Tasks 0.18 (and 0.17)

Whilst Tasks isn't exactly under active development, I'm still maintaining it because I actually use it (unlike certain other projects, ahem). So, Tasks 0.18 is released.

Tarballs and more information as usual are available at the Pimlico Project web site.

In related news, we're slowly migrating over to the GNOME infrastructure. We've migrated the source code, next up is the tarballs and bugzilla.

20:00 Monday, 12 Jul 2010 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

Gypsy 0.8 Released

As acting release engineer of the Gypsy project (a GPS mux, if you didn't know) I'm proud to announce the release of Gypsy 0.8. So, what's new?

Many thanks to Jussi Kukkonen for patch review, and Bastien Nocera for patch review and new features.

The big question of course is what of the future? So far we've got some rough ideas. An overhaul of the device interaction layer is definitely required as actaully getting NMEA is becoming more complex: for integrated 3G/GPS chips you need to talk to oFono/ModemManager to get a socket, for some embedded GPS devices you need a proprietary binary that writes to a pipe, and so on. There are some new features we're considering too: server-side proximity detection and update rate limiting.

17:05 Wednesday, 09 Jun 2010 [#] [computers] (6 comments)

Sound Juicer "I Got Nobody On My Side And Surely That Ain't Right" 2.28.1

Sound Juicer "I Got Nobody On My Side And Surely That Ain't Right" 2.28.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Props to Bastien for doing most of the work here.

Bastien originally called this release Not the maintainer, lalala, plug ears but we all know he is, right?

15:43 Wednesday, 25 Nov 2009 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (8 comments)

New Maintainer for Postr!

After months of neglect by myself, Postr has a new maintainer! Step forward Germán Póo-Caamaño, everyone's favourite Chilean, who has been hard at work migrating to git.gnome.org, merging patches and fixing bugs (the Upload button works!), and creating a new project page.

Now all I need is for someone to adopt Sound Juicer...

10:49 Thursday, 12 Nov 2009 [#] [computers/postr] (7 comments)

Sound Juicer "And It Ain't Even 9 In The Morning, Sorry I'm Late" 2.28.0

Sound Juicer "And It Ain't Even 9 In The Morning, Sorry I'm Late" 2.28.0 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Very little in the 2.27 cycle...

Did I mention that SJ could really do with a dedicated (co)maintainer?

20:54 Tuesday, 22 Sep 2009 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (4 comments)

Facebook in ¡Mojito!

Thanks to those nice people at Novell, Mojito (everyone's favourite social aggregator, as used in Moblin) now has Facebook support. We now support Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, MySpace and Twitter — any requests for the next service?

NP: Cold Water Music, AiM

10:04 Monday, 14 Sep 2009 [#] [computers] (44 comments)

ORBit--; DBus++

Today I finally merged the dbus-hybrid branch of Evolution Data Server into master, which ported the addressbook part of EDS to use DBus instead of Bonobo. There are bound to be some bugs in this so if you are running EDS from master and find a bug, please file it in GNOME Bugzilla.

Now to finish reviewing the calendar port and merge that too...

NP: Session 2 - The Herbaliser Band

20:47 Monday, 17 Aug 2009 [#] [computers] (3 comments)

Gypsy 0.7

Earlier in the week someone pointed out over email that considering the entire geolocalisation thing is starting to come together, it's not great that Gypsy (the modern GPS daemon for the modern desktop) appears dead. Well, it's not quite dead, and to prove it I fixed the bugs that were stopping me from uploading it into Debian. Specifically, the hard requirement to run it as root and the lack of DBus auto-starting (to be fair, when it was written this wasn't supported on the system bus). These are now fixed at last and Gypsy 0.7 is available to download from freedesktop.org.

Packages for Debian are in the upload queue now, and I believe everyones favourite frockney is working on updating Fedora now.

NP: Oneric, Boxcutter

15:52 Thursday, 06 Aug 2009 [#] [computers] (7 comments)

OAuth 1.0a in librest

Because the world is rapidly moving to OAuth 1.0a exclusively after a rather painful attack was discovered against 1.0, I've recently been updating our bling HTTP/REST/XML IPC library librest to support it. In particular Twitter only supports 1.0a, and Fire Eagle shows the user a very scary message unless 1.0a is used. Now that the code is finished I thought I'd give a example of the new API when used with Twitter. 

#include <rest/oauth-proxy.h>

Including the OAuthProxy headers is a good start. 

int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  GError *error = NULL;
  RestProxy *proxy;

  g_thread_init (NULL);
  g_type_init ();

  proxy = oauth_proxy_new ("UfXFxDbUjk41scg0kmkFwA",
                           "pYQlfI2ZQ1zVK0f01dnfhFTWzizBGDnhNJIw6xwto",
                           "https://twitter.com/", FALSE);

First, initalise the GLib threading and type system. Threading is required by libsoup at the moment because it will use threads to lookup names in the background, I imagine this requirement will disappear with the next GLib release.

Next, an OAuthProxy is created. The two strings of garbage are our OAuth Consumer Key and Consumer Secret, then the URL endpoint to access and FALSE to say that this URL is complete and doesn't require expansion. Yes, that was Consumer Secret. Not very secret, is it. 

  if (!oauth_proxy_request_token (OAUTH_PROXY (proxy), "oauth/request_token", "oob", &error))
    g_error ("Cannot get request token: %s", error->message);

Here we ask for a Request Token. The function to call is oauth/request_token, and because this is a basic test application which doesn't support URI callbacks we're setting the callback URI to oob (out-of-band). It is the callback URI argument that tells the server that we're using OAuth 1.0a, in 1.0 this parameter (oauth_callback at the HTTP leve) doesn't exist.

The callback is used to pass from the server to the client a verifier which is then required to obtain the Access Token. In the case of Twitter, this is a seven digit number. If a URI was specified then it would be invoked with the verifier as a query argument, but because we're getting it out-of-band Twitter will show it to the user and ask them to enter it into the application. 

  g_print ("Go to http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=%s then enter the PIN\n",
           oauth_proxy_get_token (OAUTH_PROXY (proxy)));
  fgets (pin, sizeof (pin), stdin);
  g_strchomp (pin);

Here we tell the user to go to the authorisation URL (to which we add the request token we have so far), and then enter the PIN that Twitter gives them. 

  if (!oauth_proxy_access_token (OAUTH_PROXY (proxy), "oauth/access_token", pin, &error))
    g_error ("Cannot get access token: %s", error->message);

Now we ask for an Accesss Token. The function to call is oauth/access_token, and we're passing the PIN the user entered as the validator. If we were using OAuth 1.0 then the validator would be NULL.

If this method succeeds then we have an Access Token, and are authenticated. To avoid the authentication dance the Access Token and Token Secret should be saved somewhere secure (gnome-keyring would be a good idea) for future use. 

  RestProxyCall *call;
  call = rest_proxy_new_call (proxy);
  rest_proxy_call_set_function (call, "statuses/update.xml");
  rest_proxy_call_set_method (call, "POST");
  rest_proxy_call_add_param (call, "status", "Hello from librest!");
  if (!rest_proxy_call_sync (call, &error))
    g_error ("Cannot make call: %s", error->message);
  return 0;
}

First a Call object is created, which encapsulates all of the data required to make a REST call. The function is set to status/update.xml, the HTTP method set to POST (the default is, logically, GET), and a status message is set as a parameter. We make a synchronous call, and we're done. The bonus of using OAuth to authorise with Twitter is that you get the nice "from whatever" annotations on the tweets, to promote your application.

The full source of this example is available in git, along with other examples for Flickr and Fire Eagle. If you want to understand the differences between OAuth 1.0 and 1.0a but don't fancy reading both specifications in full, I can heartily endorse An Idiots Guide To OAuth 1.0a.

NP: Simple Things, Zero 7

11:34 Tuesday, 04 Aug 2009 [#] [computers] (0 comments)

GList Anti-patterns

g_list_length(children);
for (int i = 0; i < (int)num; i++) {
  GList * child = g_list_nth(children, num - i - 1);

FAIL 

if (g_list_length(nb_pages) != 0) {

FAIL 

for( i=0; i < g_list_length( GTK_CLIST(clist)->selection; i++ ){
  gint row = (gint)g_list_nth_data( GTK_CLIST(clist)->selection, i);

TURBOFAIL

16:11 Thursday, 16 Jul 2009 [#] [computers] (10 comments)

Tasks 0.16

Some stability fixes, translation updates, and small new features in Tasks 0.16.

As usual, download from the Pimlico Project.

08:27 Monday, 13 Jul 2009 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

Myzone on Eee Keyboard

Asus had previously announced the Eee Keyboard, which isn't a keyboard but more a netbook with a full sized keyboard and wireless HDMI. The end result being that this is the ideal companion to your huge 1080p LCD television in the front room for light browsing and so on.

Now the Eee Keyboard also has a small touchscreen by the side of the keyboard, which had generally been shown displaing a calendar and the time. Fairly useful but nothing that interesting. However, they have recently demonstrated Moblin 2 running on the Eee, including the Myzone social desktop update thingy.

Myzone on Eee Keyboard

Now this is pretty neat. I don't know how the touchscreen is related to the main display, but a custom Moblin 2 panel and Myzone tailored to fill the touchscreen would be really cool. Now, where can I get an Eee Keyboard from...

NP: Arecibo Message, Boxcutter

18:00 Monday, 15 Jun 2009 [#] [computers] (2 comments)

Emacs Command of the Weekday

When Thomas talks about "us all" learning a new Vim command, he meant "us heretics". We pure and just people on the path of truth are far more interested in ecotd, Emacs Command of the Day, by our very own Neil.

Okay, I admit at times it looks like a parody, but honestly it isn't!

16:00 Thursday, 23 Apr 2009 [#] [computers] (3 comments)

Sound Juicer "Bonnie and Clyde" 2.26.1

Sound Juicer "Bonnie and Clyde" 2.26.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Some crashes have been fixes:

Finally, a call for someone with deep LAME knowledge. The GStreamer LAME element is, well, lame because it sets a number of properties to default values that make it very difficult for LAME to work well. Someone who understands how all of the LAME settings operate needs to sit down, vet the settings and remove the pointless ones, unset most of the rest, leaving the 'preset' setting as the only one which has a default value. At the moment there are many contradictory default settings which mean LAME produces rather badly encoded files. Any takers?

11:04 Friday, 10 Apr 2009 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (10 comments)

Tasks 0.15

Just a small few fixes, translation updates, and little features in Tasks 0.15.

As usual, download from the Pimlico Project.

12:00 Monday, 30 Mar 2009 [#] [computers] (0 comments)

Sound Juicer "Don't Go Back To Dalston" 2.26.0

Sound Juicer "Don't Go Back To Dalston" 2.26.0 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Only translation updates this time, sorry.

15:55 Tuesday, 17 Mar 2009 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (3 comments)

Sound Juicer "I Call Out To You And You Don't Save Me?" 2.25.3

Sound Juicer "I Call Out To You And You Don't Save Me?" 2.25.3 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. I actually did some coding this time!

16:48 Friday, 13 Feb 2009 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (3 comments)

Sound Juicer "I Should Be Crying, But I Just Can't Let It Show" 2.25.2

Sound Juicer "I Should Be Crying, But I Just Can't Let It Show" 2.25.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

13:22 Tuesday, 03 Feb 2009 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (4 comments)

3G Woes

Has anyone out there used a recent Nokia phone (E65 to be precise) as a modem with Network Manager 0.7? I can't seem to get the magic right, and get one of two failures: 

NetworkManager: <info>  (ttyACM0): powering up... 
NetworkManager: <info>  Registered on Home network 
an 15 10:50:04 blackadder NetworkManager: <info>  Associated with network: +COPS: 0,2,"23415" 
  NetworkManager: <WARN>  dial_done(): Dialing timed out </WARN>

Or: 

NetworkManager: <info>  Activation (ttyACM0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) complete. 
NetworkManager: <info>  (ttyACM0): powering up... 
NetworkManager: <info>  Registered on Home network 
NetworkManager: <info>  Associated with network: +COPS: 0,2,"23415" 
NetworkManager: <info>  Connected, Woo! 
NetworkManager: <info>  Activation (ttyACM0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) scheduled..
. 
NetworkManager: <info>  Activation (ttyACM0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) starting...
 
NetworkManager: <info>  (ttyACM0): device state change: 4 -> 5 
NetworkManager: <info>  Starting pppd connection 
NetworkManager: <debug> [1232015456.962700] nm_ppp_manager_start(): Command line: /usr/s
bin/pppd nodetach lock nodefaultroute user web ttyACM0 noipdefault usepeerdns lcp-echo-failure 0 lcp-echo-interval 
0 ipparam /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/PPP/4 plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.4/nm-pppd-plugin.so 
NetworkManager: <debug> [1232015456.964964] nm_ppp_manager_start(): ppp started with pid
 29590 
NetworkManager: <info>  Activation (ttyACM0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) complete. 
pppd[29590]: Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.4/nm-pppd-plugin.so loaded.
pppd[29590]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
NetworkManager: <WARN>  pppd_timed_out(): Looks like pppd didn't initialize our dbus mod
ule

Anyone know what the problem could be?

11:15 Thursday, 15 Jan 2009 [#] [computers] (7 comments)

GUPnP Repositories

Zeeshan created a clone of the GUPnP repository at Gitorious today, so to any contributors to GUPnP: feel free to clone the repository there so that we can all benefit from a distributed version control system being used as it should be.

NP: Rendez-Vous (Mexico), Erik Truffaz featuring Murcof

17:45 Tuesday, 13 Jan 2009 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

Postr 0.12.3

A small point release to fix some small bugs before it's 2009...

The tarball is here, and Debian packages are building now.

NP: Live at the Royal Albert Hall, The Cinematic Orchestra

15:00 Friday, 19 Dec 2008 [#] [computers/postr] (12 comments)

SSH Tip Of The Day

Do you regularly ssh into machines which have dynamic IP addresses, and get really annoyed with OpenSSH warning that the IP's key doesn't match the host key? I certainly do, with machines announce their names using mDNS and a DHCP server in my router. Today I finally checked the documentation and found out how to skip this check.

The magic option is CheckHostIP, which you can set in .ssh/config on a per-host level. I've got this in my config: 

Host *.local
  CheckHostIP no

Now all machines I ssh into using a .local domain won't have their IP's key checked against the host key, because the IP is dynamic. Sorted!

NP: Music Like Amon Tobin, Last.fm

12:00 Thursday, 11 Dec 2008 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

All Hail Our Glorious New Maintainer

Or, Contact Lookup Applet 0.17 is now released. Some bug fixes and features thanks to the core widget being used in Nautilus Send-To:

The tarball is here: contact-lookup-applet-0.17.tar.gz.

16:55 Wednesday, 10 Dec 2008 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

Asynchronous Flickr Library, version 0.3

Finally, Flickrpc 0.3 is released. Some nice features that we all know and love from Postr here:

Grab a tarball here or the Bazaar tree here.

21:50 Tuesday, 11 Nov 2008 [#] [computers/postr] (0 comments)

Sound Juicer "Old Man Take A Look At My Life" 2.25.1

Sound Juicer "Old Man Take A Look At My Life" 2.25.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Everyone's favourite Frockney did a huge amount of work on this, and I'm still talking to him after he admitted that the master plan is to replace Sound Juicer with Rhythmbox in Fedora!

21:33 Tuesday, 04 Nov 2008 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (2 comments)

OfflineIMAP, ConsoleKit, GNOME Keyring

Over the weekend I finally got fed up with Evolution struggling to connect to work's "IMAP" server (Exchange 2007), and switched to using OfflineIMAP to sync the mail to a local Maildir. This as expected worked pretty well, and I'm now hidden from the nasty lag on the server. However, I've had to write my top secret Intel password into .offlineimaprc, which sucks. Then I had a cunning plan...

GNOME Keyring will store passwords in a pretty secure manner, so somehow I need to fetch the password from there. A quick look at the OfflineIMAP manual revealed that I can write Python functions which return the password, so I should be abe to hook into the keyring from OfflineIMAP. This should be fairly simple: 

import gobject, gnomekeyring

# The keyring needs to know the application name
if gobject.get_application_name() is None:
  gobject.set_application_name("offlineimap")

def keyring(user, host):
  keys = gnomekeyring.find_network_password_sync(user=user, server=host, protocol="imap")
  # First one will do nicely thanks
  return keys[0]["password"]
...
remotepasseval = keyring("rburton", "imapmail.intel.com")

After writing a small tool to add the key to the keyring, to my surprise this worked first time. I bounced with glee, but ten minutes later I had error messages from OfflineIMAP running from cron in my inbox...

GNOME Keyring uses an environment variable to find the daemon, which isn't set in a cron environment. GNOME Keyring will fall back to using DBus to find the daemon, but the DBus session bus environment variable isn't set. DBus will fall back to reading the session bus address from the X root window, but DISPLAY isn't set so that doesn't work either... EPIC FAIL.

But, I thought, I upgraded to Network Manager 0.7 last week which bought in ConsoleKit. If I ask ConsoleKit for my sessions I should be able to find a session with has an X connection, then I can set DISPLAY appropriately and then the chain described above will work, and I'll have my password. Shockingly, this worked first time too: 

import dbus, os
if not os.getenv("DISPLAY"):
  # Get the ConsoleKit manager
  bus = dbus.SystemBus()
  manager_obj = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit', '/org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager')
  manager = dbus.Interface(manager_obj, 'org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager')
  
  # For each of my sessions..
  for ssid in manager.GetSessionsForUnixUser(os.getuid()):
    obj = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit', ssid)
    session = dbus.Interface(obj, 'org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Session')
    # Get the X11 display name
    dpy = session.GetX11Display()
    if dpy:
      # If we have a display, set the environment variable
      os.putenv("DISPLAY", dpy);
      break

(man, I really with python-dbus had a better syntax for getting objects with a specific interface)

So there you go, integrating OfflineIMAP with the GNOME Keyring via ConsoleKit and DBus. Surprisingly this was pretty easy to do, thanks to DBus and the magic provided by ConsoleKit it is 100% hack free.

20:00 Tuesday, 04 Nov 2008 [#] [computers] (7 comments)

Tasks In GNOME SVN

Thanks to the heroic work of Olav and Thomas, Tasks (along with Contacts and Dates) is now in GNOME SVN. Translators, feel free to do your thing. Oh, and would it be possible to get Tasks added to Damned Lies?

20:15 Friday, 17 Oct 2008 [#] [computers] (3 comments)

Translation Nightmare

I just got a new bug titled Very weird translation template, need comments in .pot file to clarify, and giggled to myself. I was wondering how long it would be for this bug to be filed. The problem is that whilst most of the translatable strings in Tasks are pretty boring: "Tasks", "today", "Priority" and so on, all of a sudden the template goes a bit mental: 

"^(?<task>.+) (?:by|due|on)? (?<month>\\w+) (?<day>\\d{1,2})(?:st|nd|rd|th)?$"

Apparently the average translator doesn't think that learning PCRE-style regular expressions, and reading the source that uses this string to understand how it is to be used, is appropriate. [note: this is sarcasm]

Maybe I should have added some translator comments to clarify exactly what I meant by this. These monster strings (all in koto-date-parser.c) are GRegex regular expressions which are used to parse the user's input to try and extract meaningful date information. To translate these strings you'll need to have a basic understanding of regular expressions: if you don't then skip them and hopefully someone who does will finish the translation. If you know regular expressions then translating these strings is easy, honest.

The golden rule is to never translate the words which look like this: (?<foo>. These are markers which identify portions of the input (such as task or month) and need to remain in English, although they can be moved around if required. The rest of the strings are translatable. I'll give an example using the French translation by Stéphane Raimbault. First, the string in English and a worked example: 

"^(?<task>.+) (?:by|due|on)? (?<day>\\d{1,2})(?:st|nd|rd|th)? (?<month>\\w+)$"

First, we have a sequence of any characters identified as task, which magically expands to be as many as possible. This is optionally followed by one of the words "by", "due" or "on". This is followed by one or two digits identified as day followed by "st", "nd", "rd" or "th". Finally a sequence of characters which is identified as month. If the user had entered "pay bills on 2nd june" then task would be "pay bills", day would be "2", and month would be "june". Tasks can then turn "june" into a month number through other translations, and it now knows what date the user entered. In French, this translates as follows: 

"^(?<task>.+) (?:pour|prévu|pour le)? (?<day>\\d{1,2})(?:er|e)? (?<month>\\w+)$"

See, I said it was easy! All I need now is a legion of translators who understand regular expressions enough to correctly translate the new Tasks... [this, again, is sarcasm] Luckily, plans are afoot to move the Tasks source to the GNOME Subversion server, so the full fury of the GNOME translation team can attack this.

NP: Trailer Park, Beth Orton

21:17 Wednesday, 01 Oct 2008 [#] [computers] (11 comments)

Tasks 0.14

It's been nearly 10 months after the previous Tasks release, for which I profusely apologise. I wanted to fix one final bug before releasing, which sadly took five months to get around too... I eventually fixed it last night, so here is Tasks 0.14.

The most interesting change in this release is the magic date parser, which first landed back in March. This lets you use Google Calendar style descriptive tasks such as "release tasks today", "do shopping next tuesday" or "pay bills on 2nd". There are many patterns that are matched but I need two things from any users of Tasks.

  1. Translations. At the moment there are only English and French translations for the strings, which are critical for the parser to work. Translators, please update the translations!
  2. Feedback. The parser handles all of the natural language expressions that I thought would be useful. There are probably plenty more which are not handled, so if you find one which isn't handled (or is handled incorrectly) then please file a bug.

Oh, and one last thing. The OpenMoko and Maemo ports have likely bitrotted. New functionality has been added to the platform abstraction and I don't think those ports were updated. If someone actively uses Tasks on either Maemo or OpenMoko and is willing to test builds before release, please contact me.

08:45 Monday, 29 Sep 2008 [#] [computers] (2 comments)

Sound Juicer "Why Should You Know Better By Now" 2.24.0

Sound Juicer "Why Should You Know Better By Now" 2.24.0 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

13:41 Sunday, 21 Sep 2008 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (1 comments)

Sound Juicer "Stab Stab Stab! This Is More Than A Message" 2.23.3

Sound Juicer "Stab Stab Stab! This Is More Than A Message" 2.23.3 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

11:01 Monday, 08 Sep 2008 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (0 comments)

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of fixes from the Amazing Matthew Martin:

14:59 Monday, 18 Aug 2008 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (0 comments)

Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1

Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Nothing that amazing here, sorry:

20:33 Monday, 04 Aug 2008 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (0 comments)

GUADEC

Hmm, so I never did blog a GUADEC roundup. In two words: it rocked. Congratulations to Baris and everyone else who organised it!

In other late GUADEC news I finally reviewed the rest of my GUADEC photos and uploaded them to Flickr. I'll try and not take a month to upload next time, honest!

21:40 Tuesday, 29 Jul 2008 [#] [computers] (0 comments)

OH Wares

I've just been informed that Rob Bradford has one large "I3<OH" left. If you want one, then find him fast! The grapevine also says that there is a crack team of rouge OH Men on the loose, so watch out!

14:14 Friday, 11 Jul 2008 [#] [computers] (0 comments)

GUPnP Action

Action around GUPnP has been really hotting up recently. Jorn is back from the dead studying and demonstrating that he hasn't lost his touch by refactoring the various audio/visual widgets spread around our toy projects into libowl-av, adding Vala bindings, and then writing a MediaRenderer implementation on top of that. This means we now have reference implementations of the full media specification in the form of gupnp-media-server (server), gupnp-av-cp (control), and gupnp-media-renderer (playback).

Also Johan Kristell posted to the list for the first time with an implementation of the Digital Security Camera specifications, both server and client. GUPnP Network Camera currently only supports still images, but as it is based on GStreamer video can't be far away.

14:00 Monday, 30 Jun 2008 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

Erm...

case "$1" in
        *.sh)
                # Source shell script for speed.
                (
                        trap - INT QUIT TSTP
                        scriptname=$1
                        shift
                        . $scriptname
                )
                ;;
        *)
                "$@"
                ;;
  esac

OPTIMISATION FAIL.

NP: Roseland NYC Live, Portishead

18:00 Monday, 23 Jun 2008 [#] [computers] (5 comments)

Zebu 0.1

As one of the maintainers of debian.o-hand.com I use the always wonderful pbuilder and cowbuilder to rebuild packages originally build for Debian Sid for Debian Etch, Ubuntu Gutsy, Hardy, and so on. Continually typing the commands to update the cowbuilders can get tiresome fast so last week I scratched the itch and produced Zebu.

Zebu

As of version 0.1 it is barely functional but it does let you update or login to a cowbuilder. It requires that the cowbuilders are named /var/cache/pbuilder/*.cow and doesn't support "traditional" pbuilder rootstraps yet, but that is planned. Anyway, cowbuilders are the future.

If anyone else thinks this could be useful there is a tarball and a Bazaar repository. I must also thank the wonderful Ulisse Perusin for the rocking icon he created.

NP: Cosmos, Murcof

14:20 Sunday, 22 Jun 2008 [#] [computers] (4 comments)