GUADEC, Vilanova, Spain

General

GUADEC

Tomorrow I fly to Vilanova, near Barcelona, to attend the GNOME conference. Afterwards, I’ll stay in Barcelona over the weekend for some touristing.

I’m looking forward to GUADEC as a kind of holiday where I can spend the time just doing things that I find interesting. I’ve had the guilty pleasure of not helping at all with the organisation, though I’ve been on the mailing lists, so I’m more than usually grateful to Quim Gil and his team for their fantastic work, and for the stress that they will probably endure/enjoy for the week.

I know that they don’t speak Spanish in Catalonia, but there will be people from other parts of Spain. I would really love to practice some of the simple Spanish that I’ve learnt. I’m now up to lesson 17 of part 2 of Pimsleur’s Spanish, and I need to see if I’ve really learnt anything.

Contributing to Glom

At GUADEC, I’ll try to recruit contributors for Glom. So far, I’ve not had success getting people involved, though I knew there’d be a delay while it even got into the distributions for testing by users. At least life is easy now with Ubuntu Dapper at least – you can even build Glom without using jhbuild.

To make contribution easier, I’ll do some more reorganisation of the source code, and some simple developer documentation. In the meantime, I marked the easier Glom tasks, and added some more clues about how to implement them. Some of these tasks are appropriate for people just getting started with C++ or gtkmm. Interested people should find me at GUADEC.

If you have a laptop with you, I’ll take the time to help you setup Glom and setup your development environment, and I’ll show you how to make patches. If you don’t have your laptop, I’ll show you stuff on mine. I’ll introduce you the code and show you how to get started on one of the simple tasks, based on your current experience. I’ll try to do this online too, but a week in the GNOME Village is a real opportunity to do this properly in person. I’ll do this in English or German.

I also added 3 more examples in CVS, and put some screenshots of the examples online. Two of them (Music Collection and Project Manager) are really simple, but Film Production Manager is quite large and involved and is based on a real situation.

Postgres detection via Avahi?

General,

I don’t have much time for coding right now, but I can still abuse my blog to suggest fun stuff for others to do. Then I can put the results together when I’m free again at the end of September.

I’d love if it someone patched Postgres to announce itself over the network with Avahi. Then Glom wouldn’t need to ask anyone for a hostname – they could just choose a server from a list, with a good default. Postgres already uses Bonjour when running on MacOS, so some stuff must already be there.

Party, Football, etc.

General

We finally had our apartment-warming party, which turned out really well, with lots of our favourite people and the drama of a German goal to win in the 91st minute.

Josh made the journey to Munich. He’s recently been in Austria doing some German-language Ubuntu Linux training videos with Video2Brain. They sound like a great bunch of people and I imagine that the result will be a really useful addition to their catalogue. His video should be available soon. Of course, if he found the time to blog then I wouldn’t have to be the definitive source of Josh-related information.

The day after the party we took a weary walk around the Viertel and visited the beach bar on the bridge over the Isar.

IMG_0947

New Hackergotchi

General

As GUADEC approaches, it’s really time for me to update my hackergotchi so people don’t tell me afterwards that they wished I had been there.

murrayc_hackergotchi_old.png

Unfortunately this also means that less people will meet me and remember me as particularly wise and with a German accent too. If you’ve had that experience already then you’ve actually met Matthias Clasen, who indeed does the work of two people.

That’s three or four years of not looking half normal while simultaneously being between a camera and a plain background. I did my best with the normal-looking, but I plan to be dissatisfied with this one for another few years.

murrayc_hackergotchi_new.png

This takes me ages to do in GIMP. If anybody would like to do a better job, here is the original:

IMGP0765Update: Mark Slater made a better one, though it shows up with a black background in WordPress when I import it into WordPress. Let’s see how it looks online:
murrayc_small

GNOME Mentored Projects

General,

I started a Mentored Projects page on the GNOME wiki for us to list stuff left over from Google’s Summer Of Code. There seems to be much enthusiasm for this, and we have a lot to gain. It shouldn’t be just for students, but some universities would like to make it part of their courses.

So, mentors, please do move your unsuccessful Summer of Code ideas over to the Mentored Projects page.

Glom 1.0.3 on Ubuntu Dapper

General,

Glom version 1.0.3 is now available in Ubuntu Dapper. Several nasty bugs were fixed in the last few versions, thanks to some excellent feedback on bugzilla and the mailing list. This included a crash when adding fields in non-English locales and a problem opening examples in 1.0.0. So, please try it out and give me some more bug reports to fix. Note that your bug might be fixed in 1.0.4 already.

There’s still not much sign of Glom on regular Debian. I guess it needs one of the existing Debian packagers to pick up Daniel’s work.

Denis Leroy is still working on packages for Fedora and is apparently still pushing Bakery in. He might appreciate some help.

I’ll do some more code cleanup before branching for new features. At the moment, I have a tendency to break existing stuff when I fix bugs. I’d also like to find the time to port a cut-down client version to the Nokia 770.

Web 2.0 programming languages

General,

As before, I’m still pondering indecisively how I might implement the Glom Web UI. There’s several AJAX toolkits that should take some of the pain away, but the choice of programming languages is still the big forking decision.

Now that Java can be distributed on Linux, it’s a candidate again. And now that Java has generics, they’ve dealt with the lack of compile-time type-safety that always annoyed me. Python is less verbose, but the run-time type surprises have always annoyed me. Of course, Java still isn’t open source (or clearly patent-free, so free implementations may also be in danger), and it’s monolithic, so we’re stuck with the quality that we’re given. That is admittedly only marginably better than putting my nuts in Microsoft’s hands. But I guess it helps that it’s so big and successful already.

And I started thinking about Java again when I saw that Google released the Google Web Toolkit, a Java API for AJAX UIs. (Update: It’s not Open Source so I won’t be using that. There will be bugs and I’d want to fix them.) I didn’t expect them to be using Java. I thought they were all about C++ (The main search UI, apparently, and I’ve heard they use lots of boost::python.) and Python (not sure where though). I’d love to see a list of Google products with programming languages and technologies that they use. There must be enough client-side clues to figure that out. At the moment there’s such a mess of competing frameworks that I’d love to choose something based on the quality of google’s products.

There’s now a libglom, with a C++ API, which I’ll want to reuse. boost::python for C++, or JNI for Java would let me do that. I don’t have much confidence that I’d be able to use C++ for this. I just dont’ think enough people are doing that, and I’d rather not be the only consumer of a toolkit.

I looked at Ruby on Rails, and I think there’s a Python version now too. It seems to demand a static database structure. I think it generates classes for each database table. I imagine that’s a fast hacky way to do web applications. But that’s no good for a generic database API. It’s the UI and session management that I’m interested in.

GNOME’s Google Summer of Code: Let your students code.

General

Every now and then I’m trying to help prune our big (> 180 elligible) list of applications. The quality of applications is much better than last year, so we have to be quite critical. Even where the applications aren’t great, the students seem to have lots of ability and enthusiasm.

I don’t want these people to get away from us when we have to reject their applications. Their universities should let them spend the time on these projects even if they aren’t getting paid for it by Google. They’ll learn far more than they would during three months of lectures and assignments. Some of the world’s best software developers would love to mentor them. And they’d be a great advertisment for the university.