Advogato blog for herzi

Peer-to-Peer DBus over TCP

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 20:08:26 GMT

When I was searching the web, I didn't find some proper documentation about this, so I started to develop some bits of code to show how a peer-to-peer connection on TCP can be established between a DBusServer and a DBusConnection. With this connection, I can properly invoke methods from remote objects (and with a little bit of avahi-voodoo, clients can automatically connect to each other).

First Steps with Tracker

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:32:02 GMT

As I‘ve been happily trying out the OpenSuse Build Service, and I wanted to have a presentation about it at the Lanedo apres-conference, I decided to package a recent version of tracker.

I managed to package it within an hour and then decided to need a use-case for these new packages. I picked GNOME Launch Box and after some hacking, I managed to properly replace the application search module by a tracker based module. It was pretty straight-forward to develop that module (after getting a bit into SparQL).

I even ended up doing some more cleanups and finally dropped libgnomeui and libgnomevfs.

I'm really looking forward to replace even more backends with tracker-based ones.

FOSDEM 2010

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:32:02 GMT

Last weekend Lanedo brought its hackers to Brussels, mostly for attending FOSDEM. We‘ve had a delicious joint dinner on Friday evening and attended the conference on Saturday. Just as in the past, the conference has been nice with all the people around and all the good talks.

I mostly spent time in the GNOME presentation room and the hackers room upstairs. Even though I decided for a pet project to be developed during the weekend (some random widget that will be developed later), I ended up doing something completely different (will blog about it later).

On Monday we‘ve had a nice apres-conf with the Lanedians at the hotel. We got a presentation of the first year of Lanedo in the business and a nice presentation about future plans of the company.

After flying back with Tim and Martyn, we realized how warm Brussels actually was. Hamburg was a lot colder, totally snowy, windy and the footways are icy and really dangerous.

In the afternoon I will visit the new Lanedo office for the first time.

Time, Time Zone and the total mess… (continued)

Sun, 1 Nov 2009 10:30:57 GMT

This blog post is intended to be a reply containing the information that I would have needed abut half a year ago:

as Jürg has correctly pointed out: gmtime() would have helped me a lot (but isn't portable)

as I realized during the last week, replacing mktime() with timegm() would have properly helped, too

Going along with timegm() also yields exactly the results that I expected. This makes things a little easier as all the times in my application are UTC times and will properly get converted into local times when using… It also allows things to become a little easier as I can assume that all times in my application are UTC times.

So right now, I'm trying to get the g_timegm() patch into glib, so there is a portable, threadsafe (as in “does neither modify your environment variables nor use static variables”) implementation people can use in their applications.

Maemo Summit 2009

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 09:11:16 GMT

Thanks to Lanedo, I'm able to visit the Maemo Summit this year again.

I'm pretty excited about the things they will show off there.

ThinkPad X200 Tablet

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:13:40 GMT

Lanedo was so kind to offer a notebook upgrade for me and on Tuesday I happily received a ThinkPad X200 Tablet.

I will spend the following weeks setting up the machine to replace my current X60s by Fedora 12's release date.

Wednesday evening I started to install Fedora 12 Alpha via USB pendrive and managed to get a bootable device. The screen was flickering like hell and, after a large upgrade yesterday, things are usable now.

The next step will be to get the Wacom tablet working. Fedora has a pretty recent Xorg server (Ubuntu is actually lagging behind this one); but the wacom drivers don't seem to work with it yet…

Auslosung zur Playoff-Runde der Europa-League

Fri, 7 Aug 2009 12:09:38 GMT

Nach dem Debakel unserer B-Elf gestern gegen Randers FC steht wenigstens fest: Wir sind dennoch weiter!

Die Auslosung in Nyon hat nun grade ergeben, dass unser HSV am 20.08. auswärts bei EA Guingamp (bei Wikipedia; Pokalsieger 2009; wurde 2008/2009 nur 13. von 20 Vereinen in der französischen League 2) antritt und dann wieder das Rückspiel in der HSH-Nordbank-Arena am 27.08.09.

Wie üblich habe ich den Google-Kalender für die HSV-Spiele aktualisiert: HTML, iCal, XML.

Die Anstoßzeiten werden dann nachgetragen, sobald ich sie kenne.

Casio Exilim Z85

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 08:08:45 GMT

Jetzt ist es gut einen Monat her, dass Anja und meine Eltern mir einen Fotoapparat geschenkt haben und ich wollte einfach mal ein bisschen zusammenfassen, wie sich mir die Lage nun darstellt:

Pro EX-Z85

Die Kamera ist sehr klein; sie passt in eine Handy-Tasche (»Handysocke«) und kann dann auch gut in der Hosentasche transportiert werden.

Die Kamera ist sehr leicht; auch das macht sie gut geeignet für den unkonventionellen Transport.

Die Kamera ist sehr schnell; nicht nur was die Zeit zum Einschalten angeht, sondern auch was das eigentliche Fotografieren betrifft (»Hey, mach' mal ein Foto!« - »Och nö, das war zu schnell. Mach noch eins!«).

Contra EX-Z85

Die Kamera ist sehr leicht (ja hatten wir schon); leider macht das die Kamera recht schwer ruhig zu halten.

Die Kamera hat keinen eingebauten Beschleunigungssensor; die Fotos müssen von Hand in die richtige Orientierung gebracht werden.

Fazit: für meine Zwecke eine tolle Kamera; die Fotos sind für mich tolle Andenken und die Qualität ist toll (wenn man der Kamera genug Zeit für den Auto-Fokus lässt). Für 130 Euro ein Schnäppchen. Wer Beispiel-Bilder sucht, wird bei meinen Gran-Canaria-Bildern Fotos finden, die mit GraphicsMagick einfach nur auf 1024×768 Pixel skaliert und bei FlickR - nach Bedarf - rotiert wurden.

Gran-Canaria-Fotos bei Flickr

Sun, 2 Aug 2009 21:09:28 GMT

The Boss is always watching…

So, ich hab' grade meine Fotos vom Gran Canaria Desktop Summit bei Flickr hochgeladen:

Auslosung zur 3. Qualifikationsrunde der Europa-League

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:06:31 GMT

Nachdem gestern ausgelost wurde, dass der HSV seine Spiele in der dritten Qualifikationsrunde gegen Randers FC (bei Wikipedia; Fairplay-Qualifikant; Ligafünfter in Dänemark) oder FK Sūduva Marijampolė (Pokalsieger in Litauen; Ligavierter 2008) bestreiten wird, habe ich den Google-Kalender diesbezüglich aktualisiert:

XML, iCal, HTML