Present Perfect

GNOME

Been hacking on a piece of desktop integration - sound profiles for GNOME. The idea is very simple. A lot of applications need to convert audio (sound-juicer, nautilus in the future, gnome-sound-recorder, ...) Right now, they have to ask media-specific details like sample rate, format, and so on. And they all do it in their own way.

The thing I'm doing is pretty similar to something I remember seeing in Windows in a more basic form; some way of specifying audio profiles. For example, the human name would be "FM Radio Quality", and behind it would be a profile that would convert to Ogg/Vorbis, at 32000 KHz, with a certain quality setting.

The point would be that these profiles could be stored in GConf and managed centrally. Applications could also use a default setting for operations if they want to. This way, Sound-Juicer would just present you with a drop-down box of human-readable encoding profiles. When dragging cd tracks out of Nautilus, or right-clicking on tracks in Nautilus, they could be converted using those profiles.

Taking a leaf out of hadess's book, I started to look around for bits I could steal. The GNOME panel has some notion of profiles, but there is something very complicated going on there. So I decided to steal from gnome-terminal, which has the added bonus of having lots of code by Havoc, which gives me the feeling I can trust the implementation :)

Work is progressing nicely, and I'm learning a few new tricks. Right now, however, I've come to a dead end. I need opinions. I have a .c/.h combination for the profile edit dialog. There's one function that will instantiate a new dialog to edit a profile. The GtkDialog is in a glade XML file. the GapProfileEdit GObject is a subclass of GtkDialog and is just the dialog with a few private bits for internal management. So far, everything is great.

However, combining GObjects that are extensions of GtkWidgets with Glade presents me with a problem. Here are my options:

• don't get the actual GtkDialog from glade, but get the contents of that dialog and add them to the custom GapProfileEdit dialog. The drawback is that things that are specified in glade (response buttons and so on) will be missing, because creating a GtkDialog instantiates those too apparently.
• I empty the created GtkDialog somehow and add the glade stuff in it

Neither really feel right - there should be some way to instantiate a custom widget from an xml file. I suppose I could try and see if there is some way I can override the parent's instantiator and have it instantiate from glade instead.

Sounds

I had someone read in pieces of sound for GNOME, GStreamer and Dave/Dina. Here are some samples:

• GNOME startup sound
• GNOME logout sound
• GStreamer tag
• GStreamer tag
• GStreamer tag

The first two pointed out to me that esound isn't very good at this on my laptop. The sound breaks up too much because the machine is doing too much stuff at those times.

Interested in hearing opinions - I wouldn't mind having a voice theme for the desktop.

GNOME Been hacking on a piece of desktop integration - sound profiles for GNOME. The idea is very simple. A lot of applications need to convert audio (sound-juicer, nautilus in...

mach

Progressing steadily. Getting patches and comments from various people at this point, which are again holding me back from doing a release. Axel Thimm pointed me at the fact that since I now use rpm and apt on the host instead of inside the root, I no longer need to bootstrap everything up to apt anymore. Duh. He's right, and it should simplify the configuration file a lot.

Other people are starting to ask me questions about it, so that's a good sign. I need to get it out.

computer

To celebrate my redundancy, I bought two Compaq LCD flatscreens (they were on sale) and a Matrox 550 (I haggled). I have xinerama at (ex-)work, but I might make more use of it at home. I hope to somehow run X on one and DirectFB on the other, for example. Or GNOME CVS on the other. Will take some twiddling.

The motherboard I'm using is an SiS variant and apparently a lot of them trap Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and make it instantly stop the PC. I'm not sure I'll manage to unlearn muscle memory for "kill X" anytime soon.

Severn

Installed it on the new machine with the dualhead. It seemed to lock up at boot time, and it seems to lock up every other time too. When doing Xinerama, for some reason it has the heads the wrong way around, so that my second output always has XVideo and the other doesn't. I also have to switch around the Server Layout to fix the xinerama. Not sure what happens here.

DirectFB

Something must be wrong with the build system because none of the packages out there had working binaries; all of the packaged binaries were the libtool shell scripts. I hacked around it by manually copying libtool in my spec file, and showed it to Matthias when I was there, who didn't like the solution :) But I'm assuming he did the same as well anyway.

I have a largish patch for the directfb guys, but I'm not sure my mail got through. to them.

Unemployedness

I look forward so incredibly much to my self-imposed timeout from the working world. I have a ton of things I want to work on: mach, Dave/Dina, GStreamer, GNOME multimedia bits, a car GStreamer player, a python-based GStreamer-based Dave/Dina integrated player, ...

There's too much interesting stuff to do.

mach Progressing steadily. Getting patches and comments from various people at this point, which are again holding me back from doing a release. Axel Thimm pointed me at the fact...

Work

Resigned today. Funny how resignation is being made out as an action when it's more like a process. I sent in my letter on friday. Some small distress because Thursday night I got a mail from my boss saying he was on holiday from Friday on, and I wanted to tell him personally.

But apparently the grapevine caught up with him and he called me on Sunday to ask if the rumour was true. Had to get into work early this morning to discuss it with him, and it seems we might have some sort of amicable parting of ways. I guess my emergency backup from last night wasn't as necessary as I thought it would be.

What next ?

After this, time for some well-deserved rest, and the chance to tie up a lot of loose ends. I have a ton of projects I still want to work a bit on, and now is my chance to do so. After that, we'll see.

Work Resigned today. Funny how resignation is being made out as an action when it's more like a process. I sent in my letter on friday. Some small distress because...

Decisions

Making decisions is both good and bad for you. They're good because they give you a goal to focus on. They're bad because everything that does not directly contribute to following that decision feels like indentured labour.

I need some freedom soon.

mach

Dedicating this day to getting out a 0.4.0 release of mach. I want it out. It works very well for me. I tested it a little with Matthias, and it worked a little for him as well. It even pointed to some missing stuff in his spec file for some things, so that's good - it's a way to show the usefullness of the application.

It's the right time to bring it out now that The Red Hat Linux Project has taken off. Or, to put it in other words: my favourite distribution just got favouriter.

Gentse Feesten

Gent is great at this time of year. 10 days of partying. Two days ago, rumour had it that Manu Chao was going to be a surprise guest at one of the stages. Everyone got frantic. (Personally, I don't like him much). Anyways, it wasn't him, but Goran Brekovic (who isn't bad at all). And I ended up going to Chris Whitley, in a small tent. Did I mention how great Gent is at this time of year ?

Peeve Of The Day

People saying "X sucks". Seriously. That sucks. Negativity is not something I like dealing with in my life.

Decisions Making decisions is both good and bad for you. They're good because they give you a goal to focus on. They're bad because everything that does not directly contribute...

Here

I am here. Here's pretty nice. I could see myself staying here for a while.

The terms seem good. The work seems good. Need to decide soon enough.

mach

Trying to convince Matthias from FreshRPMS to use mach. Sitting next to him, installing it on his home machine, and trying it out. It threw a glibc post install error on his one build machine that has Red Hat 8 with rawhide upgrades. Need to check that, always irritating when you're trying to show something and you come to situations where it does stuff you've never seen.

It works fine on his home machine though, and now he's transfering his setup. Need to do more evangelizing soon.

Red Hat

Waiting for the Beta and other announcement. What I've heard sounds very good, but I want to see the announcement myself and figure out what they plan. Anyway, sounds like very good news for projects like Fedora and my own Dave/Dina.

Here I am here. Here's pretty nice. I could see myself staying here for a while. The terms seem good. The work seems good. Need to decide soon enough. mach...