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

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

Nokia will be funding Codethink in the development of 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. Thanks for this goes to Nokia and all in the accessibility community that have supported us in making this happen! 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Obama is world’s choice for Democratic nominee? So, no surprise there then! If you’re reading this in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island or Vermont, please go place a vote tomorrow for the rest of us out here and also for someone who understands the internet, creative commons, freakonomics and wants to make life easier for those that need it.

Today I uploaded MySQL 5.1.23 to Debian experimental. It's currently waiting in the NEW queue for manual approval, because thanks to Monty Taylor the libndb parts are now in separate binary packages libndbclient3 and libndbclient-dev. Until it's getting approved to experimental, the updated package is available (amd64 only) from my home directory on gluck.

On my way home from New Zealand, I spent a (Friday) night in Melbourne. Peter, Donna, Andrew, and Mark, all of whom I knew from LCA 2008, came out and helped me get away from the after-work-craze that filled centre city. Thanks to them, I found (and refound) a couple of places worth noting:

• The staff of Joe Taylor, a cute bar at the corner of Victoria and Errol Streets, prepare a delicious cocktail they call Don Quixote : vodka, lime, basil, sugar, and ginger beer. They also have Mountain Goat on tap; their hightail beer instantly became my new Aussie favourite.
• The Hot Poppy right next door has all-day breakfast, including a fantastic housemade Bircher M esli. Both Joel, who joined me for brunch, and I enjoyed it, so you don t have to rely on just my judgement.
• The outdoor bar my brother and I found on our previous visit to Melbourne, fenced off from a small lane with crates and boxes to sit on, is called Section Eight Container Bar. It s on Tattersals Lane, which is off Lt. Bourke Street between Swanston and Russell. It took me three tries to find it again, but it was worth it. They also serve Mountain Goat beers! Issue 5 of the Melbourne Pixel magazine has a review of it in the right pane.
• The Somerset Gordon Place hotel at 19 Lt. Bourke Street is a splendid location within walking distance from the centre. It s a four star hotel, but you can get sweet last minute deals there via booking.com, it seems.
• Federation Square and Wharf next to Flinders Station are always worth a visit.

NP: The Phoenix Foundation: Happy Ending Update: Joel points out that the Australia on Collins shopping centre on 260 Collins street has free wireless

Mrs Taylor asked:

"are the council allowed to reroute a redway or are they right of way and if so can you help me to prove that they are??"

I don't know. Do you? If no-one knows, I'd probably start by looking at the detailed OS maps for the area (which I think mark rights of way) and maybe make Freedom of Information Act requests for the order that established a particular redway. However, even if they are a right of way, a council could reroute it through the usual transport planning process, although a member of the public and any affected councillors should be able to speak against it at a hearing.

Colin, you might want to check out PyPy, especially it’s translation framework, which (as I read it) allows the separation of language definition, optimisation techniques and machine backends (virtual or not). It looks like right now you can translate Python to C, CLR, JVM, LLVM or even JavaScript and there seem to be people working on different language definitions also, with JavaScript, Prolog, Scheme and Smalltalk in the tree.

According to a notification of trade on the Oslo B rs market, Nokia has made an offer for Trolltech of about 843 million Norwegian kroner , around 104 million. What this could mean for GTK+ is anyone’s guess. I’d expect at least that Nokia’s competitors that use Qtopia (like Motorola, Panasonic and Sony) are probably a little worried at the moment. Maybe there’ll be impetus for OSSO to move over to Qt, or maybe there’ll be internal competion at Nokia between a Qtopia stack and a GTK+/X11/Freedesktop stack. Maybe Qt will become more closed as Nokias pushes its advantage, or maybe it’ll be more open as development becomes less dependant on non-GPL license revenues, or maybe it’ll just stay the same. An interesting left-field move in this space is OpenMoko moving over to EFL, but on a primarily GNOME/Freedesktop stack. EFL is certainly much more capable than GTK+ in producing flashy UI’s on limited hardware. I”ve also heard of some companies writing UI’s in Flash using Gnash. I also wouldn’t be suprised if we start seeing embedded hardware running Mono and Moonlight at some point. Maybe one day we’ll have a GTK3 with DOM-like two pass event system and a cairo backend that renders totally on the GPU. One thing’s for certain, there’s a hell of a lot of competition on the toolkit front and it will only grow.

Today, from David ‘Lefty’ Schlesinger, when asked “so, how did Mac OS X get released without DVD support?” … “Who the FUCK knows???!…. Well, actually I do.”

Last night I watched Obama’s speech on the night of the New Hampshire primary. Pretty impressive and emotive stuff - good aims, positive campaining and the kind of delivery that evokes some of the great orators.

Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

Happy leap second, everyone. The earth's rotation slowed by another second, and the extra second was added just before the new year. Or did it? According to the NIST "NOTE: No leap second will be added at the end of December 2007" So why did some of my machines see one and some not? All are running NTP, all using pool.ntp.org. Perhaps some NTP servers in the pool falsely inserted a leap second? According to this thread I'm not the only one to notice spurious leap seconds, one also happened in July 07, and this page documents one in July 06 with some great graphs. Figuring out whodonit is tricky.. (Insert conspiracy theory,thriller plot here.)

Yesterday in the evening I uploaded MySQL 5.0.51-1 to Debian unstable. Unfortunately it took a bit longer to prepare the updated package than expected, mainly because 5.0.51 wasn't MySQL's best relase, and I had to backport and include some fixes from 5.0.52 and 5.0.54 to get it working (see the changelog for details). Then I had to wait a few more days until 5.0.45-5 got into testing before I could finally upload 5.0.51-1 to unstable.

The most important changes are:

• Testsuite is now enabled during build process, which requires some time, but it ensures that everything is fine with the build. I already found two gcc 4.2.x related bugs in 5.0.51 which were fixed before 5.0.51-1 was uploaded to Debian.
• Manpages re-added, MySQL AB has put them under the GPL so we could include them again after we had to remove them a few months ago.

Regarding the Community vs. Enterprise decision I had a discussion with Kaj Arn , Lenz Grimmer, Daniel Fischer and Monty Taylor on IRC last week and we decided to stay with the Community Edition in Debian for now, and see what the future will bring us.

Now as anyone who knows me knows, I love Git. I find it gives a very productive and comfortable workflow. One of my favourite new(ish) features is git rebase --interactive, which along with cheap’n'fast branching gives a great way to hack and commit as you go and then later on refactor your work into sets of nice orthogonal patches. However, there I do still find a good few things wrong with git, so I’d like to discuss these problems and possible solutions:

1. Error Messages In general git has some terrible cryptic error messages. My favourite example is if you modify a file and then pull a change that modifies that file before you commit it: Updating beb8c37..b953e6f
test: needs update
fatal: Entry 'test' not uptodate. Cannot merge. WTF? what does uptodate mean? why isn’t it up to date? whats gone wrong? what should i do?
   Surely something like: Cancelling pull as 'test' has changes that would be overwritten by this pull. Please commit your changes or force an overwrite using the '--force' flag would be a lot better? I leave it as a reader excercise to repeat this process for most error messages…
2. The index Why oh why oh why is it called the index? It does no indexing as far as the user is concerned. Its name gives you no clue to what it is, you don’t know when or how you’re supposed to use it. git add and git rm modify it and it’s used all over the place by the obscure low-level git helpers that you stumble over. How about commit staging area, that being what it actually is. You could have nice commands like git stage and git unstage and git stage --interactive. That’d make more sense, right? Then git add and git rm would be a lot more meaningful, being only used when you actually want add or remove a file.
3. Remotes With git remote this is a lot better than it used to be - having to use cryptic refspecs (see git-pull manpage for the gory details). Unfortunately refspecs are still scattered all over the documentation just to confuse you… That should almost certainly be moved out to less user-visible documentation. The main issues I have now are:
   • Remote branches don’t always behave like local branches when they should. In particular git pull . <remote branch name> doesn’t work (and gives an obscure error) but git merge <remote branch name> does. remote branches should act just like local branches you can’t modify.
   • I’m not sure I like git branch -r to list remote branches, maybe git remote branches would be nicer and more obvious, or even git branch --remote
4. Lots of git-* commands that confuse people This is a common complaint, and I have to say that I agree. Why not put all the low-level commands in libexec? People who really use them often (which can’t be many!) can always add it to their path.
5. No bug tracker! For such a user-facing tool, a bug tracker would be very useful for users who lack the experience or time to get their hands dirty in the codebase. It certainly seems that just taking bugs to the mailinglist without a patch isn’t generally useful.

So, what do people think? What other bugbears do beginners and experienced git users see? Are these useful ideas? After some discussion, I’ll happily take these to the git mailing list and come up with some patches! Update:
Looks like people had some problems with my OpenID based login. Comments are now open.

The Mozilla Foundation is funding Codethink to investigate the feasibility of moving the GNOME accessibilty infrastructure, AT-SPI, to use D-Bus as its underlying IPC rather than CORBA. You can follow the investigation as it progresses on the GNOME Wiki Hopefully our findings will show that D-Bus is more than up for the job, paving the way to a true cross desktop accessibility infrastructure!