Le Weblog à Cassidy

More Map widget!

Guillaume Desmottes — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:43:00 +0200

Seems like mapping is the hot topic today, Pierre-Luc also announced a Gtk+ Map widget. Since he's not on Planet GNOME yet, I'll post the links for you all to see:

His post
The project's page

Collabora boat party tonight!

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:26:00 +0200

To all Guadecers, be sure to attend to the awesome Collabora party tonight. Don't know yet about the exact location but it will be on a boat!

edit: Seems the party will be around Kabatas

Voice and video calls with Empathy

Guillaume Desmottes — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:41:00 +0200

Thanks to the hard work of the Empathy, Telepathy and Farsight teams, VoIP is finally usable with Empathy. So you can now very easily do audio/video calls using Jingle and SIP. There is still a lot of UI polishing to do but it should basically work, so feel free to test and report problems.

You'll need Empathy 0.22.1, recent versions of Farsight, telepathy-stream-engine, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-farsight, and a gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg with H263 encoder if you want video support.

If you're using Debian Sid you should have the right versions of the Telepathy stack but need the Debian multimedia repo for video support (which is optinnal).

On Ubuntu Hardy you have to use Telepathy PPA and Medibuntu repos if you want video support. So just add to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://fr.packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free

Happy calling!

Empathy IRC account configuration

Guillaume Desmottes — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:17:00 +0100

Yesterday Xavier merged my Empathy irc-account branch. You can now very easily configure IRC accounts using empathy-accounts. We ship a XML file containing lot of well know IRC networks so users don't have to care about server address, port, etc.

This is the first step in my "use Empathy as a real IRC client" plan. Now we'll start a new set of libempathy-gtk widgets in order to create a dedicated application for multi users conversations (probably based on the interface of xchat-gnome).

Calendar synchronization

Guillaume Desmottes — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:29:00 +0100

Thanks to Ross, Dates is now installed on my N810. I played a bit with it and it looks great. So great than I'm considering to use my N810 as an organizer. But I'd really like to be able to synchronize it with the Evolution running on my desktop.

Conduit seems really promising but I didn't see a Maemo port yet. Maybe OpenSync or Sync could do the job too? So, if anyone has some experience in N810 <-> desktop 2 ways synchronization, feedback would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

Atelier d'introduction au développement GNOME ce samedi 1er décembre

Guillaume Desmottes — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:21:00 +0100

Comme déjà annoncé par mail et sur LinuxFR, j'organise avec Fred et Xavier ce samedi 1er décembre un atelier d'introduction au développement GNOME. Ce sera un peu similaire à l'atelier de programmation GNOME que nous avions organisé il y a quelques mois sauf qu'ici cela se déroulera toute la journée et sera basé sur une "vraie" application, à savoir Empathy.

On commencera la journée par de courtes présentations d'introduction : les outils de développements GNOME (Fred), le framework Telepathy (Moi) et enfin Empathy (Xavier). On tentera ensuite de résoudre ensemble des bugs d'Empathy^[1].

Ce sera donc ce samedi 1er décembre^[2] de 10 à 18h au forum A du campus de la plaine de l'ULB. Plus d'info sur le wiki du BxLUG; il serait d'ailleurs sympa de vous inscrire si vous êtes intéressé.

Au plaisir de vous y voir !

Notes

[1] oui, il y a du boulot

[2] ATTENTION, la date du 24 novembre avait été proposée initialement mais n'a pas été retenue

Présentation Telepathy/OLPC ce dimanche au BxLug

Guillaume Desmottes — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:25:00 +0200

Dans le cadre de la Linux Copy Party/Install Party mensuelle du BxLUG je donnerai ce dimanche 28 octobre une petite conférence sur Telepathy et l'OLPC. Celle-ci se déroulera aux alentours de 15h30-16h au FIJ.

Le contenu exact n'est pas encore défini mais cela devrait parler de l'architecture de Telepathy, des logiciels existants, des tubes, de comment on utilise cela dans le cadre de l'OLPC ainsi que de l'intégration dans GNOME (Empathy). Je devrais également faire une petite démo à l'aide de deux XO.

Au plaisir de vous y voir.

GTetrinet through tubes

Guillaume Desmottes — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:08:00 +0200

During the GNOME Summit, I started to hack GTetrinet (based on the initial work of Alban) and Empathy to try to offer a better user experience using stream tubes. I finally found some time this afternoon to finish this work and I am now able to play GTetrinet through tubes!

GTetrinet was patched to add a new dialog. It uses libempathy and libempathy-gtk to display user's contact list. When you have chosen a contact, it launches tetrinet-server into another process and exports its socket through a stream tubes.

The rest of the work is done by Empathy which was modified to display incoming tubes and launch GTetrinet if the user accepts it.

Alban's diagram showing GTetrinet using tubes

Screencast showing GTetrinet initates the tubes with a contact

The other side where Empathy receives the tube and launchs GTetrinet

These 2 patches still need lots of polishing before being ready for merging and we still have to design how tubes will be integrated properly into Empathy and Mission Control but I think they are a good demonstration of how tubes will revolutionize the collaboration in GNOME.

Inet socket support in stream tubes

Guillaume Desmottes — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:23:00 +0200

While Rob is finishing to review the Gabble tubes mega branch, I implemented inet4 and inet6 sockets support for stream tubes.

That means we are now able to export any (ip, port) socket to a tube and create an inet socket binded to the localhost interface to connect to it. So, any network application can easily be exported through a stream tubes to your contacts or to a muc a room.

For example, if you export your socket (127.0.0.1, 22) to muc foo, each participant of this muc who accepted your tube will have a new socket (127.0.0.1, port) created on their box. They'll just have to connect to it^[1] and they'll be automagically connected to your ssh server!

Next step now is to integrate all these cool stuffs to Empathy and GNOME will gain a rocking Collaboration framework!

Notes

[1] ssh localhost -p port

Telepathy Ubuntu Personal Package Archive

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:19:00 +0200

Thanks to Bigon, the Ubuntu Telepathy team have now its own Personal Package Archives. We'll use it to store packages of the latest upstream version of the Telepathy stack (connection managers, Empathy, Farsight, Soylent, ...) that can't be included in Gutsy due to freeze.

So, if you want to be sure to have latest releases, you just have to add these 2 lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list :

deb     http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

Stream tubes, a new generation of tubes

Guillaume Desmottes — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:15:00 +0200

A few weeks ago Daf and Rob announced D-Bus tube, a new Telepathy technology allowing applications to use D-Bus facilities for their network communications.

We have now a new type of tube called Stream Tube. With these tubes you'll be able to easily establish TCP connections with your contacts or with the participants of a multi-users chatroom. Let's take a look on Daf's amazing ASCII art to see how that works.

 .---------.
 |TP client|--|listening socket| B
 '---------'         ^
     C               |
                .----------.
                |Connection|
                | Manager  | A
                '----------'
                     |
                   _____
                __/     \___
            ___/            \
           /                 \____
          |                       \
          \__                     /
             \    Internets      /
             /                   \
            /                     \
           |             ___      /
           \____/\      /   \____/
                  \____/
                     ^
                     |
                .----------.
                |Connection|
             F  | Manager  |-|listening socket| E
                '----------'        ^
                                    |
                               .---------.
                               |TP client| D
                               '---------'

Alice wants to share a, say, local Unix socket (B) with Fernand. She exports that socket in a stream tube and offers it to Fernand. He accepts it and so its Connection Manager creates a local socket (E) on his system. Now, each time Fernand will connect an application (D) to this new socket, Alice's CM will make a new connection to the socket B and a new bytestream will be established between Alice and Fernand to transport data of this connection. So, applications C and D can now communicate together without caring about the network between them and without any code modifications, they just have to support unix socket (more socket type will be supported soon).

So, now imagine C is, for example, a VNC server and D a VNC client and we have... VNC over jabber!

RealVNC doesn't support Unix socket yet, but this patch add this feature. Thanks to the help of its author, I was able to build it with RealVNC 4.1 and so play with a remote GNOME mine. :)

GNOME mine over VNC over stream tubes over jabber

Currently only local unix socket support is implemented but we should support other socket type soon. We're still using XML bytestream (IBB) but real P2P bytestreams (with NAT penetration support) are planned too.

GNOME t-shirts @ FOSDEM

Guillaume Desmottes — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 17:25:00 +0100

As previously announced by Vincent, we printed very sexy GNOME t-shirts for FOSDEM (thanks to Andreas for the design!).

They are sold 10€ in our devroom (H.1302) and for free if you are speaker in the devroom or member of the GNOME Foundation (but any donation is of course welcome ;).

So, don't forget to come and take our t-shirts (especially if you wrote your size on the wiki, there is one t-shirt reserved for you !).

Our official GNOME model wearing the GNOME@FOSDEM 2007 t-shirt

Jamendo Rhythmbox plugin

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 01:34:00 +0100

Yesterday was released Rhythmbox 0.9.8. This new version includes my Jamendo plugin.

Jamendo is a rocking musical portal from where you can listen and download a huge quantity of free (as in freedom and/or as in free beer) music. Like the Magnatune plugin, it gives you the ability to listen (streaming) and download all the Jamendo library (except that here you don't have to pay anything!). Download is done using Bittorrent and you can choose if you prefer OGG or MP3 files.

So you can very easily enjoy more than 20000 tracks from 1600 artists (that means more than 58 days of music!) and new albums are added each day. Furthermore, as you can see on this screenshot, the plugin interacts with the albums cover component.

Rhythmbox playing B-Shake^[1] from Jamendo

Notes

[1] Very cool rock band of a friend of mine

Hello Planet GNOME + new job

Guillaume Desmottes — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 11:33:00 +0100

Hi, I'm yet another hackergotchi on Planet GNOME (but you can call me Guillaume).

Some words to introduce myself. I'm a Belgian GNOME hacker who mainly worked on XChat-GNOME with David. I'm very interested about IM in GNOME and so try to give also some love to Gossip, Telepathy...

Some days ago I was still student at ULB (the university where FOSDEM takes place) but I joined Collabora very recently^[1]. I'm very excited about this new job as it gives to me the opportunity to work on very exciting projects and learn amount of stuffs with cool people.

Speaking of work, I'm in Cambridge (at Collabora's office) until the next Wednesday. First business trip woohh. :)

Notes

[1] it's my first week of work

Atelier de développement GNOME ce mercredi

Guillaume Desmottes — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:07:00 +0100

Cet après-midi j'ai préparé quelque peu avec Fred l'atelier que nous donnerons mercredi intitulé très pompeusement Atelier de développement GNOME. L'idée est de réaliser une application permettant de récupérer de l'espace sur ses différents disques. Fred a déjà codé un squelette d'application sur lequel nous avons sélectionné une série de tâches que nous tenterons de faire ensemble mercredi soir.

Ça aura lieu très probablement à l'ULB^[1] à 19h. Tout le monde est le bienvenue mais un minimum de connaissance en programmation (Python) est demandé. N'oubliez pas votre portable, nous ne disposerons pas de machines sur place.

edit: plus que probablement, le local sera un des OF situé en bas du FOSCUP

Et en guise de trailer un petit screenshot :

Notes

[1] le local n'est pas encore définit, plus d'infos bientôt sur la liste du BxLUG

XChat-GNOME 0.16 released !

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:56:00 +0100

Yesterday we released XChat-GNOME 0.16, the "True love dies hard on jagged rocks" release^[1].

Moreover the traditional bugs and crashers fix (thanks to the new bugzilla), there are two improvements visible for the end user.

The bigger one is that now each plugin can define its own preference page. So, when you load it, a new item is added in the preferences dialog. As you can see, you can now configure the notification plugin to choose when you want the tray icon appear. It's currently the only plugin having a configuration page. Don't hesitate to implement one for existing plugin or suggest interesting options (but let's try to avoid configuration mess).

The second change is the new channels list dialog. A lot of people complained that the old one was too big and consume too much time at opening because of channels list retrieving. The new dialog doesn't automatically load channels, you have to expand a panel to do it. You can also directly type the name of the channel you want to join. I also added a gconf key^[2] if you want to disable the auto popup of the dialog when you join a server and don't have any channel in its autojoin list.

This release should also be the end of all our locale specific bugs. I write with Olivier (thanks to him) a little script to detect badly formatted strings and mark these as fuzzy. We hope it will fix the /me command bug. To avoid to reintroduce these bugs in future version, *please* translators be careful when you translate this kind of strings :

#: ../src/common/textevents.h:21
msgid "%C13*%O$t$1 $2%O"
msgstr "%C13*%O$t$1 $2%O"

A little mistake can make this command unusable in XChat-GNOME. We could argue than translators should not have to worry about this kind of crap. That's true but we're still very dependent on xchat's code and so can't change that easily.

Thanks to Joachim, we now have a begin of new documentation. Rocks!

As usual, RFE and bug report are welcomes. I'd like to insist about crashers. Please try this new version and report any crasher you found. We'd like to fix as many of them ASAP to limit flood mail after Feisty release.

Notes

[1] don't ask me about this release name, i'm not in the mad brain of David ;)

[2] /apps/xchat/channel_list/auto_popup

Dotclear 2

Guillaume Desmottes — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 01:32:00 +0100

Sur les conseils de Bigon j'ai migré mon blog vers DotClear 2. J'espère ainsi, à l'aide du plugin Akismet, en finir une bonne fois pour toute avec cette saloperie de spam.

La migration s'est passée très facilement, il m'a récupéré tous mes posts et commentaires (ça aurait été dommage de perdre mes 900 spams). Le seul problème est l'URL de mes flux RSS qui a changé. Donc, si quelqu'un connait un truc pour garder la compatibilité URL avec DotClear 1 cela m'intéresse fortement. Sans cela, je serai obliger d'emmerder les admins des différents planet sur lesquels je me trouve. Si vous savez comment faire le filtrage par langue sur le flux RSS cela m'intéresse aussi.

Le Père Noel est un rockeur

cassidy — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 20:47:32 +0000

Ce samedi j'ai assisté avec beaucoup de plaisirs au festival Le Père Noel est un rockeur. Principe simple : deux scènes, une affiche quasi exclusivement belge, d'excellents groupes qui viennent jouer bénévolement, un jouet en guise de ticket d'entrée, plein d'enfants qui auront le plaisir de se voir offrir un cadeau pour les fêtes.

Parmi la multitude d'artiste que j'ai eu la chance de voir, j'ai particulièrement apprécié : Minérale, The Tellers, Piano Club et Freaks; quatre groupes que je ne connaissais pour ainsi dire pas (hors single) et que je vous conseille chaudement. Et c'est avec tout autant de plaisir que j'ai revu Été 67, Montevideo, Showstar (le chanteur m'a laissé une impression moins antipathique qu'à la fête de la communauté française) et Sharko; tout aussi recommandable.

Ça fait vraiment plaisir de voir ce genre d'initiative. Comme quoi on peut faire d'excellents festivals avec des artistes de chez nous, dans un but non lucratif et sans Clear Channel.

GNOME Foundation, here i am

cassidy — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 19:02:06 +0000

Dear Guillaume Desmottes,

We are pleased to inform you that you are now part of the GNOME Foundation Membership.

Like some other Belgian guys, i'm now member of the GNOME foundation. :) It's really cool to know that your work is appreciated and become better involved into the community.

Thanks a lot to David and Vincent for their really kind mail and have supported my membership.

Automatically shutdown unused computers

cassidy — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 00:37:10 +0000

For my job at the university I was asked to shutdown unused computers during the night (let's save some energy!). So i wrote halt-if-no-one, a little Python script that checks if there isn't any user logged and if not halt the system.

Sources with Debian packaging stuffs are available as a bazaar branch on http://cass.no-ip.com/~cassidy/repos/halt-if-no-one/.

bzr get http://cass.no-ip.com/~cassidy/repos/halt-if-no-one/

By default the script is called each hour between 8 PM and 8 AM but you can easily change it by editing /etc/cron.d/halt-if-no-one