IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day four

Day four. People had bad dreams last night due to the huge amount of cheese ingested. Will need to seek counselling. Travis' knee doesn't hurt too much anymore.

Today we discussed the interaction of the “presence chooser” in the Shell's user menu with IM statuses, especially given that we soon hope to make it possible to answer chats without launching an “empathy” binary. A number of options were discussed, and the best one now lives in a bug. (Note that both reports are incredibly detailed, thanks to Will Thompson's amazing screenwriting skills).

Morten then presented his current plan for integration of contacts within the Shell. More details are available on the wiki, and most of the problems and potential solutions were discussed at a high-rate, given the well-known problem space.

We missed out on some interesting changes to account creation (as well as edition) in Empathy/Telepathy yesterday.

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day three

Day three, and the walls are closing in.

Some of our hosts mention they have “work to do” and hide away from light, behind shades.

Alex Larsson showed up, bright and early in the Collabora offices, and most of the day has been spent working on a Folks hit list ^[1] with Travis and Philip as tech leads. Integration of GnuPG contacts metadata (can I encrypt e-mails for that person?), as well as more general IM integration in apps (slide-show sharing for example) was also mentioned, as we hope to share most of this infrastructure.

[1]: Travis' knee was on the hit list, got whacked against a table leg.

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day two

Day two, in the Collabora house, Rob Bradford graced us with his presence, on his birthday, and today started discussing integration of gnome-online-accounts into Empathy/Telepathy[1], libsocialweb and interactions with various accounts systems.

Most of the rest of the pre-lunch hacking was about setting ourselves up for hacking on the above. The afternoon was spent with much of the same, trying to get more documentation for things like Google's Chat authentication, including a draft patch to gnome-online-accounts, Empathy/Mission Control work for this support, and tons of related bug fixes.

The Telepathy hackers also discussed text handling in Telepathy (with the goal of making the specification clearer, avoid problems of "missed" messages, etc.).

[1]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652546 and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652544

nautilus-sendto plugin API

As promised in the nautilus-sendto module proposal, I fixed up the plugin API, wrote API docs, and exported the plugin functionality.

I've already patched Empathy to carry its own nautilus-sendto plugin, and will be moving the Pidgin and Bluetooth plugins in the near future.

New gnome-phone-manager and Telepathy

I just released a new tarball of gnome-phone-manager, version 0.40. New in this version is the Telepathy backend. It's still a work-in-progress. But it allows you to send and receive messages from any number of phones.

Here's a little screencast:



There are obviously a number of bugs, including the fact that none of the contacts from your phone show up in the buddy list, so you can't send new messages. Try using gnome-phone-manager itself for now, but the future lies here.

PS: Get your distros to update gnome-phone-manager. Fedora has the latest versions in rawhide and Fedora 8. Some distros *cough*buntu*cough* still ship ancient versions.

I's got some links

A bunch of post-GUADEC random linking.

Dieguito got me a new hackergotchi photo. He also sent a proper hackergotchi, which I won't post until I can get some vendetta photos of him being carried off the pitch by 4 people after getting real bad cramps. 4 people! Have you seen the size of the guy? Clearly a geek footie game.

Plenty of floods all around the south of the country meant I had to get the train through Euston instead of direct through Reading/Oxford. It was pretty fun seeing all those groups of GUADEC people in different locations: Birmingham New Street platform - "Hey kids", Euston tube station - "Hey kids", Tube to Waterloo.. well, you get the point. That also means I got to see Kate Silverton in wellies.

I kind of fell asleep, that really horrible kind of sleep when you're just feeling as tired and punch-drunk after waking up, and dreamt that I had to organise GUADEC again. I'm sure Paul and Thomas' similar nightmares will be much more vivid than mine.

The online desktop talks also meant I got to put into action (bug filing action for now) my ideas from last summer's "GNOME and Freud" talk. Feel free to comment on the ideas, in bugs 459505 and 458133.

Thanks to Vicky for:

• mentioning that I look like some Big Brother contestant. I don't. Isn't that rubbish finished already anyway? Hopefully they'll get flooded in.
• proof that some people live under a rock. Mmmh, pagan-ilicious.
• providing Daniel with some much needed literature.

I should mention that it was pretty fun picking on Xavier with vuntz, filing dozens of bugs against Empathy: Xavier! Ca va pas!