Hacking

I sent today an internal email to the Igalia staff about happiness at work. You know that our main goal, as company, is to achieve our happiness. Regarding to that, I wrote a not so long essay about my experience with an useful option that comes with GNOME since a few releases ago. I’m talking about the Typing Break option located at the last tab of Keyboard preferences dialog. If enabled, it basically locks your screen during a specified amount of time every X minutes. For example, I usually break for 3 minutes each hour. (that is the origin of the 3.60 -read it as three sixty- happiness movement, thanks to Juanjo for the original name, I modified it lightly in order to give it a more “commercial” ;-) name). ...

GNOME 2.16 is out, so we must begin thinking about the new release. I’ve just generated the graph of dependencies of the 2.18 modules using jhbuild svillar@wopr:~$ jhbuild dot | dot -Tps > dependencies.ps See the result here in ps.bz2 format. Can you find your favorite module? As you can see in the zoom bellow it’s an easy task to follow the track :-) ...

I’ve been working last days with my old K6-2 300 at home. I had some problems with large apps like Evolution or Firefox there, so I decided to look for another email client and another browser. Then I found two really cool ones. Dillo is a very very light weight browser. It does not render web pages perfectly, but it’s OK if you just want to read. On the other hand I found Sylpheed email client. It’s also light and has lots of plugins (even integration with dillo). ...

Hi, I’m here at work again, after 3 weeks at Köln learning German, meeting a lot of people and also having fun. What I can say about the city is “das Wetter ist schlecht aber die Leute sind toll” :-) I arrived Galicia on Saturday, and after 20 days without using a computer (very nice experience), I retook my sound problems with mine Intel HDA sound card. The problem was very weird, I had sound once the system is up (the module was loaded also without problems) but every time I tried to modify the volume by software then the sound turned off. As usually I thought that the problem was mine, you know, bad configurations and so on. ...

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for two years, and I was (and I still am) very comfortable with it. Especially I like very much how it manages multiple pop accounts, the themes and mainly its speed. But now, for some reasons, I began (again) using Evolution. I need it because its great integration with the GNOME desktop, and because it has some features that I need, for example, tasks and appointments management. ...

A few weeks ago I have been working with the libgalago library by Christian Hammond. If you don’t know what is libgalago take a look at this article of the Linux Journal. Basically galago is a library that provides presence to applications. This library had a little performance issue. libgalago uses DBUS for getting/setting presences, and all the calls through the bus were synchronous. Imagine a device with low resources, for example the Nokia 770, that uses libgalago. It could be that if you have a lot of contacts, an application that uses libgalago could get stalled due to it should wait for every call to the bus that requests for presences, contacts, services …etc. ...

Yesterday was another intensive hackfest afternoon. But this time no one came neither with food nor drinks :(. We should review our policy about hackfests. Anyway, Iago and me were reviewing our past work about DBUS. We were trying to port Gedit to use DBUS instead of its own “bacon-message-connection”. We coded some tests in order to know if we were understanding everything. Creating a client and a server was easy, and the API to perform a remote call to an object is easy too, but like other projects, I think there is a lack of documentation. This time we took some help from the DBUS missing tutorial For example, we were in trouble because we were not able to connect to the session server. We read in the DBUS tutorial that libdbus automatically discovers the address of the per-session bus daemon by reading an environment variable. But what is its name? We found it, well we found them, because there are two: DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID. Finally we were able to call our amazing method called foo from our really impressive GObject called Objectlet. What a great victory :-). Next week, we’ll begin analizing the “bacon-message-connection” code, and then after reviewing the requirements, I hope we’ll begin the port. ...

Iago had a talk with Paolo Borelli this afternoon while I was rebuilding some Gnome 2.14 components. This is a little extract of the talk: <pbor> there are other hacks that can be done though :) <iago> I hope so <iago> :) <iago> sergio told me <iago> something about dbus <pbor> yeah <iago> that would be interesting <pbor> we would like to try to use dbus instead of bacon-message-connection <pbor> something like evince and epiphany do <iago> cool <sergio> eo <iago> is that a high priority task? <sergio> I lost connection :( <pbor> enforcing just one instance of gedit using dbus and the second time gedit is launched use dbus to pass the list of args to the running ...