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.

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

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

• Read the track artist instead of album artist in Musicbrain3
• Don't crash if the release date is unknown
• Read tracks when falling back to gvfs

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?

• Add --edit-task
• Use gtk_show_uri if available
• Lots of translation updates
• Add magic patterns "in x days" and "in x weeks"

As usual, download from the Pimlico Project.

• Put the disc number in the file name
• Support multiple genres
• Use libcanberra for event sounds
• Handle custom patterns in the prefs dialog
• Remove Musicbrainz data if the track data is changed
• Fix disc number editing logic
• And lots of bug fixes by many people

• Port to Brasero (Luis Medinas)
• Fix Solaris builds (Brian Cameron)
• Drop libgnome (Iain Holmes, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort)
• Fix conflicting mnemonics in the message area (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix mb3 backend (Bastien Nocera)

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?

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

• The Upload button now works
• Don't delete images if the upload fails

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

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

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

• Pass future maintainership to Bastien Nocera
• Don't search unopened books
• Automatically detect sources (Bastien Nocera)
• Only error out if all the addressbooks failed to open (BN)
• Show one menu item for each e-mail address, and select by default in the contact details dialogue (BN)

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

NP: Repercussions, DJ Distance

• Proxy support
• Add more upload arguments: safety, privacy, public/friends/private, search_hidden
• Cache the users full name, username and NSID (jcrosby)
• Fix UTF-8 encoding problems
• Verify our cached token before using it

Grab a tarball here or the Bazaar tree here.

• Chain the metadata lookups (Bastien Nocera)
• Finish the libmusicbrainz3 metadata fetcher (BN)
• Add a GVFS metadata fetcher as fallback (BN)
• Make libcdio option, as it breaks the GPL+Exception license (BN)
• Export ASIN, Discogs, Wikipedia in the internal metadata (BN)
• Lots of other cleanups to the metadata code (BN)
• Remove copy of the id3mux plugin, assume it exists now (BN)
• Remove Encoding field from desktop file (Pacho Ramos)
• Add Audio to desktop categories (Patryk Zawadzki)
• Correctly parse CDDA URLs (Matthew Martin)
• Don't free the option context

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.

Sunday:

"^(?<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

• Magic date parser when adding tasks
• Support libunique in the GTK+ port (Jonny Lamb)
• Support OWL window menus in the GTK+ port
• Save and restore the edit window size
• Add a clickable note icon (#548)
• Ellipsize the undo/redo menu items (#741)
• Make sure the date popup doesn't go off the screen (#752)

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.

• Don't crash when exiting
• Don't distribute full GFDL with docs
• Correctly parse CDDA URLs (#550131, thanks Matthew Martin)

Total of 5 Calls while abroad 00:23:20 £31.402

Money grabbing tight fisted evil bastards. This includes a rate of £1.25 a minute to receive a call.

NP: Los Angeles, Flying Lotus

• Stop playback when the disc is re-read (Matthew Martin)
• Only eject the disc if tracks were ripped (MM)
• Don't try and move the non-existant temp file when skipping (MM)
• Free the option context (Pierre Benz)
• Don't block until n-c-b quits when copying discs
• Fix playback track switching (MM)

• Fix play+pause+play (#523182, thanks Matthew Martin)
• Add %ay, album year (#522909, Juan F. Giménez Silva)

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!

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.

OPTIMISATION FAIL.

NP: Roseland NYC Live, Portishead

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

The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are being worked on next.

Useful, but not exposed anywhere. Until now...

This is a small Epiphany extension which adds all presentation URLs it finds to the Nearby Sites menu, just like the URLs discovered using Avahi. It needs a bit more work as it doesn't yet handle being unloaded or devices disappearing, but it is certainly usable now.

If anyone else wants to have a go with it, the source can be fetched using Bazaar from here. Watch out for the currently hard-coded paths...

NP: Aerial, 2562

Growing nicely.

• Port to GIO (Michael Terry)
• Update URL handling for New GIO World Order (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix display problems with the cluebar (Pekka Vuorela)
• Add audio preview when overwriting (Luca Cavalli)
• Use GtkVolmeButton instead of BaconVolume (MT)
• Fix crash when no profile is selected (Matthew Martin)
• Add []<> to the special character list (MM)
• Make the year and disc entries a11y (Patrick Wade)
• Fix error handling in CD playback (Tim-Philipp Müller)
• Require intltool 0.40

I really need some heavy testing on the GIO rewrite, so please try and extract tracks to as many different targets as possible. Although I expect confirmation that using an unmounted remote location currently fails, it should be possible to use this to write to Samba, OBEX-FTP, and so on.

The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are being built now.

In other news postr.dev has seen a lot of development and is looking pretty damn neat at the moment.