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Come and See

Decemberists: Yesterday evening, The Decemberists were in London, and made a wonderful concert at Shepherd Bush. I’ve fallen in love with the band after vieweing the video of their song Sixteen Military Wives and I started getting my hands on their whole discography (right now, only the singles are missing). They played mostly songs from their new album, The Crane Wife, which is really as good as it can get (so go out and buy it now).

gnome-utils: It seems that my plea for someone to work on GFloppy has been useful; right now, Paul Betts and Riccardo Setti are working on a replacement using HAL and libparted, and are also getting the ball rolling for adding formatting support directly in HAL. Guys, you rock!

GTK+: I’ve been working on fixing some bugs of the GtkRecentChooserMenu widget; specifically, bug #377164 and bug #405696. While I was at it, I finally closed the FIXME I left in code, for supporting both appending and prepending custom menu items in the recent files menu, and finally added a test case for the widget, so I can track regressions.

Obligatory screenshot of the test application

FOSDEM ‘07: Like last year, at the end of February I’ll be in Bruxelles, attending FOSDEM.

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

Precious

Saturday, Marta and myself finally went to choose the wedding rings. We asked to get engraved, after our names, the date of the wedding in a format of our choice, and we gave to the puzzled guy a note with this number on it: 1152265200.

Now listening: Depeche Mode, Playing the Angel

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.

Feeling yourself disintegrate

life: In the past 24 hours I’ve had:

• a bad cold
• a sore throat
• some lines of fever
• water spilled on my laptop’s keyboard
• thus, a broken Ctrl key that would not disengage itself
• and, finally, a broken Ctrl key that would not work anymore

The last problem was solved by switching Caps Lock and Ctrl (thanks to the Gnome keyboard capplet; but I’d prefer to be able to use the windows key as a replacement, as it’s nearer to the original key), as my finger memory could not adapt to using the right Ctrl key for stuff like workspace navigation.

doap: like all the cool kids, I’m too working on a way for handling DOAP streams, except that I’m doing it in Perl and not in fancy Python (I’m using the Redland library, though). Unfortunately, there’s no such Perl module for basic handling FOAF and DOAP data - so I’ll need to create them first, then work on a nice authoring interface.

perl: also, I’ve been working on Perl bindings for the Maemo libraries, as one of the goals for the 2.0 version of the platform is having language bindings working. From inside the scratchbox (version 0.9.8.5 comes with perl 5.8.4), I downloaded the GLib and Gtk2 modules from CPAN, and even with some failures, they basically worked out of the box; then I began binding stuff (hildon-lgpl, hildon-libs and hildon-fm for starters, libosso will be next, as it needs the DBus perl bindings), and in less than twenty minutes I had my own nice little hello world application written (sorry, no screenshot at the moment).

Now Listening: Led Zeppelin, Stairway to heaven

ChangeLog

moving out: Marta has been in London a couple of times, in these two weeks; she has found a nice house in Crystal Palace, and began to buy furniture and stuff, and preparing it for us to move in. Next week, we’re both going to London and buy the remaining stuff (a sofa-bed, a table for the living room and some chairs to begin with). We should return in Milan for a couple of days on the 4th of May, as we must sign documents and papers for the marriage, and actually choose its date (it’ll be in July, probably).

gtk+ recent: the merge went well; on the gtk-devel list, Murray Cumming pointed out a couple of issues; most notably, the lack of integration with the GtkUIManager. The plan was to add a placeholder tag to the markup used to build the UI, but I really don’t like this approach anymore: it’s inherently messy. As a replacement, I coded up in a couple of hours a new GtkAction subclass: GtkRecentAction; when bound to a menu item tag, it creates a new submenu hooked to a GtkRecentChooserMenu; when bound to a toolbar item tag, it creates a GtkMenuToolButton like the one Gedit uses for the Open toolbar button. Unfortunately, I still can’t see a way to hook up an inlined list of menu items. Well, I suppose I’ll have to file a bug to the HIG and have it changed to use submenus for the list of recently used files.

gnome-utils: good news everyone: I’ve asked Fabio Marzocca for his permission to include into the gnome-utils package the fine disk usage tool called Baobab that he wrote; he agreed, and work is underway to clean up the code and hook it up to the gnome-utils build, in order to have it ready for the 2.15.1 release. Also, work is underway to add Solaris support to the system log viewer, and I’m fixing up a bunch of open bugs for the dictionary, including the re-addition of the “speller tool” (the list of matching words showed if no definitions were to be found).

Third-graders

This is a comment I left on Philip’s blog in response to Ross’ blog.

question: what are we, third graders that we must do all this touchy-feely, “we must not make comments” stuff?

ross’ comment was a bit on the edge, but its his blog, and he has any rights to write that the player sucks; the other blog post from joe is the more relevant: the entire free software/open source thingie works because we have copyright and because we have peer pressure. the “author” of listen stole code, because it didn’t simply lift it and put it into his project: he also removed the copyright notices. I copy code from many projects (as far as the license enables me to do it safely) but I leave at least a note saying from where I took the code and who’s the author. if a big company did the same thing we would all be jumping and screaming around.

what strikes me the most is that, instead of integrating stuff by talking to the various projects and - at most - forking some code base, the guy just went lifting code, collating stuff like a frankenstein movie, and then releasing the resulting “monster” without even a mention of the other projects. and all these people say: “oh, the media player situation demands it” or: “oh, amarok is such a fine player that we need a poor man’s clone for gnome” - basically insulting every author of the other media players around, insulting an author that want his contribution to the f/oss community recognized as he well should, and justifying the copyright infringement for the sake of having their pretty little clone.

these are energy stoppers. If I was a developer of another media player I would simply cease all my work instantly, out of such blatant ingratitude.

After having read some of the comments on Ross’ blog, and after the querelle about the NLD10 stuff that happened on the desktop-devel-list, I’m wondering if the major problem of the Gnome community is its being made of third graders, where one must not say bad things about someone else’s work because of a “we are all special”-kinda-like agreement that, it seems, you implicitly sign when you get an account.

Come on! If I think that a projects sucks I’ll write that it sucks, ferchrissake! I expect none the less from my peers, and I expect none the less from the many people that is well above my skills. If I wrote a piece of software and someone comes along saying that it sucks because of this and that, then I’ll respond or I’ll say fuck dude, you are right and will change it, or I’ll say yep, but it’s my project and I will go on. Gracefully taking criticism for your work is a valuable indicator that you are not a child anymore.

If you cannot cope with this, then please don’t even begin coding; because peer pressure and peer review are what makes F/OSS such a great endeavour.

Transfer

Marta got accepted for a MSc at the LSE, and she’d really like to move to Good Ol’ London - with me coming along.

So, in the next months I’ll have to find a gig in the UK: time to update my resumé.

Snow

It’s been snowing since yesterday morning, here in Milan. Waking up with 20 cm of snow and watching it grow has some sort of hypnotical beauty, which vanishes as soon as you realize that: two of the major national airports (one of which is the italian major international hub) are shut down; basically, all the roads to and from Milan are closed or soon-to-be (and all major news sources advice not to travel unless strictly necessary); also, one of the major railroads axis - the Milano-Roma - is basically cut off.

Two days worth of snow, and the entire northern Italy is cut off from the rest of the planet; so long for it being the economical centre of the nation.

There And Back Again

Again at home, after a week in Berlin.

The city is wonderful - now I understand why Marta loves it that much: the place is gorgeous, the people is warm and they really make you feel at home. Me and Marta were both a bit sad to leave - but we plan to return there as soon as possible, maybe even in summer, even though with the GUADEC 2006 moved at the end of June we’d already have our summer holidays covered. Time will tell.

We’ve done a ton of photos - but the last day’s worth of them (mostly about and from the dome on top of the Reichstag/Bundestag) were eaten by F-Spot; it was an older version of it, and I did the stupidest thing by deleting them from my card too, but F-Spot shouldn’t lie about having done the import and then really having finished just the thumbnailing.

While in Berlin we’ve met for a couple of hours Torsten Schoenfeld, another gtk2-perl hacker - well, he is the gtk2-perl Release Master and the Test Suite God, other than being more than Just Another Perl Hacker; he is a real pleasure to talk with and a great guy. If you ever come to Italy, you’re up for a beer, or more than one.

Now that the winter holidays are really over, let’s get back to work.

The gnome-utils release went fine (even though there’s a typo in the NEWS file I’ve submitted - dang!), and a bunch of bugs have been filed in Bugzilla. Keep them flowing, so I can know what doesn’t work. I’m off to add the window-size-saved-across-session feature that was added to the search tool, and to make the icon in the applet become a toggle button, instead of a plain icon.

Another project I’m working on is the build environment for the Glib Perl module and Glib-based Perl extensions; I began looking at Module::Build while in Berlin, but in the end, I came up with another solution - which will be easier to port to Module::Build later on, when that module enters the standard Perl base distribution. Anyway, I’ll talk about this issue later in a (lengthy) post, so stay tuned.

There are a bunch of fixes due for the libegg/recentchooser code, the main one being the sorting functions duplicated from the RecentManager object into the RecentChooser object; in the end, I’d like to remove all the sorting/filtering stuff from the RecentManager, and let all the UI built upon the RecentChooser interface provide their own sorting/filtering stuff. This would make the RecentManager object a thin layer upon the BookmarkFile object, and would really make things easier to be included into the GTK library. In the end, all the sorting a filtering is something that has to do with the display of the data that the RecentManager holds, so they do not belong into the manager itself. Other than this fix, I’ll begin working on a patch for the BookmarkFile object in order for it to land inside Glib, and a patch for the FileSystem object to use it for its bookmarks.

Leaving

packing again, me and Marta are leaving tomorrow for Berlin. we’ll get back in seven days, with a ton of photos.

Health

As usual, I’ve got a flu at the end of the year.

This really sucks, because due to the slight fever and the cold, I had to cut back hacking time; the re-write of the source dialog in Dictionary has begun but I don’t know if I can finish it up before the next release.

Other things I‘m was working on: new features for the Gnome2::GConf module; fleshing out the GTK2-Perl tutorial; writing the Dictionary manual; updates to the RecentManager/RecentChooser code.

Maybe this Christmas

Only a few minutes into Christmas, and a few hours before the traditional lunch and dinner of this day.

In the last four days I feel like I’ve already eaten more than I usually eat in a month. On Tuesday, me and Marta celebrated her birthday with some friends; on the 22nd - the real date of her birthday - just the two of us went to a japanese restaurant here in Milan, to celebrate by ourselves; on the 23rd we went with my family to a restaurant to celebrate both Marta’s and my father’s birthday. Today, we went to lunch with Marta’s parents. Tomorrow (well, today) we are going to have lunch with Marta’s relatives and dinner with my relatives.

This is our first Christmas together (last year, I had to go around all night with the band, playing christmas carrols from 10pm to 6am), and we are celebrating in our own way: she is finishing the translation of her under-grad thesis in order to send it around and get a PhD abroad and I’m finally committing the last features of the GNOME Dictionary. We’s so two geeks.

Now, Dictionary allows the creation (and the removal) of dictionary sources using a nifty UI (it already worked by dropping the dictionary source .desktop file inside $HOME/.gnome2/gnome-dictionary, but with a UI this becomes a little easier for everyone). The dialog still has rough edges, and I think that the code stands out as a little too messy - especially against the overall cleanliness that I tried to keep in the project. I’ll remove it as soon as I can, and will use a proper class for that dialog; for the time being, I tried on making the magic happen as fast as I could, since we are approaching release time.

The next gnome-utils release is due at January, 2nd; I’ll try and get everything in shape before that day, in order to let people use the new Dictionary application and begin filing bugs. I won’t be around when the next GNOME unstable release will happen; instead, I’ll be in Berlin since January, 3rd till January, 10th, for a week of well due holidays.

[hacking]
[geek+xmas]
[gnome]
[gnome+dictionary]

Birthday

0x19 years.

Presents so far:

• Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton, from Marta (at midnight)
• money, from my parents and relatives (I love it)
• the new Back to the Future pack from my former high-school mates (we still see each other to hang out in week-ends): because we love 1985 as well as 1955 as well as 2017 as well as 1885
• the first season DVD box of The OC - which is a great show, with great scripts, very good actors and a wonderful sound track; and the whole point of the show seems to be that “geek is cool”, which is undoubtely true
• this über-cool Victorinox swiss army knife
• various books

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]

Dictionary Applet

With almost everyone in Boston, both the mailing lists and IRC channels are really quiet; feels a little weird - but I think it’s mostly envy for not being able to go to the other side of the pond and hack away.

Thus, staying here means choosing between 1. cleaning the house with Marta and 2. hacking on the dictionary applet. While the first option would significantly improve my life, the second option is the most tempting. I’ll be a good boy, though, and clean up, now that I finally found to what I’m allergic to (you wouldn’t believe it: absynthe pollen; a potential career as “damned poet” thrown out of the window). Tomorrow I’m going to stay eight hours at the university campus, so I’ll end up working on the dictionary applet anyway…

As a side project, I’ll have to update the desktop bookmarks specification. The new revision should take into account not only the storage format, but the file locations for recently used resources, desktop places and shortcuts; by defining locations and launch behaviour we will be able to create a standard way to access bookmarks to resources on a desktop box. You could access your favourite locations inside your browser, FileChooser dialogs and Nautilus; also, your system administrator could define system-wide locations, in order to access default positions on each machine and on the network - no matter which environment you are using.

Scary Voice Over

Since last tuesday, I’ve done little to nothing on the “hack” side; I’ve began a little project in Perl that should resolve in a backup manager (it’s called Hudson), but mostly I’ve done some code polishing to the libegg/recentchooser code, following the notes about the API review sent me by Matthias Clasen.

During a chat on IRC, he also raised the point of the Windows MRU system, and how to make it work with ours recently used resources list.

So, tonight, with a little help from Christopher Lee, I sent an email with a strategy on the gtk-devel mailing list. I hope to get some feedback from the win32 people.

university: lessons began. I’ve already missed one class (the bus arrived already late, and built up some considerable delay on the way), but stayed until 16 to follow a Network Security class - which began with the teacher requiring us to read and discuss for the next time the six dumbest ideas in computer security - which I did already read beacuse linked on Planet GNOME some time ago.

Yarrr!

    T' me,
    Yo, Ho, Yo, Ho,
    It's "Talk Like A Pirate" Day!
    That time in September when sea dogs remember
    That grown-ups still know how ta play!
    When wenches are curvy and dogs are all scurvy
    And a soft-wear patch covers your eye,
    Ta hell with our jobs, for one day we're all swabs
    And buccaneers all till we die!

    So hoist up the mainsils and shut down your brain cells,
    They only would get in the way,
    Avast there, me hearty, we're havin' a party,
    It's "Talk... Like... A Pirate" Day!

Talk Like a Pirate Day ‘05

Wild life

You can’t say to have done any good deed, unless you saved a week old cat from death.

Check out

I’m back from Amsterdam with a ton of pictures (most of them really ugly: I’m not much of a photographer), that will be uploaded on Flickr, if and when I find the time/bandwidth.

Since my parents first, and my brother next are leaving for their holidays too, me and Marta are going to stay at my parents place for a week or so; unfortunately, here I don’t have a broadband connection but just a 56k one - and that is paaaainfully sloooooow: how on earth did we use it and survive after using it? And mind you me: I’ve used any connection from a 14.4k to a T3 connection, only that now I have a couple of CVS trees to look up and a box to maintain up to date.

Anyway, I’m preparing coffee and chocolate for a long night of downloads - just like when I dist-upgraded my old Potato to Unstable, three years ago.