Archive - 2004

Lars: you should really avoid using PHP arrays, just take the step, increase the dependency of PHP to 5.0.x and enjoy objects (which are a LOT saver to use than arrays - imagine you want to change an attribute name and you had to try to replace all array indices by the correct ones). If you don't want to, you should at least define some constant as the idices so there's just one place to replace such things.

Luis: Thanks for the link to S5, I already knew it, but I lost the link. I think that we should go this way once we work on html export.

Ronald: First of this, congratulations to your plans to build up a local GNOME-nl community.

Rodrigo: It's nice that you share your GNOME-es experiences, so will I with mine of GNOME-de (GNOME Deutschland). GNOME-de is older than my string interest in GNOME, so I can only tell you what happened since I realized theres #gnome-de. There are lots of small and some bigger GNU/Linux events in Germany, so we try to represent GNOME as strong as possible, it's important that you have some people who like presenting talks (I've seen a CeBIT presentation from the Nat 2003 and while listening one really felt his motivation). Booths on such events are great to make contacts to people, #gnome-de has been some quite small elite group of about 10 people (in channel-rush-hours) when I joined that channel, in the meantime it have become 15 at 6am and up to thirty in rush hours. These people are really important because one can present small hacks and get feedback of people one (virtually) knows before getting it out into the public. So, besides IRC (as Rodrigo mentioned, which is correct AFAIS), local events are important too, because such a channel works great as a news aggregator (people discuss topics there) and as a small GNOME community where people might know others from real life, which is pretty nice to get motivated to fix issues of smaller project; I really enjoy the feedback from the #gnome-de channel on criawips, my presentation application because I know the people like to test software and propose improvements (and criticism of people one almost knows is better that criticism of people one doesn't know).

Rodrigo, you said that a lot of started projects failed, I don't think that every cancelled application means failure. I have been participating on agnubis two years ago. I have to admit that the application itself failed, but in my opinion the project succeeded, because it left me with the knowledge of things that worked out bad and with more motivation to come again and finally develop my presentation application. So, successful projects are not the only ones being successful :-)

Ronald: please show some sample code, e.g. how do I get stereo sound out on my 5.1 system? One simple gst-launch command line. The stereo-to-surround-sound feature of mplayer has been the last thing that kept me using it (I'd love to volunteer for tests as a day-by-day-user of such a feature).

Criawips is quite well progressing now, I think we can really release version 0.1.0 in time (read: until the end of the year). I just committed a patch that enables borders for blocks on slides, so people can actually see the borders of the text elements. Now we just need to implement focus/cursor handling and we have a basic version of slide editing available.

Wow, this has been a very successful weekend so far. I started to work on criawips again this week (motivated by the engagement of the other contributors) and see what I did. I have had three local development trees on my machine, so I went ahead, fininshed the new debugging code (#1), checked it in, finished the rendering re-organization (#2), check it in too and I have been looking for a bug in my tree dedicated to the reintroduction of glade for the main window (#3). The bug got squashed, the code checked in and I have only one development tree (aka HEAD).

In the meantime Ezequiel made some progress on the save operation which is pretty cool, though it showed up a bug in libgsf which has been fixed in CVS. Unfortunately Jody just released a new libgsf version some days ago (including the "gsf gnomevfs can follow symlinks" patch), so I will wait for the next release to depend on.

Unfortunately I realized that my gdb on the Powerbook (Ubuntu Hoary) is broken, I should provide a bug report for this. First I thought that it might have been some broken memory stuff, but a reboot (the first one for 24 days) did fix only other issues.

Now it's time to relax because I had a very hard day, hacking to 3am, sleeping to 8am, doing sports, hacking, going to bed now.

Two or three months ago I have been talking to Benjamin about debugging output of applications. We've been talking about this when we had lunch and he told me what he would expect of a generic debugging library. I just finished some debugging code for criawips (the ones who tested it know that it had been printing hundreds of lines of debugging output).

Since today, criawips will be quiet. When one tells configure that he's not a developer, the debugging output will be completely disabled (similar to g_assert <-> G_DISABLE_ASSERTS). Otherwise it will only print information that can be specified by environment variable (use CDEBUG="Cria" ./criawips for the whole fun).

For those interested, the code is available under LGPL 2.1.

Frank: Just to tell you this (once more): I refused to give you MY username/password combination because we tried working together using the single account for www.gnome-de.org with several users. I just gave the password to four people and it worked out badly because people did not stick to their road works but were abusing the permissions to also modify things there didn't have my permission. It worked out badly and so I will be the one who modifies content. Ob es dir passt oder nicht.

Murray, Jeff, please update my hackergotchies to a scaled version of this one as it shows the hair color that I have since early June.

The 21C3 (27. to 29.12.; also known as THE european hacker conference) is coming closer. There are still lots of things to do for me, fixing up my abstract and a short summary (I'm going to have a GNOME hacking talk there).

Jan was so kind to send a reminder to the German GNOME hackers to invite them to form some GNOME hacking corner in Berlin. If other people are interested please contact me to improve out favorite desktop during these days. People who will be there are Matthias (author of the GNOME Development Book pulished this year) lots of other cool hackers, and me.