A long overdue blog

I haven’t had the time to blog about the things I wanted to this summer, unfortunately I’m a couple days behind in the project I’m working on now so I’ll have to try to make this brief.

First ever GNOME summit

This took place in Montreal several weeks ago, it’s definitely a late blog post for this but I really wanted express my gratitude.

I did not take any pictures, however I did force some time into my schedule to push out a release of Glade (you could easily say that the latest stable releases of Glade were brought to you in a large part by the GNOME summit).

All in all I just wanted to voice my appreciation for getting the opportunity to shake hands with some of the people I’ve admired over the years, after arguing countless topics with many of the same people on  gtk-devel-list and desktop-devel-list over the last decade, it’s really amazing to get to meet some of these people in real life.

I do wish I had blogged this earlier, and I sincerely apologize for not having been a better host (as Montreal is my home town), it was hard enough to push the summit (and Glade release) into my schedule at all (was more of a great pleasant surprise that the summit actually came to me).

A summer of evolution-data-server

This summer at Openismus we’ve been making some enhancements to the Evolution Data Server as a part of Intel’s effort on the Meego platform.

I haven’t been blogging about this work, generally because I did not feel like there was something to “show off” about, we haven’t invented anything new, however  since yesterday we’ve landed the final patch so I’ll just give a rundown of which patches I was tasked to work on.

Bug 652178: Store PHOTO data as plain files

This is probably the most complex of the patch set, Evolution Data Server’s addressbook api allows storing of image data either as binary encoded blobs or simply as a URI. This patch basically enforces a policy where the local backend of EDS converts any incoming binary data into URIs on disk managed by the addressbook backend.

Bug 652175 and Bug 652177:

These patches add a backend property to the calendar and addressbook, the value of the property is guaranteed to remain the same so long as no data has changed for that backend, whenever data changes in the backend then the overall revision is bumped (this allows tools like SyncEvolution to abort when no data has changed without iterating over the whole database).

Bug 652171 and Bug 652180:

These patches implement an api which already existed but had remained unimplemented. The api allows one to filter the reported results of a calendar or addressbook view to only report some of the desired information (this way if you only want contact names and UIDs for instance, you dont have to transfer full vCards from the EDS just to get them).

All of these patches have landed in Evolution Data Server and should be available in the next (3.4) release.

Here and Now

Only a few days ago I landed back in Seoul, South Korea where I expect to be spending the greater part of the coming year, right now I’m in a guest house and hacking in the basement, it’s a nice quaint little atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re doing some kind of crazy science experiments in grandma’s basement again.

For the next few months I’ll be devoting much of my time to a fun (commercial software) project which is to write the new up and coming Karaoke Application for TouchTunes.

While I can’t directly devote any of the company time to GNOME, I can always find a good excuse to enhance the code at the correct level in the stack instead of working around the problem in an application. It’s always good to prove that it pays off to give back to the community which provides your platform libraries.

 

Well, it’s been great and I hope there are not too many typos … now back to not having enough time to do all the things I must 😉