Alejandro Valverde

What a great performance today from Alejandro Valverde, Paco Mancebo and Mickael Rasmussen in the Tour, who have been the only riders, in a long time, to go with Lance Armstrong up to the end line. But Alejandro’s performance has been specially great, since even though it’s already known he is a rider with a bright future, nobody expected him to perform so well in such a difficult stage as today’s, in his first Tour de France. Let’s hope he can continue this way, and make us, spaniards, forget about all the disappointments (Iban Mayo, Carlos Sastre, Joseba Beloki, and, specially, Roberto Heras).

Testing GNOME session new services framework

To make it easier for people to test the new service framework in gnome-session, here are some instructions to help them.

  1. Get and install libgnomeservice from CVS.
  2. Apply the dbus*.patch files in libgnomeservice to D-BUS HEAD.
  3. Compile gnome-session, with this patch and with –enable-services argument for autogen.sh/configure.
  4. Test this, and check the session is started correctly. If not, report bugs to me, please.
  5. Then, it’s time to add additional services. You can either apply one of the patches in libgnomeservice (*.patch) to the corresponding modules. I suggest just testing with something like beagle, or gnome-screensaver’s patches. Those are not session managed, and should be started correctly on session startup but not saved to the session. The other patches (panel, nautilus, etc) make services be started twice, so that part is better left out for now.
  6. You can also add additional services, by just putting a .desktop-service file (here‘s an example) to $(datadir)/gnome/desktop-services, and a .service file (example) to $(datadir)/dbus-1/services. For the .service file, the command line should be like:

    gnome-service-launch org.gnome.MyService /full/path/to/command_to_execute_as_service

With this, the new framework can be tested perfectly.

London blasts

Very sorry to wake up this morning and hearing the blasts in London, sadly too similar to what we had in Madrid 16 months ago. And very worried, since my sister lives in London with her husband and two daughters. Fortunately, I got in contact with her pretty immediately, and they’re all ok.

I hope all gnomers around there are ok, as well as their friends and families.

Software patents

After all the joy of seeing the software patents directive rejected, some people are starting to worry that it hasn’t been a victory.

Since the link is in Spanish, here is a little summarised translation of the important points:

  • The day before the voting, people from the anti-patent organizations were very worried about the result, with the Popular Party campaigning in favor of the bill, and some socialists (like Spanish Joaquin Almunia) saying that voting against it would make Europe be left behind in terms of innovation. Why that big change, in only one day?
  • Seems, from some explanations about the result given by some MPs, that the vote was against the commission’s way of doing things. So, one can think that once they do things “correctly”, the bill will we accepted.
  • The big corporations haven’t said anything about what is supposed to be a very bad thing for them.

So, have we been trapped, and the bill will be be back in a few months with a different shape and with the good willing and acceptance of the Euro parlament MPs? I hope not, but as Javier says, let’s celebrate it today, but let’s get back to work tomorrow.

Notifications

After all the comments in my last blog entry and some other comments, here are my thoughts:

  • notifications in dialogs, like the ones in gaim, are disturbing, and sometimes makes user lose them (if you are typing and looking at the keyboard, and press SPACE/ENTER/whatever)
  • notifications in panel (either notification area or a bubble on an icon) are, at least from my experience, always missed. I used to have the alarm daemon in Evolution set up to use the tray icon instead of dialogs, and after a few days missing *all* my appointments, I switched back to disruptive dialogs, which at least are more difficult to lose (unless you are typing)
  • libnotify implementation makes it difficult to not see the notification, but doesn’t interrupt your current task

So, my conclusion is that libnotify is the best way I’ve seen so far for notifications. Of course, as with the trash applet thingy, we need to make sure we don’t abuse them, and only use them for real notifications, not for every status change.

The GUI in the notification-daemon might need some tweaks, specially if we want it to look like all those mockups we saw some time ago, but that’s all I can think of against libnotify.

libnotify in GNOME Applets

I’ve been playing this weekend with libnotify, and, before taking the task of changing the Evolution’s alarm daemon to use it, I’ve made some applets in GNOME Applets use it for some nice notifications.

First, the weather applet, which displays a notification whenever it gets an update from the weather forecast service:

Then, the trash applet, which does the same when there are files deleted/added from/to the trash.

These notifications expire a few seconds after they are shown, so they should not disturb the user at all.

Tour 2005 podium picks

Following John Fleck, here are my picks for this year’s Tour:

  1. Alexandre Vinokourov
  2. Lance Armstrong
  3. Roberto Heras

I really think Lance Armstrong is going to win his 7th Tour, given his demonstration of power yesterday in the time trial, but I had to be original in my vote 🙂

And yeah, I don’t see Jan Ullrich being in the podium. But watch Roberto Heras, with only one time trial left (time trials are his main handicap), he can have a lot of things to say in the mountain.

GNOME Session desktop services

In the last couple of weeks I have been working on completing the work started by the Red Hat guys on libgnomeservice. This is a system for system wide services installation and startup, so that admins can add services to be started for all users. It is also used to start the standard GNOME desktop services, like Nautilus, the panel, etc.

To test it, you need to get libgnomeservice from CVS, compile and install it, and apply all the *.patch patches to the corresponding CVS module. Then, to install additional services, you just need to put a *.service file in $datadir/dbus-1/services and a .desktop-service file in $datadir/gnome/desktop-services. There are two ways to install services. First one, the easiest one, is to use the gnome-service-launch program, which starts another process, wrapping the libgnomeservice API for that process. The second one, not yet used on any CVS module, is to use libgnomeservice API in the service. This is, of course, the best solution long term, since it would allow services, like Nautilus, to provide extra methods, and thus allow other applications to call those methods on the desktop service.

There are a couple of things missing, which I’m looking at at the moment. First is the D-BUS patch, which hasn’t been accepted upstream yet because of the test program failing, while for gnome-session, things are working pretty well. The second one, is a crash on gnome-session when you close the session, which needs to be fixed before anything of this goes to CVS.

Let’s hope this can be included for 2.12, so please, send your comments/suggestions/patches/etc

Spain is different

Lately there have been many demonstrations here in Spain. The first one, which is the only one I attended, was in Las Bardenas Reales, a protected desertic area, except for a part of it, which is used by the military to test their bombs and weapons. So, yeah, the parade was against the military use of that area, with a great lunch after the parade in the countryside. Will post the photos I have of that soon. 1.000 persons showed up.

Then, there was a demonstration in Madrid, organized by catholic organizations, to protest against the homosexual marriages, which have been allowed as of today in Spain, with the only opposition of the right-wing parties. They were protesting because “homosexual marriages will destroy the families”, whatever that means. 180.000 people, from what the authorities said, showed up.

Then, last weekend, there was a demonstration against poverty in the world, to ask polititians to do everything on their hands to make poverty history. So, as ignorant as I am, I was expecting all the people in the previous demonstration, plus many more that have nothing against homosexual’s rights, show up on this one. But heh, only 50.000 people showed up, so it means, provided that all those 50.000 were in the previous one, there are still 130.000 “familiy-protective” persons in Spain that don’t want homosexuals to be married and form their own legal families, but have nothing against poverty, which indeed destroys many more families than any other thing 🙁

Curious country we live on. Fortunately next week there is San Fermín, which will help in forgetting about all this 🙂