Older blog entries for menesis (starting at number 8)

tony: I'm building whole GNOME from CVS right now, with the help of scripts. You don't need to write them, check out vicious-build-scripts from GNOME CVS, read, run, wait, after several hours of compiling you can have Evolution! If everything builds... But it should. Packages do not conflict. You just need to know which branches to get stuff from. You want OAF from oaf-stable-0-6 branch, that one does not require ORBit2, and so on...

And I decided to build everything with CFLAGS='-O3 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686'...

noise

Remembered that I can suck mp3z from Dalnet, what I was used to two years ago... While my friend gets a gigabyte of music per day over University's Ethernet, I simply cannot download that fast with simple modem. But from Dalnet it is the same speed for him as for me, because the link is more reliable.

So, I've got Sonar vinyl and half of Winterkälte album, titled "Drum N Noise". Even a title is worth downloading :) Yeah, kicks ass! dzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzzzzzz

Today was a bit of simple hacking day. Found a simple bug in libxml1, then in gnomeicu, fixed a bit of Evolution, backported my earlier i18n fixes to stable branch... Finally found out why Evolution composer was not working and fixed a bit of bonobo. Largely updated my translation of Evolution in both branches.

But indeed that is not much work -- just some lines of code and a bit more lines of translation. I work very slow :(

Yesterday started to rebuild my GNOME into another prefix (home dir). Today it was complete, except some apps that did not compile (eel). Uninstalled most of gnome debian packages and tried to remove my compiled and installed crap from /usr prefix. Probably much left there. The result is that i can finally type make install. So I do not do it ;) vicious-build-scripts can do this for me.

By the way it is so nice days outside.... I know it but do not feel, because sit all night behind keyboard.... bad.

Cool, hacking catches me! The downside of this is that I sleep until lunch, and work at night.

What I have done... tried to understand GAL/Evolution and fix some small issues. I suceeded in i18n of categories and importer/mail config druid's pages, but not in popup menus. Also fixed some strings in camel. Then fixed trash and executive summary icons both in folder view and shortcut bar. Browsed in Ximian Bugzilla, commented issues, resolved some bugs.

You'll say: "What's special here? I do that every day". But I am not that skilled programmer and indeed very lazy person. So I am very happy when I done anything good in a day. It takes me much time, but I learn, later I will do more in less time. I hope :) And it is pleasant to fix my most often used application, and make it better.

Again I did not ask permission to commit, but I hope they will see that something is better after recompile, and ChangeLogs say all.

All saturday spent recompiling GAL and Evolution, and fixing includes all over the place. kmaraas has been fixing them, but his latest gal cleanup patch required to fix evolution, so I did that.... Only after I've sent my patches, notzed noted that it was not what I should do. This is a very good point. One person working on one thing, and doing that job well, is better than two working on the same. While my patch was not bad, better I should not wasted my time on it this time. Waiting how this story will end up...

On the other hand, I wrote another patch, and am happy with it. Now Evolution caches menu/toolbar pixmaps of all components, so switching between them is faster. And there are much more icons in menus (not drawn by me:) Oh well, my Evolution. The patch is not comitted yet, it's weekend and Ximian hackers don't work, do they?

Surely I have done some other good things, but don't remember. Maybe nothing?

Weekend:

Spent all weekend outside. It was cold... All the trip took 54 hours, 2 hours of them was in a train station, 4 in the cars which took me hitch-hiking together with my girlfriend. All other time was standing on road, sleeping on ground in a tent, walking with all stuff on the back (I think we made 30 kilometers on Saturday). It was around +2C on days and -7C on nights... brrr...

After all that I was so tired that got to sleep as soon as I got home.

Computer:

Oh no... it's too hard to catch up with the mail I got within those three days... Spend almost all evening reading various gnome and friend lists, compiling new stuff, downloading debian updates... Why I do all these things? Are they neccessary for me?

i18n:

Finally Peteris sent me some first gnome translations to Latvian. Fixed simple things, by the way updated my (Lithuanian) translations and commited everything. I'm glad another Baltic (they are only two!) language started to be supported. I wish them good luck.

Life:

So I finally have moved into another room to the centre of town Kaunas. I have no more access to University's 100Mbit/s network, but got a phone line. So internet now costs... But thanks to telecom, it introduced flatrate this year, so I'm again online! Strange, but with 14400 modem GNOME CVS works much faster and reliable than previously! I am very happy with it. In general, I have much nicer network setup now: a single command pon does everything, thanks to Debian's tools: it launches exim, fetchmail, fetchnews, so I even do not notice how mail/news arrive to me. Actually I launch pon just by clicking on GKrellM. It is a very cool thing: now I use it for ppp status monitoring, watch if there is new mail in ~mail/menesis and adjust volume, control xmms, have a clock, watch free space on disk -- amazing thing.

GNOME:

I have missed all deadlines for translations, so Lithuanian will be half finished in GNOME 1.4 :( Really sad. Updated some translations yesterday, but they won't go into release anyway (i.e. Evolution). Fixed small i18n bugs, changed Makefiles, cleaned up CVS and similar tiny things for Bonobo, encompass, Evolution... Have read a bit of documentation about Bonobo and CORBA. Now have some idea about how it works, but how to write it -- still not enough. Thanks to Open source, there are much examples :)

Mulad: Your Evolution Composer does not work because you do not have GtkHTML Editor component. If you compile from source, add --with-bonobo to ./configure parameters. If use Debian -- install gtkhtml package. If... similarly.

I feel somehow bad and non-interested in anything. I search for a new room to live, but cannot find it, even though the deadline for getting away from current place in dormitory is due.

As future is obscure now, somehow lost interest in compiling, testing fixing GNOME, reading all those mailing lists... Maybe I won't have access to internet... That would be bad.

Prepared two patches for modules to use xml-i18n-tools. One, big one -- for gnome-core. Have sent a part of it for Jacob to review, but still have no permission to commit. Anyway, the xml-i18n-tools version which is needed for the patch to work is not released yet. The other one -- for gedit. First time when made it for stable branch, I've got rants from chema. Than I undesrtood that all this really was not even useful. So, although I have a patch I think it's better to rm -r gedit and search for another module that needs xml-i18n-tools more...

Review: Galeon is the best browser of all. Some bugs are fixed every day, it always gets more configurable and convenient to use. Every morning I turn on my computer, update galeon from cvs, compile, install, only then launch it. And close only when going to sleep. I love it's interface. I no more think Internet Explorer is the best browser... It does not have tabbed browsing mode :)

Life.

Finally paid for my paperwork for summer. I am going to USA this summer, with a program "Work and Travel USA"... so I'm going to work all the summer, unfortunately not with computers and of course not for open source. Most probably I will be a ride operator in Six Flags over Texas enertainment park....

Anyway I wait for summer, because it will be the first time I leave my country for long time... and I will earn money for myself. I want to see how people in US live. In real, not in movie.

Press.

Today I saw my two articles printed in local newspaper. One of them is about Kylix, quite a big one. (sorry but it's in Lithuanian). I'm happy with it.

Code.

Looked at gtranslator... the new code of course is screwed but somehow works. It is very inneficient and leaks GdkColor on every displayed character. I cannot understand why kabalak tries to initialize every variable, like this:
gchar *text=g_new0(gchar,1);
text=gtk_editable_get_chars(GTK_EDITABLE(textwidget), 0, -1);
It's stupid. So I'm going to clean all this like I did before.

Commited a tiny fix to gnome-libs. I got no agreement from maintainers, but for such a simple change I hope miguel won't beat me (he did a couple of times before).

I hope to do more today...

So I finally found where can I enter my diary. So here it is, for a first time.

From yesterdays diaries, the one that really enjoyed me was by ajv -- about kittens. I like cats and kittens very much, and its so sad that I cannot have one where I live. And I live in student hostel -- no place where to keep it, and my roommate certainly won't be happy with this.

Hacking: None really. kabalak keeps on attacking me through ICQ, but I haven't done anything good to gtranslator recently. He did. He thinks 0.35 is ready for release, and will do it on weekend.

Also, I decided to take care of commiting translations for galeon. And the next day they decided to not release 0.9 (from stable branch), but make 0.10 from HEAD and use it for GNOME 1.4 extra apps. Or maybe not, I still do not understand. But now I should write messages to translators, better I know what happens...

is it enough? :)