OSS Planets (Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu)

Tim Horton: Clutterhs First Release

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:36:17 -0800

My good friend and roommate Matt Arsenault has just pushed the initial (0.1) release of his Clutter bindings for Haskell. This was his RCOS project for this semester.

Anyway, if you speak Haskell and enjoy Clutter, download them and see what you can do! He's looking for lots of input for the next steps, so please have at it...

Jono Bacon: The Shot Of Jaq Train Begins

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:09:11 -0800

Yesterday we kicked out our first proper episode of Shot Of Jaq and I am chuffed to bits with the response. Right now it stands at 42 comments, and I am sure this will continue to grow.

The whole idea behind Shot Of Jaq is that our 10 minute shot acts as the start of a conversation, and then the conversation continues on shotofjaq.org. With Shot Of Jaq being something of an experiment, I am tickled pink that our first shot has generated so much interesting discussion. I am also excited that we are seeing the beginnings of the Shot Of Jaq community forming, and we have some awesome community members already knee deep in the Shot Of Jaq spirit. Thanks so much to you all for throwing both feet in and getting involved. If you have not yet joined the conversation, go here and join us!

In the interests of making sure the Shot Of Jaq (and Severed Fifth) sound quality is top notch, yesterday we got up at 4am and went shopping on Black Friday. There I bought a new studio computer (Quad Core Athlon 2, 8GB RAM, 640GB disk, 20″ screen), new control surface (Tascam FW-1082), bought Aq a Shure X2U XLR to USB for his side of the recording (I will give him one of our Sennheiser mics) and I have some other bits on my list to upgrade.

The next episode of Shot Of Jaq will be out on Tuesday. Looking forward to it!

Lydia Pintscher (Nightrose): Let’s make identi.ca and Twitter a little more KDE!

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:26:02 -0800

It’s been bugging me for a while that most sites on identi.ca and Twitter look rather boring and I thought it would be nice to give them a little KDE touch. cosmonautirussi was so kind to do some cool backgrounds for KDE contributors, developers, translators and users as well as a generic one. You can just upload them to identi.ca (or any other StatusNet site) and Twitter, adjust the page background color a little to fit your taste and voila!

You can grab them on community.kde.org.

Wanna see what it looks like in action? Check out this, this, this and this.

Zeeshan Ali: We can has Python too

noreply@blogger.com (zeenix) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:14:00 -0800

Zachary Goldberg reports:

As I've been mentioning lately I have been working on using PyGObject + GObject Introspection (recently forked, now called PyGI + PyGObject + Gobject Introspection) and have some exciting news!

I have been working on fleshing out a whole bunch of unit tests which exercise the entire GUPnP API. I hate a major roadblock in that PyGI did not support native callbacks! So, after a week or two detour I have implemented PyGI callbacks (which now work rather nicely, but need a bunch of stylistic cleanups and error checking before its pushed back upstream.. priorities!) as well as some working GUPnP demos.

My best demo so far is about 25 lines of python which:

1) Gets all devices on one network interface
2) Scans for all the services each device provides
3) If the device is GMediaRenderer and it provides an AVTransport Service (it does...) then it
3a) Stops whatever is currently playing
3b) Loads a new URI (hardcoded from my mediatomb server for now, havn't played enough with gupnp-av to dynamically get the mediatomb data -- for now!)
3c) Initiates playing

3a->3c have been tested using the synchronous GUPnP action api (send_action...) as well as the asynchronous API (begin_action.... end_action...) with callbacks!

Update: Seems this info is out-dated already, Zach has done quite some more after this.

Ray Strode: Plymouth ⟶ X transition

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:09:50 -0800

So one of the big polish bits in the boot process is the transition from plymouth to X. In Fedora, we worked to make it as seemless as possible when we first started on the Better Startup stuff a few releases ago.

If you haven’t seen it, when boot up finishes, plymouth settles down the boot splash to a transitionable animation frame, then the mouse pointer shows up, and GDM’s background cross fades in while the login window maps and expands to show frequently logged in users. In the best case, this transition all happens without any flicker, resolution changes, black intermediate screens, or console text showing up.

The way we accomplished this was:

I gave “plymouth quit” a “–retain-splash” option which told plymouth to keep the boot splash’s contents on screen even after plymouth exits
krh and ajax added a -nr option to the X server to make X not clear the screen to black (or a weave) at start up
krh, airlied, and darktama (Ben Skeggs) added the driver backend support for -nr to intel, ati, and nouveau drivers respectiviely. Also, Bill Nottingham made -nr work with the fbdev X driver.
ajax made the ugly big “X” mouse cursor not show up by default
I made gdm stuff the screen contents to a pixmap referenced by the pseudo-standard _XROOTPMAP_ID root window property
I also made gnome-settings-daemon cross fade from the _XROOTPMAP_ID pixmap when it loads its background. This step meant we also get a nice transition from gdm to the user’s session, because it also causes a crossfade to happen from gdm’s background to the user’s background during login.

Another big piece to the puzzle was kernel modesetting. This is what makes sure the right mode is set at boot up from the start. Jesse Barnes and krh did most of the work for that in the Intel driver (based on top of the memory manager work anholt, keithp, and other Intel crew did), while airlied did it for the ati driver, and darktama did it for nouveau.

This all works pretty well these days, but one big wrinkle in the whole process is the hand off from plymouth to gdm. Plymouth exits, leaving the system in KD_GRAPHICS mode and hopes that X starts and picks up the peices. This is not a very robust design, because if X doesn’t start, the system will be stuck in KD_GRAPHICS mode and the user won’t be able to switch VTs or really do anything at all, but reboot.

Furthermore, when plymouth exits, the kernel sets the scan out buffer to the frame buffer of the console. This is because the previous scan out buffer was owned by plymouth and goes away when plymouth exits. That means in order to keep things seemless we need to copy the last frame of the animation from plymouth’s framebuffer to the console frame buffer. This extra copy is unfortunate, because it means the kernel console has to be configured the same way as plymouth, but in multihead set ups it’s not. The kernel console “clones” the ttys across all heads, forcing every head to be the same resolution. But plymouth (and X) want every head to run in native resolution. This means in multihead setups we can’t do the copy because the pixel layouts aren’t the same, so we end up filling with black instead.

I’ve wanted to improve this situation for a while, but haven’t really been able to prioritize it above other various bits of work that need to be done. Since I’m on Thanksgiving break I can, in good conscience, ignore my priority list and just work on what I want, so I decided to work on this problem a bit :-)

I just merged the “no-fbcon” branch to plymouth master. It adds a new way to “deactivate” plymouth such that it’s still on screen and idly running, but X can start and take over anyway. This combined with some gdm changes to tell plymouth to go away in the appropriate way after X is started or fails to start means we solve the robustness issues and avoid the extra fbcon copy.

It actually only took a few hours to do. I probably should have made time for it before break.

Thomas Vander Stichele: Python ugliness

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:06:11 -0800

I usually tend to think of Python as the discerning gentleman’s programming language: well-behaved, well-documented, people take care of the code written. I like the batteries-included approach and assume that the battery code in the standard library is well-written. “import this” is a vision statement directly included in the language – it’s hard to get more stylish than that.

I got an eye-opener this weekend however. I was still on my quest to get desktopcouch and ubuntuone working on Fedora. While wresting with this bug and doing things that I usually consider a hanging offense (changing /usr-installed code by adding prints to figure out where the craziness was coming from) I finally drilled down to the exception-raising reason. It all boiled down to a single line of code in httplib.py:
def __init__(self, host, port=None, key_file=None, cert_file=None, strict=None, timeout=socket._GLOBAL_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT):
where socket.py contains
_GLOBAL_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT = object()

So, in a nutshell, httplib2.py tracebacks because of this new object, which isn’t a valid argument to sock.settimeout()

Now, I’m pretty sure I’m running into this problem because I’m doing “bad” things to some of the stdlib, pulling in bits I need to make ubuntuone (coded on a 2.6.3 python where my Fedora 11 comes with 2.6) work.

But pulling the cover off like this did point out this one object that:

seems to be intended to be private, but it gets referenced from other stdlib modules
comes with no documentation at all
comes with not a single comment explaining *why* it’s there, or *why* it’s ok to just create a completely empty and useless “object” that you can’t even trace the origin of (I had to override __setattr__ on some class to figure out what the anonymous object was, and where it was being set from, to find it)

Maybe I’m oldfashioned, but this leaves me disappointed. This one line breaks beauty, explicitness, and readability that is included in the Zen of Python.

The only attempt at explaining I found is this.

Any Python guru want to set me straight on why this isn’t the incredibly ugly wart on stdlib that I consider it to be ?

Meanwhile I’ll go digging in svn to see when it was added to 2.6 and why.

Jos Poortvliet: KOffice meeting

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:27:14 -0800

Had a good flight yesterday, now I'm in Oslo. The KOffice meeting has started. Was a bit late this morning - The Other Jos had put his phone (with alarm set) next to my bed. He needs to do that to force himself to get up and turn it off. However, I didn't need to get out of bed - just smash the phone. Ok, didn't do that, but I did turn it of quickly, turned around and continued sleeping. The Other Jos didn't even wake up. We had to take a cab, shared with Jstaniek and lukas Tvrdy.

Aaah well. Be on the lookout for an article later today, it's under review now ;-)

Erich Schubert: Tracking Google image search in Analytics

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:52:00 -0800

I do not really understand why they don't support this themselves, but Google Analytics will not track keywords for Google image search. Instead it just shows up as "referrer". A site I'm webmaster for, Swing and the City, gets a lot of image search exposure (funnily for an image that is gone since August, Google also needs to work on their index, too), so it was a bit odd to have images.google.com show up as top referrer but not "organic search".

Here's the code I use to fix this:

var r=document.referrer;
if(r.search(/images.google/)!=-1 && r.search(/prev/)!=-1){ var e=new RegExp("images.google.([^\/]+).*&prev=([^&]+)"); var m=e.exec(r); pt._addOrganic("images.google","q",true); pt._setReferrerOverride("http://images.google."+m[1]+unescape(m[2]));
};
pt._addOrganic("maps.google","q",true);
pt._addOrganic("forestle.org","q",true);
pt._trackPageview();

Note that image search is more complicated than the maps and forestle search engines I also add for keyword tracking. The original query is encoded in the "prev" parameter, and the easiest (or only?) way to get working tracking is to use the ReferrerOverride function of analytics.

Note: this is not a straight copy & paste, since I use this code in a compressed and encoded (for injection into the page via DOM ops) form. So no guarantee of syntax completeness. You'll need to adjust it to your variable naming anyway (I use "pt" instead of "pageTracker"). This is just to show you the use of unescape on the "prev" parameter for this purpose.

Ariya Hidayat: putu, kelepon, terang bulan

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:23:19 -0800

While enjoying this vacation, I managed to steal few hours to do some fun coding. Nothing spectacular, but it yielded something I will surely share in the near future. However, since I am still in the mood of bombing the planet again, here is another post with food pictures.

Something else we were glad to taste during our extremely short visit to Bandung were Putu and Kelepon, typically sold at the price of 1 EUR for 25 pieces. They are basically rice cake filled with palm sugar and served with grated coconut. Putu is steamed, while kelepon is boiled. The latter is also colored using pandan leaves.

While sampling culinary specialties means that we do not cook quite often, when the opportunity presents itself, it is of course a good feeling to eat something home-made once a while. Here is one: Terang Bulan (literally: bright moon). It is some sort of pancake, very similar to Martabak except Terang Bulan is filled with sugar, sprinkles, condensed milk, cheese, and the likes. Hence, it is also known as Martabak Manis (literally: sweet Martabak), a term that is somehow I dislike (because language-wise it is unnecessary as there exists a good name for that and thus it extends and pollutes the meaning of Martabak with a very weak reason).

The recipe? Check what this lady has posted. Terang Bulan is sweet and healthy (reduce the amount of sugar if in doubt), it makes for a good snack in the afternoon.

Last but not least: Eid Mubarak to everyone!

Chani Armitage (Chani): The Future of Activities

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:18:52 -0800

Since last Akademy, several plasma people have been thinking about activities, and virtual desktops, and What It All Really Means. We had some good discussions at akademy, and at tokamak, and online too. KWin and Nepomuk people were involved as well, although I wish that KWin guy (..mgraesslin? sorry, I suck at names) had been able to stay at tokamak longer. :)

We’ve emerged with a new vision of what activities are all about, and I’d like to share that vision so that I don’t get blank stares when I mention how much I wish I had activities already. ;)

Where We’re Going

See, what we have right now, that we call activities… they’re not what I think of as activities any more. They’re just desktop containments, groups of plasmoids. They can have a name, but nothing makes use of that yet. What I think of as an “activity” is the entirety of what I’m working on at the moment – be it a kde-related project or a university course or just reading lots of comics. :) This activity includes several windows from several applications. It includes files needed for the project. It includes a set of plasmoids, like the one I put my list of math questions on and the calculator plasmoid to go with it. At times it includes only *part* of an application: show me school email folders when I’m doing schoolwork, hide the KDE lists so that I’m less tempted to procrastinate. ;) Some activities have lots of associated windows, and since I can’t carry around a spare monitor with my laptop, I’ll use virtual desktops to have more “space” to lay out my windows for that activity.

When I’m working on one activity, I don’t want to be distracted by other activites. Everything related to the other activities is out of my way, sitting on *those* activities only. If my hardware isn’t up to leaving all my activities running at the same time, or if I just want to pack one away because I won’t be needing it for a while, I can do so, and everything that’s no longer needed will be closed. When I want that activity again I can load it up and return right where I left off.

If I open a document tagged for a certain activity, it’ll be associated with that activity by default; if there’s no obvious association then the new window will be available on all activities until I choose to associate it. Windows can be associated with any number of activities, so I can have anki associated with both of the courses I use it for and still not be bothered by it when I’m hacking on plasma.

Now, that vision is fairly bold. It includes a lot of features that don’t exist at the moment. You will *not* see all these features in KDE 4.4, not by a long shot. However, a lot of the framework already exists. Code was recently committed to Nepomuk to represent activites there; and from there, any program can ask what activity we’re on and update itself to fit. KWin code can be written to hide windows that don’t belong. Plasma will have a new bar (a bit like the new add-widgets bar probably) for managing actvities (not until 4.5 now, I’m afraid). Saving little mini-sessions of windows along with the activity is something I’m going to investigate over christmas (hoping it won’t be too painful :).

There are still details that haven’t been filled in (like, what happens to the activity-per-desktop setting? is it possible to have a mode where activities and virtual desktops act as one?), but we have another tokamak in february, and I’m sure more good ideas will come from that. Once things actually begin to take shape, more of the pieces should fall into place, and in the end we’ll be another step closer to a workspace that enables you to get work done instead of having to be worked around. :)

How We Get There

Here’s a rough roadmap for when I expect these features to show up. It’s not set in stone, of course; we could get an awesome volunteer who goes and does half the work in a few weeks, or we could lose a key person to other commitments and not be able to get it done as fast… but I’m hoping it’ll go somewhat vaguely like this:

4.4
Plasma still has a ZUI, although the only feature not reachable from elsewhere is dragging a widget between activities. Nepomuk advertises which activity the user is on, but no applications are listening yet.

4.5
Windows can be associated with activities; those windows will only show on the activities they’re associated with. Plasma will have an activity manager instead of a ZUI. Saving and loading the plasma side of activities will work, but windows won’t go with them.

4.6
Windows will be saved and restored with the activity. Applications will start offering the ability to show data specific to the current activity. Experiments with automatically associating new windows to the right activity begin.

4.7
???

4.8
Profit! ;)

So, it’s probably going to take a while – but I think it’ll be really cool, and really useful… almost every day now I’m wishing I could organize my stuff by activity instead of having lots of windows all mixed together… even with 6 virtual desktops :P there’s just not enough flexibility in what we have now.

Sujith H (sujith_h): KDE Contribution – 3