GNOME

or: prepare-ChangeLog.pl - now git-flavored

So, today I got fed up by our prepare-ChangeLog.pl to not support git at all. Fernando the Brave added support for Subversion 3.5 years ago, and now I decided to add support for git.

Chatting with Fernando and Olav we decided to move the script from web-devel-2 into the releng module and then I committed my changes on top. So, now the script is saved from Nirvana (which web-devel-2 will hopefully end up, soon) and is located next to Martyn's maintainer.py.

Webkit/GTK+ is a really nice thing already. It still has it's rough edges, but it already works really nicely.

I'm leaving to Hamburg today to spend the next week at Hanover. Linux New Media was so kind to offer a booth to the German GNOME community. Josh will also be there the whole time, MacSlow and maybe others will join us for the weekend.

GNOME Launch Box is an application launcher inspired by QuickSilver. You can find more information at the project page.

Downloads

Canek Peláez Valdés is creating a nice geometry application (english) based upon the CCC canvas library. There's even a really interesting flash demo (english) that demonstrates some of the ideas for the application.

He's blogging a lot right now, which might be a pretty nice addition for Planet GNOME Hispano.

This started as something really easy, but very quickly became really complex. Alex suggested to take a look at the camera concept of piccolo. Yesterday late I started to create something like this:

[A minimap in CCC]

Having tests for your projects is nice (others consider it as necessary, but that's not part of this post). Well, as with many brand new projects, people get suggested to use the trunk version as in subversion. This brought me to a really annoying problem: People were complaining about a missing macro (which was AM_PATH_CHECK). Of couse, I could argue now whether a developer should have this installed, but I came to the conclusion that I shouldn't imply any piece of installed software that's not absolutely necessary to build.

Fortunately the people are Ubuntu users, so the solution for them was quite easy (apt-get install check). But I was thinking about doing this a bit more cleverly. Ubuntu currently delivers check 0.9.3, version 0.9.4 includes check.pc, which is nice but unusable for me (Ubuntu Edgy, Feisty already has this). So, finally I started to improve my m4 skills and provide some code (that you're free to copy) that works as it should:

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CHECK,[check >= 0.9.4],:,[
ifdef([AM_PATH_CHECK],
[AM_PATH_CHECK],
[AC_MSG_RESULT([no, testing is disabled])])
])

AM_CONDITIONAL([HAVE_CHECK],[test "x$CHECK_CFLAGS" != "x"])

You might want to replace the second AM_PATH_CHECK with AM_PATH_CHECK([0.8.2]) or your required version.

So, I haven't been blogging for quite some time. And I actually have to good excuses for that: I have been really busy during the last weeks (ImendioConf took place in the beginning of November; Linux World Expo in Cologne the week after) and my server has been down for 2 weeks (I'm sorry).

But now things are getting back up again (at least most of the SVN trees and web sites are) and I can catch up with some things.

So, I started to use this cute machine that Imendio payed about two weeks ago. Last week I realized a very nice feature: as this is a Dual-Core processor, I got CPU loads of 49-51% while compiling. The reason is obvious: one core is busy with the gcc command while the other is still available for the desktop (that's the feature point).

Every three months I'm confronted with this one: I need to declare my VAT for the next quarter to the tax office (larger companies need to do this once per month, maybe Openismus GmbH does this monthly). In Germany needs to be done electronically through the Elster system.

It's very nice and full of features:

• Encryption (state of the art)
• Weak authentication (almost anyone knowing my tax number can submit tax forms for me)