context switch

Summer Indeed

It’s summer, once again. Luckily, this year’s not as hot as the previous one, but still… I’ve already begun switching my wake cycle: staying up in the night, when the temperature is comfortable enough for sustaining human life, and sleeping during daytime, with my air conditioner turned on for the few hours when I do actually sleep.

On the programming side, I’m still battling against the Perl binding for the panel-applet library: with a little help from Torsten Schoenfeld, I’ve been able to make things actually work, but each applet written using Gnome2::PanelApplet still fails upon launch. I really don’t have an idea - even though the error seems due to a misunderstaing between me and applet programming, more than a binding bug.

This semester finals really sucked me out of will to program, by the way… I almost stopped working on libgnomepim - and I really need that to be ready before september, in order to have something to discuss in desktop-devel.

Space for Rent

Six months ago, I bought me a new HDD for my workstation (a Maxtor, 80GB drive), that couples my old Quantum 15GB drive, which was beginning to feel comically too small, with just half a GB for my /home. Now, my root rests on a ext2 partition of hda, whilst /var, /usr and /home are on hdb. This means that I do have some 14 GB to spare, and I was wondering about installing a new Linux distribution, just for testing purposes (I won’t let my Debian Unstable down for anything, except a wetwired implant - that too based on Debian).

I had been thinking about a Gentoo, but not having a snapshot on ceedee, they’ll have to hang me before I event think to download a ISO image with my pathetic V.90 dialup connection.

So I began considering a Fedora Core 2. It’s been a whole four years since I installed a Red Hat: I’ll have to get myself reacquainted to that.

14 GB of spare disk space. I began using computers when a 40 MB disk was the standard size, and disk manufacturers were saying that a 1 GB disk would have been too expensive for a workstation.

libgnomepim

I’ve drafted a proposal for a personal information management library for GNOME, called libgnomepim. It’s a library for creating PIMs with vairous backends, an easy API and a notification daemon. This library should be independent from Evolution and its data server, although a e-d-s backend is planned right from the start (since Evo is presumably going in GNOME from the 2.8 release cycle).

Why a PIM lbrary? Why not using Evolution? Because Evolution is a groupware. Is a mail user agent. And it is also a PIM, but with a twist for handling groups of people interacting. What I really need is a PIM, just a PIM, nothing more than a PIM. Something really light on requests, and something easy to use (programmatically speaking). And also something powerful enough to grow and use the things that GNOME will support in future release (see Robert Love’s Project Utopia). So there’s really no competition intended with Evolution; on the contrary: libgnomepim could be really offer an easy middle layer for its data server.

Moving out

My blog in enlish has been moved to a proper place. Since I’ve been using WordPress for the past three weeks on my blog in italian, I felt that it was a change for the best. All I need is just a pair of days to let things adjust while I create links and categories.

What really bugs me is that WordPress does not handle multiple web logs with just one installation. Right now, I had to replicate 1.5MB of files, database tables, users and settings. I should really look at the code, and see if I could draft out a multiple-blog system, backward compatible with the current layout.

About the name of this log, for those who do not understand it: a context switch is an operation a multi-tasking operating system does when switching between the active processes currently run on a machine. Heance the name of my random babblings on various subjects: from computer, to politics, to movies…

libgtodo

In a couple of hours, I’ve done a decent job in subclassing GtkListStore into the GTodoListStore class. Still missing some methods, but the constructor works, and the model is usable with a GtkTreeView widget (here’s a screenshot of the test app). I plan to wrap everything up tomorrow, and ask QBall to design the GTodoListView widget.