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• I'm putting in a little time today on my windows branch of jhbuild. Running git now works (using a .bat file to call MSYSgit in its own shell, it's all messy but works fine once it's set up).
  
  
• I spent the past hour or so wondering why ACLOCAL_FLAGS was being ignored. I finally realised that it's not actually honoured by aclocal at all and never has been. autogen.sh scripts tend to execute aclocal $ACLOCAL_FLAGS which make it work often enough that I assumed it was meant to.
  
  Now I wonder whether autoreconf would accept a patch to make it honour $ACLOCAL_FLAGS, or if I should patch Pixman's autogen.sh to call autoreconf $ACLOCAL_FLAGS .. and any others that don't ..
  
  
• Highlights of Glastonbury were definitely Blur, and a more obscure band called Edward II who I last saw aged about 12.
  
  Best wishes for everyone in Gran Canaria!

I had to opt out of GUADEC due to personal reasons. But there are three guys from evolution team Srini (board director ), Akhil and Bharath right now at Gran canaria . You can catch them for any evolution queries

Akhil should love meeting Ara and Eitan and discuss ldtp stuffs!

gzip · bzip2

AbiWord had a long lasting usability issue: pressing the insert key caused to toggle the overwrite mode on and off. When doing so we provided two different feedback to the user:

• a display in the status that switch from "INS" to "OVR"
• the caret (insert point) switch to red.

This lead to different kind of complaints:

• "When I type, the text to the right is replaced"
• "Why is the insert point red? What did I do?"

See bug 3641

This reveal two problems. The first one is that the user didn't realise something happened. I hit a random key (ie he didn't realise which one) and something happened. The second the user noticed the caret changed colour, but still didn't know why.

I had a few ideas in mind.

• Change the feedback, and there are a few options for that: change the caret shape (colour is never enough), change the status bar message, any other kind of notification
• Do something for the key binding: popup a dialog, use clippy, play a music just make it disabled by default.

How I did implement it:

• For now I changed the status bar message to be more readable. INS and OVR are just confusing obscure and an anachronism inherited from the AbiWord first step over 11 years ago mostly in trying to clone MS-Word with some of its atrocities. Now it is in plain $LANG (English here, but it is / will be localised, I hope).
• I added a UI to enable the toggle. We had that option already in place, it was just on by default, not bound to any UI. I'm not a big fan of adding options, but that's just the best way to do it for now.

What can be done in the future?

• Change the caret shape when in overwrite mode. I didn't want to do it that late in the release cycle has it seems to have been source of problems. Also it need to be well thought too as we also deal with bi-directional writing.

But that was a real paper cut for AbiWord. Not the only one, just one of them, and it was not that hard to fix. For the sake of it, I did it watching the BSG mini-series for the 3rd time.

I know it’s a bit late, but I hope this helps.

I’m from Gran Canaria, the place where the event is going to be, so I like to give you some advices and recommendations:

• Sun protection. Here the sun can burn you if you don’t take some protections. Some times seems like it’s not so sunny, but it could be dangerous if you are from a northern area.
• Don’t drink top water. The top water here is supposed to be good enough for human consumption, but the true is that nobody here drink it. We always drink mineral water. And also here was a incident a few month ago about top water’s high levels of boron. That now is normal, but you know…
• Here there is not so many place with vegetarian food but we try to find all kind places for eat nearby the event. You’ll find that info (which will be updated) at the wiki.
• The important phone numbers are also at the wiki. Remember the international code for Spain is +34
• In Gran Canaria (Spain), electricity is provided normally at a voltage of 220 V and 50 Hz. But you’ll probably find adapters at the mall (Centro comercial Las Arenas) just in front the event’s place.
• Here in Gran Canaria we talk Spanish, so you can find useful the list of common words and expressions we have at the wiki. If you already know Spanish, you need have in mind that here we have some different words (eg. Autobus = Guagua).
• The most useful lines of guaguas (buses) for going from or at the auditorium are the lines 47 and 17.
• Taxi is also a good option. Probably you’ll pay 4 € for a normal ride (from the Auditorium to the farthest hotels.
• There will be a infodesk where you’ll find people who can bring you some help. The contact person will be Fabio, but there will be more people there.
• I will be also around there during the weekend, I can’t be sure about the rest of the week. Anyways, if you need touristic/local information or just any info of Canarias or Gran Canaria, find me (Juanje Ojeda) and ask me
• If you have a group of people who want place for lunch of dinner, ask for me at the infodesk, I’ve been talking with some places to try to arrange this king of things.

I just like to add that Gran Canaria is much more than beaches and sun. So try to get into the countryside or to different part of the island. They are so different between them hat people usually get surprised.

I’ll highly recommend to visit Teror, Tejeda, Agaete, Artenara (and the Tamadaba pine forest), Mogán, Agüimes, Santa Lucía and, of course Maspalomas. There are more interesting places, but with those you’ll get the idea

Well, we’ll meet you at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

GUADEC is starting tomorrow, but the GNOME Foundation was busy today with a all-day board meeting. With the election results now being official, we were able to welcome Germán and Srini.

Still, the meeting wasn't easy for everybody.

Still, you can be sure that the board is working hard for the Foundation to make sure that the GNOME project will succeed!

Arrived at the hotel/summit. Going to head to the venue with a couple of folks soon.

And a small screencast for the day. Testing out the new blur-cache meant for notify-osd:

Quite some stuff has been going on in Zeitgeist since UDS, including the addition of two new developers to our team: Mikkel Kamstrup and Markus Korn, who both have been doing awesome work!

As planned, we split the project into the engine (Zeitgeist) and the default graphical user interface (GNOME Activity Journal), but during this time we also dropped our old database to start with a completely new structure which is way more flexible and uses less disk space than our previous one.

Not so positively, some team members wanted to try out an ORM (Storm), which from the start one I thought was a bad idea (it’s not that I can’t see the convenience for using one in certain projects, but for Zeitgeist, an engine mainly constituted by a little set of rather complex queries, I don’t really see how it can help us). Doing this -at the same time as the switch the the new database model- ended up as a pretty demotivating experience, and while we got it working at the end the result was an engine which worked slow (even with caching) and used lots of resources, so we’ve decided to go back to plain SQL.

Right now we still have a mix (we’ll probably finish quicking out the remaining Storm parts within the next weeks), but I already changed the main information request methods to SQL, thus reducing common operations from requiring up to thousands of queries to doing only a single one, doubling the speed while reducing memory usage. I hope to get further performance improvements while converting the remaining parts (for example, inserting data currently takes way more time than I’d like).

We also cleaned up the D-Bus API (it was pretty much of a mess before, just enough for the GUI to work) and added more functionality to it. However, it may still undergo substantial changes in future versions once we start making more use of the added flexibility the new database gives us (for example, for the 0.2 release we’ll probably split up tags into “user defined tags” and “automatically assigned tags”). Unrelated to this, Markus has started working at making it possible to configure and enable/disable loggers, so there’s also some cool stuff coming from this front (but nothing visible yet).

Just some random notes… You can read more about Zeitgeist at Seif’s blog, in his recent blog post “Some Zeitgeist news“, and if you have any comment you can come find us in #gnome-zeitgeist on GIMPnet . I’m now going back to work: after all, today we’re going to release Zeitgeist 0.1 (development preview)!

Related posts:

1. I’m in Google Summer of Code!
2. UDS 2009

© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | No comments | Add to del.icio.us | Post tags: gnome, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, Ubuntu, zeitgeist

I’ve arrived yesterday to Gran Canaria for the Desktop Summit, awesome weather, specially for someone like me who is coming from a pretty cold winter at Santiago de Chile. I’m pretty happy to see a few of my good Gnome friends here and I’m really looking forward for the conference to start.

Also remember to put your info at http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2009/Rooms

The purge is complete

As of a week ago or so, HAL is no longer required by either NetworkManager or ModemManager.  This helps streamline the hardware detection process and cleans up that code a lot.  It was a fun ride and a lot of other great stuff came along with the udev port, because rewriting everything to use udev pretty much required cleaning up a bunch of other stuff.  The udev parts were a lot easier than I thought they would be; what was complex was rewriting a ton of ModemManager to be more flexible and work better with multi-port modems on the one hand, and really stupid quirky hardware on the other.

For everyone in the US, have wonderful 4th of July.  To everyone who’s not, have fun at the Desktop Summit.  Had prior plans meaning I couldn’t attend, but I’m sure the Red Hat team will honor my absence by spreading the love and drinking all the liquor.  Rock on, GNOME.

This morning I committed a rather largish (23 files changed, 28 insertions, 1551 deletions) patch:

This means that gnome power manager in git master no longer needs HAL to compile or run. This is a quite a significant moment, as now it relies just on the thriving DeviceKit* stack, rather than the old lumbering HAL.

Just a word of warning: You’ll need DeviceKit-power 009 (released in a few days time) if you want to use g-p-m in git master without loosing your ability to change your backlight, or to set the lid action preferences. It’ll still compile with 008, but 009 is very much recommended.

• Arrived last night at Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This city looks a lot like Salvador, my home city!
• Dinner with Stormy, Jonathan, Zana, and Vincent at a nice Spanish (duh!) restaurant. I ate so much that I’m still feeling stuffed today!
• Foundation Board meeting during the whole day today.

• As all the other cool kids in town, I'm flying to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, to attend the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. In practical terms, this means GUADEC, GUADEC Hispana, Akademy, and, eventually, other conferences/activities that might be arranged during the big event.

  Partly because of laziness, partly because of having really busy weeks lately (both work and life-wise), I won't be presenting anything during GUADEC Hispana, although I would have liked to. However, Berto and I will be giving a talk on the new Hildon toolkit for Maemo 5, during the Mobile Day. Besides introducing the new widgets and UI style for Fremantle, we will also talk about the difficulties we have been facing during this major revamp of the toolkit, which will hopefully serve to clarify some of the doubts spread around lately.

I had submitted a talk for the GUADEC which was accepted. However, in light of this blog entry, my decidedly infrequent contributions to GNOME and, an inability to travel using my own finances, I decided that there was no glory in asking for travel+lodging assistance. So, once again, I am not going to be at GUADEC ! Some day I will make it though.

One of the reasons that GCDS was interesting for me was the chance to talk about localization in terms of improving the context of the localization-ready content. During translations, one often encounters sentence construction which does not have context and, providing a means to overcome the issue in a gradual manner would make for much nicer localized UIs. Additionally, learning about improvements to the GNOME L10n infrastructure was a secondary goal. The ulterior motive was also to know about the project’s plans to outreach to groups of students beyond the obvious GSoC and, how to use the project’s knowledge to teach open source.

Meanwhile, let me go back to doing some more translations. They seem to be improving my vocabulary by leaps and bounds. Although, my reviewer says that my spelling is atrocious

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