This is a category view. Only posts in category Gnome are shown. Remove the filter to view posts in all categories.

Guadec 2010 Call for Volunteers

Tuesday, February 2 ★ 20:15 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

GUADEC (pronounced GWAH-DECK) is an acronym for the GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference. Held annually in cities around Europe, GUADEC is the largest gettogether of GNOME users, developers, foundation leaders, individuals, governments and businesses in the world. Gnome is the Free and open source software stack that drives the user interface of many Linux-based devices, from smartphones to your home pc.

GUADEC 2010, the eleventh edition, will be in The Hague, The Netherlands and takes place on July 24 – July 30.

Guadec The Hague

The organisation team calls you to arms! A community conference like GUADEC only happens when the community puts its weight behind it.

This is your chance to be part of this event. Whether you are a conference rookie or a seasoned GUADEC veteran, your help is much appreciated.

As a volunteer at the conference, you may enjoy special benefits such as a free and limited edition volunteer shirt and free food and drinks during your volunteering hours.

Afraid?

Saturday, July 11, 2009 ★ 00:11 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Many similar posts are appearing on Planet Gnome. Philip, Jürg, Ryan and others are not afraid of people writing code. But people writing code are scary since they are geeks who do magic things with computers! So…

I am afraid of people writing code

(Wrt. the Mono discussion this seems to be about: I agree with the other Gnome people who think Mono is not a problem by definition, as some people seem to think.)

Bashing Bazaar again?

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 ★ 21:49 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Dear Lennart,

It’s not my intention to start another flame war, but your blog post about bzr clearly shows that your real intention was not to obtain source code, but to bash bzr. I’ll explain why.

Simply visiting the the url http://www.mega-nerd.com/Bzr/libsndfile-pub/ with your web browser gives a 404 Not Found error message. That’s quite clear, so it’s not very likely there will be a branch there, right?

Spending a complete flame on your experiments with many different Bazaar commands, while the instruction page you linked to exactly tells you how to proceed, is not justified in my opinion. Especially not if you’re looking for help, and the very top of the bzr man page contains this:

SYNOPSIS
       bzr command [ command_options ]
       bzr help
       bzr help command

Yes, there’s help in there. And you also mention that in your own blog post, so there is no point in complaining about man pages, or trying the totally non-obvious man bzr-get and concluding that there is no help at all.

So, given that the url is dead (well, not found to be precise), how would you proceed from here? You’re tech-savvy, and you know how file systems work, and you probably know how the web works. So you could’ve tried visiting the parent url by cutting off the trailing part of the address. You would’ve ended up on http://www.mega-nerd.com/Bzr/, whichs contains a link to the right address that happens to work flawlessly:

$ bzr branch http://www.mega-nerd.com/Bzr/libsndfile-cue/
Branched 1046 revision(s).

The way you’ve written your blog post is highly insinuating and not helpful to anybody at all. You’ve written many very good blog posts in the past, so please keep it like that and refrain from spreading uninformed nonsense in the future. Thank you.

No love (well, not until you fix libsndfile…),

— Wouter

P.S. I’ll leave it to you to make the author of the instruction page aware of the incorrect url. You’re a good net citizen after all, aren’t you?

P.P.S. The in mano in your web page title should be in manu, since that is how manus is inflected in Latin.

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!

Dark dialog buttons

Sunday, November 30, 2008 ★ 13:57 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Over the past few years I’ve experimented numerous times with dark themes, but every time I switched back to a light theme after a while. However, there is one thing I really like about Darkilouche, namely the dark buttons in dialogs.

So… I took the relevant bits for coloured dialog buttons from Darkilouche and applied it to Clearlooks (with custom colours). The result looks like this:

Dark dialog buttons (click for full version)

I’m quite happy with how it looks. As you can see I have reduced the icon sizes in the menu as well.

In case you’re interested, the relevant snippets to put in your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (create it if it does not exist) can be found here: gtkrc-snippet.txt

Enjoy!

Gnome Specimen releases on Gnome servers

Monday, October 27, 2008 ★ 00:13 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Just a short maintenance notice: from now on Gnome Specimen releases will be available from the main Gnome servers, i.e. you can download tarballs from the Gnome Specimen directory on download.gnome.org.

Thanks to the accounts team for letting me do this.