Webkit/GTK+ is a really nice thing already. It still has it's rough edges, but it already works really nicely.

At Imendio, I spent the last 2 weeks on Webkit/GTK+ for Mac OS X. The GTK+ backend for webkit is using FontConfig/FreeType to match fonts and to cache glyphs. We decided that the right way to do this cross-platform is to use Pango for it (not for the real text layouting, but at least for the font management).

In Pango 1.18 we found the APIs that we needed and finally we finished working on »Abstract font management by using Pango«. Some parts are a bit tricky (especially FontPlatformData::isFixed() and pango_font_get_glyph() parts of the patch).

Finally, we were able to take this screenshot:



It's really nice to hack on Webkit, Apple's employees are really quick in reviewing and applying patches. They have a field for patch-reviews ("?" means »please review«, "+" and "-" are review votes for and against a patch). I think having a patch review queue in GNOME's bugzilla would also help a lot to get patches into the packages (of course, the queues would be package-specific, maybe they can appear on the package summary page).

Joomla! oder: die Quadratur der GPL, oder: warum ich seit geraumer Zeit keinen GPL-Code mehr schreibe. Mit der LGPL wäre das nicht passiert und LGPL-Code lässt sich beliebig von einer Anwendung in eine LGPL-Bibliothek migrieren, ohne dass man den Cruft von alten Contributors ausräumen muss…

Also nochmal: Leute, denkt nach bevor ihr euch eure Lizenz aussucht.

Dear Lazyweb,

today I had a problem debugging a GTK+ module (libatk-bridge.so). It threw a warning which looked like it was coming from my application:

** (criawips:26563): WARNING **: failure: no device event controller found.

By using grep I realized pretty quickly that the message didn't come from my application. The gdb was at least able to tell me where the meesage came from (after breaking on g_log):

(gdb) bt

#0  IA__g_log (log_domain=0x0, log_level=G_LOG_LEVEL_WARNING, 

    format=0xb6bde62c "failure: no device event controller found.\n") at gmessages.c:516

#1  0xb6bdc0f8 in ?? () from /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libatk-bridge.so

#2  0x00000000 in ?? ()

(gdb) 

And then I thought »Hey, nice, let's install debug symbols«. I installed at-spi-dbgsym (Ubuntu ddeb). But now I have this problem: gdb doesn't load the symbols from the debug.so (/usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libatk-bridge.so). How do I tell gdb to do? Please don't just mention a command like "sharedlibrary" (because I already tried that). The documentation is a bit poor on this and I think more people are interested in debugging GTK+ modules.

Thomas wollte, dass ich nochmal was zum Thema UMTS blogge, damit er dann meine Erkenntnisse nurnoch umsetzen muss. Seit ich mit der Spielerei angefangen habe, hat sich in der Linux-Welt auch schon wieder einiges getan: das eingebaute UMTS-Modem muss mittlerweile nicht mehr über das Modul usbserial angesteuert werden, sondern kann jetzt durch das Modul sierra betrieben werden, das dann bei den meisten Distributionen auch automatisch geladen wird.

Ist das Modul geladen, stehen entsprechende serielle USB-Schnittstellen zur Verfügung (/dev/ttyUSB0), über die dann mit dem Gerät kommuniziert werden kann.

Da ich persönlich nicht allzuviel davon halte, Passwörter u.ä. auf dem Rechner zu speichern, habe ich die USIM
immernoch mit dem Pin-Schutz versehen, der dann mit einem einfachen »echo 'AT+CPIN=4711' > /dev/ttyUSB0« bis zum nächsten Reboot aufgehoben werden kann.

Ansonsten ist das Arbeiten mit dem UMTS-Modem eine Leichtigkeit, einfach folgende PPP- und hat-Konfigurationen
installieren und alles wird gut:

## start of /etc/ppp/peers/umts ##



/dev/ttyUSB0

460800

defaultroute

usepeerdns

noauth

debug

user "t-mobile"



connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/umts"

## end of /etc/ppp/peers/umts ##

## start of /etc/chatscripts/umts ##

TIMEOUT 10



# abortstring

ABORT BUSY

ABORT VOICE

ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'

ABORT 'NO DIAL TONE'

ABORT 'NO ANSWER'

ABORT '+CPIN: SIM PIN'

ABORT DELAYED



# modeminit

"" 'ATZ'



SAY 'Checking pin lock\n'

"" "AT+CPIN?"



SAY 'Setting APN\n'

OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet.t-mobile"'



# ispnumber

ABORT 'NO CARRIER'

#OK 'ATD*99***1#'

OK 'ATD*99*1#'

# ispconnect

CONNECT \d



## end of /etc/chatscripts/umts ##

Carlos is collecting use cases and feature requests for a GtkCanvas. Make sure you're getting into this thread to make sure the GtkCanvas will really rock.

In the mean time I have been refactoring some parts of libccc. Right now I'm adding lots of test cases to make sure that the canvas behaves exactly as expected. You can check out my current master by using: git clone http://www.blaubeermuffin.de/ccc.git

I have been adding many nice things to the canvas during the last weeks. I'm currently focusing on resolution independence for the canvas, some nice API for view-specific data in items (this is almost done, needs some fixing though) and - of course - printing.