sergio@qi:~$ uname -a
Linux qi 2.6.26 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jul 16 17:34:38 CEST 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

iwl4965 LEDs working now. Thank you kernel hackers!

PS: BTW the kernel option is

Device Drivers->
Network Device Support ->
Wireless LAN ->
Intel Wireles WiFi 4965 AGN ->
Enable LEDS features in iwl4965 driver

• modest-devel: for development purpouses
• modest-user: for Modest users

You can subscribe to both of them here.

There are many other ways to contact us like the public forum, the feature request system, or the bug tracking system (thanks Andre for pointing me out that starting today we’re using the maemo bugzilla, select “Communication” as product, and “Email” as component). So just use those channels of communication, we’ll try to help as much as possible.

Now I only have to convince Rufo to use it…

svn: Network socket initialization failed

This was even reported as debian bug. But it’s not definitely a bug in SVN, the problem is located in the libgcrypt library used by SVN to deal with SSL enabled SVN servers. Being inside a JHBuild shell you’ll most likely have a LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable that will point to the location you setup as destination folder for the modules to build. So the svn command will use that libgcrypt and thus the error will appear.

It’s as easy as to wrap your svn command like this for example.

#!/bin/sh
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
exec /usr/bin/svn "$@"

Update: BTW jdub I’ve now a hackergotchi (thx pvanhoof). You can take it from here. It could be already seen in Planet Igalia

• .NET bindings
• Improved the cancellation support: cancel retrieval of messages, cancel retrieval of headers…
• Error handling refactoring
• Several bug fixes here and there (specially a very important one in the POP backend)

So, if you want to try the new features of tinymail just download the latest release of Modest. We didn’t release a new version last week because some of us were at FOSDEM, but you can now get the latest code. Things that you’d appreciate

• Fixed some crashes here and there
• Lots of tiny UI improvements: error messages, localization, performance
• Improved the support for non-Latin emails (mainly Chinese support)
• First partial implementation of an account setup dialog for the GNOME version

In general, people are telling us that Modest is becoming quite stable, so just try it and tell us what you think. Oh I forgot a couple of mandatory screenshots, this is how Modest looks like in my scratchbox

and the GNOME version as well

Check out the video (only in Spanish, hope that somebody will provide subtitles)

More or less at the same time I began to contribute to the Tinymail project leaded by the unique Philip van Hoof. Thank you Philip for providing us the APIs we wanted, for reviewing our patches and for your long e-mails plenty full of decorators, bodystructures, IMAP IDLEs and so on

And finally I’d like to thank Dirk-Jan because it’s a pleasure to work with you.

Talking a little bit about Modest, these are the features I specially like

• Modest is asynchronous: this means that the UI does not block while network operations are taking place, the UI is fully responsive while Tinymail performs the network stuff in the background
• Easy Setup: as Dirk said once, Modest is for humans. Just tell Modest where you are, your ISP and provide an username and a password and Modest will do all the hard server configuration stuff for you
• Connection specific SMTPs: when you’re at work, you access the Internet through your ultra-high secured intranet which allows you to do almost anything. You can only send e-mails using your company’s SMTP for example. But when you’re at home you want to send it through your ISP’s SMTP. Do you need two configurations? No, Modest can detect the network where you are connected to and use the proper SMTP for you with almost zero configuration.
• In Rome do as Romans, so if you’re human use your thumbs don’t use stylus!
• And finally Modest can be used as a desktop e-mail client as well. I don’t recommend it to you though right now, because it’s a little bit unmaintained but it’s been designed to be used in both Hildon and GNOME desktops, so be patient (and send us your patches)

So stay tuned, more about Modest is coming soon. BTW download and try it!

I set up a GConfClient to listen to changes in keys under a specific directory. I wrote also a handler for this GConf notifications hoping that I’ll get every change in those keys (the API doc literally says “Any changes to keys below this directory will cause the “value_changed” signal to be emitted”). So I relied in this GConf notification handler some important code of my application. But, while executing the application I realized that I was not getting some notifications even tough I was completely sure that I was setting a new value in the GConf key. So, I had to take a deeper look…

I verified that the GConf server was issuing a notification for every change I made, so the problem should be in the client. Looking at the GConfClient code I found the following in the notify_from_server_callback function:

changed = gconf_client_cache (client, FALSE, entry, TRUE);

if (!changed)
return; /* don't do the notify */

gconf_client_queue_notify (client, entry->key);

What? This means that I won’t get notifications if the key is already updated in the client cache? What’s the reason for such a behaviour? I don’t think this is what a developer expects, specially for a system that uses idles for notifications (you could never be sure when you’ll get it), because it could cause things like the one that was happening to me:

1. As a response to a user action I was setting a new value to a GConf key
2. Before the GConfServer notified the GConfClient, there was some other code that was trying to get the new value of the same key
3. GConf cached the new value in the client while doing the get operation
4. The GConfClient received the GConfServer notification, but was not issuing a notification because the value was already updated
5. I was scratching my head trying to figure out what the hell was happening …

So, IMHO there are two possibilities

1. Always notify
2. Write in bold 46-point sized font that sometimes you could not get notifications because of that

Anyway, it’s always good to look into the guts of the software you use.

My name is Sergio Villar Senín. I’ve been using free software for 7 years, and I’m a free software developer since 2003 when I joined Igalia. I started there with project Fisterra, a free software framework for developing enterprise applications.

I’ve been (and I am) involved also in some projects related to Maemo technologies. Recently I’ve been contributing to the great tinymail framework started by Philip.

Now that the GUADEC is (almost) over I’d like to say that the keynotes are amazing but, what I really enjoyed this year, were the lightning talks. They were all very interesting, all the speakers did a great job, and the rhythm was really frenetic. Furthermore, the lightning talks have a great advantage, if you don’t like one of them, don’t worry, you’ll get the next one in a couple of minutes . I’d really like to see a lightning session each day in the next GUADEC.

Update: does anybody know why I get this awful footer to my post? It does not happen for example here.