Planet Closed Fist

Elliot Smith: Zombie Haiku

2010-03-09T16:02:42+00:00

I noticed this Zombie Haiku book yesterday: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1600610706

Which reminded me of this zombie haiku I wrote when I was about 12 (27 years ago - ouch):

A noxious zombie
eats a mouldy, worm-filled leg
in a rancid cave.

Which isn't very good (though vivid enough for me to remember and obviously ahead of its time); and not strictly haiku (it has no "kireji", or its closest equivalent in English, i.e. "a dignified ending, concluding the verse with a heightened sense of closure" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kireji). So I rewrote it while in the bath last night:

An ashen zombie
gnaws a muddy, worm-filled leg:
tears run over bones.

Hopefully, this will enable you to see how much I've progressed as an artist.

Update: After having written this, I read this surprisingly relevant blog entry about how we see our artwork when we're young (by way of Rotating Corpse), how our perceptions of it change, and even how art comes to have value.

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-03-08 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-09T08:00:00+00:00

Vagrant - Welcome
Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Sun’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments.

Andrzej Zaborowski: balrog

2010-03-07T19:45:48+00:00

Over christmas (it’s March, the perfect time to post your new year’s post! Happy new year, BTW!) I finally sat down and re-made www.openstreetmap.pl, the site about OpenStreetMap in Polish, similar to what you can find at the other openstreetmap sites under country-level domains. It’s nothing spectacular but the remake was long overdue. While at it I also launched a blog where any high-level news or propaganda about freeing geospatial information and about OpenStreetMap itself, relevant to Poland (or not), can be posted in Polish. I think there was a need for a place like this even though there isn’t a whole lot to post there yet and not a whole lot of interest either (yet). The openstreetmap diaries at the main site collect all kind of small and big news and user comments, so I missed a place that’s like the OpenGeoData blog in English. If you have anything relevant to share, you can post it on blog.openstreetmap.pl now.

Second new (to me) thing in the last months was the internet’s reaction to the disaster that was the Haiti earthquake January 12. It caused a great range of destruction and chaos and when the humanitarian relief teams rushed there it became apparent that lots of IT resources available for other places were not available for that area. This is where people all over internet tried to help and their reaction was somethign I had never seen before, a whole new experience. The leading by CrisisCommons and the crisis camps organised as soon as January 15 where people met to code new needed services, give ideas or just collect data. On one day we saw more than 20 people from different crisis camps around the world joining the OpenStreetMap IRC channel asking if there was anything urgent for them to work on right now, and everyone planning how to best use their time resources. Needless to say the advancement in terms of data quality the Port-au-Prince area was huge, much bigger than in the case of the Gaza strip initiative a year ago and than perhaps any other moment in OSM history. Other very cool projects like this also sprung up really quickly. A very interesting experience alltogether, one that also exposed the OSM project in a new use case / situation. OSM proved extra valuable in it and this is always a gain for the project at the same time, now that it became part of the official FEMA resources, International Red Cross’s as well as US navy’s and got some more mainstream media attention than usually. Now the newly created HOT or Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is gearing up for helping Chile overcome the damages resulting from the recent quake and is already providing accurate maps of the flooded Albanian regions.

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for February 2nd through March 3rd

2010-03-06T23:00:00+00:00

These are my links for February 2nd through March 3rd:

March 94 - Protocols - Nice explanation of Protocols as a method for defining interfaces. Interesting to see an Apple guy (at the time) admiring NEXT and Objective-C …
Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS. - A bit of history about an alternative Newton OS in Dylan. Those Newton guys where years ahead of their time!
Monofur Font | dafont.com - My current favourite programming font. Monospaced with some nice ligatures and slanted characters to make it interesting to look at without getting in the way.
Shared Library Search Paths -
noelwelsh’s assembler at master - GitHub - This is an assembler for 32-bit Intel x86 code (IA-32) written in PLT Scheme.

I wrote about about why these posts are being generated here: Sharing Links.

Joshua Lock: Sharing links

2010-03-04T10:07:41+00:00

I’ve been using the Delicious bookmarks service for many years, mostly as a means of sharing cool links with people.

A while back I realised that there probably weren’t many people following me there and thought the things I shared where interesting enough that I put a widget in on my blog home page to pull in the last 10 of those links (and any comment I wrote about them) and display them in the side bar.

This thought of more people seeing my Delicious feed led to me more consistently writing about the things I’m sharing, just little thoughts in a sentence or three about why I thought the article was worth sharing. This feels good as it further develops my thoughts on the article while developing my writing skills.

Today I’ve taken this a step further, in an effort for this blog to become a better representation of the thigns I’m working on and interested in I’m using a natty little Wordpress plugin called Postalicious to monitor my link feed and create posts containing the links and their notes.

I’m going to monitor how this pans out and tweak the parameters so that I don’t spam the RSS feed, I’m going to try and keep the automatic posts to one a day (thought is’ much more likely that it will be fewer).

As a corollary I’m going to try and write slightly longer notes, so that readers can tell if the link is worth clicking on without having to follow it first. I don’t want to waste peoples time here.

Expect a first post with my last 3-5 Delicious links some time today!

Let’s see how this experiment goes…

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-03-02 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-03T08:00:00+00:00

Clutter: Clutter 1.2.0 - Stable release

2010-03-02T20:23:42+00:00

Clutter 1.2.0 is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/1.2/

MD5 Checksums:

  38edd0d3403b1612a987533a7c4ec84b  clutter-1.2.0.tar.bz2
  19a609fda6e75e7f6a3958402347ffe1  clutter-1.2.0.tar.gz

SHA1 Checksums:

  c4a8d8dc3aa26c65e48c76647c6776968ca56748  clutter-1.2.0.tar.bz2
  31eaa2fc180d6eba2ec2175d49fcd1a991a48da1  clutter-1.2.0.tar.gz

This is the first stable release of the 1.2 cycle; this version is API and ABI compatible with the previous stable release of Clutter.

Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, visually rich, portable and animated graphical user interfaces. Clutter is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1.

Requirements

Clutter currently requires:

GLib >= 2.16.0
Cairo >= 1.6
Pango >= 1.20
OpenGL >= 1.3 or 1.2 + multitexturing, OpenGL|ES 1.1 or OpenGL|ES 2.0
GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz or an EGL Implementation

Depending on the platform and the configuration options Clutter also depends on:

GDK-Pixbuf >= 2.0
JSON-GLib >= 0.8
GObject-Introspection >= 0.6.4
UProf >= 0.2

Notes

This is the first stable release of the 1.2 cycle
This version is API and ABI compatible with the previous stable release of Clutter
Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Clutter
Bugs should be reported here

What’s new in Clutter 1.2.0

Since 1.1.14

Improve the Animator API for consistency, and the implementation to match the intended behaviour, as documented
Add initial (and internal) support for queueing clipped region updates and let the GLX texture-from-pixmap actor take advantage of it
Support any pixel format in cogl_read_pixels()
Conditionally use G_VALUE_COLLECT_INIT() in functions using variadic arguments lists
Consistently use :min-width and :min-height inside the Stage to define the minimum size of the Stage window
Implement the Scriptable interface for ClutterModel sub-classes; this allows setting ClutterModel columns (both types and names) in ClutterScript definitions
Add support for unsigned integer indices in the VertexBuffer API
Documentation fixes for Clutter: the coverage is now 100%
Fixes for the EGL native backend
Require libtool >= 2.2.6
Improve tests coverage

Many thanks to all the contributors during the 1.1 development cycle:

  Robert Bragg, Neil Roberts, Damien Lespiau, Chris Lord, Øyvind Kolås,
  Bastian Winkler, Joshua Lock, Owen W. Taylor, Thomas Wood, Samuel
  Degrande, Alejandro Piñeiro, Colin Walters, Götz Waschk, Halton Huo,
  Jussi Kukkonen, Rob Bradford, Zhou Jiangwei, Christian Persch,
  Johan Bilien, Jonas Bonn, Kristian Høgsberg, Raymond Liu, Tim Horton,
  Vladimir Nadvornik, Xu Li

Have fun with Clutter!

Beaver's Blog: New release of Poky Anjuta integration

2010-03-01T15:42:09+00:00

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the Anjuta Poky SDK plugin.

This release brings updates to build against the Anjuta 2.28 API’s thanks to Haito Feng along with a few minor tweaks from myself including populating the Debug Remote and Run Remote entry boxes with /usr/local/bin by default (the same path as is used by the Deploy action).

Download Anjuta SDK Plugin 0.7

Thomas Wood: Usability Hackfest London

2010-02-27T18:26:47+00:00

I spent this last week at the Usability Hackfest in London. It was a great opportunity to catch up with and meet many of the Gnome usability folks and also get some interesting research done. Unfortunately I didn’t get around to writing up anything during the week, too much time was spent either hacking, talking or admiring the view from Canonical’s offices!

System Settings

My main goal for the week was to look at what happens to the traditional “Control Center” in Gnome 3.0. I’m currently forging ahead with the new single window approach, but it was also time to look at what settings Gnome presents to users and how they are categorized. We had several card sorting excersises, where volunteers were recruited by Canonical to spend a session sorting and categorizing various settings to help us understand how ordinary users viewed them.

On Monday we discussed the current categories and settings available in Gnome 2.0. There are broadly two main categories that most settings fall into: settings to do with personalisation and preferences, and settings to do with hardware and configuration. The latter category is fairly constant in what the system needs to expose to the user. For example, mouse handedness or keyboard layout are settings that are required for the user to be able to use the computer more effectively.

Preference settings where a hot topic, and we discussed these further on Tuesday. There was some disagreement about what constituted as useful to most users and what where just “tweakers” settings. In the end, we agreed to focus on providing settings that allowed the user to make their environment feel more personal. This means setting the wallpaper from web services such as Flickr is in, but providing options for toggling icons-in-buttons is out. We recognised that a lot of our audience includes early-adopters and technologists who enjoy tweaking their computing environment, so we’re going to provide a special tweaker’s application to allow changing these settings without manually editing the settings database.

Card Sorting

We had the opportunity to run some card sorting studies during the week. I made a list of various settings and tried to cover a wide range of areas. The volunteers where then asked to group the settings based on what they felt was appropriate and then give the groups names and discuss a little about their reasoning. We had some interesting results, which are going to be published on the Usability Project wiki page.

New Preference Panes

I also started working on creating some UI files for the mock-ups from the design team at Intel. There are several new preference panes: Date & Time, Language & Localisation, External Devices, Background & Screensaver. They’re all currently under heavy review, so I won’t mention any specifics just yet. We’re also going to try and pull in more “core” preference panels into the Gnome Control Center module, so that no Gnome install is without any important settings panes.

Other Stuff

I was inspired to look into ATK support for Mx, the GUI toolkit built on Clutter that I work on for Intel. I have some rudimentary keyboard navigation support available, but I would like also like to build in support for ATK (the accessibility toolkit).

I also spent some time talking with Nick, Calum and Matthew about possible collaboration and shared goals between MeeGo, Ubuntu and Gnome, for the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.

I walked Jakub through the process of making a gnome-icon-theme release, so expect more releases in the future. I also helped set up gnome-shell on Garret’s laptop, which apart from getting the necessary dependencies installed to run the build script, we also had to add “export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none” to his .bashrc file because the video driver he was using had broken vblanking, causing everything to be painfully slow.

Finally, I organised the social event on Friday, with Gnome hackers from Intel, Collabora, Codethink, Red Hat, Sun, Canonical, Novell all meeting up for drinks and pizza with other Gnome “hangers on” in London. A good evening had by all!

A great week in all, so thanks must go to Google and Canonical for sponsoring, and to everyone else involved.

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-02-26 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-27T08:00:00+00:00

Guy Debord's Game of War, the movie
"Sweep away the anachronistic barriers of intellectual property." (via Simon Sellars, http://ballardian.com/)

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-02-25 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-26T08:00:00+00:00

LONE, Ecstasy & Friends - Boomkat music download
Processing.js
Processing, implemented in JavaScript, using HTML 5 canvas element

Clutter: Clutter 1.1.14 - developers snapshot

2010-02-24T14:50:58+00:00

Clutter 1.1.14 is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/1.1/

MD5 Checksums:

  3a1f8204dbe2f5f47b12125f2402cd58  clutter-1.1.14.tar.bz2
  32ed14044a6a0eef212817b64e61ad6b  clutter-1.1.14.tar.gz

This is the seventh developers snapshot of Clutter 1.1, leading to the release of 1.2.0 (planned on March 1st 2010).

Requirements

Clutter currently requires:

GLib >= 2.16.0
Cairo >= 1.6
Pango >= 1.20
OpenGL >= 1.3 or 1.2 + multitexturing, OpenGL|ES 1.1 or OpenGL|ES 2.0
GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz or an EGL Implementation

Depending on the platform and the configuration options Clutter also depends on:

GDK-Pixbuf >= 2.0
JSON-GLib >= 0.8
GObject-Introspection >= 0.6.4
UProf >= 0.2

Notes

This is the seventh developers snapshot of the 1.1 cycle
This version is API and ABI compatible with the current stable release of Clutter
Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Clutter
Bugs should be reported here

What’s new in Clutter 1.1.14

Fix interaction between user resizable Stages and fullscreen on X11
Define the semantics of ENTER and LEAVE events when actors are on the border of the Stage window
Take the InputDevice of an event into consideration when throttling MOTION events
Round the coordinates when clipping to a rectangle in window coordinates
Always trust the user-provided coordinates when creating a CoglTexture from a foreign GL texture
Split Clutter’s debug annotations from the pick and paint mode behavioural modifiers
Improve the usage of the CLUTTER_ACTOR_NO_LAYOUT flag so that every actor using a ClutterFixedLayout manager will automatically benefit from it
Fix the packing order of ClutterBox so that the convention of first-in-first-painted is maintained
Documentation fixes

Many thanks to:

  Robert Bragg
  Chris Lord
  Neil Roberts

Have fun with Clutter!

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-02-23 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-24T08:00:00+00:00

Mockingbird | Wireframes on the fly

Paul Cooper: You are entereing the QuietZone [2]

2010-02-22T23:55:36+00:00

I think in any country you can end up with weird cultural curiosities that are bourne out of the history and idiosyncrocies of the country, like how “Have a nice day” has become an American cliche, or in Greece the wonderful informal package delivery mechanism of the bus and ferry services to the multitude of islands. Of course, being British, I love the many many such curiosities we have on this fair isle.

One I enjoy on a weekly basis is the concept of a ‘QuietZone’. For those who’ve not had the fortune to travel on one of the many (privitised) train operators in the UK the idea might seem obvious at first glance – a train full of people can be a noisy place – so why not designate one carriage, a kind of library like carriage, where the social contract is to keep noise to a minimum. Unfortunately, this being Britain, things are not so simple.

For the uninitiated this is a list of things that it appears is quite OK to do in the QuietZone (quite OK, meaning I have never seen another passenger complain about anyone doing these things – there is no formal definition, in the carriages at least, of what the QuietZone is/isn’t for other than the, somewhat defaced, signage above);

Talk loudly to the person or people sitting in adjoining seats

Eat noisy food (such as crisps, crunchy biscuits, etc).

Listen to mp3 players with headphones

Compulsively play with a noisy item, eg velcro fastening on a jacket

Generally make noise

However any of the following is almost guaranteed to inspire another passenger to remind you that this is a ‘QuiteZone’

Hold a mobile phone to your ear

Talk at any volume into your phone or headset

Do anything with a phone that involves noise – receiving an SMS, typing, etc.

Now I’m not making any judgement or outcry about this – I’m just reveling in the curiousness of the situation. Mobile phones users started out as a cultural outcast – loud, rude, inconsiderate (cf. the TriggerHappyTV sketch below) – and this got encoded in the expected behaviour of the QuietZone (whether intentionally or unintentionally), and has since got overtaken by what is now the cultural norm – that everyone has a mobile phone, and feels at liberty to use it without thought.

So you end up with the QuietZone, and the the myriad bizarre juxtapositions, like someone stopping mid (silent) Blackberry email to lean over to someone else talking (quietly) on the phone to remind them it’s the QuietZone, and using phones isn’t allowed.

And because of this, and because it’s such a British thing, whenever possible I book tickets in the QuietZone – it’s the funnest carriage in the train ;-)

Øyvind Kolås: Sentry

2010-02-22T19:05:50+00:00

Every so often I've found myself wishing for a tool that ran a command when a file was modified on disk. After finally spending half an hour searching for one; I ended up throwing something together in less time. A couple of hours of tweaking later - sentry scratches my itches.

Usage: sentry [options]  [file|dir ..] -- commandline to run

 sentry monitors the listed files or directories for changes, if such occur it
 and invokes the commandline following -- each time something changes.

 Options: 
   -t  N   throttle updates to maxium every N seconds, by default 2s
   -c      monitor for file creations in dir (occurances of % in the
           commandline are replaced with the path of the newly created file.)
   -d      daemonize detach from terminal and run in background
   -v      be verbose, add more v's for more verbosity

Thomas Wood: Going Retro

2010-02-21T19:29:10+00:00

I discovered through the Android Market that there was a Mystify live wallpaper, which is reminiscent of the Windows 3.11 screensaver of the same name. It looks great on my Nexus One and doesn’t consume much battery power. Struck with a new sense of nostalgia, I wanted to have the effect as my screensaver in GNOME. I was rather surprised not to be able to find one for gnome-screensaver, so I decided it might be fun to give it a go myself. So, with the power of Clutter, Cogl and OpenGL, I brought the mid-’90s screensaver to my GNOME desktop:

ignore the glitch, it’s due to missing vblank and isn’t normally visible

I used Clutter/Cogl with a thought to adding some OpenGL effects in the future, although I’m not quite sure what that might be apart from some blurring effect on the trailing polygons.

If anyone is interested, I’ll publish the code somewhere. I’m tempted to re-write “starfield” too…

Chris Lord: MxDeformTexture

2010-02-18T16:42:26+00:00

Just a quick blog to say that the old Clutter Odo demo now lives in Mx as a dedicated widget. Its been tidied up so that it's much easier to use and animate. Also in the video, MxWindow which uses client-side window decorations and demonstrates Clutter's support for argb visuals under a compositor. Note that of course the video isn't recorded at 60Hz and also impacts on performance - this runs silky smooth on typical netbook hardware.

Download video

As always, Mx is available from git at git://git.moblin.org/mx

Iain Holmes: Transmission Towers Collapsed, Communication Down

2010-02-18T16:32:15+00:00

Transmission Towers Collapsed, Communication Down

Download for free in whatever format you want.

Track listing

Transmission Towers Collapsed (45:49)
Communication Down (31:09)

Clutter: Clutter 1.1.12 - developers snapshot

2010-02-16T14:14:11+00:00

Hi,

we skipped a few snapshots announcements, so I’ll try and coalesce everything into this one. the target release date for Clutter 1.2.0 is March, 1st and we’re well on our way to actually make it. Clutter is also now formally API frozen, so language bindings authors can start their engines and wrap the newly added API.

Clutter 1.1.12 is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/1.1/

MD5 Checksums:

  eea5dde515d0eb00be5467defb89a0e0  clutter-1.1.12.tar.bz2
  e48e917077a31966dec6cf536157976c  clutter-1.1.12.tar.gz

Requirements

Clutter currently requires:

GLib >= 2.16.0
Cairo >= 1.6
Pango >= 1.20
OpenGL >= 1.3 or 1.2 + multitexturing, OpenGL|ES 1.1 or OpenGL|ES 2.0
GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz or an EGL Implementation

Depending on the platform and the configuration options Clutter also depends on:

GDK-Pixbuf >= 2.0
JSON-GLib >= 0.8
GObject-Introspection >= 0.6.4
UProf >= 0.2

Notes

This is the sixth developers snapshot of the 1.1 cycle
This version is API and ABI compatible with the current stable release of Clutter
Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Clutter
Bugs should be reported here

What’s new in Clutter 1.1.12

Added ClutterAnimator, a class that allows defining complex implicit animations involving multiple actors and states; this class is mostly meant to be used through the ClutterScript definition format, but it provides a convenience C API for easily building animations in code
New experimental COGL API to expose “hardware” buffers such as PBOs or libdrm surfaces. This API can be used, for instance, to make texture uploading faster
Fixed the issues with resizable stages getting a 1×1 window with the X11 backends
Expose input devices for every event; by default, X11 and Windows backends expose the core devices only
Add the ClutterStage:key-focus property, for key focus tracking
Allow setting transformable value types in ClutterAnimation when calling clutter_animation_bind() and clutter_animation_update()
Delay the creation of the default Stage until clutter_stage_get_default() is actually called; this reduces the work of clutter_init(); this is known to work on the GLX and the Win32 backends, but needs further testing on other backends
Implement Ctrl+Delete and Ctrl+Backspace in ClutterText
Improve the extendability of CoglTexture with internal backends
Add implicit texture atlasing; Cogl will try to put every texture inside the same texture atlas by default, to avoid state changes in the driver and (hopefully) improve performance
Fix notification of the cursor and selection changes in ClutterText; this improves the usage of Clutter from A11Y toolkits
Do not wait for a frame if the system clock goes backwards
Fix the dirtying of the clip state; this unbreaks cogl_path_fill()
Documentation and build fixes: COGL is now 100% documented
Fixed compilation with the Sun C compiler
Use SSE2 instructions to premultiply RGBA images, if available
Improve readability of ClutterActor::raise/::lower warnings
Add sanity checks for _clutter_do_pick() to avoid invoking it on stages in their destruction phase
Avoid multiple type checks in clutter_actor_get_paint_opacity()
Fix some race conditions in the resizing of the Stage on the X11 backends
Optimize taking sub-textures of sub-textures
Add support for getting event notification after a non-blocking glXSwapBuffers() by using the INTEL_GFX_swap_events extension that has been added to Mesa 7.8
Improve ClutterBox and ClutterGroup

Many thanks to:

  Neil Roberts
  Damien Lespiau
  Robert Bragg
  Chris Lord
  Alejandro Piñeiro
  Bastian Winkler
  Halton Huo
  Jussi Kukkonen
  Kristian Høgsberg
  Øyvind Kolås

Have fun with Clutter!

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-02-12 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-13T08:00:00+00:00

Running a Ruby application with jruby-complete | Atomic Spin

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-02-11 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-12T08:00:00+00:00

ccMixter - Samples :: Browse
Creative Commons licensed samples
freesound :: home page
Creative Commons licensed sounds

Elliot Smith: An unpleasant experience

2010-02-10T23:02:17+00:00

A few years ago, I wrote a Rails (1.0.0) application for Nicola (my wife), to help her with her PhD research. It ran on her Linux laptop, happily, for those few years.

However, once the new laptop has arrived, I knew I'd have to migrate the application from Linux to Windows; I also wanted to avoid having to update the application for a newer version of Rails. How painful could it be? Fairly.

First I needed an old MySQL server (in case the API has changed), 5.0.15 to be precise. It is practically impossible to find archived downloads on the MySQL website, but I got there eventually.

Next I needed to get an old Ruby (1.8.4) for Windows. Again, virtually impossible to find old versions of Ruby with an installer. When I first did this, there was a Ruby 1.8.4 One-Click Installer for Windows, which seems to have disappeared. I finally tracked it down to some website run off some bloke's back somewhere out East.

Then, I needed Rails 1.0.0. For whatever reason, the Ruby I installed couldn't get Rails off the official gems repository (probably because the gem repo format changed). So I installed rails 1.0.0 on a different machine, created a new Rails project, then froze the 1.0.0 gems into it; then copied the frozen gems over to my app on the new machine. Phew.

Finally, I'd used RedCloth in the app. However, after a couple of attempts, I decided it was easier to rip it out than try to install it on Windows. So I did some surgery.

Add to that the fact that Nicola had forgotten her password (Firefox had been saving it), so I had to manually edit the db to add one; plus no decent text editor on Windows 7; plus MySQL not removing its service properly when I installed the wrong version then uninstalled it (sc delete MySQL removes errant services, by the way); plus Windows 7 making it difficult to get an administrator command prompt; etc. etc..

So overall a frustrating experience, but I did finally get there.

(On top of that, I also migrated several thousand POP-ped emails from Thunderbird 2 on Linux to Thunderbird 3 on Windows: I thought there would be an import wizard which would know what to do, but I saw no sign of it. And moved all her data over and installed OpenOffice. Entertainment all round.)

Richard Purdie: A day I’ll remember

2010-02-08T12:23:15+00:00

On Saturday there was a trip out organised, heading to Alston and I decided to tag along. I decided to ride to the first meeting point and set off into the fog at about 8am. Despite the visor being useless and my glasses becoming covered in water all too quickly, I made it there. Descripbing it as freezing fog was accurate as these photos of my gloves and jacket show:

Recently I’ve noticed that the front wheel on the bike was twisted and sat about 3″ to the left of the centreline of the back wheel. I’ve spent an age trying to find the source of this and found interesting things like tiny metal fatigue cracks in the headstock. They were not serious though, just a sign of the bikes age and the fact it will not last forever. The alignment problem turned out to be one fork leg 1″ longer than the other. This seems to have been due to an upsidedown spacer inside the forks and a service and fresh oil resulted in two forks of the same length. The only problem left is that my brain is now wired to ride a bike with its wheels out of line, not a straight one.

So I met up with three others and we continued on to the second meeting point via some lanes. On one of the lanes I managed to drop it, possibly due to the different handling. The GPS fell off but I noticed and collected it and there was no damage done. The green lanes weren’t too bad but you had to be careful the watch for the patches of ice. There was then some tarmac sections as we climbed the hillside and rose above the fog. This meant sheet ice on the untreated roads. The others were waiting for me to catch up having nearly slid on a nasty corner and someome was saying “I bet he manages to fall off on that” just as I came into view, lost my footing and put the bike on its side.

The mist returned causing visibility problems but the ice remained. Along a section of road I realised too late there was 2″ thick ice ahead and when I tried to avoid it, I picked the wrong patch to aim for hitting the edge of the block of ice instead of what I thought was tarmac. Apparently the mini tsumami I caused as I slid though the puddle next to the ice was impressive. I picked the bike up, got to the edge of the road and the bike promptly slid from vertical on the sheet ice again. Slippy? Just a little. No real damage apart from the now shredded waterproof trousers and the fact I was now soaked down one side. I put on the spare pair of gloves.

The others all disappeared, not daring to look back as at least one of them had nearly fallen off doing that. I eventually got the bike started and followed. A short while later I came around a bend to a steep give way junction totally covered in sheet ice. I wasn’t going quickly but there was no way I’d stop on that much ice so falling off again seemed like the safest option and I did stop short of the junction, albeit with the bike on its side. Again. On the plus side I was having trouble getting the bike going and was given a tip which really did help after it had been on its side.

The journey to the second meeting point continued, slowly and carefully and I made it there without any further incident. We suggested to the rest of the group that they might want to be careful although it was obvious they didn’t quite understand what we were talking about.

From this point on it turned out the worst of the ice was behind us as the sun was starting to make its mark. The way some of the rest of the group were riding, it can only have been a good thing. Personally, I was riding extremely slowly, determined not to come around bends to find sheet ice at an inappropriate speed, or follow anyone else too closely. The destination was Alston, the highest market town in England, a place known for its snow, ice, mist and general weather (as well as its nice tarmac roads for road bikes and its green ones which were the days objective).

The next few lanes were fine and eventually we were at the bottom of the trail up to Long Cross. This is an ascent I’ve mentioned before, steep, rocky and today, covered in snow and ice. I did make it about two thirds of the way up on the rocky route itself but after having the bike slip and slide a lot and with total sheet ice ahead, I joined the others and rode up the grass bank which was much easier. We found a gate buried in a deep snow drift next but this wasn’t much of a problem as you could just ride over it. After Long Cross we crossed the A686 the bike stalled and wouldn’t start. I bumped it down the rocky ice covered trail with little success. At the bottom I realised it was out of fuel so switched onto reserve at which point it started much to my relief. It was then into Alston for lunch. The usual Cafe was shut so we tried somewhere new and it seemed appropriate to have cumberland sausage .

Looking back at the top of the ascent, little ice/snow here – Click to zoom the picture – lovely view of the mist and sky!

After lunch, Tynehead. Steve was grinning at the thought. There are ski slopes just above that trail. Its a really tricky route, requiring crossing several streams with the odd waterfall and several steep drops and whilst it was slow tricky work, we managed to get a fair way along past several obstacles. There is a section which consists of a path with a drop off the edge into the South Tyne and the lead up to this bit is a stream crossing followed by a steep climb up a hill where I remember stalling the bike before causing myself a few problems. Today it was 2ft deep in “old” solid snow and the rest of the path along the “cliff” was equally covered. A couple of people did try and get bikes up it but it was hard work and it was unlikely the whole group would make it. In the end, we admitted defeat and got to the main road a different way. This was probably wise given what I know of the route further on from that point.

An example stream crossing. Note the steep drop and waterfall below the crossing and the snow just where you don’t want it. Sadly the photos of the hill we couldn’t make it up haven’t come out.

The ski slopes!

Crossing a snow drift to head to Coldberry End.

Riding along the A689, there was 3ft snow at the sides of the road. Coldberry end was next to cross from the Tees valley into Ireshopeburn in Weardale. The southern face of this was covered in deep snow and it took a bit of ploughing through but eventually we all made it up to the top where the going was easier. Watching where others struggle helps a lot. There was a gate which people were having problems getting through. I took a run at it, kept moderate power on and made it through with sheer will power and a little help from conservation of momentum.

There was much less snow down the other side and I was riding on the snow filling one of the ditches at the side of the main track since the track itself was covered in patchy ice. I slowed and was making a move to get off the ditch as the main track was clear when the front end of the bike fell into the snow stopping the bike dead. I did not stop and flew over the bars headfirst. Something from school PE lessons obviously kicked in as I turned it into a forward roll and flipped myself back onto my feet, standing in front of the bike. From a distance, Steve had just seen my legs in the air and had come back, worried.

Where’s the front wheel? (Fuzzy, not much light, sorry)

After this there was an interesting lane with deep ruts filled with snow or covered in thick ice with odd snow drifts thrown in. I did slow and steady apart from the bits where I saw people having problems where moderate momentum was once again order of the day. The problem now was the fact that it was late and getting dark rapidly. We planned tarmac back from here but my fears about ice returned. This is the first time I’ve used the bike in true darkness and the bikes headlight is useless and effectively lights up the mudguard. What followed was a slow trip back to civilization as the fog returned. I was pleased I went slowly as I found one sharp bend with ice on it, and a section of road covered in 2″ thick solid ice. I was at the back but caught the group up in blanchland. I was slow at setting off and they left me behind though meaning I didn’t know which way to turn at the next junction. I took a best guess but eventually it became obvious I’d lost them. I didn’t have a phone signal so continued on and joined the A68. Heading along there I found the group again as whilst we’d taken different routes, we’d ended up in the same place. The group split up with me leading a couple of others back into Swalwell, Newcastle and home.

Some really enjoyed the day, I did in some ways but had a few too many incidents to be entirely happy. Its certainly a day out I will remember for a long time to come and as always, it was a learning experience. Today, I ache all over and can barely move but it beats going to the gym!

Chris Lord: FOSDEM 2010

2010-02-05T12:12:17+00:00

I'll be there.

Damien Lespiau: AS_AM_STFU

2010-02-03T15:04:19+00:00

Writing m4 macro is fun, it really is.

If you want to have make be a “make -s” without doing boring stuff like aliases and actually respect the default verbosity of automake >= 1.11, use this small m4 macro I wrote.

Thomas Wood: Searching the Control Center

2010-01-31T17:17:30+00:00

Nick and I had a discussion a few days ago about what search should look like in the new Settings shell. I had a go at implementing what we discussed and now it is possible to search not only panel names, but also their descriptions:

Showing the match in-line (much like search engines do) gives the user an understanding of why the item has matched, but also some context. It probably needs some tweaks to detect things like word boundaries, and the description of each panel needs to make sure it includes relevant keywords.

I also made sure that keyboard usage was easy. The filtering is done as you type and pressing enter will activate the first (top left most) item. Hitting the escape key will clear the entry and return you to the All Settings view. I also need to add arrow key support so that it is possible to navigate directly to the results view from the entry.

If you’d like to try it out for yourself, the code is in the extensible-shell branch of gnome-control-center.

Chris Lord: MxPathBar

2010-01-28T19:34:46+00:00

Since getting back from my month-long holiday a few weeks ago, I've been working on Moblin's next-generation, Clutter-based UI toolkit: MX. You can check this out on moblin git. We're really hoping that we can make this toolkit all you'd need in writing a modern, Clutter-based application for Moblin, so if you're interested, please do check it out and give us some feedback! If you're already acquainted with the Moblin infrastructure, you should know that this obsoletes NBTK.

Today, I 'finished' on one of the new widgets that we'll be providing, MxPathBar. This is very similar to the breadcrumb-bar in the GTK file-chooser, with the added bonus of having an 'editable' mode that allows you to search. We intend to use this in the media library, and perhaps in the file-chooser (more on that at a later date...) Here's a little demonstration - note that this is pre-final stuff and animations/graphics may improve :)

Download video

Joshua Lock: The Beaver bites (recovering from a failing hard disk)

2010-01-23T14:08:25+00:00

Last week I had a hell of a time when the Kingston SSD in my laptop started failing, badly. Poky is well known as a destroyer of disks but it seems cheap SSD’s are even more susceptible to it’s toothy maw.

At first it was just (extremely noticeable) performance degradation, but minutes after telling my manager about it and asking for a new disk it was starting to look more serious: directory listing (file manager, fancy filename completion in my editor and good old ls) was failing on my home directory.

I figured I had to get as much data off the drive as possible before I shut the machine off, rsync wouldn’t work as it needs to get directory listings. Fortunately Roger pointed me at ddrescue, which enabled me to carve a partition on an external drive and copy do a direct clone of the failing drive. ddrescue works by following the British mantra of “Keep calm and carry on”, that is if ddrescue finds some data it can’t copy it gives up and moves on copying as much data as possible rather than exiting because corrupt/unrecoverable data was found.

I managed to recover most of my data with ddrescue and while it was going I had to set up another machine to use while I was waiting for the replacement disk. This gave me opportunity to try out a backup solution and various tactics to make my data easier to recover.

The biggest problem, email. Having all my mail filtering and account configuration trapped in Evolution meant that I rely on it more than I am comfortable with. Based on recommendations and usage in the office I decided to try offlineimap and imapfilter.

Offlineimap is a Python program that will download your mail and store it in the maildir format, meaning that you can use any of a range of mail programs to read your mail. Imapfilter is a Lua program that will connect to an Imap server and move mail around on the server. You write simple Lua scripts whereby you instantiate an Imap object then write bits of code to move messages around based on the mail headers:

msgs = imapacc.INBOX:is_unseen() *
imapacc.INBOX:contain_field(“X-mailing-list”, “linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org”)
imapacc.INBOX:move_messages(imapacc[‘INBOX/linux-fsdevel’], msgs)

Brilliant! Now my email is stored in a Mail folder in my home directory and imapfilter connects to the mail servers directly and sorts my messages into appropriate mail boxes.

For backup Ross recommended duplicity, another Python program. This program uses librsync and GnuPG to create GPG encrypted incremental backups.

After the first run duplicity will only backup what has changed, and all of your backups are stored in GPG encrypted tar archives. The first run didn’t take too long to backup my 20GB home directory and I expect future backups will be even swifter.

Now that I have my new disk installed and my data in a more recoverable format with a simple backup solution I thought I’d try and address the cause of the disk destruction.

Blunting the teeth (trying to stop Poky so easily destroying disks)

Poky, and OE, are known as destroyers of disks, for understandable reasons. Building an operating system means a lot of disk activity, to increase the lifespan of the disk it would be good to reduce the amount of disk activity.

Now I’m not expecting my new disk to fail as rapidly, it’s an old school platter-based drive, but as I do all of my development on a single disk machine (laptop) the simplest solution; to use a separate disk for builds, is impractical.

I decided to create a separate partition for Poky builds (simple thanks to LVM) and use a filesystem setup which would hopefully reduce the amount of writes.

I chose to use an Ext4 filesystem without a journal. With this set up I get the modern filesystem goodness (extents and delayed allocation should equate to less disk activity) and also fewer writes through not using a journal (as it’s a partition for temprorary build data, so I’ll not be upset if I lose any/all of it). I strongly considered Xfs and Btrfs, I decided against Xfs after reading about it’s slow directory creation and deletion (Poky does a lot of this) but will likely try Btrfs soon, though I’m more inclined to play around with that on a set up that can benefit from its snapshot support.

As far as I can tell you can’t disable journalling on an existing ext4 filesystem, you need to create the filesystem without a journal. Fortunately I was working with a new disk where I’d left plenty of unused space. I created a new logical volume to house the partition, then created an ext4 partition in that logical volume using the default filesystem features (from /etc/mke2fs.conf) only, with the journal option disabled.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vg_scimitar-lv_srv -L srv -O ^has_journal,extents,huge_file,flex_bg,uninit_bg,dir_nlink,extra_isize

Et voila, hopefully that will increase the longevity of the disk.

While losing several days of coding time to this was initially a little frustrating it was fun and productive to play around with storage, backup and mail solutions to make my working environment a little more pleasant and my data more secure.

Thomas Wood: Monet – A Widget Drawing API

2010-01-22T22:45:26+00:00

I’ve been quietly working in my spare time on a new project, called Monet. The aim is to provide a cross-toolkit widget drawing API and theming architecture. This would allow different toolkits to use the same code to draw their widgets, thus producing a more consistent look and feel across applications. The other motivator is to improve the theming abilities provided by existing toolkits and applications. The main target is to improve GTK+ theming opportunities, but I am also considering extending this beyond traditional widget theming, especially as GTK+ may have client side window decoration support soon.

Following on from the discussions at the theme hackfest last year, with extra input from Benjamin Berg (current maintainer of the gtk-engines package) and other Gnome artists and designers, we’ve created a new widget drawing API, drawing on ideas used in existing toolkits such as GTK+, Qt and Windows.

The main concepts behind the design are fairly simple. Each widget is represented by an object that encapsulates all the information necessary to draw it. This can include geometry, context, state, colours, and other properties such as text. For example, the Button class includes text, background and border colours, as well as certain flags such as whether the button is focused. This information is passed to the theme drawing API (the “theme engine”) with a cairo context, onto which the button will be drawn. More complex widgets are split into sub-elements and passed to the theme engine as a group. More exotic widgets such as window frames could also be added as part of this API. The advantages of using objects to define each widget’s drawing parameters is that they can be sub-classed and provide well documented properties.

Since the drawing API is defined as an abstract class, it is still possible to write new themes in code, just as they are done now in GTK+. However, I would like to include a theme engine that allows artists and theme authors to write new themes without requiring a compiler and even provide GUI tools for creating themes. There are several possible solutions to this:

Using an existing specification such as CSS seems attractive, but on closer inspection it is clear that CSS is not suitable for widget drawing without using images or custom extensions. As author of the Moblin toolkit, which uses CSS exclusively for styling, I have experienced first hand its short comings when it is applied to a widget scene graph, rather than an HTML document. There are several unapparent problems that arise, such as the lack of class hierarchy matching*.

SVG might be an alternative solution, but again there are problems that can only be solved with custom attributes and renderers. These would need to include the ability to keep constant stroke widths and corner radii when scaling. This would necessitate both custom editors and renderers.

Another possibility would be to use a custom scripting language such as Lua or even Javascript. The drawing API could be exposed to appropriate objects in these languages and cairo used directly. However, I would expect concerns about performance and efficiency, not to mention that writing a wysiwyg editor would be near impossible.

Finally, a custom XML format was suggested as a possibility (in fact, by a designer, no less). Personally, I don’t think anyone should have to write XML to create a theme, but luckily it would be trivial to write a custom editor for this type of theme. It also would have the advantage that it is not bound to any existing but ever-so-slightly different use case. It would also be trivial to expose the cairo API in such a format. Metacity also has a drawing API defined in XML and this could be used as a starting point (although, a much simpler schema could be achieved since less geometry needs to be specified).

I would be interested to hear any further thoughts on alternative theme formats.

I have started prototyping these ideas in a git repository on git.gnome.org, under the Monet project. Since the API includes an object for each widget type, I have experimented with implementing this to some success using Vala. The abstract base classes are available, as are classes for simple widgets. There is also an implementation of a GTK+ engine in Vala, which would form the basis of a translational mechanism. A very simple (and limited) test engine is implemented, along with a test case to drive it. Certainly none of it is interesting to users yet.

My hope for the future would be that toolkits gradually begin to start using the new API natively, but to help during the transition period, wrappers can be added to the existing infrastructure. For example, the project will include a traditional GTK+ engine as a proxy to allow GTK+ users to start using the new architecture immediately.

There are certainly problems that the API does not yet solve, such as transition effects. Other considerations might whether to add support for “native” styles on other platforms, such as Windows and Mac OS X, or whether these are best left to each toolkit to implement themselves. I would be interested to hear any suggestions around these areas.

* Qt “solve” this in quite an interesting way, but it changes the semantics of class selectors in CSS.

Srini Ragavan: anjal-settings capplet & smarter tabs

2010-01-20T09:08:06+00:00

Email Settings Capplet

Thomas posted an awesome blog on GNOME/Moblin control center. Last week or so, I wrote a capplet to fit into the single-window control center. Screenshots below…

Screen1: Single window control center shell with Email setttings capplet in it.

Single window shell

Screen2: Anjal/Evolution account settingsScreen3: Anjal/Evolution account editor

Thanks to Matthew for the debonofication & all other refactoring, I was able to pull out the editor/settings from Evolution as a stand alone capplet. Its part of anjal source and it uses some bits from anjal which helps to get everything up and running outside the Evolution shell. Without starting Evolution users will be able to open up the account settings, and first time open will get them a druid to setup basic account and other configurations like evolution. Since the evolution accounts stored in gconf, changes to the settings via this is instantaneous even if evolution or anjal is running in the background. Beyond all of these, it reuses 99% of evolution sources and with a little shell from anjal, it just works!

Smarter Tabs

In anjal, an user can open mails in new tab or composer in a new tab from draft. Generic tab implementation, appended tabs at the end and when closed the last but 1 from the closed tab is selected. The work flow for the user would be very difficult. To fix the problem, anjal considers the following while deciding which tab to chose or where to place.

- When a tab is opened, it is placed next to a relavant tab. A email tab is placed next to the folder. Composer draft tab is placed next to draft folder tab. Rest of the tabs are appended to the end.

- When a tab is opened, its remembered from where its opened. The lastly viewed folder, or any other tab will be the one which will be opened if this is closed.

- On multiple visits, the last visit is only remembered.

Should I consider any other case? IIRC Chrome has a similar scheme.

Clutter: Clutter 1.1.6 - developers snapshot

2010-01-20T01:15:44+00:00

Hi,

I’ve temporarily stolen the maintainer hat from our venerable Emmanuele Bassi to bring to you the latest developer’s snapshot leading up to the 1.2 release. Enjoy!

Clutter 1.1.6 is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/1.1/

MD5 Checksums:

  b90f1585bffb7151d6af14f4cd369eb7 clutter-1.1.6.tar.gz
  e87acc83b0b62a583d05bea70600f3d6 clutter-1.1.6.tar.bz2

Requirements

Clutter currently requires:

GLib >= 2.16.0
Cairo >= 1.6
Pango >= 1.20
OpenGL >= 1.3 or 1.2 + multitexturing, OpenGL|ES 1.1 or OpenGL|ES 2.0
GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz or an EGL Implementation

Depending on the platform and the configuration options Clutter also depends on:

GDK-Pixbuf >= 2.0
JSON-GLib >= 0.8

Notes

This is the third developers snapshot of the 1.1 cycle
This version is API and ABI compatible with the current stable release of Clutter
Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Clutter
Bugs should be reported here

What’s new in Clutter 1.1.6

Some fixes for the Win32 backend (bug #1905).
Profiling support via the UProf library. Configure with –enable-profile to get a report after each Clutter application is run.
Improved conformance tests with coverage reports via gcov.
ClutterTexture no longer tries to read back texture data into g_malloc’d memory on unrealize (bug #1842).
The CGL_* defines from cogl-defines.h have been removed. These should not have been used by any applications, but if they were being used then please replace them either with the Cogl enums or with the appropriate GL_* enum if you are using GL directly.
Added a delete-event signal to the stage.
Fix for using cogl_rectangle with different texture coordinates for multiple layers (bug #1937).
Fix for using stencil and depth buffers in FBOs on Intel drivers in Mesa (bug #1873).
Support for subtitles in ClutterMedia.
ClutterGLX will now use an RGB visual by default. For applications (and toolkit integration libraries) that want to enable the ClutterStage:use-alpha property there is a new function: clutter_x11_set_use_argb_visual().
Fix ClutterText to allow using Pango markup and attributes in the same actor (bug #1940).

Many thanks to:

     Alejandro Piñeiro
     Damien Lespiau
     Emmanuele Bassi
     Gord Allot
     Halton Huo
     Robert Bragg
     Samuel Degrande

Have fun with Clutter!

Joshua Lock: All the toys!

2010-01-19T10:28:52+00:00

I’ve acquired a bunch of new gadgets of late, I’m very excited about them all so I decided to promote them here.

Reading

A Sony PRS 600 E-Book reader was gifted to me this Christmas, and what a fantastic piece of kit it is.

I’ve been enjoying several public domain texts from Feedbooks as well as a bunch of geeky PDF’s.

The PDF handling is not as bad as I expected, at standard zoom it’s just about readable in good light although much more pleasant to read at M(edium) or L(arge) text size, despite the slightly weird line wrapping you end up with.
Unfortunately tables and diagrams are completely destroyed when the text size is increased so I tend to set it back to S(mall|tandard) text size for those bits and sometimes use the Zoom function to make text more legible in low light.

The touch function is fun and sometimes even handy for turning pages and looking up words as well as highlighting and annotating the more academic reading materials.

I’ve been using Calibre to manage the device. While the UI is not to my taste (photo-realistic icons, busy interface, etc) the functionality is excellent and extremely stable. I should really donate some money to the project.

Listening

The iPod Shuffle just wasn’t cutting it as a portable audio player once I moved to London and had lengthy commutes to fill my ears on. I tried using my Android phone but the short battery life made this a chore, so I decided to pick up a new audio player.

I wanted something relatively cheap which had to have a screen (yes Apple, a screen!), a reasonable amount of storage (more than 2GB) and allow me to put music on it by simply copying files. For extra points it would play Ogg Vorbis and Flac audio.

The Sandisk Sansa Clip fits all of my requirements. With 8GB storage, support for all the formats I care about (and more) and a built in FM tuner it’s a steal at less than fifty notes. I’ve only had it a couple of days but battery life seems reasonable and it charges in a few hours over USB.

Watching

Long have I been meaning to build a PVR machine, and this Acer (Veriton N260G) computer was too cheap to pass up on.

Pair it with a Hauppage WinTV-NOVA-T DVB-T tuner and an install of MythTV and I have a low power PVR running with little cost or effort.

I’ve a few niggles to iron out on the software side but this seems like a more than capable machine at less than two tonne. I’ve not tried watching live TV while recording or trying to shove high def through it but both of these are on my agenda. For now it’s happily (and very quietly) humming away recording things for me.

MythTV is a bit of a pig though, if I was building a media PC without PVR functionality I’d be running Boxee or XBMC and would have had it running in less than an hour from no-OS to full system. Alas that was not the case with the MythTV set up…

Nick Richards: Links for 2010-01-18 [del.icio.us]

2010-01-19T08:00:00+00:00

Pinboard
A bookmarks service. Quite handy.

Nick Richards: Links for 2010-01-16 [del.icio.us]

2010-01-17T08:00:00+00:00

Thomas Wood: GNOME/Moblin Control Center

2010-01-15T16:17:45+00:00

I’ve been looking recently at what can be done to improve the GNOME Control Center shell for both GNOME 3.0 and for Moblin. In Moblin, we wanted a single window approach, so that finding a setting and opening a preference pane could be done within a single environment. After some discussion on IRC and on the control center mailing list, it seems people within the Gnome community were also interested in this idea. I’ve been having a go at prototyping this behaviour to see how it would turn out. We’ve now gone through a couple of iterations of refining the design into something that is more promising. Here are some screenshots of how it looks right now:

Displaying all settings categories:

Searching for a setting:

Opening up the keyboard preferences:

The work is all available in the single-window-shell branch of gnome-control-center. At the moment, the single window behaviour is implemented using the XEmbed protocol via GtkPlug and GtkSocket. This allowed us to quickly prototype and experiment with the behaviour while making minimal changes to the existing capplets, although any capplets without the added functionality will open in a new window as before. Jon McCann of RedHat is also looking at using GIO Extension Point based approach, but this requires a more significant re-write of the capplets.

At the upcoming GNOME Usability hackfest I hope to gather more feedback on the design and possibly start working on refining the UI for many of the individual preference panes as well.

Nick Richards: Links for 2010-01-12 [del.icio.us]

2010-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

The Book Cover Archive

Clutter: Clutter at CES 2010

2010-01-12T11:17:46+00:00

Clutter has been generating some buzz at this year’s CES in Las Vegas.

LG demonstrated their Moorestown-based LG GW990 mobile phone which uses Clutter as part of Moblin:

(via Engadget)

Also, Else Ltd showcased their Else Intuition which uses Clutter as part of the Access Linux Platform v3.0:

(via Engadget)

Both projects leverage Clutter’s hardware acceleration for creating cool, animated user interfaces, as well as its portability and versatility.

Richard Purdie: CRM in the snow, take 2

2010-01-10T22:25:49+00:00

Since last week its snowed heavily. Logic dictated we should therefore
go out on the bikes again.

The sign says “Unsuitable for motor vehicles” – Rubbish!

As last time, the camera phone did well and there are pictures on flickr.

This time I decided to ride from home to the meeting/starting point which is 20 miles of tarmac. This turned out to be fine and I arrived on time for the meetup. The bike coped with the icy roads very well.

Eventually we set off being four in number at this point. We followed the same route as last weekend off up a trail that climbs the hillside. One of us, a relatively new TRF member struggled a lot on this section with him and his bike overheating and being difficult to start and it having no traction. It being 525cc and a MX bike variant by no means helped. I ended up going on ahead to tell the others what was going on, we U turned and took him back down. We then tried a simpler lane but he kept stalling due to the cold and in the end he decided to head home as he wasn’t enjoying it. A good call as if he struggled then, he’d have hated the rest of the day.

We continued on ending up at another residence and picking up two more riders, then we were five.

Upon departing Stocksfield on approach to a paved ford someone binned it due to ice on the road and nearly got soaked. He seemed to be enjoying himself though. Riding on a little further Steve pointed down a lane and suggested I go on ahead. Nobody overtook me which was unusual and I arrived at the next tarmac junction and waited. And waited. Eventually they turned up, apparently someone had to push his bike up some hill as there wasn’t enough traction to ride it. I must have rode up it but it didn’t register and I have no recollection of it. This was when the group photo was taken.

Moving onwards we now needed to cross a field thick with untouched snow. I had my doubts about it but as always, if someone can show me its possible, I’ll try. I found bringing up the rear at this point quite tricky as it meant following some elses deep rut in the snow. Creating them is hard on the bike, following them is hard on the rider as you end up bouncing foot to foot. In this case the back wheel did lots of spinning and the bike didn’t do much moving forwards. The bike temperature warning light came on, it made suitable hissing noises and generally was not happy. I let it cool off.

Things didn’t seem to be working as everyone was making much better progress than me through this field. Why? Good question. I stopped and let some air out the rear tyre in case it would give me some better traction. It might have marginally but this was not the problem. I’d been trying smooth engine revs, I tried pulsing throttle as an experiment. This is something I need to play with more and no doubt has its uses but didn’t do much here. I suddenly realised I was never leaving 1st gear. Trying to get some (any) speed up, and balance the bike long enough to change gear whilst riding along a twisted rut in deep snow isn’t as easy as it sounds but it didn’t half make a difference in this case. I’ve hence learnt a new way to torture the bike. Pulling away in higher gears actually worked reasonably well too.

Ahead, the others had been having fun whilst having a break with Nick demonstrating how to run in an engine. The fountains of snow were impressive, especially as he seemed the most nervous on the icy roads.

We moved onto Slaley forest itself. The first part of the route we’d taken last time where I got stuck in the bog wasn’t accessible as the gate was frozen into ice several inches thick so we bypassed that bit and onto the forest proper. I was at the back so I stopped and watched, making a note of where people were getting stuck. I then made sure I had more momentum and less mechanical sympathy for those bits .

The bike continued to get hot and require rests which was fine with the rider. This whole section was badly rutted, you never knew what you were going to hit under the snow and hence feet down bouncing from foot to foot to keep it upright was order of the day. This zaps energy and tortures muscles, the strain was showing on us all at the back, two of whom are a bit older than me. After various breaks, they were struggling and it got to the point where it was hard work following them so I overtook. It also meant the rut I was following wasn’t as churned up.

I was pleased that I did manage to find bits where I could start to keep my feet on the pegs around this time too.

We’d covered no where near the distance we had last weekend but time was getting on and everyone’s energy was expended so we decided to head homeward. Lots of icy tarmac country backroads followed but the bike behaved itself well. In the forest the wheels had filled the spokes area with snow and every now and again bits would break off, fire out the mudguard into the air and hit the rider. This left the wheel unbalanced and at one point it was actually oscillating the front suspension which was a weird feeling.

With only a few miles back to the start point I noticed a whirring from the front end. Handling and brakes seemed unaffected so I assumed it was the current road surface. The bike then stuttered and died, distracting me to the more urgent lack of fuel. Switching it to reserve dealt with that but I didn’t want to lose the others so pressed on, thinking the noise was in my mind. The others returned home, I headed off to the village fuel station where I noticed the front tyre was now totally flat. I rode it up to Steve and tried to pump it up which failed. From here it was 20 miles of tarmac through the centre of Newcastle to get home. I therefore wimped out and summoned a van. I could have attempted to fix it but in the freezing cold it wouldn’t have been fun.

It was all good fun, albeit very hard work at times and very draining on energy. I’ve learnt some new stuff about riding on snow and ice, its amazing whats possible.

I was surprised to realise that I never fell off which has to be a record. Also, I only ever had to get off the bike once to resolve an issue (to shove the front end down a hole to join the rear in a different rut). Makes a change!

Richard Purdie: CRM in the snow

2010-01-10T22:19:19+00:00

Over the holidays there was plenty of snow here both on and before New Years Day and there were weather warnings in place in Northumberland and North Tyneside with people being advised not to travel unless essential. Obviously when invited out in the snow on the CRM on Saturday (2nd January), I therefore said yes!

The camera phone did well with the photos for a change and there are some pictures of the day on flickr.

Setting off at 7:30am the roads weren’t too good but were passable, particularly once onto major ones. I was taking the bike to a meeting place in the Tyne valley in the van and was pleased I’d loaded it the night before. I put the many layers of clothing on and then tried to get the bike going which it refused to do. I was at the top of a steep hill and it took most of the length of it to bump start it but it did fire up at the bottom, thankfully and I met up with three other riders, two of them who’d travelled from Yorkshire.

200m of road and then onto the first lane which didn’t seem too bad. You couldn’t tell what you were riding on but the bike can cope with most things so it wasn’t a problem. Suddenly crashing through ice into a rut was an interesting experience.

Short bits of tarmac and more lanes followed gradually climbing out the Tyne valley and the higher you got, the deeper the snow. It was interesting to be riding through villages where people could barely stand on the pavements/roads – some gave us rather funny looks. We made it to one of the TRF members residences and then there were five.

The tarmac roads were as interesting as some of the lanes being covered in ice and snow in varying proportions. We decided going too far wasn’t sensible so headed for Slaley forest. At some point I managed to fall off in a field but nothing serious. Coming up to the forest I managed to sink the CRM into a rather unfrozen wet soggy bog and had to pull it out with some help some of the routes were variations I’ve not used before too.

When the leader stops and invites someone else to do the next bit you know its going to be interesting. Thankfully the skilled volunteer found a safe line through a rather badly rutted section. I took the lead for a bit and found it was actually easier riding the fresh snow that following the rut left by someone else.

We had wondered about going onto the exposed moorland beyond the forest and tried to do so where we thought the turning might be but the snow was too deep for our small number to plough through and be fun. It was also near lunch time and it started snowing at this point quite heavily.

The next long climb uphill was by far my worst part of the day as the bike would not go in a straight line and required feet down, bouncing from leg to leg the whole way up, zapping my energy. The following fire road was straight and level and proved interesting as the bike would not follow the rut in the snow left by someone else but would go along it with the rear wheel if (and only if) the front was left to run over the edge of the rut by an inch or two in fresh snow on the left side. I mentioned this to others and it was dismissed as the camber of the road but more on that in another post.

By this point vision was the main problem as the visor was covered in water/ice/snow and useless after about 5 seconds of riding. I left it half raised but this meant driving snow going into my face with my eyes only protected by my glasses.

Thankfully lunch followed (gammon, egg and chips) whilst it continued to snow and the bikes had snow on them upon exiting the pub. Given the time, the weather and the distance some people had to get home it was decided that we’d had enough fun for the day and it was time to make it homeward. The backroads we used to get back were the ever changing mix of snow, ice of varying compaction but the CRM seemed to take it in its stride.

All in all, quite an enjoyable day!

Clutter: Clutter 1.1.4 - developers snapshot

2010-01-08T11:27:44+00:00

hi everyone;

do you remember when I said that there would be monthly developers snapshots until the 1.2 release? well, it turns out that development, traveling and moving to a new house tends to disrupt release schedules. the best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that…

anyhow, here’s to you a new developers snapshot of Clutter; I’ll try to keep these coming for the whole month, until we reach API and feature freeze later in January, in time for GNOME 2.30 and the next Moblin cycle.

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/1.1/
  http://download.gnome.org/sources/clutter/1.1/

MD5 Checksums:

  7da9fdf29a1d03baee81d8fc6bffd66a clutter-1.1.4.tar.gz
  228a20691b17e246b9f264ff97db77c8 clutter-1.1.4.tar.bz2

Requirements

Clutter currently requires:

GLib >= 2.16.0
Cairo >= 1.6
Pango >= 1.20
OpenGL >= 1.2, OpenGL|ES 1.1 or OpenGL|ES 2.0
GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz or an EGL Implementation

Depending on the platform and the configuration options Clutter also depends on:

GDK-Pixbuf >= 2.0
JSON-GLib >= 0.8

Notes

This is the second developers snapshot of the 1.1 cycle
This version is API and ABI compatible with the current stable release of Clutter
Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Clutter
Bugs should be reported here

What’s new in Clutter 1.1.4

Update the ClutterScript parser to be more resilient, and support constructor and ChildMeta properties. The parser also respects the order of the properties in the UI definitions when applying them, and will apply the properties of an Actor after building the scene graph.
Simplified the implementation of LayoutManager sub-classes, and added support for animating a layout manager.
Allow short-circuiting some layout operations by setting a specific flag on ClutterActor.
Improve caching of the preferred size of a ClutterActor.
Allow declaring “internal children” for a ClutterContainer implementation: the memory management of these actors will be deferred entirely to the Container.
Let the ClutterStage honour the pacity property and the alpha component of the stage color. This requires support in the Clutter backend used.
Improve Windows and OSX backends.
Simplify the feature detection code for OpenGL; this also reduced the required OpenGL version to 1.2.
Improve the matrix stack handling code. The matrices can be debugged by using the COGL_DEBUG environment variable, assuming that Clutter was compiled with the right configure-time switch.
Improve COGL API for draw buffers, and for offscreen buffer support.
Add support for text direction to ClutterActor.
Documentation, introspection and build fixes.

Many thanks to:

  Robert Bragg
  Neil Roberts
  Damien Lespiau
  Joshua Lock
  Bastian Winkler
  Rob Bradford
  Samuel Degrande
  Christian Persch
  Colin Walters
  Johan Bilien
  Raymond Liu
  Tim Horton

Have fun with Clutter!

Elliot Smith: Books read 2009, and to read in 2010

2010-01-07T23:35:23+00:00

Last year I only managed to read 18 books. Pretty poor going. They were:

Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
Magnetism and other stories - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everything Is Miscellaneous
The Eternal Champion - Michael Moorcock
Phoenix in Obsidian - Michael Moorcock
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate - Michael Moorcock
Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg
Breakthrough - Richard Cowper
Brontomek! - Michael Coney
To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer
Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
400 Billion Stars - Paul J. McAuley
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Tactics of Conquest - Barry Malzberg
Secret Harmonies - Paul J. McAuley
Inside Intel - Tim Jackson
Imperial Earth - Arthur C. Clarke
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.

Of those, The Road was easily the best. I dread to think what a shambles the film will turn it into.

I've also updated my list of important books to include one or two I read last year, and some others I remembered. Plus I created a separate section for my favourite sf books.

This year I'm planning to read some sf classics. Here's the list I'm starting from (as I already have copies of all these):

A Case of Conscience - James Blish
Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg
Man Plus - Frederik Pohl
Venus Plus X - Theodore Sturgeon
Davy - Edgar Pangborn
The Space Merchants - Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
Blood Music - Greg Bear
Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner
Time Out of Joint - Philip K. Dick
The Embedding - Ian Watson
The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe
I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
On Wings of Song - Thomas M. Disch
Ringworld - Larry Niven
The Child Garden - Geoff Ryman

Let's see how I get on.

Chris Lord: Gaming Highs of 2009

2010-01-04T13:32:44+00:00

Well, following on from my post from 2 years ago, here's a list of games that I played in 2009 (not necessarily released in 2009) that I think are worthy of a mention:

PixelJunk Eden:
House of the Dead: Overkill:
Uncharted 2:
Batman: Arkham Asylum:

Gears of War 2

Killzone 2:

Uncharted 2

Motorstorm

Assassin's Creed 2:
Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time:

Uncharted 2

Borderlands:

It's worth mentioning how disappointing I found Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It has a single-player campaign that should be measured in minutes instead of hours, and although there are moments of brilliance, there are many more moments of needless frustration. The multiplayer hasn't really evolved since the first Modern Warfare either. Not to say it isn't a good game, but it was massively overrated. It makes you wonder how much bribery is involved with the review scores of large publications.

New Super Mario Brothers Wii was also very disappointing. The idea of taking the new look and mechanics from the excellent DS game and making a larger, shinier, multiplayer, console version of the game is great. The execution, however, is lacking. The levels and physics haven't been tweaked significantly enough to allow for the extra players, meaning playing anything other than single-player is a lot more challenging than it should be. The difficulty curve is also far too steep compared to pretty much every other Mario game in the series. Again, still good, but disappointing.

Not sure if it's worth mentioning how deeply disappointing Halo: ODST is. But there you go, just did it. And an honourable mention goes to Dead Space: Extraction on the Wii for proving that not all Wii games have to look like ass.

It was nice to see the trend of mediocre PS3 ports start to reverse in 2009. Although you're still better off buying the 360 version of a multi-platform game in the majority of cases, the gap is starting to narrow and there are a very select few titles that are actually better on the PS3. This is quite a testament to the sophistication of the programming techniques and middleware when you consider how different the architecture of the PS3 and the 360 are.

Hopefully games will continue to become more sophisticated in 2010, both in terms of technology and artistry. I'm especially looking forward to seeing Heavy Rain and Gran Turismo 5. Until next year!

R.I.P. Duke Nukem Forever.

Nick Richards: Links for 2009-12-31 [del.icio.us]

2010-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Eurogamer Readers' Top 50 Games of 2009
33. Red Faction: Guerrilla (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
nedrichards says: "Biggest bang for your buck all year. Next year, Just Cause 2 awaits for explodeyfun."

Elliot Smith: A script for parsing work log files

2009-12-24T00:20:05+00:00

Attached is my Ruby script for parsing log files I keep at work. I have to complete a weekly report, and this forms the basis of that; as I don't keep regular office hours (I flexi-work around child care), it also helps me keep track of the hours I've worked.

The basic principle of operation is as follows:

I create a file for each working week, called something like week45.log
During the week, I record bits of activity I do (see below); I also note down stuff I plan to do next (again, see below)
At the end of the week, I run parse_work_log <file name> > summary.out on the file to produce a log of what I've done
If anything goes wrong, I tend to edit the work log and regenerate, so I can just keep the log (not the summary)
I cut and paste from the summary.out file into an email I send round

The format of the file is deliberately simple to make it easy to maintain; there are a handful of formatting rules. An example is shown below.

**********
2009-12-21

09:30-12:00    Researching this and that #research
12:00-13:00    -Lunch
13:00-14:00    More research
14:00-18:00    Writing some application #coding

**********
2009-12-22

09:30-10:00    Admin #Admin
10:00-10:15    -Break
10:00-12:00    Found out something rather marvellous #Very important research
12:00-12:45    -Lunch
12:45-18:00    Writing another application #coding

**********
+NEXT Have lots of fun banging my head on a brick wall
+NEXT Reinstall my operating system

Which, when parsed, produces this on stderr:

*************************************

Worked 15.25 hours

And this on stdout:

*************************************
This week:

Admin:

  * Admin

Very important research:

  * Found out something rather marvellous

coding:

  * Writing some application
  * Writing another application

research:

  * Researching this and that

*************************************
Next:

  * Have lots of fun banging my head on a brick wall
  * Reinstall my operating system

Notes on formatting:

The asterisks and dates are just there to make it more readable - they're basically ignored
An entry is a single line with the format HH:MM-HH:MM <...whitespace...> <text> <#optional tag>\n
The time span for an entry is added to the total time, unless the entry text contains -Lunch or -Break
# creates a tagged entry which gets included in the report; it appears as a bullet point with the tag as its heading; any entries with the same tag get aggregated under a single heading; tags and entries appear in the order they occur in the file
Any line starting with +NEXT gets listed in the Next section at the end; tags don't work on this (could, but don't at the moment)

It is pretty primitive, but it does the job for me.

Installation: there isn't any, really. It works from the command line and needs Ruby. The licence? BSD, I guess.

Thomas Wood: My first (major) GTK+ patch

2009-12-21T14:56:15+00:00

Matthias Clasen cleaned up and pushed my first major patch to GTK+ yesterday. It allows the underlines on menus and buttons to be hidden until the alt key is pressed, similar to behaviour seen on recent versions of Windows. It is configurable via GtkSettings and off by default.

I’d like to thank Matthias and Emmanuele Bassi for their help reviewing the patch and to Intel for allowing me to develop it at work (it was a requirement for Moblin from our illustrious interaction designer, Nick Richards).

The final menu behaviour is a little different from my original idea and I’ve attached a patch to the bug that implements my preferred behaviour. You can try out the new setting by grabbing GTK+ from git and adding gtk-auto-mnemonics=1 into your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file.

Nick Richards: Links for 2009-12-18 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-19T08:00:00+00:00

Browser Size
See what a statistically valid percentage of web users can see.

Beaver's Blog: Poky Version 3.2 (Purple) Released

2009-12-16T14:22:50+00:00

Whoo! The Beaver’s back with a new stable release, Poky 3.2 (Purple) is available for download now.

Along with tons of updated recipes and an updated toolchain Purple has the following notable features:

* “Canadian Cross” compiling for the standalone toolchain. This enables you to build toolchains for use on hosts with architectures other than the host systems. You can now build an i586 toolchain on your x86_64 machine and vice-versa!

* Packaged staging enabled by default. Packaged staging packages up the build results of each recipe. The next time you run a build which uses one of these packages the package will be installed saving both time and space.

* An updated version of the Bitbake build tool

* QEMU GL passthrough mode which enables QEMU images to use the hosts GL implementation, taking advantage of any available acceleration on x86

* meta-moblin, containing recipes and configuration for the Moblin user experience

The release also includes the usual bug-fixes, tweaks and updates.

The release tarball:
http://pokylinux.org/releases/poky-purple-3.2.tar.bz2

Qemu Images and Toolchains:
http://pokylinux.org/releases/purple-3.2/

Chris Lord: Moblin Web Browser in Moblin 2.1

2009-12-15T10:11:31+00:00

The astute may have noticed that the default browser installed in Moblin 2.1 is not Moblin Web Browser. There are various reasons for this, but if you're interested in trying out the Moblin Web Browser (and how it would have been had it been included with 2.1), you still can by following the instructions here: How to install Moblin Web Browser in Moblin 2.1.

Note that development has already moved on quite a lot since the snapshot in the 2.1 repositories, and performance has been massively improved (to the point where it is almost indistinguishable, performance-wise, from Firefox, as long as you don't suffer from this bug). If anyone's interested in seeing the latest browser bits, do comment or drop me a mail and I'll see if I can get more up-to-date packages available somewhere.

Nick Richards: Links for 2009-12-14 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

How to use update-alternatives to use Moblin-Web-Browser
handy knowledge

Iain Holmes: If only I was on Planet GNOME

2009-12-14T13:45:04+00:00

Proprietary software I use and actively endorse:

Reaper – http://www.reaper.fm/

Renoise – http://www.renoise.com/

Reason – http://www.propellerheads.se/products/reason/

Live – http://www.ableton.com/live-8

Native Instruments piano/synth/epiano/hammond modules – http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/?category=44

Many many other effects and instruments.

Richard Purdie: Cold, wet and muddy!

2009-12-14T08:49:25+00:00

The days are short and the weather has changed so its cold, wet and muddy. Obviously I’ve therefore been out on the CRM .

Typical Northmberland!

A week ago was the local TRF’s bottle and turkey run which involved delivering some Christmas spirit to those landowners who have either been extremely helpful over the year, or have had issues with the rights of way over their land. It gives an opportunity to talk to them about the routes and the TRF’s responsible use policies.

It was an early start ending up at the Travellers Rest near Slaley for a very enjoyable Christmas dinner. I’d not been out for a while and it was nice to see that some new recruits have joined the local group. The Travellers Rest has a ford close by so naturally we went through it both outbound and inbound again. Its not just me who got a baptism of fire that way then (on the same ford as it happens)! The new recruits managed really well.

On Saturday I was out again, heading deeper into Northumberland. I thoroughly enjoyed it and we covered some routes in the Simonburn area which I’ve seen before but only from the other directly (which is harder). I only came off once and than was a comedy stall of momentum on the top of an earth ridge where all my feet could find was thin air at the side of the bike .

Most interesting moment of the day was one of the fords which was fast flowing deep water. I was at the back from gate duty so missed the first few people going through and having difficulties. Unknown to me several of them just pushed it through. Had I known Steve had done this (unheard of), I’d have probably done things differently. At its deepest, the water was covering the mudguards of the bikes and was at least up to the tops of my legs and also very cold. For the shorter group members this meant waist high.

I had a go at riding through and I think I got further than anyone else that way and was mostly across but in the deepest bit when I let the revs drop low and it stalled. I kept it upright and didn’t get any water into the engine but had to pull the bike out and it was a pain to get it going again. Not as much of a pain as the 525 which also stalled mid river with the race plug in it though.

While others were helping get that going again, someone else wanted some washers to space his footpeg out to stop his kickstart hitting it. Nobody had any but I suggested making some fibre ones out of some reed with this result:

All in all, a couple of very enjoyable trips out!

Thomas Wood: Moblin UI Toolkit 0.3.0

2009-12-11T17:47:34+00:00

A little bit earlier than previously advertised, today I have made version 0.3.0 of the Moblin UI Toolkit available.

Disclaimer

This is a development release. API and ABI are very likely to change. Compatibility with future and previous versions is not guaranteed. It has had only limited testing and there are unfinished features and plenty of bugs in this release. It should definitively not be used in production environments.

Changes

Here is the least of new features and fixes, from the NEWS file:

0.3.0

Changes since 0.2.0

New toolbar widget
Convert MxBin to abstract class
Add MxFrame as a drop-in replacement for plain instances of MxBin
Use the i-beam insertion mouse cursor in MxEntry
Clean up MxGrid API to be more consistent with other widgets
Add support for font-weight property to buttons and labels
Add animation layout support to MxBoxLayout
Add special styling for ComboBoxes inside a toolbar
Implement font styling in ComboBox
Fix expander label visibility
Add missing public headers and single include guards (Bastian Winkler)
Clean up various references to removed functions (Bastian Winkler)
Documentation improvements (Elliot Smith)

Sources

Sources are available from download.moblin.org:

http://download.moblin.org/sources/mx/0.3/

or from git:

http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/mx/

git clone git://git.moblin.org/mx

Thomas Wood: Layout Animations in Clutter

2009-12-10T22:44:50+00:00

I’ve been playing around with layout animations in Clutter recently and made a video of what I have achieved. Currently, Clutter has very good and understood support for animations using fixed positioning, but I wanted to experiment with animations inside a layout manager. After a lot of thought, the solution was simpler than I had imagined. In its current form, it involves storing the child allocations at the start of the animation and then simply calculating the children’s positions between the start and final destinations based on the alpha value from the timeline. Animation is disabled for most allocations, but is started by certain events such as changing child properties or orientation. The add and remove animations required some additional logic to make sure the new actor faded in once the animation had finished.

I made a video of MxBoxLayout that shows changing packing options (expand, fill and alignment) as well as adding and removing children, and changing orientation (the layout children are just ClutterRectangles):

animated-box-layout

The work is currently in a branch of the Moblin UI Toolkit repository (animated-box-layout) which I will merge once I have added an enable-animations property to the actor.

In other news, there is now a page on Moblin.org for the Moblin UI Toolkit, and I expect API reference documentation to be available on-line soon too. There is also a new component in Moblin bugzilla specifically for the new toolkit (under “Moblin Distribution”).

Nick Richards: Links for 2009-12-07 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-08T08:00:00+00:00

On Google Wave, and how we made Skype Chat

Damien Lespiau: Aligning C function parameters with vim

2009-12-07T12:56:11+00:00

updated: now saves/retores the paste register

It has bothered me for a while, some coding styles, most notably in the GNOME world try to enforce good looking alignment of functions parameters such as:

static UniqueResponse
on_unique_message_received (UniqueApp         *unique_app,
                            gint               command,
                            UniqueMessageData *message_data,
                            guint              time_,
                            gpointer           user_data)
{
}

Until now, I aligned the arguments by hand, but that time is over! Please welcome my first substantial vim plugin: it defines a GNOMEAlignArguments command to help you in that task. All you have to do is to add this file in your ~/.vim/plugin directory and define a macro in your ~/.vimrc to invoke it just like this:

" Align arguments
nmap ,a :GNOMEAlignArguments<CR>

HTH.

Srini Ragavan: Who forked it?

2009-12-05T03:20:19+00:00

Srinidhi & I made some GNOME stickers for foss.in .

We distributed to foss.in attendies and some minutes later we observed that our stickers were all sold out and I saw this

Didn’t realize when I first say huge sheets of KDE square stickers, why they are for ?

Thomas Wood: Festive Beers

2009-12-04T22:35:48+00:00

With the festive season fast approaching, Hylke and I realised that we hadn’t had a GNOME beer event recently and that if we wanted to do one before the end of the year, it would have to be pretty soon. So, a little on the short notice side, is anyone up for beers in London next Friday (11th)? If so, drop your name onto the wiki page and we’ll see you then!

Clutter: Tutorials ahoy!

2009-12-04T15:01:25+00:00

Elliot Smith has written a detailed tutorial about on how to use Clutter with the GJS JavaScript bindings. it describes how to set up the development environment and how to use the Clutter API (exposed through GObject-Introspection) using the GJS bindings.

the guys at TuxRadar wrote a nice beginners tutorial for starting with Clutter; they show the C API, but they also plan to move to Python.

Tomas Frydrych: Tough Question

2009-12-03T12:41:58+00:00

We are running an election to see which of the following characters are most important to you on Maemo: $ % & ( ) = > \ _ | ~ £ €

Dear Dave,

This is a difficult question indeed; I must admit I have certain partiality for the £ but these days I should perhaps prefer the €, even if € < £ (€ > £ , banish the thought, $ = £ God help us all). I could _ not _ possibly live without %, since I have to borrow at least some of the $, £ & €. My day job relies on the |, and no day job ~ no £. But you can have the \, I could not care less about that one,

Yours truly,

Srini Ragavan: GNOME @ foss.in

2009-12-03T05:03:41+00:00

foss.in is a very nice and premier event held annually in India and some of the GNOME contributors at India planned to organize a GNOME day at foss.in. Dec 5 2009, Saturday is the GNOME Project day and we have planned a bunch of sessions, workouts & talks. I just received few t-shirts for the project day for the GNOME volunteers and speakers. Some stickers is on the way I guess. Foss.in attendies, Meet us at the GNOME project day.

All this wouldn’t be possible with out the GNOME Foundation board, who approved us a budget, even though the request was at the very last moment.

I should also realy thank myntra.com for taking an order at the last moment, and still kept the word to deliver it over to me in less than 2 days. Good work, and I recommend them for a quality work and their time handling.