Hacking

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.

So, it's been almost a week since we released Giggle. We've been happily receiving lots of love in the form of emails, bug reports, suggestions, patches and even debian packages. Now we think it's time to share some love with you, so let's giggle together.

Doing so is pretty easy: you can subscribe to the giggle mailing list or join the Jabber chat room giggle on conference.imendio.com.

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

Downloads

Habe ich bisherigen Anfragen aus meinem Umfeld »Warum bist du nicht beim StudiVZ dabei?« immer nur antworten können, dass ich nicht sehe, was mir diese Anmeldung bringen sollte, hat mir der Blog-Eintrag von Tim doch endlich mal ein paar triftige Gründe liefern können:

Also von nun an gilt also folgendes: keine Daten an Datensammler (was ja ohnehin schon galt), die ihr System nicht auf die Reihe kriegen und nebenbei versuchen ihr angeschlagenes Image durch ein paar Lügen aufzubessern.

Auch bei Heise gibt's da eine hübsche Übersicht über das ach-so-tolle StudiVZ.

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.

So, ich hab' mich heute hingesetzt und ein wenig Spaß mit meiner neuen USIM gehabt. Heute ist folgendes passiert (Details folgen):

• Vodafone USIM gegen T-Mobile USIM getauscht
• SIM-Lock des UMTS-Modems aufgehoben
• pppd eingerichtet, sodass ich ins Internet komme

Leider macht das Ganze unter Ubuntu irgendwie noch nicht so richtig Spaß, weil mit dem Network Manager die hübsche Einbindung in den Desktop fehlt. Aber das sind Dinge, um die ich mich eventuell noch später kümmern werde.

So I finally made it to Berlin again. If you like to see some canvas demos or discuss some code with me, feel free to contact herzberg.sven@googlemail.com via Jabber.

Did you ever wonder why applications like nautilus display a node called »(empty)« in the tree? I didn't. There are several reasons that could be brought up here, but in my opinion the Windows Explorer just got it right:

1. if you don't know, display an expander
2. if you look at it and it's empty, just remove the expander

So I tried to implement this behaviour in GQ. It wasn't very easy, but it works. As I wrote last week, I suspected a bug in that code, so I developed a small test case to play with that feature. If you're interested in it for your application, take my example and build your own tree model.

As I just started a project that's supposed to contain the whole user interface in a canvas, I started to develop code for rendering backgrounds of items with gradients. It was quite tricky, because the first versions didn't work out the way I expected it. But with some extension of the current brush API I got a pretty nice result:

Gradient Demo

And I just added some small passages to my Git document about merging branches (answering the questions »How do I see the delta of my branch?« and »How do I merge the branch?«).