The Evil Blog

Ok. I admit it. I have been updating my PGO-feed far too many times in the hope that Vincent or Lucas posted some news about their mysterious Gnome3-document (or maybe I am not allowed to say Gnome 3?).

So to avenge this I’ll do a bit of secrecy and foggy clue dropping myself…

I am indeed working on something big. I am not gonna tell you what it is. And in fact if the stars align in a certain way you will never have to hear about it. So, to the foggy clues

• It is way cool
• Crazy cool features
• Involves a lot of coding that I have very little spare time to do
• Does not involve any “rewrite from scratch” of anything (yet)
• Very long term goal
• Announced at the very earliest in 6 months, probably later, if ever
• A yellow submarine stranded on an empty beach
• Gnome-related
• Cases upon cases of beer
• You may be able to gather enough information around the dusty corners of the web to figure out what I am up to. At least if you have crazy Matrix-like skills and a lot of spare time
• The gauntlet have been thrown, and I’ve picked it up
• Charged by a hither to unknown combination of a micro wave oven and baby formula
• Will involve some cool patches targeting upstream libs
• Profit! Insane profit!
• Xesam is part of the greater puzzle

(I had to drop a few red herrings in there to make it trickier for all you wise-guys)

I just released Xesam GLib 0.3.0 onto the wild. You can grab xesam-glib here.

News in this release:

• The far biggest item to hit xesam-glib has been the query handling API. It contains tools to parse queries and user search strings as well as a generic QueryBuilder interface you can plug in to convert Xesam queries to what ever you like (SQL, Lucene, SPARQL, GObjects)
• A security issue related in XesamGSearch (see next point)
• Take care to treat all interfacing with a XesamGSearcher as dealing with an untrusted source. Search engine hackers are notoriously evil people, we all know that ;-P

Tarball: xesam-glib-0.3.0.tar.gz

API docs: documentation for xesam-glib-0.3.0

The Winners

The are a handful winners to my latest pop quiz. The correct answer was “Nice weather today”. As many of you knew Denmark is not exactly renowned for its good weather, hence “Nice weather today” not exactly being a regular expression. The last item (the expression/extortion one) was just chugged in the bucket to have something that looked like what programmers normally perceive as a regular expression.

Messages, Micro Blogging, Yarrr!

I think I must admit that I failed my micro blogging test. Even though I honestly tried to make it easy for myself it just really did catch on to me (I will keep trying though). I think that I just have too many communication channels to administer already. Perhaps a wicked alliance of Empathy, Soylent, and Xesam can be used to revive the  ☠ [Yarrr!] project?

Which of the following is not a regular expression?

• Super!
• That was odd..?
• Nice weather today
• How are you doing?
• Regular ex(press|tort)ion

As I’ve mentioned I am honestly trying to jump on the micro blogging band wagon, by trying out Twitter and Jaiku. Some may recall that I wrote a Twitter module for deskbar a little while back. This is of course not fair for Jaiku. So here, grab yourself a juicy Jaiku module for deskbar (no dependencies). Just drag the link onto your deskbar applet module list to install it (found in the preferences).

I added a small fix to the deskbar Twitter module as well, so if you had troubles with the last one this might work now. You can install it the same way as the Jaiku module.

Obligatory screenie:

Ok here is my vision for Gnome 3. Note that it is not a finished proposal due to my still crazily hectic home life. But release early release unfinished as they say.

I purposely left out some details because I felt them irrelevant at this point (and they would probably get us discussing the wrong things).

I really hope we can keep the momentum in this discussion.

I promised to post my “solution” yesterday, but things have been crazily hectic at home. Amidst the chaos I am trying to write a larger peace on this, so please hang in there If things calm down here maybe tomorrow. Peace.

I’ve been following the “Decadence Thread” on Planet Gnome with great interest. It all started with Andy Wingo’s blog post “gnome in the age of decadence”.

The blog posts are getting harder to track so for my own and hopefully other’s interest I’ve written down a resumé of what has been said so far. Note that the resumes are totally my own perception of the individual blog posts and to pay respect to this discussion you should really read the originals.

Here, newest at the top, earlier at the bottom.

• Luis Villa - (new) Has talked about this subject before and drops a handful still-relevant links to his old posts.
• Havoc Pennington - (new) By sticking to the desktop metaphor we will not innovate or gain significant amounts of new users. We must know the audience which we try to address. Do not look at old Gnome 2.0 heroes for inspiration or confirmation.
• Rodney Dawes - Thinks that we should not trap our (and potential user’s) minds into a “Desktop Metaphor”, but focus on empowering users.
• Richard Hughes - Thinks that it is nonsensical to argue that we need a Gnome 3.0 to develop big new features. He emphasizes that people “use GNOME to actually do things”, not to look at wiffy effects. We should not develop fancy effects just because we can.
• Jono Bacon - His own words “predictable and reliable, but has ceased to be exciting and innovative”. Points out there are a lot of people hashing out visions and new ideas, but very few backing that up with real code. Gnome 2.0 owes a lot to our Rock-Star Coders and we need buy-in from them for anything to take off. A way to get something going was to put a select handful of our finest masterminds into a room, and when the white smoke emerges we have a battle plan.
• Thomas Thurman - Does not want change for the sake of change. Does not like cold meals because of broken applications and would like apps to asymptotically approach perfection.
• Alberto Ruiz - Wants closer integration with the OS and not just let Gnome sit on top of it. Instead of us adapting to each and every OS, Gnome should supply its own interfaces for integration, taking PackageKit as a good example here.
• LinuxHater - (new, warning explicit content ) Thinks that all Gnome developers are a bunch of wankers. There are tons of things left to do for Gnome, like tackling all the enterprise features of the desktop.
• Johannes Schmid - Thinks that it is the right time to start thinking about our next-gen desktop. We should focus more on writing code instead of just talking about visions. Effects should enhance user interaction, not just be flashy.
• Andy Wingo - Chimes back in with some concrete ideas (his initial post did not have any “solutions”). Mentions the possibility of a Gnome “skunkworks” where experimentation is encouraged. Talks about enhanced user interaction, use of GL, and talks about Pyro.
• Owen Williams - (new) (Only syndicated on Planet OLPC) Has a three point line-up of why we need to break API and ABI of gtk+ and argues for a Gnome sandbox project.
• Lucas Rocha - Belives that we reached the original goal for Gnome - a desktop that just works. Acknowledges that Gnome has some problems. Writes up a list of all the things we have achieved in the Gnome community and project as a whole.
• Christian Schaller - Points out that there have been a few whole hearted attempts at writing the code to implement some orignal ideas for a next-gen desktop. The current stable iterative process has given us great buy-in from distros and users.
• Calum Benson - Tends to agree with Andy. While Clutter is cool it will not solve our problem with “vague lack of coherence and integration on some parts of our desktop”.

Me? My opinion about this matter is that Gnome has indeed painted it self into a corner in some way. In the office we usually refer to Gnome colloquially as “The Enterprise Desktop” (a term I believe to be coined by the internet’s Luis Villa). It is very mature and stable, and indeed ready for the enterprise. But it is also seems to be mature and stable in a way that was more fitting several years back.

It is getting increasingly hard to get new stuff into Gnome, and when someone approaches with something that is slightly controversial huge flamewars erupt. Consider Tracker and Empathy on the desktop-devel list and the recent “incident” on the gtk-devel list.

On one side we have distros with very high bars for stability, and the others we have a very grumpy but vocal minority of users and developers who like to bash on anything unknown. Tight spot.

On top of technical problems with outdated semi-deprecated libs, and missing core funtionality, we also have a community issue. Sure “Gnome is people” and we have a rocking community and all that, but I am also seeing growing internal tensions and frustrations turning into poison, more and more often. I, for one, have closed my laptop lid with a bad feeling too many times.

Solutions?

I really have a lot on my heart about this issue, but I am too tired to write down the details for now. I will write it up tomorrow. To drop a clue of my intentions I don’t care much about the visual or interaction parts of a renewed platform, more about making a modern, extensible, maintainable, and cohesive platform (buzzword count alarm goes off). Doing all sorts of fancy visual tricks should be a lot easier when we have a solid platform to do it on, if it is properly extensible we wouldn’t have to break anything in the process. Anyway, I already posted some related thoughts a while ago.

UPDATE 1: I added Havoc Pennington’s and Owen Williams’ replies to the list. Somehow Havoc’s post did not show up in Liferea. I wonder how many PGO posts I’ve missed this way. Owen is interesting because he is not syndicated on PGO.

UPDATE 2: Added Luis Villa.

UPDATE 3: Add LinuxHater

There are three simple questions that one should always ask one self when writing emails. Especially when writing mails to (public) mailing lists. Most importantly:

Would I say this to a person face to face?

And when writing to public mailing lists or a group of people:

Would I say this to a stranger?

Would I say this in public?

If the answer is no to any one of the questions, then don’t write that mail, or at the very least change it so that you can answer yes on all questions above.

These points does (obviously) not apply to blog comments. You are supposed to be loathful and derogatory in those. Feel free to fill the comments with obnoxious ranting

A good while ago Phil Wilson wrote a very simple deskbar-applet backend to post updates to Twitter. I always thought it was a very cool idea, and now that I have jumped on the micro-blogging-band-wagon, even more cool.

Sadly it does not work in the new Deskbar API. So what will a hacker do? I was already in desparate needd for some quick bang-for-the-buck because hacking on xesam-glib can sometimes feel like working in an ivory tower (listen to the monkey whine…).

Without further ado

Of course if works with gnome keyring integration, async posting, and all that.

The deskbar twitter handler can be downloaded here

I will massage it a bit and submit it to deskbar trunk if it is deemed worthy. It contains a few tricks that might be handy for other deskbar backends too. Namely a generic urllib.URLopener that integrates with gnome keyring (thanks Sebastian Rittau!) and has an async open() variant that integrates with a GMainLoop.