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Had a million conversations (well maybe not that many), followed threads and kept up (mostly) with email. Too many different things going on for a short week.

Organized a GNOME Roadmap discussion.

Discussed copyright policy with team putting it together and adboard member with feedback.

Discussed having a GNOME Mobile event at LinuxTag through WIPJam.

Talked to Zonker about GNOME 3 press roadmap.

Had some interchanges about GUADEC sponsors, logos, etc. I think all agreements are worked out except one now.

Set up some meetings at LinuxTag.

Met 1:1 with Brian and Rosanna (separately).

Next week:

• Get out board approved proposal for using the Nokia money for GNOME Mobile.
• Put together presentation for LinuxTag.
• Attend LinuxTag.
• Write opening letter for annual report.

Related posts:

1. Stormy’s Update: Week of April 19, 2010
2. Stormy’s Update: Week of March 22nd
3. Stormy’s Update: Week of April 26, 2010

News · ChangeLog · gzip · bzip2

• Mini lie-in; off to NCC, ran the creche. Home for lunch, with John Madden. Babes played together happy to be re-united. Out to a party with N. Back, prepped the house for a movie and watched "Up" with Lydia, John, Martin, DT, Zoe & Patrick - which was great. Bed lateish.

I have been a Palm fan for a very long time. My first PDA was a PalmPilot Professional, which eventually led to the m100 (AA batteries!), my first Palm OS phone, Pia’s hand-me-down Tungsten W, the Treo 650 and finally, my last (real) phone: the Treo 680. I’m even vaguely sad that I missed the final outing of Palm OS on the Centro.

I was disappointed when Palm split into two companies, but perhaps it was ultimately a good thing… PalmSource became victim to an almighty corporate Sarlacc, to be digested slowly over a thousand years, while Palm became nimble and determined to win out of necessity.

The ill-fated Foleo was a public relations disaster, but in retrospect, a concept way ahead of its time — consider the explosion of the netbook market soon after, and where the iPad is today (albeit generations of mobile technology beyond the capabilities of the Foleo).

Which brings us to webOS, released a year ago today on the Palm Pre. Having waited impatiently all that time (often running to the emulator to get my fix), I finally acquired one last week.

It is a truly delicious user experience. I won’t go into too much detail on this front — as with most things, you must use it — suffice to say that it carries the soul of Palm OS in a 21st century vessel.

(Okay, one thing on this: When it comes to the basic functions of a smart phone — calls, and contacts — I’m convinced this thing has both the iPhone and HTC’s Sense UI for the Desire beat. Synergy is seamless and awesome.)

Despite it’s youth, webOS is an incredibly promising and fast-moving platform… and in stark contrast to other “mobile Linux” competitors, it’s not just a bunch of goofy shit piled on top of a heavily molested Linux kernel: What runs on your phone is an utterly recognisable Open Source stack and an utterly recognisable web stack. Sure, there’s a layer of proprietary Java gumpf shoved between the good bits, but even that is getting thinner.

To some extent, webOS is the GNOME Mobile platform with a user interface and services layer built for the web generation. It’s D-Bus, GStreamer and PulseAudio under WebKit. Mojo applications, written in JavaScript, talk to services via JSON APIs, and native apps integrate into the web-based user interface via — get this! — NPAPI plugins.

Crucially, webOS will grow and improve along with the web. Everything you’re seeing in the web world — faster JavaScript, hardware accelerated CSS animation, massive growth of the JavaScript ecosystem (consider all the frameworks, CommonJS modules, nodejs event-based server, etc.) and all the incredible new APIs popping up — will find a place in webOS. Check out the Palm Developer Day keynote and podcast from Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith for more on the near future of webOS.

On the awesomeness of Dion and Ben at Palm? I’ll just quote James Governor:

Palm tried to use Apple’s trick of secrecy first rather than investing heavily in developer good will and playing the open card. It didn’t work. Palm realised its error last year and did something incredibly smart – it hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith to develop a new, web-savvy, strategy around its platform.

Using open technology as the bricks and mortar of a platform is not particularly amazing of course. Everyone’s doing it. But Palm are making friends and influencing developers by having an impressively open attitude to devices, too. Your store-bought phone — with a bit of Konami code action and the freely downloadable webOS SDK — is already “rooted” for you. Just log in. ps afx? cat /proc/cpuinfo? top? Your “first command” habit is most likely catered for.

That openness has encouraged an incredible amount of community activity. The most Open Source savvy group dedicated to the platform is WebOS Internals. Initially, they published all sorts of juicy information about the innards of webOS and the Pre… but have now rallied around distribution of “home brew” Open Source patches and apps, using their own package management interface, Preware. They’ve even published an updated kernel which supports overclocking, temperature sensors and more advanced power management than the original! It’s wonderful stuff.

Then HP bought Palm.

Despite some messaging hiccoughs (now resolved), this is an incredibly exciting move for Palm and webOS fans. I’m hoping it gives Palm the reach, resources and relationships to go global, accelerate improvement of the platform, and ship some terrific new hardware to make their software shine… that said, it better not be an almighty corporate Sarlacc!

Damn it feels good to be a Palmster.

Ray Strode and I recently got the Sprint HTC Evo 4G smartphone this Friday and we just tried out tethering with Fedora 13 today. Thanks to NetworkManager kicking serious booty, it was amazingly easy. Watch and learn in our video.

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The packaging continued - I found a Gentoo overlay that has buzztard packages, as well as packages for Arch Linux. The later brought up some issues as arch Linux uses --as-needed when linking. An article in the Gentoo documentation suggests that its not a good idea to use this by default. To cut the long story short - normally (without that option) the order of libraries in the linker invocation did not really matter. When using --as-needed only libraries that are actually used are linked in. To make that work one has to put needed libraries behind libraries that need them. If you want to try this on your own software: LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed" ./autoregen.sh

The Debian packages that have been made recently are nice too. All packages undergo various checks, among a spell-checker of strings in binaries.

As planned I worked a bit more on undo/redo. I have it now implemented and in use for some case in the pattern editor. I also added unit tests to verify the stack logic.

I also managed to finished some work I had started at the Linux Audio Conference - copy and paste of machine parameters between patterns and the machine property window.

54 files changed, 2174 insertions(+), 699 deletions(-)

When I was 17 or18 years old, I wanted to be a DJ with a friend of mine. I grabbed all of my parents vinyl records, trucked them over to my friend’s house and then… we didn’t do anything. He and I eventually had a falling out and a couple years later when I inquired about getting the records back, I was dismayed to learn that his basement had flooded and they were trashed.

I don’t think my father has forgiven me to this day.

I grew up heavily influenced by music, including my parents listening to their records and favorite artists such as ABBA, Billy Joel and Elton John. I remember periods of my life based on the music I was listening to at the time and if I hear a specific song it can take me back right to that moment.

I’ve been thinking about buying a turntable for the last few years and re-creating some of those memories. I participated in Record Store Day last year shopping at a local store and picking up a number of CDs and this year on Record Store Day I went out and this time picked up some used and new vinyl records and then bought a turntable off Craigslist. (An early 80s Pioneer direct-drive).

I’m one of growing number of people getting back into vinyl – just visit The Future of Vinyl blog for non-stop media coverage of the growth of vinyl over the last couple years – it’s now the fastest growing segment of the (dying) music industry. Even large retailers like Best Buy are getting in on it. (Though I found their selection disappointing – very few new records, just 180g re-issues of older material, and for the same prices as the local stores, who I would rather support).

I own more CDs than I can count, and even if it’s in my head, I do think vinyl sounds better. There is something to be said for the crackle and hiss of a well worn and loved album playing on a stereo.

I don’t know what’s more fun – listening to the albums or shopping for them. I’ve already bought over 60 records in the last 6 weeks, the bulk of them at two events. The first was a private collector who put an ad in Craigslist and was selling over 5000 records with most of them going for 3 for a dollar. The second sale was today at the Minnesota Record Show which is held four times a year and features a number of dealers selling records for a few bucks each to rare albums worth hundreds of dollars. On average at an event like this or in the local record stores, used albums are about $3 each. I have bought a few re-issues on 180 gram vinyl of some of my favorite albums of all time, such as Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. (Most albums are 120 grams – the thicker the album the higher the fidelity).

But what impresses me the most is the resurgence in current artists releasing vinyl day and date with CD – and including MP3 or FLAC downloads for free when you purchase the vinyl record. I’ve picked up some great new albums, including the latest from The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers and Broken Bells.

My wife laughs at me every time I say “I’m going downstairs to listen to some records” but I’m enjoying the experience immensely. She also says I’m done collecting for a while, but don’t tell her, I have my eyes on some more new releases and I heard about another upcoming show…

When I was 17 or18 years old, I wanted to be a DJ with a friend of mine. I grabbed all of my parents vinyl records, trucked them over to my friend’s house and then… we didn’t do anything. He and I eventually had a falling out and a couple years later when I inquired about getting the records back, I was dismayed to learn that his basement had flooded and they were trashed.

I don’t think my father has forgiven me to this day.

I grew up heavily influenced by music, including my parents listening to their records and favorite artists such as ABBA, Billy Joel and Elton John. I remember periods of my life based on the music I was listening to at the time and if I hear a specific song it can take me back right to that moment.

I’ve been thinking about buying a turntable for the last few years and re-creating some of those memories. I participated in Record Store Day last year shopping at a local store and picking up a number of CDs and this year on Record Store Day I went out and this time picked up some used and new vinyl records and then bought a turntable off Craigslist. (An early 80s Pioneer direct-drive).

I’m one of growing number of people getting back into vinyl – just visit The Future of Vinyl blog for non-stop media coverage of the growth of vinyl over the last couple years – it’s now the fastest growing segment of the (dying) music industry. Even large retailers like Best Buy are getting in on it. (Though I found their selection disappointing – very few new records, just 180g re-issues of older material, and for the same prices as the local stores, who I would rather support).

I own more CDs than I can count, and even if it’s in my head, I do think vinyl sounds better. There is something to be said for the crackle and hiss of a well worn and loved album playing on a stereo.

I don’t know what’s more fun – listening to the albums or shopping for them. I’ve already bought over 60 records in the last 6 weeks, the bulk of them at two events. The first was a private collector who put an ad in Craigslist and was selling over 5000 records with most of them going for 3 for a dollar. The second sale was today at the Minnesota Record Show which is held four times a year and features a number of dealers selling records for a few bucks each to rare albums worth hundreds of dollars. On average at an event like this or in the local record stores, used albums are about $3 each. I have bought a few re-issues on 180 gram vinyl of some of my favorite albums of all time, such as Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. (Most albums are 120 grams – the thicker the album the higher the fidelity).

But what impresses me the most is the resurgence in current artists releasing vinyl day and date with CD – and including MP3 or FLAC downloads for free when you purchase the vinyl record. I’ve picked up some great new albums, including the latest from The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers and Broken Bells.

My wife laughs at me every time I say “I’m going downstairs to listen to some records” but I’m enjoying the experience immensely. She also says I’m done collecting for a while, but don’t tell her, I have my eyes on some more new releases and I heard about another upcoming show…

Second week of the (rather hot and sweaty) Summer of Code is over! And during this week....

1. Replicated most of the UI of Cheese
2. Learnt how to make C and Vala code co-exist (Thanks folks at #vala!)
3. Made the thumbnail widget work, in both modes/orientations
4. Implemented fullscreen mode, with autohiding of the action buttons
5. Started modifying parts of libcheese to support clutter for video output

In last week's report, I mentioned that I didn't quite like my pace of work. I still don't like it - Hamster reports I've spent 15.2 hours since Monday on Cheese, which is just about 3 hours a day! Totally unacceptable, and I'd like to increase that number considerably.

Last week's predictions were for libcheese integration, UI replication and Thumbnail view implementation. I've finished the last two, and have made a start on the first. Needs improvement.

By next week, I hope to have accomplished...

1. Working video preview showing up!
2. Photo taking works
3. Video taking works
4. Burst mode works

Basically, it would be usable. In a basic way.

And what did I learn this week?

1. Don't try to be too clever. Clear Code > Lesser LoC.
2. Ask first. Verify assumptions.
3. Just because something can be rewritten, does not mean it should be :)

On an unrelated note, my sleep cycle is totally messed up - I've been sleeping at 6 AM and waking up at 2 PM. Sunlight feels weird to me. I haven't been able to do my biweekly bicycle rides :( I should also try to fix that before the end of next week.

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• Up early, with a pair of small invading the bedroom, and helpfully patting me etc. no doubt questing for the missing Mother. Breakfast.
• Read the note I should have read yesterday, and discovered another set of good things for picnics prepared in the fridge. Spent a considerable time attaching a new baby-seat to my bike, in conjunction with the trailer-bike.
• Cycled off into town by back roads for some play-ground goodness, E. apparently much pleased with her new cycling experience. Picnic, play, ice-lolly, back home.
• E. to bed, M. watching CBeebies videos on the BBC; and demanding 'milk warmed up', and complaining of the service. Fair sentiment, unhelpful articulation. Cleared and cleaned up frenetically for J's return, tea, packed everyone to bed.
• J. returned, Jacket Potatoe dinner appeared to work for everyone, packaged H. & N. off to bed quickly; B. & A. left, bed exhausted.

The story of my work on the message tray this week can be summed up in two words - "more pictures." I've been trying to replicate the music player mockup we have by getting the previous and next icons into the notifications and getting the album art into the background. This has resulted in two branches I'm working on at the moment. One is my attempt to add an optional background image to notifications in general. This has been (and continues to be) a lesson in the shell toolkit of widgets. I'm still not entirely sure how they all work together, and some of them have unexpected interactions (or lack thereof). My other branch, which is doing its job nicely, implements icon buttons as part of normal libnotify notifications. Without asking applications to add more info to notifications, I made the code that haddles the actions sent in the notification check to see if the action key corresponds to a stock icon, if it does, icon button! This means I've patched my copy of rhythmbox to send the next action as 'media-playback-next' or something like that, but I hope that is an easy and relatively non-invasive way to make the notifications more interesting with minimal effort.

While trying to implement things for the message tray, it's been interesting seeing how the pro designers think about it. At first it was a bit frustrating when marina was insisting on sticking to the notification spec and not jumping right into writing mini dbus applications for every program, but I think I'm starting to realize the value of all that. She also has the uncanny ability to pop up in IRC when I least expect her.

This past week, while I have gotten some things working, I've made quite a mess of some code, and still need to polish things off. I don't tend to have lots of time right now because classes are still in full swing for me, so these weekends are my best work time.

In the coming week, I'd love to see the status icons moving down to the message tray, once I've finished these bits up. I feel like that's an important part in seeing how this all will fit together, but the project is still pretty fluid, as people who follow development will know, and we'll see where those up top think I'm best put to use in the coming week.