4 février 2010
FOSDEM 2010, in a hurry
12:16 - GNOME
Just like Vincent wrote there is a flurry of activity this weekend in Brussels, thanks to FOSDEM, in fact there is even some people already here today, it will be nice to meet all of you.
I just got confirmation from the t-shirt producer (tip top print): they will be ready tomorrow, thanks a lot to them, if you ever need t-shirts printed in Belgium, they are really friendly.
There is a GNOME event in a bar on Saturday evening, it will happen at « La Porte Noire » (The Black Door) where there is a great collection of Belgian beers, and other beverages (with a special attention to all of you whisky lovers). (and there is the FOSDEM party on Friday evening, at the Delirium Café, where there is also lots of different beers (noticed a pattern?)).
The address and more details are on http://live.gnome.org/Brussels2010/Attendees
See you!
[imagine a "I'm going to fosdem" button here]
27 novembre 2009
Life & Design
17:20 - GNOME
This is getting traditional, noting how busy I have been this month, and how little I managed to do in GNOME (it had been weeks since a significant change, but I got back to it with the addition of the nightly buildbot scheduler to JHBuild (bug 591231).
Busy weeks for many things, with the high point this Sunday with an audio workshop for beginners I found myself organizing, and which turned out great, with the motivation to do it again with the same people. But then I was drained for a few terrible days. And even yesterday evening — that should have been a blast (finally the premiere of the short movie of S.) — went kind of wasted on my low energy.
The nice thing is holidays are coming soon, more on that later.
Miró on a calendar. November 27th, 2009
Anyway I didn't have much time for GNOME while I would have loved to push that proposal, quoting myself answering to William Jon McCann, on focusing artists, designers and usability people on "user experience":
With both you and Jeremy Perry who are working hard on the shell design, with Andreas Nilsson and friends¹, with the experienced people from Sun, with designers from OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, in an open but focused channel, we could assert we have a trusted team in charge, and avoid accusations of changes being made by lone runners.
I didn't push, but it was briefly discussed on IRC, and Andreas seemed well motivated ("I'm into whatever you guys come up with"), and it could start as a monthly design about 3.0 materials.
The proposal is on the table, and I am sure the constitution of an "as official as it can get" team working on user experience would be a great asset.
Speaking of design, I will have a few weeks off in Italy, first week in Reggio Calabria, then the plans are less clear, as S. should arrive and join up with me for the rest. Perhaps there will be some days in Palermo as a friend got there a few weeks ago, we will see.
Italian GNOME hackers, especially in the south of Italy, or in Roma (I'll stop there), I will love to meet you, you know my email.
14 septembre 2009
Getting features back in Bugzilla
10:57 - GNOME
The migration to Bugzilla 3.4 was a success, Max Kanat-Alexander did a great job porting many of our features, and most important porting them the right way, to be sure we do not end up in a few years stalled with an old Bugzilla again.
Still we had many features in Bugzilla and not all of them could make it, and it's now up to us to work on features we miss. Hacking on a web application written in Perl? The dream of all the GNOME hackers! Not. But I spent some time on this before my laptop broke, and I got back a development Bugzilla running this Saturday.
Helped by Olav and his insistance and doing it the proper way I set to work and by yesterday evening we now got back support for stock answers and the patch report (not yet linked from other pages, and with a different URL imposed by the extension mechanism, example).
In the pipeline I also have a port of the describeusers.cgi page and of the weekly bug summary. Hopefully they will soon be finished and installed.
Bruxelles, August 24th 2009
Actually I wanted to post a picture of "Camembert au miel et pommes de terre au four" as I got a new oven (thanks Chris) and have a great time cooking but the picture didn't turn well, so here's a rainbow for you.
23 août 2009
Stepping into the future
14:54 - GNOME
Sure my laptop was more than five years old and showing its age at times but I was still quite happy with it, unfortunately some mechanical part broke down and the lid couldn't be closed anymore, not practical.
So I now have a Thinkpad, first time I don't go for a cheap assembled computer, first time I get to buy a Windows licence, scratched as soon as I boot it up.
I still do not have migrated everything, but I got my GNOME development environment set up already, and used the opportunity to fix a build issue with nss on 64bits archs, and while I was at it I also fixed xulrunner to build, using the nspr and nss libraries installed by jhbuild. Mozilla built in jhbuild, the next logical step was to check if I could gnome-shell built in my full jhbuild system, and sure it managed without a glitch.
However starting gnome-shell was a pain, way too slow, actually not slow but terribly sacadated, something was really wrong, as the processor showed little activity. It's finally the day after that I looked at it again and took measurements, how strange, the screen is refreshed only every three seconds! Then I checked with a sample Clutter app and it had the same behaviour, so I looked at Clutter debugging infrastructure and read the Running Clutter page, to learn about the available debugging modes but just below there was a note on CLUTTER_VBLANK and I gave it a try.
CLUTTER_VBLANK=none and voila, it works! I could at last try gnome-shell And to be honest I was pleasantly surprised, I only gave it a shot once, months ago, and it sure improved and is quite usable now (in fact I am using it at this moment), and it goes really well with my dark theme. Congrats to the gnome-shell people!
And now the paint has dried, I'll go back to my Sunday paint job...
17 juillet 2009
Status Control Applet
20:23 - GNOME
I had great fun last week in Nantes, participating in the ephemeral radio station, set up thanks to the good folks of Autres (M) Ondes, all the programs we had are available online, on radio.rmll.info.
Obviously it was running exclusively with free software but between Jack, Rivendell, Jamin and friends, there are many components to monitor, and it would have been useful to have a direct view on those processes availability. So I promised to write a small applet, and here it came, pretty basic, but functional.
At the moment it is limited to monitoring processes, but it could well be extended to monitor other things, for example that the streaming server is up and serving files correctly.
This has also been the occasion to try Gitorious, it is quite nice, my project is available at gitorious.org/status-control-applet (fwiw this is Python & GPLv2+).