J5’s Blog

Come one, come all down to the MIT Tang Center 3rd floor for this years GNOME Boston Summit. The Summit starts at 9am with a couple of minutes to say hi to everyone. We will start organizing the bar camp like sessions around 9:30 and break off into smaller groups around 10. If you want to give a presentation to the whole group let me know and we can fit you into the schedule. Keep in mind this isn’t a conference of talks, this is a conference of participation and getting things done™. Talks should be short and allow for a good bit of discussion.

If you haven’t already, please update the wiki to propose a topic.  At the beginning of the first session we will have people write their proposed session on a piece of paper, pitch them and  then organize them into time slots and rooms.  Hope to see you there!!!

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.

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.

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.

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!!!

We are back from dinner where we met up with some of the D-Conf hackfest guys. Thanks to sponsorship from Red Hat and Novell we nourished ourselves with some decent Portuguese cuisine and are now back hacking for a bit before we turn in for the night. We’ve been working hard today, building on the great start we had on day 1.

Because of our work we have pushed py3k branches for both pygobject and pygi into the main GNOME git repo. They don’t pass their test suites yet but they compile under Python 2.6 and 3.1. The plan is to get them passing their test suites on these platforms and then test for regressions for older versions of Python.

Also the cairo bindings and callback support are almost ready to be merged into master pending code review. As soon as that happens I am going to merge it with the py3k branch and eventually we will move the py3k branch into master after much testing from the community.

I’m going to finish up debugging this long vs. int issue and will be heading home.

As day 1 is coming to a close let us quickly recount the work that has been started:

• We started by debating the way forward and came up with an action plan – In the short term PyGtk will be ported to Python 3.0 but start moving to using PyGI under the hood when wrapping non-overridden functions. PyGI will be developed in parallel to both support PyGtk and eventually replace it.
• I have gone and setup a build environment and documented it on the wiki along with the places to get various modules as well as helping out with some of the Py3k issues
• John Ehresman has been working on his github branch to bring Py3k support to PyGObject
• David Malcolm has been working on the PyGI Py3k support
• Zach Goldberg and Colin Walters have been working on the PyGI callback support, both code reviewing the current patches and discussing the best way to support callbacks given the way the gjs bindings handle them
• Tomue is working on introspection for cairo so we can use it from PyGI