Colin Charles Agenda

• Some cool Nautilus file manager scripts and GNOME Power User Tools. When time permits, or if someone else is interested, these should really get packaged for Extras. Also, posting to flickr using Nautilus is nifty. A useful resource is the GNOME ISV Guide - with tools like Sabayon, and more gconf customisations, I can see this being a very, very useful resource.
• San Francisco was the usual fun. Oakland was far out, but go BART. We toured the Mission District on Wednesday, and tried to run a tour on Thursday for various sites in San Francisco. Seeing Fisherman’s Wharf after about eleven years, things don’t seem to have changed. Topic is from the fortune cookie that I kept.
• The craze with Harry Potter is out. I pre-ordered the last book, and till today, a year later, still haven’t read it. So I’ll have to marathon the two at some stage. So, its not only churches that don’t like you reading HP, its also rms.
• Finally catching up with mail (thanks to the rain, humidity and heat outside), and there’s some new things in Maemo land. For starters, python 2.4 is now available. And there’s also a MaemoWiki. Also, since Fedora is big on Eclipse, there is a Laika Scratchbox plugin available. While I haven’t tried making a package, I’m unsure if it will work on Fedora or not without a Debian chroot or something.
• At the Desktop Developers Conference 2005 I learnt a few new things - how to use inotify with gamin (its now in rawhide kernels too), Eclipse Trader might be useful for stock trading, Unicode is important, Rasterman believes that “Bling bling is much more important than functionality”, and Hubert has been lied to, many a time :) More to the point, I learnt more about digital imaging, and its something that’s of interest lately (I want my RAW working, and cataloging, backing up, and manipulation via The GIMP, etc.).
• Glad to see its not just dwmw2 or me running FC-4 on the Pegasos II. We clearly need a new yaboot (basically with svenl’s patches), and we don’t have anaconda working (neither does ydl), and I definitely need to update the fedora ppc document.

• So m-commerce must’ve really taken off. Today, I made a purchase from a WAP site on my mobile, using my credit card details, and then having an item I ordered delivered. All without a computer, mind you.
• I started jhbuilding GNOME again. On a fairly standard FC-4 system (workstation install), you need: docbook-utils-pdf, howl-devel. It has a spiffy notification area icon now. audiofile wouldn’t get installed (host not found) - so manual fixing. mozilla wouldn’t build. The jhbuild dependencies is a mighty useful page - if time permits, maybe something like the comprehensive jhbuildonubuntu ought to be written for Fedora.
• Spent some time with the FUDCon II folk, aka, the FESCO meeting #2. SkypeOut seems to have served well for the three hours, because I got to do these things handsfree. And it didn’t cost a bomb. While sitting on it, I decided we needed to communicate (well, this was a goal from FESCO physical meeting #1), so I present Extras Steering Committee. We have meeting minutes that are public there now. And its been announced. Good talk about how package process works (the arch stuff came up, and more stringent ExclusiveArch goodness and Bugzilla tying ins). What we can package/ship also came up, and I’m sure the minutes and stuff that comes out of it will be interesting.
• < |Jef|> he clearly doesnt understand that Red Hat is the catholic church of distributions… every year its congregation splinters in yet another reformation - how true. You can splinter, but you can never leave us.

• Hubert, I don’t know where you’ve heard/seen that Apple will ship the Intel C/C++ compiler, but they’re definitely backing XCode and GCC. In fact, they encourage gcc usage, as it will provide smooth transitions, and one of their new Intel Macs already had gcc -arch compiled to handle ppc and i386. This probably quenches the rumors that Intel will build PowerPC processors.
• Boolean searches in Spotlight enhances it with NOT/OR searches - useful. I haven’t tried Beagle yet, but this shouldn’t be a hidden feature but really pimped up.
• Wah, Delicious Library is seriously being pimped at WWDC. I think they’d be winning some design awards sometime soon. For those of us using Linux, there’s mCatalog (requires Mono). All this uses the exposed Amazon Web Services API.
• Popped Mono on OS X. To use gtk#, I need X11? Eh, it isn’t native, but it works right. Well, here’s news, Mono is not cross-platform, either. Mac users hate X11 apps. Why do you think we have NeoOffice/J being more popular than OpenOffice.org/X11? So besides wxWindows, we may never have a true cross-platform GUI out there (and its not even a pretty solution).
• Been playing with Dashboard widgets a lot. Its highly impressive. CSS, JavaScript, and basic HTML, and you get some really useful features. Also mining Apple’s Web Kit. There’s a lot of potential here, and with some good CSS-fu, lots of cool widgets can happen. XCode is something I’ve used a bit more, and I’m rather impressed - jump around .js file functions too. It even edits HTML! Its very cool.
• Tried Abiword. Its kinda nice. Lightweight, doesn’t require X11, I’m kind of impressed. I wonder if gnumeric is also available on OS X and if it’s as good (I mean, I keep on reading about abiword at planet gnome…).
• Quartz Composer is cool. If this is what the programming future is going to be, we’re going to get a lot of cool, high-end apps. The toy RSS screensaver is completely easy to build! However, it performs shitless on my iBook G3 with the Radeon 7500. Looks like I really need to get some power… erps, PowerBook thing at some stage.

When oh, when, will GAIM support MSN7 better? All those swanky emoticons, and the like… From a few weeks back, this seemed rather appropriate.

01:32 < @nosnilmot> drbyte: cool, that’d be helpful, although I do worry that you have too many MSN7 using friends
01:32 < drbyte> nosnilmot: yes, that is the way people are moving
01:32 < @nosnilmot> why aren’t they moving to a decent OS ?
01:33 < drbyte> nosnilmot: well, Windows XP is decent enough for them. and some software has no linux equivalent
01:34 < @nosnilmot> *exclusive* drbyte defends proprietary crap ;-)

Of interesting bits, Nautilus will no longer have Open Terminal when you right click on the desktop any longer. So like OS X behaves, I have to now go searching for it, and then adding a shortcut to it on a convenient place with new installs… But this is also progress - it means that an average end-user will require to not use the command line now, will she? Everything can be done using magical points-n-clicks.

Fedora Core 4 Test 3 was loaded on the Mac Mini today. It seems to be a lot faster than my snapshot of the 20050504 tree, so I’m guessing (because I have had no time to debug) something was very wrong earlier. 256MB of RAM makes GNOME usable again. Installer doesn’t detect X resolution properly, but did earlier - weird.

Retail therapy always helps right? So today, I went out and bought a bike. And a helmet. And a pump. Need to find a water bottle holder thing, and a mount for my GPS (I have one about 8000km away from here!), but took the thing for a spin today for a couple of hours. Came back because of a flat tire… C’est la vie.

GNOME
So, with the 2.10 release, libwnck (metacity) sort of behaves funny in the sense that my GAIM windows don’t pop-up anymore. Its true, the current method of not stealing focus is a good one, but I felt it was important for IM. Havoc made an interesting post with options that we could work around, and reading back, the adding “URGENT” flashing to tasklist is a solution (that requires some coding effort). Otherwise, for IM purposes Guifications works really well. nosnilmot packaged them for review at his site, and if you’re lazy to rebuild rpm’s, I’ve got them built against a rawhide snapshot from post-test2 here.

Fedora
Fighting with QEMU. Its broken in Extras with GCC4 (log) and its also broken when I attempt a “export GCC=gcc32″ (log). All on a stock QEMU 0.6.1, which I’d really like to get going before Wednesday, for the LCA kernel hacking tute. Paul Brook pointed me to missing FORCE_RET on store ops, and figures this is what I need to do for i386.

MyOSS Magazine
Remember the days of LinMagAu? Now defunct, but while it was around, every month it got Slashdotted. Ow Mun Heng got enterprising and created Malaysian Open Source Software Magazine, now affectionaly known as MyOSS Magazine. Good first attempt, and hope it continues this way. Pay it a visit, contribute an article or two. Better still, print it for the next install fest or something (there are pretty pictures).

Handhelds
Loaded Familiar 0.8.2 onto the iPaq. Delved into using minicom again, and boy did that bring back old memories. With GPE of course. My Dlink DCF-650W used to work with the slim sleeve, however, no drivers are being loaded now, so I’m sort of wireless impaired at the moment. Even a manual modprobe orinoco_cs seems to not work. However, my full-sized PCMCIA card seems to work nowadays; only catch is using the dual-sleeve, with battery thing, thats huge. Gotta love the new GPE Package Manager (though I think it lacks dependency resolution capabilities). Command line ipkg search seems broken, but listing works. Minimo, vim, and python are on it now. Online screenshot application (scap) works well from the command line and the menu, but via the command line, you get a direct URL to your shots.

Life
Boringness. Its just mad rush before LCA. Plenty to do, not enough time. Went for cell yesterday after a hiatus, and it was surprsingly good. Last day to see S. for a week, till next Saturday. I’m actually going to be missing her.

For some reason, the last few days have been quite busy, and I’ve been sleeping a bit more (and I haven’t even been having a life). Started working on an updated guide for the Fedora PPC installs, but have yet to complete it. Tried Rawhide on x86, and found that i8xx_tco (the watchdog drivers) cause the PC to constantly reboot within a 2-minute timeframe. Bad. All PC Gemilang owners will be affected.

Tried a USB scanner - the HP ScanJet 4100C. Just plugged it in, FC Rawhide on PPC just detected it, and I was on my scanning way! Talk about simply cool. No drivers, nothing required. I’ve not used a scanner since the mid-1990’s, and back then, support on Linux was horrible (parallel port scanners were cheap, and highly unsupported). GNOME 2.8 got released. I’m now popping Ubuntu Linux onto bigmac, so that’ll give me a chance to do a clean Rawhide install soon on the remaining space. Oh, also been playing with DidiWiki - I like it very much.

I updated the Fedora PPC guide sometime yesterday. Sleep issues on the G3 definitely down to acme/gnome-settings-daemon causing a conflict with pmud. Simple way out of this for all users that want sleep to work is to use XFce4 or even KDE (as per my post). Can’t find pmud conflicts at Debian or upstream GNOME bug trackers, so I’m wondering if its something Fedora specific.

That’s not Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA), which is what I thought of initially - its the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America! Good thing I clicked the link; was thinking it was some Microsoft ad on yet another Linux site - gnomefiles.org.

Speaking of accessibility, here’s a post by Bill about how GTK+ accessibility is still a little lacking in the Win32 environment. How do we successfully build a cross-platform accessible bit of software? GTK+ has been the closest to being something useful…