29/April/2004

GNOME Love

I imported yesterday gjobs
into GNOME CVS. This is just a skeleton of a simple and HIG-compliant frontend to
the crontab command, that is, a tool to manage scheduled
jobs.

This is intended to be a skeleton for gnome-love people to pick up the development. I hope
this succeeds, as it is happening with the GNOME
Keyring Manager
project. As a start point, I added a list of things
that need to be done
, which I’ll reproduce here so that everybody can see
how easy it is to do this tool:

  • Implement reading from the user’s crontab (that can be done by parsing
    the output of ‘crontab -l’, which AFAIK should be standard over all
    supported platforms). This is to be done in src/crontab.[ch].
  • Display the list of scheduled jobs retrieved from crontab in the list
    view in the main window. Some thoughts should be put on how to display
    the ‘When’ information. crontab stores day of week, day of month, month,
    hour and minute. Not sure if we should display all that or just a
    human-readable string (“first sundays on all months”, etc).
  • Implement writing the user’s crontab. This can be done again via the
    crontab command, which accepts gets its standard input as the contents
    of the crontab file.
  • Implement the ‘add’ and ‘properties’ buttons. These should open the same
    dialog, to allow adding new entries or edit existing entries in the
    crontab file.
  • Implement the ‘remove’ button. This should just remove the entry from the
    crontab.

22/April/2004

Photos

Got the memory card on my camera full, so I had to upload the photos I took while
having Arturo visiting here, which are now
available: some from the visit we did to the Moncayo
Peak
, others from Pamplona.
Also had some photos from the last time I went to ski this year (the season is now
finished here 🙁 ), to Arette,
in France, pretty close to where I live.

Desktop integration

Very nice to see Damien
working on Evolution Data Server and GNOMEMeeting integration. It
is a very nice step into the whole desktop integration.

19/April/2004

GNOME Development Platform

All the comments from the Mono/Java discussion recently have made a lot of people
be paranoid about the future of GNOME (I’m not naming those people, sorry :-).
I’ve heard in the last few weeks a lot of complaints, not about the decision,
which hasnt been made yet and wont for a while I guess, but about the conversation
taking place. And one of those complaints I’ve heard is that “GNOME
does not need a new development platform
“.

I am myself not sure what is the best way yet, but of course I am not blind enough
to not see that we really need a better development platform, maybe not for the
most experienced hackers, but for new developers. People missing this fundamental
point are missing the whole point of the conversation, and probably have never dealt
with libtool, autoconf, automake, etc. Be it Java, Mono, C/Python,
a custom thing or the the
new D programming language
, it’s clear we need a better development
platform to attract new developers. If someone still doesnt believe so, please come
see me, I’ve got a few bugs to fix that involve using our hyper-advanced-dont-need-changes
super platform.

GNOME-DB

Spent some time this weekend going over some patches and bug reports for libgda
and libgnomedb, and ended up doing the 1.0.4
release
, which should have been out much sooner (it’s been 3 months since
1.0.3).

Also, on the reporting front, seems some stuff might come out from the merging of Papyrus and the libgda report
API/engine. I hope at last this is, once for all, the definitive step to have the reporting
stuff working in libgda/libgnomedb.

11/April/2004

Weekend

Just left Arturo at the
bus station, to get back to Madrid. It’s been a very nice weekend, doing tourism over
to Pamplona, Tarazona and the Moncayo Peak.

Longhorn delay

It seems
that Microsoft’s Longhorn is delaying again, and, what is most important, some of the
announced features might be clipped to not delay its release anymore. This gives GNOME,
I guess, a lot of advantage over Microsoft.

In that article above, it says: “We are going to focus on doing fewer things,
and doing them well
“. Are they copying us? Maybe we’ll see Windows versions
every 6 months?

8/April/2004

GUADEC-ES

It seems the Spanish
GUADEC
is going to get a lot of newbie attendees, willing to be GNOME
hackers. This is a very good opportunity to get new blood, given the Linux/GNOME adoption in
Extremadura (where the event is taking place), so I guess all GNOME people that
can attend should go and try to do some tutorial-like talk.

Visit

I expect Arturo‘s
visit tomorrow. He’s staying in Madrid
for a few weeks and will come visit over here a couple of days. It’s going to be quite
funny, since I’ll bring him to see Pamplona, for some tourist sightseeing and
a lot of beers and tapas.