J5’s Blog

It took a while but we are now able to confirm we have rooms for the November 6 – 8  GNOME Boston Summit. For Saturday and Sunday we will be in the Tang Center again (part of the Sloan School) in the same rooms as last year. Monday is a little trickier since class is in session. We may have a couple of rooms spread out on the campus. We are still working out the best options there but we will have rooms on Monday to hack in.

Please go to the 2010 Summit page and tells us you are coming!

It is really great to see this year’s GUADEC videos being released so soon after the event.  Thank you Flumotion and Fluendo!!!

My only gripe is that yet again my talk’s timeslot seems to have experienced technical difficulty and is not available (the file is only 27min long).  Hopefully that is just a temporary glitch.

It is still an amazing feat of engineering that such as new technology such as WebM codec was used not only to provide archives of the conference but to also stream live.  Not to mention the software and codec used are both Open Source.

Since GNOME’s move to using git and the fact that upstream is where all the cool kids hack I have decided to move D-Feet to the GNOME servers to make it easier for contributors to contribute and users to file bugs.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to fix every feature request but it does mean others can help make D-Feet more useful.

I was sort of blown away that my humble little project was being used by more people than I had realized.    I was even more amazed that it was mentioned in the literature for the GNOME Developer Training Days at this year’s GUADEC.

That is not to say I think D-Feet is a particularly shining example of how a D-Bus debugging app should be written.  It kind of sucks but it does fill a niche, which is why I am starting a new design process for potentially developing a better D-Bus debugger.  Here is the hitch, I don’t want feature requests, I don’t want your bug reports (those can go into bugzilla), what I want is your workflow.  How do you debug your D-Bus apps?  What are the pitfalls, the annoyances, the most repetitive tasks that you encounter?  Please head to the Workflow Design page and add your own voice.

D-Feet is a D-Bus debugger written in PyGtk+ by John (J5) Palmieri

Are you getting excited?  GNOME’s flagship conference, GUADEC, is taking off in a little over a week in Den Haag, The Netherlands.  I’ve got my bags packed and a draft of my talk written.

With one more concert tonight in New York City, I set off tomorrow evening for a much needed vacation in Macon, France where I will be learning classic French cooking at Robert Ash’s cooking school.  The first lesson happens on my birthday, when I will be turning a nice and ripe 33.  Fresh fare such as bar à la crème de fenouil avec ses pommes dauphinoises, confit de canard, and profiteroles au chocolat, among others are set to be learned.  I’ve been playing with the idea of having a fund raising dinner with all the proceeds going to the GNOME Foundation during this year’s Boston Summit.  Perhaps after the course I will feel confident enough to trade donations for my cooking.

Afterwards there are a couple of days of layover in Amsterdam between when the course ends and GUADEC begins.  At GUADEC I am going to be devoting most of my time to whipping PyGObject into glorious introspection shape.   Please join us at the BOFs to learn more, help us hack or get help porting your apps to utilize the power of introspection.  There will be a BOF on general GObject Introspection on Monday the 26th between 14:00-16:00 and on PyGObject(PyGI) on Thursday the 29th between 14:00-18:00.  Otherwise you can find myself or any of the other introspection and GNOME python hackers any time during GUADEC.  If you are a newbie developer looking for something to hack on to get your name out there while learning some core GNOME technologies,  there are some really easy bits to sort of take control of and run with.  There is a lot of detail work such as fixing annotations or doing simple overrides that would take little effort to get up to speed with but make a huge impact on the final quality of the introspected bindings.  Heck, find me over a glass of beer at one of the after parties and I will wax poetic on the thing needed to be done to finish the last mile of our Python plans.

After GUADEC, Colin Walters and I will be travelling to Berlin, both to save airfare by flying out on a weekday and to decompress after a week of non-stop hacking.   I’m looking forward to seeing many old friends and making new ones.  Let’s make GUADEC rock and continue to push GNOME to continue to excel at excellence.  With this year’s focus on GNOME 3 and the underlying technologies that support it there will be a lot of exciting things to see and hack on.

I will be at Farmingdale College tonight giving a talk to LILUG.  It is a draft of my “The Future is JavaScript” talk I will be presenting at GUADEC in a little over two weeks.  I will also be talking about what it has been like working for an Open Source company for the last five years, along with how to get started working within the community.

Source: English Wikipedia, original upload 3 August 2004 by Finlay McWalter

I’m double checking now but as of this afternoon I was told we have two rooms in the Stata Center and one in Walker, November 6th-8th. I’ll post details and final confirmation as soon as I get them. Thanks goes to Walter Bender and Felice Gardner for all the leg work.

I was hoping to have a confirmation by now on the dates of the summit but we are a bit delayed in securing the rooms. I apologize as I know people need to know the dates in order to plan other events. What I can tell you is we are trying to secure room at the newly built MIT Media Lab which is one of the reasons for the delay. The preference right now is for the November dates with the October dates being requested as a fall back. The decision for that was based on the few people who contacted me with strong reasons why November would be better. This included better timing to go over results for the GNOME 3 marketing campaign and more people being in the Boston area at that time due to the Linux Plumbers Conference. Hopefully I will have more information by next week. It isn’t always easy to get big institutions to move quickly, especially since the rooms are provided gratis, but we have good people on the ground helping us out with this. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks to Carlos Garnacho’s recent work with the evdev driver and Gtk+ along with Peter Hutterer’s work on getting  the multitouch situation sorted out inside of X, not to mention everybody else who has contributed to the effort, I was able to get Multitouch working on my Fedora 13 powered Lenovo T410s.

All the following instructions relate to those who have N-Trig multitouch devices. Mileage may vary with other devices. To start playing around with multitouch in Fedora today you will need

• my evdev multitouch RPM packages built from Carlos’ branch
  • Warning: this package obsolete xorg-x11-drv-evdev so you will no longer get updates from the Fedora repo
  • Note: I’ll provide a yum repo for my packages once Koji is up and running again, for now if you don’t have an X86_64 machine you will need to rebuild the source rpm.
• If you have a N-Trig device you will also need to get the kernel Kyle built which has a fixed N-Trig driver (hopefully this will show up in an update soon).
• You will also need Carlos’ xorg.conf snippet. This is again for the
  N-Trig driver but should be easily modifiable for other devices
• To play with multitouch you will need the latest Gtk+ from the xi2-playground branch

I recommend building Gtk in a jhbuild environment or at least don’t install it since it is the unstable 3.0 branch. Once the multitouch stuff has been backported to 2-20 branch I will start providing packages. I take no responsibility for the breakage of anyone’s machine due to replacing such a major system package. Thankfully, if you run inside of jhbuild you can play around all you want without fear of breaking your system. Another option might be to run inside an virtual machine but I am not sure if multitouch events will propagate correctly yet.

If you want to play with some demos you will find them inside the tests/multitouch directory of Gtk. Have fun and ping me with any issues you have. It might be nice if we got this working for Fedora 14. The pieces are certainly falling into place.

I’ll be heading to GUADEC this year thanks to the generous support the GNOME Foundation Travel Committee but that won’t be my first stop in my mega marathon travelling month of July.

• I will first be travelling to NY around the 8th for the God Street Wine reunion concerts and will be making a pit stop at the Long Island Linux Users Group to give a dry run of my GUADEC talk entitled “The Future is JavaScript” which will continue with my theme from last year of continuing to meld the GNOME Desktop with the web platform (this year focusing on what JavaScript brings to the table)
• I fly out of JFK Airport on the 17th for Lyon France where I am taking the week long Robert Ash cooking course at Rue du Lac in Macon, Burgundy
• The class ends on the 23rd and my Hotel is booked for the 25th in The Hague so I am not quite sure if I will stay in Lyon or start my way up.  I know I have some GNOME friends living between Lyon and The Hague so I am offering to cook dinner for anyone who will let me crash at their place for a couple of days before GUADEC.
• And then there is the main event – GUADEC.  My talk is on Wednesday the 28th at noon.  It shouldn’t be missed.
• To relax a bit more, save money on airfare and because I love Germany, I am heading to Berlin for a couple of days before flying back to the US

If anyone is going to be in any of the areas I will be in and wants to hang out.  Let me know and I’ll see if I can make time.