Le Weblog à Cassidy

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 !

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.

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

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.

I finally commited my work to implement plugin's preferences page architecture in XChat-GNOME. Plugins can now have their own preference page nicely integrated in the preferences dialog.

I also added a preference page in the notification plugin to configure the level of notification of the tray icon.

So, i you have nice idea about interesting stuff to configure for a specific plugin don't hesitate to fill a bug. :)

XChat-GNOME 0.14 “I dreamt I had to go to mars” is now available.

What is it ?

XChat-GNOME is a new frontend to the popular X-Chat IRC client which is designed with the user interface foremost in mind.

More informations can be found at: http://xchat-gnome.navi.cx/

What's changed ?

• Import Debian's manpage. Thanks to Marco Cabizza.
• D-Bus support is now merged in the core and not a plugin anymore.
• Add a option to enable logging of conversations
• HIG improvements
• A mountain of bug fixes.
• Updated translations.

Contributors to this release

David Trowbridge, Guillaume Desmottes, Christian Persch, Xavier Claessens

Where can I get it ?

• http://releases.navi.cx/xchat-gnome/xchat-gnome-0.14.tar.gz
• http://reases.navi.cx/xchat-gnome/xchat-gnome-0.14.tar.bz2

XChat-GNOME 0.13 “How do they even make Broccoflower?” is now available.

What is it ?

XChat-GNOME is a new frontend to the popular X-Chat IRC client which is designed with the user interface foremost in mind.

More informations can be found at: http://xchat-gnome.navi.cx/

What's changed ?

• Add the ability to auto-join keyed channels
• Add the red-line unread indicator
• Show a short message indicating how to get spell-checking working if libenchant is not installed
• Allow users to re-join a channel with the context menu of the navigation tree.
• Pop up the connect dialog on startup if there are no servers set to auto-connect.
• Pop up the channels list dialog on connect if there are no channels set to auto-join.
• Add GUI to give OP status
• Lots and lots of major bug fixes

Contributors to this release

David Trowbridge, Guillaume Desmottes, Christian Persch, Isak Savo, Daniel Drake

Where can I get it ?

• http://releases.navi.cx/xchat-gnome/xchat-gnome-0.13.tar.gz
• http://reases.navi.cx/xchat-gnome/xchat-gnome-0.13.tar.bz2

Ayant eu la bonne idée de suggérer à Vincent une mise à jour du trombinoscope de GNOME-FR, me voilà en charge de cette délicate mission.

Si vous êtes un habitué du canal IRC ou participez d'une façon ou d'une autre à GNOME-FR, n'hésitez pas et rejoignez le merveilleux trombi. Si vous êtes déjà dessus mais désirez mettre à jour vos informations (changement de nick, de photo, de nom (?!)) c'est également l'occasion.

Pour ce faire, envoyez moi un mail à cassidy@fosdem.org avec votre nom, prénom, nick et photo. Afin de minimiser les changements, j'enverrai le patch et les photos en une fois. Essayez donc de m'envoyer vos infos pour avant le 18 juin si possible.

A lot of XChat-GNOME users often complain than there is no way to perform a "graphical" WHOIS. I never liked the xchat-gtk way to do that: a context menu is really not a place where to put this kind of information. It would be more coherent and GNOME spirit to use a tooltip like in Gajim or Gaim. Unfortunately GTK+ doesn't support tooltip in GtkTreeView actually. But thanks to David Trowbridge^[1] we have now a SexyTreeView widget in libsexy. Its API is very sexy and with just one signal^[2] and one callback, we have a very nice result. Of course it's a temporary solution until GTK+ implement this properly.

So i use this wonderful widget and implemented last night the "graphical WHOIS" in the user list treeview. It's commited in XChat-GNOME SVN so don't hesitate to test it and give us feedback^[3]. There's still a little bug and so tooltips aren't displayed with users in the bottom of the treeview.

The next step will be to add this tooltip in the main conversation window (probably using a SexyTooltip widget) but it'll need a little bit more work.