Planet Closed Fist

Rob Bradford: GUADEC 2010

robster — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:57:18 +0000

GUADEC is going really well this year, great to catch up with folks. A big thank you to everyone who came along to my tips and tricks talk yesterday. I hope that everyone discovered something new; I certainly did whilst preparing it. As suggested i’ll try and get this content all collated up into a wiki page. Watch this space.

Awesome photo CC gonzalemario - http://bit.ly/9Z0iIf

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-07-29 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Gamebound :: Home
online flash games

Neil Roberts: Mash

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:08:00 +0000

I did my first ever talk at Guadec this year along with Damien and Chris. Thankfully there were no disasters apart from that I was pretty nervous and probably incomprehensible.

My part of the talk was about Mash which is a library for making ClutterActors out of 3D models. I forgot to give any links to where to get the code in the presentation however. I made the first release (0.1.0) before Guadec. It includes full gtk-doc and introspection support so it should be ready to play with if anybody wants to try it. It's quite likely that I'll change the API if I make another release though so please bear in mind that it's still a work in progress.

There is a wiki page with download links here.

I also demoed DFight which I've blogged about before and a ridiculous example game called Robot Pony. The source for robot pony is in a git repo here:

git clone git://git.busydoingnothing.co.uk/robot-pony.git

I probably also should have mentioned that the example code in the slides was using the semi-complete Ruby bindings. They are on the clutter-1.2 branch including bindings for Mash at:

git clone git://git.busydoingnothing.co.uk/rbclutter.git

I'm also trying to make an Ubuntu package for it. If I can get it working, it will be available from here

Chris Lord: Pill popping and happy wombats

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:29:49 +0000

Damien, Neil and I gave our joint talk about doing interesting and unusual things in Clutter yesterday. I think it went down alright, hopefully we can give more of this kind of talk in the future, showing people how you can use Clutter in cool ways.

For my part of the talk, I spoke about developing small, fun games. I intended the advice I gave to apply to developing any small game with anything, though it definitely applies to making games in Clutter. You can find the text and slides for my talk here. Like Neil and Damien (and the rest of the Intel OTC crew), I wrote my talk in pinpoint, pippin's excellent, new, Clutter-based presentation tool.

I wrote two games before the talk:

Both of these games are available from my git repository. Pill-popper works with any recent version of Mx and Clutter, Happy Wombats currently requires master clutter-box2d and the 'kinetic-scrolling' branch of Mx (which should shortly be merged - I'll update this post when it is). When these games are more complete, I hope to submit them to the MeeGo garage, and perhaps suggest their inclusion for gnome-games.

Happy Wombats includes an editor, so I'd love to receive some levels at some point. I'll be improving things soon, but it's already quite easy to use. Guadec has been great so far, I hope we can keep up the momentum of awesome developments until the next one :)

Emmanuele Bassi: GTK+ Meeting @ GUADEC 2010 – update

ebassi — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:42:58 +0000

since I’m stupid and I scheduled the team meeting before I could actually be in The Hague, I had to move the meeting. and, again, since I’m stupid I managed to schedule it against important talks of the day — and my own.

so: the GTK+ team meeting has been moved to the common area after the last talk of Wednesday, July 28th. sorry for the inconvenience I caused, and please don’t hurt me when you see me.

Thomas Wood: GNOME Background Chooser + Flickr

thos — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:54:51 +0000

I’ve recently been working on a new background chooser for GNOME, which supports multiple “sources” of backgrounds. Today I used libsocialweb to integrate support for browsing the user’s photostream from flickr.

The UI is still a work in progress, I’m hoping to land it before the feature freeze at the end of the week.

I’ll also be at Guadec this week, but only for the 28th and 29th. See you there!

Chris Lord: New hosting

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:33:09 +0000

Thanks to the awesome Nick Richards, I have new hosting (the old OpenedHand server that hosted my site is disappearing soon :(). If you're reading this, everything has gone smoothly :)

Oh, and I'll be at Guadec, presenting a talk with Damien Lespiau and Neil Roberts. You won't want to miss it!

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-07-19 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Redmine
Rails project management system with SCM integration, wiki, role-based access control etc.

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for July 13th through July 19th

Joshua — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:01:08 +0000

These are my links for July 13th through July 19th:

Virtual Machine Manager - Rob pointed out that my Fedora machine has a nice virtualisation option available, and so it does. UI is perhaps not quite as polished as VirtualBox but the actual virtualisation feels better. I've heard reports that Poky doesn't play well on a VirtualBox virtualised host but I've done some builds in a VMM host and it works well so far…
App Inventor for Android - "…visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior." - Awesome, a Scratch-like environment for Android.
Hello world in Scheme for Android - Quick how to, Scheme programs for your Android device with Kawa Scheme

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

Patrick Ohly: SyncEvolution 1.0.1 released

Patrick Ohly — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 07:08:23 +0000

SyncEvolution 1.0.1

A bug fix release. The main reason for releasing it is that SyncEvolution 1.0 no longer worked on recent distros (Fedora Core 13, Debian testing) because of a name clash between the Bluez D-Bus utility code and recent glib.

Details:

compile fix for FC 13 (and possibly others): use private copy of gdbus (BMC #3556)
sync-ui: prevent overwriting device configs by accident (BMC #3566,BMC #1194) Setting up a phone used the template name as config name and overwrote an existing configuration of another phone that was created using that same template. Now the code uses the Bluetooth device name as set on the device and checks for (less likely) collisions. It also sanitizes the name to avoid complicated config names (only relevant when also using the command line).
syncevo-dbus-server: accept 'application/vnd.syncml+xml; charset=UTF-8' for starting an HTTP session (BMC #3554) The redundant charset specification was set by the Funambol Thunderbird client. Because of a literal comparison against 'application/vnd.syncml+xml' the messages were rejected.
config fix: operations on non-peer configs failed (BMC #3157) When running operations on a non-peer configuration (like --restore @default addressbook), the operation fails with [ERROR] : type 'select backend' not supported
ZYB.com: service goes away end of June 2010, template removed (BMC #3310)
some build (BMC #2586, BMC #3557) and language updates

Source, Installation, Further information

Source snapshots are in http://downloads.syncevolution.org/syncevolution/sources

i386, amd64 and lpia binaries of 1.0 for Debian-based distributions are available via the "stable" syncevolution.org repository. Add the following entry to your /apt/source.list, then install "syncevolution-evolution":

deb http://downloads.syncevolution.org/apt stable main

These binaries include the "sync-ui" GTK GUI and were compiled for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy). Older distributions like Debian 4.0 (Etch) can no longer be supported with precompiled binaries because of missing libraries, but the source still compiles when not enabling the GUI (the default).

The same binaries are also available as .tar.gz and .rpm archives in http://downloads.syncevolution.org/syncevolution/evolution. In contrast to 0.8.x archives, the 1.0 .tar.gz archives have to be unpacked and the content must be moved to /usr, because several files would not be found otherwise.

After installation, follow the getting started steps.

Andrzej Zaborowski: balrog

balrog — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:29:48 +0000

gateway.py, the script that is part of my little ofono web-based client which I mentioned before, now lets its clients export their own objects as D-bus objects. While not very practical, a full D-bus service can be written in javascript that way. I added this capability mainly because ofono will now start using agent interfaces as part of its D-bus interface and other daemons, like connman and bluez, already have agents, so you need to be able to export an object to make a UI.

All other types of http requests remain as listed here. The new (GET) requests are:

/path/to/object/export/<n>/ObjectName[;Interface.MethodOrSignalName,<in_signature>[,<out_signature>][;...]] – This looks complex but it just creates a D-bus object with the given name (arbitrary string, used just internally), and a given list of members on given interfaces. Members list is ;-delimited, each member is a signal or a method depending on whether it has an out signature. New calls with their parameters are sent to the client in replies to the “idle” request using the same syntax as for signals from remote objects. In turn signals from exported objects are emitted using the same syntax as method calls on remote objects.
/path/to/object/Interface.MethodName/return/[<value>[,...]] – Return a (possibly empty) tuple of values to a pending call sent in an “idle” request earlier.
/path/to/object/Interface.MethodName/error/<string> – Return an exception / error constant to a pending call sent in an “idle” request earlier.

Thomas Wood: Date and Time Settings

thos — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:50:11 +0000

For the new Control Center in GNOME 3.0 (or System Settings, as it will be known), I’ve been working on a settings panel to allow people to set their timezone, date and time. This means there is a new date and time mechanism dbus service provided by gnome-settings-dameon, and a new UI to configure it with. The latest UI is available in gnome-control-center git and looks something like this:

It still needs a lot of testing and I’d also like to add support for using NTP services, although finding a method of applying this for different distributions will probably be tricky.

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-07-15 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online | Open Culture

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-07-13 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

wrttn.in - a simple online notepad
Simple text editor for editing and publishing on the web

Thomas Wood: Mx 1.1.0 (“Discovery”)

thos — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:59:46 +0000

Mx is a widget toolkit using Clutter that provides a set of standard interface elements, including buttons, progress bars, scroll bars and others. It also provides useful interfaces and utilities, such as Clipboard and Icon Theme support. Styling is achieved using a CSS style configuration file. It is used to implement the user experience shell in MeeGo Netbook.

This is the first release in the unstable development series.
As this is a development release, it should not be used in production environments.
Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Mx.

Some of the new features include some visual changes:

Shadows in MxEntry and MxScrollView:

New MxModalFrame for a window modal container, which darkens and blurs the window:

News

Changes since 1.0.0:

Updated documentation
Fix compilation with recent versions of GTK+
Require GTK+ 2.20
MxWidget: Move padding into the correct struct
Reduce the libtool version age to indicate ABI change
Fix GtkLightSwitch size and remove labels
Focusable: don’t accept focus on hidden actors
Allow spacing to be set from CSS in MxTable and MxBoxLayout
MxOffScreen: Add “redirect-enabled” property
MxOffScreen: Add accumulation buffer capability
MxOffScreen: Provide an accessor to the fbo
BoxLayout: add “scroll-to-focused” property
Add MxSettings and support for reading xsettings
Use CoglSubtexture rather than internal subtexture implementation
ScrollView: add shadows to the inside of a scrollview when scrolling
Viewport: respect fill, alignment and padding properties
Window: respect ClutterStage:user-resizable property
Improvements to MxIconTheme
Support pixel (px) and point (pt) font size values in CSS
MxModalFrame: new widget to implement modal dialogs

Updated Translations:

Turkish (Ahmet Özgür Erdemli)
Asturian (astur)

Many thanks to:

Chris Lord
Neil Roberts
Thomas Wood
iain

Sources

Sources are available from clutter-project.org:

http://source.clutter-project.org/sources/mx/1.1/

or from git:

http://git.clutter-project.org/mx/

git clone git://git.clutter-project.org/mx.git

Documentation

Documentation for the unstable branch of Mx is currently available at:

http://docs.clutter-project.org/docs/mx/unstable/

Bugzilla

Issues and feature requests should be filed in bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.clutter-project.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mx

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for July 12th from 13:00 to 23:24

Joshua — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:00:29 +0000

These are my links for July 12th from 13:00 to 23:24:

The Rust Language | Lambda the Ultimate - Mozilla are working on a systems programming language; concurrent, safe and multi-paradigm. Clearly written with a browser in mind. Sounds very interesting, indeed!
The Racket Blog: Racket - PLT Scheme is now known as Racket, because it's so much more than any other Scheme. I'll be playing with Racket because "… you start without writing down types. If you later wish to turn your script into a program, equip your Racket modules with explicit type declarations as you wish. And Racket doesn't just come as a typed variant; you can also write your modules in a purely functional and lazy dialect."
DFight - "DFight is a multi-player 3D board game for Linux written using Clutter. It is inspired by a popular board game called Khet." Chess + Lasers = awesome! Not having to reset the board after the game is brilliant. Network play and everything, thanks Neil!

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

Ross Burton: Tasks 0.18 (and 0.17)

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Whilst Tasks isn't exactly under active development, I'm still maintaining it because I actually use it (unlike certain other projects, ahem). So, Tasks 0.18 is released.

Huge translation update, including several missing strings
Add a "tomorrow" button to the date popup
Support adding tasks from the command line
Use "category" over "group" consistantly
Ensure the entry is correctly styled
Ellipzies categories in the combo box
Correctly encode non-ASCII notes
Fix compilation with GTK+ 2.18

Tarballs and more information as usual are available at the Pimlico Project web site.

In related news, we're slowly migrating over to the GNOME infrastructure. We've migrated the source code, next up is the tarballs and bugzilla.

Emmanuele Bassi: GTK+ Meeting @ GUADEC 2010

ebassi — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:21:43 +0000

GUADEC is one of the rare occasions for the people hacking on gtk to meet face to face and use a high bandwidth channel to discuss development of everyone’s favorite toolkit.

I’ve reserved a room under the BOF schedule page; currently, it’s on July 27th, between 16:00 and 18:00 (to avoid conflicting with talks).

we need to gather the attendance list, to verify if we should actually have the meeting or if informal discussions are more suited. please, fill out the attendance list and we’ll see you at GUADEC!

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for June 22nd through July 12th

Joshua — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:00:27 +0000

These are my links for June 22nd through July 12th:

lyd - compact self-contained realtime audio synthesis engine - "Lyd is meant to be used as an audio engine in games for realtime effects as well as background music. It is also a testbed for the original author to experiment with audio synthesis and various forms of composition." Pippin is a mad scientist who experiments with awesome, Lyd makes me want to write a game…
HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation - I've been wanting a simpler way to get my browser to do this for a while, thanks EFF!
Mensch — A coding font - Trying another programming font. Based on Apple's Menlo (new to 10.6), which is based on DejaVu's Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

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

Øyvind Kolås: lyd

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A compact self-contained realtime audio synthesis engine, initial public release.

Richard Purdie: Northbound to Alnwick/Rothbury

Richard — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:57:50 +0000

For one reason or another I’ve never been on a TRF run north into Northumberland in the Alnwick/Rothbury direction. Those routes are renown locally for their water crossings. The recent headline news story had made me wonder if that choice of direction was a good one but since that matter came to a conclusion early that morning it was no longer a concern, we met up near Prudhoe and off we went.

We were a group of eight with one guy who’d never been outside a field on a trail bike. He managed his inevitable off quite quickly but no real harm done to him (strained muscles?) or the bike and he got back on determined to continue. I stayed around the back of the group acting as sweeper and kept an eye on him. The initial part of the run was quite interesting to me as I’d never seen the trails we used and they were a bit different to ones I’d been on before with long grass, tall enclosing greenery and in one place greenery totally blocking the path which you just had to ride through.

I don’t seem to have done much trail riding this year and my riding was definitely suffering because of it. I nearly managed to drop the bike in the middle of the first big ford but caught it and only managed wet feet thankfully. Our new recruit had not considered we might be going through water, was not really attired for it and was rather nervous about the ford. He stalled halfway and had to push it the rest of the way but didn’t fall in.

I recognised the road we were on at this point, its one the Daytona knows rather well. Along there we had the first puncture of the day which was duly repaired.

We turned off that road and followed a trail eventually coming to a section of trail with warning tape. The reason was clear as a significant section of the bank had been eroded away leaving a 1ft wide strip. We made it through but had to wheel the bikes rather than ride them. I took the only photo of the day there but its poor quality, sorry.

Further trails followed and we ended up heading into Rothbury except the road in was blocked off with a significant police presence, no surprise there. Thankfully we were going the other way at that junction anyway. We looped around the top of the town through the forest and ended up in the next village over where we refuelled and talked a bit with the attendant about the events of the past few days.

We were trying to get to the lunch stop when we suffered the second puncture which was once again duly repaired. The next lane was through a field of lovely long grass so when a KTM lost a gear lever I wasn’t holding out much hope of finding it but it was on the gravel bit afterwards. We finally got a late lunch at Powburn.

It was starting to drizzle at this point but we sat outside under some umbrellas on the tables. Just as we’d finished eating the heavens opened with a torrential downpour so we waited inside until that mostly passed over. It was then more fuel and time to head back. We had hoped to get further north and sometime maybe I will but we were out of time today.

The trip back started off heading up Ingram valley, somewhere I’ve not been for a long time and had further fords but the river levels were extremely low and the ford crossings weren’t that bad. The deepest of the day (2ft?) had a bottom like loose cobbles which is different to any ford I’ve done before. I hit something half way over, got knocked off line but kept going. This meant I went over a large lump of dead tree in the water and missed the ramp up the bank on the other wide. The CRM happily climbed up the bit of steep bank anyway proving once again if you point it at obstacles and keep the power applied its amazing what it can climb over .

The route back also ended up going through Rothbury, this time coming to it over the river from the south on the other side of the town which meant we went past the other side of the restricted area. Here there was media everywhere and someone in front of a TV camera doing what looked like a live interview next to the main road. They didn’t look amused at the eight bikes going past.

After this it was further tarmac with a few lanes and we were back to Hadrian’s wall and time to head home. It was a long day but I think the new recruit will be back again! I enjoyed seeing a different set of trails and hopefully will see the ones further north sometime soon too. Thanks go to Steve and the rest of the group for the day, the navigating and the good company.

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-07-09 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

UI-Patterns.com
Design patterns for UIs, of course

Hylke Bons: Whitespace is important

Hylke — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:07:22 +0000

Just stumpled upon this article.

It’s good to get a fresh view from someone outside the community. We can do a lot better. A lot of us look at our desktop every day and get used to bad use of whitespace all over the space or simply don’t have the time to report bugs (I usually see a couple of these issues in every GNOME application).

Whitespace, alignments and add to the satisfaction of using software. It’s like the polish on a sports car. Not only is it nicer to look at, it also increases readability and order in your application, and thus usability.

If you have questions or need help on how to use whitespace in your application, please visit #gnome-design on irc.gnome.org.

Beaver's Blog: New release of Poky Anjuta integration - 0.7.1

Joshua Lock — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:45:23 +0000

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

This is a bug fix release which fixes some issues with incorrect error reporting and remote deployment.

Download Anjuta SDK Plugin 0.7.1

Beaver's Blog: Poky Version 3.3.1 (Green) Released

Joshua Lock — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:45:15 +0000

We are pleased to announce the first bug-fix release of Poky Green, 3.3.1.

This release includes fixes for issues discovered since the Green release:

Several problems with building QEMU where reported and fixed. qemu-native can now be successfully built on Fedora 13 and is more stable (Ubuntu users in particular have reported instability issues which have been addressed).
Various issues with building meta-toolchain have been fixed including the correctly packaging dependant libraries of programs such as opkg and fixing the name of the gdb binary.
Packaging fixes which mean SDK images can now be built.
The gcc-runtime has been fixed allowing successful building of C++ programs.

Thanks to everyone who helped with reporting and fixing bugs!

Thomas Wood: Universal Access Settings

thos — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:15:40 +0000

Jon McCann was recently working with the accessibility folks to come up with a new design for accessibility settings in GNOME 3.0. The results of the discussions are linked to on the Settings/Universal Access wiki page.

To help clean up some of the current settings panels, I have been implementing the mockup that Jon worked on. The current state is available in the latest Gnome unstable release, which is available in Rawhide for people running Fedora. Unfortunately Ubuntu have decided not to ship development packages of this Gnome release for people to test, so here are some screenshots of what is available so far:

Some features will need integration with the new Gnome Shell, and these are “grayed out” for now. Clearly there is some work to be done to make sure it conforms to the new Human Interface Guidelines and generally looks visually appealing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a large team of people working on Control Center right now, so it would be great if anyone can help out testing, fixing and improving! If you think you may be able to help out, the best way to get in touch is to pop in to the #control-center channel of irc.gnome.org. If you feel like diving straight in, the UI file for Universal Access is here. Send any changes back to the mail list or pop by IRC!

Andrzej Zaborowski: balrog

balrog — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:20:45 +0000

I took one more of those silly, but sometimes recognised, language exams, because my university let me do it for free due to some programme. This one was in Turkish, and now I’m certified. But because the exam was for the “A2″ level, I think it’s fair to say I’m a certified Turkish non-speaker. A2 really really means you can’t speak the language. (So what’s the point?)

I also have these certificates in Spanish and English (both corresponding to level C2 according to wikipedia chart) that say that I can actually speak, and even teach the basics of these languages (but don’t worry.. I have not the slightest idea about teaching), and I guess these could be useful — but have never been useful so far.

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-07-02 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

NanoNote
Tiny notebook computer which runs Linux on fully open hardware

Thomas Wood: Mx Toolkit 1.0.3

thos — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:01:30 +0000

Bee over waterlily by aussiegall

I just released a Mx 1.0.3 (“Honey Dew”), with improved documentation and support for compiling GSEAL_ENABLED in GTK+.

Also with this release, I’m pleased to announce Mx is now hosted on clutter-project.org!

Sources: http://source.clutter-project.org/sources/mx/1.0/
Git: http://git.clutter-project.org/mx/
Documentation: http://docs.clutter-project.org/docs/mx/stable/
Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.clutter-project.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mx

Hylke Bons: SparkleShare goings on

Hylke — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:36:21 +0000

Just a little post to keep you up to date on some new features in SparkleShare.

Restoring documents to previous revisions

SparkleShare now has a Nautilus extension so you can revert to earlier revisions of a document. I wrote it in Python, which wasn’t a very nice experience, so if someone could write some bindings/nautilus-mono that would be great!

Restore to previous revisions

SparkleDiff

SparkleDiff is a tool that can be very helpful to designers. It allows you to view different revisions of a file to compare them. Previously there were only text based solutions to do this for Git. The tool relies on Git but it doesn’t have SparkleShare as a hard dependency, so it can be packaged separately if you don’t use SparkleShare but would like to use it as a visual diff tool for images that reside in a Git repository.

Compare revisions easily

Contributions

I will soon put up some bounties with the donations that the project has received to get some more contributors in. Meanwhile, I would like to thank the people that have squashed several bugs, set up a proper build system and translations (in no particular order and I hope I’m not forgetting anyone): Sandy Armstrong, Bertrand Lorentz, Łukasz Jernaś, Oleg Khlystov and Simon Pither

Translations

Also, a translation project has been set up on Transifex. So submitting translations is now much easier!

Twitter

Oh, and don’t forget to follow @sparkleshare on Twitter for all the latest news!

Kittens

Kittens

Elliot Smith: Links for 2010-06-30 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Programming in C
has some occasionally useful bits

Neil Roberts: GUADEC

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:39:00 +0000

I'm also taking part in a talk with Damien Lespiau and Chris Lord to talk about some fun things to do with Clutter. Damien will be talking about a cool project to render and animate SVGs with Clutter and Javascript, Chris will show how Clutter can be used to make games and if I don't collapse with stage fright I'll demonstrate ClutterPly which is a project to help render 3D models as ClutterActors.

Joshua Lock: Blunderground

Joshua — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:18:25 +0000

Recently I wrote about doing some hacking for the Palm WebOS to create a tube app for K. It’s now in a reasonably usable form so I’ve put up a noddy website and a clone of my repository is available on GitHub.

As it’s at a stage where it works for the person I wrote it for (and a bonus user) it’s unlikely to be developed with any sort of pace, too many other fun things to hack on!

I’ve decided against trying to get it in to Palms app store as I’m fairly certain TFL won’t be too happy with me redistributing their map. There are ways around this but I don’t feel it’s worth it at this time, at the very least I’d need to support rotation and likely a couple of other features before submitting it to the app store otherwise Blunderground will just be a target for flames.

Writing apps for the Web OS is really easy, it’s just HTML and Javascript. I kept falling over the lack of static typing and my ability to create a large typo to LOC ratio but not everyone uses the compiler as a crutch like I do.

The develop/deploy/test cycle, even with the emulator, is a touch clunky. Seems to me a lot of the testing could have been done in a browser with a suitable harness but I didn’t have the inclination to develop that, I shall check out Ares if I write another WebOS application.

Finally interacting with web services wasn’t as rosy as the cloud pushers would have me believe, a significant bulk of the development time so far was spent on trying to figure out how to parse the JSON data TubeUpdates was returning. In the end I gave up and switched to using XML which I manipulated with JavaScript DOM methods and had the functionality running in minutes.

Andrzej Zaborowski: balrog

balrog — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 01:09:17 +0000

In the last two months I spent quite a lot of time working on a data import into OpenStreetMap that has been a little different from most of the imports happening in the project. I’m quite happy with the result but I’m also really happy to be done with in.

Most of Poland administrative institutions today are behind in the aspect of sharing information with others for common good, and information re-use (and in many other aspects). This includes geospatial data and clinging on to it and always assuming there might be something secret in it, such as… I don’t know, really. Obviously at some level there can be information protected by the privacy laws intermixed with geospatial data (parcel owners etc.), the other common case of spatial data that cannot be shared is the locations of protected species. But most of the time none of this is concerned.

Then there are laws in place that mandate those institutions to take money for disclosing particular types of information, and only under rather restrictive licensing conditions (nothing that remotely resembles CC-By-SA). But according to some people in the know, there are other laws in Poland that make most of this information classify as public information. Theoretically those former laws take precedence over the public information related ones, but last I heard there’s some other legal complication, way above my level of understanding law (unfortunately), that in effect means there’s a conflict/inconsistency in that system. What this means is that the institutions can assume either interpretation and they should be safe under the law. But they will always assume the “closed” interpretation.

So looking at all the other places and “battles” that people in OpenStreetMap have with their local administrations, it seems that this is a common trace in Europe, with a slowly progressing change in the direction of openness. But perhaps if you drew a little map of how “open” the institutions in different places are based on the number of data releases that happened, the area covered by Poland would mostly range between black and dark grey. So it was a lucky strike that the city of Szczecin was happy to let us use all the information available through their GIS website, including for automatic processing.

Their website has bitmap layers with some pretty high quality data, and no vector data available directly. This meant that it could be manually copied or some complex and rather hacky vectorisation could be attempted (obviously talking only about the data layers that were lacking in OpenStreetMap, not just everything — if you’ve done any OSMing, you know that some types of data are unlikely to be crowdsourced). French mappers are trying to manually copy the national cadastre bitmap layer made available by their administration, but it seems like a very tedious work, which is unlikely to be finished soon. So I tried to automate as much as possible of the vectorisation and I think in a big part it was a success. Still quite a lot of manual work was left to be done. Not a very interesting job, but not one that you can let some monkeys do for you either, because everything that could be automated has already been automated. So I’m really happy that it’s mostly done now (import status page firefox only, and takes a while to load). More details in Polish available in this post, but check out the mapsurfer screenshots and the tree density heat-map there. Maybe I’ll have a lightning talk about it at the upcoming State Of the Map 2010.

We’ve contacted some other municipalities trying hard not to scare them with the modern terms like share-alike etc., and as expected they are reluctant, but there seem to be two more candidates right now, and the import process is better streamlined now, and it really could be quite straight forward if it was not for some little annoying properties of the way the Szczecin data was shared.

For the moment I have a long backlog of information surveyed in my own neighbourhood to put on the map.

Thomas Wood: Re: Custom JHBuild Prompt

thos — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:22:13 +0000

There’s no comment facility on Federico’s blog, but it’s a shame he didn’t notice my post from a few weeks ago about how to set custom prompts in jhbuild shells. No patches needed, and a much more entertaining environment variable is already available!

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for June 11th through June 16th

Joshua — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:00:42 +0000

These are my links for June 11th through June 16th:

Bluetile - a modern tiling window manager with a gentle learning curve - Bluetile builds on the XMonad libraries to provide a tiling window manager with GNOME integration in mind. This means you can resort to a traditional window manager style for certain programs (GIMP) and rearrange tiles with your mouse. If XMonad has been intriguing but scary try Bluetile.
Git Reference - A quick reference, complementary to the git book.
Embedded in Academia : Why Take a Compiler Course? - Seconded, or whatever - my compiler course was briefer than I'd have liked but many of my peers didn't take it and I spent ages explaining what I thought where simple concepts to them when working on group projects and the like.

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

Patrick Ohly: SyncEvolution 1.0 released

Patrick Ohly — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:23:19 +0000

After several betas and lot of testing, it's finally time to announce the end of the 1.0 development cycle: SyncEvolution 1.0 is released and replaces 0.9.2 as the stable version.

0.1 was released over four years ago. It has always bee part of the long-term vision to bring "personal SyncML" to desktops. Thanks to the Synthesis engine and Intel's support for the project, this goal has been reached and this release really deserves the magic 1.0 label.

For those not familiar with the project, SyncEvolution synchronizes personal information management (PIM) data like contacts, calenders, tasks, and memos using the SyncML information synchronization standard. Up to and including 0.9.2, a third-party SyncML server was required. In 1.0, SyncEvolution itself is able to act as a SyncML server, both via HTTP and Bluetooth (direct sync with phones).

SyncEvolution 1.0

Major new features compared to previous stable release:

synchronize directly with a phone over Bluetooth/OBEX
accept Bluetooth/OBEX connections in cooperation with obexd >= 0.19
run SyncEvolution as a rudimentary HTTP SyncML server

The GTK sync-UI can be used to select a paired phone and create a configuration for it based on the bundled configuration templates. Configuration templates are included for Nokia phones; for other phones see the HOWTO and check out the Wiki there. Some users have already reported success for Sony Ericsson phones and added setup instructions. New templates from the Wiki can be dropped into ~/.config/syncevolution-templates under an arbitrary file name.

Unexpected slow syncs can be detected when running as client (MB #2416) and unless turned off (see "preventSlowSync"), SyncEvolution aborts the session so that the situation can be analyzed. A refresh from client or server might be more suitable. The command line tool provides instructions at the end of its output. The GTK sync-UI points towards its recovery dialog.

Automatic synchronization is supported by the syncevo-dbus-server (MB #6378). When that is installed, it will be started as part of a user session and keep running to trigger syncs in the background. Notifications are emitted when syncs start, end or fail (MB #10000).

Automatic synchronization can be enabled separately for each peer ("autoSync=0/1", off by default), will be done at regular intervals ("autoSyncInterval=30" minutes) when online long enough ("autoSyncDelay=5" minutes). That last option ensures that a) an automatic sync does not attempt to use a network connection unless it was already active and b) hopefully is also around long enough to complete the sync.

The Synthesis XML configuration was split up into different parts which are assembled from /usr/share/syncevolution/xml. Files in ~/.config/syncevolution-xml override and extend the default files, which my be useful when adding support for a new phone.

SyncML servers:

ZYB.com now works thanks to a workaround for anchor handling (MB #2424); only contacts tested because everything else is considered legacy by ZYB.com
Horde: avoid confusing the server with a deviceId that starts like the ones used in old Funambol clients, helps with calendar sync (MB #9347)
Mobical.net (and other, similar services): fix vCalendar 1.0 alarm properties before importing them (MB #10458)
desknow.com works when switching to SyncMLVersion = 1.1
Funambol, Memotoo (and probably others): preserve meeting series when receiving update for detached recurrence (MBC #1916)

Evolution:

calendar backend: minor fix for change tracking when deleting a single instance of a recurring event
workaround for Evolution 2.30: "timezone cannot be retrieved because it doesn't exist" is triggered incorrectly when importing non-standard timezone definitions because libecal changed an error code (MB #9820)

Performance and reliability improvements (MB #7708):

synccompare much faster
database dumps consume less disk space
more intelligent about expiring obsolete session directories and backups
database accesses are reduced in several backends
shorter logs (MB #8092)
message resending helps under unreliable network connectivity ("RetryInterval")
full support for suspend&resume in SyncEvolution client to SyncEvolution or Synthesis server syncs
better handling of certain third-party time zone definitions (MBC #1332)

Improved GTK sync-UI:

revised config screen: all in one list where entries can be expanded, integrated setup of sync with other devices
recovery support: restore from backup, unexpected slow sync handling
spinner while network is in use (MB #2229)
interactive password requests (MB #6376)
uses new D-Bus API

Command line:

fixed printing of rejected items (MB #7755)
consistent logging of added/updated/deleted items with short description
improved error reporting (textual descriptions instead of plain error codes MB #2069, partial success MB #7755, record and show first ERROR encountered MB #7708)
can create new sources (MB #8424)
runs operations inside daemon and thus avoids conflicts with operations done by other clients; for testing purposes (like running a client which talks to a local server in the daemon) it is still possible to ignore the daemon (--daemon=no, MB #5043)
revised README, now also available as man page (MBC #690)

Redesigned and reimplemented D-Bus API, used by sync-UI and command line:

central syncevo-dbus-server controls configurations and sync sessions
accepts incoming SyncML connection requests and messages received by independent transport stubs (obexd, HTTP server, ...)
can be used by multiple user interfaces at once
fully documented, see src/dbus/interfaces and http://api.syncevolution.org
no longer depends on dbus-glib with hand-written glue code for C++, instead uses gdbus plus automatic C++ binding generated via C++ templates

Revised configuration layout (MB #8048):

several peer-independent sync and source properties are shared between multiple peers
they can be accessed without selecting a specific peer, by using an empty config name or with the new "@" syntax
user interface of command line unchanged
old configurations can be read and written, without causing unwanted slow syncs when moving between stable and unstable SyncEvolution versions
old configurations can be migrated with the "--migrate" command line switch; however, then older SyncEvolution can no longer access them and migrating more than one old configuration causes the second or later configuration to loose its "deviceId" property (which is shared now), causing a slow sync once
config names may contain characters that are not allowed in the file names used for the underlying files; will be replaced with underscores automatically (MB #8350)

Upgrading from 0.9.x:

Upgrading and downgrading should work seamlessly when using existing configurations.
The new configuration layout is only used when creating new configurations or explicitly invoking "syncevolution --migrate" (see above). Such configs cannot be used by older SyncEvolution releases.
The new "RetryInterval" property causes messages to be resent after 2 minutes (increased from 1 minute in previous 1.0 betas). At least the Funambol server is known to not handle this correctly in all cases. So in the Funambol config template the interval is set to zero, disabling the feature. Disabling the feature must be done manually in existing Funambol configurations.

SyncEvolution 1.0 beta 3 -> 1.0 final

Bug fixes and new features:

Configuration templates are stored in a single file (MBC #1208). New templates (like something downloaded from the Wiki can be dropped into $HOME/.config/syncevolution-templates using an arbitrary file name.
Progress and per-source status are now also reported and recorded when running in server mode (MBC #1359). There are still several limitations (sync mode not reported, no information about sent/received/processed items while the sync runs, see MBC #2786).
Better handling of certain third-party time zone definitions (MBC #1332). Better logging to track down such problems.
D-Bus server + command line: return error code when failed (MBC #2193)
syncevo-phone-config: simplified command line options, several bug fixes (syntax error, incorrect handling of calendar+todo, MBC #1197)
Revised README, now also available as man page (MBC #690). Conversion of D-Bus API documentation into .html page (MBC #1745).
Funambol, Memotoo (and probably others): preserve meeting series when receiving update for detached recurrence (MBC #1916)
Fix for potential out-of-bounds memory access (MBC #1007).
HTTP server: fix for potential crash when second session was requested while an older one was still running, initial sync was done without libical time zone information and thus may have mismatched times (MBC #2435)
Nokia E55: convert alarm times (MBC #1657). This is done via a new remote rule in /usr/share/syncevolution/xml/remoterules/server/46_E55.xml If another phone needs the same treatment, then copy that file to ~/.config/syncevolution-xml/remoterules/server and edit the element.
GTK GUI: styling fix (MBC #1372), updated toolbar for MeeGo 1.0 (MBC #1970), avoid duplicating configs when selecting a config created by syncevo-phone-config or the command line (MBC #1266), scroll bars for emergency window (MBC #1296), avoid compile problem on Fedora Core 13 due to name collision with system sync() call, updated translations.

Known Issues

Compatibility with phones has not been tested as well as compatibility with the officially supported SyncML servers. Some issues have been reported which still need to be investigated:

Nokia N85: ignores refresh-from-server? (MBC #2722)
Sony Ericsson W595: All-day-events created in evolution are synchronized as all-day-events + 1 additional day in the mobile (MBC #2093)
Nokia N81: Evolution contacts loose "Other" email-addresses when synced two-way (MBC #2566)
Nokia phones: absolute alarm time? (MBC #1657)

Call for action: test with your phone and report which config works and how well synchronization works.

Other known issues:

server progress events: no information about sync mode (MBC #2786)
Calendar event alarm synchronization between N900 and Goosync (MBC #2764)

Source, Installation, Further information

Source snapshots are in http://downloads.syncevolution.org/syncevolution/sources

deb http://downloads.syncevolution.org/apt stable main

After installation, follow the getting started steps.

Elliot Smith: Why upgrading to Fedora 13 was a pain in the backside

elliot — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:23:23 +0000

I resist upgrading my work machine as much as possible, as whenever I do, everything I rely on stops working properly. A few notes on my particular pains this time round as I upgraded to Fedora Core (FC) 13:

SELinux is an utter pain. And for some reason it's difficult to turn off in FC 13 as the SELinux graphical config tool isn't installed by default. The package you need is policycoreutils-gui, which will enable you to disable SELinux easily.
The GNOME menus have ceased to be editable by default (there are lots of things there I don't use very often, and don't want clogging up my menus). You need to install alacarte to be able to edit them easily.
mp3 and other restricted codecs are not available by default. To get these, you can do:
*: sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
*: sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-ugly -y
Personally (because I'm set in my ways), I like quodlibet and grip for music (I know how to configure them to suit my taste; and yes, I know they're both pretty old hat). So I tend to install these next. You can also install lame if you want to be able to rip CDs to mp3.
I like pidgin better than empathy. Still.

So what's improved in FC13? Erm...

Shotwell is quite a nice photo manager.
The system boots slightly faster.
The volume settings are more sane, so I don't have to manually keep turning up my speakers between tracks (not sure what the technical term is, but the range from 0 to maximum across the software settings covers a greater range of volumes - if that makes sense).

That's about it. (My main reason for upgrading is so I can more easily build other people's software, rather than for application upgrades.)

There would probably be more if I wasn't so old fashioned about the applications I use...

Tomas Frydrych: Putting the Spill into Perspective

Tomas — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:21:33 +0000

This and this needs to be set alongside the NIMBY rhetoric coming out of the White House over the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Elliot Smith: Album released

elliot — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:21:50 +0000

I've finally released an album: One Million Corners, recorded by me under the name Spill Twins. It's on the Earthrid net label, and available either as a CD or as free mp3 downloads. (I'm going to put lossless versions on bandcamp this week.)

Here's an embedded player from the Internet Archive page for the album:

NB the content is Creative Commons by-nc-sa licensed. In the unlikely event anyone fancies remixing it, they're also welcome to the original sound/project files.

Elliot Smith: Releasing music

elliot — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:10:20 +0000

I've been writing more music recently, and am really enjoying it. Part of the reason for this was some interest from a local radio DJ, Kevin Busby, who produces Phantom Circuit, a great radio programme with eclectic tastes. Kevin's been a fantastic proponent of my music (he's played a few on his show). Having this external verification that it's not completely terrible has urged me on (though I would carry on without an audience, as I have been doing for the last 20 years).

The second reason was the discovery of LMMS, a free multi-track audio sequencer tool for Linux, which supports (some) VST instruments (I've actually just found a list of VSTs known to work, which I'll explore next week). I've switched entirely to that environment now, and think my music is improving. On top of that, I also bought Music Theory for Dummies. Despite its good reviews, I don't think it's a particularly great book; but it has helped me learn about scales, chords, and chord sequences, which I vaguely understood but never really applied. I feel like understanding form better, and principles of composition, gives me a better feel for what "sounds right", as well as giving me starting points for writing new stuff.

So, to the point, I just finished Umpet Steak Ripple as Spill Twins (my current musical incarnation). Here it is:

Umpet Steak Ripple by Spill Twins

I published it on Bandcamp which was introduced to me by Iain - as an aside, there seem to be a lot of musicians among the people I work with). It's a free download, or you can listen on the site, or embed it elsewhere (like I did above). Bandcamp seems much better suited to releasing music than http://last.fm/, which is what I was using previously: for whatever reason, tracks on last.fm seemed to keep disappearing or turning into limited 30 second previews, even if they were free downloads. Bandcamp allows you to upload proper, lossless recordings (I used a wav file), while making it available in standard formats like mp3; you can also sell stuff through it (not just give it way).

I really like this track. It feels like the kind of music I should be making, and sounds novel when I listen to it: by which I mean, I can't quite fathom it and personally find it interesting to listen to. Although very short (1m 37s), it took ages to put together. Finding just the right notes (I even wrote down the chords) and sounds (I had probably 10 different attempts at the bass sound) and the right tempo etc. took me probably 6 hours. FYI, the voice is sampled from Carnival of Souls (which you can watch in its entirety online); the drum sounds are generated using one of the built-in LMMS instruments which (I think) emulates a Gameboy sound chip.

I've still got a lot to learn about music (just ordered another book about composition; P.S. if anyone knows of a music composition evening class in Birmingham UK, please let me know). But it's currently one of the things I can lose hours to without realising, and which I love doing. So expect more soon. (And I haven't forgotten about my mathis project, either.)

Richard Purdie: Northumbria TRF Camping Weekend

Richard — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:09:15 +0000

On Thursday night I set off for a field in Hexham, arrived and set up camp. A pleasant evening was had around a couple of campfires.

Friday was marking out day. This was a repeat of the previous Saturday before but with marker tape for the junctions and checkpoint signs. Wark forest was straightforward and we met the forestry commission representative who was very friendly. Kershop forest already had markings in red/white so we had to switch to yellow/black which was hard to see. We made it back to the vans and then the campsite without incident.

The markup crew

Including comedy high vis jackets!

The bike was starting much more easily, had more compression and more power. Several people commented it appeared to be running better.

Another pleasant evening was had around the campfires with bike footage playing on the big screen and bbq’d food, watching various people arrive and set up camp.

Saturday morning arrived, the refueling station left at 6:15am and the first group (A) was due out at 8:15am. As with the best laid plans, they started to go wrong. The run leader did not show up. His KTM had a locked up front brake calliper apparently so he was stranded and unable to make it. End result was that A group was dispatched with C’s leader.

It was decided I was our best chance at leading group C of 10 bikes. As for a route, I’m still hopeless at both finding trails and joining them together but I did have the route from last year in the GPS so I could potentially do something which wasn’t all tarmac. My GPS needs its backlight to be readable and the external power is broken as the connector on the device is bust. I had it on the bike with no backlight purely to track where we were, not to navigate off.

Typical Northumberland with a slight misty haze

Regardless, we added a tail gunner I knew/trusted and off we went. We found our way to the first checkpoint with everyone present having made the required fuel stop and only one U turn as I was looking for the wrong gate and couldn’t see the GPS due to the sun so an improvement on last year.

At this point we were joined by the two from the refueling van having ridden in from the other direction so I was back to group E, cleanup detail. We were following, removing tape, locking gates and so on. It was dry and hot and very dusty so being there wasn’t actually a bad thing.

The group at one of the checkpoints

We got through Wark forest being led by Steve and arrived at Kershop. At this point I took over leading E group as Steve needed to sort out the refueling site and would catch up. We got a short distance into the forest only for me to get called back as we’d had our first mechanical of the day, in the cleanup group of all places. Investigation showed a front sprocket with no teeth left. After some discussion, we tightened up the chain, advised gentle use of the throttle and continued on collecting up the marking tape.

We arrived at the refueling site as planned and Steve never had caught us up. Everyone had arrived there except one bike from D group. Bikes and people were refueled and the broken bike was put into the van. Steve arrived and had only found one tape we’d missed. He went off in search of the missing bike, the rest of the group proceeded with the plan with E group once again doing demarking and being led by me since I knew the route.

A nice grassy decent. Would have been very different if it had rained!

We made good progress and came to the final forest checkpoint. The other bike was still missing. It was agreed that I’d take the remainder of E group back through Wark locking gates and Steve and Nic would stay behind on search duty.

We set off only to find D3 parked up next to a house asking about obtaining some fuel. Someone was dispatched to cancel the search and regroup so Steve and Nic rejoined us and as a group we headed off towards Wark forest. As we neared it, we caught up with the main group. We found B1 which wouldn’t start on the button and no kickstart. We bumped it down the hill towards the ford and I’m just pleased it started as otherwise he’d have got wet!

On the way back through Wark, we found mudguard and numberplate that had gone missing on the way up from one of the group’s bikes. Just before we arrived at the original checkpoint exiting Wark I had my closest near miss of the day as I went into a corner too fast and had the front wheel sliding all over with me flailing around too. Somehow I managed not to fall off.

My original plan for a route back had been Simonburn “proper” as I could find the start of that, then the route I’d used to get there reversed up Chollerford steps. Since Steve/Nic were there they led over the other Simonburn route. There are pictures of bits of that route in previous blog posts. I have never seen the ground so hard and the fords so low with water. After Simonburn, fuel and Steve+Nic were not interested in more trails but the others were so I took over the group from there and led them up the steps and back to the campsite. We were the first group back after Steve+Nic.

Another evening of banter, campfires, BBQs or takeaways, bike footage on the big screen and so forth went ahead at full steam. Some of my raffle numbers even came up!

Sunday morning came around all too quickly and I was undecided about going out but decided since the bike and gear were there and already filthy it would be rude not to.

Nick ended up leading a group of five of us to Hamsterly forest and back. The three other members of the group were two locals who’d just got off road bikes (one wearing jeans?) and a 70 year old from Norfolk (Dave). If I can do what he does at his age I will be happy . I played tail gunner for the day.

The trip was good fun with a comparatively relaxed pace. We had to pull the bike off Dave a couple of times but he seemed to be enjoying it . We passed a convoy of 4×4s who were having fun getting vehicles stuck. Personally comparing the capabilities of the bikes to them, I’ve an infinite preference for the bike. There was at least one maneuver I was lucky to get away with and some others where I was able to intentionally bounce the bike around in ways I’ve never had the nerve to before. The bike did fall over once, off the side stand as I was parking it.

The run ended with ever heavier rain and then I lost the group as nobody was marking a turn they’d taken. I was close to the campsite and thought they must have headed back so went there to find they weren’t. A quick phone call (phones work around there!) called off the search for me and they arrived back shortly thereafter along with many of the other groups who’d been out.

I packed up in the rain and headed home, unloaded the van and collapsed, exhausted having an early night. I’ve never managed two days riding before, let alone three so this is a new record. The bike behaved and everyone seemed to enjoy it. My thanks go to everyone who helped with the weekend.

Beaver's Blog: Poky Version 3.3 (Green) Released

Joshua Lock — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:13:26 +0000

We’re pleased to announce the release of Poky version 3.3 (Green).

Poky is aiming to release on a regular 6 month cycle so this release follows the 3.2 release approximately six months ago.

This release includes a lot of changes:

Updated toolchain:
- autoconf 2.6.5
- automake 1.11.1
- binutils 2.20
- bison 2.3
- gcc 4.3.3
- gdb 6.8
- glibc 2.9
- libtool 2.2.6
- pkgconfig 0.23

We now provide QEMU 0.12.4 (including the Poky enhancement to enable running GL apps in the emulator using a passthrough to the host GL)

Linux kernel updated to 2.6.33.2 for all QEMU machines and netbook

Recent X.org stack including X server 1.7.99.2

Busybox updated to 1.15.3

Many other new recipes and updated recipe versions

Basic support for PowerPC and MIPS machines, including qemumips and qemuppc machine configurations

Updated version of Bitbake which includes many enhancements:
- layers, a new method for maintaining extensions to the Poky metadata (see the Handbook Chapter 3 section 4.1 on Bitbake Layers)
- a switch to the 1.10 client/server branch allowing custom UIs such as the dependency visualisation UI ‘bitbake some-package -g -u depexp’
- enhanced mirror support, including ability to use local (file://) mirrors (whereby files will be used directly from the file location rather than copied to DL_DIR)
- speed enhancements

Use of BBCLASSEXTEND to provide native, cross, etc. packages using the same recipe as the host build

A class to add the correct gettext dependency to your package, regardless of build-type (cross, native, etc). This is particularly useful with the BBCLASSEXTEND variable.

Kernel class updated to handle changes in recent linux kernels

Packaged staging enhancements:
- support for pulling staging packages from a mirror (see the PSTAGE_MIRROR variable in your local.conf)
- post-processing of binaries with chrpath to make them relocatable
- removal of all legacy staging functions leading to improved build quality and faster builds
- note: packaged staging packages will now live in ${OEROOT}/pstage unless you set the PSTAGE_DIR variable in your local.conf

There have been some directory structure changes:
- the staging directory has been renamed to sysroots
- the cross directory has been removed and cross packages are now installed into the native sysroot
- the pstage toplevel directory has been created to house staging packages now that they are less tied to the build system

Various fixes for building on modern distributions (tested on Ubuntu and Fedora x86 and x86_64)

*NOTE*: We have changed the format of various configuration files and therefore added an compatibility check of files in build/conf - if using old configuration files you’ll want to be sure to check the .sample files in the build/conf directory and ensure your configuration files match.

Finally we’ve updated the Poky Handbook to include documentation for all of the changes made during this cycle.

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for June 8th through June 11th

Joshua — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:00:40 +0000

These are my links for June 8th through June 11th:

SparkleShare - Sharing work made easy - Hylke's fantastic little project to make collaborating with his fellow designers easier. Note the fantastic, but minimal, graphics - classy.
Embedded in Academia : Why Take an Operating Systems Course? - I completely agree, the title should probably be "Why Take a Hands-On Operating Systems Course" - I had an OS course at University but it was a subset of a larger systems course and very high-level theory. Would have preferred a dedicated, hands-on, OS course.
Barrelfish - "a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge … exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems." - Another interesting OS research project from MSR.

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

Hylke Bons: Announcing SparkleShare

Hylke — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:42:12 +0000

I’m very happy to finally being able to announce a little project of mine that i’ve been working for the last couple of weeks whenever i had a spare moment:

What is SparkleShare?

SparkleShare is the result of Project SparklePony. At the Usability Hackfest this year in London, a couple of us OSS designers came to the conclusion that we don’t have a proper collaboration tool. We have been using Dropbox for this for a while. Dropbox has a great user experience, but it has downsides as well: you can’t host your own server; it’s not open source and has some freaky things in its license agreement.

Features

So SparkleShare aims to replace Dropbox for us. There are some resemblances and some differences. SparkleShare creates a SparkleShare folder in your home directory in which you can add different remote folders (these can be on different servers). It has the same DropBox like notification system, one feature that we really liked. It allows you to see what others are doing and take peek, much easier than sending around e-mails, forget attachments and add wrong CCs. The most important thing is that the synchronisation is automatic and happens when you add or edit files.

Technology

SparkleShare is build on Mono, GTK+ and wraps around Git. It aims to integrate with the GNOME Desktop. I’m planning OSX and Windows versions as well (in that order).

There is no release out yet, as I’ve yet to fix some nasty bugs, but my programming skills are quite limited (I’m a designer and scriptkiddie). So this is a…

Call for contributors

Help would be very much appreciated! Any kind of contribution would be great. Translations, bug reports, code, docs, it doesn’t matter. Check out http://www.sparkleshare.org/ for links to the source code on gitorious. Join #sparkleshare on git.gnome.org if you have any questions

Special thanks

…to Jakub Steiner and Lapo Calamandrei for the awesome artwork and website design!

Ross Burton: Gypsy 0.8 Released

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:05:00 +0000

As acting release engineer of the Gypsy project (a GPS mux, if you didn't know) I'm proud to announce the release of Gypsy 0.8. So, what's new?

Support the Nokia N810 integrated GPS. If someone can verify that this works for the N900 too, that would be great.
Ability to dump the parsed NMEA to the console for debugging
Fixed over-eager old-school Garmin detection
Support reading NMEA from named pipes and FIFOs
Support seting the baud rate on ghetto GPS devices that don't default to a baud rate that actually works (Globalsat ND-100 and BlueNext BN-903S, I'm looking at you)
Support NMEA < 2.3

Many thanks to Jussi Kukkonen for patch review, and Bastien Nocera for patch review and new features.

The big question of course is what of the future? So far we've got some rough ideas. An overhaul of the device interaction layer is definitely required as actaully getting NMEA is becoming more complex: for integrated 3G/GPS chips you need to talk to oFono/ModemManager to get a socket, for some embedded GPS devices you need a proprietary binary that writes to a pipe, and so on. There are some new features we're considering too: server-side proximity detection and update rate limiting.

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for June 8th from 21:06 to 22:57

Joshua — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:00:05 +0000

These are my links for June 8th from 21:06 to 22:57:

The BitC Programming Language - "BitC is a new systems programming language. It seeks to combine the flexibility, safety, and richness of Standard ML or Haskell with the low-level expressiveness of C."
Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment - The Reader in Apples Safari 5 is actually just a bundled (and tweaked) copy of Arc90's Readability. Add this fantastic bookmarklet to your Firefox or Chrome browser and get the readable hotness.
The LLDB Debugger - Apple have just released a debugger built on the LLVM infrastructure released under the LLVM BSD style license. Very exciting! OS X only at the moment, but I've no doubt we'll see a Linux backend.

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

Clutter: Clutter 1.3.4 - developers snapshot

Emmanuele — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:55:08 +0000

hi everyone;

here’s to you the second 1.3 developers snapshot of Clutter, in time for GNOME 2.31.3.

Download

Clutter 1.3.4 is now available for download at:

http://source.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/1.3/

A mirror is also available here:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/clutter/1.3/

SHA256 Checksums:

935b4bdf6e8c0a649da6f267d67c22cec35f36d482f1c7b113ecc6bfcb905732  clutter-1.3.4.tar.gz
955d1b56f68fcfaede1f1268d5923694740322fd4eb782c57080113885dbd10e  clutter-1.3.4.tar.bz2

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

Requirements

GLib >= 2.18.0
Cairo >= 1.6
Pango >= 1.20
Atk >= 1.7
OpenGL >= 1.2 + multi-texturing, OpenGL|ES 1.1 or OpenGL|ES 2.0
GLX, 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

Release Notes

This is the second developers snapshot of the 1.3 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 1.3.4

List of changes since Clutter 1.3.2

Add ClutterEffect a ClutterActorMeta sub-class that affects the way an actor paints itself.
- Clutter provides a base class for effects painting to an offscreen buffer, and a base class for effects using the GL programmable pipeline (through the GLSL shader language).
- Clutter also provides some simple, shader-based effects: ClutterBlurEffect, ClutterColorizeEffect and ClutterDesaturateEffect.
- Effects can be applied to any actor, and can also be stacked.
Add ClutterClickAction, an action that provides “button-like” semantics for any ClutterActor.
ClutterDragAction now moves the actor to which it has been applied by default, using a class handler for the ::drag-motion signal.
Add the :pick-with-alpha property to ClutterTexture; this property allows using the alpha channel of a texture when picking it.
Regenerate the mipmaps on COGL textures when a texture is modified.
Documentation and build fixes.

Many thanks to:

  Robert Bragg
  Damien Lespiau
  Neil Roberts
  Colin Walters

Have fun with Clutter!

Iain Holmes: Music By Iain

iain — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:34:10 +0000

For those of you not following my astoundingly amazing Twitter feed, let me present

http://www.musicbyiain.com

It follows the Ronseal method of naming things. It doesn’t have much really, one 32second piece for guitar and piano, that one Scottish person described as “Bachy” but another person said “No, I think thats a Scottish slang word because it sounds nothing like Bach.” Who am I to argue, but it did lead into the best pun ever…

“Well, Bach was baroque, and baroque has lots of rules”

“Ah, but rules are meant to be baroquen”

Coming soon: http://www.punsbyiain.com

Joshua Lock: Delicious Bookmarks for May 19th through June 4th

Joshua — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:00:24 +0000

These are my links for May 19th through June 4th:

DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide - According to one cunning French man "that's kind of the reference for XSL"
Hands-on: MeeGo for netbooks picks up where Moblin left off - Balanced. Positive. Insightful review.
The WebM Project : The WebM Project : Welcome to the WebM Project - WebM = VP8 + Vorbis + Matroska. That's right kids an Open Source, royalty free video encoding solution for the web. Thanks Google! Firefox, Chrome and Opera will all support this. I wonder if Apple is on board?

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

Damien Lespiau: Learning how to draw

damien — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:35:16 +0000

I can’t draw. I’ve never been able to. Yet, for some reason, I decided to give it a serious try, buy a book to guide me in that journey (listening to an advice from pippin, yeah I know, crazy). The first step was, like a pilgrim walking to a sacred place, to go and buy some art supplies, which turned out to be a really enjoyable experience.

The first thing you have to do is a snapshot of your skills before reading more of the book to be able to do a “before/after” comparison. I thought it was quite hard, but was surprised that the result was all right, by my low standards anyway. You have to do 3 drawings: a self-portrait, looking at yourself in a mirror, a person/character drawn from memory without a visual help and your hand.

The next exercise is there to make you realize that you’ll have to forget everything you know and re-learn how to see to draw. It’s about copying drawings upside down, copying it curve by curve without associating any meaning to what you are doing. The result is quite surprising as you can see on the left. Now it’s a matter to learn how to do that without resorting to the upside down trick.

It’s only the beginning of a long journey, so many things can go wrong, but worth giving it a try!

Richard Purdie: It lives again

Richard — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:09:12 +0000

Well, the piston arrived, I fitted it and rebuilt the engine. Compression was *much* improved. I tried to start it and whilst it tried a few times it then stopped entirely and was basically dead.

Taking it to bits showed no spark. Meter out and more of the bike in bits. Kill switch was fine, power was obviously being generated from the lights, tested the ignition pickups and no continuity to the ECU on one of them. That’d do it.

Found the broken wire where the cable was wedged between the airbox and the frame, fixed it, bike started first kick. At this point it was 11pm and I don’t particular want to upset the neighbours so I’ll leave a test ride until the morning. It was smoking nicely which was expected.

It looks highly likely it died due to the broken wire and not the piston which makes more sense. Nice to have found the piston before it disintegrated!

I just hope I’ve fixed the gremlins, the bike tests successfully tomorrow and I can play on Friday!

Andrzej Zaborowski: balrog

balrog — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:44:39 +0000

(I guess I better post something here because it’s been a while.) So over the last two weekends I made a simple oFono client in javascript, meaning that it’s browser-based or “web-based”. To do that I needed a way to talk to D-bus over HTTP. I’ll try to set up a demo instance of the client later but now I’ll just mention the HTTP to D-bus gateway. Even though the whole thing is a hack, maybe the gateway will be useful to someone. It’s also possible that there are already fifteen similar programs there, I’ve not really checked.

The idea is rather simple, it’s a 10 kilobyte python script called gateway.py and you can run it in some directory and it will run a primitive web server on a given port using python’s built-in http library, and will serve the files from the current directory and its subdirectories. It also understands a couple of fake requests that enable web applications to talk to D-bus. It connects to the system bus and relays messages to and from D-bus services using the following three types of (GET) requests:

/path/to/object/Interface.Method(parameters) – This makes a regular D-bus call to a given method on a given interface of an object. It’s synchronous and the HTTP response will contain the D-bus response written as JSON. The D-bus types correspond very neatly to JSON types so the response is easy to use in javascript on the web.
/path/to/object/Interface.Signal/subscribe/<n> – This subscribes the application to a given D-bus signal. The applications identify themselves with a number (<n>), this can be any integer but it should be (reasonably) unique, for example it can be a random number generated when the application loads.
/idle/<n> – This just waits for any signal that application <n> is interested in, to arrive. The signal arguments are then sent to the client as JSON again, in the HTTP response. This way the browser keeps a socket open to the server and signals are sent over it.

Here are some example calls to make it clearer, along with their return values:

$ wget 'http://localhost:8000/modem01/VoiceCallManager.Dial("5555")' -O -
'/modem01/voicecall01'

$ wget 'http://localhost:8000/modem01/voicecall01/VoiceCall.GetProperties()' -O -
{ 'State': 'active', 'StartTime': '2010-06-01T02:16:34+0200', 'LineIdentification': '5555' }

$ wget 'http://localhost:8000/modem01/Modem.PropertyChanged/subscribe/500' -O -
null

It’s easy enough to make a little javascript class in your code to hide the http stuff away so you can make plain js calls and get the return values and have handlers called for the signals. Also, obviously ajax doesn’t just sit waiting for a http response so your application doesn’t become synchronous in any way.

You’ll notice that the interface names are shortened to just the last part of the name. Since the part before the dot is usually same as the service name, you can skip it and it’ll be added automatically. So you can write either /org.ofono.ModemManager or just /ModemManager

To check out the repository do,

git clone http://openstreetmap.pl/balrog/webfono.git

It’s python 3 and uses the D-bus and glib bindings, so getting these dependencies installed may be a little challenge at this point.

Richard Purdie: Fun in the forest

Richard — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:11:35 +0000

Its been a while since I’ve been out on the CRM due to work commitments and a variety of other things conspiring against me. I did however venture out on Saturday with some friends to prepare for something next weekend. The assumption I’ll make it out then is an optimistic but I’ll get to that.

For a while it looked like I might not have even made Saturday as I noticed the bike’s MOT had run out. Thankfully despite failing the first attempt on Friday, it passed second time around with some warnings about addressing certain things which I will do in due course.

So I found my way to the rendezvous at a place called Stonehaugh which isn’t even in the road atlas I had, complete with a motorcycle, fuel, two stoke oil, appropriate bike clothing and all seemed to be good.

We set off into Wark forest following a route which was familiar and my GPS recognised. There wasn’t as much water in the ford this year so it was much less interesting and the ground was a lot harder.

Wark forest became Kershop forest. We were mostly on forest fire roads and I continue to marvel at the way those bikes can glide over horrendous surfaces, over deep potholes and you can still maintain control over the direction they’re going at quite a speed. There was one horrible piece of track covered in some kind of different rock to the others which had the bike vibrating like crazy to the point I was checking the front wheel for a puncture.

After this we came to the section which I later learnt had been recently regraded, probably after a rally. The bike simple stopped wanting to turn corners which the front wheel sliding, locking up and things generally getting messy. Retrospect says I was simply going too fast for the ground conditions. Regardless it was an interesting lesson in machine control and I didn’t actually fall off at least.

We went through a few rain showers but nothing major which makes a nice change for that part of the world as it usually buckets down on me there. Attentive readers may remember a steep climb last year where I went last up after a large groups of bikes and had fun. This time we went down that same slope and it was much easier. Admittedly it was a lot drier too.

Upon leaving Kershop forest, the CRM started miss firing badly. This was after a ford but a shallow one with a concrete foundation so it shouldn’t have caused the bike a problem. At first I thought fuel and switched to reserve but no change. Up the next hill I was on full throttle misfiring like crazy as I caught up to where the rest of the group were stopped. One new spark plug later and it still wasn’t happy. No water on the ECU either and the contacts there seemed fine.

The bike was no longer revving and there was a nasty noise which sounded “top end” like although nobody could say exactly what it was. I also thought the previous plug possibly had tiny flecks of aluminium on it. End result, engine pronounced dead so what to do. Estimate 15 miles back through the forest or alternatively recovery from Scotland back round through Carlisle or Kielder which would take hours.

Since people were bored of forest tracks anyway, towing the bike was the obvious winner. The following journey had its fair share of fun moments, particularly as the towing bike needed the main track so I was riding the overgrown unpredictable bit between the two standard 4×4 wheel ruts most of the time. Downhill the tower’s engine braking meant they went much slower than my freewheeling so lots of braking was order of the day. Corners were particularly interesting as having no control over the speed you take them at is not for the faint hearted.

In the whole trip back, there was only one corner I disconnected the rope on, and only one other point where we stopped to make it single file past a gate. It included a return trip through the rocky ford where I did let the rope go a little too slack causing Nic to get a bike of a shock when it did tighten up but we made it out the river fine. I have to say a big thank you to Nic for the trip back, it was much appreciated and I suspect we both learnt some things about bike control, I certainly know I did. The rest of the group also made a great relay team overtaking and having gates opened for the main convoy to roll through .

So we made it back to the vans, called at Battlesteads for some posher than usual food, then home. Once home I tried to start the bike but it wasn’t having any of it. I had some time before dinner so I took the exhaust off and peered up the exhaust port. Top of the piston was intact, front of the piston was intact, piston rings intact. The 1mm vertical movement of the top piston ring was not good however and indicated one way or another the barrel was coming off.

I did get the barrel off with the engine still in the frame with some creative engineering despite several studs coming out when they shouldn’t and having to remove some studs that I shouldn’t have had to.

The current situation is that the piston and top ring are obviously knackered. It looks like the ring has worn, allowed detonation to occur behind the ring and this has eroded the ring grove. The piston ring itself is also badly worn. How it didn’t catch down a port in this state I do not know.

Note the gap above the top ring

Note the thin section on the bottom right

I’m still not 100% convinced this would cause the misfire but it certainly needs fixing. The barrel looks fine, head looks fine and the exhaust powervalve moves but very stiffly. I’m wondering if this heated ring overheated the exhaust port and maybe caused the power valve to stick causing the misfire. I’m unsure how stiff a powervalve should actually be.

Will I get out again on Friday? I should be able to get a new piston by then so we’ll see…

Neil Roberts: Clutter Board Games

Sun, 30 May 2010 16:58:00 +0000

I'm a bit of a fan of playing board games. I'm also irresistibly drawn to somehow getting computers involved in all of my hobbies. Hence in my spare time I've been working on Clutter versions of two of my favourite games.

First up is a game which for some reason I've called DFight. The game is inspired by / stolen from a real board game called Khet. Khet is best described as ‘chess with lasers’ except it's probably a lot simpler and cooler than chess. In the real game there is a board with a real laser on either end. Each player has a number of pieces, some of which have mirrored surfaces. The idea is to move your pieces in such a way that your laser beam reflects off enough pieces to hit the ‘pharaoh’ of the opposing player.

For the Clutter version I thought it would be fun try and use 3D models of the board and pieces rather than a flat 2D interface that Clutter would traditionally be good at. This makes use of the CoglVertexBuffer API to create actors out of the models stored in PLY files exported from blender so that they can be animated with the usual Clutter mechanisms. The code for this ended up as the basis for the Clutter-PLY library. I won't talk about that library here though because in theory I'm going to give a talk about it at GUADEC.

The game is meant to be played over a LAN with each player on a separate computer. If all goes well, it should automagically discover any other users running DFight so that a second player would see the game in their list. It's also possible to play over the Internet but there is currently no UI to make this simple and instead you have to specify the IP address of the other player using a command line option.

The implementation knows nothing about the rules of the game but instead just gives you a virtual board to play on and assumes neither of you will try to cheat. Any player can drag pieces around at any time and the pieces are moved around live on the opponents screen.

Although the implementation is good enough to play a full game, it's still a bit rough-and-ready and there are plenty of improvements to make such as:

The models need a bit of love as you can't currently see which side of the pieces is reflective.
It'd be nice to be able to discover other players over the Internet. Perhaps GGZ could be leveraged for this?
It doesn't know the initial board layouts so you currently have to tediously re-layout the board manually before every game (although you could argue this makes it more authentic ;)

I haven't made an actual release yet, but the code is available to try in a git repo here:

git clone git://git.busydoingnothing.co.uk/dfight.git

The second game I've been working on is called Amagramanam. It is not entirely unlike a popular tile-based crossword-style word game that you've probably heard of. For this game I've also made use of Mx which is the Clutter-based widget set Intel has been working on for MeeGo. This version is not networked but instead is meant to be played against the computer AI.

The ‘AI’ is not really intelligent at all but instead just uses brute force to try every possible play and picks the one with the best score. However this makes the game impossibly difficult (at least for me) so it's also possible to limit the computer's vocabulary and cap the score by clicking on the computer icon.

The game includes a copy of the Webster's Second International dictionary which I believe is out-of-copyright. Of course it's much better to play with a real Scrabble word list but I'm not sure about the legality of distributing that. However it's fairly easy to find a list via the magic of Google and any text list can be used with the game.

This game is also missing a few features. In particular, it's not possible to pass or exchange tiles, there's no blanks and it doesn't tell you when someone has won. However it's close enough to play an interesting game.

The git repo is available at:

git clone git://git.busydoingnothing.co.uk/amagramanam.git

Elliot Smith: In lieu of a mid-life crisis

elliot — Fri, 28 May 2010 21:22:07 +0000

I'm 40 this year (not yet, I hasten to add). Yes, I know it's no big deal it's a round number, that's just human preference for powers of 10. Anyway, it does seem like some kind of milestone in my life, for whatever reasons. And as I have a generally introspective mind, and a good dose of self-absorption, and this is my blog, I'm going to write a few notes about it.

Not sure what got me started down this path, but yesterday I dug out a load of old school books, note books, board game designs, roleplaying game campaign books, poetry, short stories - it's all still out there in the garage. But what struck me, rather than "where did all my dreams go? what am I doing with my life?", the usual things accompanying the average mid-life crisis, I found myself thinking "actually, I'm pretty much the same person I was when I was 12; I haven't really changed much; I still believe the same things". I mentioned this to Nicola (my wife) and she said something like "that's one thing you always are: consistent, stable, level-headed". Though she made it sound better than that: I'm paraphrasing.

So, where is my evidence for this. Cue quotations from old school books etc.:

"There is not anybody that I would really like to be, but if I had to be someone else, I think it would be Arthur C. Clarke...I would not like to be him because of the mysteries he has investigated but because of his great output of short stories and books..." (June 22nd 1982; still love science fiction, would love to be a great SF writer, but realise that probably that's not my calling)

"There are three things I would change in the world if I became, as it were, a 'supreme dictator'. 1. Banning of vivisection: all animals should be treated as part of life, and if they are destroyed or harmed we would be affecting our future lives... 2. Freedom of speech: I would give everybody in the world the freedom to speak how they wish... 3. Nuclear war: I would try to stop the production of nuclear weapons." (December 15th c. 1983; basically I was a hippie then and I still am; I think that's quite forward thinking for someone living in a provincial backwater in the early 1980s - probably my mum's influence)

There's really no point going on about achievements since then etc.; you can read my about page to find out what I've done with myself all this time. I don't think I'll ever "do enough" to say I've finished.

More important, though, are things which have meant a lot to me over the past few months. These are the kind of things we're living for:

Sledging in the local park with Madeleine (my daughter) on Christmas Eve 2009. This was just the most wonderful day for me: exhilirating, laughing with my daughter, expectations of Christmas the next day, looking forward to warming up in the cafe for lunch. I'll treasure this one for a long time.
How Joel (my son) loves to throw himself at me, fling his arms around me, wrestle me, nestle into my neck, calls me "my daddy"; his carefree grin as he ambles around the garden looking for interesting things.
Gaming night with Nicola (my wife): it's one time in the week when we sit down together, just the two of us, and get a chance to do nothing but spend time together, chat, have a drink. Sometimes we're both too knackered, but most Sunday nights, that's what we do. Carcassonne and Dominion are our current arenas. It's also great working at home, as we get to see each other a bit more and meet for lunch once a week in the local cafe. Good to be together.
Paul (my current manager) having the faith in me to persuade me to work at Intel, when I was at a really low point, virtually no self confidence, no self belief, and practically telling him I couldn't do the job. He was right, and I was wrong. It's taken me a while to build myself up again, but I finally feel like I'm getting into my stride and being useful.
Rediscovering my love of SF. I made a concerted effort this year to read more, and have been having a great time doing so. I've read quite a lot of classic SF this year, and have made some good discoveries (Grass by Sherri S. Tepper is my current one, which is really good, and actually brought tears to my eyes). I'm convinced reading fiction, great fiction, makes me a better person.
Writing more music and releasing an album. The release will happen in the next few weeks, and it's going to be very small (it's a tiny net label), but I'm really pleased and grateful someone else (Kevin Busby) has enough faith in my music enough to put their name to it.

While digging around, I also found this rather excellent (and very 1980s and corny, obviously around the time of Close Encounters) birthday card from my family; inside it says "HOPE YOUR BIRTHDAY IS OUT OF THIS WORLD!" There's also some of my mum's handwriting: "To Elliot, lots of love Mum, Dad, Dean & Chloë" (she always put the umlaut on Chloe). Finding some of her writing, that made me a bit sad (she died a few years ago of cancer). Here's the picture, anyway:

(Looking at this now, the sentimental part of me suddenly finds this picture quite fitting as a visual metaphor for what it's like to grow up...)

Thomas Wood: MeeGo Zones

thos — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:23:20 +0000

One thing everyone might not have noticed in the new MeeGo 1.0 for netbooks is the nice new zones panel, which I had the pleasure of working on. One of the neat things is that you can drag and drop windows between zones, and there are some nice animations as this all happens. I wrote about how I implemented the animations back in December last year, although I couldn’t mention what it was for at the time!

Unfortunately I didn’t get time to do a video yet, but here’s a screenshot showing the drag and drop in motion:

Emmanuele Bassi: Crash Years

ebassi — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:16:52 +0000

to continue the series about actions and constraints, here’s an example showing how to use the ClutterDragAction to create a scrolling container that pans the contents using dragging.

we can start with the usual set up of the stage:

  clutter_init (&argc, &argv);

  stage = clutter_stage_new ();
  clutter_stage_set_title (CLUTTER_STAGE (stage), "Scrolling");
  clutter_actor_set_size (stage, 800, 600);
  g_signal_connect (stage, "destroy",
		    G_CALLBACK (clutter_main_quit),
		    NULL);
  clutter_actor_show (stage);

then we set up the group that will contain the visible portion of the panning content:

  scroll = clutter_group_new ();
  clutter_container_add_actor (CLUTTER_CONTAINER (stage), scroll);
  clutter_actor_set_size (scroll, RECT_WIDTH, RECT_HEIGHT);

  constraint = clutter_align_constraint_new (stage, CLUTTER_ALIGN_X_AXIS, 0.5)
  clutter_actor_add_constraint (scroll, constraint);
  constraint = clutter_align_constraint_new (stage, CLUTTER_ALIGN_Y_AXIS, 0.5)
  clutter_actor_add_constraint (scroll, constraint);
  clutter_actor_set_clip_to_allocation (scroll, TRUE);

the RECT_WIDTH and RECT_HEIGHT are the two size constants for the each “page” of the content. we use ClutterAlignConstraints to keep the group centered on the stage¹.

the important bit is clutter_actor_set_clip_to_allocation() which will use (and track) the actor’s allocation as the clipping area.

  viewport = clutter_box_new (clutter_box_layout_new ());
  clutter_container_add_actor (CLUTTER_CONTAINER (scroll), viewport);

  for (i = 0; i < N_RECTS; i++)
    {
      ClutterColor color;

      clutter_color_from_string (&color, rect_color[i]);

      rectangle[i] = clutter_rectangle_new_with_color (&color);
      clutter_container_add_actor (CLUTTER_CONTAINER (viewport), rectangle[i]);
      clutter_actor_set_size (rectangle[i], RECT_WIDTH, RECT_HEIGHT);
    }

this is the content area, composed of a ClutterBox using a ClutterBoxLayout to lay out a list of rectangles.

let’s start the main loop, and the result should look like this:

does not do much

now we need to enable the panning logic. to do so, we use the ClutterDragAction on the viewport actor, and we constrain it to the horizontal axis:

  action = clutter_drag_action_new ();
  clutter_actor_add_action (viewport, action);
  clutter_drag_action_set_drag_axis (CLUTTER_DRAG_ACTION (action), CLUTTER_DRAG_X_AXIS);
  clutter_actor_set_reactive (viewport, TRUE);

and that’s it:

it's done! ship it!

well, except that it isn’t really done; the behaviour at the edges of the viewport can lead to simply have no way to pan back, and the whole thing is a bit static. we should add some “kinetic-style” animation depending on the position of the content at the end of the panning action. to do so, we can use the ClutterDragAction::drag-end signal:

g_signal_connect (action, "drag-end", G_CALLBACK (on_drag_end), NULL);

and have our logic there; first, the edges:

  float viewport_x = clutter_actor_get_x (viewport);

  /* check if we're at the viewport edges */
  if (viewport_x > 0)
    {
      clutter_actor_animate (viewport, CLUTTER_EASE_OUT_BOUNCE, 250,
                             "x", 0.0,
                             NULL);
      return;
    }

  if (viewport_x < (-1.0f * (RECT_WIDTH * (N_RECTS - 1))))
    {
      clutter_actor_animate (viewport, CLUTTER_EASE_OUT_BOUNCE, 250,
                             "x", (-1.0f * (RECT_WIDTH * (N_RECTS - 1))),
                             NULL);
      return;
    }

then the content:

  float offset_x;
  int child_visible;

  /* animate the viewport to fully show the child once we pass
   * a certain threshold with the dragging action
   */
  offset_x = fabsf (viewport_x) / RECT_WIDTH + 0.5f;
  if (offset_x > (RECT_WIDTH * 0.33))
    child_visible = (int) offset_x + 1;
  else
    child_visible = (int) offset_x;

  /* sanity check on the children number */
  child_visible = CLAMP (child_visible, 0, N_RECTS);

  clutter_actor_animate (viewport, CLUTTER_EASE_OUT_QUAD, 250,
                         "x", (-1.0f * RECT_WIDTH * child_visible),
                         NULL);

and here’s the result:

your browser does not support control

that wasn’t very hard, was it?

I’m going to submit this as a recipe for the Clutter Cookbook; the reference source code is available here.

this will work even if you set the stage as user resizable, as the constraints are recomputed at each allocation cycle

Thomas Wood: Meego™ and Mx 1.0

thos — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:39:53 +0000

Meego™ 1.0 for Netbooks is now available, with a revamped user experience based on Clutter/Mx. The Mx toolkit now sports a number of widgets and classes, as I mentioned in my previous post. The API reference documentation is now also available online, or can be built from the source code using the –enable-gtk-doc configuration option. Source code is available from git or source tarballs.

Mx Widget Gallery

Nick Richards: MeeGo 1.0

nedrichards — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:45:53 +0000

New today, part of the last few months work. MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks. Hope you like it.