J5’s Blog

I got to a bit of a milestone today on the new PyGObject Introspection invoke code I have been working on. I can now run a handful of tests that marshal in’s out’s and returns. It is mostly just basic types right now but it works. Of significant importance is that I got the first torture test to run. We call a simple interface with a couple of in and out parameters 10000 times in a loop. Here is the output from the old implementation:

test_torture_profile (test_everything.TestTortureProfile) ...
        torture test 1 (10000 iterations): 0.240000 secs

and now from my new implementation:

test_torture_profile (test_cache.TestTortureProfile) ...
	torture test 1 (10000 iterations): 0.070000 secs

That is more than a 3x speedup for a simple case. Of course there is still a lot of work to do to handle more complex types and all of the edge cases but again, progress. I’m probably losing some speed gains due to moving to function calls instead of a big switch statement but one of the benefits of splitting everything up is when issues occur I know exactly where it is happening instead of having to scroll up the code to see if I am decoding or encoding and what type is causing the issues.

The hackfest is next week in Prague. Note to those going, because of the small amounts involved in your travel costs, I will be handling reimbursement in Euros or CZK. We will figure it all out when I get there.

I’ve been so busy I also forgot to thank Collabora who is sponsoring the hotel, a thank you dinner, beer and a coffee machine for the hackspace which is donating rooms for us to hack in. I’m looking forward to having a great time and getting some work done. Hopefully this blizzard that is hitting us tonight won’t effect my travel.

We are holding a hackfest in Prague the 17th-21st of January.  I am currently working up the budget to submit to the GNOME Board for approval.  If you think you should be at that hackfest but still haven’t filled out the wiki please do so now.   Add your name to the attendant request and to the cost section, letting us know how much it will cost to get you to Prague.  Since hackfests are small and have a limited budget, requests will be considered based on what you will bring to the conference as weighed against the cost of getting you there.  That being said, the right people need to be at a hackfest for it to be successful so if you should be there, we will get you there.

After talking to various people at the Boston Summit and looking at the work that needs to be done to finish the PyGObject Introspection bindings we are putting together another hackfest to finish up the last bits that application developers need.  The dates and locations have not been decided yet but it is known that it will be held for a week in Europe, sometime early next year (which is only a couple of months away).   Prague, CZ and Cambridge, UK are the two areas we are looking at hosting this event though we are open to other suggestions.

While Tomeu and I, as the current lead developers on the project, will be in attendance, we are asking for application developers to attend this time around so we can address the remaining issues facing people porting from PyGtk to PyGI.  Please go to the hackfest proposal wiki page and add your name to the list of people requesting to attend.  We need to know why you wish to come, what you expect to accomplish if sponsored to come, where you will be traveling from and where would you like to see the hackfest held.  We are mostly looking for people who have already engaged us through irc, the mailing list, bugzilla or patch submissions but we would also consider active PyGtk application developers who wish to start porting to PyGI immediately.

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’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.

I’m going to be starting the process for setting up the Boston Summit. That basically means getting the space at MIT and then a budget from the board. Last year we saw an issue with the timing of other GNOME related conferences. This year we have a choice of two dates – the usual Columbus day weekend, October 9th-11th or piggyback the weekend after the Linux Plumbers Conference, November 6th-8th.

I’m leaning towards keeping Columbus day weekend because it is easier to get rooms, and it reduces confusion by having it at the same time every year.

The reasons for piggybacking the Plumbers Conference is that a number of our fellow GNOMies will already be in Boston and we might get a few stragglers from other parts of the Linux stack to stop by and offer their perspective.

I want to get the foundation members’ opinion on this. Ultimately it will be up to the board to make a final decision but I plan to have a concrete date by the middle of June if not sooner.

I hope you are all getting excited to reflect on the work done in the past year and plan the future of the GNOME platform. I hope to see as many of you as possible at GUADEC and the Boston Summit this year!

What a week. Get six smart people in the same room together, spend a little bit of money to get them there and get them comfortable, and good things happen. An in-depth praise for the hackfest process, which the GNOME Foundation Board has been putting more and more resources into every year, will have to wait until another blog post. Right now I want to thank our sponsors and quickly recap what was accomplished. First out sponsors, who made this possible:

• The GNOME Foundation board for providing the framework for the hackfest and travel assistance to Tomeu
• OLPC for providing us free space and all the water we could drink at their office in Cambridge.
• Canonical for making sure we were awake after the social events by providing us with coffee
• Red Hat, for feeding us with a nice Portuguese meal which we shared with the D-Conf/GSettings hackfest guys who were sponsored by Novell
• Myself, for sponsoring a couple of after hours social events to keep us all sane and allow us to discuss the future in a more social environment

I would also like to thank Walter Bender for helping us find a venue and Jeorge Castro for being the liaison between us and the Foundation. He is off to a great start as the newest Board Member.

Now to the meat of what was accomplished:

• PyGI saw its first formal release
• We suckered relative new comer Zack Goldberg into ongoing maintainership of PyGI
• Cairo, callback and virtual function support was added to PyGI
• pygobject and pygi both sprouted py3k branches on GNOME’s git servers which both fully compile and pass their unit tests (which probably means we need more unit tests). We aren’t going to move these to master for some time. But if you grab the branches and test them out the process will be much quicker.
• We were written up in Ars Technica

Right now I am porting D-Feet to use PyGI and will be testing out my D-Bus Python py3k branch after I get that up and running. D-Feet is a good test because it uses the GenericTreeModel from PyGtk as well as GtkBuilder elements. In both cases I have found places where I have had to add overrides to PyGI to complete the bindings. For instance, in the Builder I need to override gtk_builder_connect_signals which in C searches for C symbols which match symbols in the XML description file. This is useless in Python so I need to modify it to work the same way PyGTK works. Namely, by being able to pass in a dictionary or object with name/python function mappings (e.g. {’on_click’: on_click_handler}). It is not all that hard, especially since PyGI overrides are written in Python and not in C like PyGtk overrides. However I do have to get the exception behaviour correct so that might take some time.

All and all we are in excellent shape so start porting your apps and file bugs!!!

For those of you who haven’t seen Tomeu Vizoso’s blog on the hackfest we are trying to pull together this is a second call to PyGObject, Python 3 and GtkIntrospect hackers who might want to join us in getting the future of the Python bindings to GTK sorted out.

At issue are a couple of roadblocks to the continual maintenance of the the bindings. First is the lack of support for Python 3.0 and second is the unclear picture of how GNOME 3 effects us. The current plan is to finish the work done on PyGI (Python GObjectIntrospect support for PyGObject), at the same time making sure it all works under both Python 2.x and Python 3.x. Moving to the PyGI bindings should make the maintenance burden somewhat lighter for our busy maintainers.

If you have something you can contribute and are interested in attending our hackfest please take a look at the wikipage and e-mail myself or Tomeu. While this is being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, you don’t need to be a Foundation member to be considered for an invite. We hope to be finalizing things soon and getting a budget to send to the board for approval.