Posted
about 11 hours
ago
After I released version 0.1.13 earlier this week and the Debian package got updated accordingly, I took the time to port the package to Ubuntu Karmic. I created a PPA containing the packages for Karmic. Add the PPA to your system and install
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gnome-dvb-client, gnome-dvb-daemon and totem-plugins-dvb-daemon.
Packages are available for Mandriva and Arch Linux, too. Obviously, packages for Fedora and OpenSUSE are still missing. Creating packages for one of these distributions is highly appreciated. [Less]
Posted
about 11 hours
ago
I missed something I wanted to go to yesterday, because I opted to wait for the bus that was coming in 5 minutes, and thus be early, rather than walk and only just make it on time.
The bus companies in Melbourne seem quite small, they only
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run a couple of lines each. Most shifts seem to be a driving the same line back and forth. The problem is when there is a delay on a route, driving the same route back and forth leads to that delay stacking and stacking. A technique I've seen to combat this is having buses change routes at the end of every route, effectively driving in circles around the area. This hopefully gives them an opportunity to make up the lost time. Of course, it requires bus routes that terminate in the same place and bus companies that operate more than just a couple of routes.
For what it's worth, a lot of yesterday's angst could probably have been avoided if the City of Yarra had bothered to tell someone it was closing part of Johnston St. Simply adjusting the traffic light sequences for the detour would have been a huge win, instead of having a traffic light that gave you but 15 seconds to turn down the next road, backing traffic up for 15 minutes. [Less]
Posted
about 14 hours
ago
Since I am planning a project which relies on storing encrypted information on a potentially hostile host, I tried to design a cryptographic mode, called mode FMC. This mode should, when combined with AES, provide a higher security margin than AES
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alone would. Basically mode FMC is a try to defend your private data (like credit card numbers or password lists stored in the application I am going to write) against yet to be discovered weaknesses in AES. As with any cryptographic project, it would be great to get review.
I’ve written a paper and published the code under LGPL. The code is implemented in C++ and includes a python binding. [Less]
Posted
about 16 hours
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (zeenix)
For those interested in UPnP/DLNA on Maemo and happen to miss Maemo summit, here is the video of my talk. You'll notice that slide screen is only half visible but that is not really a problem since you can access the slides here.
Posted
about 20 hours
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (zeenix)
GUPnP AV 0.5.2
Changes since 0.5.1:
- Add a missing NULL check.
- Fix a potential leak of xmlDoc.
- Register a (g)type for GUPnPSearchCriteriaOp for better gtk-doc and
vala-gen-introspect support.
- Fix docs for
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GUPnPSearchCriteriaParser::expression.
- Fix parsing of SearchCriteria strings: Closing parenthesis doesn't imply end
of SearchCriteria expression.
All contributors to this release:
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak>
Download source tarball from here.
GUPnP Vala 0.6.2
Changes since 0.6:
- Remove bogus type_argument from gupnp metadata.
- No need for custom bindings for SearchCriteriaParser.
Dependency-related changes:
- Require vala >= 0.7.8.
- Require and adapt to gupnp-av >= 0.5.2.
Bugs fixed:
1850 - Vapi for ServiceAction.get_message is wrong
All contributors:
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak>
Jens Georg <mail>
Download source tarball from here.
Rygel 0.4.6 (They've Got a Secret)
Brief summary of changes since 0.4.4:
- Implement optional UPnP Search action. This is not only a must have feature
for a commercial MediaServer but is also a big first step towards proper
XBox 360 support.
- Simplify Browse action handling.
- Simplify MediaServer plugin implementation.
- Make sure autostart dir exists before attempting to write to it.
- Fix a potential crash that is trigered by MediaContainer reporting incorrect
(higher) number of children.
- External:
- Work around (vala) bug#602003.
- Optimizations and code clean-ups.
- Tracker:
- Provide an efficient Search implementation using Tracker's search API.
- Minor code clean-ups.
Dependency-related changes:
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.2.
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.2.
- Require valac >= 0.7.9.
Bugs fixed in this release:
600256 - Segfault when trying to access a stream
All contributors to this release:
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak>
Download source tarball from here. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
The GNOME Asia Summit has an awesome group of Vietnamese volunteers this year - over 50 of them! What distinguishes them from most free software events is that they are mostly women and mostly business students! They are also extremely enthusiastic
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, full of laughter and always eager to help or ask questions to learn more.
These students have been working hard to get the event ready, they show up at 7:30 every morning, they spend all day interpreting for the speakers and the foreign attendees and they are planning a party for speakers and volunteers this evening. They've been doing a great job of interpreting - especially given that they aren't familiar with free software and technical terms and given that most of us speakers are not used to working with interpreters and speak way too quickly and long. And they still have time to ask lots of questions, make the speakers feel welcome and to laugh a lot.
The GNOME community is a richer one, and GNOME Asia is a great event, because of them.
(As soon as Emily Chen or Andy Fitzsimmon's load their pictures of the volunteer meeting to Flickr, I'll add a picture of them.) [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
On my first day of GNOME Asia, I was most impressed by the Vietnamese culture and people - I think it is one that meshes well with the open source community culture. One of those cultural traits is honesty and openness.
During the opening
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talks, the deputy director of the ICT Ho Chi Minh City government was very honest about the difficulties of switching to free and open source software. He talked about how he's spent the last five years trying to encourage more free software usage and has had a budget of $20 million. My favorite quote was "Trying to deploy open source software is like hitting your head on a rock. We hope the rock breaks soon." I sat next to him at lunch to learn more and hope to follow up further via email. During lunch I learned about the incubator program they have for startups and how those companies think it's safer to use .NET applications. However, after they are out of the incubator stage they have a hard time supporting their company off of support revenue.
Hopefully we can help them break the rock by showing them successful business models around free software and helping develop their pool of expertise by encouraging more students to learn and participate in free and open source software. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
The other day I did a quick hack using Raindrop & Jetpack to get new mail notifications from Raindrop. In total it took me less than an hour. It’s no Joe Shaw hack, so I don’t expect to get in the paper for this but I figured I’d share
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anyway.
This Jetpack checks Raindrop to see if there are new messages and bubbles them up as notifications if there are. Here’s the source code:
var messages = {};
function checkMail() {
var api="http://localhost:5984/raindrop/_api/inflow/conversations/home?limit=10";
jQuery.getJSON(api,
function(data, textStatus){
jQuery.each(data, function(i,item){
if (item.unread) {
if (!messages[item.id] || messages[item.id] != item.messages.length) {
var n={title: item.subject,
body : item.messages[0].schemas["rd.msg.body"]["body_preview"],
icon : 'http://localhost:5984/raindrop/inflow/i/logo.png'};
jetpack.notifications.show(n);
}
messages[item.id] = item.messages.length;
}
});
});
}
setInterval(checkMail, 10000);
To try this out you’ll need Raindrop installed and running and Jetpack installed in Firefox.
Go to about:jetpack and copy the above code into the Develop tab, then click the try out this code link just below the Bespin editor.
If you don’t want to do all that you can just watch the video below (no sound, so you might want to play some music)
<object height="304px" width="650px"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7733464&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="304px" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7733464&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="650px"></embed></object>
View on Vimeo. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
Carl stayed true to his awesomeness from yesterday: He updated the hackfest notes with the things we did today. In particular, it includes “hacking ideas” that we’d like to work on.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the ideas of
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my gst-plugins-cairo design with all people. And I have to say I’m happy to say that the general approach has seen excitement from all sides and there doesn’t seem to be any big issues with it. THe best way to summarize it is probably an event from today: Edward ran a gst-launch pipeline as a benchmark for gst-plugins-cairo and it completed in 0.2 seconds. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
Last week, eight of us converged on Chicago for a Gnome marketing hackfest. Thanks to Google and Novell for thier generous sponsorship. There are other blogs posts about the event, including posts from Brian Cameron, Paul Cutler, and two posts
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from Jason “The Chronicler” Clinton.
Unfortunately, I had to leave early on the second day, which seems to be when the dust settled and some real work got done. But we had some great discussions on day one. Others have recapped most of our discussions well, but one thing they haven’t talked about is our discussions about mentoring.
I’ve spent the last eight years trying to build and foster a community of documentation writers, most of whom are not professionals. So I’m particularly interested in how the marketing team can mentor new team members who, like me, don’t really know anything about marketing.
My one contribution was a lesson I’ve learned over the years: Give new contributors achievable and concrete tasks. If you tell them to pick something and do it, they usually won’t.
Stormy, Denise, and I continued this conversation at the bar on Tuesday night. One of my big questions was “What do people need to learn?” If you have no background on something, it might not just be the answers you’re lacking; you might not even know what questions to ask. Not only do I not know things about marketing. I don’t know what I don’t know about marketing.
Stormy and Denise rattled a dozen things off, most of which I’ve already forgotten. (There’s a reason I carry a notebook everywhere. I don’t know why I didn’t take it to the bar.)
So how do we pass knowledge like this along? Sure, we could braindump into a wiki. And somebody who’s skilled at content organization could turn it from a braindump into something useful. But it’s actually really hard to write down everything you know about a subject. The good nuggets of wisdom are things you don’t think to mention until the right situation arises. Real life experience matters.
I’m curious what others have found helpful in bringing new contributors up to speed. This isn’t marketing-specific. It happens in any community where many members aren’t professionally trained in what they’re doing. (And I realize I’m asking about those very good nuggets of wisdom about community mentoring that you don’t think to mention.) [Less]
