This is the archive for January 2009. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Birthday cake

Thursday, January 15, 2009 ★ 23:36 ★ Categories Gnome, Misc ★ Permanent url

I’ve had many birthdays before, but this year’s Gnome cake is awesome. Too bad it’s only a picture. Thanks anyway, Daniel!

Launchpad for Gnome?

Sunday, January 11, 2009 ★ 00:39 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Perhaps this is a crazy idea, but wouldn’t it be great if Gnome would set up its own Launchpad instance in the future?

The Gnome Bugzilla installation is outdated and hard to maintain since it’s an old Bugzilla version that is hard to upgrade (at least that’s what I understand from Olav). I think Launchpad can be made to do everything Gnome needs (if it doesn’t already).

Launchpad is also very useful to share source code, of course all well-integrated with the bug handling, i.e. “Hi, here is my branch that fixes bug xyz, please merge it.” It integrates well with Bazaar (which I personally really like), but Git support (for those who care—quite a lot it seems) can be added as well of course (e.g. if Gnome decides to migrate towards Git).

Given that Launchpad will finally be open source Real Soon now, and given that Gnome has recently been discussing its future development infrastructure, wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to integrate the best of both worlds and make everyone happy? I think it would be awesome.

Disclaimer: this post is just a thought I had recently, and specifically not meant to start flame wars or conspiracy theories, nor is it an invitation to question my mental health. Please note that I don’t have anything to do with Canonical, and that I don’t use Ubuntu either.

Magic numbers

Monday, January 5, 2009 ★ 20:19 ★ Categories Gnome, Misc ★ Permanent url

A few minutes ago I filed bug 566666 (Dutch l10n issue). That means we have 100.000 bugs to go before Gnome will officially turn evil, just like Ubuntu 6.66.

Speaking of magic numbers, don’t forget to add a note at Saturday Feb 14 2009, 00:31:30 2009 in your calendar! Why? Well, it will be the historical moment 1234567890 in Unix time, right at the start of Valentine’s day. Lovely!

And exactly a month after that we can celebrate Pi day again.

Sweet moments to come!

Evolution signature without dashes

Saturday, January 3, 2009 ★ 14:37 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Most mail messages I send end with my name. It’s quite tiresome to type it all over again (yes, I’m lazy), so let’s try to do something about it.

First try: force Evolution to somehow use a template with my name already typed in when composing a message. I haven’t found out how to do that, and I gave up looking for it quickly when I realized this would only work for new messages, but not for replies.

Next try: signatures. However, it seems Evolution does not allow me to not include the -- mail signature separator in my signatures. I found a work-around though: use a signature script instead of a piece of text, since for some reason no -- is included in that case. The script itself is really simple (make sure you make it executable):

#!/bin/sh
echo ''
echo '— Wouter'

Hope this helps others as well!

Update: Johnny Jacob (Novell) pointed out that Evolution 2.24.x supports message templates, available under plugins. Thanks for letting me know!