J5’s Blog

February 4, 2013

GNOME and Languages

Filed under: Gnome, JavaScript, Linux, Python, community — J5 @ 8:03 pm

So GNOME finally chose an official language and it is JavaScript. As one of the developers who helped bring Python into the world of GObject Introspection, you would think I would be upset that they chose JavaScript over the language I and others worked so hard to get up and running in GNOME 3. You would be wrong. My only questions is what took the GNOME community so long?

JavaScript is the best choice going forward for a lightweight glue language between the great C libraries that the GNOME project has produced. Python, while great and my language of choice, carries a lot of baggage that makes it hard to be a complete fit going forward. For instance many of the compromises we have to make when using GI in Python means we no longer take advantage of some of the nicer features of the language. In other-words GNOME programming in Python often veers from “the Python Way”.

Now that finally there is some consensus, we can all move forward and GNOME can concentrate on making a kick ass development platform that can focus on the little things like great docs, best practices and tight language integration. They can do all this without the distraction of “but that isn’t how it is done in <insert your favorite language here>”. Seriously, if someone brings that up in a discussion they can now be thoroughly ignored.

Does that mean other languages are left out in the cold? Certainly not. Python still remains one of the best languages supporting GI and GNOME. That will continue as long as people are interested in contributing to the effort. It will even gain from the documentation work being done by the JavaScript guys.

Day in and day out I work with many computer languages. While I may hold my favorites close to me, I have also come to recognize there are times when even languages I may not be fond of are a better fit for a particular problem space. Like it or not, JavaScript is pervasive and really is the way forward for rapid development in GNOME. It must have been a tense moment when the decision was made but I applaud that a hard decision was made and we can now move forward with a clear vision of delivering a great developer story for the GNOME desktop.

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August 10, 2012

Why the social web is so powerful

Filed under: community, friends, music — J5 @ 12:17 am

I just had a surreal experience with some of my best friends from high school.  Even though we all live in different states, some in New York, others in Texas, still others in Seattle and California, and myself in Boston, we were all occupying the same space tonight as we watched a live stream of the band God Street Wine.   This was the band that defined us in High School and now when we all have other priorities that keep our lives apart it still was able to evoke a kinship as we live commented on the performance over Facebook.  This reminds me of the power of Open Source communities which are drawn together through social means as well as technical.  Some of the first social networks happened over forums, mailing lists and irc.  The biggest issue we face is we are an exclusive club.  While we pretty much invented the social Internet our exclusivity pretty much means that any innovation is looked at with an air of suspicion leaving propitiatory companies like Facebook to fill that vacuum.  The question going forward is how do we turn our social know how into areas of general interest instead of just technical pursuits?  How do we open up our technology to a wider audience without “selling out”?

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July 30, 2012

GUADEC A Coruña Restaurant Suggestion

Filed under: GUADEC, Gnome, community, conference, friends, weekend, wine — J5 @ 11:32 am

Just a bit of a service announcement for those looking for a good bite to eat here in A Coruña. Last night Colin, Emily and I found ourselves sitting outside Tapa Negra looking for a bit of food and wine. We were not disappointed. The food was simple yet flavourful and the wine list quite extensive. Since most of the dishes are topped with some sort of meat or fish, the chef even made an amazing veggie dish for Colin off menu. I recommend trying one of the Tostas, thick cuts of toasted bread topped with fish or meat and some sauce. The prices were a bit higher than surrounding restaurants but the quality and service made it worth it.

Duck dish at Tapa Negra by John (J5) Palmieri
, a photo by John (J5) Palmieri on Flickr.

I had some duck in a cream sauce over toasted bread. I don’t have a picture of it but Emily had sliced cured beef similar to Iberico Ham over toasted bread with a high quality EVOO drizzled on top.

Veggie dish at Tapa Negra by John (J5) Palmieri
a photo by John (J5) Palmieri on Flickr.

This was the dish the chef made for Colin. It was a tower of sautéed vegetables topped with goat cheese and caramelized onions with EVOO and a balsamic reduction drizzled on top.

I was quite impressed and the small dish sizes left room for some desert with the mandarin orange sorbet being my favorite. The complete meal left us completely satisfied.

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February 2, 2012

Well hello OpenShift

Filed under: Fedora, Python, Redhat, community — J5 @ 8:18 pm

I haven’t blogged lately. For some reason since the popularization of Facebook posts and tweets, my ability to write more than a few coherent sentences have greatly diminished. Perhaps it is just me getting old but change is what change does and a lot of change has happened recently. The biggest recent change is me getting a promotion to Senior Software Engineer and moving from the Fedora team to the OpenShift team inside of Red Hat. Yes, I have traded Beefy Miracles for Space Pandas and I think the change has done me some good. I have wanted to transition to a more customer driven structured part of Red Hat without sacrificing the excitement of working with a fast moving project. OpenShift fit the bill very nicely with their agile development workflow in the emerging field of PaaS (Platform as a Service) cloud development. It is also nice having a large and growing team to work with.

My involvement with PyGObject

That being said most of my hacking time will be spent on OpenShift related projects and while I had already transitioned out of day to day PyGObject maintainership some time ago, I will no longer have any real time to dedicate to the project (I’m actually learning Ruby right now). To tell the truth, not being able to put any more serious time into the project is one of the major reasons I decided I needed a change. There are a number of other people still contributing to the project but it is sorely in need of a lead maintainer who can do releases, keep people on schedule and ping the right people when bugs languish. I feel PyGObject is in good shape but as it begins to get more uptake bugs fixes need to be committed, edge cases corralled and the last mile needs to be traversed. I will still hang out in #python on GIMPNet and can be persuaded to look at patches or even write a few if you ping me and are nice.

Jobs

With me leaving the Fedora team there is now an opening for someone to join the team. They are looking for an all around FOSS rock star who can work in a number of different areas such as packaging, desktop and web development, and any number of miscellaneous skill your would encounter with any FOSS project. The main responsibilities would be maintaining, improving and integrating our infrastructure tools such as Fedora Community Packages web app, Bodhi update tool and Fas accounts system as well as developing tools to make it easier to contribute to Fedora. Most of the tools are written in Python so being a Python expert is a big plus as well as having worked as part of a team on any major open source project. If that sounds like fun to you send me your resume (I get a bonus if you get hired).

OpenShift is also expanding so if any of these jobs look more like your speed feel free to mail me also.

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August 18, 2011

Calling all Introspection Hackers

Filed under: Gnome, community — J5 @ 6:47 pm

Want to become famous for a small amount of work? Want to have people thanking you for saving their project?  Well then step right up and write a tutorial about Introspection.  Ok, perhaps you won’t become famous and I might be the only person to thank you but here is a challenge for those who like to get their hands dirty in some of the more esoteric abilities of a piece of code.

As of now we have mostly been talking about introspection as a way to hook up existing GObject libraries to scripting languages but one of the most powerful features of Introspection is the ability to write your own C libraries inside your scripting project.  You may wish to do this for speed, or perhaps there is a feature that is not yet directly bindable via introspection.  While it is trivial to write one of these small libraries the devil is in the details and having a tutorial around would help people to dive in and play around.  What I am looking for:

  • Setup – show how to setup a makefile or even a setup.py file to compile a simple library, gir and typelib files.  Make sure the build env installs all the files to the correct locations and even has a way to test changes without installing
  • The C example 1 – show how to implement a simple function that takes simple input and returns output
  • The C example 2 – show how to implement different types of functions including multiple output functions and memory managed types
  • The C example 3 – show how to implement a gobject class with properties and other gobject features
  • The Vala examples – show how to do the above in Vala
  • Advanced topics could include callbacks

I’m pretty sure there may already be some Vala examples running around but the point of these tutorials would be to teach a scripter who is somewhat familiar with compiled languages how they could add lower level functionality to their project with out too much pain.  Are you up for the challenge?  Feel free to add a subpage to the PyGObject wiki.

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August 15, 2011

GObjects in Berlin: The search for more documentation

Filed under: GUADEC, Gnome, Python, community, conference — J5 @ 12:08 pm

One of the big topics of during the GObject Introspection Hackfest in Berlin has been generating documents directly from the .gir files.  While we are far from having complete documents for every supported language binding but thanks to Tomeu Vizoso,  Shaun McCance, Laszlo Pandy and Colin Walters with myself holding up rear after my work on the PyGObject 3.0 pre-release, we have a working framework.  Examples of the first output are available on my peoples page and you can get more information on the project page.

I would like to thank the Gnome Foundation for sponsoring travel and hotel as well as space during the Desktop Summit; Openisums for supplying us with space after the Summit was over; Nemein for the excellent Fondue dinner; Collabora for the Africana food that I had to miss due to the equally excellent cocktail party at Kat and Dave’s place; and KDE for the yummy Vietnamese lunch.

Much has been sewn and much has been grown, but now it is time to go.  Another successful hackfest is in the books and now the hard work of building on our achievements begins.  But first, some beer.

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August 9, 2011

Ich bin ein Berliner

Filed under: GUADEC, Gnome, Python, community, conference, travel — J5 @ 11:53 am

And I am very tasty. Though I missed the main portion of the Desktop Summit I will be in Berlin early tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. I should be in time for the Introspection BOF provided I don’t get lost. I trust that taking the TXL bus to the Staatsoper stop will prove to be uneventful.

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June 3, 2011

Some practical fixes to the Foundation Membership process

Filed under: Gnome, Politics, community — J5 @ 9:39 am

I figured instead of just complaining I would offer some practical fixes which would avoid the issue of disfranchising in the future.

First let’s examine why this is is an issue.  In order to become a member of the Foundation one must prove they have worked on significant pieces of GNOME and have two references to back them up.  A lot of people I know balk at even going through this first step because as far as they can see there is little benefit to becoming a member.  I try to remind them that voting is an important benefit.  During my tenure as a Foundation Board member we saw this as an issue and tried to promote Foundation participation by those in the GNOME Community.  Among other things we required people receiving funding from the foundation to apply for membership at some point in the future.  However the problem still remains that being a member constitutes a voting ballot once a year (1 and a half years during my tenure due to realigning  election years) and little else (there is the occasional smaller ballot).  A foundation member also has to renew their membership once every two years.  So if a member has to think about Foundation process once a year and membership process once every two years it is easy for membership to laps until a member finds themselves in the quandary I now find myself in.  To further exacerbate the situation it is a known issue by the membership and election committees that spam filters eat their e-mails and that the only reminders sent out are the exact same e-mails.

So how do we fix this?

Long Term Solutions

1.) Make registration an in person event to compliment the reminder e-mails – one of the things Foundation Members tend to do every year is go to one of the many events the Foundation sponsors.  If there is a registration system their names should be flagged and they given the opportunity to  renew their membership if it is set to expire in less than a year.  This should be an offline form that is processed at a later date as we all know how bad conference networking can be.  This can be a stipulation to organizers for receiving funding from the Board.

2.) Remind people when they are interacting with the Foundation process – Since voting happens every year, why not warn people when they vote that they will not be eligible for the next years vote unless they reregister at some point during the year?

Short Term Solution

All those who were denied a vote and who voted in last years elections should be allowed to reregister for this vote and given a ballot.

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May 18, 2011

GObject Introspection Hackfest in Berlin

Filed under: community, conference — J5 @ 12:20 pm

Hey everyone, we are planning a GObject Introspection Hackfest to run with the BOF sessions at the Desktop Summit in August. Openismus has also kindly offered us use of their offices for the three days following the conference.

One of the big areas we want to address this time around is generating developer documentation directly from .gir files for each of the languages that support Introspection. This means making sure GObject libraries tag C identifiers for translation to the correct language syntax as well as providing a way to override the more complicated sections such as code samples and Interfaces that have been modified to closer fit a given language’s syntax.

Other items on the agenda include finishing up some of the features, such as default values, that have yet to be implemented but make introspected bindings much easier to use.

If you are interested in attending please add your name and contact info to the wiki page along with any agenda items you would like to see addressed. We should be submitting this to the board for approval and arranging accommodations fairly soon so the sooner we get a list of participants, the better.

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April 10, 2011

Tonight’s Boston/Cambridge Release Party details

Filed under: Gnome, celebration, community — J5 @ 2:33 pm

This is just a reminder to those who are coming to the launch party. The dinner reservations has be moved to 8:00 at The Blue Room in Kendall Square. We also have the two back pool tables reserved at Flat Top Johnny’s at 9:30. See you there.

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