Advogato blog for zeenix

Out in the forest for a week

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:09:35 GMT

I am on a one week vacation starting from tomorrow afternoon. I'll be in a summer cottage in the middle of a forest and might not have any internet connection at all. I am taking my laptop with me, but I'll try to resist hacking. Lets see how successful I am. :)

Trouble with gmail and o-hand.com

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:06:48 GMT

I hadn't been getting replies to any of my mails to o-hand dudes but I just thought they are either on vacation or just too busy doing more important stuff. Yesterday I caught Matthew on IRC and it turned out that he did reply to my mail(s). I became a bit worried and searched my "Spam" and "Trash" to see if it ended-up there for some reason but i didn't find them there. I got a bit worried and looked into the archives of o-hand hosted mailing lists that i am subscribed to. It turned out that I haven't been able to receive any mail after 10th of June from o-hand.com mail server.

Getting really worried, I hit the "Help" link in gmail. Turns out that I can either go through a stupid automated troubleshooting procedure that didn't help at all or I can post my problem to a discussion forum that is sometimes visited by the gmail admins but mostly they assume that your problem will be solved by a user. I did post about my problem there but since this morning I am unable to find that forum anymore. Err..

I don't know on which end the problem exists but if you are reading this mail and you work at either o-hand or google, kindly investigate this issue.

UPDATE: I figured out the issue. Eric created this cool looking "@gstreamer.net" alias for me once and I had been advertising that all around. Turns out that I even used this alias/redirection to subscribe to (o-hand) mailing lists. I subscribed to clutter ml using '@gmail.com' address and I instantly got the messages from the list. I'll write to Eric in hope of getting the lost mails but I must stop using this alias/redirection no matter how cool it is.

The Istanbul story

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:10:06 GMT

Time flies and it's already been a few days that I am back from Istanbul. It was a lot of fun. Great presentations, discussions and hacks in the mornings and Shisha and beer in the evenings.

Had lots of discussion with a lot of people about GUPnP, how it can be used for UPnP integration in GNOME and what features they would like to see in gupnp-media-server. My talk went pretty well and this time the demo really did work on the wireless network available at that time. :) The only issue was that it was scheduled at the same time as the Lightning talks and because of that only a few (~10) people could attend.

Talking of talks, my favorite was Michael's talk about Moonlight. There were many other nice talks as well like Quim's BoF, where he nicely explained Nokia's relationship with Open Source world in general and GNOME in specific, and OH people's talk on Clutter and the cool new features in Clutter 0.8.

There was a big debate going around on git vs bazaar. Although I was on git's side myself, I couldn't help but appreciate how reasonable the bazaar advocates/developers were. I had a lot of discussion with them and bombarded them with lots of straight questions. Unfortunately, I felt that I failed to convey my concerns about bazaar and how they (my concerns) can not just go away by simply me trying out bazaar myself.

Regarding next year's GUADEC/Akademy on one hand, I am very sad about Tampere's bid to be rejected but on the other hand I am really glad that it'll be in Canaries. Before you get me wrong, I don't think Galicia would have been less than perfect spot either. One thing that many people don't know about Canaries is that it's "the" vacation spot for Finnish people. So if you look even a bit Finnish or hanging around with Finnish (looking) friends in there, don't be surprised if the locals start to talk to you in (very broken) Finnish. :) Seriously, I am speaking from experience. So much for keeping GUADEC away from Finland. :)

Cute Lennart

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:07:11 GMT

Lennart enjoys Federico's talk.

UPDATED: I didn't repost this, I only update the older blog entry with a rotated by 90 degrees clockwise version of the same image. Blame planet GNOME if you don't like seeing this again. :)

GUPnP MediaServer 0.1 released

Tue, 8 Jul 2008 12:12:57 GMT

GUPnP is an object-oriented open source framework for creating UPnP devices and control points, written in C using GObject and libsoup. The GUPnP API is intended to be easy to use, efficient and flexible.

GUPnP MediaServer is an implementation of the UPnP MediaServer V 2.0
specification based on GUPnP and tracker. It is written (mostly) in Vala language.

Download at http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-media-server/

GUPnP Media Renderer 0.1 released

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:23:14 GMT

- Initial release. This is a reference implementation of the UPnP MediaRenderer version 1 device type, written in Vala. For rendering it uses the video widget from libowl-av. GUPnP Media Renderer can be downloaded here

GUPnP Network Camera

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:09:20 GMT

This is the announcement of the GUPnP Network Camera project, an implementation of the UPnP Digital Security Camera specification, based on GUPnP.

The GUPnP Network Camera package contains applications that enables V4L cameras to be shared on the network as UPnP devices, and control point software for controlling and viewing images from such cameras.

The software can be downloaded at: http://www.kristell.se/network-camera/

Some facts

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:09:20 GMT

Regarding my last blog entry, I thought I should get some things straight:

I am not a native english speaker so sometimes it's hard to choose the right words and sometimes this leads to confusion. Fortunately! I try to learn from my mistakes and comments on my blog entries really help me in that.

I've been a big fan of Ubuntu ever since the project started and have been (and still) am a very happy Ubuntu user. In fact I was having the usual Ubuntu is better than Fedxxx debate with him the other day when Karl told me of this. Also I am writing this blog entry using Ubuntu.

Disregarding what someone said about Ubuntu, I truely appreciate their work and efforts for Free Software and especially GNOME in specific. The world would be a much worse place if Ubuntu hadn't existed.

The motivation behind this blog entry was not 'anger' but 'disappointment' being an Ubuntu user and advocate myself.

Regarding the discussion between Mark Shuttleworth and Karl-Lattimer, I must agree with Karl that Mark having to defend the 'GNOME About dialog' in the menu doesn't reflect good things about Ubuntu developers (the ones who were against this). On the the hand, I must ask Karl not to resort to insulting language even though I feel he has the right to be angry here (Something Mark also recognized).

Shame Ubuntu shame

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:09:58 GMT

I am no more a fan of Ubuntu. The reason is their recent demonstration of lack of community spirit. Here is the release announcement of Ubuntu hardy alpha6. If you scroll-down you can see the gnome-system-monitor's new cool "Resources" view featured with a nice screenshot. Since Karl-Lattimer worked really hard to make this happen, he asked to be given personal credit on that page. Don't know about others but I see this as a very reasonable thing to ask. The result of this request can be seen in the announcement of hardy beta. They just removed the feature from the announcement. Shame Ubuntu shame.

UPDATE:It's interesting how most of the comments that are from people who got pissed without actually caring to understand the main point of this blog entry (which me and Karl-Lattimer tried to emphasize in the comments) are posting as Anonymous. :) Acknowledging the possibility that they might not think comments are worth reading before commenting, let me make it clear here: The main point not being that they don't give credit to all the people behind the software they market but silently removing a nice feature from the release announcement after being asked to be given credit. If all the contributors ask for credit, would they remove all features from their announcement? I don't think so.

Git vs Bizaar/Bazaar

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:11:06 GMT

I will spit my vodka in your eyes if all you come up with is speed

WTF? If you can't compete on a very important (to me at least) point, you don't want to listen? Git (especially if you use git protocol) is so fast because they first sorted out the basics and design right and then worked on the UI. Git is not just faster but tons of magnitude faster than bizaar.

I used to think that 'speed' is irrelevant in this context but when I started to use Git, I realized how important it is for me as a developer.

Also the stories of learning curve of Git are extremely over-exaggerated. For example, i recommended Git to a darcs user (who was pissed at darcs taking hours do clone a repo) and after three hours he came to thank me for that. I was surprised to see how quickly he learnt it but then realized that if you just give a bit of information how it's different than other VCSs out there before a newbie actually starts to learn/try it, he/she finds his way very easily into the Git world.