Planet SoC -

I'm a bad GNOME person

Charbucks — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:51:00 +0200

Who would have thought that driving across Canada, moving into a new house in a totally unknown city, finding a social life, beginning a master’s project, applying for scholarships, taking a full-time course load, and trying to TA a course without knowing anything about the subject would occupy all of my time during the past month? Despite my last post to this blog where I proclaimed that I would continue to work on various programming projects after GSoC finished, I don’t think I’ve even signed in to IRC let alone looked at a piece of source code. Sigh.
So, why I am I posting now? Mostly so I don’t feel as guilty, but also because I’ve got some downtime coming up (3 hours each way on the plane between Alberta and Ontario, to be exact) on Thanksgiving weekend. If I’ve finished all the schoolwork due the following week, and if I feel studied-out for midterms coming up, then I’ll take advantage of the time to pay some much needed attention to my still-unfinished SoC project, as well as to Referencer (at least that one has the excuse that it will be useful in school). I figure by writing things down in a public location (though it may not be read by anyone else) I’ll be more likely to actually follow through with my plan, so hopefully by this time in two weeks I’ll have made some kind of progress. If not… I promise I’m still thinking about it, I still read Planet GNOME on occasion, and one of these days I will make a sincere effort to become a more active member of the community. Until then, I’m working on getting through school on my way to becoming a “real” person.

F-Spot 0.5.0

rubenv — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:02:17 +0200

Extra! Extra!

We’ve just released the most awesome f-spot so far: 0.5.0! It features a countless amount of enhancements, polish and bugfixes. Here’s some appetizer, but you’d better taste it by yourself:

- New Sidebar context switching
- Extendable Editors
- New Metadata display
- Color profile support
- Duplicate detection at import time
- Reduced and faster db access, faster queries on big collections
- Light speed tagging
- FullScreen mode enhancements
- New extensions distributed by default
- Updated documentation
- Updated translations
- Hundreds of bugfixes
- New contributors

We’d like to thanks everyone involved in that release cycle, bug reporters, triagers, testers, developers, translators. So thx, and keep up the hard work.

The minimal dependencies should be as they were for 0.4.4. But if you want to build for gnome 2.24, you’ll probably need gtk-sharp 2.12.3

...

gabrielgeraldo — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:00:56 +0200

C Version of In the Mood

Charbucks — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:13:00 +0200

GSoC has officially come to a close, and in a very short time I have managed to make a more or less working version of In The Mood in C. On the plus side, it does seem to be more efficient, using less memory, and it gets rid of any possible command-line-parsing errors. Also, I’ve re-done the vector file storage so that it’s in subfolders, so there’s guaranteed to be unique names (basically the complete path for each song is copied over into ./gnome/rhythmbox/inthemood), and I’ve left the .mp3 or .ogg extension to make them easier to locate in the database (might be a little confusing if you ever look at those files, but they are indeed text). On the down side, anyone who tried the python version, you’ll have to re-analyze your database, due to this reorganization of vector files. Sorry!
You can check out the source by running “svn checkout http://rhythmbox-predictive-playback.googlecode.com/svn/branches/c_rewri… inthemood”. Since C plugins have to be built from within the Rhythmbox source code, I’ve created a diff file that can be used to patch the svn version of Rhythmbox (it just modifies configure.ac and plugins/Makefile.am), and from there you can just put the entire “inthemood” folder into rhythmbox/plugins/. Make sure you have all the dependencies described in the original install instructions, and then just run ./autogen.sh —enable-inthemood (along with whatever other flags you usually use) in the rhythmbox top level directory. After that, the usual make && sudo make install should do the trick.
There’s a few bugs that I have yet to iron out, but they didn’t seem important enough to prevent me from sharing this with the world. You can add multiple songs to the “In The Mood” playlist, but only the last one will be used to append new songs, which will only occur while it is playing. Also, if you add songs that haven’t been analyzed, they’ll be added, but ignored when choosing a new song (i.e. you need to play an analyzed song to get a new one added). Basically, the best way to keep it safe is just to pick one song and go from there (deletions should be fine) - for some reason I couldn’t get rhythmbox to remove an entry from the playlist, so I’ll keep working on that.
I’m sad to say that the summer is over, I’ve had a great time working with Philip Van Hoof and the rest of the GNOME community. I don’t really plan on stopping anytime soon - my project has a ton of things I’d like to add/fix, and there are many other things that I have resisted working on due to the need to finish this one up. The next couple weeks will be super busy as I get ready to move across the country - ditch enough stuff so that I can fit my apartment into a Honda Civic, tie up loose ends in Ontario, and figure out where I’m going to sleep in various locations along the way. However, I’ll still be hanging out on irc from time to time (Charbucks is the name), and I’m sure I’ll pop up on Planet GNOME and various mailing lists. Thanks again for a great summer GNOME!

libsoylent v0.5.0 “let’s talk about…”

Noya — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:07:02 +0200

Version 0.5.0 brings online-functionality to libsoylent. Want to launch a chat with someone? One function call. Want to see who’s online? One function call. Want to see someone’s online-status? You get it.
This release is also the last one for Google Summer of Code 2008. It’s the result of about four months of work. Phew.
The plan for the next release is that it will be a pure documentation and bug-fixing release. Also in that version: libsoylent will stop taking control of strings passed to it.
Changes

implemented Telepathy / Mission-Control / Empathy support
implemented various functions / methods for IM-information (get online-people, get presence etc.)
added communication functions (e.g. launching a chat with someone)
added an example for online-functionality
enhanced documentation
fixed some bugs

Download
libsoylent is available for download at:
http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent
Contact
Feature requests, questions and related discussion go to the Soylent mailinglist. You can join at:
http://lists.codethink.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soylent-devel
If you found a bug please report it at:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=soylent
More
More information on libsoylent is available at:
http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Voice Notes status

gabrielgeraldo — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:10:30 +0200

(Moving: I’m moving to ggmarcondes.com/blog)
Hi guys,
As usual, it’s been a long time since the last post. Although I don’t have difficulties talking to people, it is still strangely hard for me to post in english…
But let’s go to the news: the Voice Notes addin is already into tomboy Addins directory at the gnome svn server. Check it out [1] and apply a patch [2] to enable its compilation (it is disabled because is not stable yet).
Some notes about it:
- Present: it is not speech-to-text. At the current state, it’s just a recorder/player that keeps a voice record related to the note. And the main difference since the last post- no popup window.
Note visualization with Voice Notes addin enabled
- Future: it’s going to have *some* speech recognition and store only some keywords for indexation purposes. So the user will also be able to find references to the voice notes when searching, not only to the typed notes.
I’m going to make a screencast, and I’ll link it soon.
As we use to say in Brazil, “it is not the world’s 8th wonder”. But it is already usable and may become a very nice feature. There is a long road ahead, so this is just beginning. Suggestions and help are welcome. Hope you like it =)
[1] http://svn.gnome.org/svn/tomboy/trunk
[2] http://www.ggmarcondes.com/files/enable-voice-notes.diff

F-Spot Sidebar Editors + Histogram

rubenv — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:52:41 +0200

Just in: The new sidebar editors in F-Spot have landed. Apart from the color tool and some cosmetic changes, it’s mostly finished.

Also: F-Spot now features a histogram in the sidebar.

Sidebar + Histogram

That is all.

PS: F-Spot already had the histogram. It was just very well hidden.

libsoylent v0.4.0 “small step, giant leap”

Noya — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:38:46 +0200

Let me present you the newest version of libsoylent: 0.4.0. Three weeks of hard work went into this release, and in fact so much was added and changed that we decided to skip a version-number. Sorry 0.3.0.
So, what’s in it? More or less a complete people-management-library. Our goal was to create a simple yet-powerful API that “just works”. Hopefully we managed that. If you have no clear picture of what libsoylent is or just want to know more about it, look at the examples we’ve put up on the libsoylent-page.
What comes next? Because the library is that new and fresh, much testing will be needed. If you want to help, just play around with libsoylent and report bugs that you may encounter to our mailinglist. Thanks! Besides, next to the need of more documentation and polishing, here is a list of features that will follow in the next releases:

live-attributes (e.g. online-status)
communication (launch applications for chat / mail etc.)
address-book searching (atm you can only get all people)
people association / merging

Please leave a comment on my blog if you have thoughts, ideas, criticism, feature-requests or suggestions for changing something. Just let us hear your opinion.
Anyway, if you’re working on something that needs people-functionality, why not give libsoylent a try?
Changes

creating and modifying attributes works
adding / removing attributes to / from people works
attribute-mapping (for C runtime-types) implemented
attribute-system (definition, cleanup and to-string functionality) implemented
changes to people can be commited
loading people from the addressbook implemented
signals for SlBook, SlPerson and SlAttribute implemented
integrated gtk-doc
added a bunch of documentation
added more tests
added example-code (three examples)
revised architecture
a lot of internal-code improvements
fixed a bunch of bugs
added debugging functions
a lot of polishing was done (code-cleanup, convinience functions and macros etc.)

Download
libsoylent is available for download at:
http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent
Contact
Bugs, feature requests, questions and related discussion go to the Soylent mailinglist. You can join at:
http://lists.codethink.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soylent-devel
More
More information on libsoylent is available at:
http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Back to work

Charbucks — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:18:00 +0200

I’ve been sadly neglecting this blog, and even worse given the current timing, my GSoC project - next week is the ‘pencil’s down’ date, and I’ve decided to re-write everything in C. However, I’ve got a good excuse: last week I gave a presentation at the North American Congress On Biomechanics (NACOB) in Ann Arbor. It was pretty nerve-wracking, my second conference presentation (and much more intimidating than the little Ontario-grad-students-only OBC), but I think it went well. I also got to see some other interesting presentations and meet some fun people, so all in all it was a great trip. Oh yeah, and I also saw Rod Stewart at the DTE Energy Music Theatre. It was pretty funny to be amongst 15 000 drunken screaming middle-aged soccer moms.
My other reason for taking a break from the project was a trip back home for the August long weekend. It was pretty nice to be on Saltspring in the summertime (rather than my usual Christmas trips) - here’s a little picture from Saturday night’s dinner on my parent’s boat:

Not a bad place to be at all. I also got a little surprise when I got home: an early birthday/graduation gift in the form of an EEE 900! This little thing is half the size of my already-tiny 12” tablet, and I took it to the conference last week and it was awesome. I got used to the keyboard surprisingly fast (although I did increase the keyboard responsiveness by adding tinfoil as described in this post). I also loaded Ubuntu 8.04 (actually, ubuntu-eee because I was too lazy to do the webcam/sound/wireless config myself), as well as the custom kernel from array.org. The result boots almost as quickly as the default Xandros (30 seconds or so), but seems to run a little hotter (around 60 degrees, 65 when under heavy load). All in all, it’s a great toy.

Wordpress Bug #7306

Noya — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:52:17 +0200

I recently upgraded to Wordpress v2.6. After a quick check, everything seemed to work fine. However a few minutes ago a reader of this blog told me that he encountered some problems: The overview would work, but everything else like reading certain posts, commenting or using the RSS feed produces a “404 - not found” error. I quickly found out that the blog was experiencing bug #7306. The suggested workaround, filling the category and tag fields under wp-admin -> Settings -> Permalink, worked instantly and now everything should be up and running again. Let’s hope Wordpress v2.6.1 will be released soon to fix the problem without the need for workarounds.