CCC

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.

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?«).

At ImendioConf we had some discussions about version control systems and Tim was so kind to point me to Keith's blog post Repository Formats Matter. I read it and was really interested in trying out git.

Kjartan came up to me a month ago, giving a list of Gnome Canvas bugs to me that might be worth to look at. As there's hasn't been much to do for Imendio yet, I spent my working time and also some spare time on the Gnome Canvas during the last month.

It was quite nice to take a look at this code again. The most interesting part for me as a canvas developer was to take a more detailed look at some specific parts of Gnome Canvas that aren't really solved in a very good way (the reasons haven been technical issues mostly) and to get an idea of how to do some things a bit nicer.

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.

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.