good job

I just upgraded my machines to Intrepid, so I could fix Totem’s slow startup speed. And it turns out stuff works better than before. Thank you everybody - in particular Kernel, X and Ubuntu people - for making stuff work so well.

Syndicated 2008-10-06 21:45:38 from Swfblag

Scary

What’s scary about 5 second boot is not that it is possible. What is scary is that Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo and Suse couldn’t do it. Not even close.

And that seems to be a mindset issue: “It’s not about booting faster, it’s about booting in 5 seconds.”

Syndicated 2008-10-03 09:56:36 from Swfblag

scripting GNOME

So, lots of talk about sripting engines on Planet GNOME. I was first planning this as an answer to Alex’s GScript introduction, but I thought others might be interested, so here it goes:

Here’s the three things I’d care about in a GNOME scripting environment a lot:

The most important thing is of course the bindability. You need to make it incredibly simple to bind stuff to or from GObject stuff. It looks like GScript already does an awesome job at this with natively marshalling everything and so on.

Another important thing is this: Does GScript ship programming tools and provide a way to do RAD? I’m thinking console, debugger, dnd script installation etc here. Not just for people writing scripts (where I’d want completion and built-in documentation), but also for me when making my application scriptable and having to debug refcounting issues because a script holds on to a GObject that my C code thinks is gone already.

But the most important thing for scripting I think is security. I want to be able to download scripts from untrusted sources (read: the Internet) without fear of them doing anything bad to my computer or its data. This is doubly complicated if exposing stuff is too easy. So if you expose “RemoveSong” in Rhythmbox, you already have a problem.
The reason you want to allow this, is twofold: 1) We are incredibly bad at maintaining a useful set of plugins (or art - same issue for themes). That’s not due to lack of capability, but because it’s booooring. 2) If you would set up a website where everyone can upload/download/vote on scripts and even integrated that site into your application, you would make the application self-improve and lower the barrier of entry for new people incredibly.
Here’s a use example

1. I want to remove red eyes in the GIMP. So I open the plugin browser, enter “red eye” and get a list of plugins (note that none of these plugins are installed). I select the highest-rated (or most-installed one) and it launches, asking me to select the red eyes and afterwards removes it.
2. I decide I’m smart and can write code that detects the red eyes automatically, so I select the script, click on “edit” and modify the script. After half an hour (read: 2 weeks) it does what I want. I’m happy.
3. When looking through my scripts, I see the “upload” button next to my red-eye removal tool. So I click it and it’s available for everyone else.
4. Go to 1, replace “I” with “you” and “selecting the area” with “speed”, “accuracy” or whatever other feature.

This gets you the whole bazaar style software evolution without human intervention, automatically and for free. The only people I know that are doing something like this are Userscripts for Greasemonkey, but even that doesn’t look very professional.

Syndicated 2008-09-09 11:37:39 from Swfblag

Why Python will never be fast

Yesterday, when reading the Tracemonkey stuff, I realized this. The question “My code runs slow, how to make it go fast?” has two answers: “Improve the compiler/runtime to make it go fast.” and “Rewrite it in another language that can go fast.” As long as the second option is possible, there’s just no need to spend a huge amount of brain on the other option.

Besides, I’m back from my holidays where I’ve played with Flash 9 scripting in Swfdec. While it won’t make it for Swfdec 0.8, I’m positive 0.10 will play ABC-scripted Flash.

Syndicated 2008-08-24 12:45:20 from Swfblag

Holidays!

Yay, I’ll be on holidays on Madeira for the next 3 weeks. So if I don’t answer to email, now you know why. (I didn’t break the GNOME build on pourpose, I swear!)

To not leave you without code to break, I did releases of Swfdec: 0.6.8 (stable) and 0.7.4 (unstable) with corresponding swfdec-mozilla and swfdec-gnome releases.

Last but not least, I also uploaded the slides for the talk I gave at LugRadio Live and GUADEC. Of course it’s a Flash file. Navigate using space, left and right arrow. Mouse click (un)fullscreens. Flash is a pretty great presentation creation framework, especially because everybody can just watch the presentation in the browser the same way I did it.

Syndicated 2008-07-30 20:38:58 from Swfblag