Other – Tristan's World

Not back from GUADEC yet …

Good after noon gnomies 😉

While many of you are already back home and settled in after GUADEC this year, I’m still scrambling around from hostel to hostel and city to city (or rather from town to town ?) in Europe.

So a few words about GUADEC are owed, as usual it was great to meet face to face with more people I usually only work with on IRC or communicate with by email, I met a few new faces this year (specifically Matthew Barnes and Milan Chra from the Evolution team) which was really nice.

Day One

On the first day of GUADEC I arrived at the hotel, August 1st, really looking forward to the first night where we all get together and have some beer and meet each other before the conference starts. Since I arrived early in the afternoon on the 1st, and nobody was around, I got to relax a bit and wait for the others to arrive (I’m thinking, YAY I guess I’m the first to arrive 😉 )… since I’m only speaking on Day 2 of the conference I should have plenty of time to dust off my presentation and prepare myself…

This fantasy of mine quickly disintegrated shortly after, when I realized that GUADEC had started without me, one entire day earlier than I had booked my flight & room for the dorms.

Happily, I ran into the Collabora Kids (Montreal Chapter) on the street while trying to use some wifi at the local grocery store (as wifi was not available at the dorms), and then was lead down to a bar where most of the GUADEC people could be found (Thanks for finding me !).

The Rest

So the rest of GUADEC went as expected, there were talks, I gave my talk about the new composite templates feature in GTK+, and on how this will help us to guide developers of GTK+ applications to create cleaner, more modular and more deterministic code using composite widgets. It was also my goal to point out how this has been sorely needed over the years which GTK+/Glade/libglade/GtkBuilder has evolved. My criticism towards myself is that I think I talk a bit slow, but hopefully I managed at least to get all my points across to the audience.

There was a meeting with the Evolution hackers, where I got to meet Matthew, Milan, Srini and others, Alberto chaired the meeting and this was definitely a very involved and productive meeting. We also took a picture of the Evolution team at the end which Alberto posted in his blog. Unfortunately we did not line up against the wall and appear to be monkeys which evolved into human beings and and then devolved into computer users with back problems… but the picture was still a great souvenir 😉

There was of course plenty of face-to-face conversations, and plenty of late night beerings, Federico informed me of the tradition of SMASH (Single Malt Appreciation Society… Something beginning with ‘H’), I’m not sure if the H really stands for something or if you are supposed to be too drunk to care by the time you get to ‘H’, but we proudly kept up the tradition with a bottle I purchased in one of the airports on the way to Brno.

We even wrote code !

I know I know, we write code all year round, sitting in various parts of the globe, hanging out on IRC, so the last thing you would expect to do at GUADEC is write code, right ?

But near the end we did have a bit of a live hacking session on Glade with Juan Pablo, Kalev, Miguel and I (Kalev wrote the new support for GtkListBox which we reviewed, touched up, and pushed upstream, Miguel is new to writing code in C/GObject and we guided him with fixing an annoying bug in the signal editor).

All in all this was a pretty productive GUADEC and I’m very thankful to the GNOME foundation for sponsoring my trip to get here, thank you !

Meritocracy

I’m posting this here, while I would have replied to Taryn Fox’s blog but couldn’t do it without subscribing to something….

(I’m throwing away all of the text I wrote yesterday and starting over, I’ll instead try to write something shorter).

First and foremost, please remember that GNOME projects are indeed mostly volunteer driven, except for a few projects in GNOME which may be dominated at times by developers all working at a given company (and in those corner cases, the meritocracy approach may not apply as strictly).

In most cases, the maintainer is the only one that actually cares about the given project enough to weather the storm. Example, if I had not been so determined to make something out of Glade for a number of years in my spare time… believe me that the project would have died, in the same way that if Juan Pablo did not take care of Glade these last couple years, nobody else would have taken charge for the long term. I know this because I see the flood of contributors who come and go, the ones who stay the course and show dedication are few and far between. It’s only fair that we afford a special level of trust to those who work hard and stay the course.

Yes there are things that can be improved, hopefully we can all take criticism and try not to hurt people’s feelings etc etc, but please consider the cruel alternatives to meritocracy.

The alternative to meritocracy as I see it are those “Pay to get in Boys Clubs”, what I mean by “Boys Club” is you know… those people who’s daddy was rich or knew the right people, and so were able to go to the most reputable universities and have all the opportunities that others did not. Now let me stress that not all members of these clubs have an arrogant sense of self entitlement, however sadly some of them do in my experience, also most corporate human resource departments are unconditionally biased to hire only people who hold some kind of university degree (or even, those who hold a degree from a first world country).

Meritocracy helps us to level the playing field, it gives a chance to those of us who grew up in a cardboard box or in a third world country, to prove that they can indeed make just as worthy contributions as those of us who attended one of these rich kid clubs/universities and also get the same recognition, provided they at least did their homework (whether the walls of that home were made of brick, wood, or only cardboard).

This is something worth fighting for, worth protecting.

Glade @ GUADEC

Hi everyone,

Long time no blog. I’ve been meaning to blog and build hype around this but as I’ve been busy with so many things it just hasnt come out.

Well the first thing so say is, please be interested to click this link and visit Juan Pablo’s blog. He is speaking first thing on the first day of GUADEC on the topic of embedding GtkBuilder script natively into GtkContainer derived widgets. Some may remember some of my ancient blog posts on the same topic, I never found time to complete the patches in the composite-containers branch but Juan Pablo has picked up the work with a fury and is going to explain in more details in his talk.

In a last minute decision, as the dates are right, I also decided to drop in too. With all the work Juan has already done, a little consensus and participation hopefully we can finally pull off this great feature.

See you there 😉

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 😉

Beware of google’s pressure tactics

It seems for the moment I will be unreachable by my gmail account, today google sent me a rude surprise:

google-harassment — The screen google presented to me today harassing me for private information

Of course I could have suspected something like this was going to happen, I started receiving some similar warning splash screens from google this week in the disguise of “Protect your account, give us some alternative contact information”, they gave the “option” to provide a mobile phone number or alternative email account (of course I have an alternative anonymous hotmail account they can use to reactivate my account, the account at hotmail is still valid but I suppose for them its not enough).

Well I guess push has finally come to shove and their user interface provides me no alternative to reactivating my account other than to provide them with some mobile cell phone number.

This is crossing the line; obviously if my account had been hijacked the hijacker could just as well provide any cell phone number to have continued access to my account – the motive behind this harassment is plain to me and the way they are going about it is just plain sneaky.

No, google has no right to know who is the human being behind the persona that is “tristan.van.berkom@gmail.com”, they can speculate whatever they want while going through the contents of my account which I expect they are already sharing with a number of criminal organizations and governments… however I am not yet desperate enough to sign my own death warrant by volunteering them any further personal information than what traffic passes through my account.

If you value your anonymity on the internet… I think it’s about time to salvage your gmail content before they take it hostage from you too !

UPDATE:

@foobar:

learn-more-link — Learn more about your support options link

Ofcourse I wrote them something via the “contact support” link, I’m waiting for a reply now we’ll see.

I may however find someone I trust to obtain an anonymous phone number for this purpose but that seems a little overboard.

Late back to work post

Hello again GNOME !

I’ve been back for a few weeks now from taking a month vacation in Mexico with my girlfriend; heres a courtesy picture of us standing on top of the world… or at least on top of a pyramid 🙂

At Teotihuacan pyramids near Mexico City

… and the great news is that I’m continuing my employment with Openismus GmbH indefinitely, working specifically on GTK+ and GNOME.

So let’s recap on what’s been going on in GTK+ height-for-width resizing land since my last post.

Out of the patches that were available on the GTK+ native-layout branch, we landed the work on GtkExpander allowing the expander labels to wrap but still havent finished the work on wrapping text inside treeviews.

Similar to the GtkExpander implementation, we added support for wrapping/ellipsizing text in GtkFrame label widgets (to see this all in action you can try the ./tests/testheightforwidth demo from GTK+ git master at any time, I wont include shots for the GtkFrame here as it works pretty much exactly as the expander does).

So instead of running full till into another revision on the GtkTreeView height-for-width patches I took a different approach and moved right along to implement naturally sizing GtkComboBox (which we landed in GTK+ git master last week).

Some might wonder what is the relation between combo boxes and treeviews. The key point here is that they both end up using GtkCellRenderers to render content; the combo box by way of the GtkCellView widget. Since the cell renderer modifications for height-for-width GTK+ was a huge patch; implementing GtkComboBox first was a good excuse to pull that work in first and hopefully simplify the work that needs to still be done for treeviews.

So without further adieu here are some shots of how the combo box is performing in height-for-width land:

So far not too much to observe, the above combo box renders the liststore with a wrapping cell renderer, the combo box below renders the same liststore but uses ellipsizing cell renderers instead.

For the wrapping renderer, you need only specify the “wrap-width” which will be used as a minimum width request, if no “max-width-chars” was set on the cell renderer then the renderer will request the fully unwrapped text width as a natural width.

For ellipsizing renderers, you just specify the ellipsize mode and again the renderer will try to request the full text width as a natural size.

combo-boxes-large — Combo boxes demo with the left pane streached wide

In this (above) shot we see the text unwrap fully when the combo is allocated sufficient space to display the underlying cell renders (and similarly the lower combo box need not ellipsize at this size).

combo-boxes-small — Combo box demo with the left pane at minimum width

And finally, at their smallest possible size the cell renderer text wraps up to the minimum width which was specified by the user/programmer via the GtkCellRendererText:wrap-width property.

Well once I got that far I thought it would be enough… until I clicked on a streached out combo box and found that the menu items were still requesting the height for the minimum cell width instead of the height for the menu’s allocated width (imagine a menu with random looking menuitem heights and text that doesnt quite fit the vertical allocation).

So we went on to implementing the natural size allocation in GtkMenu and the coresponding requests in GtkMenuShell:

combo-box-dropdown-medium — The drop down menu at a larger than minimum width

Note in this screenshot some menu items wrap while some dont wrap, however they are all allocated the correct height.

combo-box-dropdown-small — Here the combo box drops down its menu at the minimum width

Here at the minimum width all of the items are wrapping and they still get allocated a correct height.

And with combo boxes doing height-for-width requests.. finally we were able to close this nasty bug.

Enjoy ! … and stay tuned for another episode of wrapping/ellipsizing text in treeview widgets 🙂

Glade could use a little help

While the Glade project can seem complex and not everybody writes GObject code in C; there are a few things that could really improve the usability of Glade without applying any real coding skill.

For instance, ever since GtkBuilder was introduced, we are still missing icons for almost all the important and attractive new objects available with GtkBuilder:

The missing icons include things like Size Group, Status Icon, Text Buffer, Text Tag, Entry Buffer, some of the newer Cell Renderers etc. Glade uses these icons every chance it gets to help to give context to the user while editing the interface, like in the Property Editor:

They are also a great indication when viewing the overall project with the Inspector view:

Note that most of the missing icons are not widgets and don’t already have a visual representation. The design needs creativity to create visually familiar patterns based on functionalities of new and interesting objects that are available, like a Size Group or a List Store.

We’ve made requests before but I suppose the interest just wasn’t there.

But really, Glade’s engine is not doing so bad, if it only had a good paint job to match then it wouldn’t appear so much like it just came out of the junkyard.

Note also Glade installs the icons into the theme, which means other development tools can also leverage the icon set that Glade installs.

Please help us with the icons ?

Good afternoon 😉

One week of Glade brought to you by Openismus GmbH

So its Tuesday afternoon prime time on Planet GNOME, here’s an inside look on whats been going on this week for Glade.

Runtime Warnings

Last week we got the GtkToolPalette integrated into Glade and got Glade vertical again, this week I went on a rampage of hunting down startup warnings, warnings caused by loading Glade files and generally any warnings/assertions that can be fired while manipulating projects in Glade.

That effort left us with a couple interesting side effects:

Now we introspect if widget classes are scrollable and we don’t allow adding non-scrollable widgets to scrolled windows
Now we update treeviews in the workspace seamlessly when the underlying treestore columns are redefined
A nasty data corruption bug occurring when loading liststore data that contains gaps (missing unserializable columns) was also fixed.

Once these items were fixed I was pretty much left on my own to fix some issues of my choosing and improve some things in Glade – awesome – so I decided to prioritize on issues that did not need backing support in GTK+, as there has been lots of development there that we haven’t been able to keep up with.

The signal editor

The first issue I decided to tackle was the ‘swapped’ attribute for signal connections defined in Glade – that’s right, until this week Glade was never able to read/write this attribute. To illustrate the importance this has in Glade I want to show you a before shot:

Ok so the editor looks alright at first sight but there are some confusing aspects, for instance the “user data” in the signal can only ever refer to an object in the Glade file – no mention of that is made. Furthermore when one goes through the whole google research to find that the user data is supposed to be an object, they immediately get stumped by GTK+ swapping the object at connection time for seemingly no desired reason – very, very confusing.

Something to keep in mind as well is that signal definitions in Glade have generally been unused. Mostly because of an inability to pass data external to the Glade file as user data to callbacks. Generally people use a parent or controller object as a module pointer to be passed to all callbacks; this technical problem with signals has really been a non-issue ever since the introduction of the gtk_builder_connect_signals() api which takes a default pointer argument to pass to signals for just this purpose.

Well, moving on – after adding the “swapped” attribute to the editor I was quite unable to tear myself away from the editor, it hasn’t seen an update in many years and has been lagging behind the rest of the UI, so without further adieu I present to you:

Now the signal editor is doing a bit better, I didn’t have the time for a full scale rewrite using GtkBuilder for its store, view and renderers as I have been hoping to do for a while but – at least she learned some tricks from her big brother the property editor:

Now the signal editor lets you view the documentation for a signal at the click of an icon (Thank you Frédéric Péters for getting DevHelp page contextual searches working again ! sorry for waiting 6 months+ to notice !).
The editor does not let you type text for connected objects for user data, instead you get an object selection dialog
Now versioning support icons/tooltips show up for signals that are introduced in the future of your project’s target version.
Tooltips explaining about the signal editor fields show up on the treeview column headers
Signal, Handler and Object fields in the editor are user resizable but allocate a reasonable size.

Actions

So, with a rocking new signal editor in master I still had some hours to kill, I went on to tackle the relationships of GtkActionGroup <–> GtkAction in Glade – I wasn’t able to pull out a customized editor for this yet, but I imagine it will look like the menu or toolbar editor and allow hierarchical configuration of the project’s action groups/actions (currently Glade will only let you add an action to a group via the Inspector widget: Right click -> Add widget here / Paste commands will do the trick).

Glade now also lets you set an accelerator key for a GtkAction, the property only applies to actions which are placed into a group, ideally this will be the ultimate place to define accelerator keys using Glade so that they integrate well with menus and toolbars.

Thank you

A big thankyou to Openismus GmbH who sponsored the project and made all of these unlikely advancements in Glade actually happen.

I’ll be turning my attention away from Glade this week to look at some other serious GNOME issues, keep up with my blog for regular updates on this Openismus sponsored effort.

Grant me a wish !

Hey my gnomies, long time no blog !

Actually long time since I’ve been actually doing gnome stuff and for not rolling a tarball this winter I’m a bit sorry… actually I did get the impression this past year that there was really very little interest in our little Glade project, which from my point of view is a work in progress with so many really amazing opportunities on the horizon.

But on the other side of the coin, while not everyone sees the potential as I do – I do not think all that work to get our initial writeup of GtkBuilder support was a waste of time; on the contrary, it still amazes me how many people around the world are using Glade and getting stuff done, even though Glade itself… is not done !

Actually I’m also touching base with you guys because my own plans fell to the water this winter and I need some help to make my wishes come true !!!

I dont wish for a house… I dont wish for a BMW… all I wish is to get to Korea soon to visit somebody important to me (as silly as it sounds – seems to me the house and the beemer are more attainable in the world I live in).

So doesn’t anyone have some odd contract for me ? I’d love to do some serious hacking of course, as specially anything gnome development platformish (hint hint: … 😉 ), but hey I can write silly iphone apps or even script some php if I have to.

So whether this is an opportunity for you to secure my services for a long term, or just throwing me a bone cause you’re a nice guy, just send my cv along to someone who might be interested and you’ll really make my day.

and dammit why cant I build gnome-doc-utils today ?! (joke, dont have to answer that 😉 )

Another rant about nothing

This year I’ve had lots of mixed feelings about Glade 3.6 … The bright side of things is that despite some regressions and even if some of the feedback we get is negative – alot of people are still using Glade 3.6 and leveraging at least some of the new features available with GtkBuilder (ofcourse only a few loose strings can make entire features unusable, like tight GtkTextBuffer/GtkTextView integration for a random example), but Im still really happy for this – its a shame we missed out on tying up GtkActionGroups so far but I think some people might already be doing some interesting stuff with GtkActivatable/GtkAction associations.

Some things do make me sad, and if you are reading this and I snapped at you in the past for some bugzilla comment that I found was not helpful to me at the time, sorry about that. The truth is I bit off more than I could chew, and for some reason I imagined that picking up the pieces after releasing 3.6 would be different.

The bugmail I received this morning was kindof disheartening, this bug was probably one of the most imporant and most annoying bugs still open since the release of 3.6, it was filed in April.

It took me 20min. to fix including the changelog entry, and it took me more time to beat up git and make a fresh checkout/commit and go comment/close the bug … and the core is like 100% documented … and I usually answer my emails …

Well I think Glade has big big potential personally, but sadly the potential is (potential * 0) if people are so scared to fix the bug in Glade, that they need to integrate a script into the build to reinterpret Glade’s xml output to fix the bug locally instead.

Anyway I wish you all luck, theres another big decade coming up for the those who will do this thing all over again, I dont know if or how much Im gonna be there but man, its important to be a crew and stick together, set your objectives together, get funding together, rock the gnome crew logo, leverage it and do something really revolutionary. I doubt the traditional competitive every man for himself attitude inherent in the free software domain is going to cut it this time.

And PEACE OUT !