transport code I wrote a few months back, anyone interested, this (couldn’t think of a better way to document it than through dia) is the API that needs condensing – comments welcome

Loudmouth on Windows – I have been thinking about this for a month or two now and people have been commenting at various times about it working on Windows on the mailing list. I think when I next find time, I will look into getting loudmouth working out of gnu’s auto tools under MSYS/MinGW. Shouldn’t take long, I had a butchers at it this morning – what this space [ ] :)

New Blogggger – I think it is time to sort out a proper blogging system on my newly aquired server. Advogato is good but I just set up Blam! and realised the title never comes out – plus I can’t post images :/

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