g-p-m/g-p-m integration

Richard sent me that little screenshot, showing off the gnome-phone-manager/gnome-power-manager integration, now in SVN of everything.

Yay! Integration! D-Bus! Buzzwords!

Hope I'm not stealing your thunder, but for once, you showed up on IRC after I did :)

My 3 GUADEC tasks

I had 3 main tasks when I came to GUADEC.

1. The USB keys
Mandriva provided us with 500 USB keys with a live distro, the usually-printed booklet, and loads of data provided by the sponsors (I quite liked that AMD chose to have compilers on there). If you didn't attend GUADEC, the booklet and data are available in the SVN repo. Shame they only arrived on Tuesday.

2. The football game
Apart from loads of bruises (and a huge nosebleed for me, thanks Glynn for ducking) and a map reading snafu to get there, it was great. For posterity, if you were there, please add the scores from your team and amend the teams if you got moved to another team. (My team finished second again, just one goal in it...). I should add that 3 hours of football is a bit too much.

3. Bluetooth and GNOME talk
Here's my slide, and the intro sound.

Slide 1

It was great not having any slides, but the video should be available very soon. As promised, here's a link to the use cases we have for Fedora.

More GUADEC-y stuff soon.

Tidbits

Some toys I've had in Ephy tabs for a while:

• Intel's Think Thin laptop
  
• Sony's 10th anniversary T-series
• Plenty of nice Bluetooth gear, for, hmm, software testing

At least the Sony Ericsson and Samsung phones would be useful for gnome-phone-manager testing.

Totem has made it on System76's list of recommended apps for their laptops. The laptops look quite nice on their own right.

After running into some problems with FC6's Firefox, I'm filling in this blog with a copy of Opera with static Qt (quick download, fast install), and noticed their new Speed Dial feature. It's neat, and if someone managed to integrate the HTML version of it in Epiphany, they'll get plenty of free beers at GUADEC.

Browse device

A complement to the gnome-vfs-obexftp work (most of which is already in James' tree).




All that is in my git repo:
git clone git://cgit.freedesktop.org/~hadess/bluez-gnome.git
Which you can view via the web:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/hadess/bluez-gnome.git;a=summary

I have no idea how git works, so don't be too surprised if it's broken.

Who wants leg surgery?

Thanks Benoît for the link to SUN's JDS patches.

If anyone ships this Totem patch, they get to fix all their bugs themselves. As if X worked that well with threads, they're making all the display locking no-ops. If it hangs, your libraries are broken, and you're just 4 years late fixing it.

Update: Damien kindly posted a link to the original bug report. And it confirmed my above assumption. They have a broken libXi. For reference, the original Totem bug report.

Mo' Bluetooth

In Bluetooth++, I showed the cups bluetooth backend enhancements. Marcel is currenly reviewing those, and should merge the code upstream next week. In the meantime, the code is available in bluez-utils-3.11-2.f8 in rawhide.

I've also been working on James' gnome-vfs-obexftp code. While the old code needed you to make hcid launch with the -x option to enable the experimental features (in this case the now-defunct RFCOMM service). Marcel told me it should be using RFCOMM sockets directly, and we now have a version of gnome-vfs-obexftp that works without any tinkering, and is also more reliable, and quicker.


It's also available in the repos for Fedora Core 6, Fedora 7 and rawhide under the name gnome-vfs2-obexftp.

Yay, less code

GTK+ now contains the old BaconVolume widget, called GtkVolumeButton. I hope we get GTK+ 2.12 for GNOME 2.20, so that Rhythmbox, Sound-juicer, Totem, Banshee, etc. can use the widget without cut'n'pasting bacon-volume.[ch].

Useless screenshot (you have to try it to believe it)

Many thanks to Ronald for writing the widget in the first place, and Matthias and Christian for the code reviews.

Licences and copyrights

A couple of problems have recently cropped up in the latest development of Totem, and we've tried our hardest to solve them.

One problem was that some files contained the exception to allow the linking of proprietary GStreamer plugins, but the addition of that exception wasn't agreed upon by the copyright holders.

This was the case of the plugins system (fixed), and the sidebar widget (fixed as well). The nautilus properties page was a draw. If we make it GPL with an exception, it wouldn't work anyway, as nautilus is GPL, and the properties page is linked directly in nautilus. The plan is to write a D-Bus helper, which would allow us to avoid hangs when checking the properties of some file.

Those relicencing was what kept me from making a release for 2.19.x, but it's sorted now. Many thanks to the copyright holders that allowed this to happen.

Well stripey week-end (aka stripey #5)

Lapo Calamandrei went a bit mad, and produced a clever piece of artistic genius.

I'm sure he'll post the full icon theme somewhere soon for all of us to enjoy (he sent me a copy, but it didn't install properly).

Another little computer gets on the market (where you at Jeff? missed the Zonbu?), runs some form of Linux with KDE, but uses Totem for their movie player. Can I get a free one, guys?


On Friday, I managed to solve that really annoying problem that made the browser plugin with the xine-lib backend just not work at all.

Good and bad things this week-end:

• Cello, creepy, although not the best of the kind
• Man United finally won it! After the debacle of last Wednesday against Milan, we'll get a row of honour against Chelsea on Wednesday evening.
• Pan's Labyrinth, a special fairy tale. Beautiful. Narnia is for weenies.
• Ma Mère, a couple of tits, but horrible French art-house malarkey
• Arsène Lupin, pretty shite
• Michel Vaillant, pretty fun if you remember the comic from when you were a kid
• Les Poupées Russes, where you see that Romain Duris can be a good actor
• Shite results in the French elections (not that the alternative was much better, but it still was). Berlusconi, I'm sure Nicolas can show you how to be a better crook, his predecessor has quite some experience too.

Guess what I did this week-end? (with stripes)

I watched another nerve-wrecking performance from United. I didn't yell that much though, as I was watching the game with Everton fan Gareth. I'm not one to rub it in.

We also went to said Gareth's girlfriend's birthday party, and had very little luck getting the Kärcher going. The hose keeps popping out under the pressure from the tap (ar, ar).

I've also spent some time trying to get both my laptop and my desktop to suspend. The laptop was fairly straight forward. No hacks, no quirks, just echo mem > /sys/power/state, and you're done. But I'm still hitting a weird bug when using gnome-power-manager to do it.
The desktop (a Dell Optiplex GX620) is a bit more problematic, as pm-suspend doesn't seem to use vbetool at all (despite having an Intel video card in there, but being an older FC6 install...), and the video is completely screwed up (yellow lines, and a lot of flashing blue and red) when resuming under X.

Watched Filles perdues cheveux gras (stopped after 20 minutes, French variété is only below some of their TV shows in things I hate about France), 300 (stopped after about 30 minutes, and finished some weeks later, why would Spartans behave like they were Gulf War I vets), and a Journey Through Porn (stopped 10 minutes near the end to watch Match Of The Day, not great, but still the best docu about pr0n I've seen).


PS: What on earth is going on with them stripes? The window of the local JJB Sports shop. Could it be the metrosexual influence of David Beckham?

More plugins, again

This time, the hero is Jan Arne Petersen, who added activation failure support to the plugin API, and then ported the GNOME 2.18 media player keys support, and LIRC remote control support to plugins. He also ported a lesser known functionality of Totem to the plugin system. The Gromit plugin allows "telestrator" mode. A picture speaks a thousand words.



It's not that well integrated into Totem itself, but the default configuration is still pretty good for Paul to have used it with his tablet to show american football moves.


On Tuesday, I received my new work laptop, a Dell Latitude D420. It's a shame I received it the day before they announced they were doing flash-drive versions. The latch sucks, the right of the underside gets pretty hot, and the screen is not as good as on my Sony laptop. But I didn't pay a penny for it, it's very light, and has cool shit like an ambient light sensor and a fingerprint reader, so it's all fine by me. I started filing a good bunch of bugs about making it work better, which will hopefully get fixed in due time.

Useless discussion bait #1697

Apple invents Galago:

For example, Apple said the framework will allow developers to programatically determine through their own applications whether a specific instant message user is online[...].

We're well known for nicking ideas from Apple, and they also like to steal some from us, which isn't surprising given some of the cross-breeding among the communities that's happened over the years.

They still have a much better record at bringing those features to the users (Beagle vs. Spotlight, where the latter is integrated in many many more applications than Beagle is), and even better at advertising them (with pretty moving pictures).

Sqeaky bum time!

Fedora 7 is gearing up, and I'm spending most of my time fixing bugs. If you have a pet peeve (a bug, not a feature) for Rhythmbox, or Totem, be sure to let me know (by filing bugs in Bugzilla!).

I'm very happy that project for accepted for an SoC project. It means I won't have to do it myself, and that the person got the best mentor possible, the BlueZ man himself. And I'm never tired of hearing some success stories with the browser plugin. Changes a bit from all the bugs :/

I hope Aaron finishes his encoding profiles code in time for GNOME 2.20, as I don't won't to have to deal with gnome-media's profile code anymore.

Watched a couple of films: The Interpreter (I wanted to slap and drown Nicole Kidman for most of the film, certainly not her best film by a margin, and Sean Penn should stick to indie movies, which is what we like him for), and The Jacket, a tip-top if weird thriller. Bit like bath water near the end (soapy).

PS: In case you wonder where that title comes from. Plenty more goals where that came from.

I'm away

After a day of work at the factory^Wfixing bugs, I committed some more plugin work to Totem. Philip Withnall wrote a Galago plugin, as featured in the screenie below. It will set your Gossip (with Peekaboo support), or Pidgin (with the gaim-galago plugin) as away when watching a film fullscreen.



I added support for sidebar plugins, which means people can get cranking at an IMDB cover sidebar, a DAAP browser for videos, or even a tagger for Beagle or Tracker.

Thanks to David Schleef, I got libtool to like me (and my uninstalled shared library). noinst_LTLIBRARIES wouldn't compile a .so, so my plugin loader couldn't find it. The trick is install-pluginLTLIBRARIES:. Thanks David.

PS: fonts don't work one bit in Blogger, so no fancy monospaced font for the bits of code...

The playlist parser API has changed!

If you're a user of Totem's playlist parser API, you'll need to update to the new API. The change is pretty straight forward, instead of passing the title and the genre as arguments of the "entry" signal, we now pass a hashtable of extra information to the "entry-parsed" signal.

This means that you should be able to get extra information you couldn't before, such as the duration for a specific entry from ASX playlists, or comments from XSPF playlists.

I'd help, but my engine has problems

I've just finished an (almost) all-nighter to finishing stealing code from Rhythmbox. As soon as the licensing is sorted out, Totem will be getting plugins, so I can start cleaning up the code, and fix some long-standing bugs. This might also mean some cool new features like posters, or TV guides. Let's see what we can do.

First Totem plugin ever

OMGKYHO!

Ronald, that'd be because there's a bug in the code, and the free Fluendo MP3 plugin would be what shows up as the default in this dialogue. As Brian mentioned, the Codec Buddy page explains what this is about.

And the dialogue only shows what you need to download at first, I just changed the view so it looked a bit less empty.

PS: That's Oh my God, keep your hair on!

Totem news

At least some sort of news.

First off, I just committed support for xdg-user-dirs to Totem, so your Movies and Music directories will show up in the file choosers (which fixes a bug where Ross tried his hardest not to understand what I was talking about, and used "fab").

Secondly, Tim and Thomas have been hacking on codeina, the interesting part of Codec-Buddy. It allows users to purchase the codecs from Fluendo when they can't play a proprietary format. Hopefully, it will be useful for users that want to support Fluendo/don't know where to get Open Source alternatives/want great Windows Media support.

Paying for stuff can look good!

Finally, I committed some rough code to watch TV in Totem (xine-lib backend) using DVB cards. It's far from finished, but after creating a ~/.xine/channels.conf using w_scan (the easiest way I've found to create tuner data yet), "totem dvb:" will list all your channels in the playlist, and you're ready to lose some time.

Films: one great film, The Machinist (for those who liked Memento), 2 decent ones, Angel-A, and Cars, one I'm ashamed of, but not that much, The Devil Wears Prada, and an utter pile of crap that I stopped before the end (actually, near the beginning), Ultraviolet.

Exclusive GUADEC posters for Comic Relief

Much like Paul, I'm selling some exciting memorabilia on eBay for Comic Relief. I had a lot of fun watching tonight (there's DVDs of the program for sale, well worth the pennies), and thought I'd sell my recently recovered posters.

Held by booze and fags, a wonderful poster

Unlike the picture, the poster doesn't look washed out. You will get one autographed poster, with the likes of Tigert, Jimmac, Miguel, Telsa, Jim Gettys, and many more (including yours truly). You will also get a clean one, to compare, and all. I expect to get at least a 100 quid off of it, so don't let me down.

BUY IT!

What did I miss?

Pfff. I go away for a couple of days to watch a football game, and both RHEL 5 and GNOME 2.18 get released in my absence. In a somewhat related way, I didn't know Zara had a men section. Hoooo, manic monkeys!