context switch

Berlin/0

just landed in Berlin, for the GTK+ Hackfest. At the moment, I’m hanging out in the dbus/gsettings/gdata/gtkapplication room with desrt, MacSlow, gicmo, chpe and herzi waiting for somebody (and I’m looking at you, behdad) with a key for my room to get in.

Travelling Band

Im in ur FOSDEM

givin u talk

Kingdom of Spain

Clutter: Today I released the first developers snapshot of Clutter 0.6 - Clutter 0.5.0. The full announcement is on the Clutter blog, and since it’s very long, I won’t copy and paste it here. You can grab 0.5.0 here; as usual, this is a unstable snapshot, and it’s meant to be used to play with the new API, start binding it and find the inevitable bugs that might have creeped in - and help us fixing them as well.

Last week I also went through the huge list of changes, additions and removals in the public API; the result is a collection of seven emails (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7) I sent on the clutter-list - complete of mistakes which I can only attribute to the amount of food, wine and beer I had during the Xmas break.

I’m incredibly proud of how much Clutter grew since the 0.4 release we did after GUADEC; the amount of bug fixes alone makes it worth to check it out - and the new features list is impressive. A lot happened, and a lot more will happen in the near future; some things are already here - but will be announced in due time.

As always, kudos to everyone that has helped by filing bugs and patches; started writing bindings; and last, but not least, contributed documentation.

Back in Black

Dear ATi,

if you’re not even able to make decent drivers for your own (admittedly crappy) graphic hardware, please have the decency to fail and go out of business as you rightfully deserve.

No love,
  Emmanuele.

Song for Sunshine

I just made two releases for gnome-utils: the first is 2.16.2, another release in the stable branch, which fixes a couple of bugs in Baobab and Screenshot that were also fixed in HEAD and deemed important enough to be backported.

The second release is - finally - 2.17.0, the first release of the new unstable release cycle which will lead to gnome-utils 2.18.0.

The major change in this release is in Baobab, which acquired the new, spiffy, cairo-based ringchart view, thanks to the hard work of Fabio, Paolo, Alejandro and Miguel. Baobab also dropped the search option, which mostly replicated the Search Tool already included in gnome-utils. Baobab user interface was cleaned up, its memory consumption was reduced and many bugs were fixed.

The other modules in gnome-utils got some love, but not much; my development tree still doesn’t build well and it’s not ready for inclusion in HEAD, but I plan to work on it before the next release.

As usual, download, test and file bugs.

Shake Your Groove Thing

Still in Italy, for the next 48 hours at least

The wedding went incredibly well: the ceremony itself was so short (twenty minutes) that I don’t remember much of it.

We were married in a beautiful building in Milan, with frescoes made by Tiepolo, by a city hall official.

The lunch was much more fun, even though it proved to be really tiresome: we went to sleep at 18:00 and woke up at 9 the day after.

We were cheered by (many) relatives and (many) friends - surely one of the best days in my entire life, and an awesome way to begin a new life as well.

More photos: here

London

Well, it’s been a full week since I moved to London, and everything is coming along quite nicely. The house is really cool, with a big bedroom and an even bigger dining room. It’s still missing some bits of furniture, like a dining table and its chairs, but the Ikea is going to have yet another visit from me and Marta; there’s something reassuring in the way Ikea shops look all the same in every country you are - like a beacon in a sea of strangeness: cars on the wrong way, public transportation and bureocracy that work, upholstery even in the bathroom, etc. Anyway, I think that I’ll just get used to it. Well, to most of it.

Growing Family

I’ve just finished including baobab, the disk usage analysis tool written by Fabio Marzocca (and others), into gnome-utils HEAD. Everything seems to build fine, and make distcheck has just confirmed that gnome-utils-2.15.0 is ready to be released. I plan to give the final touches before the deadline of tomorrow, so that the first unstable release of Gnome will ship the growing family of gnome-utils.

Now Listening: The Decemberists, Picaresque

End

Happy new year!!!

Dancing Barefoot

Marta, as an early (a week early) birthday present, bought me Dancing Barefoot, the first book written by Wil Wheaton. It arrived today, and I literally devoured it in an hour.

Wil writes gorgeously. I found myself smiling, grinning or plain laughing out loud while reading it. As a trekker, and a geek, I can’t but relate to the stories he wrote; I really can’t wait for Just a Geek to arrive (Marta bought me that too).

[books]
[wil+wheaton]

Trenchcoat

This has totally made my day.

[doom]
[doom+video+billgates]

Cleaning up

life: after the “exam craze” (two in five days) that took the best part of the week, me and Marta have resumed cleaning up the house. Since I have moved in with her, there has been so much work to do that we haven’t really felt the whole “moving in” part; but I assume it will get us, sooner or later. Next week we’re going to visit my parents, and get some of my books/DVDs/whatever that I left behind.

hacking: after moving the RecentManager to new new BookmarkFile parser/writer object, I resumed working on the actual separation of the recently used resources viewer widgets (implementing the RecentChooser interface) and the list controller (the RecentManager object). Last week I removed every trace of sorting and limit handling code involving the manager object from the widgets, and recoded them directely into the widgets themselves. Thus, it’s now possible to have a single manager instance and multiple viewers bound to it, instead of creating a manager object per widget:

Two widgets, one manager

Sorting, filtering and the list limit property are still present in the RecentManager object; this way you could have a custom sorting and filtering functions set into a manager, and then multiple views attached to it.

Separation was a job the the current EggRecentModel/EggRecentView objects didn’t handle well enough; basically, you could feed you own model to a EggRecentViewGtk widget, but every other widget using the same model would display the same data, with the same sorting, filtering and list size. This behaviour doesn’t really match the MVC paradigm; for instance, using the same TreeModel you could set up many TreeView widgets, each of them showing only some part of the data stored in the model. Filtering, sorting and size are handled by the TreeView code, not by the model.

The same should happen with the recently used resources list; also because this could lead to the creation of a default singleton instance of the manager object, in order to reduce memory and locking issues due to the on disk storage.

xavier

xavier

Originally uploaded by ebassi.

A couple of weeks ago, me and Marta had some spare time on our hands, and since I had “retired” my old server (wolverine) before leaving for Amsterdam, I needed a new linux box doing all the dirty stuff for my home network.

I also had a personal project of doing a case mod, so I decided that this was the perfect occasion to try and do something neat and geek.

I retrieved two boxes full of various bricks of Lego®, an old motherboard with a P2@233MHz and 128 MB of RAM, the old 15GB hdd from wolverine[1] and the ISO image of the first Debian Sarge disk.

After a full afternoon for building the case, and another day for configuring the whole thing, here’s xavier, the new server for my home LAN.

[1] which got upgraded to a 80GB disk and declared as a “workstation” when I switched from a poorly updated Debian Unstable to a brand new Ubuntu Hoary Hedgeog.

GoogleTalk

Seems that this is the new hotness.

I’ve had a GMail account for some time now, and GMail really changed the way I use email everyday - at least until Google added POP/SMTP support, then I got back using a MUA (at least when I can use either my notebook or my workstation). Now, with GoogleTalk supporting Jabber, I registered a new account on Gaim, and here it is:

ebassi@gmail.com

(which, incidentally, is also my main email address for all the development-releated issues)

WordPress

Since I’ve already updated my italian blog to version 1.5 of WordPress, I’ve decided to update my english blog.

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.

Study

boring class on computer programming. I’ve already done this when I was taking the computer engineering course (I switched to a pure CS course when I fluked three times in a row the electronics and the theory of automation classes; it’s not that I don’t like engineering: it’s engineering that does not like me).

libgtodo

Yet another week begins, and yet another week of work on libgtodo. I’ve completed the basics of the GTodoClient object: it can append/remove items(and categories), and each modification is dumped onto the XML tree in memory. I also began working on a sub-class for GtkListStore, called GTodoListStore, which will interface a GTodoClient object with a liststore, and later I’ll design a GTodoListView widget, subclassing GtkTreeView.

Thus, a simple viewer, would consist of these calls:


client = gtodo_client_new (some_uri);
store = gtodo_list_store_new (client);
g_object_unref (client); /* store holds a reference */
view = gtodo_list_view_new_with_model (store);
gtk_widget_show (view);


In parallel, this week I’ll begin writing a Perl binding to libgtodo. Subclassing a widget in Perl is quite fast, so I could design a prototype and then port it to C. Discussions about a platform language always revolve around Java/C# (with brief appearances of Python, from time to time), but they always forget that gtk2-perl and gnome2-perl bindings are one of the most advanced bindings available on GNOME D&DP.

With the upcoming of Perl6 and Parrot, I’d say to give Perl a chance.