Older blog entries for clarkbw (starting at number 28)

Translation Strings

Worked on some cleanups for translatable strings in gnome-blog today. Finished the protocols directory and I'm now moving on to the rest of the files. It's going fast, I'm really just removing the markup text from any error messages, as per instruction of the L10N folks. I really appreciate their quick and easy guidelines for developers, it wasn't that hard to look through and seems well thought out.

Blog categories in gnome-blog

Finished up the categories system for gnome-blog, this has really been a bug for way too long. Honestly, I've never really needed to post to different categories before so it wasn't really a concern of mine (and no one yelled too loudly). However now that I need to blog to different categories often I can see how bad it is when you're trying to quickly post to different sections of your blog and you'd have to open the preferences each time. Sheesh. Well right now I've only upgraded the preferences section, I haven't figured out a good place to put the categories drop-down list in the UI. Here are the obligitory screenshots: first time setup of blog and subsequent opening of preferences. On first setup the button says 'Lookup Blog' and then the categories are stored in a GConf key for quick access later. Everytime you open up the preferences after that your categories stay in the drop-down list, but you have the option to refresh the list from your blog. Sounds pretty simple? Yes, but I had a hell of a time finding out how to use the gnome-python gconf set_list and get_list methods as they were no examples that I could find anywhere.

gnome-python gconf lists

And so, an example for everyone else to use in case they need:

client = gconf.client_get_default()

fav_things = ["bright copper kettles","warm woolen mittens","brown paper packages tied up with string"]

client.set_list(gconf_key, gconf.VALUE_STRING, fav_things)

fav_things = client.get_list(gconf_key,gconf.VALUE_STRING)

The 1st line is the usual setup. The 2nd line are a few of my favorite things... ha ha ha. The 3rd line will set the gconf_key value to be a list of strings. In the GConf key you'll see the comma separated list of strings. Then the 4th line will return the list of strings just like python expects (isn't pygtk great!). I'm supposing (but haven't really tried) that using the gconf.VALUE_INT will work the same way in storing a list of integers.

It looks like PAM has enrolled herself into the Song Hyun-Jung Academy. I can't wait to hear the results of whether she gets in or not.

Go PAM!

Ok, I'm back from what was a great holiday break.

UI-Review

I'm in the midst of organizing my life right now, so I won't have anything else done up for the ui-review stuff just yet. I will have lots of stuff Sunday and Monday. Classes start this coming Friday, so the rest of the week might be a little shaky for time.

Next week or the week after will be a big push for ui-review stuff, schedule meetings on IRC and open up lots of bugs.

GNOME-Blog

I did do a little work on gnome-blog over the break. Almost ready to commit some stuff. I made a little database for auto-complete nicks in blog replies. It's just a little hack for storing the URL of someone you reply to with the person_name: format. The BerkDB just remembers the URLs you used and autofills them whenever you type that same string again. Need to do lots more testing to see if this is where it should be. It's not a critical feature, so I doubt I'll try to push it into the CVS HEAD version.

Sent message out to GNOME Lists

Finally sent out the email for UI-Review's to the appropriate GNOME mailing lists.

Posted two UI-Review How-To's

I added both how-to's to CVS today, there is the coordination of a ui-review and the how to write a ui-review both online now. These are both still DRAFT versions, I'm working over the next two days on finishing them up a bit.

Bug Hunting

I did a bunch of bug hunting today as well, mostly related to the UI-Review stuff. I'm trying to flush out the old bugs that have become irrelevant.

How to Coordinate a UI-Review

For your viewing pleasure I'm journaling my work into a howto page so that everyone knows exactly what I'm doing for a UI-Review and a an added bonus future coordinators can have a step by step guide to this job. I'll be setting the page up on the GUP - UI-Review page soon.

How to do a UI-Review

If you're wondering the what's the best way to get started on your first UI-Review then this next howto should help you to get started quickly. Again this should be on the ui-review page in the gup project are probably by the end of the day.

A little faster progress

I've been sick the past couple days and I think it's ending now, so I'm hoping things will be going a bit faster now that I'm free of all these germs. :-)

Multi-Layer Interfaces

Read the first couple pages of Ben Shneiderman's paper on Multi-Layer Interfaces which is really cool and a plan that I have for gnome-blog.

Very cool news! I hope Robert works on the bad beer first :)

Exams

Exams are finally over with for this semester and we've gotten all of the numbers that we'll need for our research paper on Xen now I just need to read over what we have of the paper now throw in my corrections. Also I need to fill in my sections of the research with the content that I've written.

UI-Review

I'm the UI-Review coordinator for this release of GNOME. I've started on some information that should be helpful for those who are doing their first UI-Reviews for GNOME. I also need to spruce up the old information we have and decide what to do with last years reviews that were never finished. I'm also contemplating emailing the sig-chi student mailing list calling for participants once we have a good amount of helpful pages up for new comers.

The Night Off

Since I couldn't sleep last night and it was supposed to be my night off. So I'm taking tonight off to go drinking at dowem's place with some of the guys who are graduating and leaving COSI for good.

Took the day off today, I've been working around the clock since Thursday without much of a break. Today I took care of some things in my apartment, I didn't go to school and I ate some good food. I wonder if anything was done in the lab today? I doubt it. Some people in my group took the entire weekend off, while 4 of us grinded through the work that needed to be done. I really hope those people who took the weekend off did something with their time today, like running more performance tests and possibly writing up some of the paper.

Dashboard

I checked out dashboard today and played around with it a little bit. I really like the idea that Nat is following, it's along the line of a presence system that other apps could tune into. I've been considering taking some of the old code in my spare time and writing a gDesklet that incorporates all the functionality. I don't have a very good display on my laptop, so I'd appreciate this thing being integrated into the desktop as an applet type thing. Then if we had real transparency through xserver we could see the dashboard system giving us hints on where things might be.

Anyway, off to the store to pick up some ice cream, cause it's 16 F out here and that makes me hungry for ice cream. I need other food too...

How to blog better

Someone pointed out to me in an email that I should really link more to the things I'm blogging about. So here's the link to the Xen project that I'm working on (and blabbing about earlier). Thanks for the correction.

Xen

I haven't been able to work on anything I want to these past couple of days. We're almost done running the test suites for Xen, I can't wait until this paper is finished and I don't have to look at Xen anymore. Not that I don't like Xen, I just can't handle running so many performance tests on it. I'd really enjoy doing something else for a little while, but we're running out of time fast.

NPR

Looks like the NPR system is going to go over well. Everyone on the team seems to like the idea of using Blog software for NPR stations, now I just have to convince NPR themselves that blogging is the future of handling their sites content management system. Next week sometime we have another meeting to hash out the final issues and I need to have everything ready to sell the blog idea. I can't wait for the day when we have Planet NPR! :-)