Sat 2010/Jan/02
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Danielle, you are working around this known maemo GTK+ bug, which will be fixed any time when the backported upstream GTK+ fix is released by Nokia.
Syndicated 2010-01-02 10:38:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Sat 2010/Jan/02
Danielle, you are working around this known maemo GTK+ bug, which will be fixed any time when the backported upstream GTK+ fix is released by Nokia.
Syndicated 2010-01-02 10:38:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Tue 2009/Dec/29
Last night, around 3am, while I was still awake, the fire alarm in the building got activated. I was already thinking it had to be a false positive (it happened once at least since I live here), but anyway quickly grabbed my jacket and phone, in order to evacuate the place. When I was reaching the third floor, the smoke made evident that it was not a false positive: something was on fire, and it was downstairs.
The feeling of knowing that you are in an upper floor of the place where something (that you can't really see) is on fire, is a bit scary, so to say. Anyway, when I was reaching the first floor I noticed that the fire was coming from inside the store located in a big portion of the floor (Tarjoustalo, for the finns reading this). Something was on fire inside, and luckily at a good distance of the gate I was using, so I had no problem to leave the place, call 112, and wait for the firemen and police to appear.
A few hours later, the fire was controlled. I read this morning in Helsingin Sanomat that the fire was extinguished by the fire sprinklers in the store, and most of the damage was caused by the smoke and water accumulated. For me, only a good fright, a bit of smoke inside the flat, and a couple of hours waiting outside in the cold. Next time, I will grab the scarf and gloves, even if I think it's a false positive.
Syndicated 2009-12-29 21:32:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Tue 2009/Dec/22
If you've had the chance to play already with a N900, you've probably noticed that you can typeahead your contacts' names in the Phone application, in order to filter them and find the person you're looking for quickly. Similarly, the media player will allow you to filter the list of artists/albums/songs/etc. by simply typing the first letters of the media you're looking for. This is probably one of the most praised features of these two applications, specially in times when contact lists grow up to several hundreds of people and dumping your media collection inside the phone takes no effort.
This feature, known as live search, used to live inside these two applications, each with a different implementation. Third party maemo developers wanting to have a similar feature would have needed to cook it themselves inside their applications. Clearly, a waste of effort.
But luckily, that's not the case anymore. I spent a big part of the last two months (when not in holidays nor flying from and to A Coruña) working in a consolidation of the live search widget originally written by the good old Jörgen and later rewritten by Xavier, part of the osso-abook library. With the blessing of Nokia, I took it and removed all the osso-abook dependant bits and made it as generic as possible, in order to allow its usage in any application using a GtkTreeView and a GtkTreeModelFilter. This widget, now LGPL and named HildonLiveSearch, landed in hildon's master around a month ago. Better yet, I also took HildonLiveSearch and made it a feature of HildonTouchSelector, the hildon widget for pannable lists that you can see in most of the N900 applications. This already landed in the stable branch of hildon and I'm confident that Nokia will release it at some point with an update of the phone's software (don't ask me when, though). Rumor has it, this is already a feature in one of the latest releases of Hildon Application Manager.
For developers interested: if you use a HildonTouchSelector, don't worry, you'll have live search for free in your application. If you just use GtkTreeView, have a look at the HildonLiveSearch widget implementation and its simple example, as well as the HildonTouchSelector implementation for a more complete example. Of course, you can imagine that the changes to make it work inside HildonTouchSelector are quite invasive, so I'd please ask you to grab hildon's code from the repository, build packages, smoke test it in your application, and file bugs if you find any. This way, we minimize the possibility for regressions by the time this hits the public. Shall you have any concern or question, don't hesitate to contact us in the hildon-devel mailing list.
Let this be my christmas present to the world for this year. Special thanks to Xavier, who was of great help during the push of the live search into hildon.
Syndicated 2009-12-22 16:15:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Mon 2009/Nov/30
El árbol que tú olvidaste
siempre se acuerda de ti
y le pregunta a la noche
si serás o no feliz
El arroyo me ha contado
que el árbol suele decir:
Quien se aleja junta quejas
en vez de quedarse aquí
Al que se va por el mundo
suele sucederle así,
que el corazón va con uno
y uno tiene que sufrir
Y el árbol que tú olvidaste
siempre se acuerda de ti
Arbolito de mi tierra
yo te quisiera decir
que lo que a muchos les pasa
también me ha pasado a mí
No quiero que me lo digan
pero lo tengo que oír:
Quien se aleja junta quejas
en vez de quedarse aquí
Atahualpa Yupanqui – El Árbol Que tú Olvidaste
Syndicated 2009-11-30 18:08:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Tue 2009/Nov/17
Maemo Summit '09 gave me the chance to visit Amsterdam for the second time. A city I love and can't get enough of it.
All photos of Amsterdam, in its flickr set.
Also, Berto and I took a couple of days of holidays after the summit. We visited Den Haag (flickr set):
Delft (flickr set):
and last but no least, Rotterdam (flickr set):
Of course, I also made some pictures during the summit. Not all of these are so great as this one, though:
Syndicated 2009-11-16 22:24:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Wed 2009/Nov/04
I read the other day in a Finnish newspaper that the Chilean musicologist Alfonso Padilla was awarded by the Student Union of the University of Helsinki as the best international teacher.
Of course, this is not very relevant to be in the Chilean news. We all care much more about Pellegrini's career in Real Madrid, and whether he is fired or not after every match.
Syndicated 2009-11-04 12:59:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Tue 2009/Nov/03
Arrived in Helsinki yesterday evening after a rocking Igalia Summit near Padrón in Galicia. Unfortunately, my luggage didn't make it with me.
This is the third time in a row that my luggage doesn't make it with me (same happened when I came back in August after spending two months in A Coruña and on my trip to Amsterdam for the Maemo Summit in October). Downside is not having things I need with me, positive side is that it's comfortable to get your luggage delivered to you instead of having to carry it all the way from the airport. Of course it would be nice if this would be predictable, in order to have the important stuff in the hand luggage instead.
Hopefully, it will arrive safely as it did the other two times.
Syndicated 2009-11-03 12:47:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Wed 2009/Oct/28
Do you see anything harmful in this chunk of code? You can read the GTK+ docs but please don't look at the implementation of the called methods.
GtkTreePath *path;
GtkTreeIter filter_iter;
for ( /* an iteration on all iters in a GtkTreeModel */) {
path = gtk_tree_model_get_path (base_model, &iter);
gtk_tree_model_filter_convert_child_iter_to_iter (filter,
&filter_iter, &iter);
if (gtk_tree_selection_iter_is_selected (selection, &filter_iter)) {
/* do something with path */
}
}
The code looks harmless, but it's not really. Looking at the implementation of gtk_tree_model_filter_convert_child_iter_to_iter() you'll see that the actual conversion is done by obtaining the GtkTreePath for the base model iterator and calling gtk_tree_model_filter_convert_child_path_to_path(). Similarly, gtk_tree_selection_iter_is_selected() internally calls gtk_tree_selection_path_is_selected(). So, you are calling gtk_tree_model_get_path() three times in total when you only need to do it once. Just use the GtkTreePath equivalents.
Is this obvious for everyone but me? I mean, without looking at an oprofile callgraph and/or the GTK+ sources. I am not so sure.
Syndicated 2009-10-28 17:19:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Fri 2009/Oct/02
One thing that the N900 is missing is a way to scrobble the listening habits to last.fm. Since I am sort of addict to last.fm scrobbling, I couldn't wait for someone else to do it and wrote myself a last.fm scrobbler for mafw, the Media Application Framework used since Fremantle in Maemo.
After a few weeks smoke testing it and fixing things here and there, I released today mafw-lastfm 0.0.1. This is the initial release and it does the basic stuff quite well: playing-now status and scrobbling. It has several rough edges but it was working good enough for me not bother to work on them. Releasing, I guess, is a good way to push me to do it, when anyone complains.
The git repository is in gitorious, there's a garage page with some resources for those curious, and I pushed binary packages to Fremantle's extras-devel repository. Happy scrobbling!
In August I took a few weeks off from work, and spent a wonderful time with Maria in Paris and Fontainebleau, in France. Paris is a wonderful city but it has just too many things to see and do, so you can easily go back home needing holidays from your holidays. To avoid that, we spent several days in the small town of Fontainebleau, around an hour south from Paris. The town is quite small but charming anyway, life is way more relaxed, and it served its purpose of giving us some rest from the crazy Paris experience.
The crazy Champs-Élysées:
One of the lovely fontaine Wallace, decorating many corners of Paris:
A random restaurant in Fontainebleau:
Yesterday, I managed to finish uploading some of the pictures from Paris and Fontainebleau to flickr. The quality of these proves that I still have a lot to learn about reflex cameras.
Syndicated 2009-10-02 15:55:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Thu 2009/Sep/10
magit is one of those gems that one always discovers late, and then regrets not having started using earlier. If you are an emacs and git user, this is what you are missing to get those perfect commits.
Wonderful article on Ricardo Baeza R., my Professor for Applied Math and Linear Algebra back in the Facultad, awarded now with the Chilean National Prize for Exact Sciences 2009.
Syndicated 2009-09-10 20:27:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!