Johns Blog

I had two days off while I moved offices, so I got a chance to catch up on my backlog of random hacking.

osm-gps-map

I released osm-gps-map v0.5.0 which adds a few new features (such as keyboard navigation) but also contains many bugfixes and performance improvements. Check the release notes for more information. The next item on the TODO is merging the OSD/layers branch.

Conduit

I released Conduit 0.3.17 which was long overdue. Mostly a bugfix release and updating to new API. The Conduit homepage has also moved to live.gnome.org. Progress on Conduit is a bit slow at the moment, it does everything I want it to (I have a budget cellphone so phone synce does not interest me), and is pretty stable. I have some SOC work I would like to merge, but basically I am looking for developers and inspiration…

PyGTK for Windows

I finished off the fixes to build correct PyGTK+ installers on windows, hopefully closing bug #589671. I uploaded new installers with the fixes people have reported. I expect these installers to become the ‘final’ installers at some point. Feedback welcome.

• Stable (requires the Gtk+-2.16 bundle)
  • PyGObject 2.20 for Windows
  • PyGTK 2.16 (no Glade) for Windows
  • PyGTK 2.16 (with Glade) for Windows
• Update: I also built
  • PyCairo 1.8.6 for Windows

PyGTK Hacking

I wanted to play with the new client side windows work in Gtk+, so I ported the effects gtk-demo to Python. This required a bit of ctypes magic to access the new API (good), and some more ctypes magic to interact with new signals that appears to have unfriendly prototypes (not so good, bug filed here).

PyGTK example using client side windows

Some of you out there might be familiar with Gloobus. Over the last few nights I spent some time integrating Gloobus inside nautilus.

This is a proof of concept. I have done very little so far - it shows the first 8 files in the directory, and allows you to navigate between them with animation. It is mostly just a port of Gloobus from C++ into a ClutterGroup derived Actor in C, most of the thanks should go to the Gloobus author.

It features the same bugs as Gloobus, like poor support for resizing the window, positioning bugs, and it does not scale to very many files. It also leaks like a sieve (that one’s on me). Here is my inadequacy represented in video form.

However, if you would still like to take a look and perhaps fix all the bugs, the steps for testing it are

1. Install clutter-gtk-0.9
2. Download nautilus from my Git repository (the clutter branch)
   https://github.com/nzjrs/nautilus/tree
3. Build the test program
   cd src/file-manager
   make -f Makefile.covflow && ./test-covflow
4. Built nautilus with –enable-clutter-view
5. Run the newly build nautilus
   cd src
   ./nautilus -q
   ./nautilus –no-desktop

This is very early work so the standard disclaimers apply. I needed to get this off my chest so I could get back to PhD work.

As was the theme of yesterdays post, here comes some more software that I have hacked on recently and can now be found on Github.

osm-gps-map
osm-gps-map is a Gtk+ widget (and Python bindings) that when given GPS co-ordinates, draws a GPS track, and points of interest on a moving map display. It Currently supports a number of different mapping sources;

• openstreetmap (default)
• openaerialmap
• maps-for-free
• satellite maps from a number of proprietary providers

It also has the following features

• Intelligent caching of maps, including the ability to request a specific area of the map to be cached ahead of time
• Recording of points of interest on the map (and the ability to add arbitary pixmaps at those points
• Automatically draws a GPS track (a line showing the history of past added points)
• Automatic centering on new GPS points
• Support for multiple other tracks of co-ordinate points
• Adjustable Zoom
• Includes a comprehensive example
• Simple, flat API

I have been running it on a number of embedded boards (beagleboard, Overo) for some commercial work I have been doing (hence the minimal dependencies). For those Planet GNOME readers, It is kind of like libchamplain but without the Clutter part.

facebook-notify
Reaction to the posting of my Facebook notifier for GNOME was positive, and I made a few quick fixes to remove some crasher bugs.

The biggest source of frustration at this point is that libwebkitgtk segfaults, upon destroy, almost every time it encounters a page that requires the initialization of an NPAPI plugin. Disabling plugins using the built in BrowserSettings object does not seem to have any effect.

Is there a RoadMap or any plans for an updated WebKitGtk release before the next round of distro updates?

Conduit
I have been hacking on Conduit a bit over the last few days, and thanks to Julien Lavergne we now have updated builds for Intrepid and Jaunty. Julien also packaged a trunk snapshot (and set up the infrastructure to allow easier updating of such snapshots). I recommend all users of Conduit add our PPA.

Now that Matt has gone ahead and announced this, I think I should send some more traffic his way. If you are interested in using Conduit to synchronize your iPhone contacts, calendar and notes then go and check out his work.

I hear people like this “iPhone” thingee

Also, I am still looking for volunteers to help me maintain the Google contacts/calendar Conduit dataproviders. They need some love, and I am just one developer.

Summer of Code
This has now finished, and I am really happy with how it went. I was able to complete a Python binding to libsyncml. This was done with the help of Pybindgen, which aside from a few quirks, performed admirably. Expect this to become the premier tool to automatically create python bindings to C/C++ libraries. The binding still contains too many bugs to be considered usable in Conduit trunk (read: crasher bugs) but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Alexandre Rosenfeld was also successful in his Conduit Summer of Code project. He contributed audio and video support for the iPod, and a comprehensive audio/video converter/trans-coder using python-gstreamer. The iPod support seems quite comprehensive, and the converter component is a necessary component of the Conduit architecture for our future plans.

Conduit
While it may look like I have been dormant at Conduit hacking, work has been ongoing in a number of branches. <rant>Unfortunately I still cannot push these branches to bzr-playground.gnome.org because the SSH keys from GNOME have not been synced across in over two weeks, leaving me locked out.</rant>. The GIO port is now working (with the exception of gvfs bug #547133, which I would dearly like someone to commit the fix for).

One of the major tasks necessary for the GIO port was the isolation of the platform specific parts, such as GConf, and GnomeVFS. One thing that fell out of this work is that Conduit now works on Windows. With no (~10 lines) code changes. Amazing really. It should be noted that this is not actually using GIO on windows, it is using a pure Python File class implementation.

Conduit can haz Windows!

I am not really serious about maintaining this port, but it shows what is possible. If someone wants to hack on this I can point them to the necessary places. But basically you will need

• Python 2.5
• The Gtk+ Runtime for Windows
• PyCairo, PyGObject, PyGtk installers
• Goocanvas and PyGoocanvas installers
• The conduit-win32 branch (not accessible ATM, due to aforementioned bzr brokeness)

I have also moved over to using PyWebkitGtk for the Conduit Web browser. They just made a 1.0 release, and I would really like it if those responsible for packaging Conduit, could please also package PyWebkitGtk, and ensure that it gets the necessary exceptions so that it is accepted into the appropriate distributions. Words cannot express how happy I am to be rid of gtkmozembed. It is a shame that webkitgtk was not accepted as an external dependency for GNOME 2.24, as this now makes getting things like pywebkitgtk into distributions a royal PITA.

Openstreetmap GPS Widget
Some time ago I mentioned the osm-gps-map widget that I have been working on, semi-related to my PhD. I just made the inaugural 0.1 release. This widget basically lets one easily write moving-map display widgets very easily, showing points of interest, and multiple gps paths atop of tiles fetched from openstreetmap, or other mapping providers. It started as a port of Tango GPS, and can now basically do everything that application did, but behind a simple GObject API. Python bindings are also provided

• Download
• Documentation (soon)
• Example Code
• Applications [1] [2] using this widget.

Miscellany

• Dear Ubuntu. Please make this your theme.
• RMS spoke at the University of Canterbury last week. It was quite good and well attended.
• I am off to France in 10 days for a two month PhD excursion/exchange to ENAC
• If you know a packager for a distribution, then poke them to package PyWebkitGtk