Planet GNOME-NL

Reinout van Schouwen (reinouts): Orhan Kaya stopt ermee

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:09:05 +0000

Zojuist is bekend geworden dat Orhan Kaya stopt als wethouder Participatie & Cultuur in Rotterdam. GroenLinks blijft nog wel in het college en is op zoek naar een vervanger.

Die had ik niet zien aankomen…

» Plaats op eKudos

Philip van Hoof (pvanhoof): Upskirt!

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:06:31 +0000

This blog item was done for the sole reason of pissing off some people.

Wouter Bolsterlee (uws): Vala bindings for Epiphany Extensions

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:21:18 +0000

Yes, that would be nice to have. No code yet, but Cosimo Cecchi promised to do it, as can be seen on this video:

Cosimo promises to create Vala bindings for Epiphany extensions (Ogg Theora video, 737 KB)

Philip van Hoof (pvanhoof): Wireless Internet everywhere, not

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:27:09 +0000

Another reason why the web fan babies are not getting it is the current price that the vast majority of people today pay for mobile Internet. This is the story of a Belgian who went on vacation for three days in Spain. He bought himself a mobile data formula and I guess he hoped that it wouldn’t be very expensive.

A few weeks after he came home he received an invoice of 18888 euros. The price per megabyte was 10 euros.

This poor guy was lucky because Proximus (the phone network company) settled the invoice for 1400 euros. For 1400 euros it would still have been cheaper to take a plane to Belgium, check your mail at home, and take a plane back to Spain. For 18888 euros … I don’t think it’s possible to schedule as much flights in three days as you could buy with 18888 euros.

I remember I told a few people at GUADEC that it would be cheaper for me to fly home every day to check my mail, than it would be to do this over GPRS in Istanbul. This story seems to verify that.

These are the prices for mobile Internet access in 2008, the year when all the web 2.0 babies started crying that all of the mobile applications should become AJAX websites.

Again the point that I’m trying to make is that instead of completely changing the strategy of products like GNOME Mobile towards webberty web stuff, maybe intelligent people should consider that maybe, just maybe, we just don’t have the wireless connections for that yet. In reality, you see, we don’t have that at all at this moment.

I’m not convinced that within the next decade we will have anything that comes close to reliable wireless Internet connections at the same coverage as GSM. Which still wouldn’t be sufficient. I mean, the connectivity of GSM is really bad if you take into account how often you don’t have a good signal.

The reason is simple: the economic model of a free wireless Internet for everybody everywhere on the entire planet, is probably just not profitable. The research to achieve this without needing a few thousand nuclear power plants and without having to hire thousands of people for maintenance of the wireless routers worldwide, is just not happening.

The political power that you’d get out of having control over this giant wireless network can much more easy be achieved by simply owning all news papers, television networks, schools, etc. What that means is that politicians wont do it either.

Martijn Koedam (qball): Stuffkeeper vala plugin

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:14:05 +0000

I am writing, a slightly pointless, vala plugin to test (and fix) the stuffkeeper.vapi file.
I now have a working “tag cloud” that listen to added/removed/changed tags and updates accordingly.
I have already hit a few errors in the gtk vapi file, and it became clear that I am better of writing the stuffkeeper.vapi file by hand. But it works, and that is very nice, and I am starting to like vala more and more..

Owh screenshot, offcourse:

or newer (and to large to inline):
http://images.sarine.nl/stuffkeeper-tag-cloud-vala-plugin2.png

Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn): F-Spot database surgery

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:04:31 +0000

Currently it’s not possible to assign a single comment to multiple photos using F-Spot. Of course, with F-Spot being open source, it’s relatively easy to do some manual database surgery to make this happen.

First make sure F-Spot is not running and backup F-Spot’s photo database:

cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db.bak

Then again make sure F-Spot is still not running, and go ahead a execute the following command, customized to your own liking:

sqlite3 ~/gnome2/f-spot/photos.db “UPDATE Photos SET description = ‘In the above shot, Daisy poses during the ZNAM Modellendag at an abandoned mining complex in Waterschei, Belgium.’ WHERE id IN (SELECT photo_id FROM Photo_tags WHERE tag_id in (SELECT id FROM Tags WHERE name = ‘Daisy’));”

Manual modification of the F-Spot photo database isn’t really recommended, but in cases such as these the only time-efficient solution. If you botch the above command it’s easily possible to destroy or criple your photo database (that’s why we backed it up in the first place, so you can always revert).

Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn): F-Spot hacking spree

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:39:08 +0000

Lately I’ve been on an F-Spot hacking spree. I’ve been fixing a few small ennoyances of mine. A couple of bugfixes have already been commited, mostly touching the DevelopInUFraw extension.

I also found a small bug caused by odd rounding behaviour when typecasting a (double) to an (int). I implemented a patch using the obviously solution: Math.Round, which works just fine.

I have packaged F-Spot 0.4.4 with these patches, and can be installed by adding the following line to your apt sources:

deb http://ubuntu.pcode.nl/ubuntu hardy gtk-sharp2 f-spot

Again, use these packages at your own risk. Make sure you backup your photos, and your Photos.db, before installing.

Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn): LensFun in UFRaw

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:29:48 +0000

Modern Digital Single Lens Reflex camera’s can produce Raw photo’s instead of JPEG. These Raw photo’s are more or less sensor dumps. A big advantage of using a sensor dump is that it usually is 12 or 14 bits per component, instead of 8 for JPEG. And of course you don’t have the quality loss JPEG inherently has.

There just one catch. Most software can’t deal with Raw images. The main reason for this is that the image data in a Raw image, is oddly structured, and needs interpolation to be displayed or processed by normal software.

Luckily for me, UFRaw can do that interpolation, and it does it well. Offering a lot of options to adjust an image to my liking. However, there are two important missing features in the current version (0.13) of UFRaw:

Lens-correction
Arbitrary-rotation

The second feature is still a work in progress, so we’ll have to wait for that one.

But, the first feature, lens-correction, has already been commit to cvs, using the excellent lensfun library. An excellent overview has been already posted here.

I’ve packaged development versions of lensfun and ufraw, which you can use (at your own risk) by adding the following line to your apt sources:

deb http://ubuntu.pcode.nl/ubuntu hardy lensfun ufraw

I’d like to stress that these are development versions and could display some weird behaviour.

Philip van Hoof (pvanhoof): Consequences of SMASHED

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:03:57 +0000

An innocent developer will now not only be addicted to girly drinks, like Malibu, he and his girlfriend will also become addicted to drinking the same Whisky as one of the SMASHED members brought to GUADEC this year.

Ruben Vermeersch: GUADEC 2008 Review

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:00:35 +0000

Ik zit momenteel op de vlucht van Istanbul naar Brussel, met een tussenstop in München. Met schapewolkjes onder mij heb ik een paar conclusies neergeschreven over de afgelopen anderhalve week GUADEC:

Het was mijn eerste GUADEC, dus ik kan niet meteen vergelijken, maar deze was geweldig!
Proficiat voor het lokale Turkse team, heel vriendelijke en behulpzame mensen.
Proficiat voor Baris, om dit allemaal te organizeren. Moet een helse taak geweest zijn, maar hij heeft het uitstekend uitgevoerd.
Istanbul is een geweldige stad, die nooit slaapt. Midden in de nacht met een drilboor werken is de normaalste zaak van de wereld/
Al deze geweldige mensen ontmoeten is een enorme bron van motivatie en inspiratie
Oh btw, heeft iemand al vermeld dat we Stormy Peters aangenomen hebben als CEO? Stand up Stormy! *applaus* Stormy ontmoeten en met haar praten was heel aangenaam en heeft me heel veel vertrouwen gegeven in haar en in de toekomst van GNOME.
Feestjes op boten zijn waanzinnig cool
Een heleboel mensen bleef nog enkele dagen na de conferentie, voor toerisme, wat leidde tot heel aangename meetups 's avonds
Zwemmen in de buurt van ferry terminals is een goede manier om je sandalen te verliezen. Deze boten maken enorme golven, zelfs al zijn ze heel ver weg. Gelukkig heb ik ze terug opgevist, wat ons een wandeling terug naar het hotel, op blote voeten, bespaarde
Turkse mensen zijn heel vriendelijk, op een paar corrupte taxi chauffeurs na (die je gelukkig heel gemakkelijk kan herkennen).

Over het algemeen ben ik heel tevreden, ik hoop iedereen dan ook snel terug te zien.

Hylke Bons (hbons): Merging i.p.cpw.qulogic.msn to i.p.p

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:40:58 +0000

For human beings this means: support for status messages and offline messages (MSNP15) in the next Pidgin release.

Thanks everyone who has been working on this! :)

Wouter Bolsterlee (uws): Don't worry about all the tabs

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:27:15 +0000

I hope that by now everyone understands that tab support in Totem, Banshee, Empathy, Pidgin (despite clear demand for it), Gnome panel, and the easy GTK tab support are all fake. All the images are just mockups.

So don’t worry, Gnome 3.0 will not feature tabs as the main UI improvement. There is no tab frenzy. Tabs are useful in some places but certainly not in all the programs we were collectively joking about.

Thanks to everyone for all the cool mockup images, I’ve had a few good laughs.

Philip van Hoof (pvanhoof): Mint crystals in Istanbul

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:26:40 +0000

I finally found what I was looking for at the Istanbul Spice Bazaar (Misir Çarsisi): mint crystals.

For the Nokians and other Finnish sauna freaks reading this, this is the stuff that you want to mix with a little bit of water (else your sauna is way to dry, of course) and then put the mixture on the hot stones. Crystalised mint is a very pure form of mint. Mint in a sauna gives a very cold and cool feeling on your body. Meanwhile your sauna is obviously very hot. You basically think that it’s cold, yet it’s very hot.

Well, with crystlized mint you maximize this. Eucalyptus is nothing compared to mint crystals. Chinese mint comes close, though. But not quite.

The aftermath is that you probably don’t want to jump in ice water after your sauna anymore. Not before adapting to normal temperatures for ten minutes. You wouldn’t be the first who passes out. I mean, your body is in a very confused state: it behaves as if it’s cold, but it sweats as if it’s very hot. The one thing you don’t want to do is to make it very cold suddenly. Unless you are a big dangerous looking Finnish dude, maybe.

I mean, I’m not underestimating the Finnish sauna people. I’ve been to a public one in Helsinki. Woah.

Anyway. The store can send the crystals to your home with DHL, the owner told me.

If any of the Nokians or other Finnish sauna pussies want to know what a real sauna experience is, you can mail them at ucuzcular@gmail.com, and try it.

Philip van Hoof (pvanhoof): Fantasies of web fan babies

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:27:54 +0000

Just like how GNOME developers are only good at serving themselves, development communities and hackers, so do web application developers only make solutions that serve the group of people that act like little crying babies whenever there’s no Internet connection. (well, not really. Both serve other groups too. Of course.)

Truth is, and I’ll take any of those Web fan babies on a trip to reality in any city at any time for at least the next 15 years, that the vast majority of people during the vast majority of their time don’t have something that you could call an Internet connection.

Surprisingly those people also often have sex in the evening. Meanwhile the people crying for Internet connections usually don’t.

Choosing between real sex and an Internet connection is an interesting question for me, being a workaholic software developer. But in the end, my Tinne’s charms always wins the fight against my computer’s shiny Internet connection. Seriously.

I mean that listening music in my car using Last.fm is not an option. Consider this: With good music in my car and my girlfriend sitting next to me, I’m far more likely to please her than I would be in case I’d frustrate her with this “Buffering…” and “Connection lost” crap that would inevitably be the result of a Last.fm player in my car.

Guess what will get us at a cocktail bar leaving us with the right atmosphere? A car with a Last.fm player, or a car with a USB stick? (usually we use bicycles, because we are responsible young drivers, but anyway). A car that 90% of the times has this “Buffering…” thing would make her laugh about her funny nerdy boy the first time. But after ten times, I’m pretty sure my investment in her cocktails will be ruined by that piece of shit music player, in my car.

People who are not into computers don’t even get that first time for free from their female partners. A piece of shit music player is an instant failure. Meaning: they won’t buy it. That’s why you are not seeing Last.fm players for cars.

I mean that using Google Maps for car and truck driving navigation is only something the kind of architect that you want to ban from your software development company would propose. You need to focus on the road while driving. Please don’t focus on the millions of irrelevant accessibility and usability problems a web application like Google Maps introduces.

On top of that, there’s no way all of the highways and cities in Belgium would have reliable Wifi coverage for at least another decade. And Belgium is a wealthy Western country.

We ‘rich boys’ are not the only ones with cellphones. We are probably the only ones with super Internet backbones sticking in our arse, though.

I mean, without any of that Web 2.0 stuff are car GPS devices working just fine the way they work today.

Seriously … to say that all the future of computing belongs to the web, while neglecting the real problems mobile solutions are solving today already, is something only the worst kinds of wannabe architects and morons would say. In my opinion.

You really think I would accept that I can only listen to music with your iLast.fmPod device in the most crowded places of planet earth? Places like inner New York City are probably the only ones where, if you are extremely lucky, you could have a Wifi Internet connection. Even with that connection, Last.fm would still take minutes of buffering per song.

That’s why iPod is a success, and your iLast.fmPod wont be. Well, that’s not the only reason. The other reason is that people buy iPods for the same reasons why grown up people buy swimming pools: to make other people jealous.

Usually, they don’t download a free desktop for the same reason as why they invest in swimming pools. They download it because it’s the only way to make the piece of shit computer perform the things that help them achieve their personal goals.

The point that I’m trying to make is: most Web 2.0 applications suck. They solve one problem (deployment) and they introduce fifty clearly identifiable new ones. On top of that, they are not ‘free’ as in free beer either, right?!

They are the monopolist’s best friends! Microsoft’s monopoly will look like a baby compared to Google’s in a few years.

But don’t confront the Web 2.0 fan babies with those ‘problems’! They’ll just go “la la la”, “not listening”, “Youtube rocks”, “la la la”.

That’s fine, but then go out of the way for the people who will solve the real problems in the next decade.

Web apps work and will work where they work. They might even work great, sometimes. But they wont where they wont.

Ruben Vermeersch: Istanbul

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:09:06 +0000

Een heel geweldige GUADEC is net afgelopen. Ik zal mijn gedachten later online plaatsen (wanneer ik terug thuis ben). Voorlopig zal je het moeten stellen met enkele beelden om bij weg te dromen. Gepost bij een heerlijk kopje thee vanop het dak van ons hotel.

Istanbul by night, zoals te zien vanop het dak van ons hotel.

De Bosporus, zoals te zien vanop de conferentie.

Een draaiende dervish

Nog een paar dagen in Istanbul voor toerisme. Iedereen die zin heeft om er samen op uit te trekken, laat iets weten.

Hylke Bons (hbons): Update: GNOME 3: Tabs and People

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:46:26 +0000

Update: Yes, ofcourse this is a joke, it was set up at GUADEC. Thanks for all the concerning responses! :)

Actually dobey, I, and although I’m not a hacker I do some UI design for Pidgin. I was impressed with the new direction for GNOME 3.0, and the modifications made to Banshee and Totem, and I think we should redesign Pidgin to fit in with the next generation of desktops.

If the Pidgin devs don’t agree with this I’m going to fork Pidgin and call it Hidgin.

Nicolas Trangez (ikke): Free Software startups

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:39:43 +0000

At GUADEC last days, fun times. One thing I noticed (again) is the growth of the number of small companies, some of them driven by young guys (like, between 25 and 30) doing some really great stuff with Free Software, combining a steady income, whilst still providing valuable contributions to the community.

I’d want to write more about this seen, but here’s a quick idea: how about creating a mailing list for, at one side, these young startups or people interested in starting one, and on the other side people who already got their business running, or already established investors or managers, to discuss issues they encounter, potential business plans, how to get in contact with potential customers, how to combine open communication at one side and dealing with closed environments on the other,…

This could lower the barrier for people to start working full-time on the projects they love, it’d add value to Free Software because larger companies can start using it even more, because more expertise and consultancy is available on the market,…

I guess this is just a shot in the dark, but I think it could be pretty useful. Thoughts?

Kristian Rietveld (kris): More GUADEC!

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:53:26 +0000

Okay, I am actually getting hacking done (okay okay it is more like reviewing) and I just committed the fix for #316087 "Resizing columns is chaotic" to gtk+ trunk (finally!). Should be in the next 2.13 releases. This patch does modify the internals of tree view column size allocation, so if people could give the latest gtk+ from trunk a test drive that would be really appreciated :)

By the way, you can find the slides from yesterday's GTK+ state of the Union here.
The plans from the release team for GNOME3 sound cool, exciting times ahead :)

Martijn Koedam (qball): Donation for a new laptop battery.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:26:28 +0000

My, year old, laptop battery is dead. So I cannot code in the train anymore.
So I thought about opening a pay pal account for donations. Several times before people asked if they could make a donation (mostly happy gmpc/gtodo users), so now it is finally possible.
If I get enough so I can buy a new battery, I will finish up a 1/2 finished jamendo plugin I have lying around and push it into git.

The e-mail adres the paypal account is attached too is: qball _at_ qballcow.nl

Thx,

p.s. what is a good store/webstore to buy a new battery. The cheapest one I found was 100 Euro for a 6600mah battery for my ibm t42.

Wouter Bolsterlee (uws): Totem tab support

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:09:26 +0000

Since tabs are just so nice as a UI metaphor, I also did some Guadec hacking. See the screenshot below for the awesome result of just a few hours of hacking:

Most parts work fine already. It will be landing in Subversion after a bit of cleaning up.

Next stop: tab support in Gnometris!

(Don’t forget to read the update to this post as well.)