A little (geo)clue

Over the past week, I've been working a little on Geoclue stuff.

First up is a Geoclue plugin for gnome-bluetooth, which allows you to set up your Bluetooth GPS device.


This will work best with the patches in the Geoclue bugzilla, so that the selection is instant-apply.

The second piece of work is a Skyhook Geoclue provider. This code manages to put me within 20 yards of my house, though we should be getting NetworkManager's help to get the AP's MAC address.

Finally, my Geoclue Firefox patch should soon be getting reviewed. It's been long enough that I forgot how to build Mozilla (probably a good thing).

As an added bonus, I've sent a patch against NetworkManager to Dan with a gnome-bluetooth plugin, which should allow users to just tick a box to set up PANU Internet access.

Now, we just need somebody reviewing all those Geoclue patches. Maintainer, where are you at?

gdb trick

I had a problem with gnome-bluetooth's wizard, a couple of days ago, that I couldn't reproduce when running under gdb. Turns out that I'm too slow at typing or something, and the problem was a race (though a slow one).

There's a few tips and tricks in this class material. The one I was interested in was:
(gdb) break foobar_new
(gdb) commands
thread apply all bt
continue
end

Then, every time you hit that break point, you'll get a backtrace, and the program will continue. I fixed that bug I saw :)

I'm upstream!

Or at least, my Wacom Bluetooth tablet driver is. I was wondering in which tree it was lost. You'll still need a patch to bluetoothd though.

Simplez! Simple Pairing support now in gnome-bluetooth.

After a furious hacking session (and a bunch of paper-drawn mockups), Simple Pairing support is now in gnome-bluetooth.


Simple Pairing is an optional part of the Bluetooth 2.1 spec, which makes pairing Bluetooth device simpler. For most devices, simply check that the passkey matches on your computer and the device, or for headsets, do nothing, and voila, paired.

Code is in git master, release to follow shortly.

Entrevue

Just got back from France, where my best friend was getting married to his best friend. I didn't see civilisation for 5 days, and enjoyed food, wine, and the swimming-pool instead.

Just before I left Jackaboutboul interviewed me about the fingerprint reader support in Fedora 11. I hope I gave enough credit to Daniel Drake and Ray Strode for their work, without which mine wouldn't look half as good.

PS: I was tired when I wrote the answers, and my grammar and vocabulary is sub-par. I'm ashamed :)

Plugins, here they come

We now have plugins in gnome-bluetooth. The purpose is to allow third-party applications to offer additional setup steps for the Bluetooth device you just configured.

The above screenshot shows an example plugin that NetworkManager could provide, and with the click of a button, you'd have PAN set up between your computer and your mobile phone.

If your phone supports SyncML, then Conduit could show a button to allow setting up syncing, or when setting a GPS, you could have a button to set it up as the default GPS device for GeoClue.

Those plugin-provided widgets will also be available in a device properties dialogue for the Bluetooth preferences, when I get to it.

PS: Diego has kindly agreed to help out with the FreeFA organisation.
PPS: The widget layout is pretty broken, feel free to send patches through bugzilla.

Dear Diego, let's have a wager

Diego, here's a little bet for you. The supporter of the losing team in tonight's final will organise the FreeFA tournament?