Tag Archives: Gnome

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Openismus T-Shirts for GUADEC

General, ,

The days are busy right now, but I found time to Inkscape up a design and get just a few Openismus T-Shirts printed in time for GUADEC in Birmingham. The conference is gradually becoming as much a T-Shirt swap meet as a developer conference, so it’s obligatory.

Hopefully it’s simple and eye-catching and a little retro. I got them done at georgefrank along the road, in a furry 70s-style texture print. They weren’t cheap but the quality is great, the colors are warm, and they won’t shrink in the wash.

IMG_2682_001

IMG_2668

IMG_2674I’d really planned to have time by now to gather together my ideas and get a proper designer to do a company image, inspired by the quarter where I live here in Munich, but that must wait. Luckily, I already wanted the visual image to keep changing, because the name itself is distinctive enough. While I expect some consistency of elements at any one time, I don’t expect anything to remain the same from year to year, and I hope people can enjoy the changes. We’re a small company and our customers know us personally, so we can have some fun along the way. An unchallenging anonymous corporate image with the same old shiny fakeness would bring us nothing.

prepare-ChangeLog.pl for git?

Uncategorized

cairomm has switched to git. I have no need for what git offers, being quite happy with svn, and I’m generally annoyed at having to change the tools I use unnecessarily, but Jonathan Jongsma does most of the cairomm work so he gets to choose. So far I’m learning how to do the basic stuff:

Check it out:
git clone git.cairographics.org:/git/cairomm

Get a diff of my changes:
git commit -a -m “a paste of my changelog entry”
git pull
git diff origin HEAD > my-changes.patch

I know that’s probably not how I’m meant to work with git but I don’t currently want to change how I work. I like to make patches, and it annoys me that even that is so involved. I might use other stuff later, but I’m not going to be forced to do it now.

But I’d really like a git version of the prepare-ChangeLog.pl script, which currently only supports CVS and SVN. Does anyone have one?

Update: MOAP‘s “moap changelog prepare” command does this wonderfully, and supports cvs, svn, and maybe others too. It makes me happy.

Just a ChangeLog and none of your nonsense

I also know that various mad people think that ChangeLogs are unnecessary and/or should just be generated from commit logs. This is silly and doesn’t ever work. I’ve seen it fail again and again. Why don’t your dangerous optimism LEDs flash just at the thought of it?

I’d be just slightly persuaded if anyone could show an http URL of even one ChangeLog in one git project that listed files changed and functions in those files changed, instead of the vagueness that you normally get when you tell people just to say something in a commit message with no review of what they’ve changed or how they are explaining it. Your tool isn’t better than a ChangeLog yet.

Please think before you post examples. Just because you have a URL of a generated ChangeLog, that doesn’t mean that the content is any good. And it’s not enough that I could theoretically write some scripts or click all over a website to see what was changed in what function, which I could theoretically understand without any comments about the changes (don’t get me started about lack of code comments in general). A nice ChangeLog would just explain what was done and get out of my way and I could even read it in the tarball. I’ve been to ClearCase and I’m not going back.

Bugs I CC, and how to be a hero.

General

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a large list of bugs to which I’ve added myself as CC in bugzilla. I do this when someone mentions something (in a mailing list, blog, or IRC) that looks like it should affect lots of people or will affect one of my own projects when it’s fixed. This helps me to mention them in the Gnome release notes when they are fixed, and to provide useful information when someone mentions the problem again. Your CC list is probably interesting too.

A downside is that I get bugzilla email whenever someone else adds himself as CC. By far the most CCed bug in my list is GTK+ bug #56070 – “Can’t click button after setting it sensitive”. I think I get email for this, or the Ubuntu bug #22930 “Newly-sensitive button ignores clicks until cursor re-enters it” almost every day. I guess that roughly 1 in 1000 people who have a problem try to report a bug, and I guess that 1 in a 1000 people who try to report a bug actually find the original bug report and CC themselves. So fixing this would make several million people happy. Even if it’s only a few thousand people that you make happy, you’d be a hero.

It looks like Matthias Clasen will be that hero. He might like some help testing or reviewing the patch.

GNOME Event Box: New stuff

General

I finally found the time to go into the cellar and see what came back from the Berlin LinuxTag in the GNOME Event Box. Here are some pictures of what I found. They are available to all the events organizers who request the box, along with the LCD screens, wireless keyboard/mouse, wireless router, cables, etc:

A generously donated Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo Q mini PC, thanks to Josh Kress‘s persuasive skills:
IMG_2640

A Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, thanks to Quim Gil of Nokia:
IMG_2648

Two new GNOME foot posters to replace the ones that DHL lost, thanks to Sven Herzberg (Don’t forget to send me the bill, Sven):
IMG_2650

Openismus at GUADEC

Uncategorized, ,

I’ve registered, booked rooms, and booked my flight for GNOME’s GUADEC conference in Birmingham. Four of us from Openismus will be there: Myself, Daniel Elstner and Christian Kellner for the core days, and Johannes Schmid will be there for both the core days and after-hours days. We are staying in the Etap hotel.

Nautilus: Dragging the path

General

I’m probably the last person to discover this, but I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere before.

I just noticed that you can drag the path from the parent-folders button (at the bottom left of a GNOME file manager window) to the file chooser dialog’s location entry, which is convenient when you are opening or saving from an application and happen to have a folder open in a window already.

However, it doesn’t deal well with spaces, for instance. It escapes them as %20 though the file chooser dialog expects them to be unescaped. This could be very useful with a little work.

It would also be nice if the drop worked on the path bar too, and if I could drag from the window’s title bar.

Strategies for multiple gconf notifications

General,

I sent this to the gconf-list as well, but I’m posting it here in case someone has some generic code that I can steal, or has some better idea.

Say I have an intensive process that should be rerun in response to changes in any one of twenty GConf configuration keys, how might I prevent my application from re-running that process 20 times instead of just once, when changing all the keys at one time?

At the moment, I think the only solution is to append each notification key to a GList, and use a g_timeout handler to notify my application about batches of changes, if anything changed, at regular intervals. That would not avoid all excess notifications, but it could avoid most.

Note that you can’t just turn off notification while making the changes, because the notification happens later, after you’ve turned notification back on again. It’s asynchronous.

Glom ported to libgda 3.0

General, ,

A little while ago, Vivien Malerba released libgda 3.0.0 (and libgnomedb 3.0.0), so it’s now finally API/ABI stable. This was a long hard push, but we pulled everything together and got it done. Vivien deserves many thanks for his relentless bug-fixing.

C++ bindings are already available: libgdamm 3.0 and libgnomedbmm 3.0, with lots of documentation, though I will wait before declaring them API stable. Our examples and Glom were much needed test cases for libgda and libgnomedb.

Armin has already ported Glom to libgdamm 3.0, and just merged that work into svn trunk for the future Glom 1.6. It needs the svn version of libgda until there’s a 3.0.1 release. This is another large step on the way to accessing the database efficiently, instead of reading every single row into memory when showing a list, which is silly.

Also, Andreas Nilsson cleaned up the Glom icons a bit:

Christian Kellner and Marcus Bauer join Openismus

General,

Openismus now has another part-time developer: Christian “gicmo” Kellner, a gnome-vfs maintainer who has also worked for Scalix on their Evolution connector, currently a student at Passau University, Germany. He’ll be doing roughly similar work for Openismus, getting stuff done that wouldn’t get done otherwise. If only we could get the rest of the GNOME couch.

And Marcus Bauer joins us internetically as a full-time freelancer for at least the next couple of months, hopefully more if the work is there. Marcus is an accomplished coder, living in Nice, France, who is most well known within GNOME for his work on the LiveCDs for previous releases. He promises he’ll have a blog soon.

I received several other good applications this time, but few from Germany. Even in the EU, employing residents of other countries is a legal/bureaucratic/language problem that I’m trying to avoid, but will probably have to deal with eventually for outstanding candidates. I’m sure there’s lots of information out there but, like many location-based things, it doesn’t yield to Google searches.