The order of the Wayland talks are going to be flipped compared to the printed schedule. This means my introductory talk to Wayland will be before the panel discussion which should give valuable background for the subsequent discussions. Hopefully see you there!

This GUADEC there will be a couple of sessions on Friday afternoon from 2pm about Wayland. I ll be giving a presentation with a brief introduction to what Wayland is, what new features we ve worked on in the last cycle as well as what s planned for the next one. As this is GUADEC i ll of course be covering how we re doing with getting Wayland integrated into GNOME. There will also be a Wayland panel discussion where you can ask your tricky questions of myself, Owen Taylor, Robert Bragg and Kristian H gsberg to get things started i ve got some already prepared! And if that s not enough Wayland for you, on Monday we ll be BoF ing between 10am and 2pm in room A218. It would be great to see you there.

Lots of us over at Intel towers are working hard to bring you a great new Wayland powered experience. Cogl and Clutter have now been updated to work with the latest Wayland master. You need to compile master Cogl with: ./configure --enable-wayland-egl-platform=yes --enable-gl And then to run any applications using Cogl on Wayland you need to setup the environment variable COGL_RENDERER=egl_wayland then you can run cogl-crate! For Clutter you need to compile Clutter master with: ./configure --enable-wayland-backend You also need to set an environment variable to choose the Clutter backend too in this case it s CLUTTER_BACKEND=wayland (and you need to set COGL_RENDERER too) then you can run test-actors! Or just look at the video below <iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="300" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/33734847?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="400"></iframe> Direct Vimeo link! A big kudos needs to go to Robert Bragg, Neil Roberts and Emmanuele Bassi for helping make this happen. The Clutter client side support is basically complete so i ve now moved onto working on GTK and MX watch this space for updates!

The latest release of the Wayland protocol and support library along with the Weston compositor is now out. For the GNOME community this release is particularly interesting:

• It is the first one to advertise a stable API for the implementation of compositors (libwayland-server) which will prove useful with the porting of gnome-shell & mutter to Wayland
• Two new protocol enhancements have been staged for inclusion: subsurfaces from Pekka Paalanen which will be the basis for implementing Clutter-GTK on Wayland and support for input methods from Jan Arne Petersen. These are not yet in the core of the Wayland protocol but will be moved there when the API has been proven.
• HiDPI support Alexander Larsson implemented this for Wayland and GTK+ too

At GUADEC i ll be speaking about the current state of the Wayland project and plans going forward. If you have a particular topic or question you d like me to cover please let me know in the comments.

Howdy, i m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let s look at the Myzone, we re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that s the theory, how does it work:

• Recent files: Recent file information is pulled from the GtkRecentManager and the thumbnails are pulled from the XDG thumbnail specification directory. Metadata for the file comes courtesy of gio which I presume comes from shared-mime-info. Yay. By using the GtkRecentManager for all our recent activity metadata across the platform we re allowing legacy GNOME applications to just work. Sweet.
• Events and tasks: These are pulled from EDS using libjana, a calendaring library primarily developed by Chris Lord (of Dates fame.) A couple of months back (well, uh, March) I enhanced libjana to support tasks and thus we are able reuse the existing Tasks/Dates apps for interacting with the calendar.
• Favourite apps: Here I let the side down. I use some quite crazy custom format for doing this which frankly stinks. I m going to try and sit down with the GNOME shell guys to see if we can come up with some better way for dealing with user originated application metadata.
• Social networking/web service integration: This comes courtesy of Mojito and librest, two projects that I and the esteemed Ross Burton have been working on. Mojito is a project that pulls in content from a variety web services into a centralised place, abstracting some of the complexity and the makes it trivial to query. librest is a library for to keep developers happy even though they re having to deal with web services. It does this by making requests and parsing the result simple.

Previously i d talked about how we use GNOME technologies in the Moblin Myzone. Now i m going to talk about another component that i m responsible for, the People Panel. An important aspect of the Moblin user experience is about communicating with others and this panel provides quick access to do this. The core of the content is provided by an abstraction, simplification and aggregation library called Anerley. This provides a feed of items (an addressbook of people) that aggregates across the system addressbook, powered by EDS, and your IM roster, powered by Telepathy. You have small set of actions you can do on these people such as start an IM conversation / email / edit them with Contacts. The core of our IM experience is supplied by the awesome Empathy. We ve been working with the upstream maintainers to accomodate some of the needs of Moblin into the upstream source. This included the improvements to the accounts dialog and wizard that landed for GNOME 2.28. One of the biggest problems with the IM experience in Moblin 2.0 was that it was easy to miss when somebody was talking to you. If you were looking away when the notification popped up, whoops, it s gone. With our switch to Mission Control 5 I was able to integrate a Telepathy Observer into Anerley and the People Panel. An Observer will be informed of channels that are requested on the system. This allows us to show ongoing conversations in the panel and by exploiting channel requests and window presentation allow the user to switch between ongoing conversations. This wouldn t have been possible without the assistance of the nice folks in #telepathy and at Collabora: Sjoerd, Will, Jonny and countless others.

I came across the following compiler warning today:

    CC     libplurk_la-plurk-item-view.lo
  plurk-item-view.c: In function  construct_image_url :
plurk-item-view.c 233  warning: format  %lld  expects type  long long int ,
but argument 3 has type  gint64 

Tut tut tut .. a compiler warning! How could the commiter had let this happen? Lets look at the code

url = g_strdup_printf ("http://avatars.plurk.com/%s-medium%lld.gif", ...);

Ahaha .. they re probably using a 32-bit system, the nice thing to do here is:

url = g_strdup_printf ("http://avatars.plurk.com/%s-medium%" G_GINT64_FORMAT ".gif", ...);

To handle the case that on a 64-bit system you can represent a gint64 as a long rather than needing to go for a long long. I ve seen this quite a bit with debugging output for size_t for which G_GSIZE_FORMAT is definitely your friend.

In/near London on April the 8th? Like beer? Like pizza? Love GNOME? Then you probably want this wiki page.

Spent some of my morning fixing a build issue that came down to the use of AC_ARG_ENABLE. I thought it was worth recording some notes for its use: Something enabled by default:

AC_ARG_ENABLE([badgers],
              [AC_HELP_STRING([--enable-badgers=@<:@yes/no@:>@],
                              [Enable badgers @<:@default=yes@:>@])],
              [],
              [enable_badgers=yes])

Something disabled by default:

AC_ARG_ENABLE([badgers],
              [AC_HELP_STRING([--enable-badgers=@<:@yes/no@:>@],
                              [Enable badgers @<:@default=no@:>@])],
              [],
              [enable_badgers=no])

Observe that in this case the only thing that changes is the default value in the third parameter to AC_ARG_ENABLE (and also the documentation ) Something enabled by default but with a disable syntax:

AC_ARG_ENABLE([badgers],
              [AC_HELP_STRING([--disable-badgers],
                              [Disable badgers],
              [],
              [enable_badgers=yes])

Notice that this case is just the same as the first except with the help changed. Of course you actually need to use the value from the flag. I think this is more readable if presented outside the AC_ARG_ENABLE parameters this is possible because AC_ARG_ENABLE always sets a variable called enable_<thing>. Awesome, huh? For conditional pkg-config:

AS_IF([test "x$enable_badgers" = "xyes"],
      [PKG_CHECK_MODULES(BADGERS, [badgers-1.0])],
      [])

For conditional building:

AM_CONDITIONAL(ENABLE_BADGERS, test "x$badgers" = xyes)

Are you graduating this year? Or recently graduated? Do you want to work in Open Source? Do you have the right to work in the UK? Do you want to work with some of the best minds in the field: Chris Lord, of Happy Wombats fame; Damien Lespiau, the Clutter GST mastermind; Emmanuele Bassi, our Clutter super-hero; Jussi Kukkonen, who puts the clue in Geoclue; Ross Burton, our EDS magician; Srini Ragavan, Evolution shiny-thing maker; Thomas Wood, of the MX and control-center massive; Tomas Frydrych, our Antarctic naming scheme generator and of course pippin. Interested? Take a look at our job entry. I should be around as FOSDEM so feel free to corner me to talk.

GUADEC is going really well this year, great to catch up with folks. A big thank you to everyone who came along to my tips and tricks talk yesterday. I hope that everyone discovered something new; I certainly did whilst preparing it. As suggested i ll try and get this content all collated up into a wiki page. Watch this space.

Awesome photo CC gonzalemario - http://bit.ly/9Z0iIf

Previously i d talked about how we use GNOME technologies in the Moblin Myzone. Now i m going to talk about another component that i m responsible for, the People Panel. An important aspect of the Moblin user experience is about communicating with others and this panel provides quick access to do this. The core of the content is provided by an abstraction, simplification and aggregation library called Anerley. This provides a feed of items (an addressbook of people) that aggregates across the system addressbook, powered by EDS, and your IM roster, powered by Telepathy. You have small set of actions you can do on these people such as start an IM conversation / email / edit them with Contacts. The core of our IM experience is supplied by the awesome Empathy. We ve been working with the upstream maintainers to accomodate some of the needs of Moblin into the upstream source. This included the improvements to the accounts dialog and wizard that landed for GNOME 2.28. One of the biggest problems with the IM experience in Moblin 2.0 was that it was easy to miss when somebody was talking to you. If you were looking away when the notification popped up, whoops, it s gone. With our switch to Mission Control 5 I was able to integrate a Telepathy Observer into Anerley and the People Panel. An Observer will be informed of channels that are requested on the system. This allows us to show ongoing conversations in the panel and by exploiting channel requests and window presentation allow the user to switch between ongoing conversations. This wouldn t have been possible without the assistance of the nice folks in #telepathy and at Collabora: Sjoerd, Will, Jonny and countless others.

Howdy, i m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let s look at the Myzone, we re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that s the theory, how does it work:

• Recent files: Recent file information is pulled from the GtkRecentManager and the thumbnails are pulled from the XDG thumbnail specification directory. Metadata for the file comes courtesy of gio which I presume comes from shared-mime-info. Yay. By using the GtkRecentManager for all our recent activity metadata across the platform we re allowing legacy GNOME applications to just work. Sweet.
• Events and tasks: These are pulled from EDS using libjana, a calendaring library primarily developed by Chris Lord (of Dates fame.) A couple of months back (well, uh, March) I enhanced libjana to support tasks and thus we are able reuse the existing Tasks/Dates apps for interacting with the calendar.
• Favourite apps: Here I let the side down. I use some quite crazy custom format for doing this which frankly stinks. I m going to try and sit down with the GNOME shell guys to see if we can come up with some better way for dealing with user originated application metadata.
• Social networking/web service integration: This comes courtesy of Mojito and librest, two projects that I and the esteemed Ross Burton have been working on. Mojito is a project that pulls in content from a variety web services into a centralised place, abstracting some of the complexity and the makes it trivial to query. librest is a library for to keep developers happy even though they re having to deal with web services. It does this by making requests and parsing the result simple.

Myzone in action

I really like the 3.0 plan. There are two extra areas in particular that i d like to see us attack: Firstly (the smaller of the two) i d like to see a revamping of the Evolution client libraries, ECal & EBook, in particular ECalComponent is horrible. The work that Chris and I have been doing on libjana is showing some of the direction that such a library for accessing calendaring could go. This requires an ABI & API break to do this effectively (hence being a 3.0 thing.) Ross has also been doing sterling work on the server side of things by migrating the eds-dbus fork into the mainline. This is now basically just waiting on the migration to git and a double review of the calendaring code. The second and more significant thing that I care about is that I think we need to bring web services closer into the desktop. I ve been persuaded that desktop applications are not dead but I think we need compelling, transparent and easy ways to integrate with cloud services. In particular we are entering an age of almost always on connectivity. Many people already find little use for their computers if they are not connected to the Internet. However since the omnipresent and omni-reliable 3G/wireless/wimax utopia is not yet with us we live in a world where we get connectivity in bursts as we travel, socialise and live. Our platform should cunningly pull down interesting content when the user is on cheap and reliable connectivity which they can then peruse when offline or on an expensive and unreliable connection. A project that Ross and I have been working on at Intel to bring social networks to the desktop/mobile is called Mojito. I ll cover this in more detail soon.

Our hero: Ross Burton

Just a reminder that London GNOME Beer (v2.2) will be happening this Friday. Add your name to the wiki here.

When OpenedHand was first acquired by Intel I was asked to look into ways of making it easier to access web services from within GLIBish (i.e. Clutter & GTK) applications. We figured that as web services more important to the users of Moblin, and thus by extension, GNOME we needed some way to help developers access them. So, I did some research, read up on RESTful. And thought yay, lots of services are claiming to be RESTful, let s see if we can come up with some kind of service description language that we can autogenerate code from (ala, dbus-glib). Turns out that very few services actually adhere to this RESTful definition and my attempts to produce some kind of description language resulted in more lines of XML than code, hmmm. Anyway, I persevered and looked at building an API that I would fine easy to drive RESTful web services with. After a few iterations I decided upon designing something with a somewhat Cairo-esque API.



Marco thinking RESTful thoughts.
The API is comprised of two parts, the first half is for making the requests (and is based on libsoup.) Here is an example:

  proxy = rest_proxy_new ("http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/", FALSE);
  call = rest_proxy_new_call (proxy);
  rest_proxy_call_add_params (call,
                              "method", "flickr.test.echo",
                              "api_key", "",
                              "format", "xml",
                              NULL);
  rest_proxy_call_run (call, NULL, NULL); /* obviously can do async instead */
  payload = rest_proxy_call_get_payload (call);
  len = rest_proxy_call_get_payload_length (call);

Easy, huh? Anyway, enough rambling for today s blog post, next week i ll talk about the really interesting stuff we re (Ross and I) are working on to make parsing XML fun (yes, really, honestly, fun.) Oh and and the source code can be found in git and it s licensed under LGPLv2.1, etc etc. (Yes, we have too many libraries, when mature perhaps we can move this into libsoup.)

The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

My iRiver T60 has died after only 6 months of occasional use. This sucks. But since this is my 3rd MP3 player in ~ 2 years I feel i’m somewhat cursed in my ability to lose/break them. So my question is this: If I go into John Lewis (because it’s easy to take back if when it stops working) on Saturday and buy a shiny shiny iPod shuffle and turn myself into a complete sell-out will it *just* work with Rhythmbox 0.11.5? Will it just work or will I need to find a Mac to activate it or something painful like that?

Packages for Clutter 0.8 have been uploaded to the Debian archive and to the OpenedHand Debian repository. There are packages available for Debian unstable and Ubuntu hardy (no gutsy i’m afraid, glib is too old.) And in completely unrelated news thanks to everyone involved in the organisation of GUADEC: Good work guys!

Despite a couple of false starts with the Flickr group (thanks Claudio for nudging me), the group should now be ready to accept your photos!