Contact Lookup Applet 0.10
Version 0.10 of the Contact Lookup Applet is available from here, Debian packages are available from my repository and will be hitting unstable shortly.
- Show a dialog if there are no completing sources set
- Hide unused buttons
- Fix setting sources in EContactEntry
- I really should start crediting translators: Iñaki Larrañaga (eu), Amanpreet Singh Alam (pa), Hendrik Brandt (de), Marcel Telka(sk), and Raphael Higino (pt_BR)
John Peel
The legendary Radio 1 DJ John Peel died today from a heart attack at 65. This is tragic news, as listening to John Peel's eclectic late-night radio show was a regular event for me in the evening. He had a wonderful voice, a habit of mumbling to himself, forgetting the names of the songs he was playing, talking to his producer, and playing the strangest mix of music ever heard of national radio (death metal followed by folk followed by trance is usual), and we loved him for it all.
John, you will be missed.
NP: Automatic For The People, R.E.M.
DOAP Plugin for Pyblosxom
People who are in the know are expecting big things from DOAP, the XML/RDF schema for describing software projects. As a standard location for DOAP storage is on the project's home page, it made sense to link to DOAP files inside my blog.
The Pyblosxom plugin I created works quite well. If there is a file called doap.rdf in a category the plugin will create replacement variables so that my flavour templates can insert a <link> element in the header and show a button in the sidebar. These links point to the file, so of course at some point a client will try to load it. However Pyblosxom treats this as a request for the article with the ID "doap" using the xml flavour. Thankfully plugins can catch requests for files and respond to them there and then, so the plugin can handle these requests manually.
End result: the Sound Juicer blog category has a DOAP file, so the category has a <link> element and a link to the DOAP in the sidebar. This is more than enough for the DOAP Viewer to find the DOAP, as can be seen here. At some point this week I'll clean the source up and submit it to the Pyblosxom plugin registry, but if anyone wants it now just mail me.
Introduction to D-BUS
Quick post: I was updating my CV and noticed that I neglected to blog about my D-BUS article, Connect Desktop Applications Using D-BUS, being published on IBM developerWorks. It was posted whilst I was on my honeymoon, which is probably why I never got around to write about it. Hopefully the code examples still compile...
End Of An Era
Today is indeed the end of an era. It all started this morning, when one of our management guys turned up in a suit. He normally sticks to "smart casual" dress, and when asked if he had a meeting he seemed quite uncomfortable. Shortly afterwards one of the investors arrived, and then the top man from our parent company. Blimey, we thought, everyone is here today. Finally Russel (our boss) arrived, which confused us. "Aren't you supposed to be in America?", we asked (we had a stand at the ARM conference). "Yes, well, on a plane", he replied. Body language alone told us this wasn't going to be a normal day.
After much speculation among us lowly programmers, and a long meeting by management, the top man from the parent company shot off out of the office like he was on fire. Then the remaining members of the meeting came out and informed us that as of 12:30 that day, OneEighty Software Ltd was no longer being funded. No funding means no money, so OneEighty was being liquidated.
We talked briefly about how this happened, which was especially confusing as we were very close to finishing a port to a faster, better chip. I spend an hour squeezing the contents of my desk and drawers into my bag, and we all went down to the Porter and Sorter for a pint. Not much more to say really, I'm currently doing my last commute from London for a while and probably my last ever from sunny Croydon.
I think this qualifies for the most upsetting command I've ever entered into a shell:
ross@hactar ~/Programming $ du -hs OneEighty/ 70M OneEighty/ ross@hactar ~/Programming $ rm -rf OneEighty/ ross@hactar ~/Programming $
Many people will point out that at the end of the day this is just a job and there are other jobs, and that is indeed true. What is also true that Dan and myself worked with Russel on what is now called ORIGIN-J, for what is now called OneEighty Software Ltd, back when we were still at university in our spare time over four years ago. We've seen the architecture evolve, processors come and go, and the company grow from three people working at home, to seven people in a Regus office, to thirteen people in another office. We've been there from the beginning to the end, and it's sad to see us shut down just as things, in a real physical product sense, were starting to take off.
Personally, I'm going to take a few days out to sort out the chaos left behind by The Gift Registry going into administration, and to check my Debian packages are ready for Sarge. If anyone out there in the London/Cambridge area wants to hire a C/Java/Python/Debian coder, mail me. If anyone wants to hire a kick-arse Linux system administrator in the Croydon area who battled Samba in a domain environment and came out with his sanity intact, mail me and I'll forward the message to Dan.
Finally, thank you Russel, you were a great boss.
NP: Lamb, Lamb. Loudly.
All Change Non Stop
Well, what a few weeks this has been. Work has been mental with the porting work charging ahead, which I managed to pass onto other people as the core became functional. I've mostly been working on the documentation system, previously we had LaTeX and generated HTML API docs, now we have an all-singing DocBook build process. In all this I switched servers for burtonini.com (thanks Thom!) and my s3krit project is going well.
Amusing things have been going on in the world around us. George Bush Snr. called Michael Moore a "total ass, slimeball"; Great Ormond St. Hospital may sue Disney over copyright violation; and a private (!) voter registration company has been throwing away registration cards from Democrats.
Just for fun, last week the company who we had our wedding gift list with, The Gift Registry, went into administration. As a result we've only got about a third of the gifts we should have, and we've got to contact everyone to sort this out.
Finally, a word from Dubya: "Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe." [update: turns out Dan Quayle said this]
NP: Dummy, Portishead
Sound Juicer "Bust The Meter" 0.5.14
Sound Juicer "Bust The Meter" 0.5.14 is available -- download the tarball here. Debian packages available in my repository and are in the upload queue as usual.
- Don't corrupt the title/artist entries when changing CD
- Sort the genre list at runtime (Christophe Fergeau)
- Handle unset values in GConf (Colin Walters)
- Fixed HAL compile (Colin Walters and Sjoerd Simons)
NP: Worldwide Underground, Erykah Badu
Contact Lookup Applet 0.9
Version 0.9 of the Contact Lookup Applet is available from here, and a Debian package is in experimental. This release is dedicated to everyone who wants a completing address book entry widget -- it's a separate widget now.
- Split the completing entry into a separate widget
- Search all address books marked as completion sources in Evolution
- Support i18n, with prompt translations from Christian Rose and Adam Weinberger
