Club Silencio

Evolution

Sent a couple of simple patches to Evolution… they said me that they’re mostly OK, but to get them in I have to sign the copyright assignment.
I have no problemem doing that and I understand it’s a general policy, but it’s a bit annonying, especially considering the fact that mine were just a couple of simple “boring-sunday-afternoon” patches and that I don’t plan (lack of time and skill) to become a regular evolution contributor.
I wonder how many contributors are put off by this hurdle… not the copyright assignment per se, but the fact that you have print it down and send it to the US by regular mail.

Would a click-through agreement when submitting a patch in bugzilla hold any legal value?

Anyway Evo 1.5 is shaping up really nice, it’s a still a bit raugh and unstable but running cvs HEAD you can really feel the improvement day by day… You almost can hear the noise of bugs being squished ;-)
Thanks to Ximian and to all the Evo hackers!

Flu

Felt like crap the whole day: as usual I get ill during a week-end. Didn’t manage to get anything done school-wise, I spent the day between IRC and TV… At some point I got bored enough to prepare a couple of patches and file them in bugzilla.
I think I also have a simple Evolution patch, but I have still to see if it works properly.

Gnome 2.6

In the past week the first pieces of Gnome 2.6 have started to get into Fedora Rawhide. Since during the transition many things are still broken (e.g. I don’t have items in the Applications menu), I took the chance to switch again to a Gnome cvs HEAD installation made with jhbuild.
During the 2.3 series I run cvs HEAD all the time, but during 2.5 I limited myself to try cvs HEAD only of some apps I’m interested in. This for two reasons:

• I didn’t manage to get Fedora GDM to log into my GNOMECVS session by default: it always tell me to use SwitchDesktop and that crap, but it only sees the standard Fedora Gnome.
• Spatial Nautilus. It’s not that I don’t like it or that I’m against it: if so many people I trust think it’s a good idea it’s probably true… on the other hand it gets in my way of doing things. Probably I just have to get used to it.

Anyway as a whole it seems that Gnome 2.6 is shaping up really nice and clean.</ul>

UART

Started to work seriously at the “Electronics of Digital Systems” assignment (design and implement on a test FPGA board an UART in Verilog). Until yesterday I didn’t do much more than find out what a UART is.
We split the thing in 4 parts:

• Transmitter
• Receiver
• BaudClock Generator
• Bus Control

I think I have pretty clear idea of how to implement each component, but I didn’t imagine that was such a pain passing from the “alogorithm” (eg “oh ok, the txmit is a state machine that does this and that”) to a working (where working means “it passes all the test benches”) module.
Extra grief was caused by the crappy Xilinx tools.
We started from the BaudClock Generator: it’s a relly simple component that given the system clock and the selected baudrate outputs a clock which is 16x the baudrate; for example, this clock is used in the receiver to do triple sampling on the incoming bits.
Basically it’s nothing more than counting up to N and switch, counting up to N and switch, etc.
It passes the behavioural simulation just fine, but when we mapped it, all we got as output is wire connected to ground. Wonderful.

Gedit

Yesterday paolo committed a big patch, which among other things introduces the new close confirmation dialog. I like it, but during the UI-review clarkbw and others made good points about some potential usability problems.

In the time since the last update I’ve submitted some misc patches to MLView and gedit, mostly simple ui improvements, but today I submitted a patch for a gedit bug that was marked a Maj in bugzilla, waiting for the review…
I got the chance to talk a bit with the maintainers of these two project (respectively sdodji and paolo) so I decided to certify them here on Advogato: both as Masters since they are major contributors to Gnome.

Also nice to see a burst of activity (or better hack-tivity) on glade-devel wrt Glade-3, things have been quiet for a while and I didn’t get the chance to work on it lately… I hope that some new contributors get involved!