Planet Closed Fist

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2

2008-08-18T13:59:53+00:00

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of fixes from the Amazing Matthew Martin:

Stop playback when the disc is re-read (Matthew Martin)
Only eject the disc if tracks were ripped (MM)
Don't try and move the non-existant temp file when skipping (MM)
Free the option context (Pierre Benz)
Don't block until n-c-b quits when copying discs
Fix playback track switching (MM)

Chris Lord: libjana fixed up for rapid application development

2008-08-17T13:48:08+00:00

Just finished fixing up libjana-gtk to work nicely with glade-3. When compiled with --enable-glade, a glade-3 catalog file will be installed and some work-arounds will be enabled in the code that allow the widgets to be used nicely inside glade-3, allowing easy creation of GtkBuilder/libglade xml UI description files.

Also, thanks to Thomas Wood's GSOC student pointing out that they were broken, and Emmanuele Bassi showing me exactly what was broken about them, I've fixed the libjana{-ecal,-gtk} vala bindings. Unfortunately, I've not had the time to test them, but they look correct :)

The plan is to use vala and glade-3/GtkBuilder in Dates2, as I get the time to work on it. Hopefully some other people might start playing with it though, as I really think libjana* lowers the barrier of entry for using PIM data via evolution-data-server in GTK applications. Just look what's possible!:

Click to zoom

Neil Roberts: blame-browse

2008-08-16T23:00:09+00:00

The one thing that's worse about Git compared to Subversion is that git-blame is so much harder to use than svn blame. The output from git-blame is very wide so if you run it on the terminal then often most of the line of source code will be cropped off the right edge. SVN's revision numbers are replaced with a git commit hash so it's also not immediatly obvious what the parent of a commit is from the information in git-blame. When I use either blame command, I often find the commit reported against a given line is not the change that I'm interested in so I usually want to re-run the annotation with the parent commit.

I thought it might be fun to knock up a program to browse the output of git-blame. I initially thought 'oh that's easy, that'll take about half an hour' so I cobbled together a quick program in Ruby with the GTK bindings. It was pretty quick to write because Ruby (like Perl) has excellent support for processing text. However I eventually got fed up with the Ruby GTK bindings because they are randomly missing bindings for some functions that I wanted and it's difficult to debug. After discovering this bug I got fed up and rewrote it in C. I also ended up making it much more complicated because now it tries to run git asynchronously and process the output as it comes using the glib main-loop.

So far you can see the source code for the file you've annotated with the hash of the commit for the that line. A tooltip is displayed for the commit with a short summary. If you click on the commit you get more information in a dialog and you can jump to the parent commit from there.

The screenshot gives away that I stole a function from ebassi's Tweet and also that I fixed a tiny bug in it :)

There's quite a lot left to do:

I would like to add forward and back buttons to the main window so that you can move through the history of what you have visited.
Searching the source and jumping to a line number are probably pretty essential.
It should probably use GtkSourceView instead of my crazy custom widget.
The UI looks nasty

I also should probably have tried to implement within the giggle source code but I didn't look at this until I'd got too far. It looks like giggle already has a lot of code to handle running git asynchrously so I could've avoided a lot of work.

The code is available on Github at http://github.com/bpeel/blame-browse

Marcin Juszkiewicz: What do I do for living

2008-08-12T14:03:33+00:00

Recently my mother asked me what exactly I do for a living. As she is not type of computer person I had to create definition which would be easy to understand for normal people. And as from time to time people asks me same question here is what I told her.

When hardware vendor builds new hardware and want to sell it to end customers he cames to us to get help on software side. As my part is building whole systems rather then single applications I took her phone as example of device and told:

Your phone is able to do many things:

make, receive and reject calls
send/receive text/voice/video messages
make/show/send photos/videos
has addressbook
has calendar
has menu to choose functions etc…

Each part is handled by separate application and my job is to build them into something what hardware vendor can put on a device before shipping it to end customer.

She was happy with that explanation, even my wife told that it is nice summary of what I do for a living. Of course there are more things which I do at work, but how to tell that I am fixing badly written software or do some testing of new ways to build it…

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Emmanuele Bassi: Stuck with me

2008-08-10T21:04:27+00:00

guadec 2008: I’m late, but I wanted to thank everyone in the GUADEC team for making this edition of the conference really rocking. thanks to everyone.

clutter: well, after the 0.8.0 release during GUADEC things have slowed down — but just a little bit; we’re fixing bugs in trunk and preparing for a 0.8.2 release of Clutter core. we also released the various integration libraries, and I’m trying to find more time to fix up the bindings. at the moment, the only bindings that have been officially released are the Perl bindings, the C++ bindings (thanks to Murray Cumming), the C# bindings (thanks to Thomas Machelen) and the Ruby bindings (thanks to Neil Roberts). I plan to release the Vala bindings really soon now — just some finishing touches to make the API nicer to use.

pyclutter: I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the Python bindings for Clutter have been, let’s say, problematic. taking a week or so away from them seems to have worked well enough, though, and now trunk is in a much better shape. unfortunately that have been some reports of segfaults and weird memory allocation issues — so any help in terms of testing is much, much appreciated. I also finally got around and generated the API reference for pyclutter using a slightly modified script coming from pygobject — but the content is missing sections like the object properties and signals. it just needs editing and some kind Python developer to start contributing documentation and fixes. again: any help is much appreciated.

travel: next week I’m headed to Sunnyvale for work; I’ll be there from the 17th to the 22nd. after I get back I’ll finally get a couple of weeks off, which I’ll spend with my wife travelling between New Haven and New York.

gnome-utils: finally found some time to do bug triaging and applying some old patches. nothing stellar: for what I have in mind I’d need a lot more time, or a lot more contributions (and less drive-by patches). for instance:

gnome-screenshot needs a maintainer, badly. preferably somebody with a dual screen set-up, that can test the behaviour on multiple screens;
gnome-system-log either needs a rewrite and a maintainer or needs to be dropped from gnome-utils and moved into its own module and its presence in the desktop suite re-evaluated; as it is, it’s mostly a liability and a relic of the past; if somebody comes up with a maintained replacement, we can talk about integrating that;
gfloppy needs to go. seriously: it’s useless. I had hopes for gnome-format, but now David Zeuthen is planning for a complete disk manager using the DeviceKit-disks API and PolicyKit so we can either wait for that, or write something really simple using those two APIs.

as you can see, gnome-utils is not at all dead — it just lacks manpower sticking around enough to get a SVN account and an entry in the MAINTAINERS file.

Chris Lord: Firefox certificate nonsense

2008-08-06T12:58:40+00:00

Just ran into this again (I must have to add exceptions on average 3 times a week?) and I have to agree with the people critiquing it; it definitely *isn't* good for security. What *would* be good is if the security exception page was deferred until you submit data through that page.

Surely there's no risk until you start giving out your details? I don't get error pages every time I view a page without certificates, I don't see how that's any more secure. I shouldn't have to add an exception (and desensitise myself further to these security issues) if I'm just viewing a page with a bad certificate.

Marcin Juszkiewicz: Links for 2008-08-05 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-06T05:00:00+00:00

Dell™ Latitude™ D400 Service Manual

Marcin Juszkiewicz: KDE 4.1? No, thanks

2008-08-05T11:03:47+00:00

I am using KDE since switched from Duron 600 to Athlon XP (few years ago). IIRC it was 3.1.something then. It was nice improvement from my desktop built on ROX-Filer + gnome-panel and WindowMaker. Time passed, my machines got faster and faster, 3D hardware acceleration was added with NVidia cards and then KDE 4 started to appear…

I installed KDE 4 on my desktop and tried to use it for few months. First it was 4.0.x but I upgraded to 4.1-svn packages when they started to be available for Debian. Ideas which KDE team has are nice but usability of such desktop is much worse then KDE 3.5.9 one :( Too much bling, too less features so I “upgraded” back to 3.5.9 to get nicely working system.

What did I lose with KDE 4.1 (tried final release yesterday):

fast desktop switching (if there is Konsole open on desktop it will render for long time)
fast Konsole tab switching (I have 2-8 tabs in terminal)
ability to set/move panel at any edge of screen (now I use top panel, used more)
ability to reorder applets/plasmoids in panel (ops - there is a way but not as intuitive as it was in 3.5)
Klipper is not usable (crash on nearly each use, not launching browser)

From what I read on KDE website Konsole problems are related to NVidia cards and workaround is given. I wonder why there is no check in preferences “I have NVidia — do not use ARGB windows then” or other way. I think that it should be easy to check with few function calls which OpenGL libs are in use…

Looks like now I have to wait to 2009 for KDE 4.2 and then check does it behave or not. Or maybe it is time to check XFCE or other environment?

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1

2008-08-04T19:33:17+00:00

Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Nothing that amazing here, sorry:

Fix play+pause+play (#523182, thanks Matthew Martin)
Add %ay, album year (#522909, Juan F. Giménez Silva)

Marcin Juszkiewicz: Nokia N8×0 emulation part II

2008-08-01T06:03:59+00:00

My previous post about Nokia N800 tablet emulation became one of popular ones. On LinuxTag I shown Maemo booting in QEmu and it was met with nice response from community. But the problem remained — how to boot it when config.mtd which I used was not distributable…

Yesterday I solved that part. After studying how Maemo boots and why does QEmu restarts with wrong config.mtd I grabbed that partition from my N810 and tried again. This time OS2008/Chinook booted fine :)

What is needed? Tablet needs to have “no-lifeguard-reset” flag set. IT can be done by using flasher as this is one of R&D flags. I had it set on my N810 because I did experiments with booting from internal SD card in past.

Thanks to Faheem Pervez (more widely known as “qwerty12″) who sent me config.mtd dumps (without R&D and with “no-lifeguard-reset”) from his N800 I was able to confirm that this is all what is needed.

Next step will be updating qemu to more recent revision to get N810 emulation (which is present in HEAD) and getting Diablo booted.

UPDATE: Diablo booted on emulated N800 and N810:

Nokia N810 emulation is more useful as there is a keyboard attached so no need for use of onscreen input methods. There are some things to remember anyway:

Alt(Gr) behave like Fn (with sticky status)
no CapsLock (but Shift works like on N810 so no big loss)
no numeric row — to get “5″ press “Alt+t” like on N810
some of other keys are also in weird places
Right Shift does not work (N810 has 2 Left Shifts)

NOTE: This is QEmu HEAD — no extra patches were needed to boot Chinook on emulated N800. To boot Diablo “hw/nseries.c” file needs to be edited to change partition info (initfs is twice as big compared to Chinook).

OpenedHand News: OH at OSCON

2008-07-31T16:47:15+00:00

OSCON is the largest conference containing the broad open source community, so it’s good to see plentiful OpenedHand appearances at this huge event.

First up at the Open Mobile Exchange was Jenny Minor on Handwave to Hardware: A Product Story Bit by Bit, the story of how Vernier created the LabQuest from product concept to shipping product (24,000 units and counting!) in 18 months - all based on Poky Linux. Later that afternoon Dave Neary and I gave a impromptu 10 minute brief on GNOME Mobile - what it is, who’s using it and how to get involved.

On Thursday, Ted Gould was kind enough to mention Clutter in his talk, ‘Ubuntu Desktop Technologies’, which, despite the title, was about all the cool technologies you can use to build apps for any upto date GNOME based distro, so it was lovely to have Clutter included in that mix! Slides here - Clutter is on slide 14.

On Friday Tomas and I gave our presentation on ‘Clutter: Breathing Life into User Interfaces’ (slides, example code). The talk was well attended and there were plenty of questions before and after, so it will be interesting to see if some more Clutter based projects start appearing over the next 12 months.

At some point Ken Gilmer was cornered by Shaun Powers of Linux Journal for a video interview about the BUG and Poky. Nice one Ken - we love Xeyes too

Like any big conference at least half the value of OSCON is the hallway conversations, catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones. The Redmonk gatherings were great to meet friends old and new, as well as the always weird Sun party - this year in a (carpeted) hotel car park, featuring outsize trike racing, and inter-project sumo wrestling. It was fun to be part of, and we look forward to taking part again next year.

Beaver's Blog: Poky at OSCON

2008-07-31T10:49:59+00:00

Although there was no official Poky talk at OSCON, Poky featured in Jenny Minor’s talk ‘Handwave to Hardware: A Product Story Bit by Bit’ about the Vernier LabQuest, and also on the BUG that Ken Gilmer was showing off. In the video below Ken is being interviewed by Shaun Powers of Linux Journal about the BUG and Poky.

Great to see Poky pop up and generate interest at such a large event!

Ross Burton: GUADEC

2008-07-29T20:40:00+00:00

Hmm, so I never did blog a GUADEC roundup. In two words: it rocked. Congratulations to Baris and everyone else who organised it!

In other late GUADEC news I finally reviewed the rest of my GUADEC photos and uploaded them to Flickr. I'll try and not take a month to upload next time, honest!

Marcin Juszkiewicz: I am 0×20 now

2008-07-28T09:47:26+00:00

Since Saturday I am 0×20 years old. We had small meeting with birthday cake etc. There was no candles on it because it is hard to put so many of them on small area. One friend had idea of putting 6 candles (with only one lit) but rest of company was non-IT so would not catch (there was already problem with “0×20″ text on cake)…

The most of fun was with one present which I got week before by post… It had “Open 26th July” sign on it so had to wait. Inside was puzzle made from C code — really hard to solve because source looked like one of contributions to IOCCC (and later I got information from friend that it indeed was based on one of them: gavare/2004). It took some time and 3 persons to solve puzzle.

Next part was entering source into C file… As I do not know any good OCR software for Debian GNU/Linux I had to type all 35 lines by my own hands. Good that with puzzles there was a sheet of paper with md5sum for each line (I had 5 typos). Resulting source compiled out-of-box with GCC 4.3.1 (but lot of warnings). Output of application does not had any sense to me anyway… But after redirecting to file and leaving for time longer then 2 minutes it finally ended work (after 12,5 minutes). Result was PPM picture with birthday wishes :)

Some presents are really great :D Thx, Ury!

Rob Bradford: Lazy web: iPod Shuffle

2008-07-24T10:07:07+00:00

My iRiver T60 has died after only 6 months of occasional use. This sucks. But since this is my 3rd MP3 player in ~ 2 years I feel i’m somewhat cursed in my ability to lose/break them. So my question is this: If I go into John Lewis (because it’s easy to take back if when it stops working) on Saturday and buy a shiny shiny iPod shuffle and turn myself into a complete sell-out will it *just* work with Rhythmbox 0.11.5? Will it just work or will I need to find a Mac to activate it or something painful like that?

Iain Holmes: The Space Between Efterklang and Tortoise

2008-07-22T11:50:41+00:00

Things You Don’t Expect To Discuss With Random Girls You Stand Beside At Concerts

#94: Memory allocation strategies for next-gen consoles.

Beaver's Blog: BUG adopts Poky Linux

2008-07-21T21:03:02+00:00

Having evaluated various options the people at Bug Labs, makers of the BUG have decided to switch to using Poky as their build system and development tool. You can read more on their blog.

Chris Lord: Guadec '08

2008-07-20T00:46:49+00:00

Been putting off writing about this for a while, but it's getting on a bit, so a 'short' blog post is in order, I think. Guadec '08 was pretty awesome. I was expecting it to be a little stale, not so many of the talks sounded that exciting, and all the talk about decadence/stagnation (poppycock!) probably lead me to have negative preconceptions. That just meant that some of the excellent talks that there were were even better, as they came unexpected.

OpenedHand, of course, had some excellent talks, but I guess this goes without saying by now. Clutter just gets more and more interesting (go check out the new 0.8 release, recently accompanied by 0.8 releases of the gtk, qt, gstreamer and cairo integration libraries!), as do our surrounding applications and technologies. Guadec always seems to get me coding on Dates-related bits - '06, I rewrote the event-fitting and query code in Dates (making it usable on the tablets), '07 I started writing libjana (as used in openmoko-dates and openmoko-messages, amongst other things) and this year, I wrote vala bindings and started some work with glade3 integration. Unfortunately still a ways to go on the latter, but I hope it'll provide the foundation of Dates 2, eventually. I will delivery on that pledge, honest!

Istanbul was an excellent location for guadec and is a really interesting and entrancing place. Anyone reading p-g-o would have seen the multitude of picturesque photos being spammed about the place, but the coolest thing with Istanbul is that it really is like that, everywhere you look. It must be awful for OCD photographers, there are so many picture opportunities. Even with my camera-phone, I managed to capture some (what I consider) great photos. It's a close match between Istanbul and Catalonia, but I think Istanbul just about pips it. One thing that Istanbul couldn't quite match was the very cool atmosphere that there was at the Villanova (sp?) cabin site. Having everyone in one place, with easy transportation to the event was really nice and it'd be cool if that were repeated in future guadecs somehow.

Outside of the businessy aspect of guadec, I had a great time jamming with the Drooling Macaques. Hats off to the guys (Lucas, J5, Alberto, Carlos, Claudio, Edward, Rob, Thomas, Lefty, Jono, I don't think I missed anyone?), especially for putting up with my terrible drumming! I'll be better for next year :) Also, kudos to Collabora and whoever else was involved in setting up the awesome boat party. Was a lot of fun, although I'm sure some others partied a lot harder than I ;)

As for all this GTK+3.0 talk, I think Karl's post is a pretty good short-list of features that I'd like to see in a new major version. To that list, I'd add easy event redirection, a w3c style bubble/capture event system and for there to be a scrollable interface, as opposed to some crazy, hard-to-implement, totally undocumented, magic way of creating scrolling widgets (no, I'm not bitter...) Also, better input method integration/control (from the program side as well as the user interface side) wouldn't go amiss. Past this, I don't think there's that much more necessary... For next generation interfaces, we have Clutter. Once we can embed GTK inside Clutter reliably (off-screen is coming in 2.x, right? That just leaves easy event mangling/synthesis/redirection?), all sorts of crazy shiz can go down. At the end of the day, I suppose it's down to the people that will be doing the work. If the majority of GTK devs think there needs to be a new major version, I trust them to make the right decision - they did a pretty bang-up job on 2.x :)

As for Gnome 3.0, I think the future of HCI lies in more specialist devices and ubiquitous/pervasive computing that it does on the desktop. I'd like to see a Gnome 3.0, just because I think it'd be very interesting and I like to play with new toys, but I don't think it's something that's *necessary* per se. Certainly there's still quite a ways to go in polishing what we already have.

Clutter: Clutter 0.8 integration libraries release

2008-07-18T14:50:29+00:00

Clutter 0.8 suite of integration libraries is now available for download
at:

sources/clutter-cairo/0.8/
sources/clutter-gst/0.8/
sources/clutter-gtk/0.8/

MD5 Checksums:

  56b69645629293d5dcd93817fabe669a  clutter-cairo-0.8.1.tar.gz
  91262dd6ead7261a584dacf5dd1933f5  clutter-cairo-0.8.1.tar.bz2
  9ebf9bbe406757472952743ca01870f3  clutter-gst-0.8.0.tar.gz
  13d2a34ea76e4f010e66d20eba12e864  clutter-gst-0.8.0.tar.bz2
  1fea21affb3a74014fc0b4270b67ed2d  clutter-gtk-0.8.1.tar.gz
  0a93adeb69281dcd1d8455a53f746d9b  clutter-gtk-0.8.1.tar.bz2

The Clutter integration libraries suite is a series of open source libraries for integrating Clutter with other libraries:

clutter-cairo, for integration with Cairo
clutter-gst, for integration with GStreamer
clutter-gtk, for integration with GTK+

This suite of libraries allows to use the Cairo drawing API into Clutter; or to use the GStreamer pipelines to render to a texture inside the Clutter scenegraph; or to embed a Clutter scenegraph into a GTK+ application.

Clutter-Cairo 0.8.1

List of changes since 0.6:

Added clutter_cairo_surface_resize() and clutter_cairo_create_region()

Clutter-GStreamer 0.8.0

List of changes since 0.6:

Add clutter_gst_audio_get_playbin() function
Add support for 24-bit textures
Add pixel-shader AYUV/YV12 support via ‘use-shaders’ property on ClutterGstVideoSink

Clutter-GTK+ 0.8.1

List of changes since 0.6:

Support the Clutter win32 backend
Support multiple GtkClutterEmbed widgets
Add utility functions for integrating with GTK+ themes, GTK+ stock icons, icon themes and GdkPixbuf
Do not open a second Display connection on X11

As usual, have fun with Clutter!

Beaver's Blog: Using Poky SDK to build software

2008-07-18T10:38:56+00:00

Poky Linux distribution provides SDK for quite long time. From time to time I hear persons which complain about lack of libX or libY in toolchain tarballs. But there is a solution for them — Poky SDK can be expanded with packages.

Installation

This is described in Poky Handbook already:

The meta-toolchain and meta-toolchain-sdk targets (see the images section) build tarballs which contain toolchains and libraries suitable for application development outside Poky. These unpack into the /usr/local/poky directory and contain a setup script, e.g. /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm/environment-setup which can be sourced to initialise a suitable environment. After sourcing this, the compiler, QEMU scripts, QEMU binary, a special version of pkgconfig and other useful utilities are added to the PATH. Variables to assist pkgconfig and autotools are also set so that, for example, configure can find pre-generated test results for tests which need target hardware to run.

Using the toolchain with autotool enabled packages is straightforward, just pass the appropriate host option to configure e.g. “./configure –host=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi”. For other projects it is usually a case of ensuring the cross tools are used e.g. CC=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-gcc and LD=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-ld.

Extending SDK

So you want to build GTK+ based application but “configure” tells you that you miss GTK+ headers? In normal systems you would install development packages. Same is with Poky SDK, but due to fact that there are no repositories for Poky a bit more work is needed.

You will need contents of “tmp/deploy/ipk/” from other developer or from local Poky build. I have them from local build and they are stored in “/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk” directory.

Next step is editing opkg configuration file (stored in /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm/arm-poky-linux-gnueabi/etc/opkg.conf) to add feeds locations. With my packages it looks like this:

arch all 1
arch any 6
arch noarch 11
arch arm 16
arch armv4 21
arch armv4t 26
arch armv5te 31
arch qemuarm 36
src oe-all file:/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/all
src oe-armv5te file:/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/armv5te

Now it is time to install those missing headers: “opkg-target update” will update list of available packages and “opkg-target install gtk+-dev” install required headers.

Building software

First something really simple: helloworld.c. Run “arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-gcc hello.c -o hello”. Result will be ARM binary:

14:14 hrw@home:$ file hello hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

I took Tasks 0.13 as an example of autoconf based application as it use some libraries not present in standard toolchain. After unpacking and starting “./configure –host=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi” I got message that GTK+ headers are missing so I installed them with “opkg-target install gtk+-dev” (like it is described).

After next “configure” call there was message about missing “libecal” which is part of “eds-dbus” so “opkg-target install eds-dbus-dev” solved problem.

Finally “configure” does not give any errors and “make” call built application:

14:19 hrw@home:tasks-0.13$ file src/gtk/tasks
src/gtk/tasks: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

Summary

As you see Poky SDK is not limited to default set of packages but can be extended with additional ones. OK, someone needs to build them first but imagine situation when company has 10 developers — one has Poky build tree which he use to generate packages which can be used by rest of team without spending precious time on building.

Marcin Juszkiewicz: Using Poky SDK to build software

2008-07-17T14:17:55+00:00

Installation

This is described in Poky Handbook already:

The meta-toolchain and meta-toolchain-sdk targets (see the images section) build tarballs which contain toolchains and libraries suitable for application development outside Poky. These unpack into the /usr/local/poky directory and contain a setup script, e.g. /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm/environment-setup which can be sourced to initialise a suitable environment. After sourcing this, the compiler, QEMU scripts, QEMU binary, a special version of pkgconfig and other useful utilities are added to the PATH. Variables to assist pkgconfig and autotools are also set so that, for example, configure can find pre-generated test results for tests which need target hardware to run.

Using the toolchain with autotool enabled packages is straightforward, just pass the appropriate host option to configure e.g. “./configure –host=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi”. For other projects it is usually a case of ensuring the cross tools are used e.g. CC=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-gcc and LD=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-ld.

Extending SDK

Next step is editing opkg configuration file (stored in /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm/arm-poky-linux-gnueabi/etc/opkg.conf) to add feeds locations. With my packages it looks like this:

arch all 1
arch any 6
arch noarch 11
arch arm 16
arch armv4 21
arch armv4t 26
arch armv5te 31
arch qemuarm 36
src oe-all file:/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/all
src oe-armv5te file:/home/hrw/devel/OH/poky/trunk/build/tmp/deploy/ipk/armv5te

Now it is time to install those missing headers: opkg-target update will update list of available packages and opkg-target install gtk+-dev install required headers.

Building software

Hello world

First something really simple: helloworld.c. Run arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-gcc hello.c -o hello. Result will be ARM binary:

14:14 hrw@home:$ file hello hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

Autoconf based application

I took Tasks 0.13 as an example as it use some libraries not present in standard toolchain. After unpacking and starting ./configure --host=arm-poky-linux-gnueabi I got message that GTK+ headers are missing so I installed them with opkg-target install gtk+-dev (like it is described).

After next “configure” call there was message about missing “libecal” which is part of “eds-dbus” so opkg-target install eds-dbus-dev solved problem.

Finally “configure” does not give any errors and make call built application:

14:19 hrw@home:tasks-0.13$ file src/gtk/tasks
src/gtk/tasks: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

Summary

BTW — It is not limited to Poky SDK. Other OpenEmbedded based systems should be more or less capable of doing such things.

Matthew Allum: Clutter Embedded in Qt

2008-07-16T14:52:43+00:00

Neil cooked up a quick Clutter-Qt widget (Klutter?Qlutter?) today.

For those that enjoy Qt, this represents a more powerful and flexible alternative to QGraphicsView (imho).

Source is here; http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/clutter/trunk/clutter-qt. Note, needs Clutter 0.8.

Marcin Juszkiewicz: Back from GUADEC

2008-07-16T11:34:07+00:00

Mira’s reaction — priceless…

Emmanuele Bassi: When the World Ends

2008-07-15T01:57:21+00:00

I’m delaying my sleep time further on, after two hours on IRC discussing the gtk+ 3.x issues spawned by Miguel’s blog post, because there are a few points I’d like to make.

discussion: the first, and foremost, is: let’s not use blogs to discuss. blogs suck at this — they break down communication, they are slow and they are not meant to do this kind of stuff. we have meetings, mailing lists, IRC — all of these are better versed at discussing things. for instance, I would have loved to have Miguel at the gtk+ team meeting of tuesday at GUADEC: it would have been a great discussion, I’m sure of it, and we might have had a different state of the union talk.

marketing: let’s be honest, here — we’ve been joking a lot on KDE 4.x and their marketing trainwreck, and how it was similar to the GNOME 2.0 own marketing trainwreck. there’s a difference, though, with gtk+ 3.0 and it is: gtk+ is a library, is not an entire desktop; if we call 3.0 the initial release of the 3.x API series it’s because we promised that the 2.x API series would not break API nor ABI. QT 4.0 was released with KDE 3.5 still going strong and KDE 4 far away in design land, and the features that are now used by KDE 4.x have been added during the 4.3 and 4.4 releases of the QT platform.

features: yes, 3.0.0 might not have features. is this bad marketing? probably. so we need to fix this. a way¹ to do this would be keeping the 3.0.0 in alpha state, call it 2.99.0² and add features to that until we get to a 3.0.0 that developers will want to migrate to, like the new scenegraph API or the new style API. let’s break with 2.x in style.

communication: there’s a certain lack of communication between the gtk+ team and the users of the library. in my opinion, it’s due to the small number of active developers and to the fact that ISVs don’t really get involved into shaping the platform they are using. they have the source code, and sometimes it’s easier to fix in-house than to communicate and go through the proper process — and this is a structural problem that is caused by the small number of people involved in the said process as well. the gtk+ team needs to open up more, and at the same time the ISVs need to get more involved. sometimes it feels to me that the team is waiting for features, direction and help in the development, while the users of the library are waiting for the team to come up with the perfect plan to fix all the bugs and warts while retaining the whole API and ABI.

process: this is connected to the first point — we have a lot of channels, and it might be daunting to actually follow them all; but we’re also open in terms of discussion and revision. this is our strength. so please: if you want to discuss, join the IRC meetings on the #gtk-devel channel on Tuesday at 20:00 UTC or send an email to gtk-devel-list with your points. get involved. help shaping the future. don’t stand idly by, and wait for stuff to break to complain.

I’d like to thank iain, Hallski and campd for the interesting discussion — and for the points raised and taken

kudos to iain [↩]
but install a pkg-config file called gtk+-3.0 and install the headers under gtk-3.0 [↩]

Thomas Wood: Guadec Roundup

2008-07-14T13:55:29+00:00

Back from Guadec, which was great. Few interesting points:

I am not actually Linux Hater, despite my colleagues attempts to spread vicious rumours to the contrary.
Pleased with GTK+ 3 decisions, obviously lots of thought and planning gone into this. Glad to see long term goals being put in place.
Had some good meetings/BOFs about artwork and GTK+ theming.
Chose the wallpapers from the wallpaper contest, despite Kalle falling asleep during the process and refusing to wake up
Had fun playing a lovely red saxaphone at the opening party
Got some good hacking time in, and resurrected my Pixbuf theme editor, now renamed Monet (code available soon)
Lots of interesting talks on user experience and user interface design, especially the keynotes and Andy Fitzsimon’s talk. I am now wishing I had taken some proper notes, but I hope the slides/videos will be online soon.

My new tasks are to release some version of Monet fairly soon, and to start work on a GTK+ theme engine to implement some of the css style GTK+ theming thoughts I had a while back.

Thanks to everyone that helped organise this years Guadec. It was a great event and of course great to catch up with old friends and meet new ones.

Neil Roberts: Compiling Clutter on Windows with MinGW + MSYS

2008-07-13T20:00:08+00:00

I keep getting asked how to compile Clutter on Win32 now that we have a native backend so here is some instructions to compile with MinGW and MSYS on a fresh Windows installation.

First you need to install the MinGW and MSYS packages from here.

Select the top package called 'Automated MinGW Intaller' and download the exe of the latest version. Run the executable and install to the default location. Make sure you DON'T install 'MinGW make' to make life easier.

Next download the 'MSYS Base System'. Use the .exe installer from 'Current release' (not the technology preview). Run the executable and install to the default location. Answer yes to whether you want to continue with the post install and tell it the location where you installed MinGW (which should be c:/MinGW).

Next install the 'MSYS supplementary tools'. Again select .exe from the current release and install it to the default location.

To make downloading the dependencies for Clutter easier, we want to be able to run the mingw-cross-compile.sh script which will do some of the leg work automatically. However to do this we first need some extra utilities.

Make a directory called c:/msys/1.0/clutter-work and another directory called downloads under that. Go back to the SourceForge page for MinGW and select the 'User Contributed: mingwPORT' section. Download the wget tarball to the newly created downloads folder.

Start MSYS and type the following to install wget.

cd /clutter-work/downloads
tar -jvxf wget-1.9.1-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
cd wget-1.9.1/mingwPORT
mkdir /usr/src
PATH="$PATH":"$PWD" ./mingwPORT.sh

Press enter at each question to just use the default

Next we need to install unzip.exe which we can get from the GNUWin32 ports. Visit here and download the 'complete package, except sources'. Install it to the default location.

Now we can type the following to download and install the clutter dependencies using the helper script:

cd /clutter-work
wget -O downloads/mingw-cross-compile.sh \
'http://svn.o-hand.com/view/*checkout*/clutter/trunk/clutter/build/mingw/mingw-cross-compile.sh'
PATH="$PATH:/c/Program Files/GnuWin32/bin" sh ./downloads/mingw-cross-compile.sh

Press enter to all of the questions to get the default except the 'Do you want to download and install Clutter...' questions because these will try to use SVN which we don't have installed.

Next we need to install pkg-config to get Clutter's configure script to work. Type the following:

cd /clutter-work/downloads
wget 'http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/releases/pkg-config-0.23.tar.gz'
tar -zvxf pkg-config-0.23.tar.gz
cd pkg-config-0.23
prefix=/clutter-work/clutter-cross
libdir="${prefix}/lib"
includedir="${prefix}/include"
CFLAGS="-g -O2 -Wall -I${includedir}/glib-2.0 -I${libdir}/glib-2.0/include" \
LDFLAGS="-L${libdir} -lglib-2.0 -lintl -liconv" \
./configure
make all install

Now we should finally be ready to compile Clutter:

cd /clutter-work/downloads
wget http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/0.8/clutter-0.8.0.tar.bz2
cd ..
tar -jvxf downloads/clutter-0.8.0.tar.bz2
cd clutter-0.8.0
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/clutter-work/clutter-cross/lib/pkgconfig \
 PATH="$PATH:/clutter-work/clutter-cross/bin" \
 CFLAGS="-mms-bitfields -I/clutter-work/clutter-cross/include -g -O2 -Wall" \
 ./configure --prefix=/clutter-work/clutter-cross --with-flavour=win32
make all install

Now to prove that it worked we can run test-actors. Windows needs the Clutter DLL to be in the system path for this to work so type the following:

export PATH="$PATH:/clutter-work/clutter-cross/bin"
cd /clutter-work/clutter-0.8.0/tests
.libs/test-actors

If you want to compile a simple app without using autotools, it's easiest to use the libtool generated in the Clutter source so that it can work some voodoo with the included libraries. This assumes you've still got your path set up from the previous test:

libtool --mode=link gcc -Wall -g -o simple-app simple-app.c \
-I/clutter-work/clutter-cross/include \
`PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/clutter-work/clutter-cross/lib/pkgconfig pkg-config clutter-0.8 --cflags --libs`

Enjoy!

Rob Bradford: Clutter 0.8 Packages

2008-07-13T11:17:22+00:00

Packages for Clutter 0.8 have been uploaded to the Debian archive and to the OpenedHand Debian repository. There are packages available for Debian unstable and Ubuntu hardy (no gutsy i’m afraid, glib is too old.)

And in completely unrelated news thanks to everyone involved in the organisation of GUADEC: Good work guys!

Iain Holmes: 11 Strawmen About KDE4

2008-07-12T22:11:29+00:00

1. “KDE4 is finished”

2. “Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake”

3. KDE needs a fork

4. “KDE needs to drop Plasma”

5. “Plasma lacks functionality”

6. “KDE4 cannot cure cancer”

7. “The whole KDE4 desktop interface is radically new”

8. “I am forced to use the KDE in the dark because my light is broken”

9. “The KDE team does not like llamas”

10. “KDE 4 vs 4.0 is confusing”

11. “KDE should just have told the truth and not pretended KDE 4 was ready and then articles like this would not have been necessary 6 months later”

To see rebuttals to all these strawmen and more, read the article over at groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080710131440951

Iain Holmes: I am a whore

2008-07-11T14:57:52+00:00

KDE has lots of clocks.

That is all, Jorge you owe me 50$

Emmanuele Bassi: Something on my back

2008-07-11T14:03:24+00:00

dear, all-knowing and all-powerful lazyweb;

what’s the reason why python segfaults¹ with this error message:

TypeError: Cannot create a consistent method resolution
order (MRO) for bases Container, Scriptable

when I’m trying to instantiate a python class inheriting from a C class that implements those two interfaces? just for the record:

the interfaces have no colliding methods
the python class is registering a GObject type
the python class has no colliding method with either interfaces

I can point at the code or, if python-gobject/gtk maintainers are at GUADEC, I can show them right away. you can easily find me: I’m the one swearing at python.

yes, python segfaults — and it does inside pygobject [↩]

Ross Burton: OH Wares

2008-07-11T13:14:00+00:00

I've just been informed that Rob Bradford has one large "I3<OH" left. If you want one, then find him fast! The grapevine also says that there is a crack team of rouge OH Men on the loose, so watch out!

Marcin Juszkiewicz: What was on GUADEC 2008

2008-07-11T11:29:06+00:00

GUADEC is going to end for me today — I am going back home tomorrow. Was it worth going here? Yes, it was. I met interesting guys, spoke about nice projects which I will probably work on soon etc.

Talks

There was lot of interesting talks during this year GUADEC:

“Bob the Builder: How can he fix it?” by Rob Bradfort from OpenedHand — it was about Poky, developing for embedded targets, which tools are available and how to use them.
“Clutter guts” by Tomas Frydrych, Emmanuele Bassi and Øyvind Kolås from OpenedHand. This was was about Clutter — what it is, how to use, what it gives. For me it was interesting as I did not knew what exactly it is.
“Location-aware applications with GeoClue and Gypsy” by Henri Bergius (Nemein), Iain Holmes (OpenedHand), Jussi Kukkonen (also OH) — from clock applet which automatically change your timezone for shopping lists which reminds you about milk when you are near store. I wonder how those projects will change the way of writing applications. For those who does not know what Gypsy is — it is GPS multiplex daemon which does not have gpsd bugs.
“Breaking the Silence: Making Applications Talk with Telepathy” by Robert McQueen from Collabora. I think it was a bit too technical but otherwise it shown what Telepathy is and how cool can it be.

I see that some of Lighting Talks can be also interesting.

Parties

O yes… parties… Monday and Tuesday were easy days — we got some Turkish coffee somewhere (it was really good) and Turkish beer (was not good) but next days were different.

On Wednesday evening there was roof party at the University. Lot of people and red wine in plastic/paper cups. Get to sleep at ~02:00…

Thursday… Collabora boat party with “unlimited” beer… That was great event. At 21 we get on board and the party started. Carlsberg is quite good beer and after 3rd can you do not notice taste :) There were few places with stronger alcohols — 15 years old whiskey for example. We went under Europe<>Asia bridges — the first one has animated lights which looks very nice. I spoke a lot with Ken Gilmer from Bug Labs company and it was good spent time. Later from party to came to “bar” near the Golden Horn hotel and from there I walked to our hotel. Final bed time: 03:30…

Today there will be Google sponsored party but I do not plan to go there. I prefer to have some time for packing and rest before traveling home (Istanbul -> Berlin -> Szczecin) and going to the party would makes me look like zombie on Saturday… And I have family event on Sunday so I should look like normal person rather :)

BTW — after boat party I thought that conference could be named GUADEP as sometimes it looks like parties takes more time and attention then conferences :D

Summary

I will not write that it was worth going to GUADEC because it is widely known fact. I met interesting people (also few not interesting ones), discussed some projects with their managers (as talking is always better then exchanging emails).

Next year should be even more interesting as it will be merged with Akademy which is KDE conference (and I use KDE3/4 rather then GNOME on my machines).

Matthew Allum: OH Clone

2008-07-11T11:19:53+00:00

With everyone away enjoying Istanbul, I got lonely so cloned (most of) the gang - seems I lacked enough parts for everyone however. Things were obviously beginning to get desperate with Samuels incarnation.

Click the image for flickr note bombing fun.

Rob Bradford: GUADEC Flickr group

2008-07-11T06:47:06+00:00

Despite a couple of false starts with the Flickr group (thanks Claudio for nudging me), the group should now be ready to accept your photos!

Emmanuele Bassi: Odalisque/2

2008-07-11T00:44:44+00:00

so, it turns out that the plans of releasing Clutter 0.8 right after GUADEC were a little bit on the conservative side, since

Clutter 0.8.0 has been released

thanks to all the contributors for bugs opened, patches written, tests performed — you all rock my world.

now you’ll just have to wait a tiiiiny little bit for the integration libraries¹, for the bindings² and for Tidy³.

they all work with the new API, they just need to be distchecked [↩]
this will take some more time but they’ll be there [↩]
will demo something tomorrow at my lightning talk around 14:30 if you’re at GUADEC [↩]

Matthew Allum: Announcement.

2008-07-10T19:14:03+00:00

Says so the Smogun..

Clutter: Clutter 0.8.0 Released!

2008-07-10T17:16:16+00:00

The Clutter team are extremely pleased to announce the new 0.8 stable release of Clutter core. This is probably our biggest and most exciting release yet.

You can download the 0.8.0 tarball from here.

So whats new? Quite alot;

COGL, the underlying GL abstraction layer in Clutter, has been
completely rewritten from the ground up. It is now a more mature,
fully documented abstraction layer across OpenGL, OpenGL ES 1.1
and OpenGL ES 2.0. COGL allows Clutter Applications the unique
ability to run on both Desktop and Mobile hardware with no source
level modifications. New features include;
- Much improved and wider tested OpenGL ES 1.1 support.
- OpenGL ES 2.0 Support.
- Rich scalable texture support, supporting numerous pixel formats,
  transparent tiling, mipmapping, deformation etc.
- Overhauled clipping functionality
- Path based vector drawing functionality.
- FBO & Shader support across OpenGL and OpenGL ES.
- Image loading and image library wrapping.
- Full API documentation
Increased portability. Clutter now provides experimental native
backend support for the Microsoft Windows(tm) platform and
Apple(tm) iPhone and iPod Touch families of products as well
improvements to existing OSX, GLX, SDL and EGL backends.
The X11 based backends now feature support for Actors that wrap
external X drawables (i.e the texture-from-pixmap extension and
fallbacks). This primarily allows for the creation of desktop
compositing type applications with Clutter.
Clutter now seamlessly supports multiple stages (windows) on the
backends that allow this feature. Stages are also now sub
class-able.
The custom Pango text renderer has been completely rewritten, now
using the more modern PangoCairo (instead of FT2), and avoids
nasty subclassing hacks; it supports smooth fast scaling of
text, has many edge case issues fixed and it still is very
efficient (using a texture glyph cache). It is even a little bit
faster.
Numerous ClutterTexture Improvements. Including;
- Image loading from disk.
- Easier subclassing with custom ‘deformed’ rendering.
- Mipmap support.
- ‘keep-aspect-ratio’ property.
- Repeating tiling fixes.
Multiple pointer device support. Clutter now features support for
multiple simultaneous pointing devices including event processing
and grabs. The feature is backend dependant and currently
provided by X11 (with optional new XInput support) and Apple(tm)
iPhone ‘fruity’ backends.
Completely rewritten the size negotiation API and implementation,
which allows the creation of fluid and dynamic layout management,
using natural and minimum sizes, and different geometry management
like height-for-width and width-for-height. Classic ‘fixed’ layout
still available and not impeded.
The ClutterContainer interface has been extended with a flexible
infrastructure to store container specific per actor state.
The timeline behaviour has been updated and made more consistent;
ClutterEntry has been improved with regards to multi-byte text
and cursor handling; the API documentation coverage has been
extended; performance on OpenGL ES has been improved;
ClutterScript improvements.

For further detailed information see the README and NEWS files. The List of bugs fixed since 0.7.6 are here. The full mailing list announcement is available here.

A very big thanks to all those that have contributed to this release:

Chris Lord, Neil Roberts, Robert Bragg, Haakon Sporsheim, Xan López, Jussi Kukkonen, Armin Burgmeier, Tommi Komulainen, Iain Holmes, Havoc Pennington, Lucas Rocha, Johan Bilien, Ivan Leben, Richard Purdie, Gwenole Beauchesne, David Stanczak, Peter Enzerink, Andy Wingo, Peter Csaszar, James Ketrenos.

Expect the various Clutter ‘add on’ library’s and bindings to be updated for 0.8 in coming days.

As always, have fun with Clutter!

Emmanuele Bassi: Odalisque

2008-07-10T16:00:26+00:00

this GUADEC has been quite a ride, and we’re just halfway through.

gtk+: the gtk+ team meeting on tuesday went really well — and part of the discussion was incorporated in Kris always excellent State of the union talk. the team went over and over this issue since last GUADEC and during the hackfest, and even though something at some point will probably go wrong the plan is good and allows leeway to reduce the overall effort for moving the entire platform. I think that given the circumstances this is the best plan that can be realistically implemented.

gnome: everyone will be discussing the release team plan as well. I can only say: let’s do it!

clutter: the Clutter Guts talk went really smoothly; we tried to fill Matthew shoes — and had to be in three to do it — but I think people came out of the talk with more knowledge about the deep magic and the pixie fairies dust that power Clutter and make it as awesome as it is. as I said during the talk, Clutter 0.8 is really in the final stages now, and it’s going to be released as soon as we finish testing some of the backends. people will just have to wait a little bit, but by the time everyone gets back home from GUADEC they will be able to get the tarball from the server.

Rob Bradford: Patchsquad BOF [Updated]

2008-07-10T15:10:07+00:00

Since Kristian’s excellent GTK State of the Union talk was today his slot is now available for a Patchsquad BOF. So that’s tomorrow at 11am. Thanks Behdad for allowing us to grab this.

A little background on the idea of a Patchsquad: Primarily the idea is to reduce the workload of maintainers by commenting, not reviewing, patches that are waiting in Bugzilla. This may include testing, checking for obvious issues and gentle pestering of maintainers. Lucas held a BOF last year to introduce the idea that was well attended and a lot said but interest seems to have twindled. Myself and Diego want to try reinvigorate the idea!

Update: Whoops! Looks like we haven’t got that slot afterall. If you’re interested in the Patchsquad pleas some along and speak to either Diego or myself.

OpenedHand News: Quick GUADEC report.

2008-07-09T16:58:35+00:00

As I sit here in a currently very wet London manning the fort, the rest of the OH gang are over in Istanbul, Turkey attending this years GUADEC - The GNOME users and developers european conference. Today was pretty much OH talk day with presentations by OH folks on Poky development tools, Clutter internals, GeoClue, and GEGL.

By all accounts so far, the talks went well and were very well received. Well done folks! Just don’t forget my Turkish delight..!

Its rumored a number of OHMen hitched a ride with the gang to Istanbul. There looking for nice new homes. If you think you can offer one, kindly grab and convince one of the various OH people at the conference.

Marcin Juszkiewicz: Second is very long time

2008-07-08T09:15:19+00:00

I am at GUADEC now and typing from my Dell D400 laptop. The fun part is in battery — it is more or less dead but in interesting way…

For last few minutes it say that I have 3% of battery left which will give me 1 second of work. It is quite long second :)

After all the battery has enough juice to give me about 30-40 minutes of usage (with removed everything not needed like USB, Ethernet) with WiFi enabled (on Broadcom 4306 chipset). And to avoid data loss I have all partitions mounted read-only now.

UPDATE: some more facts:

11:08 — 3% battery left, 00:00:01 remaining
11:31 — 0% battery left
12:02 — still working…
12:08 — started dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null to give some work for CPU. Machine stopped working

1 hour with unknown status of battery… It was enough for reading Google Reader over WiFi.

Emmanuele Bassi: Constantinople

2008-07-08T00:49:21+00:00

the song from the Decemberists, not the city

finally arrived at Istanbul with the rest of the OH gang. it has been quite a trip, with a massive delay at Heathrow caused by bad weather¹. we landed around 2am local time and went straight to the hotel. hopefully, I’ll be able to wake up at a reasonable time and not feel rubbish the whole day.

see you around.

I know, I know: shocker [↩]

Iain Holmes: Guadec

2008-07-06T02:30:23+00:00

I’m going to GUADEC. I probably won’t talk to you.

Alleke Allum (trainee): golden gate

2008-07-05T05:44:36+00:00

golden gate
Originally uploaded by sidske

this is me and the golden gate bridge.....although mum and dad were well sick they took me to see the golden gate bridge....there was a lovely park ....it was fun...

Alleke Allum (trainee): fish coming out my head mum

2008-07-05T05:43:14+00:00

fish coming out my head mum
Originally uploaded by sidske

this is me and tasha at the san francisco bay auarium....we went on holiday again...but everyone got very sick......

Alleke Allum (trainee): last night

2008-07-05T05:41:54+00:00

last night
Originally uploaded by sidske

on our last night on holiday mum and dad let me stay up late it was cool

Alleke Allum (trainee): on the ferry not seasick yet

2008-07-05T05:40:51+00:00

on the ferry not seasick yet
Originally uploaded by sidske

this is me and mum on the staten island ferry, it was great untill they took me off it ...why oh why didn't they just want to stay on it all day long...

Alleke Allum (trainee): hotel toilet roll carnage

2008-07-05T05:39:10+00:00

hotel toilet roll carnage
Originally uploaded by sidske

i caused a bit of bother in that hotel room in new york.......

Alleke Allum (trainee): at the central park zoo

2008-07-05T05:38:07+00:00

at the central park zoo
Originally uploaded by sidske

me and my daddy down at the zoo.....

Alleke Allum (trainee): central park

2008-07-05T05:35:55+00:00

central park
Originally uploaded by sidske

this is me when i went to new york on holiday for new year mum's putting these on here finally,....

Alleke Allum (trainee): dinks

2008-07-05T05:32:06+00:00

dinks
Originally uploaded by sidske

okay red shiny car barbie car or ohhh whatsthat behind me ......hmmm a tank yes that's the one i need.......ultimate pug control vehicle...

Alleke Allum (trainee): dinks

2008-07-05T05:31:09+00:00

dinks
Originally uploaded by sidske

okay red shiny car barbie car or ohhh whatsthat behind me ......hmmm a tank yes that's the one i need.......ultimate pug control vehicle...

Alleke Allum (trainee): l plates required

2008-07-05T05:30:04+00:00

l plates required
Originally uploaded by sidske

mind you this barbie car is cool too, hmmmm red shiny car or barbie car....

Chris Lord: Clutter-gst, now with 100% more shaders

2008-07-04T13:38:15+00:00

Just committed shader support to clutter-gst. When your card supports it and gstreamer decides it's the format to use (often it picks rgb over yuv, I've no idea why this is), YUV decoding will now be handled by a pixel shader instead of the CPU. This should give a reasonable boost when it gets used (in terms of CPU use).

Even more interesting in my eyes, is the YV12 shader I've also committed. Normally YV12 hardware-assisted decoding would be done with 8-bit textures and multi-texturing. This is also the sensible way to do it, mind, and I do realise that... But also committed, is a YV12 shader that will decode YV12 uploaded into a 24-bit rgb texture. I've not seen a shader that does this before, probably because it's an insane thing to do, but if you build clutter-gst with USE_YV12_SHADER defined, YV12 decoding will be handled by the graphics card, using a single rgb texture. Note that this shader is completely untuned, however, and very experimental.

The win here is that not only are you offloading a lot of work from the CPU (most videos tend to be stored in YV12 format), but you're also halving the texture upload (YV12 has quarter-resolution chroma). I imagine I'll get back to this after guadec and implement it in the correct way. Patches welcome of course.

Marcin Juszkiewicz: GUADEC 2008

2008-07-03T13:13:35+00:00

Tickets bought, insurance bought, maps of Istanbul loaded into Maemo Mapper on N810 o I am nearly ready for GUADEC 2008. This year it will take place in Istanbul, Turkey but it is still European conference :)

Trip starts on Monday morning — bus from Szczecin to Berlin Texel, then flight (Turkish Airlines) to Istanbul. Short trip to hotel Senator and I will be ready to wait for rest of OH gang to arrive. I do not plan to get lost like I did year ago :)

List of talks to attend is generated and stored in GPE Calendar (when Maemo will get good PIM…) and this year I plan to attend most of this list. Too bad that Quim Gil talk is on Monday — I will not attend his talk. I hope that some familiar people from Maemo community will attend so we will be able to talk a bit.

But conference is not everything — I plan to take a walk though city to show something as I do not know when I will be there next time.

Ah — and I have to remember about N810 headset — GSM calls to/from Turkey are expensive so VoIP calls will be my only way to contact rather.

Matthew Allum: More Nuvi, GUADEC And A Little Clutter.

2008-07-03T11:31:23+00:00

Following on from my Garmin Linux Nuvi Post, the usually obtuse LinuxDevices now has a story with more details.

Its GUADEC next week and unfortunatly it now seems I’ll be stuck manning the fort and not following along with rest of the OH gang to Istanbul. Just waaaaay to busy to take a week out currently. My scheduled Clutter guts talk is now going to be bravely tag teamed by Pippin, Tomas and Ebassi who will no doubt do a much better job than myself. Damn, I love Turkish food too.

Also Clutter wise, 0.8 is very close. It a great help if folks can keep hammering the 0.7.x developer releases and report issues. This will be by far the biggest Clutter release yet.