Older blog entries for snorp (starting at number 16)

GNOME

Finally got off my ass and did a bit of hacking. Fixed a couple small bugs in gedit, and also a couple in nautilus that were really annoying. I also tried out thomasvs' new audio properties tab, and jamesh's font stuff for nautilus. It's great to see people doing really kick-ass stuff like this.

Stuff

I have this portable mp3 player that I've been fighting with lately to make it work in Linux. Apparently, the thing is using a scanlogic chip to do the usb->ide stuff. There is a driver for said chip in the kernel. However, something is screwed up with the firmware in my player, and I have to flash it if I want it to work with Linux. Of course, the utilities they provide to do this are totally crappy, and only work in windows 98 (not 2000 or XP even). I am not happy.

I am meeting next week with a professor in the CS dept. about my independent study project. My goal is to basically create a replacement for FAM. There are some difficult issues to deal with, but I am really looking forward to giving it a shot. I will probably hack on it a bunch over christmas break (I get about 3 weeks), but I would like to get a bunch of GNOME stuff done in that time too (I am feeling deprived).

GNOME

Wow, no diary all month.

Finally finished up the nautilus context menu and property page stuff. Also, added a context menu handler to file-roller, so we can finally trash those scripts.

I messed around with jamesh's new bonobo/pyorbit stuff. Totally cool. I was able to use the gedit CORBA bindings with just a few lines of code. Way nicer than doing it in C. Sadly, I couldn't create a working bonobo control, but that was probably because I didn't know wtf I was doing. Once I get it working, though, it will be a really great way to add context menus/property pages to nautilus.

School stuff has really put a damper on recent hacking. I have 3 weeks off in december/january, though, so looking forward to that.

Uraeus: You do an excellent job with the summaries. It's a really important contribution to GNOME, and I hope you keep doing it!

GNOME

Now that the property page stuff for nautilus is done (well, mostly), I decided to also add support for mime-type-sensitive context menus. Michael Meeks had a great idea about how it could be done, and it seems to work pretty well. At this point, the only problem is that there is no way to translate the menu items. Of course, that's unacceptable. Michael has made a suggestion on how to fix it, but it requires hacking bonobo-activation-server, and I am too afraid/lazy/busy-with-other-stuff to do it. I need to get to it soon, though, since the feature freeze for 2.2 is approaching quickly.

File selector flameage has apparently started again, which is always nice. Especially since hadess and I seem to be the target of some of it. People are screaming "listen to the users", but the "users" are all saying different things and just being rude in general. Seriously people, it's just a freaking file selector. There are a helluva lot more important things, even within GNOME. I don't think the current one is all that bad, really. Of course, it's missing the all-important recent-files integration, but whatever :)

GNOME

I've modified the nautilus properties dialog so that you can add mime-specific pages to it, using the existing NautilusView stuff. It seems to work pretty well. I created a quick and dirty hack for testing it which shows mp3 and ogg metadata (title, artist, album, etc.). I think I'll try to get jorn to put it in monkey-media when I'm finished with it. I made a very small modification to the notes sidebar, which makes it also work as a property page. Also, Alex has already started on an image properties page (sweet!).

I saw that there was a story about this on gnomedesktop.org. I expected to see constructive comments about it, but sadly, it seemed like most people felt like flaming instead. Why can't people just say "thanks"? It's so much better to hear that instead of "konqueror already has this", or some such nonsense. I was especially saddened to read the stuff people posted in response to the excellent interview Dave and Alex gave. These guys really do work very hard, and they have always been helpful to people like me. Sigh.

School

I sign up for spring classes next week. Wow, my very last semester . I have to take 3 CS classes to graduate, but I want one of them to be independent study. This will be great, since I could conceivably do some project for GNOME and school at the same time! I have no idea what I want to do, though. I have to decide before Tuesday, so I'd better hurry up. Suggestions?

GNOME

The egg-recent patches have now been committed to nautilus and gnome-panel, which is pretty cool :) Also, it seems that file-roller is now using it. So far, most of the feedback has been positive, however, people who don't have FAM installed aren't seeing the panel menu update properly. I expected this to some degree, but apparently I've underestimated the number of people who don't have FAM (the recent-files code uses gnome-vfs to monitor the XML document that the list is stored in (gnome-vfs uses FAM for this), and when it changes it updates the menu). I thought an easy way to fix this would be to just make FAM a non-optional dependency, so I suggested this to some mailing lists. This didn't go over very well. In fact, some people had nearly violent reactions to the idea. Sigh.

So, in light of this, I've begun implementing a different monitoring backend for the file method in gnome-vfs that will use polling instead of FAM. Right now, it only works for files. This sucks, since I think the primary consumer of the gnome-vfs monitoring stuff is nautilus, and it uses it to monitor directories. I probably need to make that work if it's going to be useful.

Did some more hacking on the emblem sidebar. Now you can remove and rename emblems through a context menu. This is nice, since I don't think you can do these operations with any of the other emblem browsers. I should probably add it to them too.

So, I've switched from Debian unstable to RedHat 8.0. I am pretty happy with it. I think the availability of apt for RH is what eventually pushed me over the edge.

GNOME

Mark reviewed my recent-files code, and gave me some good comments/criticism. He even did some cleanup/optimization work for me. So now, hopefully, he will accept my panel patch adding the recent docs menu. I'm starting to get a little nervous now about the recent-files stuff actually making it in to 2.2. It still hasn't been moved to a stable library yet, and also the feature freeze for 2.2 is coming up rapidly. AFAIK, only 2 apps are using this code, and that's only because I patched them myself. If it doesn't make it, it's only my fault, but I've been working on this for like 6 months so it's kind of pathetic. :/

I implemented a sidebar for nautilus that displays the available emblems, and lets you drag them to files/folders. You can also drag random images from the file manager to the sidebar to add those images as an emblem. Alex helped out a lot with this....he is so cool. Today, I made it work with web browsers (so you can dnd an image or a link to one to add it as an emblem). This limited amount of nautilus hacking was really fun. I want to do more, something less trivial, but haven't really thought of much yet.

GNOME

I've added some cool stuff to the recent-files code. alex has converted nautilus to use the icon theme spec, and has also written some code that lets you get the properly themed nautilus icon for a given mime type. This kicks ass, since now I am able to have icons in the recently-used menus. I have to wait to commit this, though, since there is a pending GEP to get Alex's code moved into libgnomeui (sigh). Also, I've moved a bunch of stuff from eel-vfs-extensions into gnome-vfs, so now I'm able to use all the nifty string URI manipulation functions to (hopefully) fix the nasty UTF-8/unescaping issues I was having.

GNOME

Did some more panel hacking, and came up with some patches that add recent item menus for both applications and documents. I think it looks pretty good. Also, removed the libuuid dependency, so that should make things go down a little smoother.

GNOME

Added IR remote support to Rhythmbox and Totem. I used lirc for rhythmbox, and it was a _bitch_ to set up. Sadly, even though having the IR stuff is cool, hackers are probably the only people that will be able to make it work. Also, squeezed my recent-file code into totem, so hopefully it will get some more exposure that way. While doing this, I discovered that the gtk view is totally borked if you have GtkImageMenuItemS in the menu. I definitely need to fix it, but I am apparently too lazy....

GNOME

I implemented monitoring for EggFileSystem, and did some gedit hacking. Paolo has managed to recruit some more developers on gnome-love, and I've talked to some interested parties on IRC. This is good, since I am starting school again next week and won't have much time. Plus, it seems to be increasingly more difficult for me to be productive at all anymore, so maybe some others can help pick up the slack.