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Title: Planet GNOME
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Description: Planet GNOME - http://planet.gnome.org/
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****************************************
Item: John Fleck: Savant
<http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/archives/001578.html>
Date: 2005-02-21 16:32:48 UTC
[A]

Last night, Sadie was behaving powerfully strangely. Lissa and I were 
reading in bed, and Sadie was moping around the bedroom, looking at us, 
sniffing at things, sometimes just standing there sadly, as if she was 
trying to tell us something.

When I opened this morning's paper, I understood. Hunter S. Thompson[1] 
*and* Sandra Dee[2] had died. It's like Sadie is some sort of pop 
culture doggie savant, like *she knew*.

[1] 
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/67D36E3F-9D1E-4E17-8938-5624B812897C.htm
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4283213.stm

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jfleck.png

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Item: Hubert Figuiere: Software Rant
<http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2005/02/21/100-software-rant>
Date: 2005-02-21 16:11:35 UTC
[A]

- I'm ranting about Evolution, its speed and its antispam[1], I'm not 
alone[2]. Someone should really start to replace this antispam by what 
we find in Thunderbird / Mozilla, including flagging as \Junk over IMAP 
(I couldn't find any reference in RFCs and couldn't find the code in 
Thunderbird, anyone has an idea?) see bug 72547[3]. For reference, 
marking one message as junk on my laptop take 15 to 20sec, even if the 
message is local.

- I'm ranting about MacOS X memory usage, I'm not alone[4]. With 256MB 
the MacMini is barely usable. I'll get a 1GB memory...

[1] http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2005/02/09/83-all-mailers-suck
[2] http://www.advogato.org/person/robertc/diary.html?start=31
[3] http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=72547
[4] http://www.advogato.org/person/avriettea/diary.html?start=51

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hub.png

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Item: Dave Neary: 21 Feb 2005
<http://www.advogato.org/person/bolsh/diary.html?start=81>
Date: 2005-02-21 15:02:22 UTC
[A]*GUADEC progress*

So I managed to get the GUADEC acceptance mails out over the weekend. If 
anyone was expecting a mail about a GUADEC presentation, and didn't get 
one, please let me know. It's entirely possible that I missed one or 
two.

Some people have queried why there is a proceedings for GUADEC, and why 
authors have to submit papers. The explanation is two-fold.

First, writing a paper beforehand helps the presenter organise his 
material and gives attendees a support for the conference, which allows 
greater participation, and a more coherent presentation. Writing slides 
in the train before a conference is a practice that should be 
discouraged.

Second, several attendees can get funding to attend if the conference is 
an academic conference - which means having a proceedings. The Norwegian 
guys were really great with this last year, especially Janis who took 
care of all the administravia, and several people got to the conference 
on college grants thanks to that proposal. Since funds are typically 
tight, any help that we can give to attendees is a good thing.

Finally, we're not asking for a formal oeuvre. You're not going to have 
your article submitted for a Pulitzer. A couple of pages presenting the 
major concepts you want to present, essentially a long abstract, is 
fine. And if you don't have time, or just don't want to, let us know at 
guadec-papers, and we'll sort something out.

That said, I encourage everyone presenting to write a paper, at least 2 
pages, at most 5, since it will really help the GNOME Users and 
Developers in Europe, who are, after all, what the conference is about.

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/bolsh.png

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Item: Zaheer Abbas Merali: Ashura
<http://zaheer.merali.org/?p=100>
Date: 2005-02-21 13:59:55 UTC
[A]

Yesterday was Ashura[1]. The talks given at the mosque for the past 11 
nights can be found here[2] and were given by Seyed Mahdi 
Al-Modarresi[3].

[1] http://www.ashura.com/
[2] 
http://www.hujjat.org/index.php?name=zina&#38;op=modload&#38;file=index&#38;p=Seyed+Modaressi%2FMuharram+1426
[3] http://www.almodarresi.net/

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/zaheer.png

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Item: Michael Meeks: 2005-02-21: Monday
<http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2005-02-21>
Date: 2005-02-21 12:00:00 UTC
[A]
 
- Up late; J. off to rescue Janine from being boxed in in Town. Got the 
machine-room spun up again.

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/michael.png

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Item: Alex Graveley: Erotic cleft
<http://www.beatniksoftware.com/blog/index.php?p=16>
Date: 2005-02-21 06:42:05 UTC
[A]

From *Jennifer and the Master: A Unique Erotica*, a hardcore S&M book 
(opus really), the only book on my desk: 

Within the living mirror, the beholders fondle the erotic cleft between 
them. 

This book was left inexplicably at our doorstep on Valentine’s eve, and 
thus far no one has taken credit. 

Blah blah blah[1]… 

- Grab the nearest book. 
- Open the book to page 123. 
- Find the fifth sentence. 
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these 
instructions. 
- Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do 
what’s actually next to you.

[1] http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/archives/001577.html

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/orph.png

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****************************************
Item: Evolution: Evolution 2.0.4
<http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/archives/000449.html>
Date: 2005-02-21 05:01:52 UTC
[A]

The Evolution Team exuberantly announces the release of Evolution 2.0.4. 
Unless any critical issues are are discovered this will be the last 
release in the 2.0.4 series.
Download the following:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/evolution/2.0/evolution-2.0.4.tar.gz[1]
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtkhtml/3.2/gtkhtml-3.2.5.tar.gz[2]
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gal/2.2/gal-2.2.5.tar.gz[3]
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/evolution-data-server/1.0/evolution-data-server-1.0.4.tar.gz[4]
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/libsoup/2.2/libsoup-2.2.2.tar.gz[5]
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/ximian-connector/2.0/ximian-connector-2.0.4.tar.gz[6]

*Upgrade Notes*
Evolution 2.0 is the stable version of the 1.5.x development series. It
will upgrade your existing 1.4 install if you were not using 1.5
previously, but will not delete it until told to.

*Bug Fixes and Updates*

Evolution 2.0.4, 2005-02-14
----------------------------

Bugzilla bugs fixed (see http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi[7]):

* Addressbook

#36137 - Leading %s in addressbook message totally non-obvious (Siva)
#70339 - vcard preview doesn't appear to work (Siva)
#70622 - Crash changing gtkhtml settings (JP)
#70922 - Email address types should show "Other" when importing vcards 
(Siva)
#70540 - Adding contact from email doesn't let you change "file as" 
(Hans)

* Calendar
 
#41624 - only the last exception is deleted on palm device (JP)
#46901 - Only one line gets printed when printing Tasks and Appointments 
(Yong Sun)

* Mail

#33933 - Sorting by subject does not result in expected order (Jeff)
#70795 - Next/Previous Message Should Only Display Listed Emails 
(Michael)
#65329 - regression in default folder name localisation (Michael)
#71312 - Double-clicking vFolder of Draft folder doesn't allow editing 
(Michael)
#71310 - Always loses my signature script settings (Michael)
#71310 - Always loses my signature script settings (Michael)
#69850 - Crash: attempting to create a Vfolder based on a message 
without a Sender (Michael)
#65178 - newly created folder on local maildir doesn't show until 
evolution restart (Michael)
#70858 - selecting newly created folder flakey (Michael)
#60664 - message view does not follow theme change (Michael)
#70768 - 'Mark All as Read' marks all the mails which are not in current 
query as read (Michael)
#70563 - crash when 'load images' on MyEclipse newsletter email 
(Michael)
#66943 - Crash when saving draft (Michael)
#71105 - When trying to rename a folder containing a slash "/" and 
spaces, evil stuff happens (Michael)
#72020 - Error parsing filter: Unknown identifier: adjust-score 
(Michael)
#38791 - gpg can make evo hang if keyserver unreachable (Michael)
#36142 - Don't use acronyms as verbs in messages (Michael)
#70303 - pgp signature invalid with very short emails (Michael)
#69757 - Memory leak in imap_parse_list_response (Michael)
#22496 - Evolution does not appear to support ALERT messages (Michael)
#71427 - Evolution does not prompt for new password (Michael)
#71625 - Don't display content of e-mail when first selected (Michael)
#56110 - Messages in digest displayed as source (Michael)
#69024 - Doesn't update NNTP folder in a Virtual folder (Michael)
#47824 - nested, identical multipart boundaries dont parse properly 
(Michael)
#70919 - Crash during fetching mail (mail has gpg signature) (Michael)
#70556 - Unable load messages info from MS Exchange by IMAP (Michael)

Other bugs

* Mail

-64 bit fixes (Michael)

* Addressbook

- work around 67411 (Hans)
- 64 bit fixes (Michael)
- Turkish locale fixes (S.Çaglar Onur)

* Calendar

- fix potential resize crash (Michael)

* S/MIME

- don't remove the cert from the tree if it wasn't actually deleted 
(Michael)

Updated translations:

- nl (Vincent van Adrighem)
- pt (Duarte Loreto)
- hu (Laszlo Dvornik)
- ca (Jordi Mallach)
- fr (Jeremie Knuesel, Sebastien Bacher, Christophe Merlet)
- sv (Christian Rose)
- de (Hendrik Brandt)
- id (Mohammad DAMT)
- es (Francisco Javier F. Serrador)
- da (Martin Willemoes Hansen)
- ko (Changwoo Ryu)
- zh_CN (Funda Wang)
- ms (Hasbullah Bin Pit)
- hu (Laszlo Dvornik)
- cs (Miloslav Trmac)
- ru (Leonid Kanter)
- bg (Vladimir Petkov)
- sq (Laurent Dhima)
- en_GB (David Lodge)
- pl (Artur Flinta)
- sr (Danilo Segan)
- sr@Latn (Danilo Segan)
- en_CA (Adam Weinberger)
- pt_BR (Raphael Higino)
- nn (Åsmund Skjæveland)

Exchange Connector 2.0.4 2005-02-14
------------------------------------

Bugzilla bugs fixed (see http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi):

#70730 - connector hangs on kerberos authentication attempts (Sarfraaz)
#71432 - Don't see schedule in new meeting request dialog (Sushma)
#70357 - Crash: Exchange calendar query hangs Evolution (glibc gives a 
double-free or corruption error!) (Sarfraaz)
#68330 - Exchange now crashes on start (Sarfraaz)
#66963 - The trash is filtered for spam (that I just deleated) when I 
select (and there by open) the trashdir to do an expunge (Sarfraaz)
#71469 - Menus for Connector are not Translated to French (Sarfraaz)
#71555 - Label setting is not being saved across sessions (Sushma)
#70283 - All-day calendar events incorrectly show as busy (Sarfraaz)
#70414 - Memory corruption/build-up tracking bug (Sarfraaz)
Fixes for 64 bit support (Michael Zucchi)

Updated Translations: (Since 2.0.1)
- bg (Alexander Shopov)
- da (Martin Willemoes Hansen)
- ca (Jordi Mallach)
- hu (Laszlo Dvornik)

Evolution Data Server 1.0.4, 2005-02-14
----------------------------------------

Bugzilla bugs fixed (see http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi):

* Address Book

#64298 - G/W failure to authenticate (Siva)
#67541 - LDAP password not to be remembered (Siva)
#66854 - Some strings are missed to translation (Rodney)
#71116 - wrong gettext initialization breaks translation (Rodney)
#70918 - Importing kontact vcard causes inifinite loop (Siva)

* Calendar

#64682 - Moving an appointment from one calendar to another sends update 
(Chen)
#67031 - GroupWise tasks are not getting updated in any way (Chen)

* All

#69186 - cannot remove GAL from Autocomplete in settings (Siva)
#64298 - G/W failure to authenticate (Siva)

Other bugs

* Calendar
- warning fixes (Michael)
- fix groupwise ssl usage (Harish)

* Address Book
- fix vcard note migration issues if containing non-ascii chars (Siva)
- fix groupwise ssl usage (Harish)

* All
- 64 bit fixes (Michael)

Updated Translations:
-et (Priit Laes)
-ru (Leonid Kanter)

gtkhtml-3.2.5 "hispidulum" 2005-02-14
------------------------------------------------

New in this release

* Updated translations
 fr (Christophe Merlet)
 de (Hendrik Brandt)
 pl (Artur Flinta)
 nl (Vincent van Adrighem)
 sv (Christian Rose)
 ja (Takeshi AIHANA)

gal-2.2.5 2005-02-14
----------------------

Other bugs and changes:

 - Updated translations:
 it (Luca Ferretti, Alessio Frusciante

*Reporting Bugs*

If you have problems with 2.0.4, please take the time to submit the bug
using Bug Buddy or at http://bugzilla.ximian.com. Try to fill in as
much detail as you can regarding the circumstances that lead to the
problem

If you have a feature request, you can also file that at
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/[8] don't be discouraged if you don't hear 
from
us right away, we get hundreds of feature requests a year.

You can also check if your bug has been reported before by using the
search functionality of Bugzilla.

More information is available at the project website:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution[9]

[1] 
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/evolution/2.0/evolution-2.0.4.tar.gz
[2] 
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtkhtml/3.2/gtkhtml-3.2.5.tar.gz
[3] http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gal/2.2/gal-2.2.5.tar.gz
[4] 
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/evolution-data-server/1.0/evolution-data-server-1.0.4.tar.gz
[5] 
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/libsoup/2.2/libsoup-2.2.2.tar.gz
[6] 
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/ximian-connector/2.0/ximian-connector-2.0.4.tar.gz
[7] http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi
[8] http://bugzilla.ximian.com/
[9] http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/evolution.png

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Item: Elijah Newren: Dealing with the d-d-l spam problem
<http://www.gnome.org/~newren/blog/2005/02/20>
Date: 2005-02-21 05:00:03 UTC
I don't know if it's just the pessimist in me, but considering the 
efforts before that have failed at controlling the d-d-l spam, I started 
wondering whether the recent one will work over the long-term either (I 
don't see the difference between this attempt and previous ones). So, I 
spent a little time trying to think up a solution[1]. This may not be 
feasible (why worry about petty technical details when trying to think 
of a good solution?), and may be a really stupid idea anyway (it's just 
my brain dump from an hour or two), but I'm posting it here so the world 
can have a laugh at my expense. After all, I always appreciate it when 
others make me laugh, so I thought I'd try to return the favor--although 
in a perhaps slightly different way. ;-)

[1] http://www.gnome.org/~newren/temp/new-mailing-list.txt

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Item: Nat Friedman: 21 February 2005
<http://nat.org/2005/february/#21-February-2005>
Date: 2005-02-21 05:00:00 UTC
[A] *__* #[1] "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of 
high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird 
to live, and too rare to die."

[1] http://nat.org/2005/february/#21-February-2005

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/nat.png

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Item: Joe Shaw: there goes joeyblog
<http://joeshaw.org/2005/02/21/125>
Date: 2005-02-21 02:48:32 UTC
[A]

I’ve just transitioned my blog over to Wordpress 1.5[1], and I must say, 
it’s a dramatic improvement over the last version I tried. They’ve 
separated the layout and the structure in such a nice way that I can do 
things like, for example, not allow comments or have categories or 
different authors without having to hack the hell out of things. I’ve 
spent all of today getting the layout correct, and with some *extremely* 
clever PHP and Javascript hacking I am pretty sure that all existing 
URLs continue to work. 

Now, the real question is if I can get a nice client-side solution so 
that posting photos isn’t quite a pain. Hopefully it won’t be a big 
deal, but I’ve saved my old blog setup just in case I have to revert.

[1] http://wordpress.org

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/joe.png

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Item: Jakub Steiner: More SVG Fun
<http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php/Inkscape/SVG-NG>
Date: 2005-02-21 01:41:36 UTC
[A]

As I've mentioned before[1], I started to incorporate Inkscape[2] into 
my workflow. At times it's quite masochistic compared to Illustrator or 
GIMP, but some things are easier than what I was used to. One of the 
things is making sure the outline "snaps" to the final rendering grid. 
That was tough with Illustrator, not because it didn't have 
sophisticated aids to do that, but because it used a different renderer 
than the GNOME desktop.

One thing that totally rocks is that in trunk (0.41) you can work 
pixel-precise at the target resolution and it's truly WYSIWYG. It may 
not have Illustrator's pixel-preview so that you can see the bitmap 
rendering even when working on zoomed canvas, but simply having another 
view at 1:1 works ok[1[3]]. Librsvg then reders it exactly the same as 
inkscape. I need to see about cairo/xsvg. [B]

Original bitmap on the left. Traced and pixel positioned on the right. 
Renders just like that with librsvg.

I had an idea how to overcome the complexity of creating icons at 
multiple resolutions that I wrote about earlier[4]. SVG rocks for theme 
maintanance - you can save all the work with exporting, since you can 
just save your working inkscape SVG and that's it. [C][5]

Now while I don't think automatic hinting can help making the icons 
readable for 16x16, what if I could have layers in the SVG for 
individual target render size? RSVG would render a layer similarly to 
how the icon theme engine picks appropriate bitmap version. No need to 
maintain multiple images. I think doing bitmaps for 16x16 and 24x24 is 
still going to take less time than doing them in vector, but nothing 
prevents me having a bitmap in the SVG ;)

Alternatively it could have the layers toggled invisible for regular 
rendering. But if we had some switch in inkscape to "solo" particular 
layer, 16x16 and 24x24 bitmap rendering could be automated with a script 
and still maintain a single file.

[1[6]] I also noticed the simplification wrt grid functionality really 
makes sense. I haven't missed not being able to see the grid without 
snapping to it at all. If I want to see the grid, I mostly want to snap 
to it too. If I don't, I just hide it.

On the other hand I found out I really miss being able to node select 
from multiple objects. I'm a consistant shape tweaker and not being able 
to move a bunch of nodes from multiple overlaid objects is a pain.

[1] http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/blog/Artwork/Inkscape/
[2] http://www.inkscape.org
[3] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php?flav=rss#footnote1
[4] http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/blog/Artwork/ScalableIcons/
[5] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/screenshot-413713000.jpg
[6] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php?flav=rss#note1

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jimmac.png
[B] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/leftbitmap_rightvector.png
[C] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/git-vectoricons.jpg

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Item: Jakub Steiner: Inkscape Evaluation
<http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php/Inkscape/Inkscape>
Date: 2005-02-21 01:41:36 UTC
[A]

I thought that if I have to do the icons in SVG ever again, I may as 
well revisit the river. Since I just upgraded to Ubuntu Hoary[1] (Gnome 
2.10 is slick!), I gave Inkscape[2] a try again.

Since I'm an old Illustrator junkie, I knew it's going to be tough 
getting used to especially since I've tried and failed before. I 
expected being disappointed, I was surprised in many areas though. Looks 
like a lot of good stuff happened while I wasn't watching :) I'm 
actually confident that it's usable to create less complex artwork.

So let's start with the good things.
 
- Nice shortcut overview. It could have been setup on a landscape A4 to 
get printed easily though. 
- A few introductory tutorials. Just what I needed. It's actually better 
for me than a full featured documentation which is usually too boring to 
chew through ;). What's even more fun is these tutorials are in fact SVG 
images, so it features examples you can try right on canvas while 
reading. Ingenious. 
- Easy numerical entry of object properties (toolbar) with advanced 
properties in a floating dialog. 
- Keyboard navigation not only for object and canvas movement, but 
rotation and scaling as well (now finally the Alt modifier starts making 
sense). Moving in pixel units with Alt of the current zoom level is a 
lot better than the absolute units in Adobe Illustrator. This absolutely 
rocks. 
- Layers with visibility toggle and *layer locking*! Oh man, I can't 
stress enough how this is useful. Also individual objects can be locked, 
but unlocking them is hard, I could only do this with the XML editor. 
- F12 toggles the visible floating docks. Very handy in fullscreen 
(although the *layout dock* seems to be visible all the time). 
- While function keys are still mapped to tools, there's also shortcuts 
that are easily memorizable — T for Text, S for Object select etc. # for 
grid toggle got me :). 
- Color Dropper. I prefer to call it *picker* instead since it's not 
applying color on the clicked objects, it's *picking it up* and applies 
on the selected objects. Unfortunately the tool isn't as useful as it 
could be. It only takes the color property while it could be used to 
pick more properties such as stroke, fill (gradient, pattern, bitmap), 
effects, etc. (configurable as tool options just like in GIMP). Inkscape 
does provide this functionality with *Edit>Paste Style*, but doesn't 
allow individual style properties to be selected (only fill, only 
stroke...). 
- Helpful status bar. It tells you what a modifier key will do. It 
doesn't list all functionality, but mostly the important one. Absolutely 
cool for when you're learning the tool. I found Alt+Click like that. 
It's used to "select under" with the selection tool active and it's very 
handy when I'm left without a nice layer stack overview. 
- Boolean Operations. Creating complex shapes out of primitives is a lot 
easier with these tools. 
- Cloning. Instead of duplicating, you can create an instance of an 
object. Gotta get used to the fact that even transformations are 
inherited. 
- The 0.40 aboutbox is sexy as hell :) 
- Metadata. Not oly cool for copyright info, but for icon accessibility 
too[3]. 
- Object stamping. You drag an object around and where you press 
spacebar it creates a copy. 
- Text tool. I wish we had a mature text tool like this in GIMP. Letter 
spacing (Alt+<, Alt+>), kerning, (Alt+Left, Alt+Right), vertical text, 
shaped block of text (kinda hacky, but working). 
- Didn't crash on me ;) While some of us take it for granted, some 
projects[4] don't consider stability a priority...
[B][5]

So as you can see, in many areas I've been very pleasantly surprised. 
You can see Inkscape developers did listen to their artists, err users. 
There's some inconsistencies with the GIMP that I personally find 
confusing:
 
- Path tool. I mean come on guys, the GIMP path tool rocks. The 
modifiers rock, you can work with both nodes *and* segments and it's 
just unnice to have something out of this planet when users like me, 
that are used to GIMP could be making paths in Inkscape in a nano. /me 
makes a sad, sad face.
 I'm used to tracing objects by creating a polygon first and then 
converting the particular nodes to curvy. I just found the trick is not 
to try to convert a node, but a segment to a curve. Maybe if I try hard 
enough, I can live with this. Also I'd love the handles to be 
controllable with a keyboard, not only the nodes alone. 
- Redo is Ctrl+Shift+Z while GIMP's is Ctrl+Y. 
- Ctrl locks aspect while Shift centers the pivot point. GIMP's exactly 
the other way around. 
- I miss the thumbnail navigator that GIMP has in the lower right 
corner. Also zoom-on-resize locking that's in GIMP 2.2 (upper right 
corner) would be useful here too. *Update: I've been pointed out that 
I'm just blind, it's right there! ;)* 
- The gradient editor is even worse than GIMP's. When I'm bitching about 
it, I guess I should provide a spec. But more annoying than defining the 
gradient is not being able to specify direction and length on canvas.
[C][6]

Some minor nitpicks and suggestions.
 
- Layer support is fairly primitive and unfinished. Apart from the 
spartan XML editor, I found no way to get a graphical representation of 
the layer stack. Moving objects across layers also seems only possible 
in XML editor which is very hard, since the stack is reversed and the 
layers aren't easily identifiable (UI shows comments, while XML edito 
shows ids). Also I'm not sure about the behaviour of the root node. 
- While it may sound like a good idea to use vector icons in a vector 
editor, it doesn't work in my opinion. The small resolution icons need 
detail and crispness the vectors cannot give. Having a nice gnomish icon 
set would surely help. 
- I miss tootips for the toobar icons. 
- Tool options are implemented as global preferences. While there is a 
shortcut to get to these by double-clicking on the toolbar, you're 
presented with a horror of two rows of tabs. Yikes! 
- Some sort of library is required. Just like GIMP stores brushes and 
gradients, Inkscape should have some global repository of gradients and 
patterns. 
- There's *XY properties* floating window depending on what type of 
object is selected. These should go into the object properties float. If 
the number of widgets would grow, solve either by using tabs or 
disclosure triangles. 
- Something completely subjective — I prefer the rubberband selection to 
work objects even partially selected, not only the ones completely 
enclosed in the selection rectangle. 
- Ctrl+A actually select all object *within a layer* not on the document 
as the tutorial suggests. Not saying it makes less sense, just that the 
docs are out of sync. 
- One cannot group objects from different layers. Especially painful 
when moving objects around layers manually is tough. 
- I coulnd't figure out how to scale a pattern. In fact it should be 
possible to not scale pattern along with object. Similarly, it should be 
possible to scale an object but not scale the stroke width along. 
- Deleting objects with Backspace. While Del works, my powerbook doesn't 
have the del key ;). 
- Cloning is cool, but it would be super cool to be able to create such 
object clones (links) within an external file. You could create mime 
type icons by linking the document template from an external file and 
have a quick way to alter the whole set.
[D][7]

And I few features I'm still missing an alternative for:
 
- Object blending. Select two objects and pick how many inbetween states 
you want or optionally a path along which to do the morph. Essential 
time saviour when duplicating objects. Inkscape does have a mean that's 
a bit less straight forward (subjective again). You can either use 
stamping and then distribute objects using the align dock or do the same 
with clones or duplicates (just need to pick one from the duplicated 
stack and reposition to the other extreme). 
- Converting stroke into objects. Sometimes you want to have more 
control about the dotted outline. 
- I may have just missed it, but there's no outline draw mode. Sometimes 
it's easier to find an object like that. Also perhaps when tweaking 
shapes with the node tool, the fill could go away to speed things up. 
The more complex the artwork is, the slower the thing gets. And 
sometimes way way slower than bearable. 
- Pixel preview. If we had the same renderer in GNOME & Inkscape, it 
would help tweaking the shapes pixel-precise, so it's sharp (aligns to 
the render grid) at the 1:1 size. 
- Node edit only works within selected object. I like to rubber-band 
select nodes from a number of objects and move them to "stretch" an 
drawing in that particular area. Doing one by one is close to impossible 
and stretching the whole object is not what I want either.

[1] http://www.ubuntulinux.org
[2] http://inkscape.org
[3] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/doc/high-contrast/html/ch01s05.xhtml
[4] http://www.cinepaint.org
[5] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/inkscape1.png
[6] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/inkscape2.png
[7] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/inkscape3.png

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jimmac.png
[B] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/inkscape1.jpg
[C] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/inkscape2.jpg
[D] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/images/blog/inkscape3.jpg

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****************************************
Item: Jakub Steiner: Inkscape Gradients
<http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php/Inkscape/InkscapeGradients>
Date: 2005-02-21 01:36:00 UTC
[A]

Inkscape superstar, Bulia Byak, committed the beginning of his work on 
better gradients[1] in Inkscape. Addresses a lot of the issues I've had 
with the old interface. Kudos!

- Demo[2]

Eek! I seem to have spammed planet gnome by moving things around even 
though the timestamps remained. Sorry.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=10905321
[2] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/demos/inkscape/inkscape-gradients.avi

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jimmac.png

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Item: Bryan Forbes: I can almost hear it...
<http://www.reigndropsfall.net/index.php?itemid=141>
Date: 2005-02-21 00:50:28 UTC
[A]This last week I started working on audio disc support in Coaster.[1] 
It has been interesting trying to figure out the Gstreamer[2] library 
and how to get it to interact well with Coaster without using a wrapping 
library (to save you guys the hassle of another binding dependency). So 
far, I have some test programs that read in the information I need; next 
thing to do is to get an audio store, layout, and view up and going.

[1] http://www.coaster-burn.org
[2] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/mxpxpod.png

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Item: Bastien Nocera: Bonjour
<http://hadess.net/?start=490>
Date: 2005-02-21 00:10:36 UTC
[A]Watched Closer[1], one of those relationship-analysing films. High 
Fidelity, without the music, less of the jokes, but more of the brains.

Scots footie fans are funny lads[2], and Apple will rename Rendez-vous 
to Bonjour[3].

/Music/: Greenday - Jesus of Suburbia

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376541/
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/funny_old_game/4274777.stm
[3] http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=891

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hadess.png

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****************************************
Item: Jakub Steiner: Drift
<http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php/Music/Drift>
Date: 2005-02-20 23:27:00 UTC
[A]

Yet another blast from the past. While writing the aboutpage on my 
website I found the Kosmic Archive[1] is online with mp3 versions of the 
old killer tracks.

I recall playing this on my 1bit squeeker ripped out of the PC case so I 
could hear it better. Cubic Player[2] with the fancy visualisations. 
Memories.

- *Drift*[3] – Lovely minimalistic techno.

I hope to find more jewels like this. I should have all the XMs, S3Ms, 
ITs and MODs somewhere??? Beagle[4], buddy! Help!

[1] http://kosmic.darkscape.net/archives/
[2] http://www.cubic.org/player/
[3] http://kosmic.darkscape.net/archives/1996/mp3/k_drift.mp3
[4] http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jimmac.png

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****************************************
Item: John Fleck: The Fifth Sentence
<http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/archives/001577.html>
Date: 2005-02-20 20:26:48 UTC
[A]

I like this meme[1]:

- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these 
instructions.
- Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do 
what’s actually next to you.

The book (really, I closed my eyes and reached left to the nearest 
shelf) is the IPCC's "Climate Change 1995." Page 123 is in the chapter 
on "Radiative Forcing of Climate Change":

It would be highly desirable to determine the indirect GWPs associated 
with the ozone production for these gases.

[1] 
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/we_are_all_lemmings_we_bloggers/

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jfleck.png

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****************************************
Item: Damien Sandras: A screenshot
<http://www.seconix.com/wordpress/index.php?p=8>
Date: 2005-02-20 19:01:11 UTC
[A]

I know people love screenshots. Here is a screenshot of the new accounts 
window, it permits to add/edit and see the current status of VoIP 
accounts. Those VoIP accounts can be SIP or H.323 accounts. Later, IAX 
support should be added too. I can for example have GnomeMeeting 
registered to the SIP PBX at work, to a SIP Proxy on seconix.com, to 
FreeWorldDialup and to our H.323 PC-To-Phone provider, at the same time. 
The called URL will determine what provider will be used, it is totally 
transparent and intuitive. 

Here is the long-awaited screenshot:
[B][1]

[1] http://www.seconix.com/wordpress/wp-content/accountsscreenshot.png

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/damien.png
[B] http://www.seconix.com/wordpress/wp-content/taccountsscreenshot.png

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****************************************
Item: Bastien Nocera: Nice-One-Brothaaaaaaa!
<http://hadess.net/?start=489>
Date: 2005-02-20 17:10:35 UTC
[A]All mental yesterday as the usual crew was downing J.D.s and Coke in 
a TGIF, and ended up blagging our way in the Five and Lime[1]. Waking up 
was hard this morning ;)

Some good Totem hacking, even though I still don't understand the 
drag'n'drop/reorderable bits of the GtkTreeView. I also found why the 
video thumbnailer was exiting instantaneously with the GStreamer 
backend, due to a 4-year old bug[2] in glib.

Watched 2 games of footy, and Edward Scissorhands[3].

Music: /Itchy Trigger Finger Niggers/ (no, not really)

[1] 
http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/show.shtml/3421/Five_and_Lime/Guildford
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163039
[3] http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0099487/

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hadess.png

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Item: John Fleck: "I'm melting! I'm Melting!"
<http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/archives/001575.html>
Date: 2005-02-20 15:53:03 UTC
[A]

Phil Mote and colleagues have a paper in the latest Bulletin of the 
American Meteorological Society[1] updating their work on western 
snowpack and climate change. Bottom line - the snow's melting:

The largest decreases have occurred where winter temperatures are mild, 
especially in the Cascade Mountains and northern California. In most 
mountain ranges, relative declines grow from minimal at ridgetop to 
substantial at snow line. Taken together, these results emphasize that 
the West's snow resources are already declining as earth's climate 
warms.

They don't have snow records back real far, so the results get a bit 
tangled up in the PDO[2] and other decadal-scale patterns. But it seems 
pretty clear that as things get warmer, the snowpack patterns are 
changing. This is important in a region that depends on winter snowpack 
as a water storage mechanism to meet summer water usage needs.

More here[3].

[1] 
http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2FBAMS-86-1-39
[2] http://tao.atmos.washington.edu/pdo/
[3] 
http://www.abqjournal.com/paperboy/ia/news/state/307451nm02-20-05.htm

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jfleck.png

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Item: Miguel de Icaza: 20 Feb 2005: 250 millions of PR budget.
<http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2005/Feb-20.html>
Date: 2005-02-20 13:55:00 UTC
[A]

New York Times[1] on their staged "Daily Show": /"By my count, "Jeff 
Gannon" is now at least the sixth "journalist" (four of whom have been 
unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of 
either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon 
News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that 
purport to be real news."/ 

/"The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the 
Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public 
relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds 
through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds 
that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 
million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would 
account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the 
rest of it ended up."/ 

More on the uncovering of Jeff Ganon: here[2]. 

Bill Maher video[3]

Nat at Work

[B][4]

Nat at Work.

Some Mono SVN Stats 

From diffstat for the last month of Mono activity on the SVN repository 
(excluding deprecated code): 

 mcs: 1847 files changed, 122176 insertions(+), 23168 deletions(-)
 mono: 323 files changed, 14845 insertions(+), 6360 deletions(-)
 total:2170 files changed, 137021 insertions(+), 29528 deletions(-)
 

Running Windows.Forms on OS X 

Geoff describes how to run your Windows.Forms applications on OSX 
here[5]. The short story: you must use the new `macpack' tool to create 
an OSX bundle. 

He also has a screenshot of Alexsander Olk's new color dialog here[6] 
running on OSX.

[1] http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0219-32.htm
[2] http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html
[3] http://homepage.mac.com/njenson/movies/billmaher021805gannon.mov
[4] 
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/pic.php?name=nat-at-work.jpg&caption=Nat 
at Work.
[5] 
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/mono-winforms-list/2005-February/001428.html
[6] http://blog.sublimeintervention.com/images/pretty-colors.png

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/miguel.png
[B] http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel//pictures/small-nat-at-work.jpg

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****************************************
Item: Michael Meeks: 2005-02-20: Sunday
<http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2005-02-20>
Date: 2005-02-20 12:00:00 UTC
[A]
 
- Hacked on the train at a command-line OO.o gallery creation tool: 
rather badly needed for the openclipart.org stuff. 
- Got home, lovely to see my beautiful wife again, not to mention the 
girls. Slept for a good while, ate, slept again. 
- Up in the night, dealing with H. - nasty cold, can't breath - keeps 
saying 'nose' or 'mummy', slept in her bed for some hours.

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/michael.png

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Item: Davyd Madeley: Planet UCC Lives
<http://www.livejournal.com/users/davyd/135461.html>
Date: 2005-02-20 10:09:50 UTC
[A]Due to the lack of WAIX routing, Planet UCC[1] had bought the 
proverbial farm. However now we have decided to work around the problem.

The clubroom has been cleaned up[2]. And we're almost ready for O'Day. I 
have almost finished up the Fresher's Guide, and once I finish a list of 
points we covered today, it should be ready for general proof reading. 
Hopefully I'll get that uploaded tonight.

[1] http://planet.ucc.asn.au/
[2] http://webcam.ucc.asn.au/archive/colour3/200502/20/18/05.jpg

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/riff.png

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Item: Hubert Figuiere: Picture of the day, February 19th, 2005
<http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2005/02/19/99-picture-of-the-day-february-19th-2005>
Date: 2005-02-20 03:31:40 UTC
[A]

Some eye candy for this evening. We still haven't finished our tour of 
Périgord, so I return to my slide archives. Back to the Cadouin 
Cloister[1] *(fr)*, facing the inside yard and tower:

[B][2]

Still taken with my Canon Elan 7[3] on Provia 100F, around September 
21st 2001.

[1] http://www.sigoules.com/visiter/chateaux/cloitre_de_cadouin.htm
[2] 
http://photo.figuiere.net/photodb/rolls/2001-09-21-2S/2001-09-21-2S-04.jpg
[3] http://photo.net/equipment/canon/elan-7

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hub.png
[B] 
http://photo.figuiere.net/photodb/rolls/2001-09-21-2S/thumb_2001-09-21-2S-04.jpg

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Item: Damien Sandras: Busy week-end
<http://www.seconix.com/wordpress/index.php?p=7>
Date: 2005-02-19 23:06:11 UTC
[A]

*OPAL*
I have committed my last work on OPAL. It fixes SIP Outbound Proxy 
support and CANCEL requests management. It also permits to register to 
several SIP registrars at the same time, and do authenticated calls 
using each one of them. I have also added support for SUBSCRIBE and 
NOTIFY requests, mainly to permit Message Waiting Indications. That will 
permit users to be notified when they got a Voicemail and to listen to 
it. 

*GnomeMeeting*
I have of course added support for the above code in GnomeMeeting. I 
have also reworked the preferences window so that the various VoIP 
capabilities appears as accounts that you can enable or disable. That 
permits to minimize the number of options possible while keeping an easy 
access to all required features. GnomeMeeting 2.00 should have some 
inovative features that other Linux SIP softphones do not support yet. 

*FOSDEM*
FOSDEM[1] will happen in one week. That means much work but also many 
worries. Having feedback from invited speakers is not always easy and 
you often have to mail some of them several times. Hopefully now 
everything is booked. The pre-event part is nearly over and most of the 
work will have to be done during the event. We expect a record in terms 
of visitors this year. All big projects have “developer’s rooms” with a 
separate schedule and talks.

[1] http://www.fosdem.org

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/damien.png

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Item: John Fleck: Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
<http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/archives/001574.html>
Date: 2005-02-19 23:01:12 UTC
[A]

Fun with magnetars[1]

[1] 
http://www.abqjournal.com/paperboy/ia/scitech/307139science02-19-05.htm

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jfleck.png

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Item: Daniel Veillard: 19 Feb 2005
<http://www.advogato.org/person/DV/diary.html?start=185>
Date: 2005-02-19 22:33:45 UTC
[A]

*Sabayon*

After annoying GNOME sysdamins and stealing the html and css code from 
the Evince[1] project, we now have an initial Sabayon web site[2], with 
mailing list, bugzilla and basic informations to get people started if 
they want to play or help with the project. There is quite a lot to do, 
and testing is not trivial since we depend on very recent (nearly CVS 
head) versions of pyGnome, gamin-python, etc, check the README file ! 
Simplest is to use the RPMs.

One of the main thing we need from our target audience i.e. people doing 
sysadmin setups/maintainance is feedback on some of the design 
Issues[3].

[1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/
[2] http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/sabayon/
[3] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/sabayon/ISSUES?view=auto

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/dv.png

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Item: Jakub Steiner: Macarena
<http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php/Misc/Macarena>
Date: 2005-02-19 21:46:00 UTC
[A]

Thanks Tuomas[1] for teaching me the Macarena ritual. For the ones not 
familiar with it, it's performed every time you leave a place, such as a 
restaurant, taxi etc and check for your gadgets. As you go pocket by 
pocket, checking for mobile phone, camera, PDA, wallet, car keys... To a 
random person passing by you look like you're dancing a Macarena[2].

Thanks to that ritual, performed a little later than optimal, I returned 
to the cinema theatre and retrieved my cellphone from a wondering lady 
who couldn't grasp what stupid $&$*&^ would leave a phone on the seat.

Also afterwards we went to a dinner with our finance minister. Not 
really, of course, but he was having a seat next to us. He looked a lot 
younger than on the tele, and we initially weren't sure if it's him. 
When they started to talk about Kalousek and "Standa's flat[3]", we were 
assured it's him.

[1] http://www.tigert.com
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarena
[3] http://www.radio.cz/en/article/63152

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jimmac.png

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Item: Hubert Figuiere: Fighting DRM in court... Episode I
<http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2005/02/19/98-fighting-drm-in-court-episode-i>
Date: 2005-02-19 20:26:15 UTC
[A]

Apple and Sony are being sued[1] in France by *UFC-Que Choisir*, the 
major French consumer association, for breaking the law against bundle 
sales. The lack of interroperability beetween their DRM system and 
requirment to use their device is the reason.

Looks like Microsoft DRM system could benefit as they sell it to anyone 
who wants it, but nobody use it :-)

Source: Boing Boing[2], DLFP[3] (fr).

[1] http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39127844,00.htm
[2] http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/15/apple_and_sony_sued_.html
[3] http://linuxfr.org/2005/02/14/18305.html

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hub.png

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Item: Federico Mena-Quintero: Sat 2005/Feb/19
<http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-02.html#19>
Date: 2005-02-19 19:16:00 UTC
[A]
 
- 

 Daniel[1] writes about the pressure to have software patents in 
Europe[2]. "Pressure" and "verbal violence" reminded me of last year[3], 
when I was at the amazing HP research building[4]. The first thing that 
greets you after you step out of the elevator is a wall covered with 
gold-plated patent grants. Man, I should have taken a picture. They were 
hung like trophies on a huntsman's wall. I looked at them during 
conference breaks; some were for exotic things, other for ridiculously 
obvious ones. The one I remember the most was about how to promote pixel 
values for low bit depths into values with higher bit depths. You know, 
like when going from RGB at 8 bits per channel to 16 bits per channel, 
so you have to map the range [0, 0xff] into a wider range [0, 0xffff]. 
You can't just shift by 8 bits to the left; you have to copy the value 
into the lower bits. So, 0xab becomes 0xabab; the typical symptom of not 
doing this is where 100% white becomes almost-white. The abstract of the 
patent and a cute diagram, gold leaf, fancy frame and everything, 
described *exactly that*; the only particular thing is that it seemed to 
describe a hardware implementation. 

[1] http://www.advogato.org/person/DV/
[2] http://www.advogato.org/person/DV/diary.html?start=184
[3] http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2004-04.html#28
[4] 
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-photos/2004-04-1473-monitors.jpg

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/federico.png

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Item: Rodrigo Moya: 19/February/2005
<http://rodrigo.gnome-db.org/news.php?19/February/2005>
Date: 2005-02-19 16:51:47 UTC
[A]*GUADEC-ES*
The II GUADEC-ES[1] will take place from May 19th to 21st, in A Coruña, 
in the northwest of Spain. This is just a week before the real 
GUADEC[2], so anybody planning to do some travelling can have A Coruña 
as one of the scales.

[1] http://2005.guadec-es.org/
[2] http://2005.guadec.org

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/rodrigo.png

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Item: Alvaro del Castillo: 19 Feb 2005
<http://www.advogato.org/person/alvaro/diary.html?start=52>
Date: 2005-02-19 15:12:02 UTC
Finally I have decided to help in developing a driver for the wireless 
USB 54 Mbps rt2570[1], very similar to the ralink 2500 chipset. I have 
two USB networks card using this chipset: they are very cheap, around 
30. In my student days, I developed an ethernet driver so maybe, this 
knowledge will be useful. I am learning about USB stuff, using howto 
develop USB drivers for Linux, the USB Nutshell and finally, with the 
USB standard. I am not sure how far I will go in the project, but for 
now, I am trying to understand the USB traffic until we get the data 
sheets: USB sniff[2] is the right tool to log the USB traffic and 
analyze it later (grep, cat, awk, uniq, sort ...)

A dude working with me in LambdaUX is developing in C# and Mono a 
program to update Debian systems. It is getting very nice. A pit I don't 
have yet screenshots about it.

Evolution 2.1.3 changes in the online/offline support have made that the 
Groupdav connector contacts doesn't work any more. I am trying to fix it 
before Evo 2.2, but not sure if I will find enought time.

In Planner, new hackers are coming into scene and Richard is hacking 
some weekends in it. My heart says me I have to help closing some bugs 
for 0.13 and 0.14 releases.

Hula hype is being incredible, as normal announcements that comes from 
Helix/Ximian/Novell guys. I have talked with Helge, an OGo developer 
about Hula. He has shown me a very nice webclient for his Scalable OGo 
product (very similar to Hula, and will be released as GPL/LGPL): SOGo 
web client[3] (login:test.et.di.cete-lyon/password:test, not a 
production service, it could be off). Not sure if Hula developers could 
start the web client interface for Hula from that work. They will be 
released as GPL/LGPL (all the SOGo software).

Hmmm, I can't forget to talk about the II GUADEC Hispana[4], a warm up 
meeting before the GUADEC. I will blog about it next days.

[1] http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/
[2] http://benoit.papillault.free.fr/usbsnoop/
[3] http://agenor.opengroupware.org/
[4] http://2005.guadec-es.org

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Item: Davyd Madeley
<http://www.livejournal.com/users/davyd/135302.html>
Date: 2005-02-19 14:54:08 UTC
[A]*remove one "2-bit ISP" point*
Work's nameserving capabilities have always been a fine balance of hope 
and dodgy services, but that's all about to change. With their new 
interest in zero-work-high-profit services, it has become necessary to 
make sure the nameservers are stable and sane. I have completed a 
spreadsheet of details about all the zones we host, their registrars and 
the keys for them. I found that I'm only missing 4 keys... so it's 
actually not as bad as I thought.
Once everything gets into place, I can start transferring them onto a 
new nameserver, with secondary hosting provided by a dedicated provider, 
probably Goldwell in the UK.
All in all, this makes us more into a high-tech, professional services, 
IT company... and less of a two-bit ISP.

*Tux abuse*
Driving down Mounts Bay Rd (which runs along Matilda Bay between Crawley 
and the city) I saw a small van emblazoned "Arctic Couriers". The thing 
about this van that caught my eye, was all the penguins painted on it. 
Each of these penguins had a name it would seem. One of the penguins on 
the back was the infamous Tux, of Linux fame. Only his name was now 
something beginning with B, I think it was Bernadette. My heart goes out 
to poor Tux, who has been given involuntary gender issues, just because 
some artist obviously ran a google-image-search for penguins.

*While the cat's away...*
So Stephanie is currently in Melbourne, researching for her thesis. She 
is also getting attacked by her best friend's cats. I'm still stuck 
here, and have now realised how incredibly boring my life actually is. I 
mean, I honestly don't do anything! Having no one to talk to, and no TV 
makes things very quiet.

To make up for it, I have been watching things on my laptop. I watched 
_Back to the Future, Part III_ and the third season of _Black Books_.

*Bunbury*
I intimated at some point that I had to go to Bunbury this week. In the 
end, it got called off due to a chain reaction of really crappy events, 
non of which were my fault. However now, I get to look forward to going 
on Monday instead. I can't help but feel this is going to be an absolute 
riot... not!

*UCC Love Day*
To borrow an idea from GNOME, the UCC is having a Love Day[1] in order 
to finish up the Fresher's Guide and the new website[2]. Also to give 
the room a bit of a tidy, because it's really quite messy again (how 
does this keep happening).

Again, I've had a whole heap of stuff to write about, and again I've 
forgotten it. I really should take notes, or something.

[1] 
http://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/ucc/2005-February/012297.html
[2] http://beta.ucc.asn.au/

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/riff.png

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Item: Hubert Figuiere: New Canon gear
<http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2005/02/19/97-new-canon-gear>
Date: 2005-02-19 14:20:57 UTC
[A]

New Canon gear announced this week:

- EF-S 60mm f2.8 Macro USM. Announcement[1]. The EF-S part upsets me 
because I don't really see the interests, but since it is compatible 
with extension tubes, it *may* be able to be used on a film body with 
those extensions. Needs to be tried.
- Digital Rebel XT / EOS 350D. Announcement[2], Preview[3] at dpreview.
- EOS 20Da, to be used for IR photography. Announcement[4] at dpreview. 
Apparently Japan only.

[1] http://www.dpreview.com/news/0502/05021703canon_efs60mmmacro.asp
[2] http://www.dpreview.com/news/0502/05021704canon_eos350d.asp
[3] http://www.dpreview.com/news/0502/05021713canoneos350dpreview.asp
[4] http://www.dpreview.com/news/0502/05021405canoneos20da.asp

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hub.png

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Item: Colin Walters: News Graphic Art
<http://verbum.org/blog/random/news-graphic-art>
Date: 2005-02-19 14:13:00 UTC
[A]

It's pictures like this which make me wish sometimes I could be a 
graphic artist for a news organization.

[B]

(The article this image attempts to graphically describe is here[1], for 
the curious.)

[1] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1766843,00.asp

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/walters.png
[B] 
http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/9/0,1311,i=98820,00.jpg

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Item: Miguel de Icaza: 19 Feb 2005
<http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2005/Feb-19.html>
Date: 2005-02-19 13:55:00 UTC
[A]

Weekend 

[B]We finally released Mono 1.1.4 and Mono 1.0.6. With this release we 
are recommending users to switch to the 1.1.x branch, as our automated 
testing and regression suites are much better than they ever were on 
1.0.6. 

The runtime is faster, smaller, leaner and we have fixed many bugs and 
architectural problems that were hard to backport to 1.0.6. 

Programmers that have only been using Mono, and have not tested their 
code on .NET should keep an eye open for a few problems that might be 
exposed with the stricter 1.1.4 runtime: 
 
- C# compiler is stricter when it comes to namespace and typename 
resolution. Tomboy is known to not build with it. 
- Marshalling: A few incorrect uses of marshalling are now reported 
(Pointers can not reference marshaled structures, you must use byref in 
your P/Invokes, this affected F-Spot, but only marginally, F-Spot 
fallsback into a slower operation mode). 
- If you create delegates and pass those to unmanaged code as way to 
callback into managed land, you must keep a reference to the delegate, 
or the delegate will be garbage collected. This affected some old Gtk# 
applications. You will receive a warning message with the details to fix 
this problem. 
 

The full release notes are available here[1] 

The performance difference is very visible on web-based applications. 
Our documentation[2] system for example is now instantaneous.

DB4Objects 

We have also started distributing[3] DB4Objects[4] from Mono's web site. 
For those of you that are missing ObjectSpaces, you might find db4o not 
only interesting, but faster than what ObjectSpaces could have been. 

New Tool 

We have included Paco's[5] prj2make on the latest release of Mono. 
prj2make is a tool that produces Makefiles from Visual Studio or 
MonoDevelop solutions. Specially convenient if you download some random 
code from the network. 

SHA-1 and SHA-224 

This is the first release that ships with the security sandbox 
infrastructure, Sebastien has the full story[6]. 

Last week SHA1 was broken. Because of this Sebastien is trying to get 
users to vote for incorporating SHA-224 into the Framework, see the 
details here[7]. Mono users can use the Mono.Security stack that ships 
with this and more.

Installers for Mono 

*Installers:* The folks at RawByte.com[8] have been kind enough to 
package Mono with an installer[9] that will work on all Linux systems. 
Many users love this, specially those without Red Carpet or Yum, as they 
only have to download a single binary and they get the whole system 
setup: Mono, all the class libraries, Gtk# and XSP. Like our Windows 
installer. 

There are two downsides to using the installer: for those using 
distributions with package management, the installer wont register Mono 
on the system, which means that third-party components that depend on 
Mono will still want RPM packages installed (or people have resorted to 
use the --force parameter for RPM). The second downside is that this 
ships a Mono configured for the smallest common denominator, so speed 
will suffer as Mono does not use the __thread-based local storage and 
has to go through a slower (but backwards compatible) system.

Hula 

Hula's[10] launch has been very successful. The Hula Channel is very 
active: people contributing patches, ports and various folks interested 
in the dynamic web interface are hanging out there. There is plenty of 
energy there. 

We are planning on following Hula's plan to use MediaWiki as the main 
page for the site, because updating the Mono web site has always been a 
bit annoying. 

Also, many people read Jamie's posting on Hula and miss-understood that 
Jamie was actually praising Nat's final direction on Hula, so there are 
plenty of comments along the lines of `Jamie slams Hula' and `They are 
clueless, we are not'. 

Being very interested in politics, I see this phenomenon as an 
interesting window into the human soul: if these very smart technical 
people have problems understanding a post like that, what does that say 
for people trying to discuss and debate the finer points of public 
policy? 

[1] http://www.go-mono.com/archive/1.1.4/
[2] http://www.go-mono.com/docs
[3] http://www.mono-project.com/contributing/db4o.html
[4] http://www.db4o.com/
[5] http://www.mfconsulting.com/blog/
[6] http://pages.infinit.net/ctech/20050218-0425.html
[7] http://pages.infinit.net/ctech/20050216-1213.html
[8] http://www.RawByte.com
[9] http://www.mono-project.com/downloads
[10] http://hula-project.org

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/miguel.png
[B] http://www.go-mono.com/archive/1.0/mono1.gif

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Item: Michael Meeks: 2005-02-19: Saturday
<http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2005-02-19>
Date: 2005-02-19 12:00:00 UTC
[A]
 
- Interesting phone-call in the morning. Lovely patch for libbonobo on 
Win32 from Tor - apparently all the tests now pass. 
- Out to SS for breakfast with Miguel & Nat, on to bowling nearby, good 
to see all the guys, and Jacob again. Off to catch the plane - the very 
last person to check in, a dash to the plane, offered money to get off 
etc. Slept a little on the plane, lost a lot of a night somewhere here.

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/michael.png

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Item: Todd Berman: Work. Life. Insanity.
<http://off.net/~tberman/diary/archives/003159.html>
Date: 2005-02-19 09:51:49 UTC
Spent the last couple days at work playing with our gtk# application on 
win32. This has been an interesting experience because not only do we 
use your standard gtk# stuff, we also use NPlot and Gecko. Thanks to 
Paco's[1] recent installers, the gecko stuff works flawlessly, and the 
NPlot stuff is finally starting to work. (I know NPlot works as a SWF 
control, but it is not as trivial to make it render into a gtk# widget 
on win32). Happily, a lot of progress was made. Normally I would blog a 
sshot, but I am not sure if I am allowed to, so instead, you get the 
greatest dog picture ever. better than toshok's 'cute' puppy pictures. 
Yes, that is her tounge. No, I don't have a clue what she was doing. [A]

In a somewhat work related venue, I have been hacking on stetic a bit, 
mostly on random gui[2] related bits, and on glade importing. Dan 
Winship has done a wonderful job with stetic so far, and I think in the 
future it will become a very useful tool for development.

It seems recently that all I do is work, and then sleep. I try to factor 
in a little bit of time for eating, but even that has had to slide a bit 
recently. Given our new (refreshingly insane) product goal, I don't see 
this changing anytime soon. Hopefully soon I will find some time to do 
the things I enjoy in life, but I'll be damned if I can even remember 
what they are. I think my current life goal is to quit programming by 27 
and start a bar, or pass the bar, or maybe just sleep for 6 hours 
straight. One of the 3 has to be attainable. Maybe all 3. Only time will 
really tell, but I know between now and August 15th, the only thing I 
can think about other than work, is work. Yay for being a mindless 
drone. Cog in the machine. <insert random bit of bs 'independant 
thinking' here>.

[1] http://www.mfconsulting.com/blog/
[2] http://dev.medsphere.com/~tberman/stetic.png

[A] http://off.net/~tberman/diary/archives/IMG_0528.JPG

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Item: Havoc Pennington: Simplifying
<http://log.ometer.com/2005-02.html#19>
Date: 2005-02-19 05:41:25 UTC
[A]

Two simpler approaches to the theme thing:

- Like OS X, just scrap the idea of themes and hardcode an 
application-specific design into each app.
- Limit the problem to layout. So have a layout widget that looks up the 
layout of an entire window from resource files, and allow themes to 
intercept the lookup to modify the layout.

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hp.png

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Item: Havoc Pennington: Conferences Finally Over
<http://log.ometer.com/2005-02.html#18>
Date: 2005-02-19 04:59:00 UTC
[A]

What an exhausting week; XDevConf[1] last weekend, LWE, then FUDCon[2]. 
Really enjoyed FUDCon today, I thought it went really well. Big thanks 
to the organizers. We also had a very productive meeting yesterday with 
some of the major external contributors and some Red Hat people; 
decisions were reached and action items assigned on a variety of issues.

Since I suck at displays of enthusiasm Seth[3] is picking up the slack 
explaining some of the Red Hat team's work. We also presented some of 
this stuff at XDevConf and FUDCon this week.

I think some people didn't catch on to how Sabayon works and what it 
does; this thing is not a control panel. It's a sort of live summarizer 
of changes you've made to a prototype user account, and lets you choose 
the changes to be included in a user profile. The idea is to take care 
of any needed hacks as well, for example stripping out user home 
directories hardcoded in settings. As far as we can tell this automates 
what most admins already do by hand today. Any cruise through list 
archives reveals that admins have a lot of trouble figuring out which 
files to extract and what to do with them after they set up a prototype 
user the way they want. Even the strongest mind can be crushed by the 
GConf and OpenOffice.org tag team.

Colin has been doing a ton of work to create GObject bindings for D-BUS; 
looking nice so far, see the list archives[4].

I want to elaborate a bit on one aspect of "next generation rendering" 
that we haven't really worked on yet. Everyone is working on the ability 
to do OS X or Enlightenment style effects; essentially, enabling the 
window manager to use OpenGL and enabling the toolkit to use Cairo. This 
gives us drop shadows and minimize animations, and kills off a bunch of 
flicker/tearing artifacts. Very good stuff.

However, it doesn't address one huge limitation: themes can only be 
designed piecemeal (button, scrollbar, etc.). Graphical elements can't 
span multiple widgets. An especially hard case to solve is that 
graphical elements can't cover both the window manager frame and inside 
the application window.

To make the desktop look really nice, you want the ability to theme a 
window (or sub-component thereof) as a whole. This could mean graphics 
that span multiple widgets, it could mean moving widgets around, it 
could mean changing the spacing between widgets, etc.

To address this, I believe we'd need to rework GTK+ a fair bit. I have a 
bunch of vague thoughts on how to do so.

*First*, if you look at most widget implementations they effectively 
hardcode their layout and graphics in two places: the expose handler 
(painting the widget) and the events-that-have-coordinates 
(button/motion) handlers. So to allow more free-form theming of single 
widgets, an approach would be to have a set of GnomeCanvas-style 
primitives (lines, rectangles, etc.) and assemble widgets from those. 
Rather than hit-testing in the widget code, event handlers would be 
connected to "the rectangle" or "the line" and the theme could move 
around said rectangle or line.

*Second*, you need to derive these drawing primitives and their layout 
from the theme rather than hardcoding them. The obvious approach here is 
something like libglade (resource files), where the theme provides or 
modifies the resources.

There are some special "drawing primitives" we could support to handle 
some back compat cases. One primitive could be a "custom-rendered area" 
and would be the equivalent of an X window (or in web terms, an image 
map). A compositing manager treats an app window as this kind of 
primitive. GtkWidget could be wrapped in this kind of primitive.

Another special primitive would be the equivalent of an input-only X 
window: an invisible event receiver. So e.g. a button could have one of 
these and the button code would refer to it. The theme would set the 
location and size of this thing. The point is to allow receiving events 
without hardcoding any visible graphics primitives. Alternative or 
additional approach: something like GnomeCanvasGroup. So the button 
itself would be a group object, and could say "a click anywhere on this 
group counts as a button press" (equivalent to saying "clicking any 
object the theme provides")

*Third*, something I've often thought is that the need for a "canvas 
widget" comes from having a limited widget system in the first place. 
"Canvas items" are just widgets that are lightweight, don't have to be 
rectangular, have Z-order controls, etc. So if we say that we want to 
build widgets from drawing primitives, a logical extension is that 
widgets and drawing primitives are the same thing; and we can build 
widgets from other widgets in the same way we build them from drawing 
primitives. "Composite widgets" are a sort of wacky special-case in GTK+ 
today but /all/ widgets become composite if you count lines and other 
primitives as widgets.

Thus there's a pretty straightforward way to introduce a more powerful 
widget system into GTK+: a canvas widget. Think of the canvas widget 
specifically as a new widget system. Support placing an old-style 
GtkWidget on a canvas by treating it as a raster image. Make CanvasItem 
an interface, and a single GtkWidget could even implement both the old 
GtkWidget stuff and support the new features of an improved widget 
system. An unmodified GtkButton looks to the new canvas like an X 
Window, but when support for the new interfaces gets added to GtkButton 
the new canvas can see the lines and other sub-components inside the 
button and those things can be themed, etc.

*Fourth*, Seth suggested an interesting idea which is to make resource 
files primary. In other words, to create a widget you first make a 
resource file (think of it as an HTML page) and then you specify some 
code to go with the resource file (think of JavaScript, though the idea 
is that you could also specify some C code). The widget "is" the 
collection of sub-widgets (remember that now lines and so forth are 
widgets also) specified by the resource file.

In the resource file, some sub-widgets would be essential or mandatory, 
and others would really be a "default theme." For a button widget, it 
might be required that the resource file have an "input-only window" 
widget and a "text string" widget. The code for the button would refer 
to those to get events and display the button text, respectively. 
However, everything else in the resource file might be purely cosmetic 
(not used by the code). So for example there might be a beveled 
rectangle widget and themes could remove it or change its properties.

You see where this is going: the theme is just an alternate resource 
file, or a resource file transformation. There are some tough 
complexities, because you want to bind the graphics in the theme to 
certain widget states or events. You can imagine doing this with 
full-blown scripting, but it may be possible to do it with some 
relatively simple approach. For example in the metacity theme file you 
have to specify the resources and their properties for each possible 
state. Another option would be some kind of extremely limited 
"scripting", maybe only allow relating attributes to each other like 
this:

when button.STATE = PRESSED, bevel.STYLE = IN

If you had attributes for the major widget states, widget visibility, 
etc. you could do a lot there. Add simple math as in metacity themes and 
you could do even more. So e.g.:

line.X1 = button.X1 + 2

These simple constructs may well be good enough to do all kinds of great 
themes.

The important thing here is that entire application windows are 
themselves just widgets, and the layout of a window is just the default 
"theme" for that window. So say you have a control panel, you could 
recurse down into it:

ControlPanel -> Frame -> Button -> Rectangle -> Line

A GUI builder is a widget editor, which can edit everything from the 
lines inside a GtkButton, to the entire toplevel window. To do a new 
theme, graphic designers would just load up the original resource file 
in the GUI builder and start changing around the "inessential" aspects 
of the widget tree while leaving the "mandatory" widgets/attributes 
unmodified.

Some of the more complex widgets essentially have to be primitives 
("atoms") rather than composed. We know from long experience that a tree 
widget can't be defined as a bunch of tree item subwidgets and still 
perform adequately. However, some of the visuals (such as column 
headers) are GtkWidgets today and could be composed widgets in this new 
system.

*Fifth*, and this is maybe true whether or not we do all this blue-sky 
stuff, the GTK+ layout system is showing its age. It's pretty unpleasant 
to use with Glade as it is, but if you start to think about changing the 
layout of a window in a theme for that window, it seems pretty clear 
that we can do better. In a next-generation widget system, the layout 
would almost always be in the "inessential" properties of a widget, 
rather than the "essential" properties. i.e. we would not expect the 
layout to be referenced from inside the code.

*Summarizing so far*: the idea here is to define a widget as a primitive 
widget (such as a line or input-only region) or a recursive group of 
sub-widgets. To create a new app window, you just design a new widget in 
the GUI builder. The resulting widget tree has "essential" nodes and 
"inessential" nodes, where "inessential" nodes can be replaced by 
alternate "inessential" nodes. The inessential nodes are the "theme."

Themes are suddenly able to do far more than they do today: 1) they can 
rearrange the internals of a button, because the basic layout isn't 
hardcoded in the expose or coordinate event handlers 2) they can 
rearrange buttons with respect to one another, because the widget 
containing the buttons is just another widget which is themeable as a 
whole. A control panel widget is to button widgets as button widgets are 
to line and rectangle widgets. And of course themes can insert new 
widgets (of the drawing primitive variety) anywhere in the widget tree.

(I freely admit to handwaving a bunch of details here.)

*Sixth*, we still have the problem that we can't have graphical elements 
that span the window manager frame and the client contents. A hugely 
hard solution is to somehow have a global widget tree (the widget tree 
for each app is visible to the compositing manager as a subtree of the 
WM frame). I think some simpler hack would turn out to be better, though 
in a resource-file-based widget system pushing the widgets to the 
display server could be fundamentally saner than it would be today. I'm 
not sure it would be saner, but it seems plausible that you could do 
some clever things.

To make this seem less far-fetched, imagine that most widgets still had 
an X window associated with them; now imagine that some hints were set 
on those X windows about the kind of widget and how to render it; the 
compositing manager could then be aware of the entire global widget 
tree, and render graphical elements mixed in with the widgets inside an 
app.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking on this topic. To me this would 
be a really interesting line of thought to prototype in the context of a 
canvas widget. By doing a new widget system inside a canvas widget, you 
could let GTK+ provide all the basics and just worry about the new 
ideas. You could also allow apps to try out the new stuff in limited 
contexts without porting to a wacky new widget system.

I know people will send me mail about HTML, XUL, and Longhorn and how 
they already do much of this - to answer the question, I don't disagree. 
There are several analogies I've had in my head here, including 
HTML/CSS/DOM; scene graphs (and 2D "scene graphs"); and GnomeCanvas.

I tried sketching out what the "resource file" and code would contain 
for GtkButton and GtkEntry; it gets complicated fast and there are 
unquestionably some issues to think about. In the worst case these basic 
widgets would have to be relatively hardcoded: they could have numerous 
"essential" aspects and assumptions about the visual details in the code 
portion of the widgets. However, even if these basic widgets are largely 
hardcoded, their complexities look specific to basic widgets. 
Higher-level widgets such as entire application windows are a lot easier 
in some ways (especially if we avoid the container-widgets approach to 
layout).

[1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fXDevConf
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/fudcon/
[3] http://www.gnome.org/~seth/
[4] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2005-February/thread.html

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/hp.png

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Item: Luis Villa: Fri, 18 Feb 2005
<http://tieguy.org/blog/index.cgi/315>
Date: 2005-02-19 04:15:53 UTC
[A]

I am uploading another liveCD build; details here.[1] Also, I leave for 
Miami in the morning, so if the upload gets screwed up... well, such is 
life, someone else can I'm sure rebuild it from the previous release ;)

FWIW, the LWE LiveCD was a success- we cleared in total a little over 
$200 over the production costs. That money will go towards seeding the 
next batch. Yay us, and thanks to all the guys at the booth who 
patiently repeated 'we're asking for a small donation...'

Still lots of open issues in the ToDo[2] if people are interested in 
helping out. Right at the moment, I'm particularly curious as to whether 
or not anyone is seriously using the hoary 1.9 OOo builds and whether or 
not we should ship some subset of that instead of the monolithic and 
slower 1.1 builds. If someone wants to investigate using sabayon to ease 
configuration, that would rule too- currently I have a script that is 
poking a bunch of gconf keys. Massive suckage there :)

On non-liveCD matters, I'm beginning to get seriously worried about the 
length and seriousness of the showstoppers list.[3] I know some of these 
have been in for a while, but I would not have wanted to release 2.8.0 
with them either. If you don't want to have a serious d-d-l/g-h 
discussion about potentially slipping the release when I get back from 
Miami, go fix some of these bugs :)

[1] 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2005-February/msg00135.html
[2] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLiveCd_2fToDo
[3] 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-February/msg00356.html

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/luis.png

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Item: Nat Friedman: 17 February 2005
<http://nat.org/2005/february/#17-February-2005>
Date: 2005-02-18 23:50:05 UTC
[A] *__* #[1] "Writing an open source dating system is like opening a 
vegetarian steakhouse"
    — Mike Shaver[2]

[1] http://nat.org/2005/february/#17-February-2005
[2] http://off.net/~shaver/diary

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/nat.png

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Item: Richard Hult: Long live Planner!
<http://people.imendio.com/richard/archives/2005/02/long_live_plann.html>
Date: 2005-02-18 23:34:32 UTC
[A]

Just when I thought I'd never hack on Planner again, I somehow got into 
fixing some small bug that I noticed when looking at a patch. Then I 
suddenly had done more Planner hacking in one day than over the last 
year I think ;) The weirdest part is that I enjoyed it, even though just 
last month I said that I never wanted to touch it again :)

*Gazpacho*
I just updated Gazpacho from svn and noticed that Lorenzo et al had been 
hacking a lot since I last tried it. It's really progressing nicely, I 
can't wait to be able to use it!

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/rhult.png

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Item: Thomas Vander Stichele: Computer trouble
<http://thomas.apestaart.org/log/index.php?p=274>
Date: 2005-02-18 23:34:25 UTC
[A]

So, a while back I mentioned how I have this computer put together with 
some new and some old parts that I was having problems with. The 
motherboard got replaced twice and still the damned thing wouldn’t boot 
anymore after a few days. 

Since then, I had taken my machine to work to experiment with swapping 
out pieces with other hardware - processor, memory, video card, … 
Nothing made my machine do anything other than turn on the motherboard 
LED and spin up the CPU fan. No video on the card whatsoever. 

So, time to go back one last time to the store that charged me 30 euro 
for looking at it and trying to brush me off by saying “cables were not 
connected properly". Well duh - I tried it with everything disconnected 
since the hard disk and other stuff is of no concern - just the cables 
from the power supply to the motherboard. 

So anyway - I take a cab from work to the store to arrive about half an 
hour before the store’s closing time, only to find the store chooses to 
close earlier and doesn’t allow me to bring in the computer. If I wasn’t 
a big boy I’d have started crying there and then. 

Instead, I bought a new stronger power supply from another store next to 
it - figuring it was the only thing I hadn’t really tried a good 
replacement for and went home. Put in the new power supply, still no 
sign of life. 

So then in desperation (I mean, what can you do if’ you’ve swapped every 
piece of hardware in your machine for another one by one ?), I read 
through the motherboard manual and came across the section for BIOS 
reset where it explains how to remove the battery and also short-circuit 
two pins for ten seconds. For some reason I decided to give that a go, 
and what do you know - after doing that the machine booted just fine. 

I have no explanation for this. The motherboard was bought new after the 
last failure, and had worked for about three reboots, and then stopped 
with similar behaviour as the previous one. But it leads me to believe 
that while I’d like to think about computers as logical mechanical 
things you can reason about it, in reality there’s always a case to be 
made for “when all else fails, experiment".

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Item: Daniel Veillard: 18 Feb 2005
<http://www.advogato.org/person/DV/diary.html?start=184>
Date: 2005-02-18 21:13:03 UTC
[A]

*Software Patents*

Anybody able to read french should read the on-line article from Le 
Monde[1] where Michel Rocard (ex french Prime Minister, socialist) 
explains how much battle and pressure occured under the hood at the the 
European commision on software patents. To borrow a short translation 
found from a commentator on /.:

/We never could have talked a common language with the companies 
representatives we met - in particular those from Microsoft. Speaking 
about free ideas circulation, free access to knowledge, was like 
speaking chinese to them. In their way of thinking, everything that is 
not usable for immediate profit cease to be a growth vector. They don't 
seem to be able to understand that an invention which is a pure spirit 
creation can't be pattented. It's simply terrifying. Many of us, at the 
Parliament, agree to say that they never have know such a pressure and 
such a verbal violence during their parliamentary work. It is a huge 
case./

Other translations from me that time:

/The Parliament vote, the 24th of September 2003, adopted by 361 vote 
for, 157 against and 28 abstain of amendments [restricting the field of 
software patentability]. This caused the furor of the commission and led 
to a storm of mails coming from 15 large groups led by Microsoft./

/We learned that to draft the first project, the Commission used the 
work of external experts because this was a new topic to them. But many 
of those external experts were coming from Microssoft and other software 
companies. /

What IMHO make this big, is that it's such a failure and there is so 
much griefs that someone with a very high position like Rocard ends up 
exposing the case himself, publicly and to the main newspaper in France 
!

*Code*

I didn't blogged for 2 months, but I did some code anyway, I just 
released version 0.0.24 of gamin which should fix the damn Desktop 
update problem people on Fedora Core 3 have been complaining about. I 
also worked on libxml2 for example working on XPath streaming subset but 
this is not finished, it's in part used by Kasiemir to finish the 
implementation of XML Schemas constraints.

*Sabayon*

Okay I also worked on sabayon, mostly by giving its name in a 2mn IRC 
challenge with Mark, implementing python bindings for gamin, and working 
on the RPM packages. You can visit us on #sabayon on gnome IRC if 
needed, but best is to use the RPM packages[2], it requires very recent 
versions of various packages. We also lack a mailing-list (asked) and a 
web site :-).

*Internet Radio*

I have been pointed to Radio Paradise[3] Internet radio, and have been 
listening to it from xmms the whole day, truely excellent, I'm tempted 
to make a donation since they re listener supported (no ads !).

[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3244,36-398497,0.html
[2] http://people.redhat.com/markmc/sabayon/
[3] http://www.radioparadise.com/

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Item: Jamin Philip Gray: Switched to WordPress
<http://pubcrawler.org/2005/02/18/switched-to-wordpress/>
Date: 2005-02-18 16:58:34 UTC
[A]

Well I finally got rid of Movable Type[1] and made the switch to 
WordPress[2]. I evaluated WordPress 1.4 and wasn’t terribly impressed 
but WordPress 1.5[3] is slick. It only took me about 8 minutes to 
download, install, and import my MT entries. There are some broken links 
and that sort of thing, but overall, it went smoothly. If you notice any 
problems, let me know. 

I really like the default theme, but I’m making some minor tweaks to it. 
Stay tuned… 

Unfortunately I had to remove the blogs I was hosting for friends. [B] 
I’m hoping they’ll move to a hosted blogging service because I always 
enjoy reading what my friends write. 

[1] http://movabletype.org
[2] http://wordpress.org
[3] http://wordpress.org/development/2005/02/strayhorn/

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[B] http://pubcrawler.org/wp-images/smilies/icon_sad.gif

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Item: Ronald Bultje: 18 Feb 2005
<http://www.advogato.org/person/rbultje/diary.html?start=88>
Date: 2005-02-18 16:22:42 UTC
[A]*GStreamer Developer Summit*
From wednesday on, most GStreamer core developers and following (Andy, 
Benjamin, Christian, Dave, Julien, me, Thomas, Wim) got together to 
discuss future development and direction for the 0.9 branch . This will 
then become the final design for GStreamer 1.0; 1.0 would, in the end, 
be proposed for inclusion in both KDE and GNOME developer platforms. Big 
words, time for action.

/Problems:/
Current GStreamer-0.8 design has various generally agreed-on problems 
that cannot be fixed easily without breaking ABI/API. Worse, for a long 
time we did not know how to fix it and did not agree on a common 
direction towards fixing it.

- thread-safety issues (refcount-, signal-, state-change- related stuff 
and a lot more)
- clocking/synchronization issues
- state handling on eos/error is wrong
- negotiation protocol issues
- a lot more
Wim was leading the discussion to identify and agree on the mistakes in 
our current 0.8 tree, particularly the ones that we cannot fix in the 
0.8 timeframe. This is mostly stuff that we agree on and know how to 
fix. It´s just something we need on paper for later.

/Generally agreed-on solutions:/
Here is what came out of this discussion:

- eos/error should not change state. More generally, state and actual 
processing ("scheduling") should be separated from each other.
- refcounting should be threadsafe (glib)
- signals should be marshalled to the correct thread, either through a 
message bus or through cross-thread signal marshalling.
- Clocking should be improved to be implicitely synchronization (which 
we don´t have right now; *shame*) across streams.
Most of thursday was spent on discussing and agreeing on the above. We 
mostly agree on all this. Friday was spent talking about scheduling of 
pipelines ("processing of the media").

/Solution #1: -threaded:/
-threaded is an experimental branch that aims to add locking in the 
right places, adds protocols on locking and variable usage and make it 
all just work. It also adds some nice extra features such as media 
processing on events (e.g. "preroll", which means that the media is 
preloaded while a user executes an action).

/Solution #2: -nonblock/async:/
-async/noblock is another experimental branch that aims to remove the 
requirement for threads by using an event-based scheduling model. 
Elements are only scheduled when all preconditions for a non-blocking 
execution of their function is met (e.g. a file descriptor, a clock, 
etc.). Interesting features are seamless mainloop integration, which 
allows out-of-dataflow pipeline processing (e.g. expose an X window on 
expose events).

/What's next:/
The rest of friday was spent on discussing both approaches, fetching 
problems, setting a short-term path and some more. Wim and Dave believe 
that the async/noblock approach can be merged in the otherwise nice 
-threaded approach (which already implements the other stuff that we 
agreed on).

Next few days, we'll be experimenting with the design and implement all 
of the above. We will also discuss various directions for gst-plugins 
that are not directly related to GStreamer core. For the near future, we 
will work on preparing core to become the 0.9 branch, port the various 
subsystems from -threaded and -noblock/async over to this 0.9 branch 
(and have various people understand and review this), write a porting 
guide, remove deprecated code, write reference plugin implementations, 
updating documentation and porting plugins. From then on, we hopefully 
rock.

Time for beer. :).

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Item: John Fleck: Hockey Stick for Dummies
<http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/archives/001569.html>
Date: 2005-02-18 16:18:04 UTC
[A]

Gavin and Caspar at RealClimate give the best explanation I've yet 
read[1] about how principal components analysis works, and how it is 
applied in the discussion over Michael Mann's hockey stick[2].

[1] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121
[2] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=7

[A] http://planet.gnome.org/heads/jfleck.png

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Item: Luis Villa: Fri, 18 Feb 2005
<http://tieguy.org/blog/index.cgi/314>
Date: 2005-02-18 15:05:17 UTC
[A]

I am sooo wiped today. I was supposed to go to fudcon[1], and I still 
might try to make it for the afternoon, but I'm totally wiped from LWE 
right now, and just laying on my couch and catching up on sleep and 
email seems really, really appealing. Plus I need to pack for my 7am 
flight home tomorrow morning :/

LWE in general was awesome- lots of happy GNOME users stopped by and 
said thanks, got to meet some new faces, see some slightly less new 
faces, and lots of old faces, of course. Will write more at some point 
after I'm recovered :)

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/fudcon/

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Item: Hubert Figuiere: F-Spot and libgphoto2
<http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2005/02/18/96-f-spot-and-libgphoto2>
Date: 2005-02-18 14:24:42 UTC
[A]

Wow F-Spot 0.0.8[1] supports using libgphoto2[2] to import pictures from 
the camera. Congrats guys !

I'll have to try that.

[1] http://primates.ximian.com/~lewing/blog/archives/000025.html
[2] http://www.gphoto.org/

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