I’ve been pretty happy with the Unifi wifi access points I picked up a few months back, but one of the things I hadn’t managed to replicate over my old setup was a guest wifi network. If I went all-in and bought a Unifi router, this would probably be fairly trivial to set up. But I wanted to build on the equipment I already had for now. Looking at some old docs, I’d need to get trunked VLAN traffic to the APs to separate the main and guest networks.

A while back I bought some UniFi access points. I hadn’t gotten round to setting up the Network Controller software to properly manage them though, so thought I’d dig into setting that up.

Last week I gave a talk at Perth Linux Users Group about building IoT projects using Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft. The video is now available online. Unfortunately there were some problems with the audio setup leading to some background noise in the video, but it is still intelligible: The slides used in the talk can be found here. The talk was focused on how Ubuntu Core could be used to help with the ongoing security and maintenance of IoT projects.

While working on a feature for snapd, we had a need to perform a "secure bind mount". In this context, "secure" meant: The source and/or target of the mount is owned by a less privileged user. User processes will continue to run while we're performing the mount (so solutions that involve suspending all user processes are out). While we can't prevent the user from moving the mount point, they should not be able to trick us into mounting to locations they don't control (e.

One of the options available when configuring the my ThinkPad was an Infrared camera. The main selling point being "Windows Hello" facial recognition based login. While I wasn't planning on keeping Windows on the system, I was curious to see what I could do with it under Linux. Hopefully this is of use to anyone else trying to get it to work. The camera is manufactured by Chicony Electronics (probably a CKFGE03 or similar), and shows up as two USB devices:

I’ve been pretty happy with the Unifi wifi access points I picked up a few months back, but one of the things I hadn’t managed to replicate over my old setup was a guest wifi network. If I went all-in and bought a Unifi router, this would probably be fairly trivial to set up. But I wanted to build on the equipment I already had for now. Looking at some old docs, I’d need to get trunked VLAN traffic to the APs to separate the main and guest networks.

A while back I bought some UniFi access points. I hadn’t gotten round to setting up the Network Controller software to properly manage them though, so thought I’d dig into setting that up.

I’ve been pretty happy with the Unifi wifi access points I picked up a few months back, but one of the things I hadn’t managed to replicate over my old setup was a guest wifi network. If I went all-in and bought a Unifi router, this would probably be fairly trivial to set up. But I wanted to build on the equipment I already had for now. Looking at some old docs, I’d need to get trunked VLAN traffic to the APs to separate the main and guest networks.

A while back I bought some UniFi access points. I hadn’t gotten round to setting up the Network Controller software to properly manage them though, so thought I’d dig into setting that up.

A while back I bought some UniFi access points. I hadn’t gotten round to setting up the Network Controller software to properly manage them though, so thought I’d dig into setting that up.

To help keep myself honest, I wanted to set up automated test runs on a few personal projects I host on Github. At first I gave Travis a try, since a number of projects I contribute to use it, but it felt a bit clunky. When I found Github had a new CI system in beta, I signed up for the beta and was accepted a few weeks later. While it is still in development, the configuration language feels lean and powerful.

Last week I gave a talk at Perth Linux Users Group about building IoT projects using Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft. The video is now available online. Unfortunately there were some problems with the audio setup leading to some background noise in the video, but it is still intelligible: The slides used in the talk can be found here. The talk was focused on how Ubuntu Core could be used to help with the ongoing security and maintenance of IoT projects.

When the Ubuntu Phone project was cancelled, I moved to the desktop team. The initial goal for team was to bring up a GNOME 3 based desktop for the Ubuntu 17.10 release that would be familiar to both Ubuntu users coming from the earlier Unity desktop, and users of “vanilla” GNOME 3.

While working on a feature for snapd, we had a need to perform a "secure bind mount". In this context, "secure" meant: The source and/or target of the mount is owned by a less privileged user. User processes will continue to run while we're performing the mount (so solutions that involve suspending all user processes are out). While we can't prevent the user from moving the mount point, they should not be able to trick us into mounting to locations they don't control (e.

One of the options available when configuring the my ThinkPad was an Infrared camera. The main selling point being "Windows Hello" facial recognition based login. While I wasn't planning on keeping Windows on the system, I was curious to see what I could do with it under Linux. Hopefully this is of use to anyone else trying to get it to work. The camera is manufactured by Chicony Electronics (probably a CKFGE03 or similar), and shows up as two USB devices:

At the end of 2012, I moved from Ubuntu One to the Unity API Team at Canonical. This team was responsible for various services that supported the Unity desktop shell: most noticeably the search functionality. This work initially focused on the Unity 7 desktop shipping with Ubuntu, but then changed focus to the Unity 8 rewrite used by the Ubuntu Phone project.

Ubuntu One was a set of online services provided by Canonical for Ubuntu users. It provided cloud hosted storage for files and structured data, synchronised to the user’s local machine. The Ubuntu One service was discontinued in 2014.

One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site. While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update. I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).

Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report. There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right. If you're interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look. Comments: e - 27 Oct, 2009 Have you seen the perl language?

In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel's tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API. It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker. The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file for the "org.

I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer. Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis. MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to the PS3.

From 2004 to 2008, I worked on the Launchpad code hosting site for Canonical. As well as providing hosting for third party Open Source projects, the site is central to the Ubuntu project: doing everything from bug tracking to managing the package repository.

I arrived in Prague yesterday for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Including time spent in transit in Singapore and London, the flights took about 30 hours. As I was flying on BA, I got to experience Heathrow Terminal 5. It wasn't quite as bad as some of the horror stories I'd heard. There were definitely aspects that weren't forgiving of mistakes. For example, when taking the train to the "B" section there was a sign saying that if you accidentally got on the train when you shouldn't have it would take 40 minutes to get back to the "A" section.

Since upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy I've occasionally been seeing the following notification from GNOME Power Manager: I'd usually trigger this error by unplugging the AC adapter and then picking suspend from GPM's left click menu. My first thought on seeing this was "What's a policy timeout, and why is it not valid?" followed by "I don't remember setting a policy timeout". Looking at bug 492132 I found a pointer to the policy_suppression_timeout gconf value, whose description gives a bit more information.

I am at Narita Airport at the moment, on the way to Boston for some of the meetings being held during UDS. It'll be good to catch up with everyone again. Hopefully this trip won't be as eventful as the previous one to Florida :)

When Storm was released, one of the comments made was that it did not include the ability to generate a database schema from the Python classes used to represent the tables while this feature is available in a number of competing ORMs. The simple reason for this is that we haven't used schema generation in any of our ORM-using projects. Furthermore I'd argue that schema generation is not really appropriate for long lived projects where the data stored in the database is important.

I got round to upgrading my desktop system to Gutsy today. I'd upgraded my laptop the previous week, so was not expecting much in the way of problems. I'd done the original install on my desktop back in the Warty days, and the root partition was a bit too small to perform the upgrade. As there was a fair bit of accumulated crud, I decided to do a clean install. Things mostly worked, but there were a few problems, which I detail below:

The new Canonical Shop was opened recently which allows you to buy anything from Ubuntu tshirts and DVDs up to a 24/7 support contract for your server. One thing to note is that this is the first site using our new Launchpad single sign-on infrastructure. We will be rolling this out to other sites in time, which should give a better user experience to the existing shared authentication system currently in place for the wikis.

It hasn't been long since the last gnome-vfs-obexftp release, but I thought it'd be good to get these fixes out before undertaking more invasive development. The new version is available from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.4/ The highlights of this release are: If the phone does not provide free space values in the OBEX capability object, do not report this as zero free space. This fixes Nautilus file copy behaviour on a number of Sony Ericsson phones.

I've had a number of requests for USB support in gnome-vfs-obexftp. At first I didn't have much luck talking to my phone via USB. Running the obex_test utility from OpenOBEX gave the following results: $ obex_test -u Using USB transport, querying available interfaces Interface 0: (null) Interface 1: (null) Interface 2: (null) Use 'obex_test -u interface_number' to run interactive OBEX test client Trying to talk via any of these interface numbers failed.

I've just released a new version of gnome-vfs-obexftp, which includes the features discussed previously. It can be downloaded from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.3/ The highlights of the release include: Sync osso-gwobex and osso-gnome-vfs-extras changes from Maemo Subversion. Instead of asking hcid to set up the RFCOMM device for communication, use an RFCOMM socket directly. This is both faster and doesn't require enabling experimental hcid interfaces. Based on work from Bastien Nocera. Improve free space calculation for Nokia phones with multiple memory types (e.

Previously, I posted about the FM radio plugin I was working on. I just posted the code to bug 168735. A few notes about the implementation: The code only supports Video4Linux 2 radio tuners (since that’s the interface my device supports, and the V4L1 compatibility layer doesn’t work for it). It should be possible to port it support both protocols if someone is interested. It does not pass the audio through the GStreamer pipeline.

I've been working on some FM radio support in Rhythmbox in my spare time. Below is screenshot At the moment, the basic tuning and mute/unmute works fine with my DSB-R100. I don't have any UI for adding/removing stations at the moment though, so it is necessary to edit ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to add them. Comments: Joel - 4 May, 2007 This feature would truly be a welcome addition! I'm especially pleased it's being developed by a fellow Australian!

I upgraded to Feisty about a month or so ago, and it has been a nice improvement so far. One regression I noticed though was that my USB FM radio tuner had stopped working (or at least, Gnomeradio could no longer tune it). It turns out that some time between the kernel release found in Edgy and the one found in Feisty, the dsbr100 driver had been upgraded from the Video4Linux 1 API to Video4Linux 2.

Today we unveiled the Launchpad 1.0 User Interface, which has been in private beta for the last few months. As well as the improved visual appearance, there are a number of new features such as the ability to add your own branding to Launchpad pages associated with your project (for example, Ubuntu's pages). As mentioned in the press release, we've got two new high profile projects using us for bug tracking: The Zope 3 Project and The Silva Content Management System.

Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125). One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database.

I arrived in San Francisco today for the Canonical company conference. Seems like a nice place, and not too cold :). So far I've just gone for a walk along Fisherman's Wharf for a few hours. There look On the plane trip, I had a chance to see Last Train to Freo, which I didn't get round to seeing in the cinemas. Definitely worth watching.

Like a few other states, Western Australia does not do daylight saving. Recently the state parliament has been discussing a Daylight saving bill. The bill is now before the Legislative Council (the upper house). If the bill gets passed, there will be a 3 year trial followed by a referendum to see if we want to continue. I hadn't been paying too much attention to it, and had assumed they would be talking about starting the trial next year.

I published a Bazaar branch of the Nautilus obex method here: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp This version works with the hcid daemon included with Ubuntu Edgy, rather than requiring the btcond daemon from Maemo. Some simple instructions on building it: Download and build the osso-gwobex library: svn checkout https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/connectivity/osso-gwobex/trunk osso-gwobex The debian/ directory should work fine to build a package using debuild. Download and build the obex module: bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp There is no debian packaging for this — just an autogen.

In my previous entry about using the Maemo obex-module on the desktop, Johan Hedberg mentioned that bluez-utils 3.7 included equivalent interfaces to the osso-gwconnect daemon used by the method. Since then, the copy of bluez-utils in Edgy has been updated to 3.7, and the necessary interfaces are enabled in hcid by default. Before trying to modify the VFS code, I thought I'd experiment a bit with the D-BUS interfaces via the D-BUS python bindings.

When I got my new laptop, one of the features it had that my previous one didn't was Bluetooth support. There are a few Bluetooth related utilities for Gnome that let you send and receive SMS messages and a few other things, but a big missing feature is the ability to transfer files to and from the phone easily. Ideally, I'd be able to browse the phone's file system using Nautilus.

Earlier in the year, we migrated the bugs from bugzilla.ubuntu.com over to Launchpad. This process involved changes to the bug numbers, since the Launchpad is used for more than just Ubuntu and already had a number of bugs reported in the system. People often refer to other bugs in comments, which both Bugzilla and Launchpad conveniently turn into links. The changed bug numbers meant that the bug references in the comments ended up pointing to the wrong bugs.

I've been testing out Ekiga recently, and so far the experience has been a bit hit and miss. Firewall traversal has been unreliable. Some numbers (like the SIPPhone echo test) work great. In some cases, no traffic has gotten through (where both parties were behind Linux firewalls). In other cases, voice gets through in one direction but not the other. Robert Collins has some instructions on setting up siproxd which might solve all this though, so I'll have to try that.

Thought I'd post a followup on my previous post since it generated a bit of interest. First a quick summary: It is not an Ubuntu Dapper specific bug. With the appropriate combination of fonts and pango versions, it will exhibit itself on other Pango-enabled Firefox builds (it was verified on the Fedora build too). It is not a DejaVu bug, although it is one of the few fonts to exhibit the problem.

Ran into an annoying Firefox bug after upgrading to Ubuntu Dapper. It seems to affect rendering of ligatures. At this point, I am not sure if it is an Ubuntu specific bug. The current conditions I know of to trigger the bug are: Firefox 1.5 (I am using the 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-1ubuntu10 package). Pango rendering enabled (the default for Ubuntu). The web page must use a font that contains ligatures and use those ligatures.

I've been in London for a bit over a week now at the Launchpad sprint. We've been staying in a hotel near the Excel exhibition centre in Docklands, which has a nice view of the docs and you can see the planes landing at the airport out the windows of the conference rooms. I met up with James Bromberger (one of the two main organisers of linux.conf.au 2003) on Thursday, which is the first time I've seen him since he left for the UK after the conference.

Launchpad got a mention in the latest Everybody Loves Eric Raymond comic. It is full of inaccuracies though — we use XML-RPC rather than SOAP. Comments: opi - 24 Feb, 2006 Oh, c'mon. It was quite fun. :-)

The Bugzilla migration on Friday went quite well, so we've now got all the old Ubuntu bug reports in Launchpad. Before the migration, we were up to bug #6760. Now that the migration is complete, there are more than 28000 bugs in the system. Here are some quick points to help with the transition: All bugzilla.ubuntu.com accounts were migrated to Launchpad accounts with a few caveats: If you already had a Launchpad account with your bugzilla email address associated with it, then the existing Launchpad account was used.

The migration is finally going to happen, after much testing of migration code and improvements to Malone. If all goes well, Ubuntu will be using a single bug tracker again on Friday (as opposed to the current system where bugs in main go in Bugzilla and bugs in universe go in Malone). Comments: Keshav - 17 Jan, 2006 Hiiii, I am Keshav and i am 22. I am working as software dev.

Joao: you can configure XScreenSaver to show a "Switch User" button in it's password dialog (which calls gdmflexiserver when run). This lets you start a new X session after the screen has locked. This feature is turned on in Ubuntu if you want to try it out. Of course, this is not a full solution, since it doesn't help you switch to an existing session (you'd need to guess the correct Ctrl+Alt+Fn combo).

One of the things that was discussed at UBZ was moving Ubuntu's bug tracking over to Launchpad. The current situation sees bugs in main being filed in bugzilla while bugs in universe go in Launchpad. Putting all the bugs in Launchpad is an improvement, since users only need to go to one system to file bugs. I wrote the majority of the conversion script before the conference, but made a few important improvements at the conference after discussions with some of the developers.

So after I posted some instructions for setting up Avahi on Breezy, a fair number of people at UBZ did so. For most people this worked fine, but it seems that a few people's systems started spewing a lot of network traffic. It turns out that the problem was actually caused by the zeroconf package (which I did not suggest installing) rather than Avahi. The zeroconf package is not needed for service discovery or .

During conferences, it is often useful to be able to connect to connect to other people's machines (e.g. for collaborative editing sessions with Gobby). This is a place where mDNS hostname resolution can come in handy, so you don't need to remember IP addresses. This is quite easy to set up on Breezy: Install the avahi-daemon, avahi-utils and libnss-mdns packages from universe. Restart dbus in order for the new system bus security policies to take effect with "sudo invoke-rc.

I've been in Montreal since Wednesday for Ubuntu Below Zero. As well as being my first time in Canada, it was my first time in transit through the USA. Unlike in most countries, I needed to pass through customs and get a visa waiver even though I was in transit. The visa waiver form had some pretty weird questions, such as whether I was involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies.

Picked up a DSB-R100 USB Radio tuner off EBay recently. I did this partly because I have better speakers on my computer than on the radio in that room, and partly because I wanted to play around with timed recordings. Setting it up was trivial -- the dsbr100 driver got loaded automatically, and a program to tune the radio (gnomeradio) was available in the Ubuntu universe repository. I did need to change the radio device from /dev/radio to /dev/radio0 though.

At the Septeber 2022 PLUG meeting, we held lightning talks. I gave a short talk about recreating old video assets in HD using Inkscape and Pitivi.

At the June 2022 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about building websites with the Hugo static website generator.

At the May 2021 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about using GStreamer Editing Services to programatically construct and render videos. In particular, it outlined how the library was used to prepare BigBlueButton recordings for publication on YouTube.

At the July 2020 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about Github Actions: the built-in continuous integration system provided by Github.

Last week I gave a talk at Perth Linux Users Group about building IoT projects using Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft. The video is now available online. Unfortunately there were some problems with the audio setup leading to some background noise in the video, but it is still intelligible: The slides used in the talk can be found here. The talk was focused on how Ubuntu Core could be used to help with the ongoing security and maintenance of IoT projects.

At the March 2019 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about how Ubuntu Core can be used to build IoT projects that are secure and self-updating.

At the April 2018 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about the snapd package manager, and how it is used to deploy confined applications on Ubuntu desktops.

At the September 2016 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about writing Chromecast sender applications from scratch. It gave a rundown of how the Chromecast protocol worked, and what sorts of things could be done on the receiver side.

At the October 2015 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about the Ubuntu Snappy. This talk focused on the Ubuntu Core system as it existed back then, and looked at how applications could be deployed on the platform.

At the July 2014 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about the Ubuntu Touch/Ubuntu Phone project. This included an overview of getting Ubuntu running on hardware that primarily targeted Android, and how some of the design elements of the Unity Desktop were adapted to a small screen.

Eleven years ago, I wrote a Mandelbrot set generator in JavaScript as a way to test out the then somewhat new Web Workers API, allowing me to make use of multiple cores and not tie up the UI thread with the calculations. Recently I decided to see how much I could improve it with improvements to the web stack that have happened since then. The result was much faster than what I’d managed previously:

While at linux.conf.au earlier this year, I started hacking on a Mandelbrot Set fractal renderer implemented in JavaScript as a way to polish my JS skills. In particular, I wanted to get to know the HTML5 Canvas and Worker APIs. The results turned out pretty well. Click on the image below to try it out: Clicking anywhere on the fractal will zoom in. You'll need to reload the page to zoom out.

At the June 2022 Perth Linux Users Group meeting, I gave a talk about building websites with the Hugo static website generator.

When the pandemic lock downs started, my local Linux User Group started looking at video conferencing tools we could use to continue presenting talks and other events to members. We ended up adopting BigBlueButton: as well as being Open Source, it's focus on education made it well suited for presenting talks. It has the concept of a presenter role, and built in support for slides (it sends them to viewers as images, rather than another video stream).

To help keep myself honest, I wanted to set up automated test runs on a few personal projects I host on Github. At first I gave Travis a try, since a number of projects I contribute to use it, but it felt a bit clunky. When I found Github had a new CI system in beta, I signed up for the beta and was accepted a few weeks later. While it is still in development, the configuration language feels lean and powerful.

When the Ubuntu Phone project was cancelled, I moved to the desktop team. The initial goal for team was to bring up a GNOME 3 based desktop for the Ubuntu 17.10 release that would be familiar to both Ubuntu users coming from the earlier Unity desktop, and users of “vanilla” GNOME 3.

When looking at various UPnP media servers, one of the features I wanted was the ability to play back my music collection through my PlayStation 3. The complicating factor is that most of my collection is encoded in Vorbis format, which is not yet supported by the PS3 (at this point, it doesn't seem likely that it ever will). Both MediaTomb and Rygel could handle this to an extent, transcoding the audio to raw LPCM data to send over the network.

One of the features of Rygel that I found most interesting was the external media server support. It looked like an easy way to publish information on the network without implementing a full UPnP/DLNA media server (i.e. handling the UPnP multicast traffic, transcoding to a format that the remote system can handle, etc). As a small test, I put together a server that exposes the ABC's iView service to UPnP media renderers.

In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel's tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API. It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker. The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file for the "org.

I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.

On my way back from Canada a few weeks ago, I picked up a SanDisk Sansa Fuze media player. Overall, I like it. It supports Vorbis and FLAC audio out of the box, has a decent amount of on board storage (8GB) and can be expanded with a MicroSDHC card. It does use a proprietary dock connector for data transfer and charging, but that's about all I don't like about it.

It seems to be a fashionable to blog about experiences with PulseAudio, I thought I'd join in. I've actually had some good experiences with PulseAudio, seeing some tangible benefits over the ALSA setup I was using before. I've got a cheapish surround sound speaker set connected to my desktop. While it gives pretty good sound when all the speakers are used together, it sounds like crap if only the front left/right speakers are used.

The gio library provides both synchronous and asynchronous interfaces for performing IO. Unfortunately, the two APIs require quite different programming styles, making it difficult to convert code written to the simpler synchronous API to the asynchronous one. For C programs this is unavoidable, but for Python we should be able to do better. And if you're doing asynchronous event driven code in Python, it makes sense to look at Twisted. In particular, Twisted's Deferred objects can be quite helpful.

One thing that has been mentioned in the GNOME DVCS debate was that it is as easy to do "git diff" as it is to do "svn diff" so the learning curve issue is moot. I'd have to disagree here. Traditional Centralised Version Control With traditional version control systems (e.g. CVS and Subversion) as used by Free Software projects like GNOME, there are effectively two classes of users that I will refer to as "committers" and "patch contributors":

Yesterday, a BoF was scheduled for discussion of distributed version control systems with GNOME. The BoF session did not end up really discussing the issues of what GNOME needs out of a revision control system, and some of the examples Federico used were a bit snarky. We had a more productive meeting in the session afterwards where we went over some of the concrete goals for the system. The list from the blackboard was:

I arrived in Prague yesterday for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Including time spent in transit in Singapore and London, the flights took about 30 hours. As I was flying on BA, I got to experience Heathrow Terminal 5. It wasn't quite as bad as some of the horror stories I'd heard. There were definitely aspects that weren't forgiving of mistakes. For example, when taking the train to the "B" section there was a sign saying that if you accidentally got on the train when you shouldn't have it would take 40 minutes to get back to the "A" section.

Yesterday I performed the migration of Inkscape's bugs from SourceForge.net to Launchpad. This was a full import of all their historic bug data – about 6900 bugs. As the import only had access to the SF user names for bug reporters, commenters and assignees, it was not possible to link them up to existing Launchpad users in most cases. This means that duplicate person objects have been created with email addresses like $USERNAME@users.

Since upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy I've occasionally been seeing the following notification from GNOME Power Manager: I'd usually trigger this error by unplugging the AC adapter and then picking suspend from GPM's left click menu. My first thought on seeing this was "What's a policy timeout, and why is it not valid?" followed by "I don't remember setting a policy timeout". Looking at bug 492132 I found a pointer to the policy_suppression_timeout gconf value, whose description gives a bit more information.

It hasn't been long since the last gnome-vfs-obexftp release, but I thought it'd be good to get these fixes out before undertaking more invasive development. The new version is available from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.4/ The highlights of this release are: If the phone does not provide free space values in the OBEX capability object, do not report this as zero free space. This fixes Nautilus file copy behaviour on a number of Sony Ericsson phones.

I've had a number of requests for USB support in gnome-vfs-obexftp. At first I didn't have much luck talking to my phone via USB. Running the obex_test utility from OpenOBEX gave the following results: $ obex_test -u Using USB transport, querying available interfaces Interface 0: (null) Interface 1: (null) Interface 2: (null) Use 'obex_test -u interface_number' to run interactive OBEX test client Trying to talk via any of these interface numbers failed.

Havoc: for a lot of services advertised via mDNS, the client doesn't have the option of ignoring TXT records if it wants to behave correctly. For example, the Bonjour Printing Specification puts the underlying print queue name in a TXT record (as multiple printers might be advertised by a single print server). While it says that the server can omit the queue name (in which case the default queue name "auto" is used), a client is not going to be able to do what the user asked without checking for the presence of the record.

I've just released a new version of gnome-vfs-obexftp, which includes the features discussed previously. It can be downloaded from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.3/ The highlights of the release include: Sync osso-gwobex and osso-gnome-vfs-extras changes from Maemo Subversion. Instead of asking hcid to set up the RFCOMM device for communication, use an RFCOMM socket directly. This is both faster and doesn't require enabling experimental hcid interfaces. Based on work from Bastien Nocera. Improve free space calculation for Nokia phones with multiple memory types (e.

I recently received a bug report about the free space calculation in gnome-vfs-obexftp. At the moment, the code exposes a single free space value for the OBEX connection. However, some phones expose multiple volumes via the virtual file system presented via OBEX. It turns out my own phone does this, which was useful for testing. The Nokia 6230 can store things on the phone’s memory (named DEV in the OBEX capabilities list), or the Multimedia Card (named MMC).

Previously, I posted about the FM radio plugin I was working on. I just posted the code to bug 168735. A few notes about the implementation: The code only supports Video4Linux 2 radio tuners (since that’s the interface my device supports, and the V4L1 compatibility layer doesn’t work for it). It should be possible to port it support both protocols if someone is interested. It does not pass the audio through the GStreamer pipeline.

I've been working on some FM radio support in Rhythmbox in my spare time. Below is screenshot At the moment, the basic tuning and mute/unmute works fine with my DSB-R100. I don't have any UI for adding/removing stations at the moment though, so it is necessary to edit ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to add them. Comments: Joel - 4 May, 2007 This feature would truly be a welcome addition! I'm especially pleased it's being developed by a fellow Australian!

I upgraded to Feisty about a month or so ago, and it has been a nice improvement so far. One regression I noticed though was that my USB FM radio tuner had stopped working (or at least, Gnomeradio could no longer tune it). It turns out that some time between the kernel release found in Edgy and the one found in Feisty, the dsbr100 driver had been upgraded from the Video4Linux 1 API to Video4Linux 2.

When at conferences and sprints, I often want to see what someone else is working on, or to let other people see what I am working on. Usually we end up pushing up to a shared server and using that as a way to exchange branches. However, this can be quite frustrating when competing for outside bandwidth when at a conference. It is possible to share the branch from a local web server, but that still means you need to work out the addressing issues.

I put out a tarball release of gnome-vfs-obexftp here: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.1/ This includes a number of fixes since the work I did in October: Fix up some error handling in the dbus code. Mark files under the obex:/// virtual root as being local. This causes Nautilus to process the desktop entries and give us nice icons. Ship a copy of osso-gwobex, built statically into the VFS module. This removes the need to install another shared library only used by one application.

Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125). One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database.

I published a Bazaar branch of the Nautilus obex method here: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp This version works with the hcid daemon included with Ubuntu Edgy, rather than requiring the btcond daemon from Maemo. Some simple instructions on building it: Download and build the osso-gwobex library: svn checkout https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/connectivity/osso-gwobex/trunk osso-gwobex The debian/ directory should work fine to build a package using debuild. Download and build the obex module: bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp There is no debian packaging for this — just an autogen.

In my previous entry about using the Maemo obex-module on the desktop, Johan Hedberg mentioned that bluez-utils 3.7 included equivalent interfaces to the osso-gwconnect daemon used by the method. Since then, the copy of bluez-utils in Edgy has been updated to 3.7, and the necessary interfaces are enabled in hcid by default. Before trying to modify the VFS code, I thought I'd experiment a bit with the D-BUS interfaces via the D-BUS python bindings.

When I got my new laptop, one of the features it had that my previous one didn't was Bluetooth support. There are a few Bluetooth related utilities for Gnome that let you send and receive SMS messages and a few other things, but a big missing feature is the ability to transfer files to and from the phone easily. Ideally, I'd be able to browse the phone's file system using Nautilus.

Over the weekend, I released gnome-gpg 0.5.0. The main features in this release is support for running without gnome-keyring-daemon (of course, you can't save the passphrase in this mode), and to use the same keyring item name for the passphrase as Seahorse. The release can be downloaded here: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-gpg/0.5/ I also switched over from Arch to Bazaar. The conversion was fairly painless using bzr baz-import-branch, and means that I have both my revisions and Colins revisions in a single tree.

Recently one of the Gnome Foundation directors quit, and there has been a proposal to expand the board by 2 members. In both cases, the proposed new members have been taken from the list of candidates who did not get seats in the last election from highest vote getter down. While at first this sounds sensible, the voting system we use doesn't provide a way of finding out who would have been selected for the board if a particular candidate was removed from the ballot.

The progress on JHBuild has continued (although I haven't done much in the last week or so). Frederic Peters of JhAutobuild fame now has a CVS account to maintain the client portion of that project in tree. Perl Modules (#342638) One of the other things that Frederic has been working on is support for building Perl modules (which use a Makefile.PL instead of a configure script). His initial patchworked fine for tarballs, but by switching over to the new generic version control code in jhbuild it was possible to support Perl modules maintained in any of the supported version control systems without extra effort.

I've been doing most JHBuild development in my bzr branch recently. If you have bzr 0.8rc1 installed, you can grab it here: bzr branch http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.dev I've been keeping a regular CVS import going at http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.cvs using Tailor, so changes people make to module sets in CVS make there way into the bzr branch. I've used a small hack so that merges back into CVS get recorded correctly in the jhbuild.cvs branch:

Rodney: my suggestions for intltool were not intended as an attack. I just don't really see much benefit in intltool providing its own po/Makefile.in.in file. The primary difference between the intltool po/Makefile.in.in and the version provided by gettext or glib is that it calls intltool-update rather than xgettext to update the PO template, so that strings get correctly extracted from files types like desktop entries, Bonobo component registration files, or various other XML files.

I've been testing out Ekiga recently, and so far the experience has been a bit hit and miss. Firewall traversal has been unreliable. Some numbers (like the SIPPhone echo test) work great. In some cases, no traffic has gotten through (where both parties were behind Linux firewalls). In other cases, voice gets through in one direction but not the other. Robert Collins has some instructions on setting up siproxd which might solve all this though, so I'll have to try that.

Ran into an annoying Firefox bug after upgrading to Ubuntu Dapper. It seems to affect rendering of ligatures. At this point, I am not sure if it is an Ubuntu specific bug. The current conditions I know of to trigger the bug are: Firefox 1.5 (I am using the 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-1ubuntu10 package). Pango rendering enabled (the default for Ubuntu). The web page must use a font that contains ligatures and use those ligatures.

Emmanuel: if you are using a language like Python, you can let the language keep track of your state machine for something like that: def load_items(treeview, liststore, items): for obj in items: liststore.append((obj.get_foo(), obj.get_bar(), obj.get_baz())) yield True treeview.set_model(liststore) yield False def lazy_load_items(treeview, liststore, items): gobject.idle_add(load_items(treeview, liststore, item).next) Here, load_items() is a generator that will iterate over a sequence like [True, True, ..., True, False]. The next() method is used to get the next value from the iterator.

Recently, Jeff brought up the issue of the use of the old Gnome logo on Slashdot. The reasoning being that since we decided to switch to the new logo as our mark back in 2002, it would be nice if they used that mark to represent stories about us. Unfortunately this request was shot down by Rob Malda, because the logo is "either ugly or B&W (read:Dull)". Not to be discouraged, I had a go at revamping the logo to meet Slashdot's high standards.

I put out a new release of gnome-gpg containing the fixes I mentioned previously. The internal changes are fairly extensive, but the user interface remains pretty much the same. The main differences are: If you enter an incorrect passphrase, the password prompt will be displayed again, the same as when gpg is invoked normally. If an incorrect passphrase is stored in the keyring (e.g. if you changed your key's passphrase), the passphrase prompt will be displayed.

In my previous post, I mentioned using Tailor to import jhbuild into a Bazaar-NG branch. In case anyone else is interested in doing the same, here are the steps I used: 1. Install the tools First create a working directory to perform the import, and set up tailor. I currently use the nightly snapshots of bzr, which did not work with Tailor, so I also grabbed bzr-0.7: $ wget http://darcs.arstecnica.it/tailor-0.9.20.tar.gz $ wget http://www.

As most people probably know, the Gnome project is planning a migration to Subversion. In contrast, I've decided to move development of jhbuild over to bzr. This decision is a bit easier for me than for other Gnome modules because: No need to coordinate with GDP or GTP, since I maintain the docs and there is no translations. Outside of the moduleset definitions, the large majority of development and commits are done by me.

The gnome-gpg utility makes PGP a bit nicer to use on Gnome with the following features: Present a Gnome password entry dialog for passphrase entry. Allow the user to store the passphrase in the session or permanent keyring, so it can be provided automatically next time. Unfortunately there are a few usability issues: The anonymous/authenticated user radio buttons are displayed in the password entry dialog, while they aren't needed. The passphrase is prompted for even if gpg does not require it to complete the operation.

Thomas: that behaviour looks like a bug. Are all of those volumes mountable by the user? The drive mount applet is only meant to show icons for the mount points the user can mount. Note also that the applet is using the exact same information for the list of drives as Nautilus is. If the applet is confusing, then wouldn't Nautilus's "Computer" window also be confusing? To help debug things, I wrote a little program to dump all the data provided by GnomeVFSVolumeMonitor:

In my previous article, I outlined the thought process behind the redesign of the drive mount applet. Although it ended up without any preferences, I don't necessarily think that it doesn't need any preferences. A number of people commented on the last entry requesting a particular preference: the ability to hide certain drives in the drive list. Some of the options include: Let the user select which individual drives to display Let the user select which classes of drive to display (floppy, cdrom, camera, music player, etc).

As most people know, there has been some flamewars accusing Gnome developers of removing options for the benefit of "idiot users". I've definitely been responsible for removing preferences from some parts of the desktop in the past. Probably the most dramatic is the drive mount applet, which started off with a preferences dialog with the following options: Mount point: which mount point should the icon watch the state of? Update interval: at what frequency should the mount point be polled to check its status?

Glynn: I suspect that the Pixmap memory usage has something to do with image rendering rather than applets in particular doing something stupid. Notice that most other GTK programs seem to be using similar amounts of pixmap memory. To help test this hypothesis, I used the following Python program: import gobject, gtk win = gtk.Window() win.set_title('Test') win.connect('destroy', lambda w: gtk.main_quit()) def add_image(): img = gtk.image_new_from_stock(gtk.STOCK_CLOSE, gtk.ICON_SIZE_BUTTON) win.add(img) img.show() gobject.timeout_add(30000, add_image) win.

Joao: you can configure XScreenSaver to show a "Switch User" button in it's password dialog (which calls gdmflexiserver when run). This lets you start a new X session after the screen has locked. This feature is turned on in Ubuntu if you want to try it out. Of course, this is not a full solution, since it doesn't help you switch to an existing session (you'd need to guess the correct Ctrl+Alt+Fn combo).

Picked up a DSB-R100 USB Radio tuner off EBay recently. I did this partly because I have better speakers on my computer than on the radio in that room, and partly because I wanted to play around with timed recordings. Setting it up was trivial -- the dsbr100 driver got loaded automatically, and a program to tune the radio (gnomeradio) was available in the Ubuntu universe repository. I did need to change the radio device from /dev/radio to /dev/radio0 though.

I finally got round to playing with the Google Maps API, and the results can be seen here. I took data from the GnomeWorldWide wiki page and merged in some information from the Planet Gnome FOAF file (which now includes the nicknames and hackergotchis). The code is available here (a BZR branch, but you can easily download the latest versions of the files directly). The code works roughly as follows:

I've got most of the features of my HTTP resource watching code I was working on for GWeather done. The main benefits over the existing gnome-vfs based code are: Simpler API. Just connect to the updated signal on the resource object, and you get notified when the resource changes. Supports gzip and deflate content encodings, to reduce bandwidth usage. Keeps track of Last-Modified date and Etag value for the resource so that it can do conditional GETs of the resource for simple client side caching.

Bryan: there are a number of steps you can skip in your little tutorial: You don't need to set my-default-archive. If you often work with multiple archives, you can treat working copies for all archives pretty much the same. If you are currently inside a working copy, any branch names you use will be relative to your current one, so you can still use short branch names in almost all cases (this is similar to the reason I don't set $CVSROOT when working with CVS).

One of the things that pisses me off about gweather is that it occasionally hangs and stops updating. It is a bit easier to tell when this has occurred these days, since it is quite obvious something's wrong if gweather thinks it is night time when it clearly isn't. The current code uses gnome-vfs, which isn't the best choice for this sort of thing. The code is the usual mess you get when turning an algoithm inside out to work through callbacks in C:

I uploaded a few patches to the pkg-config bugzilla recently, which will hopefully make their way into the next release. The first is related to bug 3097, which has to do with the broken dependent library elimination code added to 0.17. The patch adds a Requires.private field to .pc files that contains a list of required packages like Requires currently does, which has the following properties: When verifying that a particular package name is available with "pkg-config --exists", dependencies in both Requires and Requires.

Phillip: your idea about direct client to client clipboard transfers is doable with the current X11 clipboard model: Clipboard owner advertises that it can convert selection to some special target type such as "client-to-client-transfer" or similar. If the pasting client supports client to client transfer, it can check the list of supported targets for the "client-to-client-transfer" target type and request conversion to that target. The clipboard owner returns a string containing details of how to request the data (e.

I put up a proposal for implementing anonymous voting for the foundation elections on the wiki. This is based in part on David's earlier proposal, but simplifies some things based on the discussion on the list and fleshes out the implementation a bit more. It doesn't really add to the security of the elections process (doing so would require a stronger form of authentication than "can read a particular email account"), but does anonymise the election results and lets us do things like tell the voter that their completed ballot was malformed on submission.

Phillip: the majority of applications have no cut and paste code in them — they rely on the cut and paste behaviour of the standard widgets. Since the standard widgets like GtkEntry in GTK 2.6 mark their selections as being savable (in fact, any code that calls gtk_clipboard_set_text() will have its selection marked as savable). Most of the remaining cases are ones where you'd want to be selective in what gets saved (e.

Recently Bryan posted about background channels -- a system for automatic updating desktop wallpaper. One of the features of the design is a new URI scheme based on the same ideas as webcal://, which I think is a bad idea (as dobey has also pointed out). The usual reasoning for creating a URI scheme like this go something like this: You want to be able to perform some action when a link in a web page is clicked.

South Africa I put up my photos from the trip to Cape Town online. Towards the end there are some photos I took while hiking up Table Mountain. Building Gnome It looks like with the Gnome 2.10 release, some packages fail to build from CVS if you are using a version of libtool older than 1.5.12. This is due to the way libtool verifies the version strings — in versions prior to 1.

Travels I've put some of the photos from my trip to Mataró, and the short stop over in Japan on the way back. The Mataró set includes a fair number taken around La Sagrida Familia, and the Japan set is mostly of things around the Naritasan temple (I didn't have enough time to get into Tokyo). Multi-head A few months back, I got a second monitor for my computer and configured it in a Xinerama-style setup (I'm actually using the MergedFB feature of the radeon driver, but it looks like Xinerama to X clients).

Mataró I've been in Mataró (about an hour from Barcelona) now since Sunday, and it's quite a nice place. It is a bit cooler than Perth due to it being the middle of Winter here, but the way most of the locals are rugged up you'd think it was a lot colder. It's great to catch up with everyone, and a number of pygtk developers will be turning up over the next few days for the BOF on the weekend.

One of the changes in the Gnome 2.9 development series is the removal of most of the Bonobo code from Nautilus, which results in a speed boost due to lower complexity and less IPC overhead. This had the effect of breaking existing bonobo based context menus, property pages and views. The first two can be converted to the Nautilus extension interface, but the second has no equivalent in the new code (partly because Nautilus is concentrating on being a file manager these days rather than a universal component shell like it was in the early days).

Drive Mount Applet The new drive mount applet is now checked into the HEAD branch of gnome-applets, so will be in Gnome 2.10. There are a few things left to do, such as making it possible to open the file manager as well as unmounting/ejecting it. I did up a screenshot showing what it looks like as an applet. Libtool Finally managed to reproduce a particular libtool bug that people have reported on and off.

Even More Icon Theme Stuff To make it a bit easier to correctly display themed icons, I added support to GtkImage, so that it is as easy as calling gtk_image_new_from_icon_name() or gtk_image_set_from_icon_name(). The patch is attached to bug #155688. This code takes care of theme changes so the application developer doesn't need to. Once this is in, it should be trivial to add themed icon support to various other widgets that use GtkImage (such as GtkAbout and GtkToolItem).

I started to look at bringing the drive mount applet from gnome-applts up to scratch, since it hasn't really had much work done on it other than porting to the 2.x development platform. The applet is a classic example of Gnome 1.x user interface complexity. The applet shows a button that can be clicked to mount or unmount a particular mount point. For this simple functionality, it provides the following preferences:

Federal Election Looks like we are going to have at least another three years with The Rodent. It also looks like they will have a majority in the senate, which will reduce the senate's effectiveness as a house of review. We might not have John Howard for the entire term though, since he is of retirement age. NineMSN seems to think that Peter Costello is already the leader. It also looks like The Democrats senators up for reelection got completely wiped out, with much of their support going to The Greens.

Icon Theme APIs (continued) Of course, after recommending that people use gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() to perform the icon load and scale the icon for you, Ross manages to find a bug in that function. If the icon is not found in the icon theme, but instead in the legacy $prefix/share/pixmaps directory, then gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() will not scale the image down (it will scale them up if necessary though). jhbuild Jhbuild now includes a notification icon when running in the default terminal mode.

Ubuntu Ubuntu seems to have taken off very quickly since the preview release came out a few weeks ago. In general, people seem to like the small tweaks we've made to the default Gnome install. Of course, after the preview came out people found bugs in some of my Gnome patches ... One of the things we added was the trash applet on the panel. I made a fair number of fixes that make the applet fit in with the desktop a bit better and handle error conditions a bit better.

It seems that a lot of people get confused by what things on the panel should be applets and what should be notification icons. Originally, the main difference between the two was this: The lifecycle of an applet is managed by the panel, which in turn is tied to the lifecycle of the session. So applets generally live for the length of the session (unless they are added/removed part way through a session).

I decided to go ahead and write the code to allow Zenity to listen for commands on stdin. It was pretty easy to add, and Glynn accepted the patch so it is in the latest CVS version. The main difference between the implementation and what I described earlier is that you need to pass the --listen argument to Zenity to activate this mode (without it, it acts as a one-shot notification icon where it exits when the icon is clicked on).

Foundation Elections (continued) bolsh: as I said, many real elections make modifications to an idealised STV system to simplify vote counting. The counting for the .au senate elections sounds like it takes a random sample of votes when transfering preferences too. Also, in my description a candidate needed to get more votes than the quota and the quota could be fractional. In contrast, the Australian senate elections say candidates must reach the Droop Quota, which is the smallest integer greater than the quota formula I used.

Foundation Elections There has been talk on the foundation list about changing the vote counting procedure to something more fair. The method being proposed is Single Transferable Vote, which is the same system used within a single electorate for the senate vote in the Australian Federal Election. As with the Australian elections, some people have some trouble understanding exactly how it works, so here is a description. Each voter orders every candidate on their ballot in order of preference.

Mail Viruses The barrage of mail viruses and their side effects is getting quite annoying. In the past week, I've had a gnome.org mailing list subscriptions disabled twice. After looking at the mailing list archive, it was pretty obvious why. The mail server that serves my account is set up to reject windows executables a few other viruses at SMTP delivery time (so it isn't responsible for generating bounces). Unfortunately, a number of viruses got through to the mailing lists and were subsequently rejected before reaching my account.

Red Hat 9 Installed it on a few boxes, and I like what I see so far. The Bluecurve mouse cursors look really nice. It is also good to see some more of my packages included in the distro (fontilus and pyorbit). Spam Some spammer has been sending mail with random @daa.com.au addresses in the From: field. So far, I have received lots of double bounces, a few messages asking if we know about the spam, and many automated responses (some saying the message came from a blocked domain!

Work Last week, one of the servers died because one of the sticks of memory died. After pulling it out, the system booted fine. It would have been a lot easier to test if I didn't have to open it up to plug a floppy drive in. I now have Memtest86 in the GRUB boot menu. Was pretty easy to set up: cp memtest.bin /boot grubby --add-kernel="/boot/memtest.bin" --title="Memtest86" This is the second stick of DDR memory we have had that died; probably due to overheating.

linux.conf.au 2003 The Call for Papers is out: http://conf.linux.org.au/pipermail/lca-helpers/2002-May/000109.html There is also an HTML version on the website, but it doesn't quite match the final version of the CFP (yet). Beer Bottled the honey ale today. It will be interesting to see how it tastes in a few weeks. The sweetness was gone, but I could definitely taste the honey still. It should be very nice. GNOME 2.0 Put out yet another beta of libglade for the GNOME 2.

When the pandemic lock downs started, my local Linux User Group started looking at video conferencing tools we could use to continue presenting talks and other events to members. We ended up adopting BigBlueButton: as well as being Open Source, it's focus on education made it well suited for presenting talks. It has the concept of a presenter role, and built in support for slides (it sends them to viewers as images, rather than another video stream).

As an evening project, I've been working on a small library that integrates the GLib main loop with Python's asyncio. I think I've gotten to the point where it might be useful to other people, so have pushed it up here: https://github.com/jhenstridge/asyncio-glib This isn't the only attempt to integrate the two event loops, but the other I found (Gbulb) is unmaintained and seems to reimplement a fair bit of the asyncio (e.

One of the options available when configuring the my ThinkPad was an Infrared camera. The main selling point being "Windows Hello" facial recognition based login. While I wasn't planning on keeping Windows on the system, I was curious to see what I could do with it under Linux. Hopefully this is of use to anyone else trying to get it to work. The camera is manufactured by Chicony Electronics (probably a CKFGE03 or similar), and shows up as two USB devices:

When the pandemic lock downs started, my local Linux User Group started looking at video conferencing tools we could use to continue presenting talks and other events to members. We ended up adopting BigBlueButton: as well as being Open Source, it's focus on education made it well suited for presenting talks. It has the concept of a presenter role, and built in support for slides (it sends them to viewers as images, rather than another video stream).

Yesterday, a BoF was scheduled for discussion of distributed version control systems with GNOME. The BoF session did not end up really discussing the issues of what GNOME needs out of a revision control system, and some of the examples Federico used were a bit snarky. We had a more productive meeting in the session afterwards where we went over some of the concrete goals for the system. The list from the blackboard was:

At GUADEC 2003 in Dublin, I gave talks about Libegg and PyORBit.

At GUADEC 2002 in Seville I gave a talk about the state of the Python bindings for GTK and GNOME. At this point, I was recommending people move off the old GTK 1.2 bindings, so this talk covered the process of porting existing applications.

At GUADEC 2001 in Copenhagen, I gave a talk about the work I’d been doing on PyGTK. In particular, it talked about the major rewrite to build on top of ExtensionClass (a precursor of Python 2’s new style classes), and the start of GTK 2.0 support.

At GUADEC 2000 in Paris, I gave talks about the Dia diagram editor, and my Python bindings for GTK and GNOME.

When the pandemic lock downs started, my local Linux User Group started looking at video conferencing tools we could use to continue presenting talks and other events to members. We ended up adopting BigBlueButton: as well as being Open Source, it's focus on education made it well suited for presenting talks. It has the concept of a presenter role, and built in support for slides (it sends them to viewers as images, rather than another video stream).

With a GLib implementation of the Python asyncio event loop, I can easily mix asyncio code with GLib/GTK code in the same thread. The next step is to see whether we can use this to make any APIs more convenient to use. A good candidate is APIs that make use of GAsyncResult. These APIs generally consist of one function call that initiates the asynchronous job and takes a callback. The callback will be invoked sometime later with a GAsyncResult object, which can be passed to a "finish" function to convert this to the result type relevant to the original call.

To help keep myself honest, I wanted to set up automated test runs on a few personal projects I host on Github. At first I gave Travis a try, since a number of projects I contribute to use it, but it felt a bit clunky. When I found Github had a new CI system in beta, I signed up for the beta and was accepted a few weeks later. While it is still in development, the configuration language feels lean and powerful.

As an evening project, I've been working on a small library that integrates the GLib main loop with Python's asyncio. I think I've gotten to the point where it might be useful to other people, so have pushed it up here: https://github.com/jhenstridge/asyncio-glib This isn't the only attempt to integrate the two event loops, but the other I found (Gbulb) is unmaintained and seems to reimplement a fair bit of the asyncio (e.

With my old ThinkPad, Lenovo provided BIOS updates in the form of Windows executables or ISO images for a bootable CD. Since I had wiped Windows partition, the first option wasn't an option. The second option didn't work either, since it expected me to be using the drive in the base I hadn't bought. Luckily I was able to just copy the needed files out of the ISO image to a USB stick that had been set up to boot DOS.

One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site. While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update. I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).

One feature in recent versions of Python I hadn't played around with until recently is the ability to package up a multi-module program into a ZIP file that can be run directly by the Python interpreter. I didn't find much information about it, so I thought I'd describe what's necessary here. Python has had the ability to add ZIP files to the module search path since PEP 273 was implemented in Python 2.

This week I put out a new release of pygpgme: a Python extension that lets you perform various tasks with OpenPGP keys via the GPGME library. The new release is available from both Launchpad and PyPI. There aren't any major new extensions to the API, but this is the first release to support Python 3 (Python 2.x is still supported though). The main hurdle was ensuring that the module correctly handled text vs.

One of the features of Rygel that I found most interesting was the external media server support. It looked like an easy way to publish information on the network without implementing a full UPnP/DLNA media server (i.e. handling the UPnP multicast traffic, transcoding to a format that the remote system can handle, etc). As a small test, I put together a server that exposes the ABC's iView service to UPnP media renderers.

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

One of the nice features of Bazaar is the ability to send a bundle of changes to someone via email. If you use a supported mail client, it will even open the composer with the changes attached. If your client isn't supported, then it'll let you compose a message in your editor and then send it to an SMTP server. GMail is not a supported mail client, but there are a few work arounds listed on the wiki.

The gio library provides both synchronous and asynchronous interfaces for performing IO. Unfortunately, the two APIs require quite different programming styles, making it difficult to convert code written to the simpler synchronous API to the asynchronous one. For C programs this is unavoidable, but for Python we should be able to do better. And if you're doing asynchronous event driven code in Python, it makes sense to look at Twisted. In particular, Twisted's Deferred objects can be quite helpful.

I've been playing with OAuth a bit lately. The OAuth specification fulfills a role that some people saw as a failing of OpenID: programmatic access to websites and authenticated web services. The expectation that OpenID would handle these cases seems a bit misguided since the two uses cases are quite different: OpenID is designed on the principle of letting arbitrary OpenID providers talk to arbitrary relying parties and vice versa. OpenID is intentionally vague about how the provider authenticates the user.

Since my last article on integrating Storm with Django, I've merged my changes to Storm's trunk. This missed the 0.13 release, so you'll need to use Bazaar to get the latest trunk or wait for 0.14. The focus since the last post was to get Storm to cooperate with Django's built in ORM. One of the reasons people use Django is the existing components that can be used to build a site.

In my previous post about Django, I mentioned that I found the transaction handling strategy in Django to be a bit surprising. Like most object relational mappers, it caches information retrieved from the database, since you don't want to be constantly issuing SELECT queries for every attribute access. However, it defaults to commiting after saving changes to each object. So a single web request might end up issuing many transactions:

Yesterday, Thomas rolled the 0.13 release of Storm, which can be downloaded from Launchpad. Storm is the object relational mapper for Python used by Launchpad and Landscape, so it is capable of supporting quite large scale applications. It is seven months since the last release, so there is a lot of improvements. Here are a few simple statistics: 0.12 0.13 Change Tarball size (KB) 117 155 38 Mainline revisions 213 262 49 Revisions in ancestry 552 875 323 So it is a fairly significant update by any of these metrics.

I've been playing around with Django a bit for work recently, which has been interesting to see what choices they've made differently to Zope 3. There were a few things that surprised me: The ORM and database layer defaults to autocommit mode rather than using transactions. This seems like an odd choice given that all the major free databases support transactions these days. While autocommit might work fine when a web application is under light use, it is a recipe for problems at higher loads.

The Python standard library contains a function called thread.get_ident(). It will return an integer that uniquely identifies the current thread at that point in time. On most UNIX systems, this will be the pthread_t value returned by pthread_self(). At first look, this might seem like a good value to key a thread local storage dictionary with. Please don't do that. The value uniquely identifies the thread only as long as it is running.

Last week we moved psycopg from Subversion to Bazaar. I did the migration using Gustavo Niemeyer's svn2bzr tool with a few tweaks to map the old Subversion committer IDs to the email address form conventionally used by Bazaar. The tool does a good job of following tree copies and create related Bazaar branches. It doesn't have any special handling for stuff in the tags/ directory (it produces new branches, as it does for other tree copies).

Yesterday Federico released version 2.0.7 of psycopg2 (a Python database adapter for PostgreSQL). I made a fair number of the changes in this release to make it more usable for some of Canonical's applications. The new release should work with the development version of Storm, and shouldn't be too difficult to get everything working with other frameworks. Some of the improvements include: Better selection of exceptions based on the SQLSTATE result field.

As most developers know, Valgrind is an invaluable tool for finding memory leaks. However, when debugging Python programs the pymalloc allocator gets in the way. There is a Valgrind suppression file distributed with Python that gets rid of most of the false positives, but does not give particularly good diagnostics for memory allocated through pymalloc. To properly analyse leaks, you often need to recompile Python with pymalloc. As I don't like having to recompile Python I took a look at Valgrind's client API, which provides a way for a program to detect whether it is running under Valgrind.

Marc uploaded a new revision of the Python DB-API 2.0 Specification yesterday that documents the new two phase commit extension that I helped develop on the db-sig mailing list. My interest in this started from the desire to support two phase commit in Storm – without that feature there are far fewer occasions where its ability to talk to multiple databases can be put to use. As I was doing some work on psycopg2 for Launchpad, I initially put together a PostgreSQL specific patch, which was (rightly) rejected by Federico.

At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP. When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look at my work would be to commit the changes so that they could be pulled or merged by others.

Nicolas: Your metaclass example is a good example of when not to use metaclasses. I wouldn't be surprised if it is executed slightly different to how you expect. Let's look at how Foo is evaluated, starting with what's written: class Foo: __metaclass__ = FooMeta This is equivalent to the following assignment: Foo = FooMeta('Foo', (), {...}) As FooMeta has an __new__() method, the attempt to instantiate FooMeta will result in it being called.

Over the weekend, I spent a number of hours tracking down a bug caused by the cache in the Python urlparse module. The problem has already been reported as Python bug 1313119, but has not been fixed yet. First a bit of background. The urlparse module does what you'd expect and parses a URL into its components: >>> from urlparse import urlparse >>> urlparse('http://www.gnome.org/') ('http', 'www.gnome.org', '/', '', '', '') As well as accepting byte strings (which you'd be using at the HTTP protocol level), it also accepts Unicode strings (which you'd be using at the HTML or XML content level):

This week at the EuroPython conference, Gustavo Niemeyer announced the release of Storm and gave a tutorial on using it. Storm is a new object relational mapper for Python that was developed for use in some Canonical projects, and we've been working on moving Launchpad over to it. I'll discuss a few of the nice features of the package: Loose Binding Between Database Connections and Classes Storm has a much looser binding between database connections and the classes used to represent records in particular tables.

When at conferences and sprints, I often want to see what someone else is working on, or to let other people see what I am working on. Usually we end up pushing up to a shared server and using that as a way to exchange branches. However, this can be quite frustrating when competing for outside bandwidth when at a conference. It is possible to share the branch from a local web server, but that still means you need to work out the addressing issues.

While browsing the log of one of my Bazaar branches, I noticed that the commit messages were being recorded as occurring in the +0800 time zone even though WA switched over to daylight savings. Bazaar stores commit dates as a standard UNIX seconds since epoch value and a time zone offset in seconds. So the problem was with the way that time zone offset was recorded. The code in bzrlib that calculates the offset looks like this:

In my previous entry, I mentioned that Andrew was actually publishing the contents of all his Bazaar branches with his rsync script, even though he was only advertising a single branch. Yesterday I had a need to actually do this, so I thought I'd detail how to do it. As a refresher, a Bazaar repository stores the revision graph for the ancestry of all the branches stored inside it. A branch is essentially just a pointer to the head revision of a particular line of development.

Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125). One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database.

In my previous entry about using the Maemo obex-module on the desktop, Johan Hedberg mentioned that bluez-utils 3.7 included equivalent interfaces to the osso-gwconnect daemon used by the method. Since then, the copy of bluez-utils in Edgy has been updated to 3.7, and the necessary interfaces are enabled in hcid by default. Before trying to modify the VFS code, I thought I'd experiment a bit with the D-BUS interfaces via the D-BUS python bindings.

The Python developers have been looking for a new bug tracker, and essentially put out a tender for people interested in providing a bug tracker. Recently I have been working on getting Launchpad's entry ready, which mainly involved working on SourceForge import. The entry is now up, and our demonstration server is up and running with a snapshot of the Python bug tracker data. As a side effect of this, we've got fairly good SourceForge tracker import support now, which we should be able to use if other projects want to switch away from SF.

Emmanuel: if you are using a language like Python, you can let the language keep track of your state machine for something like that: def load_items(treeview, liststore, items): for obj in items: liststore.append((obj.get_foo(), obj.get_bar(), obj.get_baz())) yield True treeview.set_model(liststore) yield False def lazy_load_items(treeview, liststore, items): gobject.idle_add(load_items(treeview, liststore, item).next) Here, load_items() is a generator that will iterate over a sequence like [True, True, ..., True, False]. The next() method is used to get the next value from the iterator.

Back in January I started working on a new Python wrapper for the GPGME library. I recently put out the first release: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/pygpgme/0.1 This library allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify messages in the OpenPGP format, using gpg as the backend. In general, it stays fairly close to the C API with the following changes: Represent C structures as Python classes where appropriate (e.g. contexts, keys, etc). Operations on those data types are converted to methods.

Anyone who has played with Zope 3 has probably seen the syntax used to declare what interfaces a particular class implements. It looks something like this: class Foo: implements(IFoo, IBar) ... This leads to the following question: how can a function call inside a class definition's scope affect the resulting class? To understand how this works, a little knowledge of Python metaclasses is needed. Metaclasses In Python, classes are instances of metaclasses.

The Python developers have been discussing a migration off CVS on the python-dev mailing list. During the discussion, Bazaar-NG was mentioned. A few posts of note: Mark Shuttleworth provides some information on the Bazaar roadmap. Importantly, Bazaar-NG will become Bazaar 2.0. Steve Alexander describes how we use Bazaar to develop Launchpad. This includes a description of the branch review process we use to integrate changes into the mainline. I'm going to have to play around with bzr a bit more, but it looks very nice (and should require less typing than baz .

One of the features added back in Python 2.2 was class methods. These differ from traditional methods in the following ways: They can be called on both the class itself and instances of the class. Rather than binding to an instance, they bind to the class. This means that the first argument passed to the method is a class object rather than an instance. For most intents and purposes, class methods are written the same way as normal instance methods.

Found out about The Python Challenge. While you don't need to use Python to solve most of the problems, a knowledge of the language certainly helps. While the initial problems are fairly easy, some of the later ones are quite difficult, and cover many topics. If you decide to have a go, here are a few hints that might help: Keep a log of what you do. Solutions to may provide insight into subsequent problems.

Tracing Python Programs I was asked recently whether there was an equivalent of sh -x for Python (ie. print out each statement before it is run), to help with debugging a script. It turns out that there is a module in the Python standard library to do so, but it isn't listed in the standard library reference for some reason. To use it, simply run the program like this: /usr/lib/python2.4/trace.py -t program.

While discussing unicode on IRC with owen, we ran into a peculiarity in Python's unicode handling. It can be tested with the following code: >>> s = u'\U00010001\U00010002' >>> len(s) >>> s[0] Python can be compiled to use either 16-bit or 32-bit widths for characters in its unicode strings (16-bit being the default). When compiled in 32-bit mode, the results of the last two statements are 2 and u'\U00010001' respectively. When compiled in 16-bit mode, the results are 4 and u'\ud800'.

With a GLib implementation of the Python asyncio event loop, I can easily mix asyncio code with GLib/GTK code in the same thread. The next step is to see whether we can use this to make any APIs more convenient to use. A good candidate is APIs that make use of GAsyncResult. These APIs generally consist of one function call that initiates the asynchronous job and takes a callback. The callback will be invoked sometime later with a GAsyncResult object, which can be passed to a "finish" function to convert this to the result type relevant to the original call.

As an evening project, I've been working on a small library that integrates the GLib main loop with Python's asyncio. I think I've gotten to the point where it might be useful to other people, so have pushed it up here: https://github.com/jhenstridge/asyncio-glib This isn't the only attempt to integrate the two event loops, but the other I found (Gbulb) is unmaintained and seems to reimplement a fair bit of the asyncio (e.

With a GLib implementation of the Python asyncio event loop, I can easily mix asyncio code with GLib/GTK code in the same thread. The next step is to see whether we can use this to make any APIs more convenient to use. A good candidate is APIs that make use of GAsyncResult. These APIs generally consist of one function call that initiates the asynchronous job and takes a callback. The callback will be invoked sometime later with a GAsyncResult object, which can be passed to a "finish" function to convert this to the result type relevant to the original call.

As an evening project, I've been working on a small library that integrates the GLib main loop with Python's asyncio. I think I've gotten to the point where it might be useful to other people, so have pushed it up here: https://github.com/jhenstridge/asyncio-glib This isn't the only attempt to integrate the two event loops, but the other I found (Gbulb) is unmaintained and seems to reimplement a fair bit of the asyncio (e.

To help keep myself honest, I wanted to set up automated test runs on a few personal projects I host on Github. At first I gave Travis a try, since a number of projects I contribute to use it, but it felt a bit clunky. When I found Github had a new CI system in beta, I signed up for the beta and was accepted a few weeks later. While it is still in development, the configuration language feels lean and powerful.

Last week I gave a talk at Perth Linux Users Group about building IoT projects using Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft. The video is now available online. Unfortunately there were some problems with the audio setup leading to some background noise in the video, but it is still intelligible: The slides used in the talk can be found here. The talk was focused on how Ubuntu Core could be used to help with the ongoing security and maintenance of IoT projects.

One of the options available when configuring the my ThinkPad was an Infrared camera. The main selling point being "Windows Hello" facial recognition based login. While I wasn't planning on keeping Windows on the system, I was curious to see what I could do with it under Linux. Hopefully this is of use to anyone else trying to get it to work. The camera is manufactured by Chicony Electronics (probably a CKFGE03 or similar), and shows up as two USB devices:

At Linux.conf.au 2014 in Perth, I gave a talk about the “scopes” system I had worked on at Canonical as part of the Unity API team. Scopes were pluggable search providers for the Unity dash. A future version of the framework drove the launcher on Ubuntu Phone.

I've just got through the first one and a half days of LCA2011 in Brisbane. The organisers have done a great job, especially considering the flooding they have had to deal with. Due to the venue change the accommodation I booked is no longer within walking distance of the conference, but the public transport is pretty good. A bit more concerning was the following change to the wiki made between the time I left Perth and the time I checked in:

Today was the first day of the mini-conferences that lead up to linux.conf.au later on this week. I arrived yesterday after an eventful flight from Perth. I was originally meant to fly out to Melbourne on the red eye leaving on Friday at 11:35pm, but just before I checked in they announced that the flight had been delayed until 4:00am the following day. As I hadn't had a chance to check in, I was able to get a pair of taxi vouchers to get home and back.

At Linux.conf.au 2004 in Adelaide, I gave a talk about controlling GNOME applications from Python via the accessibility framework.

I gave a talk at Linux.conf.au 2003 about the experimental “EggMenu” framework I had been working on. This code was eventually merged into GTK 2.4 as GtkUIManager.

One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site. While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update. I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).

Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report. There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right. If you're interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look. Comments: e - 27 Oct, 2009 Have you seen the perl language?

I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

Yesterday, Thomas rolled the 0.13 release of Storm, which can be downloaded from Launchpad. Storm is the object relational mapper for Python used by Launchpad and Landscape, so it is capable of supporting quite large scale applications. It is seven months since the last release, so there is a lot of improvements. Here are a few simple statistics: 0.12 0.13 Change Tarball size (KB) 117 155 38 Mainline revisions 213 262 49 Revisions in ancestry 552 875 323 So it is a fairly significant update by any of these metrics.

From 2004 to 2008, I worked on the Launchpad code hosting site for Canonical. As well as providing hosting for third party Open Source projects, the site is central to the Ubuntu project: doing everything from bug tracking to managing the package repository.

It has been a while coming, but MySQL has announced their move to Bazaar for version control. This has been a long time coming, and it is great to finally see it announced publicly. The published Bazaar branches include 8 years of history going back to MySQL 3.23.22, imported from the BitKeeper repositories. So you can see a lot more than just the history since the switch: you can use all the normal Bazaar tools to see where the code came from and how it evolved.

Last week we moved psycopg from Subversion to Bazaar. I did the migration using Gustavo Niemeyer's svn2bzr tool with a few tweaks to map the old Subversion committer IDs to the email address form conventionally used by Bazaar. The tool does a good job of following tree copies and create related Bazaar branches. It doesn't have any special handling for stuff in the tags/ directory (it produces new branches, as it does for other tree copies).

Yesterday I performed the migration of Inkscape's bugs from SourceForge.net to Launchpad. This was a full import of all their historic bug data – about 6900 bugs. As the import only had access to the SF user names for bug reporters, commenters and assignees, it was not possible to link them up to existing Launchpad users in most cases. This means that duplicate person objects have been created with email addresses like $USERNAME@users.

I am at Narita Airport at the moment, on the way to Boston for some of the meetings being held during UDS. It'll be good to catch up with everyone again. Hopefully this trip won't be as eventful as the previous one to Florida :)

When Storm was released, one of the comments made was that it did not include the ability to generate a database schema from the Python classes used to represent the tables while this feature is available in a number of competing ORMs. The simple reason for this is that we haven't used schema generation in any of our ORM-using projects. Furthermore I'd argue that schema generation is not really appropriate for long lived projects where the data stored in the database is important.

This week I am in Florida for a Launchpad sprint. I was meant to arrive on Sunday night, but I fell asleep in the boarding lounge and missed the San Francisco → Orlando flight (the flight out of Perth was an early morning one, and I didn't get enough sleep on the plane). The earliest alternative fligh was the same time the next day, so I ended up ariving on Monday night.

The new Canonical Shop was opened recently which allows you to buy anything from Ubuntu tshirts and DVDs up to a 24/7 support contract for your server. One thing to note is that this is the first site using our new Launchpad single sign-on infrastructure. We will be rolling this out to other sites in time, which should give a better user experience to the existing shared authentication system currently in place for the wikis.

This article follows on from the series of tutorials on using Bazaar that I have neglected for a while. This article is about the bundle feature of Bazaar. Bundles are to Bazaar branches what patches are to tarballs or plain source trees. Context/unified diffs and the patch utility are arguably one of most important inventions that enable distributed development: The patch is a self contained text file, making it easy to send as an email attachment or attach to a bug report.

This week at the EuroPython conference, Gustavo Niemeyer announced the release of Storm and gave a tutorial on using it. Storm is a new object relational mapper for Python that was developed for use in some Canonical projects, and we've been working on moving Launchpad over to it. I'll discuss a few of the nice features of the package: Loose Binding Between Database Connections and Classes Storm has a much looser binding between database connections and the classes used to represent records in particular tables.

I've just released a new version of gnome-vfs-obexftp, which includes the features discussed previously. It can be downloaded from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.3/ The highlights of the release include: Sync osso-gwobex and osso-gnome-vfs-extras changes from Maemo Subversion. Instead of asking hcid to set up the RFCOMM device for communication, use an RFCOMM socket directly. This is both faster and doesn't require enabling experimental hcid interfaces. Based on work from Bastien Nocera. Improve free space calculation for Nokia phones with multiple memory types (e.

Today we unveiled the Launchpad 1.0 User Interface, which has been in private beta for the last few months. As well as the improved visual appearance, there are a number of new features such as the ability to add your own branding to Launchpad pages associated with your project (for example, Ubuntu's pages). As mentioned in the press release, we've got two new high profile projects using us for bug tracking: The Zope 3 Project and The Silva Content Management System.

Recently, the SchoolTool project has migrated to Launchpad for their bug tracker. We performed an import of all their previous bug reports using a new bug importer I wrote. This was the third Launchpad bug importer I'd written (the previous ones being for the Ubuntu Bugzilla import and a SourceForge importer), so I wanted this one to be the last. So the design of this importer was to have a simple XML format as an intermediate step.

Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125). One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database.

One of the things we've been working on for Launchpad is good integration with Bazaar. Launchpad provides a way to register or host Bazaar branches, and nominate a Bazaar branch as representing a particular product series. For each registered branch, there is a branch information page. This leads to a bit of confusion since Bazaar uses URLs to identify branches, so people try running bzr branch on a branch information page.

One of the new features in Firefox 2 is Microsummaries, which essentially allows dynamic bookmark titles. This is useful when bookmarking volatile pages, since the title can reflect the current state of the document rather than the state when the bookmark was created. The system works by registering XSLT transformations that generate a simple text string from the page content. The registrations are either done via a <link> element, or matched via regular expressions.

When outlining the use of team branches on Launchpad previously, I used the --create-prefix option when pushing the branch to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net. This was to make sure the initial push would succeed, even if the /\~username/product directory the branch would be created in didn't exist. To simplify things for users, we made a change to the SFTP server in the latest release, so that --create-prefix is no longer necessary. This does not affect the allowed branch directories though: the structure is used to associate the branches with products, and decide who can write to the branches.

Earlier in the year, we migrated the bugs from bugzilla.ubuntu.com over to Launchpad. This process involved changes to the bug numbers, since the Launchpad is used for more than just Ubuntu and already had a number of bugs reported in the system. People often refer to other bugs in comments, which both Bugzilla and Launchpad conveniently turn into links. The changed bug numbers meant that the bug references in the comments ended up pointing to the wrong bugs.

Earlier, David Allouche described how to host Bazaar branches on Launchpad. At the end, he alluded to the ability to create branches that can be committed to by anyone on a team. I'll describe how this works here. Launchpad Teams Launchpad allows people to organise themseleves into teams. Most of the things people can do in Launchpad can also be done by teams, including owning branches. You can create a new team at the following page:

The Python developers have been looking for a new bug tracker, and essentially put out a tender for people interested in providing a bug tracker. Recently I have been working on getting Launchpad's entry ready, which mainly involved working on SourceForge import. The entry is now up, and our demonstration server is up and running with a snapshot of the Python bug tracker data. As a side effect of this, we've got fairly good SourceForge tracker import support now, which we should be able to use if other projects want to switch away from SF.

I'm in London at the moment with Carlos, Danilo, David and Steve for a Launchpad sprint focused on Bazaar and Rosetta. The weather is a nice change from Perth winter. Next week I'll be in Vilnius, Lithuania, and then it is back to London for another week before going home. It is a nice change from winter weather in Perth. Comments: Pupeno - 27 Jul, 2006 Hello, Since you seem to be a developer of Rosetta; to where should I send an 'official' feature request for having an easy or even automatic way of feeding-back the translations to mainstream projects ?

Have you wanted to play around with bzr but had nowhere to share your branches? You can now publish them through Launchpad. David Allouche provides the details. In short, you can upload branches to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/, and they will be published on http://bazaar.launchpad.net/.

Back in January I started working on a new Python wrapper for the GPGME library. I recently put out the first release: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/pygpgme/0.1 This library allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify messages in the OpenPGP format, using gpg as the backend. In general, it stays fairly close to the C API with the following changes: Represent C structures as Python classes where appropriate (e.g. contexts, keys, etc). Operations on those data types are converted to methods.

I've been in London for a bit over a week now at the Launchpad sprint. We've been staying in a hotel near the Excel exhibition centre in Docklands, which has a nice view of the docs and you can see the planes landing at the airport out the windows of the conference rooms. I met up with James Bromberger (one of the two main organisers of linux.conf.au 2003) on Thursday, which is the first time I've seen him since he left for the UK after the conference.

Launchpad got a mention in the latest Everybody Loves Eric Raymond comic. It is full of inaccuracies though — we use XML-RPC rather than SOAP. Comments: opi - 24 Feb, 2006 Oh, c'mon. It was quite fun. :-)

The Bugzilla migration on Friday went quite well, so we've now got all the old Ubuntu bug reports in Launchpad. Before the migration, we were up to bug #6760. Now that the migration is complete, there are more than 28000 bugs in the system. Here are some quick points to help with the transition: All bugzilla.ubuntu.com accounts were migrated to Launchpad accounts with a few caveats: If you already had a Launchpad account with your bugzilla email address associated with it, then the existing Launchpad account was used.

The migration is finally going to happen, after much testing of migration code and improvements to Malone. If all goes well, Ubuntu will be using a single bug tracker again on Friday (as opposed to the current system where bugs in main go in Bugzilla and bugs in universe go in Malone). Comments: Keshav - 17 Jan, 2006 Hiiii, I am Keshav and i am 22. I am working as software dev.

One of the things that was discussed at UBZ was moving Ubuntu's bug tracking over to Launchpad. The current situation sees bugs in main being filed in bugzilla while bugs in universe go in Launchpad. Putting all the bugs in Launchpad is an improvement, since users only need to go to one system to file bugs. I wrote the majority of the conversion script before the conference, but made a few important improvements at the conference after discussions with some of the developers.

The Python developers have been discussing a migration off CVS on the python-dev mailing list. During the discussion, Bazaar-NG was mentioned. A few posts of note: Mark Shuttleworth provides some information on the Bazaar roadmap. Importantly, Bazaar-NG will become Bazaar 2.0. Steve Alexander describes how we use Bazaar to develop Launchpad. This includes a description of the branch review process we use to integrate changes into the mainline. I'm going to have to play around with bzr a bit more, but it looks very nice (and should require less typing than baz .

Havoc: we are looking at ways to better integrate version control in Launchpad. There are many areas that could benefit from better use of version control, but I'll focus on bug tracking since you mentioned it. Take the attachment handling in Bugzilla, for instance. In non-ancient versions, you can attach statuses to attachments such as "obsolete" (which has some special handling in the UI — striking out obsolete attachments and making it easy to mark attachments as obsolete when uploading a new attachment).

I got back from the Launchpad sprint in São Carlos on Tuesday afternoon. It was hard work, but a lot of work got done. Launchpad is really coming together now, and will become even better as some of the things discussed at the sprint get implemented. One of the things discussed was to formalise some of the development workflow we've been using to develop Launchpad inside Launchpad itself so that it will be usable by other projects.

One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site. While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update. I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).

I've been playing with OAuth a bit lately. The OAuth specification fulfills a role that some people saw as a failing of OpenID: programmatic access to websites and authenticated web services. The expectation that OpenID would handle these cases seems a bit misguided since the two uses cases are quite different: OpenID is designed on the principle of letting arbitrary OpenID providers talk to arbitrary relying parties and vice versa. OpenID is intentionally vague about how the provider authenticates the user.

One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site. While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update. I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).

Recently I've been working on a Firefox extension, and needed a way to test the code. While testing code is always important, it is particularly important for dynamic languages where code that hasn't been run is more likely to be buggy. I had not experience in how to do this for Firefox extensions, soEric suggested I try out Mozmill. which has been quite helpful so far. There were no Ubuntu packages for it, so I've put some together in my PPA for anyone interested:

While at linux.conf.au earlier this year, I started hacking on a Mandelbrot Set fractal renderer implemented in JavaScript as a way to polish my JS skills. In particular, I wanted to get to know the HTML5 Canvas and Worker APIs. The results turned out pretty well. Click on the image below to try it out: Clicking anywhere on the fractal will zoom in. You'll need to reload the page to zoom out.

Recently I've been working on a Firefox extension, and needed a way to test the code. While testing code is always important, it is particularly important for dynamic languages where code that hasn't been run is more likely to be buggy. I had not experience in how to do this for Firefox extensions, soEric suggested I try out Mozmill. which has been quite helpful so far. There were no Ubuntu packages for it, so I've put some together in my PPA for anyone interested:

While at linux.conf.au earlier this year, I started hacking on a Mandelbrot Set fractal renderer implemented in JavaScript as a way to polish my JS skills. In particular, I wanted to get to know the HTML5 Canvas and Worker APIs. The results turned out pretty well. Click on the image below to try it out: Clicking anywhere on the fractal will zoom in. You'll need to reload the page to zoom out.

I've just got through the first one and a half days of LCA2011 in Brisbane. The organisers have done a great job, especially considering the flooding they have had to deal with. Due to the venue change the accommodation I booked is no longer within walking distance of the conference, but the public transport is pretty good. A bit more concerning was the following change to the wiki made between the time I left Perth and the time I checked in:

Recently I've been working on a Firefox extension, and needed a way to test the code. While testing code is always important, it is particularly important for dynamic languages where code that hasn't been run is more likely to be buggy. I had not experience in how to do this for Firefox extensions, soEric suggested I try out Mozmill. which has been quite helpful so far. There were no Ubuntu packages for it, so I've put some together in my PPA for anyone interested:

Recently I've been working on a Firefox extension, and needed a way to test the code. While testing code is always important, it is particularly important for dynamic languages where code that hasn't been run is more likely to be buggy. I had not experience in how to do this for Firefox extensions, soEric suggested I try out Mozmill. which has been quite helpful so far. There were no Ubuntu packages for it, so I've put some together in my PPA for anyone interested:

Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report. There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right. If you're interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look. Comments: e - 27 Oct, 2009 Have you seen the perl language?

One of the nice features of Bazaar is the ability to send a bundle of changes to someone via email. If you use a supported mail client, it will even open the composer with the changes attached. If your client isn't supported, then it'll let you compose a message in your editor and then send it to an SMTP server. GMail is not a supported mail client, but there are a few work arounds listed on the wiki.

One thing that has been mentioned in the GNOME DVCS debate was that it is as easy to do "git diff" as it is to do "svn diff" so the learning curve issue is moot. I'd have to disagree here. Traditional Centralised Version Control With traditional version control systems (e.g. CVS and Subversion) as used by Free Software projects like GNOME, there are effectively two classes of users that I will refer to as "committers" and "patch contributors":

Yesterday, a BoF was scheduled for discussion of distributed version control systems with GNOME. The BoF session did not end up really discussing the issues of what GNOME needs out of a revision control system, and some of the examples Federico used were a bit snarky. We had a more productive meeting in the session afterwards where we went over some of the concrete goals for the system. The list from the blackboard was:

It has been a while coming, but MySQL has announced their move to Bazaar for version control. This has been a long time coming, and it is great to finally see it announced publicly. The published Bazaar branches include 8 years of history going back to MySQL 3.23.22, imported from the BitKeeper repositories. So you can see a lot more than just the history since the switch: you can use all the normal Bazaar tools to see where the code came from and how it evolved.

One of the features I recently discovered in Bazaar is the --author option for "bzr commit". This lets you make commits to a Bazaar branch on behalf of another person. When used, the new revision credits two people: you as the committer and the other person as the author. While Bazaar does make it easy for non-core contributors to send changes in a form that correctly attributes them (e.g. by publishing a branch or sending a bundle), I doubt we'll ever see the end of pure patches.

Last week we moved psycopg from Subversion to Bazaar. I did the migration using Gustavo Niemeyer's svn2bzr tool with a few tweaks to map the old Subversion committer IDs to the email address form conventionally used by Bazaar. The tool does a good job of following tree copies and create related Bazaar branches. It doesn't have any special handling for stuff in the tags/ directory (it produces new branches, as it does for other tree copies).

While doing a bit of work on Storm, I decided to try out the loom plugin for Bazaar. The loom plugin is designed to help maintain a stack of changes to a base branch (similar to quilt). Some use cases where this sort of tool are useful include: Maintaining a long-running diff to a base branch. Distribution packaging is one such example. While developing a new feature, the underlying code may require some refactoring.

When working on my bzr-avahi plugin, Robert asked me about how it should fit in with his bzr-dbus plugin. The two plugins offer complementary features, and could share a fair bit of infrastructure code. Furthermore, by not cooperating, there is a risk that the two plugins could break when both installed together. Given the dependencies of the two packages, it made more sense to put common infrastructure in bzr-dbus and have bzr-avahi depend on it.

At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP. When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look at my work would be to commit the changes so that they could be pulled or merged by others.

Elijah has been writing an interesting series of articles comparing different version control systems. While the previous articles have been very informative, I think the latest one was a bit muddled. What follows is an expanded version of my comment on that article. Elijah starts by making an analogy between text editors and version control systems, which I think is quite a useful analogy. When working with a text editor, there is a base version of the file on disk, and the version you are currently working on which will become the next saved version.

One useful feature of Bazaar is the ability to cryptographically sign revisions. I was discussing this with Ryan on IRC, and thought I'd write up some of the details as they might be useful to others. Anyone who remembers the past security of GNOME and Debian servers should be able to understand the benefits of being able to verify the integrity of a source code repository after such an incident. Rather than requiring all revisions made since the last known safe backup to be examined, much of the verification could be done mechanically.

In my previous article, I outlined Bazaar's bundle feature. This article describes how the Bazaar developers use bundles as part of their development and code review process. Proposed changes to Bazaar are generally posted as patches or bundles to the development mailing list. Each change is discussed on the mailing list (often going through a number of iterations), and ultimately approved or rejected by the core developers. To aide in managing these patches Aaron Bentley (one of the developers wrote a tool called Bundle Buggy.

This article follows on from the series of tutorials on using Bazaar that I have neglected for a while. This article is about the bundle feature of Bazaar. Bundles are to Bazaar branches what patches are to tarballs or plain source trees. Context/unified diffs and the patch utility are arguably one of most important inventions that enable distributed development: The patch is a self contained text file, making it easy to send as an email attachment or attach to a bug report.

Previously, I posted about the FM radio plugin I was working on. I just posted the code to bug 168735. A few notes about the implementation: The code only supports Video4Linux 2 radio tuners (since that’s the interface my device supports, and the V4L1 compatibility layer doesn’t work for it). It should be possible to port it support both protocols if someone is interested. It does not pass the audio through the GStreamer pipeline.

When at conferences and sprints, I often want to see what someone else is working on, or to let other people see what I am working on. Usually we end up pushing up to a shared server and using that as a way to exchange branches. However, this can be quite frustrating when competing for outside bandwidth when at a conference. It is possible to share the branch from a local web server, but that still means you need to work out the addressing issues.

While browsing the log of one of my Bazaar branches, I noticed that the commit messages were being recorded as occurring in the +0800 time zone even though WA switched over to daylight savings. Bazaar stores commit dates as a standard UNIX seconds since epoch value and a time zone offset in seconds. So the problem was with the way that time zone offset was recorded. The code in bzrlib that calculates the offset looks like this:

In my previous entry, I mentioned that Andrew was actually publishing the contents of all his Bazaar branches with his rsync script, even though he was only advertising a single branch. Yesterday I had a need to actually do this, so I thought I'd detail how to do it. As a refresher, a Bazaar repository stores the revision graph for the ancestry of all the branches stored inside it. A branch is essentially just a pointer to the head revision of a particular line of development.

This article responds to some of the points in Andrew's post about Pushing a bzr branch with rsync. bzr rspush and shared repositories First of all, to understand why bzr rspush refuses to operate on a non-standalone branch, it is worth looking at what it does: Download the revision history of the remote branch, and check to see that the remote head revision is an ancestor of the local head revision.

One of the things we've been working on for Launchpad is good integration with Bazaar. Launchpad provides a way to register or host Bazaar branches, and nominate a Bazaar branch as representing a particular product series. For each registered branch, there is a branch information page. This leads to a bit of confusion since Bazaar uses URLs to identify branches, so people try running bzr branch on a branch information page.

When outlining the use of team branches on Launchpad previously, I used the --create-prefix option when pushing the branch to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net. This was to make sure the initial push would succeed, even if the /\~username/product directory the branch would be created in didn't exist. To simplify things for users, we made a change to the SFTP server in the latest release, so that --create-prefix is no longer necessary. This does not affect the allowed branch directories though: the structure is used to associate the branches with products, and decide who can write to the branches.

Over the weekend, I released gnome-gpg 0.5.0. The main features in this release is support for running without gnome-keyring-daemon (of course, you can't save the passphrase in this mode), and to use the same keyring item name for the passphrase as Seahorse. The release can be downloaded here: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-gpg/0.5/ I also switched over from Arch to Bazaar. The conversion was fairly painless using bzr baz-import-branch, and means that I have both my revisions and Colins revisions in a single tree.

Earlier, David Allouche described how to host Bazaar branches on Launchpad. At the end, he alluded to the ability to create branches that can be committed to by anyone on a team. I'll describe how this works here. Launchpad Teams Launchpad allows people to organise themseleves into teams. Most of the things people can do in Launchpad can also be done by teams, including owning branches. You can create a new team at the following page:

Have you wanted to play around with bzr but had nowhere to share your branches? You can now publish them through Launchpad. David Allouche provides the details. In short, you can upload branches to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/, and they will be published on http://bazaar.launchpad.net/.

I've been doing most JHBuild development in my bzr branch recently. If you have bzr 0.8rc1 installed, you can grab it here: bzr branch http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.dev I've been keeping a regular CVS import going at http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.cvs using Tailor, so changes people make to module sets in CVS make there way into the bzr branch. I've used a small hack so that merges back into CVS get recorded correctly in the jhbuild.cvs branch:

One of the new features in the soon to be released bzr 0.8 is the new "knit" storage format. When comparing the size of the repository data for jhbuild with "knit" and "metadir" formats (metadir is just the old storage format with repository, branch and checkout bookkeeping separated), I see the following: metadir knit Size 9.9MB 5.5MB Number of files 1267 307 The reason for the smaller number of files is that information about all revisions in the repository is now stored together rather than in separate files.

One of the new features comming up in the next release of bzr is support for shared repositories. This provides a way to reduce disk space needed to store multiple related branches. To understand how repositories work, it helps to know a bit about how branches are stored by bzr. There are three concepts that make up a bzr branch: A checkout or working tree. This is the source files you are working with.

In my previous post, I mentioned using Tailor to import jhbuild into a Bazaar-NG branch. In case anyone else is interested in doing the same, here are the steps I used: 1. Install the tools First create a working directory to perform the import, and set up tailor. I currently use the nightly snapshots of bzr, which did not work with Tailor, so I also grabbed bzr-0.7: $ wget http://darcs.arstecnica.it/tailor-0.9.20.tar.gz $ wget http://www.

As most people probably know, the Gnome project is planning a migration to Subversion. In contrast, I've decided to move development of jhbuild over to bzr. This decision is a bit easier for me than for other Gnome modules because: No need to coordinate with GDP or GTP, since I maintain the docs and there is no translations. Outside of the moduleset definitions, the large majority of development and commits are done by me.

I updated my bzr openssh plugin to be a proper patch against bzr.dev, and got it merged. So if you have bzr-openssh-sftp.py in your ~/.bazaar/plugins directory, you should remove it when upgrading. Unfortunately there was a small problem resolving a conflict when merging it, which causes the path to get mangled a little inside _sftp_connect(). Once this is resolved, the mainline bzr should fully follow settings in ~/.ssh/config, because it will be running the same ssh binary as you normally use.

One of the transports available in bzr is sftp. This is implemented using the Paramiko SSH and SFTP library. Unfortunately there are a few issues I experienced with the code: Since it is an independent implementation of SSH, none of my OpenSSH settings in ~/.ssh/config were recognised. The particular options I rely on include: User: when the remote username doesn't match my local one. One less thing to remember when connecting to a remote machine.

When a project grows to a certain size, it will probably need a way to share code between multiple software packages they release. In the context of Gnome, one example is the sharing of the libbackground code between Nautilus and gnome-control-center. The simplest way to do this is to just copy over the files in question and manually synchronise them. This is a pain to do, and can lead to problems if changes are made to both copies, so you'd want to avoid it if possible.

The Python developers have been discussing a migration off CVS on the python-dev mailing list. During the discussion, Bazaar-NG was mentioned. A few posts of note: Mark Shuttleworth provides some information on the Bazaar roadmap. Importantly, Bazaar-NG will become Bazaar 2.0. Steve Alexander describes how we use Bazaar to develop Launchpad. This includes a description of the branch review process we use to integrate changes into the mainline. I'm going to have to play around with bzr a bit more, but it looks very nice (and should require less typing than baz .

Havoc: we are looking at ways to better integrate version control in Launchpad. There are many areas that could benefit from better use of version control, but I'll focus on bug tracking since you mentioned it. Take the attachment handling in Bugzilla, for instance. In non-ancient versions, you can attach statuses to attachments such as "obsolete" (which has some special handling in the UI — striking out obsolete attachments and making it easy to mark attachments as obsolete when uploading a new attachment).

Bryan: there are a number of steps you can skip in your little tutorial: You don't need to set my-default-archive. If you often work with multiple archives, you can treat working copies for all archives pretty much the same. If you are currently inside a working copy, any branch names you use will be relative to your current one, so you can still use short branch names in almost all cases (this is similar to the reason I don't set $CVSROOT when working with CVS).

This posting follows on from my previous postings about Bazaar, but is a bit more advanced. In most cases you don’t need to worry about this, since the tools should just work. However if problems occur (or if you’re just curious about how things work), it can be useful to know a bit about what’s going on inside. Changesets vs. Tree Snapshots A lot of the tutorials for Arch list “changeset orientation” as one of its benefits over other systems such as Subversion, which were said to be based on “tree snapshots”.

I got a few responses to the comparison between CVS, Subversion and Bazaar command line interfaces I posted earlier from Elijah, Mikael and David. As I stated in that post, I was looking at areas where the three systems could be compared. Of course, most people would choose Arch because of the things it can do with it that Subversion and CVS can't. Below I'll discuss two of those things: disconnected development and distributed development.

With the current discussion on gnome-hackers about whether to switch Gnome over to Subversion, it has been brought up a number of times that people can switch from CVS to Subversion without thinking about it (the implication being that this is not true for Arch). Given the improvements in Bazaar, it isn't clear that Subversion is the only system that can claim this benefit. For the sake of comparison, I'm considering the case of a shared repository accessed by multiple developers over SSH.

Travels I've put some of the photos from my trip to Mataró, and the short stop over in Japan on the way back. The Mataró set includes a fair number taken around La Sagrida Familia, and the Japan set is mostly of things around the Naritasan temple (I didn't have enough time to get into Tokyo). Multi-head A few months back, I got a second monitor for my computer and configured it in a Xinerama-style setup (I'm actually using the MergedFB feature of the radeon driver, but it looks like Xinerama to X clients).

Mataró The conference has been great so far. The PyGTK BoF on the weekend was very productive, and I got to meet Anthony Baxter (who as well as being the Python release manager, wrote a cool VoiP application called Shtoom). There was an announcement of some of the other things Canonical have been working on, which has been reported on in LWN (currently subscriber only) among other places. Over the weekend, I had a little time to do some tourist-type things in Barcelona.

Libtool When looking into the libtool problem I mentioned earlier, I decided to take a look at the libtool-2.0 betas. Overall, it looks pretty good. I've updated the gnome-common autogen.sh script to support it. So if a package uses the LT_INIT macro, it will call libtoolize for you. One of the new features in these versions of libtool is that if you have a AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR(directory) call in your configure.ac file, it will copy the libtool M4 macros to that directory.

When looking at various UPnP media servers, one of the features I wanted was the ability to play back my music collection through my PlayStation 3. The complicating factor is that most of my collection is encoded in Vorbis format, which is not yet supported by the PS3 (at this point, it doesn't seem likely that it ever will). Both MediaTomb and Rygel could handle this to an extent, transcoding the audio to raw LPCM data to send over the network.

One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer. Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis. MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to the PS3.

When looking at various UPnP media servers, one of the features I wanted was the ability to play back my music collection through my PlayStation 3. The complicating factor is that most of my collection is encoded in Vorbis format, which is not yet supported by the PS3 (at this point, it doesn't seem likely that it ever will). Both MediaTomb and Rygel could handle this to an extent, transcoding the audio to raw LPCM data to send over the network.

In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel's tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API. It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker. The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file for the "org.

I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.

One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer. Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis. MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to the PS3.

When looking at various UPnP media servers, one of the features I wanted was the ability to play back my music collection through my PlayStation 3. The complicating factor is that most of my collection is encoded in Vorbis format, which is not yet supported by the PS3 (at this point, it doesn't seem likely that it ever will). Both MediaTomb and Rygel could handle this to an extent, transcoding the audio to raw LPCM data to send over the network.

One of the features of Rygel that I found most interesting was the external media server support. It looked like an easy way to publish information on the network without implementing a full UPnP/DLNA media server (i.e. handling the UPnP multicast traffic, transcoding to a format that the remote system can handle, etc). As a small test, I put together a server that exposes the ABC's iView service to UPnP media renderers.

In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel's tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API. It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker. The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file for the "org.

I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.

One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer. Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis. MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to the PS3.

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

Since my last article on integrating Storm with Django, I've merged my changes to Storm's trunk. This missed the 0.13 release, so you'll need to use Bazaar to get the latest trunk or wait for 0.14. The focus since the last post was to get Storm to cooperate with Django's built in ORM. One of the reasons people use Django is the existing components that can be used to build a site.

In my previous post about Django, I mentioned that I found the transaction handling strategy in Django to be a bit surprising. Like most object relational mappers, it caches information retrieved from the database, since you don't want to be constantly issuing SELECT queries for every attribute access. However, it defaults to commiting after saving changes to each object. So a single web request might end up issuing many transactions:

I've been playing around with Django a bit for work recently, which has been interesting to see what choices they've made differently to Zope 3. There were a few things that surprised me: The ORM and database layer defaults to autocommit mode rather than using transactions. This seems like an odd choice given that all the major free databases support transactions these days. While autocommit might work fine when a web application is under light use, it is a recipe for problems at higher loads.

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

David: taking a quick look at Google's documentation, it sure looks like OpenID to me. The main items of note are: It documents the use of OpenID 2.0's directed identity mode. Yes this is "a departure from the process outlined in OpenID 1.0", but that could be considered true of all new features found in 2.0. Google certainly isn't the first to implement this feature: Yahoo's OpenID page recommends users enter "yahoo.

I've been playing with OAuth a bit lately. The OAuth specification fulfills a role that some people saw as a failing of OpenID: programmatic access to websites and authenticated web services. The expectation that OpenID would handle these cases seems a bit misguided since the two uses cases are quite different: OpenID is designed on the principle of letting arbitrary OpenID providers talk to arbitrary relying parties and vice versa. OpenID is intentionally vague about how the provider authenticates the user.

On the OpenID specs mailing list, there was another discussion about using email addresses as OpenID identifiers. So far it has mostly covered existing ground, but there was one comment that interested me: a report that you can log in to many OpenID RPs by entering a Yahoo email address. Now there certainly isn't any Yahoo-specific code in the standard OpenID libraries, so you might wonder what is going on here.

The following article discusses ideas that I wouldn't even class as vapourware, as I am not proposing to implement them myself. That said, the ideas should still be implementable if anyone is interested. One well known security weakness in OpenID is its weakness to phishing attacks. An OpenID authentication request is initiated by the user entering their identifier into the Relying Party, which then hands control to the user's OpenID Provider through an HTTP redirect or form post.

It looks like the OpenID Authentication 2.0 specification has finally been released, along with OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0. While there are some questionable features in the new specification (namely XRIs), it seems like a worthwhile improvement over the previous specification. It will be interesting to see how quickly the new specification gains adoption. While this is certainly an important milestone, there are still areas for improvement. Best Practices For Managing Trust Relationships With OPs

In my previous article on OpenID 2.0, I mentioned the new Attribute Exchange extension. To me this is one of the more interesting benefits of moving to OpenID 2.0, so it deserves a more in depth look. As mentioned previously, the extension is a way of transferring information about the user between the OpenID provider and relying party. Why use Attribute Exchange instead of FOAF or Microformats? Before deciding to use OpenID for information exchange, it is worth looking at whether it is necessary at all.

One of the issues that the OpenID 1.1 specification did not cover is the fact that an identity URL may not remain the property of a user over time. For large OpenID providers there are two cases they may run into: A user with a popular user name stops using the service, and they want to make that name available to new users. A user changes their user name. This may be followed by someone taking over the old name.

Most people have probably seen or used OpenID. If you have used it, then it has most likely that it was with the 1.x protocol. Now that OpenID 2.0 is close to release (apparently they really mean it this time ...), it is worth looking at the new features it enables. A few that have stood out to me include: proper extension support support for larger requests/responses directed identity attribute exchange extension support for a new naming monopoly I'll now discuss each of these in a bit more detail

The new Canonical Shop was opened recently which allows you to buy anything from Ubuntu tshirts and DVDs up to a 24/7 support contract for your server. One thing to note is that this is the first site using our new Launchpad single sign-on infrastructure. We will be rolling this out to other sites in time, which should give a better user experience to the existing shared authentication system currently in place for the wikis.

On my way back from Canada a few weeks ago, I picked up a SanDisk Sansa Fuze media player. Overall, I like it. It supports Vorbis and FLAC audio out of the box, has a decent amount of on board storage (8GB) and can be expanded with a MicroSDHC card. It does use a proprietary dock connector for data transfer and charging, but that's about all I don't like about it.

On my way back from Canada a few weeks ago, I picked up a SanDisk Sansa Fuze media player. Overall, I like it. It supports Vorbis and FLAC audio out of the box, has a decent amount of on board storage (8GB) and can be expanded with a MicroSDHC card. It does use a proprietary dock connector for data transfer and charging, but that's about all I don't like about it.

I'm in Montreal through to the end of next week. The sub-zero temperatures are quite a change from Perth, where it got up to 39°C on the day I left. The last time I was here was for Ubuntu Below Zero, so it is interesting seeing the same city covered in snow. Comments: Tester - 25 Feb, 2009 I hope you enjoy our nice, cool, snow covered city!

At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP. When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look at my work would be to commit the changes so that they could be pulled or merged by others.

PyGTK is a set of bindings for the GTK widget set. It provides an object oriented interface that is slightly higher level than the C one. It automatically does all the type casting and reference counting that you would have to do normally with the C API. For more information on PyGTK, see its home page at www.pygtk.org.

At GUADEC 2002 in Seville I gave a talk about the state of the Python bindings for GTK and GNOME. At this point, I was recommending people move off the old GTK 1.2 bindings, so this talk covered the process of porting existing applications.

At GUADEC 2001 in Copenhagen, I gave a talk about the work I’d been doing on PyGTK. In particular, it talked about the major rewrite to build on top of ExtensionClass (a precursor of Python 2’s new style classes), and the start of GTK 2.0 support.

At GUADEC 2000 in Paris, I gave talks about the Dia diagram editor, and my Python bindings for GTK and GNOME.

Today was the first day of the mini-conferences that lead up to linux.conf.au later on this week. I arrived yesterday after an eventful flight from Perth. I was originally meant to fly out to Melbourne on the red eye leaving on Friday at 11:35pm, but just before I checked in they announced that the flight had been delayed until 4:00am the following day. As I hadn't had a chance to check in, I was able to get a pair of taxi vouchers to get home and back.

The gio library provides both synchronous and asynchronous interfaces for performing IO. Unfortunately, the two APIs require quite different programming styles, making it difficult to convert code written to the simpler synchronous API to the asynchronous one. For C programs this is unavoidable, but for Python we should be able to do better. And if you're doing asynchronous event driven code in Python, it makes sense to look at Twisted. In particular, Twisted's Deferred objects can be quite helpful.

Since my last article on integrating Storm with Django, I've merged my changes to Storm's trunk. This missed the 0.13 release, so you'll need to use Bazaar to get the latest trunk or wait for 0.14. The focus since the last post was to get Storm to cooperate with Django's built in ORM. One of the reasons people use Django is the existing components that can be used to build a site.

In my previous post about Django, I mentioned that I found the transaction handling strategy in Django to be a bit surprising. Like most object relational mappers, it caches information retrieved from the database, since you don't want to be constantly issuing SELECT queries for every attribute access. However, it defaults to commiting after saving changes to each object. So a single web request might end up issuing many transactions:

Yesterday, Thomas rolled the 0.13 release of Storm, which can be downloaded from Launchpad. Storm is the object relational mapper for Python used by Launchpad and Landscape, so it is capable of supporting quite large scale applications. It is seven months since the last release, so there is a lot of improvements. Here are a few simple statistics: 0.12 0.13 Change Tarball size (KB) 117 155 38 Mainline revisions 213 262 49 Revisions in ancestry 552 875 323 So it is a fairly significant update by any of these metrics.

I've been playing around with Django a bit for work recently, which has been interesting to see what choices they've made differently to Zope 3. There were a few things that surprised me: The ORM and database layer defaults to autocommit mode rather than using transactions. This seems like an odd choice given that all the major free databases support transactions these days. While autocommit might work fine when a web application is under light use, it is a recipe for problems at higher loads.

Marc uploaded a new revision of the Python DB-API 2.0 Specification yesterday that documents the new two phase commit extension that I helped develop on the db-sig mailing list. My interest in this started from the desire to support two phase commit in Storm – without that feature there are far fewer occasions where its ability to talk to multiple databases can be put to use. As I was doing some work on psycopg2 for Launchpad, I initially put together a PostgreSQL specific patch, which was (rightly) rejected by Federico.

When Storm was released, one of the comments made was that it did not include the ability to generate a database schema from the Python classes used to represent the tables while this feature is available in a number of competing ORMs. The simple reason for this is that we haven't used schema generation in any of our ORM-using projects. Furthermore I'd argue that schema generation is not really appropriate for long lived projects where the data stored in the database is important.

This week at the EuroPython conference, Gustavo Niemeyer announced the release of Storm and gave a tutorial on using it. Storm is a new object relational mapper for Python that was developed for use in some Canonical projects, and we've been working on moving Launchpad over to it. I'll discuss a few of the nice features of the package: Loose Binding Between Database Connections and Classes Storm has a much looser binding between database connections and the classes used to represent records in particular tables.

Yesterday, Thomas rolled the 0.13 release of Storm, which can be downloaded from Launchpad. Storm is the object relational mapper for Python used by Launchpad and Landscape, so it is capable of supporting quite large scale applications. It is seven months since the last release, so there is a lot of improvements. Here are a few simple statistics: 0.12 0.13 Change Tarball size (KB) 117 155 38 Mainline revisions 213 262 49 Revisions in ancestry 552 875 323 So it is a fairly significant update by any of these metrics.

I've been playing around with Django a bit for work recently, which has been interesting to see what choices they've made differently to Zope 3. There were a few things that surprised me: The ORM and database layer defaults to autocommit mode rather than using transactions. This seems like an odd choice given that all the major free databases support transactions these days. While autocommit might work fine when a web application is under light use, it is a recipe for problems at higher loads.

Last week we moved psycopg from Subversion to Bazaar. I did the migration using Gustavo Niemeyer's svn2bzr tool with a few tweaks to map the old Subversion committer IDs to the email address form conventionally used by Bazaar. The tool does a good job of following tree copies and create related Bazaar branches. It doesn't have any special handling for stuff in the tags/ directory (it produces new branches, as it does for other tree copies).

Yesterday Federico released version 2.0.7 of psycopg2 (a Python database adapter for PostgreSQL). I made a fair number of the changes in this release to make it more usable for some of Canonical's applications. The new release should work with the development version of Storm, and shouldn't be too difficult to get everything working with other frameworks. Some of the improvements include: Better selection of exceptions based on the SQLSTATE result field.

Marc uploaded a new revision of the Python DB-API 2.0 Specification yesterday that documents the new two phase commit extension that I helped develop on the db-sig mailing list. My interest in this started from the desire to support two phase commit in Storm – without that feature there are far fewer occasions where its ability to talk to multiple databases can be put to use. As I was doing some work on psycopg2 for Launchpad, I initially put together a PostgreSQL specific patch, which was (rightly) rejected by Federico.

Since bottling the honey bock last month, I've tried a bottle last week and this week. While it is a very nice beer, the honey flavour is not very noticeable. That said, the second bottle I tried had a slightly stronger honey flavour than the first so it might just need to mature for another month or so. If I was to do this beer again, it would make sense to use a stronger flavoured honey or just use more honey.

Yesterday I bottled the honey bock that has been brewing over the last week. This one was made with the following ingredients: A Black Rock Bock beer kit. 1kg of honey 500g of Dextrose Caster sugar for carbonation The only difference from the standard procedure was replacing part of the brewing sugar with honey. Before being added, the honey needs to be pasteurised, which involves heating it up to 80°C and keeping it at that temperature for half an hour or so.

One of the novelties in the airport lounge at Narita was a beer pouring machine. It manages to consistently pour a good glass of beer every time. You start by placing the glass in the machine: When you press the start button, it tilts the glass and pours the beer down the side of the glass: After filling the glass the machine tilts the glass upright again and some extra foam comes out of the second nozzle:

Got around to tasting the latest batch of home-brew beer recently: a chilli beer. It came out very nicely: very refreshing but with a chilli aftertaste in the back of your throat. You can definitely taste the chilli after drinking a pint :). I used a beer kit as a base, since I haven't yet had the patience to do a brew from scratch. The ingredients were: A Black Rock Mexican Lager beer kit.

Work Last week, one of the servers died because one of the sticks of memory died. After pulling it out, the system booted fine. It would have been a lot easier to test if I didn't have to open it up to plug a floppy drive in. I now have Memtest86 in the GRUB boot menu. Was pretty easy to set up: cp memtest.bin /boot grubby --add-kernel="/boot/memtest.bin" --title="Memtest86" This is the second stick of DDR memory we have had that died; probably due to overheating.

linux.conf.au 2003 The Call for Papers is out: http://conf.linux.org.au/pipermail/lca-helpers/2002-May/000109.html There is also an HTML version on the website, but it doesn't quite match the final version of the CFP (yet). Beer Bottled the honey ale today. It will be interesting to see how it tastes in a few weeks. The sweetness was gone, but I could definitely taste the honey still. It should be very nice. GNOME 2.0 Put out yet another beta of libglade for the GNOME 2.

Started another batch of beer yesterday. This time I mixed in a kilogram of honey (replacing some of the sugar), so it will be interesting to see how this turns out. The bubbles coming out of the airlock smell fairly different, so it will hopefully go okay. Merged some patches from various people into my jhbuild build scripts over the weekend. Thanks to jdahlin, it now has support for getting things from other CVS trees.

While doing a bit of work on Storm, I decided to try out the loom plugin for Bazaar. The loom plugin is designed to help maintain a stack of changes to a base branch (similar to quilt). Some use cases where this sort of tool are useful include: Maintaining a long-running diff to a base branch. Distribution packaging is one such example. While developing a new feature, the underlying code may require some refactoring.

When working on my bzr-avahi plugin, Robert asked me about how it should fit in with his bzr-dbus plugin. The two plugins offer complementary features, and could share a fair bit of infrastructure code. Furthermore, by not cooperating, there is a risk that the two plugins could break when both installed together. Given the dependencies of the two packages, it made more sense to put common infrastructure in bzr-dbus and have bzr-avahi depend on it.

As most developers know, Valgrind is an invaluable tool for finding memory leaks. However, when debugging Python programs the pymalloc allocator gets in the way. There is a Valgrind suppression file distributed with Python that gets rid of most of the false positives, but does not give particularly good diagnostics for memory allocated through pymalloc. To properly analyse leaks, you often need to recompile Python with pymalloc. As I don't like having to recompile Python I took a look at Valgrind's client API, which provides a way for a program to detect whether it is running under Valgrind.

At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP. When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look at my work would be to commit the changes so that they could be pulled or merged by others.

When at conferences and sprints, I often want to see what someone else is working on, or to let other people see what I am working on. Usually we end up pushing up to a shared server and using that as a way to exchange branches. However, this can be quite frustrating when competing for outside bandwidth when at a conference. It is possible to share the branch from a local web server, but that still means you need to work out the addressing issues.

So after I posted some instructions for setting up Avahi on Breezy, a fair number of people at UBZ did so. For most people this worked fine, but it seems that a few people's systems started spewing a lot of network traffic. It turns out that the problem was actually caused by the zeroconf package (which I did not suggest installing) rather than Avahi. The zeroconf package is not needed for service discovery or .

During conferences, it is often useful to be able to connect to connect to other people's machines (e.g. for collaborative editing sessions with Gobby). This is a place where mDNS hostname resolution can come in handy, so you don't need to remember IP addresses. This is quite easy to set up on Breezy: Install the avahi-daemon, avahi-utils and libnss-mdns packages from universe. Restart dbus in order for the new system bus security policies to take effect with "sudo invoke-rc.

At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP. When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look at my work would be to commit the changes so that they could be pulled or merged by others.

At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP. When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look at my work would be to commit the changes so that they could be pulled or merged by others.

At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP. When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look at my work would be to commit the changes so that they could be pulled or merged by others.

Yesterday I performed the migration of Inkscape's bugs from SourceForge.net to Launchpad. This was a full import of all their historic bug data – about 6900 bugs. As the import only had access to the SF user names for bug reporters, commenters and assignees, it was not possible to link them up to existing Launchpad users in most cases. This means that duplicate person objects have been created with email addresses like $USERNAME@users.

In my previous article on OpenID 2.0, I mentioned the new Attribute Exchange extension. To me this is one of the more interesting benefits of moving to OpenID 2.0, so it deserves a more in depth look. As mentioned previously, the extension is a way of transferring information about the user between the OpenID provider and relying party. Why use Attribute Exchange instead of FOAF or Microformats? Before deciding to use OpenID for information exchange, it is worth looking at whether it is necessary at all.

Since upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy I've occasionally been seeing the following notification from GNOME Power Manager: I'd usually trigger this error by unplugging the AC adapter and then picking suspend from GPM's left click menu. My first thought on seeing this was "What's a policy timeout, and why is it not valid?" followed by "I don't remember setting a policy timeout". Looking at bug 492132 I found a pointer to the policy_suppression_timeout gconf value, whose description gives a bit more information.

One of the novelties in the airport lounge at Narita was a beer pouring machine. It manages to consistently pour a good glass of beer every time. You start by placing the glass in the machine: When you press the start button, it tilts the glass and pours the beer down the side of the glass: After filling the glass the machine tilts the glass upright again and some extra foam comes out of the second nozzle:

One of the novelties in the airport lounge at Narita was a beer pouring machine. It manages to consistently pour a good glass of beer every time. You start by placing the glass in the machine: When you press the start button, it tilts the glass and pours the beer down the side of the glass: After filling the glass the machine tilts the glass upright again and some extra foam comes out of the second nozzle:

I recently received a bug report about the free space calculation in gnome-vfs-obexftp. At the moment, the code exposes a single free space value for the OBEX connection. However, some phones expose multiple volumes via the virtual file system presented via OBEX. It turns out my own phone does this, which was useful for testing. The Nokia 6230 can store things on the phone’s memory (named DEV in the OBEX capabilities list), or the Multimedia Card (named MMC).

Started playing with nxml-mode, which makes editing XML much nicer in emacs (psgml-1.3 does an okay job, but the indenter and tag closer sometimes get confused by empty elements). There is a nice article about nxml-mode on xmlhack which gives an introduction to the mode. The first thing that struck me about nxml in comparison to psgml was the lack of syntax highlighting. It turned out that the reason for this was that colours were only specified for the light background case, and I was using a dark background.

Have been playing round with Atom, which looks like a nicer form of RSS. Assuming your content is already in XHTML, it looks a lot easier to generate an Atom file compared to an RSS file, because the content can be embedded directly, rather than needing to be escaped as character data. Similarly, an Atom file is easier to process using standard XML tools compared to RSS because the document only needs to be parsed once to get at the content (which is probably what you were after anyway).

The progress on JHBuild has continued (although I haven't done much in the last week or so). Frederic Peters of JhAutobuild fame now has a CVS account to maintain the client portion of that project in tree. Perl Modules (#342638) One of the other things that Frederic has been working on is support for building Perl modules (which use a Makefile.PL instead of a configure script). His initial patchworked fine for tarballs, but by switching over to the new generic version control code in jhbuild it was possible to support Perl modules maintained in any of the supported version control systems without extra effort.

I've been doing most JHBuild development in my bzr branch recently. If you have bzr 0.8rc1 installed, you can grab it here: bzr branch http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.dev I've been keeping a regular CVS import going at http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.cvs using Tailor, so changes people make to module sets in CVS make there way into the bzr branch. I've used a small hack so that merges back into CVS get recorded correctly in the jhbuild.cvs branch:

In my previous post, I mentioned using Tailor to import jhbuild into a Bazaar-NG branch. In case anyone else is interested in doing the same, here are the steps I used: 1. Install the tools First create a working directory to perform the import, and set up tailor. I currently use the nightly snapshots of bzr, which did not work with Tailor, so I also grabbed bzr-0.7: $ wget http://darcs.arstecnica.it/tailor-0.9.20.tar.gz $ wget http://www.

As most people probably know, the Gnome project is planning a migration to Subversion. In contrast, I've decided to move development of jhbuild over to bzr. This decision is a bit easier for me than for other Gnome modules because: No need to coordinate with GDP or GTP, since I maintain the docs and there is no translations. Outside of the moduleset definitions, the large majority of development and commits are done by me.

On the gtk-doc-list mailing list, Matthias mentioned that the GraphViz license has been changed to the CPL (the same license as used for Eclipse), which is considered Free by both the FSF and OSI (although still GPL incompatible). This should remove the barriers that prevented it getting packaged by Linux distributions. Due to the previous licensing, RMS urged developers of GNU software to not even produce output in the form that the GraphViz tools use as input.

Mataró I've been in Mataró (about an hour from Barcelona) now since Sunday, and it's quite a nice place. It is a bit cooler than Perth due to it being the middle of Winter here, but the way most of the locals are rugged up you'd think it was a lot colder. It's great to catch up with everyone, and a number of pygtk developers will be turning up over the next few days for the BOF on the weekend.

Even More Icon Theme Stuff To make it a bit easier to correctly display themed icons, I added support to GtkImage, so that it is as easy as calling gtk_image_new_from_icon_name() or gtk_image_set_from_icon_name(). The patch is attached to bug #155688. This code takes care of theme changes so the application developer doesn't need to. Once this is in, it should be trivial to add themed icon support to various other widgets that use GtkImage (such as GtkAbout and GtkToolItem).

Icon Theme APIs (continued) Of course, after recommending that people use gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() to perform the icon load and scale the icon for you, Ross manages to find a bug in that function. If the icon is not found in the icon theme, but instead in the legacy $prefix/share/pixmaps directory, then gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() will not scale the image down (it will scale them up if necessary though). jhbuild Jhbuild now includes a notification icon when running in the default terminal mode.

linux.conf.au The LCA2004 team have put together the conference CD and DVD. Apparently they will arrive in the mail in about a week. They put the CD contents on the web first, and I was a bit disappointed that the recording of my talk was missing (it does include my slides though). However, when they put the DVD contents up I saw that it included a video recording of the talk, which is pretty cool.

Mail Viruses The barrage of mail viruses and their side effects is getting quite annoying. In the past week, I've had a gnome.org mailing list subscriptions disabled twice. After looking at the mailing list archive, it was pretty obvious why. The mail server that serves my account is set up to reject windows executables a few other viruses at SMTP delivery time (so it isn't responsible for generating bounces). Unfortunately, a number of viruses got through to the mailing lists and were subsequently rejected before reaching my account.

ViewCVS After the breakin at the gnome.org web server, the CVS server were moved over to the new server HP donated. However, the LXR and Bonsai tools weren't considered as high a priority, so have not been restored yet. Since it was easier to set up than either LXR or Bonsai, I set up ViewCVS (with jdub's help), so we now have online repository browsing again. It doesn't provide all the features found in the other packages, so it'll be good to get them set up again too though.

Made some changes to the way "jhbuild bootstrap" works. Whereas previously bootstrap would check to see if each required build tool was installed by the distro and only build the tools that were missing, it now builds all the tools. If you wish to use the build tools supplied by your distro, it is now recommended that you don't run bootstrap. To perform the "check that required tools are installed" job that bootstrap used to do, you can instead run the "jhbuild sanitycheck" command, which will do these checks and report any errors.

Weather It has been really hot and humid here for the past few days. While it is not uncommon to have hot weather in Perth, high humidity is quite unusual. It seems to be due to the floods up in the north of the state (they had a report on the news about an 18 person town that had been without a pub for 3 days). There was a big thunder storm last night, so hopefully things will get back to normal.

jhbuild Had a pretty good response to the jhbuild changes. There was a number of problems I didn't catch during my testing (more that I would have liked). However, I think I caught the last few ones with pychecker. I suppose the next thing to do is to help the fd.org guys set things up so they can manage their module sets from their own CVS tree. That will make it easier to recommend as a build tool.

Checked in a fairly big set of modifications to jhbuild, designed to make it a bit more modular and the code less messy. I had been working on these changes for a while now, and had been keeping track of them on the jhbuild-ng branch. Here are a few of the main changes: Code reorganised into a package The code has been reorganised into a Python package. Unfortunately this means that the old shell script used to start jhbuild won't work.

Mark: the support for building the freedesktop.org X server hasn't been there for a while. It was just added yesterday by Johan Dahlin. If anyone else is interested in building some of the stuff in freedesktop.org CVS using jhbuild, I wrote some instructions and put them in the wiki.

Red Hat 9 Installed it on a few boxes, and I like what I see so far. The Bluecurve mouse cursors look really nice. It is also good to see some more of my packages included in the distro (fontilus and pyorbit). Spam Some spammer has been sending mail with random @daa.com.au addresses in the From: field. So far, I have received lots of double bounces, a few messages asking if we know about the spam, and many automated responses (some saying the message came from a blocked domain!

Started another batch of beer yesterday. This time I mixed in a kilogram of honey (replacing some of the sugar), so it will be interesting to see how this turns out. The bubbles coming out of the airlock smell fairly different, so it will hopefully go okay. Merged some patches from various people into my jhbuild build scripts over the weekend. Thanks to jdahlin, it now has support for getting things from other CVS trees.

At Linux.conf.au 2004 in Adelaide, I gave a talk about controlling GNOME applications from Python via the accessibility framework.

At GUADEC 2003 in Dublin, I gave talks about Libegg and PyORBit.

At GUADEC 2003 in Dublin, I gave talks about Libegg and PyORBit.

I gave a talk at Linux.conf.au 2003 about the experimental “EggMenu” framework I had been working on. This code was eventually merged into GTK 2.4 as GtkUIManager.

At GUADEC 2000 in Paris, I gave talks about the Dia diagram editor, and my Python bindings for GTK and GNOME.