Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Tybstar: I don't agree with the idea of rewriting EOG in Python. My main concern is that it will use way more memory than it does.

I quickly brought the discussion on #gnome-hackers, and some did argue that it will be still less that most panel applets, but no. That is not a good argument as panel applets have to be fixed, we all know that. The thing is that currently we can't run GNOME in 128MB without painfull swapping. This is not a Python specific problem, it is a runtime problem, it it applies to any interpreted or VM based language like Perl, Mono, Java...

Sure Python help you code faster, but it might not help having GNOME use less resource, hardware resources are not cheap.

That said, I'm not the maintainer, but I just wanted to give my opinion for what it is worth.

While reading Steven Garrity weblogs, I found a post about some cool software being developed for Linux: Roadster. Nothing really innovating as it is just a Free Software version of existing mapping software, but AFAIK it is the first Free Software of that kind. The only issue is that it only covers the USA, because they use the freely available Census Bureau datafiles. Anyone know about any other set of freely available map files ?

I promise, this is the last batch of picture from GUADEC 6:

• Stuttgart day 4
• GUADEC 6 day 3

Pictures taken at the GUADEC, small selection with the mandatory Robert M Love picture :

• Gallery

Why do I prefer Firefox in GNOME ?

Not because of the "hype". Just because of bug 70575 and bug 153792 that both Galeon and Epiphany suffer from. Actually it is a Gtk+ "bug".

The other is that Epiphany bookmarks stuff I didn't ask, and given the limited bookmark management, it is annoying.

But on the laptop I still stick to Epiphany because I have passwords stored in it...

This is a request for comments for bug 306646.

gnome-volume-manager has a capplet to allow setting actions for removable medias insertion. That's fine. But it include settings for digital cameras. While it make sens to have, it does not make to have it in a capplet called "Removable Drives and Media" as it is confusing for the user. How many times people wanted to use gphoto2 to access pictures on a USB Mass Storage camera ? So you get it.

So this bug is about splitting up the capplet to have one for digital cameras, and one for the removable medias. I even provide a patch. But comments in the bug tend to make me believe that my patch stay as is as there are plans to completely revamp the applet to be more generic.

Granted. What will happen when you'll need option for Music Players and other devices ? More applets ? Then yes, there is a need to redesign that. But in the mean time, GNOME 2.12 feature freeze is soon, and unless this redesign in done (CVS shows nothing currently), my patch is the only way to get an improvement of UI. Or maybe I'm just wrong and what I did is worse, UI-wise.

I think it will be the last batch for today. GUADEC day 2, with Mark Shuttleworth keynote and jdub explaining project ToPaZ, 10x10.

• GUADEC 6, day 2

More galleries from the GUADEC trip:

• Stuttgart, Day 2
• GUADEC, Day 1

Some more teasing:

I managed to start sorting the 533 I took at GUADEC 2005. I decided to not try to suck as usual, since I still haven't put all the GUADEC 2004 pictures from last year.

Here are the first 2 sets:

• Stuttgart day 1
• Nokia party

And now some teasing:

Today, I implemented bug 306646: splitting the gnome-volume-properties applet into 2 applets to have one for digital cameras, because digital cameras are NOT removable storage, at least from a user point of view.

There is no bounty for it, but I filed the bug. It is step #1 towards making life better.

Murray, I did put my slides online.

The slides from my talk at GUADEC are online. PDF (1.9MB) and sxi (4.1MB)

And to stop any gossip, I didn't use AbiWord this time, but OpenOffice, because:

• AbiWord is not really suited to make slides as it is a word processor
• perhaps I should try something else to see what should be put in AbiPresent or whatever its name end up to be
• I was almost guaranteed to be able to use someone else laptop for the talk, thanks to seb128 from Ubuntu in that case

Maybe next time I'll try KPresenter.

Google is offering GNOME bounties. That's cool because it is actually issues I have actually run into:

• GNOME login time
• Evolution memory usage

USD$4500 is not a small amount. But I'm not yet elligible as I suspect it might be considered as paid work...

I left Germany this morning with the Orient Express (no crime has been committed this time). Definitely GUADEC 6 was a great one. jdub 10x10 talk was awesome.

Day 3, my talk went smoothly but I had to borrow a laptop because mine still does not work with 2 screen. I'll report a bug to Ubuntu as soon as I get back home, and post the file slides ASAP. The OpenOffice problem I had has been solved by upgrading to the latest in Breezy.

I'll talk more about everything later.