Older blog entries for knipknap (starting at number 74)

Announcing: Week Of Free Software

After almost half a year of silence, I am pleased to make an announce:

Starting on Monday, I will dump large amounts of fresh free software on the public.

This had a long time coming; for about a year now I spent most of my programming time cleaning up, redesigning, and improving my projects, shaping them into higher quality software packages and simplifying everything from user interfaces to APIs to the build procedures. To me this is also an exercise in simplifying the release process. As a first step, I removed all of the project pages from my homepage, instead integrating the content on the project pages on code.google.com. I am hoping that this will save me from some maintenance work in the future.

So what is the plan? I will release at least two software packages every single day, for a week. That means all kinds of software: Some for end users, some for the web, some for Python developers; some are major updates or new releases, some bring higher quality and additional polish.

Syndicated 2009-01-02 22:30:30 from Debain.org

Protobuf Bookmark

Looks cool and useful: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

Syndicated 2008-07-09 20:22:12 from Debain.org

Adding/Installing a .desktop File In Anjuta Projects

With help from yura_dev in #anjuta I just figured out how to add a .desktop file to your project in Anjuta:

• Create the desktop file, name it test.in.in and place it in your project root.
• Edit Makefile.am and add the following lines:

desktopdir = ${prefix}/share/applications
desktop_in_file = test.desktop.in
desktop_DATA = $(desktop_in_file:.desktop.in=.desktop)
@INTLTOOL_DESKTOP_RULE@

EXTRA_DIST = $(testdoc_DATA) \
test.desktop.in.in

%.desktop.in: %.desktop.in.in
sed -e 's,[@]PACKAGE_PIXMAPS_DIR[@],@datadir@,g’ $< > $@

• Edit the line that says “sed -e …” according to whichever variables you want to replace in your desktop.in.in file.
• Make sure that the replacement variables are defined in your project. You can do this under Project -> Properties -> Variables.

If this does not work then I will probably not be able to help you. I do hope Autotools finally die a quick yet painful death.

Syndicated 2008-06-08 19:22:17 from Debain.org

Observations: Feelings In The English vs. German Language

Proof by example (search for “proof by”):

• A person is currently looking at something cluttered and wants to fix the situation. In other words, the premise is a feeling of clutter, and the intended outcome is tidiness. In English, the verb relating to such situations most often refers to the premise (clutter) rather than the intended outcome (tidiness), in this case to unclutter. In contrast, the German translation is “aufräumen”, referencing directly to the intended outcome (aufgeräumt).
• The same is true for the time axis. For example, “to be sick of something” directly refers to a current feeling of sickness. The German language provides several similar constructs:
  • “ich fühle mich krank” (”i feel sick”) refers to an illness.
  • “es leid sein” refers to a general feeling of tired discomfort rather than a pain (similar to “to be tired of something”).
  • “ich bin es überdrüssig” does not have a direct translation, but is close to “i’ve got enough”.
  • “es macht mich krank” (”it makes me sick”) refers to an ongoing process that has yet to be completed.

  However, there is no German construct referring to a current feeling of circumstance-induced sickness.

Of course, there are a lot of exceptions to these rules, but I noticed them to be true in many cases. As a result, I find that English is often a lot better at expressing feelings. Also, English is not my native language, so perhaps I’m just missing something.

Syndicated 2008-04-21 21:22:19 from Debain.org

Language Bindings And Application Certification In GNOME 3.0

There has been talk about how to change the GNOME platform to make it easier to introduce changes without alienating developers by breaking API/ABI in short intervals.

• Building an abstraction from IDL for any public API sounds like a cool plan, because
  • A thin abstraction decouples from third party libraries that are used in GNOME but can’t be ported to our namespace. Gstreamer or even Cairo are examples that may benefit from such a wrapper. I can’t think of a better way to accomplish a consistent platform (a prime example here is Mono, IMO).
  • This could potentially turn the task of generating language bindings into a fully automated process, making it easy to integrate complete platform bindings into GNOME’s regular release cycle. Now if that does not rock, I don’t know what does.
• As for the desktop part of the platform, I still believe that switching to a GNOME certification based solution is a better way to do this. Currently, GNOME is a fixed set of applications, and what is included in this set is decided mostly on the desktop-devel-list. Taking part in some of the discussions sometimes left a sour taste: I do believe that most (if not all) of the current GNOME applications took their place deservedly, but some alternative solutions never got a real chance simply because the author was not well known in the GNOME community. I believe that a certification based desktop would make this a little easier - if more than one tool meets GNOME’s standards (HIG, API/ABI promise, …) and all are equally good, then they all deserve a GNOME certificate, leaving the task of choosing the shipped application to distributors.

Also, the developer base could benefit from integrating the Win32 and Quartz ports of Gtk integrated into the regular release.

Syndicated 2008-03-13 11:54:12 from Debain.org

GNOME 2.22 Is Out

Syndicated 2008-03-12 21:54:33 from Debain.org

RPM Challenge

RPM challenge is trying to convince musicians to create an entire music album in only one month. I first saw the challenge last year, but only after it was already completed. Despite being snowed under with work, studies, and training, I am still very tempted to participate this year. But I probably won’t do it. Or will I? Ah, well, the music tools on Ubuntu are probably not really up for this. Not to mention that finding collaborators who share the same interest is never easy… but it’s tempting still.

Syndicated 2008-01-27 19:59:38 from Debain.org

Spiff Integrator 0.1

I just released the first version of Spiff Integrator, a package manager for adding plugin support to Python applications. The API documentation is now completed and available here.

Syndicated 2007-12-27 16:23:43 from Debain.org

Integrator API Documentation Online

The API documentation for Spiff’s package manager Spiff Integrator is now also online. Note that the API is nonetheless still in a state of flux.

Syndicated 2007-12-09 22:01:22 from Debain.org

Spiff Integrator Progress

I am currently working through the entire Spiff library collection to clean up our APIs; today I have been working on cleaning up Spiff Integrator. This particular piece of code has been a mess for a long time, and cleaning it up required major design changes, but it is starting to get there. I need some sleep.

Syndicated 2007-12-08 00:16:06 from Debain.org