Posted
about 18 hours
ago
My nook arrived today, along with an email asking for my shipping address in order to be sent a CD with the source on. So that's progress. The nook itself is an interesting device - it comes in impressively well produced packaging, which looks
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easily as attractive as any Apple product I've laid hands on lately. Except that it then includes a double-sided sheet of instructions in the outer packaging to tell you how to get the damn thing out.
And so far, that seems like a pretty good summary of the device. There's a huge quantity of form here, but the function is lacking. The initial registration was made infuriating by the lag between hitting a key on the keyboard[1] and anything happening. I'm not talking about the understandable lag due to the latency of updates on e-ink screens - I'm talking about the seemingly non-deterministic time between tapping the screen and it indicating that I've pressed a key. The coverflow feature for books is better than selecting from a menu of items (e-ink lends itself badly to interactive displays), but slow and jerky. Worse, it's limited to B&N content. Anything you obtain elsewhere and then copy onto the device (which presents as USB mass storage) ends up in a separate menu without any coverflow. And, even more infuriatingly, you can't catagorise the files you copy on there. It's just one big list, sorted alphabetically by author (surname) and then title.
Once you're in a book, things aren't bad. It reformats the text every time you enter a book (no caching), but that takes much less time than my Sony did. The default font is very readable, even at small sizes. But there's clearly something horribly wrong - various epub files I have take up to 4 seconds to perform a page turn, which is way longer than the second or so my Sony took. There's no way to skip to a given page number, which seems like an insane oversight. And, though it's a minor point, the next/previous page buttons are the opposite way around to the Kindle or Sonys, and it's taking a while to get used to that.
It's a promising device. The hardware's clearly capable and the software is mostly there, with the features I'm really missing being ones that shouldn't be hard to implement[2]. But those features are pretty glaring, and right now they make this less functional than the Sony, let alone the Kindle. I'm also kind of surprised that it doesn't ship with any kind of cover at all. There's ample opportunity for physical trauma to turn one of these into a paperweight.
Side note: My nook managed to include the QA checklist slip, presumably by accident. The nook's internal manufacturing designation appears to be "X2", and mine was built on 2009/11/25. Which would seem optimistic for an intended shipping date in the US of 2009/11/30, which does support the idea that the shipping delay was due to some kind of delay in the hardware production.
[1] Presented on the LCD panel
[2] Of course, this being closed-source, I can't do so myself. Sigh. [Less]
Posted
about 19 hours
ago
I’ve been playing around with layout animations in Clutter recently and made a video of what I have achieved. Currently, Clutter has very good and understood support for animations using fixed positioning, but I wanted to experiment with animations
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inside a layout manager. After a lot of thought, the solution was simpler than I had imagined. In its current form, it involves storing the child allocations at the start of the animation and then simply calculating the children’s positions between the start and final destinations based on the alpha value from the timeline. Animation is disabled for most allocations, but is started by certain events such as changing child properties or orientation. The add and remove animations required some additional logic to make sure the new actor faded in once the animation had finished.
I made a video of MxBoxLayout that shows changing packing options (expand, fill and alignment) as well as adding and removing children, and changing orientation (the layout children are just ClutterRectangles):
<video controls="controls" src="http://blogs.gnome.org/thos/files/2009/12/animated-box-layout.ogg">animated-box-layout</video>
The work is currently in a branch of the Moblin UI Toolkit repository (animated-box-layout) which I will merge once I have added an enable-animations property to the actor.
In other news, there is now a page on Moblin.org for the Moblin UI Toolkit, and I expect API reference documentation to be available on-line soon too. There is also a new component in Moblin bugzilla specifically for the new toolkit (under “Moblin Distribution”). [Less]
Posted
about 19 hours
ago
So Jason Smith approaches me after I was fiddling with Teamgeist.
Baiscally we gave Docky some awesomeness by providing its folders the knowledge of what it uses most.
After 1 hour or a bit more we had code. It is simple and I
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would love to see that in Shell. There will be much more Zeitgeist + Docky in the future. Of course stay tuned for other kick ass extensions, namely Teamgeist and Synapse.
<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/r_fk-Yr3Oho&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/r_fk-Yr3Oho&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object> [Less]
Posted
about 20 hours
ago
gtk-doc
I went over pending bugs and fixed a couple more parser errors. The
testsuite is definitely helping. The I also had a stab on one feature request
- print warnings for failed xrefs. This would be helpful to fix typos in
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the doc
comments that were intended as links, but don't become ones. It was
easy to add the warnings, but unfortunately it produced lots of false
positives. This is mainly because gtk-doc also creates implicit links.
Almost one week later I had most of them under control and now the
amount of false positives is quite low. I pushed my ohloh score by fixing
the found issues already in gstreamer core/base and in buzztard. You can
do the same in other libs. If noone complains any further I intend to release
gtk-doc 1.12 this year still :)
buzztard
I made a nice change to the pipeline graph builder - It now uses a fixed
internal format (float 32bit). This allows us to avoid plugging audioconvert
elements in wires and machines. Now we plug them only if the machine
cannot
support the internal format. This gives 7 -> 1 sec speedup for load & play
of
e.g. Aenathron.bmx.
In general also plain to wav rendering is now quite fast. On my AMD64 @
1.8GHz
the 11:45 min. song renders in 45 sec. and on my Intel Core 2 Duo @
2.0GHz it
takes 28 sec..
The rest of the month I spent a lot of time on project maintenance,
improving
the api-docs and writing more test. Regarding the latter, I got the test
coverage improved a lot. Writing automated tests for some areas is quite
tough
though.
Then I also made a small change in the UI. All context menus can now be
invoked
via a popup menu button in the toolbar above (machine, pattern and
sequence
view), this makes it more usable on touchscreen devices. [Less]
Posted
about 21 hours
ago
I’ve already mentioned on my Twitter account about our latest feat here at rPath, namely, “rPath Expands Operating System Coverage with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5.” But the more I play with our technology, the more gaga I get at how
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simple we can make things!
So today I built a plain vanilla appliance based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 with just enough operating system and launched it on VMware vSphere 4. I then ssh’ed into this system and ran:
[root@sweet ~]#: conary update httpd
Including extra troves to resolve dependencies:
apr-util:rpm=1.2.7_6-1-1 apr:rpm=1.2.7_11-1-1 mailcap:rpm=2.1.23_1.fc6-1-1 postgresql-libs:rpm=8.1.4_1.1-1-1
Applying update job:
Install apr(:rpm)=1.2.7_11-1-1
Install apr-util(:rpm)=1.2.7_6-1-1
Install httpd(:rpm)=2.2.3_6.el5-1-1
Install mailcap(:rpm)=2.1.23_1.fc6-1-1
Install postgresql-libs(:rpm)=8.1.4_1.1-1-1
[root@sweet ~]# service httpd start
Starting httpd: [ OK ]
[root@sweet ~]# rpm -q httpd
httpd-2.2.3-6.el5
In case you missed it, I used conary to install the httpd RPM and the entire system is being managed by conary but compliant to what rpm expects! Christmas did come early this year!!! [Less]
Posted
about 23 hours
ago
After some bumps in the road which delayed my start by a week, I started today in the legal department at Mozilla. Last night I lost a little sleep worrying if this was the right thing for me, but after a day around the office (during an all-hands
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meeting, no less) I’m pretty much glowing. The projects I’ve already been charged with are interesting and important (more on those very soon, I expect); the other things going on are relevant (as someone said ‘we get to change the world every day, though some days more than others’); and the energy and enthusiasm are infectious. And of course it doesn’t hurt to be able to work with old friends.
Albino Alligator 2008 by Mila Zinkova, used under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license
Also, there are reports that my boss wrestled an albino alligator after dinner; reports were conflicting over whether he bested the beast with his bare hands or if he merely threatened to subpoena it. So yeah… things are interesting.
Weird moment of the day: get introduced at a meeting. Guy across table: ‘wait, are you the Luis Villa?’ me: ‘probably?’ Meeting then starts immediately. Turns out a sure-fire way to make a meeting seem very long is to leave a statement like that unexplained and hanging over your head the whole meeting… :) Led to a great conversation later, though, as did basically everything else all day. [Less]
Posted
about 24 hours
ago
Today I kicked out a new release of Lernid – Lernid 0.3. This release packs in some juicy new features and bug fixes, and we are edging closer to Lernid 1.0 ready for our next major learning event: Ubuntu Developer Week.
This
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release brings the following new features:
Refined Interface – the interface has been re-factored to make better use of space and work better on smaller-resolution screens such as netbooks.
Schedule View – Lernid now has support for real events. Events are specified using an iCal feed: this means that any calendaring application can be used to create and publish events. Events are now displayed in a special schedule view, in chronological order.
Local Event times – traditionally events in our Ubuntu learning weeks were always shown with the internationally confusing UTC timezone. Now all events are shown in the users local timezone. Goodbye, confusion, it was nice knowing you.
Notifications – 10 minutes before an event begins Lernid will pop up a nice little notification bubble to remind you that an event is about to start. No more missing those rocking events!
Improved Browser Feature – Lernid has a built in web browser in which sites relevant to the session can appear. Switching between sites is devilishly simple, and we now have Reload and Stop buttons.
Automatic Website Loading Triggered By Session Leaders – a useful new feature I added today ready for this release adds a listener for web addresses in the main classroom session. This means that when the session leader mentions a web address, it will automatically show in the browser pane. This offers a first-of-its-kind feature for our learning weeks in which content can be delivered to attendees automatically without them having to do or type anything, right from inside Lernid. Other listening features are planned in future releases.
Translations Support – we now have translations support fully built into Lernid, with available translations in Arabic, Asturian, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), English (Canada), English (United Kingdom), Esperanto, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Lojban, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Telugu. Thanks to our awesome translations community for all their hard work!
Thanks to David Planella, Lucian Adrian Grijincu, and Andrew Higginson for contributions to this release.
Also, Lernid is built using the Quickly framework, and if it were not for this awesome tool, I doubt I would have ever started hacking on Lernid. If you have ideas for cool desktop applications and have an affinity with Python, you should give it a whirl. More information about Quickly and links to the always wonderful Didier Roche’s tutorial is here.
Getting Lernid
Lernid is still very much in development. This 0.3 release is still considered a pre-release and not final. This release is considered a more stable release in our scheme of pre-releases though. You can get it from my PPA. Simple issue the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonobacon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid
(Right now Lernid 0.3 is still building, so there may be a delay until it is available to you)
This will deliver each new release of Lernid directly to your desktop in Update Manager updates.
If you would like to play with the crack-of-the-day, the always awesome Nathan Handler has set up a daily builds PPA. You can add it with:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid
Enjoy! [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
I’ve been wanting an eReader for a while. When the Kindle first launched, I was in awe. I quickly sat down and calculated the number of books I buy in a year and compared that against the cost of a Kindle and the savings of buying an e-book for
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$10 vs. the hardcover price. Let’s just say there wasn’t much of a savings. I finally got to touch a Kindle at GUADEC this summer, and my mind was made up that I had to have an eReader in the near future.
I love tech gadgets and am an early adopter. I also love content and media, and own hundreds (if not over a thousand now) music CDs, hundreds of movies (including Blu-Ray that I bought over 2 years ago), and tons of books. My bookshelves are full to bursting in my office, and I have boxes of books stored in my closet without room to display them.
I’ve waited patiently debating an eReader. I travel once or twice a month for work, and having an eReader would definitely save space. This week, my flight was delayed hours on Tuesday, and then canceled later that night. I had finished the book I had brought an hour after getting to the airport, and then bought another one swearing in my head the whole how I wished I had a an eReader.
The good news is that when Barnes & Noble announced the nook last month that I pre-ordered one. As much as I love Amazon (I buy almost everything there now – movies, music, books and electronics) I found the nook more aesthetically pleasing as well as it was running Android, and the formats they’re using seem a bit more open than the Kindle. (My nook is supposed to ship tomorrow, still crossing my fingers with all the delays they’ve had for the last week or two!)
But now comes word that the publishing industry doesn’t get it and is fears change and the changing financial models. It’s rumored that Amazon loses $2 per eBook bought, and now we are hearing the publishers want to delay new releases 4 months after the hardcover comes out but before the paperback comes out. When will content companies figure out that not giving consumers what they want is bad for business?
There are authors (Iain Banks, Chuck Palahniuk, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman) that I will always buy the physical copy. I want to continue to build on my collections and there is a tactile difference in having a physical book. But I will buy many more books once I have my nook. I’ve already been adding to wishlist on bn.com for the moment my nook arrives. I have dozens of posts tagged “books” in my RSS reader that I want to buy. The fact that they’re slightly cheaper as an eBook and no shipping is nice, but having immediate wireless delivery right to my eReader is even better.
So the publishers are worried that Amazon (and to a lesser degree Barnes & Noble) have set a pricing ceiling of $9.99 per book. We’ve been through this argument before – the record industries felt Apple had set a similar ceiling that songs were only worth $0.99 and now we’ve seen new releases and popular tracks increase to $1.29 this year. And that’s ok. I worked in the retail industry for 15 years and have been through anti-trust training a couple of times. The publishers can set their price and the retailer can sell it for whatever they want.
If the publishers are so worried, why are they not raising the cost of the books? If Amazon is losing $2 per book, that means the cost to Amazon is $12. If the publishers raise it to $15, it will make the retailers re-consider whether losing more money is acceptable. While the publisher can’t dictate the actual retail price sold, they do have options. And lowering the cost after it’s been released a while happens all the time across all retail categories. There is no reason that months after the release the cost comes down and the retailer can re-price, at say, $9.99. This is seen all the time in the movie space, though rarely in music. Now that we are starting to have competition in the eReader space there are all kinds of tricks the publishers can do to partner with the retailer to save the retailer money on the back end as well, including marketing development funds, sell through credits and more.
But for the publishers to flatly state “We won’t release an eBook for 4 months” won’t make consumers happy. Nor, in my opinion, will it make consumers buy a hardcover once they’ve invested $200-$400 in an eReader. I’ve learned this lesson – I rarely buy a movie on new release day for $20-$30 when I subscribe to Netflix and know if I wait 3-6 months I can probably get it for $10-$15 on sale (I just got Watchmen on Blu-Ray for $10 last week!).
At this point, it’s difficult to read the future. These statements from the publishers could just be posturing as they dig in for negotiation with the retailers. But I’m not hopeful. There are plenty of lessons for content providers to learn from in the music battles of the last 10 years. And if there is one lesson they should employ, it’s to extend and embrace the new models rather than try to prop up a dying business model. Change is hard – and if consumers want to buy more books because they have an eReader, it’s in the publisher’s best interest to figure out how to do that, rather than making it harder for consumers to buy from them. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
I want a widget that is the combination of GtkComboBoxEntry and GtkEntryCompletion that can display a tree of options in a nice, indented way without the expanders (but with the rows expanded). Basically, a search box with a drop-down and
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hierarchical entries. I think I'm going to have to write my own, thought it sounds like something that might be more widely useful than just my application.
Visited nixwilliams and daniel_bethany for a cup of tea, which become lunch (which was delicious) which became more tea, which became waiting out the rain and watching Nicholas Crane trip over a lot. Got wet going home anyway. Now waiting out the rain again before going to the shops. It's a good thing that I like rain; though mostly I like wearing a giant, warm jumper while it rains outside. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
It has been a few weeks now since Aq and I started doing our new podcast, Shot Of Jaq. What a crazy few weeks.
As some of you will know, we did LugRadio for four years, and we really got into the habit of the LugRadio formula.
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Four year and 2million downloads later, I am proud of our achievements there: I consider it a success. That feeling of success has a negative side-effect though: jitters. Just before we released our first Shot Of Jaq shot I felt the same jitters I did just before we released LugRadio Season 1 Episode 1. In many ways the jitters were worse: we knew a lot of LugRadio fans were going to be checking out the new show, and even though we have made it clear that Shot Of Jaq is not LugRadio, we want to meet people’s expectations. Even though it is early days, I am really happy with the response so far.
The whole point of shot Of Jaq is that each shot is (a) no more 10 or so minutes long (b) the shot starts the conversation and (c) encourages the Shot Of Jaq community to weigh in and share their thoughts, thus continuing the conversation together. The format is new, I am not aware of anyone taking this approach before, but so far people seem to be getting into the approach, with some rather awesomely referring to it as shotcasting, which is pretty darn cool.
So far we have released the following shots, newest first, with the number of comments right now shown in brackets:
Jaqback, issue 1! (25) — this one was released today
Video Killed The Screwdriver Star (53)
The Open Office Renaissance (38)
The Arm Invasion (66)
The Great Twitter Gravy Train (60)
It Begins (40)
Each shot you can listen to from your browser and get involved in the conversation right away. Want to subscribe, well check out our MP3 and Ogg podcast feeds. I hope you check it out and we see you there.
So far things are still really new and we are beginning to settle into the format, as well getting used to doing a podcast after a year of not doing LugRadio. I have to say, it is pretty exciting getting back in the saddle, and thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of the show. [Less]
