Crack
This must be the most amount of crack, overkill, and insanity I've ever seen in a single email. I'm just in awe.
ABI Breaking Madness
Everything I see at the moment is tinted red from The Rage...
I've just spent two days debugging Evolution and the DBus data server. When I click on a contact in the Address Book wth the DBus backend, Evolution crashes in a very odd manner. Stack traces are a little odd, and Valgrind's output is just plain confusing. It can't be anything directly related to DBus as there is no IPC occuring at this point, and the memory management in the DBus port is if anything better than the Bonobo version. Eventually I figure out what is going on.
A few weeks ago a new field was added to EContact, to store the URI of the book the contact belongs too. This seems reasonable enough, just add the new item at the end of the enumeration and all is good. However, EContact does some magic for optimisation and the enumeration is sorted by type and the position of key items in the enumeration is stored, such as the location of the last simple string, or the location of the last list. This means that the new field was added as the third item in the enumeration...
Yes, really.
Also the library versioning wasn't changed, so older Evolution builds just carry on as normal. Now when an older Evolution asks the contact for the list of all email addresses, it expects to get a GList, which it promptly tries to iterate over. It was actually passed a structure representing the contact's full name, and when it tried to iterate over that as a list... all hell breaks loose.
I really hope this somehow gets sorted out before 2.12...
NP: Best Of, R.E.M. (the 90's Best Of, not the 2003 one)
Sweet, Sweet Commits
Some source code commits are boring, like bug fixes and documentation, while some are exciting, like new features. Today I got to do one of the latter:
$ svn commit -m "Adding DBus port of the Calendar" eds-dbus/calendar
I can't take any credit for this, all praise must go to Chris Lord for the port, who is interning at Opened Hand over the summer.
NP: Birth Of The Cool, Miles Davis
EXIF Tags In Nautilus
After seeing one of the new Windows Vista screenshots showing Explorer listing image titles in the list view, I decided to have a quick hack on this in Nautilus. Hey presto:
ROCK ON. At the moment it only lets you see the image title on JPEG files (from the Image Description EXIF tag), but I'll extend that later. The good thing is that it's nicely behaved, using asynchronous I/O and only reading as much of the file as it needs.
NP: Worldwide Underground, Erykah Badu
Inkscape
Last year when we were making our wedding invitations Inkscape was only on it's second release and was quite buggy. It got to the point where we were designing the invites in Inkscape and then setting the font and printing from Sodipodi, as Inkscape refused to load Type 1 fonts and print images correctly. However, what a difference a year makes! Inkscape 0.42 was just released, and is starting to look very impressive. Good work guys!
NP: X&Y, Coldplay
gtk-doc in Yelp
After finally pushing upstream some Yelp and gnome-doc-utils patches, and Shaun fixing some other bugs, a pristine Yelp can display the Docbook generated by gtk-doc. To prove it here is a screenshot of Yelp showing the Loudmouth API documentation.
It's not yet perfect: some elements need more styling and links don't work properly yet (not sure what the problem is there though), but it's a promising start.
Sound Juicer "Smile At My Answer" 2.11.90
Sound Juicer "Smile At My Answer" 2.11.90 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.
I'm very disappointed with the lack of bug reports about the new playing functionality in the 2.11 releases of Sound Juicer. It's either perfect or nobody is using it, and I think I know what the correct answer is... C'mon people, give it a hammering! Play your CDs with it for a day instead of your usual program and tell me what you think.
- Nicer icons when extracting (Luca Cavalli)
- Documentation ported to use gnome-doc-utils
Thanks to the hard-working translators who are diving into action now that the strings are frozen: Abduxukur Abdurixit (ug), Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Priit Laes (et), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Terance Edward Sola (nb), Terance Edward Sola (no), Vladimir Petkov (bg).
Contact Lookup Applet 0.13
Contact Lookup Applet 0.13 is released. No major changes, but some nice features for developers (like gnome-phone-manager) and if you've a new GTK+ then the completion isn't constrained by the size of the entry.
- Allow EContactEntry to be subclassed (Bastien Nocera)
- If GTK+ 2.7.3 is being used, allow the completion to be as wide as required
- Handle source lists which don't contain any groups
- Cleanups (BN)
You can grab it from the usual place. Debian packages heading towards Sid once I update my pbuilder...
NP: Sheryl Crow, Sheryl Crow
Google Map Hacking
I'm very late to this, but I've done a bit of a hack to mix Google Maps and the GnomeWorldWide map, the results of which can be seen here. The next step is to extract more data from the wiki page, such as the name of the person, and add this information to the markers.
NP: Schoolhouse Funk, DJ Shadow
Back Home
As many have noticed, I'm back from Debconf already. It was a flying visit mostly taken up with meetings, so I didn't get to meet anyone new really. However, Scott still holds the record for flying visits: a single day at GUADEC, and he flew by Learjet. Obviously, I suck at both being at Debconf and flying visits.
The weather in Finland appears to be a secret they keep from the world, I'm sure on the weather reports you never hear of Helsinki being in the 30s. They probably tell everyone Finland is always cold and dark to keep the tourists away from their beaches.
For anyone else out there with a new ThinkPad which throws a hissy fit when it resumes with SectorNotFound errors, the solution is to turn off the Hard Drive Pre-Desktop Area (or something like that) in the BIOS, under Security. Good old Matthew Garrett has a patch and I presume it will reach mainline kernels shortly. Now suspend/resume fails for other reasons, but Matthew knows about those too.
Da Boss Matthew introduced me to Iittala whilst on a wander around Helsinki to find food, a contemporary Finnish design store selling homeware (cups, vases, etc). Very cool stuff.
Helsink airport is a terrible, terrible place, for two main reasons. One: there are no power points in the lounge which is not good as I only had 5% charge left. Two: the Stockman sells a large amount of Iittala stuff... A surprisingly low number of Euros later I bought two espresso cups and a large bowl.
Very, very cool.
Now I best get on with work, I'm away in Cornwall all next week and have a huge patch to review.
NP: Asia Borninch, DJ Shadow
Sound Juicer "The Most Dangerous Narcotic" 2.11.4
Sound Juicer "The Most Dangerous Narcotic" 2.11.4 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.
Again, another cool release with nice new features. Everyone give it a go, and see what you think of the new interface.
- Thread the extracting pipeline for faster rips
- Add a volume control when playing (Ronald Bultje)
- Remove the progress dialog (Raj M Madhan)
- Register our custom icons as stock so themes can set them (Luca Cavalli)
- Use Disc instead of CD in the menu
- Disable Play button when extracting (Raj)
- Set the pipeline to NULL when cancelling (Raj)
- Use gnome-common (Ali Akcaagac)
Thanks to the translators: Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Frank Arnold (de), Michiel Sikkes (nl), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Priit Laes (et), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), and Tommi Vainikainen (fi).
NP: Brain Freeze, DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist
Debconf
At Debconf now, and so far it's been good despite being far too warm (like a fool I forgot to bring both sandals and shorts). Had some interesting meetings with Nokia, and Matthew Garrett figured out why my T40p refused to resume correctly. It now works, he rocks, and I owe him a whiskey or two.
No Compassion
I've never heard of Omarion, who apparently is a "R&B crooner" (according to Yahoo), but I don't like him one bit. In fact, if I met him, I'd probably hit him. Why? He has no compassion, at all. What a twonk.
Local Branches In Bazaar For Fun And Profit
I've been meaning to blog about this for some time now, so don't expect a long and detailed entry.
As previously mentioned I've now got my EoG ICC patches in an Arch repository. Doing this was surprisingly trivial. Thanks to the Bazaar people at Canonical (I've been talking to Robert Collins, but there are probably more people involved) there is a selective mirror of the GNOME CVS modules on http://bazaar.ubuntu.com. Assuming the default archive is set, a local module can be created as a branch of another with a single command:
baz branch http://bazaar.ubuntu.com/gnome@bazaar.ubuntu.com/eog--MAIN--0 eog--xicc--0
This created a module in my repository called eog--xicc--0, which I can checkout as usual and edit as I want. At some point I'll want to merge any changes from upstream, so in the working directory I perform a merge:
baz merge gnome@bazaar.ubuntu.com/eog--MAIN--0
Note that I don't need to specify the full location as the branch command added the archive name to location mapping. Simply sort out any conflicts, and them commit the changes.
Easy! This Bazaar thing is really growing on me.
NP: Sounds From The Verve Hi-Fi, Thievery Corporation
Good News, Bad News
Good news: my course pack for The Art Of Photography at the Open College of Arts arrived today, so I'm now a student again, albeit a part-time one. This should be fun...
Bad news: London was bombed this morning. Everyone I know in London is okay, but Allen cut it close: he should have been in Liverpool Street when it kicked off there, but luckily was starting work late today. So far explosions in six train stations and on one bus have been confirmed but hard numbers are very hard, even three hours after the event.
NP: Pre-emptive Strike, DJ Shadow (with the BBC news accompanying it)
Congratulations
Many congratulations to Mickael and Carina, little Emma was born last Sunday. I'm sure she'll bring you many years of joy!
NP: The Litmus Test, Cut Chemist
Sound Juicer "All Rolled Into One" 2.11.3
Sound Juicer "All Rolled Into One" 2.11.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.
This is a rocking release as it's the first to feature a Play button, thanks to Ronald Bultje. Give it hell people!
- Can now play CDs (Ronald Bultje)
- The genre field is now an auto-completing text entry
- Fix various file writing bugs caused by the move to gnome-vfs
Of course thanks to the translators: Abel Cheung (zh_TW), Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Frank Arnold (de), Mário Vrablanský (sk), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Terance Edward Sola (nb and no).
NP: Animal Magic, Bonobo
