J5’s Blog

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.

Well, I’ve gone and done it. Thanks to David Malcolm’s excellent 2to3c tool and some hand wrangling with PyUnicode objects I was able to get D-Bus Python compiling and working on Python 3. Grab the patch and start testing it out.

I’ve also tested this under Python 2.6 but it would be nice to see if it also works under Python versions < 2.6 since 2.6 has a couple of compatibility layers built in.

One of my biggest pet peeves is this argument:

You’ve done ***************** this much “good” so you are obligated to do more (and to my benefit first). If you don’t do so the world will implode.

I especially hate it when the person making that argument benefits from that good but doesn’t think they should contribute to it.

I do however agree with this argument:

You have done ******************* this much “good” and as a result have benefited from that good on average more than others, you have an obligation to keep putting in as much as you can. I am a beneficiary of your good and will try to add to it but I may lack the ability to contribute in any meaningful way.

On the philosophical side:

Is it more moral to get paid for the above arguments’ “good”, which frees you up to do more of the “good” or to do something else for a living with results being the scope of your “good” contributions are less than they would have been?

Those questions I don’t think there is a real answer to.

And no Spot, I’m not going to suddenly quit, I just sometimes wonder why I chose to be a public free software developer when it means I have to deal with anonymous idiots or break my own moral code on censorship.

Fedora Community Screencast – Background music edited from the song Conversion by Kourosh Dini off his Live At Bliss Gardens album (CC Some Rights Reserved)

Fedora Community, codename MyFedora, integrates the Fedora infrastructure into one interface focused on usability and streamlining user workflows.  This is a beta release with a production version to be released alongside Fedora 10.  While the first revisions are focused on Fedora Developers, the underlying Moksha framework, based on top of the Python WSGI TurboGears 2 platform, provides a base for writing self contained applications which can integrate to create one large application.  The applications seen on Fedora Community interact with the Fedora infrastructure to produce a single, unified view.  In the future applications can be written to interact with Transifex for translations, listen to upstream for project releases and even federate between infrastructures such as OLPC being able to have a view into their services along side the services they use in Fedora.

We are calling on Fedora members to test out the site and file bugs.  We plan to roll this out alongside Fedora 10 so pitch in and help us make a great release.

Edward Hervey recently announced the 0.11.2 release of the PiTiVi video editor.  Even though it is rough around the edges it is feeling really nice and a couple of major features away from being baseline usable for every day simple video editing.  The features I would personally like to see are:

• Splitting of audio and video channels
• At least one more video channel which makes it easier to line up cuts
• Being able to split a video into segments (with gnonlin this should be as easy as setting the time properties on the video timeline object, cloning the video timeline object to the end of the cloned object and adjusting the time properties on the clone)

The only other thing I would want is a compositor so adding titles and credits would be easy.  Things like having a text tool, transition effects, being able to undock controls for dual screen use and other nice but not needed features would simply be gravy after that, the majority of which could be implemented as plugins.

Thankfully Collabora Multimedia has started to put muscle behind the development of PiTiVi and hired Brandon Lewis who’s summer of code work significantly contributed to the latest release.  Edward, it seems, will also have a limited amount of time to work on PiTiVi.

We can’t forget  Sarath Lakshman who was my Fedora Summer of Code student.  Although he had done very little pygtk work (he had done some projects in pyQt previously) his eagerness to learn and willingness to take criticism had him make significant contributions in the form of the webcam and network capture code.  He also started on a D-Bus API for doing direct desktop recording in PiTiVi in conjunction with the Istanbul desktop recorder.  That did not get in this release because the API was deemed to be too PiTiVi specific.  This is basically blocking on me finding time to review the code and make comments on how the D-Bus API should look.

All in all I’m looking forward to what comes out of this renued interest in PiTiVi.

Piling on to Colin’s post:

If you knew what I needed to do already why didn’t you just do it?  Just popping up the dialog that I now have to go searching for would have been somewhat passable.  Besides Jython is not even usable right now so just assume I want my system python.  That is just plain laziness and the reason why I keep trying eclipse and then thinking better of it a couple of minutes later.

To be fair I hear it is a great app but I can’t get past the UI.  It gets in my way.  The run dialog alone has forever traumatized me.  Let’s see if the bugzilla plugin will allow me to file this bug or I will be back with another ranty update. I’m going to try to give eclipse a longer benefit of the doubt but if I run into much more of this it’s going to take a lot of people telling me it has since gotten better, before I try again.

I just noticed PiTiVi was upgraded to 0.11.1 at some point in Fedora 8 so I gave it a run. While there are show stopper bugs (which I will file in due time) and it doesn’t do much yet, it is almost to the point of what I need in a video editor. The important part is the UI is intuitive and easy to use. Here are a list of features I would need for the bare minimum of using PiTiVi as an editor:

• Cross fades
  • Even if it is a simple, non-configurable cross fade, cross fades really add polish between harsh cuts.
  • Fading and unfading audio is also important
• Support for image files as frames
  • This is the quick a dirty way to do intros and credits (eventually I would want direct text overlays)
• decoupling the audio from the video
• quick timeline resize of audio and video in the advanced view
  • The clip editor in the simple view is fine for precise editting but having the ability to drag either end of a clip to resize it in the timeline makes it easy to sync up with other elements in the timeline

That’s it. While I would like more functionality such as voice overs, unlimited tracks, multiple effects and overlays, the above list is all I need to support the simple editing that I do.

Just thought I would take “release early, release often” to heart. Hot on the heels of 0.1.7 is a major feature release 0.1.8. As of this version all complex and simple D-Bus types are displayed properly in the UI even if they are nested.

Please let me know if you ever see an Error(<some char>) in the parameter lists.

As usual:

Homepage: http://d-feet.fedorahosted.org

Tarball: http://johnp.fedorapeople.org/d-feet-0.1.8.tar.gz

Rawhide and Fedora 8: yum install d-feet

I’ve been so busy lately I just noticed my Decorators on a Dime article was published by Python Magazine.  Pretty neat!

A new D-Feet D-Bus Debugger has been released. Some cool new features have been added and a lot of the code has been reorganized.

• no longer restricted to the System and Session busses
  • using the connection dialog you can attach to any bus address you need
  • 
• each bus tab is restored on startup if the address exists
  • 
• execute button makes executing methods more descoverable
  • button in toolbar become sensitive when you select a method from the introspect data
  • 
  • 
• icons show up if app associated with a name has a toplevel window
  • based on libwnck so the application needs to have mapped a toplevel window
  • 
• initial support for icons on introspect nodes
  • 
• syntax highlighting and nicer formatting for methods and signals
  • unicode arrow used for return values of methods (Ray Strode)
  • 
• support for property lists in the introspect data (Marcel Holtmann)
• move to gtk.Builder for UI
  • requires PyGtk >= 2.12.0 and Gtk+ >= 2.12.0

Get It

• tarball: http://johnp.fedorapeople.org/d-feet-0.1.6.tar.gz
• git: git clone git://git.fedoraproject.org/git/hosted/d-feet