Category Archives: GNOME

“Going to California”

Published February 26, 2008 / by mario

Yep… I know that this is a Led Zeppelin song, from Led Zeppelin IV album to be exact. And why not? BTW A great song, a great 70’s rock band (one of my favourite ones) an a great album… so what are you waiting for? Go listening Led Zeppelin for hours right after reading this post! :-)

However, I’m afraid this post is not about the same topics of that Led Zeppelin song, but also about ‘going to California’ though…

As you could read during the last weeks in our planet igalia, the last version of Vagalume (0.5.1) was out on February 15th, including some new features and UI improvements that tried to make it a better and more good-looking application. At first, it seemed that the new icons bundled with Vagalume 0.5 didn’t rock too much :-), but then Berto ran a survey to be sure about what the people thought about them, and then changed that for the release 0.5.1 based on the overwhelming results.

And then, just three days after publishing the last 0.5.1 release, Berto found out that Vagalume was in the list of finalists for the ‘mobile rules’ competition!! Well, I think that he would agree with me if I say that we were so surprised and, of course, so glad with the good new when we found it out.

So, right after knowing that the ‘mobile rules’ organization team would invite two people to attend to the awards ceremony, which will take place in San Jose (California) on March 19th, we were thinking here at Igalia who could be the companion for Berto‘s trip… and we finally decided that I would go with him.

And what can I say… I’m really happy to know I’m going there with him, not just for the trip, of course, but for all what it means for Vagalume, for Igalia, for us… although I can’t lie either: the trip looks very interesting too :-).

I hope we have the chance to visit some interesting places round there, take some photos and… why not? to have a lot of fun there besides to attending to the awards ceremony, which I’m sure is going to be very interesting, regardless of Vagalume finally wins a prize or not. After all, being a finalist is already a very nice kind of gratitude, isn’t it?

So, see you then in California!

The new status bar plugin for Vagalume

Published January 31, 2008 / by mario / 1 Comment on The new status bar plugin for Vagalume

Hi all,

It has been a long time since my last post (April 15th, 2007), so I think that it’s time to write something again… and I can’t think of a better chance to do it that talking about this… :-)

As many of you could know, last November 1st my mate Berto released the first version of his Gnome/Maemo Last.fm (codenamed “Vagalume 0.1”), which started being just a “three-button application” and evolved to be a nice application to listen your favorite custom radio stations, providing lots of the typical features that a Last.fm user would expect.

So, besides to all the new features Berto has been adding everyday, and besides to the nice new UI enhancements Felipe has been working on (which will be out with release 0.5)… I also wished to contribute to Vagalume with a new component: a status bar plugin for the Maemo platform.

And taking into account Berto has just committed my patch yesterday (revision 86 of SVN trunk [*]), I thought of it could be a good moment to talk about the new plugin itself, so here it goes…

The new status bar plugin would allow Vagalume users to control some features of the application from the status bar:

Check out basic info about the song being played: title / artist / album.
Play / Stop / Skip songs.
Love and Ban songs
Bring Vagalume main window to the front.
Close Vagalume.

And that’s all. As you can see there are only a couple of commands available to be executed from the plugin, but we thought it would be the right way not to overcharge it too much with “advanced” features, and just to focus it to provide only basic actions. After all, it was designed to be an small plugin, wasn’t it?

At last, just to point out communication is currently carried out by specific Dbus messages between Vagalume and the plugin, although, in the future, this could change into one of the following ways:

Change the Dbus methods (with specific destination set: Vagalume main app or the plugin) into broadcast signals, so any application in the platform could interact with Vagalume in the same way the plugin does.
…or maybe supporting MPRIS standard interface could be a better way to allow integration between Vagalume any other application (Thanks for your suggestion, Juan).

Of course there are more improvements planned for the near future of the plugin, such as:

Adding support for OS2006 and OS2007 in maemo platforms (now, the plugin only works with OS2008).
Adding a new dock plugin supporting freedesktop.org specs, to allow desktop users to have a similar plugin.
Adding a new action to allow hiding the Vagalume main app so it’s not shown in the “tasks list panel” (desktop), or in the “task navigator” (Maemo).
… any suggestions? ;-)

So, I think that’s all so far. Now I just hope Vagalume users enjoy this plugin as much as I enjoyed developing it (and using it, of course). IMHO, I think it’s a nice way to “control” basic actions of Vagalume from the status bar, without having to open the main window when you’re running another application (the web browser or talking with the IM application, for instance), and just by using the drop down panel by clicking in the icon.

But of course, this is my (personal) opinion, so please post any comment you want about this. They will be highly appreciated!

So, let’s wait for the 0.5 release to see what people think about the new version of Vagalume, I have the feeling it’s going to rock! ;-)

In the meanwhile, here you are a example of the status bar plugin being usen while surfing the web:

Stay tuned, it’s coming soon!

[*] :: To checkout the code from SVN trunk:

svn co https://garage.maemo.org/svn/vagalume/trunk

Live report from DudesConf (3 a.m. in the morning)

Published April 15, 2007 / by mario / 4 Comments on Live report from DudesConf (3 a.m. in the morning)

Today was a nice day here in the DudesConf 07, full of interesting talks about debian and meeting new (and not so new) people from differents parts of the world who came just because one main reason: talk about the debian distro, its current state and about several related things, in general terms. (more info at http://www.dudesconf.org).

At first I thought I couldn’t attend this interesting event, but at last I could and I’m happy to do so, because it was an interesting day in which, even though I wasn’t able to pay as much attention as I wished, I learned several new things and met new people that could be difficult in other way apart from this one. And we even had a GPG signing party in which we shared our fingerprints and get our gpg keys signed by each other.

But, apart from the main reason of this conference, we had some interesting experiences after dinner, leaded by a “queimada”, and a session of playing “Frets On Fire” videogame which was a really fun and funny situation: everyone staring at someone who played an “electric guitar” with a keyboard while something like a guitar-karaoke was reproduced in the projector used for the talks.

Here you are some photos of this last “experience”:

Update [21:32]: I’ve added another photo of some igalians (Chema, Calvaris, Berto, Javi and me) with Steve Langasek, one of the Debian etch release managers:

See you next time guys!

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) working perfectly

Published March 28, 2007 / by mario / 1 Comment on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) working perfectly

Last sunday, going back home after three days of several interesting speechs at the Guademy, I’ve decided to upgrade my ubuntu distribution in my laptop from the 6.10 version (name-coded “Edgy Eft”) to the new beta released version 7.04 (name-coded “Feisty Fawn”) and I have to say that everything is working pretty well: I had no problems upgrading (not even one), my Ati graphics card works with 3D acceleration, and I can enjoy the new Gnome 2.18 desktop… and the new baobab ringschart developed by Igalia, which is included by default in Gnome in the “Disk usage analyzer” application (formerly known as “baobab”).

The only “problem” I’ve found out up to date is that some applications are not translated yet, but that’s a minor problem that will be probably fixed in not much time… so don’t worry and make a dist-upgrade to your cutting-edge distribution or wait a month for the release of the stable version if you don’t want to live “in the limit” ;-)

By the way, for all those fans (like me and berto) of the Last.fm client and the packages for debian and ubuntu which are
in the berto’s personal web, I have to say that the .deb for Ubuntu edgy is perfectly working on Feisty, so don’t worry… you’re still able to listen berto’s radio after upgrading your system!

Is it Everquest, is it WoW, is it Lineage? No! It’s just Gnome!

Published August 11, 2006 / by mario

I don’t like too much people writting posts about other people’s posts, but I think this time it’s mandatory to do it :D… since the idea of Davyd about writting an applet which turns Gnome into an MMORPG game looked so funny to me.

Just take a look into this post from Davyd’s blog and judge it by yourself.
—
– Everquest
– World of warcraft (WoW)
– Lineage

The new baobab widget

Published July 19, 2006 / by mario

As many of you (“igalians”) already know, some time ago we[*] started working in the development of a new widget for a gnome application called baobab. The main motivation for us to work on this task was being able to get a better graphical view of the disk space usage information retrieved by the original baobab program, in a similar way as done by the KDE’s filelight application. This KDE app shows such that disk usage as a beautiful ringchart (which offers a very good idea about the size of scanned dirs), instead of just using a treeview with one scanned dir by row, which is not so visually impressive as in the filelight’s ringchart.

However, you could notice that baobab already has got a graphical representation (apart from the treeview), which shows the disk usage as a colored treemap as described on this web page from the University of Maryland. I’d like to say here that this is a very good visual representation for the disk usage too, but I think that is not so “practical” and understandable as the ringchart one… and that’s why we began to work in this issue.

Nowadays, we’ve currently developed an alpha version for this new widget and have sent source code and an screenshot to baobab’s main developers to see what they think about it. As a result, since first feedbacks seemed to be good enough for us, we expect this contrib could be added to the original baobab in a near future :) if we keep ourselves working in it.

Meanwhile, you can take a look into our work by watching the following screenshot:

[*] :: Alex, Miguel, A.Piñeiro, Henrique and I.

Gaim stores passwords in plain text

Published June 27, 2006 / by mario / 3 Comments on Gaim stores passwords in plain text

Last afternoon I spent some time in the Lfcia talking to Miriam, and she told me about Gaim storing passwords in plain text. I had no idea of this before she told me, and that’s why, as soon as I was warned about, I took a look into my ~/.gaim directory and I realized how my password was really stored in the accounts.xml text file.

The reason for my password to be there was that I’d checked the typical “Remember my password” checkbox when adding my IM accounts to gaim, with the only purpose of not being annoyed each time I login into my accounts. Somebody could say at this point that the only real security would be not storing passwords at all (and this is true, of course), but I think that if a program asks you for doing something like that, you should be able to trust it about how your password is going to be saved at disk (hopefully, in a secure way).

After thinking for a while, I googled a bit looking for information about this and to see if there’s a plugin, a patch or something similar to fix this situation… and here is the final result of my search:

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/plaintextpasswords.php.

In this URL, gaim developers tell that gaim does not now and is not likely to encrypt the passwords in the accounts.xml file, nor is it likely to be encrypted in a future release. “Hard declarations!”, I thought ;)… but, after all, I think their arguments are not so bad, except that they are not taking into account a common situation when using gaim that makes unsafe storing passwords in the accounts.xml file (even when that file is only readable by its owner): what about using gaim on a computer whose superuser is not you? That superuser could read your accounts.xml file even when nobody but you couldn’t, and that’s not seem to be “pretty good privacy” :).

I know that gaim developers would say that I shouldn’t use this feature in such those environments, but this means assuming gaim users know what’s really happening when saving passwords, and this is not always true (just look at me :P). At least, I think showing an informative message warning the user about how his/her password is going to be stored could be a good thing in order to avoid this kind of surprises.

What do you think about?

mariospr.org

Ramblings from the dark side of the moon