Month: January 2012

Bustle 0.4.0: push button, receive D-Bus traffic

Breaking with the “every six months or so maybe” release tradition, here’s the second Bustle release of the month. What’s the new hotness this time? You can record D-Bus traffic by just clicking File → New, and watch the diagram being drawn before your very eyes. After years of on-off development, Bustle can finally liberate you from needing to open a terminal to monitor D-Bus traffic ((“Occupy dbus-monitor” is arguably an unexciting slogan.)). Here’s a super-brief video tour.

Bustle 0.4.0 screenshot

Grab it for x86_64 or i486 today! Unlike the previous release, these work on both Debian and Fedora and have a strong change of working on pretty much anything with a modern-ish Glib and Gtk+2 ((…inasmuch as any version of Gtk+2 can be called “modern”, that is.)). (Thanks to my fellow Collaboran Guillaume for testing these tarballs, and to Scott Tsai for his suggestion.) Source and so on at the usual location.

Today’s surprising Bustle-assisted observation is that switching to and from the Shell overview causes the Shell to retrieve /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout from GConf 29 times. (Presumably that number is proportional to the number of windows I have open?) This was extremely useful for testing the live-logging feature, but is perhaps not ideal in many other ways.

Bustle 0.3.1 provides 50% of your daily allowance of D-Bus message bodies

It’s a cold evening here in Cambridge, but I’m being kept warm at Collabora Towers, sipping a revitalizing mug of fresh applicative functor soup.

A mere five months after I demoed its features at the Desktop Summit in Berlin, here’s Bustle 0.3.1. Whereas previous versions of Bustle only recorded and showed you the names, senders and destinations of D-Bus messages, this version also records and shows you the contents of the messages.

Screenshot of Bustle 0.3.1

The statistics page also takes advantage of this new information: you can now get statistics about the sizes of messages in the log. Grab your copy today from the usual location. Beside the source, I’ve also uploaded a 64-bit binary tarball to save you some compilation time. Give me a shout if you have trouble with it. 32-bit version to follow when I get my chroots straightened out.

I have good news and bad news. Good news: here’s a 32-bit binary tarball. Bad news: seems like Debian and Fedora have differently-sonamed libpcaps. Why is distributing software so tedious?

Yesod web application dependencies

I have been experimenting with using Yesod to throw together a web application or two. My experience so far has been broadly positive—if you like computers to check things for you, I recommend it. ((assuming you like deciphering compiler error messages when the computer says no, that is)) That said, watching the full chain of dependencies fly past was moderately entertaining: ((for a quiet Wednesday morning…))

parsec-3.1.2

An excellent parser-combinator library, widely imitated. This wouldn’t be funny, except…

attoparsec-0.10.1.0

Another excellent parser-combinator library, inspired by parsec.

base-unicode-symbols-0.2.2.3

This defines a bunch of Unicode aliases for standard functions with boring ASCII names. Why write:

x `elem` xs

when you could write:

x ∈ xs

Invaluable!

utf8-light-0.4.0.1 and utf8-string-0.3.7

Two UTF-8 encoding libraries!

semigroups-0.8

“In mathematics, a semigroup is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with an associative binary operation. A semigroup generalizes a monoid in that there might not exist an identity element. It also (originally) generalized a group (a monoid with all inverses) to a type where every element did not have to have an inverse, thus the name semigroup.”