J5’s Blog

Yesterday I tasked Dan Winship, who recently joined Red Hat on the OLPC project, with porting WebKit as a Sugar activity when he had free time. Today I came into the office to find an e-mail with a link to the activity.  Here are some screen shots.  Ignore the different scaling as we have tweaked  XULRunner to better utilize the XO’s screen.

XULRunner

WebKit

My initial reaction is it shows promise but needs some work to become really usable. On the plus side it uses on average 10 megs less in resident memory according to Dan’s testing. It also starts up five seconds faster. In my qualitative tests WebKit feels a bit more responsive when scrolling.  The biggest problem with WebKit is the gtk port is just not finished yet and as such it is not a usable browser, but it is close.

Why are we looking at WebKit?  In my mind it is another Open Source project that is just more aligned to our needs as a small and fast  browser.  The issue I see with the Mozilla comunity is that they are mainly chasing the fat desktop market.  Every effort I have seen to make an embedded focused project based off of Mozilla has fallen in one aspect or another.  WebKit’s specific claim to fame is to be small and light while not sacrificing needed functionality.  For instance the Gtk port of WebKit uses cairo and pango which we need for nice antialiased and internationalized fonts.  The last embedded mozilla project I talked to spent their time blaming cairo and pango for their performance problems.  Instead of fixing their issues they opted to pull them both which gives you a slightly faster browser with no real internationalization support to talk of.

To be fair I have heard that Mozilla upstream is fixing the issues with cairo rendering in their next major release and have been getting friendlier when dealing with Linux distributions.  This is all good signs of progress.  The question is what is the direction Mozilla is looking to the future and will it line up with our requirements for low powered computing?  Can a project as large as Mozilla serve both the embedded and power desktops equally well or do we look to other projects like WebKit which have more focused goals?  For that matter, what is to say WebKit doesn’t spiral out of control and go in directions which are unsuitable for us?

For now we are using XULRunner, which works and has many benefits along with some pitfalls.  We will keep an eye on the development of the WebKit Gtk port as it is shaping up to be a worthy contender.  In the end it will come down to which offers the best experience on our platform.

Rock on Collabora. These guys are really building a great Free Software company and are an asset to GNOME and FOSS. If you have a need in the collaboration space I highly suggest hiring these guys. Apart from rocking on OLPC video conferencing they have Simon McVittie rocking out the next generation of D-Bus python bindings which replaces the Pyrex backend with a pure C implementation that should be easier to work with going forward.

My next task is setting up a repository where developers can contribute and host application bundles which can be downloaded directly to an OLPC machine and installed. This will allow people to try out the different application that will be available and make it easier for countries, teachers and kids to get involved in developing targeted content for the device. As it stands right now they have to go through me to get activities into the builds and believe me, taking myself out of the equation will make things run a lot smoother.

I’m going to have a release party for D-Bus 1.0 at the Peoples Republik starting at 8:00pm on Wednesday November 15th. If anyone wants to grab me for dinner before hand you can find me on irc in #dbus on freenode or by e-mail if you happen to know my address.

F.A.Q.

1. What is a release party?

It is an excuse to drink and be social with people in the community and celebrate a project milestone, but mostly it is an excuse to drink

2. I don’t hack on D-Bus can I come?

See first and last part of answer 1. Hint. the answer is yes

3. Is there other D-Bus release parties going on outside of Boston?

That is up to people who live outside of Boston. I would hope the people who worked hard on D-Bus would take a second to congratulate themselves on a job well done and then throw a party to unwind a bit.

See you there

According to news.com.com.com… when Fedora Core 6 was released it was downloaded 10,000 time in 5 hours. I would like to take a moment and thank everyone that was involved with this release including the people at Red Hat, The Fedora Project, GNOME, KDE, GNU, fd.o, Mozilla,all the other distributions and companies who work on upstream projects and everyone else I didn’t mention whose code, intelligence, energy and tenacity went into this release. Keep up the good work and I’ll continue to do the same.

Well after trying to figure out the hoops I needed to jump through to prove I owned martianrock.com (my address had changed, my service provider who’s e-mail I had listed had gone away and I couldn’t find my NetworkSolutions password which was being mailed to the e-mail address I had listed) I finally decided to pick up the phone. Wouldn’t you know it only took a few seconds to verify with a live tech support who I was and to get everything in working order. The do it yourself process still has a long way to go in replacing over the phone, live tech support. I must say the NetworkSolutions guy I talked to was very helpful and curtious even if he kept trying to sell me on their hosting services.

For those who don’t know what martianrock.com is, it was my old domain that housed my consulting company’s web site and then later my blog. I still have the DBA for Martian Rock Interactive. Right now j5live.com and martianrock.com both point to the same place. I kept the old domain for identity reasons. I think google still brings it up on searches and well some people still know my e-mail address (though it has been down for months now). In any case it is a part of me and my history that I would be hard pressed to part with.

There is an issue when building the GLib bindings. As they stand now they require a connection to the system bus in order to retrive introspection data so that it may create convinience functions for the bus methods. We are investigating the best way to handle this, either by distributing the xml introspection file and only generating it on dist or by getting rid of the convinience functions if nobody uses them. For now you can download the dbus-bus-introspect.xml file for 0.9x servers and place it in the tools directory in the dbus-glib package.

The patches are in. The bindings are split and we are ready to release ABI/API frozen D-Bus 0.90 on Monday. We will also be releasing D-Bus Python 0.70 and D-Bus GLib 0.70 along side. Some other bindings maintainers have also expressed interest in releasing their bindings at the same time. I will announce them in my Blog.

Run for your lives. I finished commiting the tests and Doxygen generation bits to the dbus-glib git repository. dbus-glib now builds and make check’s on its own. I also submitted a patch to remove them for the D-Bus Core in CVS.

Thanks to Diana Fong for creating my new hackergotchi from kikidonk’s great photography. Please replace my old one on Planet Gnome and Fedora People.

Luis, I have one point of contention to bring up about your concerns. We must remember what I think many forget. Companies, governments, organizations and individuals all make up the community. It is not the community vs. companies. What we see is that in any community (not just ours) there are good citizens and bad citizens and everything inbetween. Any entity in the community has equal potential to be pulled to either end of the spectrum.

That is not to say it is wrong to be weary of a companies motives. Because they do hold huge sway in certain aspects of the community, shifts in the way they interact within the community ripple more than say joe random developer. Of course there are individuals in the community who hold such respect that they also could cause similar effects. We need to protect against those who would be bad citizens and guide those to becoming good citizens. I think in the end the benifit of working together as a community will outweigh any singular interest as we grow the pie for GNOME.