Stories from the land of Rob http://blog.floopily.org Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:06:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 en Microblogging GUADEC http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/microblogging-guadec/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/microblogging-guadec/#comments Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:06:20 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/microblogging-guadec/ For my own benefit (I have a terrible memory) I’ve decided to microblog GUADEC this year - assuming that there’s some working network (Yeah, its a big assumption..). So I’ve got myself an account on identi.ca. Enjoy!

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/microblogging-guadec/feed/ GUADEC time again http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/guadec-time-again/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/guadec-time-again/#comments Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:53:18 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/guadec-time-again/ Right, its that wonderful time of year again - I’m all packed and ready to head to the airport. Painfully my plane lands at 02:10 tomorrow, so if anyone else is landing at the same time, feel free to seek me out - I’ll be coming off the flight from Frankfurt.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again and to giving my talk. Believe it or not, it’ll be the first talk I’ve ever given at GUADEC! I’m also going to try to rope in John and Mark to do some bits of it - tag team styleee. I just hope we can get the demo running in time..

See you all there!

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/07/05/guadec-time-again/feed/ Oh dear… http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/23/oh-dear/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/23/oh-dear/#comments Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:50:10 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/23/oh-dear/ I just got Guitar Hero for the Wii. And I played it for 5 straight hours last night. Oh dear.

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/23/oh-dear/feed/ Codethink news http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/20/codethink-news/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/20/codethink-news/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:32 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/20/codethink-news/ As he’s blogged, on Monday the wonderful John Carr of Conduit and very cool bzr-mirror.gnome.org fame will be starting work at Codethink. He’s initially going to be working on our top secret project and looking at bringing Conduit to mobile devices.

We’re also moving offices to the beautiful Peak District village of Hope, in the Hope Valley. I’ll post some pictures when we’ve got it all set up. Apparently the name ‘Hope’ derives from a celtic word for valley, so we’ll be in Valley valley :)

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/06/20/codethink-news/feed/ Lisa really likes rhythmbox http://blog.floopily.org/2008/05/19/lisa-really-likes-rhythmbox/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/05/19/lisa-really-likes-rhythmbox/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 15:17:20 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/05/19/lisa-really-likes-rhythmbox/ My girlfriend Lisa has been running Hardy for a good while now, some things are a pain for her, like Wine not managing to run Excel 2003 and OpenOffice having corners of bad usability (”Grraagh, why can’t I ….”), but sometimes she loves it. Today she’s been working and playing CDs on her laptop, and she said - ‘look at this, it’s really clever! It shows the CD covers and knows what the tracks are! And it even does it for really old CDs!”. Its the little things that make her happy. Well done Rhythmbox team :)

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/05/19/lisa-really-likes-rhythmbox/feed/ Nokia funds D-Bus based Accessibility http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/23/codethink-d-bus-based-accessibility/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/23/codethink-d-bus-based-accessibility/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:43:31 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/23/nokia-funds-d-bus-based-accessibility/ Codethink will be helping to develop a replacement for AT-SPI based on D-Bus. The aim will be to make a cross-desktop accessibility framework that can be used by both Qt/KDE and GTK+/GNOME applications and other applications that currently make use of ATK. Mark Doffman will be heading up the work and is collaborating with Mike Gorse at Novell who has already started working on this, thanks to Novell’s UIA effort.

The main architectural aims will be to cut drastically the amount of of IPC used and generally be lighter than AT-SPI is at the moment. We’ll be working to support both ATK and QAccessible. I’ve applied for a project on freedesktop.org to house this, so when those are up and running that’ll be the main place for discussion. In the meantime, feel free to ask questions on the accessibility-atspi mailing list at the linux foundation or for IRC, #a11y on GIMPNet.

Update:
I should also note we will also have a very strong focus on supporting automated testing tools, so anyone out there working in that area is more then welcome to join in and tell us what needs fixing with AT-SPI.

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/23/codethink-d-bus-based-accessibility/feed/ PackageKit Stop Energy http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/14/packagekit-stop-energy/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/14/packagekit-stop-energy/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:23:52 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/13/packagekit-stop-energy/ This should be a reply on Hughsies blog, but I don’t want to create a livejournal account. Richard, please move to blogs.gnome.org!

In response to Jason’s comments:

Hey. I’m a Debian/Ubuntu kinda guy and I think PackageKit is a hell of a lot better than Ubuntu making ubuntu-only solutions like gnome-app-install. It’s DEFINITELY not a NIH, there was nothing that gave us this kind of capability at all before PackageKit started. Everyone knew what was needed to be written and Richard was the guy that jumped in and got it started.

Also Richard wasn’t working at Red Hat when he started PackageKit and has worked with every distro he can on this.

Jason, stop the Stop Energy.

Update:
I though I might jump in and say a bit more on this problem: It really comes down to the question of whether a backend should ask questions of the user. Richard thinks that they shouldn’t, mainly because every time he’s seen backends ask questions they aren’t ones he knows the answer to and so, by inference, most people don’t know the answer to. These questions shouldn’t be asked in a user-friendly system.
However ‘These questions’ are actually multiple classes of problems and simplistically dismissing these is really just asking for failure in solving the problems correctly. Before I go any further, let me note that debconf has multiple levels of verbosity that it can ask questions at. Most Debian based distros just ask the highest priority questions. It should be noted that a PackageKit backend should allow a central administrator to set default values for any of these setting however.

Lets break down some of the kind of questions asked though debconf:

  • Configuration file overwrites
  • License agreements (cf suns jdk packages, flashplugin-nonfree, etc)
  • Technical questions, like whether to start a daemon or not
  • Lots of other things?…

Some packages also use stdin/out to really make sure you know what the hell you’re doing, like kernel packages, but i think that’s somewhat outside of this scope of this problem. Those kind of things should just fail unless you’re doing leet-super-admin work ;)

So the question really comes down to asking the user sensible questions that they a) know how to answer and b) care about.

The point I made to Richard on IRC is that this is actually a difficult and multi-faceted problem and just hiding these problems won’t help in solving them well, so my take is that PackageKit should allow asking of questions, probably via a dbus interface, have a debconf frontend that channels questions by this channel, and then let the Ubuntu and Debian guys get on the case of forming projects and policy to help fix the problem at source.

Update 2:Richard pointed me to this FAQ entry which explains why even handling debconf questions is hard.

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/14/packagekit-stop-energy/feed/ Blog pwned http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/blog-pwned/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/blog-pwned/#comments Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:58:38 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/blog-pwned/ Hmm, looks like my wordpress installation got pwned and inserted spam into my posts. That’ll teach me to keep my install up to date. My apologies to anyone affected.

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/blog-pwned/feed/ Apple lawyers http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/apple-lawyers/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/apple-lawyers/#comments Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:33:40 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/apple-lawyers/ My workmate Mark just pointed out how these calls have reminded him of a time when he really wished he’d got a lawyer first before something. So guys, if this Melissa Something calls you, don’t speak to her and ask her to send whatever she wants to say in writing. Probably the best way to get a good lawyer for these GNOME-related issues is to contact the GNOME Foundation.

Some people have suggested this could be an April fools joke. I sincerely hope it is, though if that is the case it is in very bad taste.

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/01/apple-lawyers/feed/ Having fun and getting distracted http://blog.floopily.org/2008/03/10/having-fun-and-getting-distracted/ http://blog.floopily.org/2008/03/10/having-fun-and-getting-distracted/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:15:50 +0000 rob http://blog.floopily.org/2008/03/10/having-fun-and-getting-distracted/ On saturday I decided to have a bit of fun hacking, so I got out my wiimote and decided to hack on some 3d gesture recogition.. There’s a great little library called libcwiid that allows an application to talk to a wiimote, with full access to the accelerometer (x,y,z force, roll, yaw) and the ir sensor. It also comes with a nice gui (wmgui) that shows you everything in real time. So far so cool.

There’s also a nice project called wiigee that was written in conjunction with a paper (ACM access required) by a group at the University of Oldenburg. This uses a k-mean quantizer, a left-right hidden Markov model and a Baysian classifier to recognize and classify gestures in a 3d space. Downside is that it’s in Java, and I want something small and fast in C.

So, I decide, lets see how hard it is to port some java code to vala… and yeah, takes me about an hour (including learning vala…) to covert the HMM. I then noticed some slight inefficiencies in vala’s generated code for accessing field members, so hacked a patch to vala for that. The HMM code also uses a lot of multidimensional arrays, and vala doesn’t yet support getting the array dimensions of an existing array, so today I finished a patch to add support to vala for this. All in all vala is a pretty nice language and valac itself is not hard to hack on!

Next up, I’m gonna finish porting wiigee to vala and come up with some fun demos ;)
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 ebook Buy cheap Zoo Tycoon 2 (SIZE 0.52 GB) at low price
mathcad 13enterprise edition
Diskeeper 9.0 532 Buy cheap Zend Studio at low price
peachtree accounting software free download
car window tint Buy cheap Xara Xtreme Pro 3.2.4 at low price
window 2003 server upgrade
quark xpress viewer Buy cheap Wondertouch ParticleIllusion 3.02 at low price
9.0 adobe cs2 photo shop
macromedia software downloads Buy cheap WebEasy Pro 6.0 at low price
window fan
6.5 introduction quark xpress Buy cheap WebcamXP Pro 2007 3.60 at low price
Discounted OEM Adobe Software
Full Version for Windows Buy cheap Wealth-Lab Developer 4.0 at low price
simgirl full version
window shades Buy cheap Visual Basic to JAVA at low price
cheap adobe acrobat
MainConcept MainActor Buy cheap Visual Basic Decompiler Toolkit at low price
accounting software programs
Adobe Acrobat Messenger Buy cheap Virtual PC 7.0 for Mac at low price
cheap software oem
window xp home Buy cheap Virtual CD v6.0.0.5 at low price
discount After Effects
errorinformation.aspx update v6 window Buy cheap VersaCheck 2007 Platinum at low price
rgc audio z3ta +
2 cs photo shop upgrade Buy cheap Ulead VideoStudio 9.0 at low price
quark xpress 6.0 serial
for Windows. Buy cheap Ulead Videostudio 11.0 Plus at low price
Apple Training SeriesCHM, PDF
2003 download microsoft oem office software Buy cheap Ulead PhotoImpact X3 at low price
cheap microsoft office 2003 software
free quark xpress tutorial Buy cheap Ulead PhotoImpact 12 with Addons at low price
quark xpress 6 serial
3DMeNow 2 Buy cheap Ulead MediaStudio Pro v8.0 with Extras at low price
spring in action ebook
illustrator Buy cheap Ulead CD and DVD PictureShow 4.0 at low price
adobe photo shop font
5.0 free quark tutorial xpress Buy cheap TurboTax Deluxe Deduction Maximizer 2006 (USA only) at low price
download full version window longhorn
MicroStation PDF Composer Buy cheap TurboTax Business 2006 (USA only) at low price
adobe software oem
adobe photo shop deluxe Buy cheap TurboTax 2006 Home Business Schedule C (USA only) at low price
encore guitars
mobilestream landscape key registration Buy cheap TuneUp Utilities 2008 at low price
Pinnacle Studio plus 10 multilanguage
adobe photo shop elements 3 Buy cheap TrendyFlash Site Builder 1.0 Standard at low price
winoncd power edition
mydvd 5.0 Buy cheap Toon Boom Studio 3.0 at low price
Cakewalk Sonar 5.0 Producer Edition (1 dvd)
adobe paint shop Buy cheap The Sims 2 (SIZE 2.79 GB) at low price
PhotoShop Elements 3.0 Plus Premiere Elements
mcafee 2006 all in one suite Buy cheap The Settlers: Heritage of Kings (SIZE 1.38 GB) at low price
adobe premiere elements
accounting software packages Buy cheap TechSmith SnagIt 8.2 at low price
microsoft software
Linotype 1.7 Buy cheap TechSmith Camtasia Studio 5 at low price
the j maker
adobe photo shop trick and tip Buy cheap TechSmith Camtasia Studio 4 at low price
NuMega SoftICE
nvidia purevideo decoder price Buy cheap Systran 6 Premium Translator at low price
warcraft dowload full version oem
adobe standard 6.0 download Buy cheap System Mechanic Professional v5.5 at low price
3DMeNow
oem software sales Buy cheap System Mechanic 6 Professional at low price
cheap adobe software for macs
adobe photoshop elements Buy cheap Symantec WinFax Pro V 10.03 at low price
quark xpress 5
oem adobe store Buy cheap Symantec pcAnywhere V 11.0 Host Remote at low price
2.0 b problems dvd architect
adobe photo shop cs one on one Buy cheap Symantec Norton SystemWorks 2005 Premier at low price
finance software
Mimaki FineCut Buy cheap Symantec Norton Save Restore 2.0 at low price
quark quark xpress
adobe go live software Buy cheap Symantec Norton Internet Security 2007 at low price
adobe video editing software
mainactor 5.5.18+download Buy cheap Symantec Norton Internet Security 2005 at low price
mimic lipsync
ABBY FineReader 7.0 Professional Edition 7.0.0.963 Buy cheap Symantec Norton Ghost 9.0 at low price
adobe acrobat professional 7.0 upgrade
microsoft publisher software Buy cheap Symantec Norton AntiVirus Corporate 10.0.2 at low price
1.5 adobe dvd encore pro
adobe acrobat software Buy cheap Symantec Norton Antivirus 2005 at low price
EUROSYSTEMS EUROCUT DESIGN
guitar pro 5.0 free Buy cheap Symantec Norton Antivirus 10.1 for Mac at low price
adobe acrobat 7.0 professional serial number
window xp professional sp2 upgrade Buy cheap Symantec Norton 360 at low price
GRAMMAR EXPRESS CD
Eyematic FaceStation Buy cheap Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.0 at low price
window media player codec
adobe cs old photo shop version Buy cheap SWiSH Max2 at low price
longman grammar express
macintosh quark xpress Buy cheap Swift Publisher at low price
windowsforms component collectionNET
3DMeNow 2 Buy cheap SWAT 4 (SIZE 1.27 GB) at low price
elsawin
dxi guitar Buy cheap Stuffit Deluxe 11 for Mac at low price
bt vst
upgrade window 95 to window 98 Buy cheap StuffIt Deluxe 10 for Mac at low price
oem microsoft office 2003 professional
discount adobe photo shop software Buy cheap StorageCraft ShadowProtect 3.1 Desktop Edition at low price
adobe photo shop 8.0
small business accounting software uk Buy cheap Steinberg WaveLab 5.01a at low price
macromedia software suite
cheap adobe acrobat 7.0 Buy cheap Steinberg Nuendo 3.1 at low price
Adobe Standard
Office Recovery Pro 3.0 Buy cheap Steinberg Cubase SX 2.2.0.33 at low price
window millennium upgrade
adobe premiere pro Buy cheap Steganos Safe Professional 2007 at low price
download full version pc game
MANDRAKE.LINUX.MULTI.NETWORK.FIREWALL Buy cheap SQLyog Enterprise 6.14 at low price
after effects tips
2 adobe creative oem suite Buy cheap South River Titan FTP Server Enterprise Edition 6.05 at low price
quarkxpress
financial software mac Buy cheap Sothink SWF Quicker 3.0 at low price
buy cheap software
window xp media center upgrade Buy cheap Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 at low price
illustrator cs
download window xp Buy cheap Sony Vegas 6.0 at low price
adobe photo shop tutorial
Ulead.3GPP.Plug Buy cheap Sony Sound Forge 9.0 at low price
microsoft office oem price
family feud full version Buy cheap Sony Cinescore 1.0c at low price
how to use adobe photo shop
window 2000 Buy cheap Sony ACID Pro 6 Music Workstation at low price
window professional upgrade
discount adobe acrobat software download Buy cheap Sonic Scenarist 3.0 at low price
microsoft office 2003 professional oem
quark xpress validation code Buy cheap Sonic MyDVD Deluxe 5.2.3 at low price
alias mental ray standalone
buy cheap Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional Buy cheap SolidWorks 2006 at low price
quarkxpress tutorials
PhotoShop Elements 3.0 Plus Premiere Elements Buy cheap Solid Edge v17 at low price
buy Encore 1.5 DVD
Adobe Premier Pro Buy cheap Solid Edge 16 at low price
SURFWARE SURFCAM 2004 SP1
oem download ejay full version Buy cheap SoftPlan v13.4.0 Professional at low price
adobe photoshop album
adobe encore tutorial Buy cheap Softimage Alienbrain 8 at low price
quark xpress 6.1 download
Infragistics.NetAdvantage 2005 vol 3 Buy cheap Snapz Pro X 2.1.1 for Mac at low price
discount adobe software
window update Buy cheap SmartDraw 2007 at low price
Windows Xp x64 Edition no activation
download oem software Buy cheap SlySoft CloneDVD 2.4.3.5 at low price
microsoft software updates
toad oracle xpert 8.5 Buy cheap Sisulizer 1.6 Enterprise Edition at low price
Acrobat Messenger 1.0
cheap adobe premier pro tutorial Buy cheap SiSoftware Sandra Pro Business XII SP1 at low price
small business accounting software free
quark xpress 6.1 crack Buy cheap Singles 2: Triple Trouble (0.77 GB) at low price
cheap Adobe Creative Suite CS2
ansys workbench suite 9 Buy cheap Shade Professional 8.5.1 at low price

]]> http://blog.floopily.org/2008/03/10/having-fun-and-getting-distracted/feed/