Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 129)

Jorn has designed such an easy API for GUPnP that I've already implemented the UPnP part of the network light. Now I'll turn towards the GUI which is quite simple now that I've these images:

The first one I borrowed from the Tango project and it's obviously made by some professional but the second one is a modification on my own using Gimp. I'll still be thankful to anyone who can make me a nicer version of the second image. Note that I've removed the shadow from the second one and I did that because the shadow becomes quite dark when i alpha-composite the two images with alpha set to max.

Didn't realize until yesterday that I had screwed-up the treeview column headers while fixing the device treeview, so had to make a quite minor release.

Network Light

I'll be mostly finished with UPnP part of the Network Light sooner than later. For the GUI part, I desperately need an image of a light bulb, actually two images of the same bulb in two different states (on and off). Any graphics artist out there who would want to contribute to this project, please contact me at zeenix @ gmail.

Don't ask why would any sane person move from git to svn and just accept the fact that GUPnP Tools is now under the GUPnP SVN. I'll still mostly be using git on my side using git-svn though and i strongly suggest others to do the same since it's still much better than using SVN directly.

Minor release.

- BUGFIX: Pack the text and pixbuf in the same column of device treeview.
- Require libglade 2.6.0 rather than 2.6.1.
- Print a warning when introspection creation fails.
- Some more english fixes with the help of Robert McQueen.

Download from: http://www.gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-tools/gupnp-tools-0.1.1.tar.gz

I am pleased to announce the first release (0.1) of GUPnP Tools, featuring GUPnP Universal Control Point. Here are some screenshots:

I must point out at that GUPnP tools is part of the GUPnP project despite the fact that it's source repo is at a different location under a different SCM. Users should use the gupnp bugzilla and mailing-list for reporting bugs and asking questions.

Also I realized that writing a CLI for the universal control point isn't really worth the trouble so I'll start working on the network light now.

The fever played quite some tricks on me last week: there used to be no sign of it in the morning but it used to slowly come back as the day passed. Ultimately, I had to take 2 days off. Together with weekend, I rested for 4 days and now the fever is all gone.

When ansku was going through the pictures and videos from bcn trip on her camera, she found a clip I accidently took in which Andy Wingo is caught saying "oh shit!". Bids for this video starts from 100€.

GUPnP tools

I am done with the universal-cp (gui frontend). At least Jorn seem to like it. Thanks to him, the action invocation dialog is quite GNOME HIG compliant now. I will start working on the CLI frontend now and after I am done with that, I'll make the first release as these are the only two client-side binaries that i currently intend to provide.

Me and Ansku had quite a good time in Barcelona; saw some museums and churches, hanged around with fluendo and ex-fluendo guys. The Friday evening we had some delicious tapas at Ciudad Condal and on Saturday we enjoyed a good BBQ party at Andy's place. Christian had been a very good host, despite his illness. On the way back, I started to feel sick and I am still trying to recover.

GUPnP tools

Action invocation is already working <tada> and now i mostly need to do some code-cleanups and GUI fixing. I hate writing GUIs but to make my life even more miserable some dude tells me that the bug I reported is so low priority that he considers it a waste of time to explain why or how that is so.

Many thanks to Rob Taylor for providing me a publically-accessible git repo to host GUPnP Tools. This evening i pushed all the commits I had accumulated during the past 6 days. Also many thanks to jorn for adding the mutants of gupnp_service_proxy_send_action*() that take hash tables for in and out arguments which would ease things quite a lot for me since a generic client like the one i am writing wouldn't know the arguments at build time. While most of the functionality (not the eye-candy) is already implemented, the method invocation dialog turned out to be much more difficult to implement than i thought so looks like I wouldn't be able to complete it by the end of this week after all. :(

Barcelona! Here i come

After a few hours, I am flying to Barcelona with my sweetheart for a weekend-trip. Looking forward to spend some quality time with employees and ex-employees of fluendo.

Guess who is going to play the role of Spock in the coming Star Trek movie? No! wait! don't waste your precious time and brain resources because you simply can't guess this one. The person chosen for this role is none other than Zachary Quinto. Who is that? he is the 'Sylar' in Heroes. :) We had some fun over this fact after i found it out last night:

<zeenix> guess who has been selected for the role of
spock in the coming star trek?
<jumpula> matt damon?
<zeenix> no no
<zeenix> that was for kirk
<zeenix> it's it's it's
<zeenix> 'Sylar' :)
<jumpula> noeees...
<zeenix> i am having trouble imaging him saying 'Live
long and prosper' :)
<jumpula> i'll bet he eats kirk's brains first chance
he gets
<jumpula> and kirk is matt damon?
<jumpula> this is bad :D
<zeenix> :D
<zeenix> and he'll say 'logic dictates that i eat your
brain' :)
<jumpula> :)
<jumpula> the needs of the one outweigh the needs of
the many
<jumpula> wonder if he get's the kirk's luck with the
ladies from the brain
<zeenix> lol

GUPnP tools

In my last communication with jorn regarding the universal control-point, he suggested to keep this in a separate package and it made sense since there shall be two binaries of the control-point provided, a console-based and gtk+ one and I am thinking of adding at least one more tool: a simple light-bulb, a free replacement for Intel's light-bulb, which would be a very nice and simple example of a gupnp-based control-points. All this combined with the fact that a separate package would allow me to use git all the way. :P There were two problems however:

1. How do you move a particular directory from one git repo/project to another with all the history intact? I asked daniels if there is way to do that and he advised me to try out git-format-patch and git-am and that is what i did. After playing with git for a while last night, I was able to achieve my goal before 2am. :) Turns out that it's very simple if you know what to do:

   git-format-patch -o /tmp --binary <commit1> [commit2]

   where 'commit1' is the id of the last commit before the first commit to that dir and 'commit2' is the last one which you can skip if all commits after 'commit1' are to the same dir. You can find the commit ids to use through 'git-log' command. You'll get a bunch of patches in your cwd after this step. Skim through those patches and remove/edit them if necessary. Then go to the directory of the repo/project where you want to move your stuff to and:

   git-am /tmp/*.patch

   And you are done. :) Make sure there are no other patches in /tmp.

2. I'll need to setup my git repo on a machine visible to everyone, which is static.fi for me. The admin told me that he is going to set it up but after he is finished with assembly (which is next week). The problem is that I (and some other git users either) don't know how to clone a repo. from my machine (which is always behind a NAT) to a remote machine. I heard it's only possible if there is a git daemon running on the other machine and I don't know if that admin friend of mine would allow that.

Although a bit of old news now but for those who haven't heard, GUPnP's first feature complete release is out. Since it now provides the same level of API that intel's libupnp provides, all the projects out there that were using libupnp until now can (and must) start using gupnp now if they want to be gmainloop-friendly and don't want any threads to be launched behind their backs.

To be (a git) or not to be

I tried git for the first time some two years ago when all i wanted to do was to grab a branch of linux source tree. That experience was enough for me to be really scared of using git ever again.

A month back, I ran into a typical problem in centralised SCMs when a contributer doesn't have write access to the repo: I sent a patch of my changes to Jorn and he committed the patch with some changes but before he actually committed it, I had made further changes on the bases of my previous changes so when i updated my working dir, SVN was able to detect conflicts but conflict report wasn't a very correct one and quite confusing to say the least. So despite my efforts, I ended-up overwriting Jorn's changes.

Matthew Allum advised me to use git-svn to avoid this problem in future but I just didn't want to use git again until i had a beer with Timo Savola a week back. He told me that the user-interface of git has improved quite a lot over the last few years and he sees no reason anyone should use any other SCM anymore. So on his advice I played with git and git-svn for the whole day on Friday. It was quite a frustrating experience at first but in the end when I got a hold of the basics, I realized that I was thinking in terms of other SCMs. So now I am also a proud supporter of git and what convinced me were strong arguments from Timo and this presentation by Linus himself (which was also pointed out by Timo).