Sound Juicer "Let's Kill First The Banker" 2.16.3
Sound Juicer "Let's Kill First The Banker" 2.16.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Loads of fixes!
- Fix install target (Christian Persch)
- Set urgency hint on completed dialog (Sebastien Bacher)
- Add man page
- Ensure playback is stopped when media is removed (Luca Cavalli)
- Source cleanups (Adam Petaccia)
Devil's Pie "Wearing That Dress" 0.20.1
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.20.1 is out. Brown paper bag release, whoops!
- Fix parsing (Lars Damerow)
- Fix test suite
Downloads are in the usual place.
Devil's Pie "Wearing That Dress" 0.20.2
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.20.2 is out. Brown paper bag release, whoops!
- Fix window_workspace (Andrew Yates)
Downloads are in the usual place.
Lenovo, I Take It Back
Those nice people at Lenovo have listened to the complaints about the lack of support for the virtualisation hardware, and released a new BIOS version. Thanks Lenovo, my only complaint about the X60 is now fixed.
Drink The Lemonade
Dave Cridland posted to maemo-developers again today, spuring me to spend my lunch time checking out his email client instead of doing something productive like eating. It's very interesting.
Basically he edits the RFCs for Lemonade, which is a IETF standard for email on mobile devices. Basically it is a set of extensions for IMAP and SMTP that improve their performance over high-latancy low-bandwidth connections (like bad wi-fi or GPRS), such as forward-without-download and efficient re-synchronisation commands. Existing extensions such as a useful IDLE implementation are also used to push new mail notifications to the client.
To test the ideas in the real world there is Polymer. Polymer is a simple IMAP client that uses the Lemonade extensions as much as possible, so is ideal for mobile use. There is more: it uses ACAP to store the settings on the Internet (Dave also provides free ACAP accounts) so it's configure once, run anywhere. I've just tried it on my laptop, and it works nicely.
But it gets better. There is also Telomer, an email client using Lemonade and designed for Maemo. I've just tried it out, it may be seriously lacking in features at the moment, but it works. Features can be written over time, but it takes serious thought to get something as fast and usable as Polymer on mobile devices. I'll quote Dave:
That all said, once it's started, it connects to the mailserver over GPRS in about 10 seconds and pulls up the summary listing in 15, with a mailbox size of 2,882 messages. With a mailbox with 33,732 messages in, it's a little slower at around 25 seconds. That's still way faster than a desktop client on a LAN, of course, unless that desktop client is Polymer - in which case it'll seem remarkably slow.
This is what we need for a mobile email client. I know I've found my email client of choice on my new N800.
NP: Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd
Postr 0.4
Postr 0.4 is finally out. This has an all-new Flickr library that uses Twisted, so I don't need to use threads any more. I've had lots of contributions to this release, in fact the change log is too long to summarise... Special features include a Nautilus context menu, GtkUnique support, and a lack of thread related crashes.
Thanks to Germán Poó Caamaño, Emmanuele Bassi, Dean Sas and Daniel Stone for their patches and feedback.
You can follow the development in the Bazaar branch, or get the Postr 0.4 tarball.
Dear Interweb...
Quick question for the Interweb regarding bash completion. If I do cat ~/[tab], I get to pick from 182 completions, as it lists all of the dotfiles. Is there a way of telling bash to only complete dot files if I put a dot, otherwise only complete non-hidden files? Answers on a postcard, or if you must, a comment on this blog. Thanks!
NP: IBM 1401, a User's Manual, Jóhann Jóhannsson
Devil's Pie "Wearing That Dress" 0.20
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.20 is out. New features galore!
- Handle multiple expressions in a file (Lars Damerow)
- Add spawn_sync and spawn_async actions to start processes (David Decotigny)
- Add println, str, hex, and expand print (DD)
- Add window_xid matcher (DD)
Downloads are in the usual place.
Testers Wanted
I've got a new version of Postr ready for release, but would like someone else to test it before I release it as quite a lot of the important code has been, well, rewritten.
So, to any potential testers: using Bazaar clone this repository, install Twisted (python-twisted-core on Debian/Ubuntu), delete ~/.flickr/c53cebd15ed936073134cec858036f1d/auth.xml (the cached authentication tokens) and try and upload a photo. If anyone gives it a go please leave comments or email me, so I can fix any bugs.
Thanks!
Asynchronous Flickr Library, version 0.1
I'm finally releasing version 0.1 of my Flickr library, flickrpc. The name is actually misleading, and I should change it for 1.0, as the class name is flickrest and the transport protocol is HTTP/REST, not XML-RPC (as was the original plan, thus the name). This library is written in Python and uses Twisted.
- Why another Flickr library?
-
Because Postr required it. All of the existing libraries that I know of are blocking (I used to use Beej's flickrapi, which was based upon Michele Campeotto's flickrclient), which makes using them in GUI applications painful. Early versions of Postr used threads so that uploading could be done in the background without blocking the UI, but as Postr makes more calls to Flickr whilst being used interactively these threads will become a maintaince nightmare. By using Twisted all of the network operations are handled in the main loop, and I can write callback-based network code just like I write callback-based UI code.
- Why Twisted?
-
Because it works, and is popular. If someone has a HTTP client library that integrated into the GLib mainloop and will expose callbacks when operations complete, please tell me. I love what Twisted gives me, but at the end of the day if there is a simplier solution, I'll consider it.
- Sounds excellent! Where can I get it?
-
There is a tarball of 0.1 available here: flickrpc-0.1.tar.gz. If you want to track the latest development, or contribute patches, there is also a Bazaar archive.
