2 July 2009


Andrea Cimitan
(Cimi)

Jolicloud preview

Today I got an invitation for Jolicloud, I was really excited about that project and I’m really happy for this opportunity to test it.

Jolicloud is not the first Linux distribution I have installed on my Samsung NC10… I’ve tested also Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic, Fedora, Arch Linux and Moblin (latest snapshot).

Which is the technology behind Jolicloud?

Basically Jolicloud is a derivate of Ubuntu Netbook Remix with wide Prism usage across the desktop environment: the majority of “applications” you have seen in the screenshots are small packages which provide an independent Prism session on a specific website: for example, if you install the twitter application you will get a new icon inside your application list, that icon will start a new fullscreen Prism session for twitter.com.
Common desktop applications are also included, like Firefox or VLC, but it is highly focused on web services.

Installation

It is just like Ubuntu, nothing more/nothing less (you are in the Jolicloud desktop, but the installer is the same used by Ubuntu).

First Run

As said, the “core” is an Ubuntu Netbook Remix, so we firstly see an Usplash booting sequence (nice and simple theme)…

Followed by the GDM session (simple and nice theme too)…

After the login procedure the desktop environment starts. It’s a GNOME desktop with the Netbook Remix session: the custom panel on top shows the title of the current application in the middle, a list of the running application on its left and the status icons on its right. In the center of the screen Jolicloud asks to login on the website and then it opens the default screen you might have already seen (the dashboard shown in the screenshots is nothing more than a Prism session running http://my.jolicloud.com).

Jolicloud is now ready.

The home screen, dashboard, how do you call it :)

As said, the main screen is a Prism session (so a website, no Clutter, no Cairo, no Gtk+…) with useful links to your applications and your settings. It is great to see how it is simple to use, really: installing and removing applications is a matter of a click, browsing and viewing the catalog of applications is very easy. For everyone. I like it.

Running applications

The separated fullscreen Prism sessions work surprisingly well… In the reality you’re running a web browser, but they give you the feeling that they are just like normal applications: if you run gmail, twitter, facebook (etc etc) you have their icons in your taskbar and you switch between them like they were a real application.

It’s the web now the protagonist of your netbook because you are actually using each web 2.0 service as an individual application: something that has been imagined for years by almost every company (Microsoft too) realized in Jolicloud really well.

A desktop replacement?

This distribution is absolutely amazing to surf the web when you’re on a train, in the university, when you just want your social websites up and running, when you want to update all your services and work with your documents.
But just like Moblin, in my opinion it is not meant to replace your Ubuntu… it will be likely added to your grub in a small partition dedicated to your social virtual space. And that is a good thing… when you need you have a quick access to the web. Great!

Comparison with Moblin

They are two completely different projects, even if they share the same love for the web.
Moblin is like a smart interface for your netbook providing a mix of useful applications with incredible tecnologies behind (KMS, fastboot, Clutter…) optimized for your netbook, with Jolicloud the web becomes your operating system (it provides the applications) trough an efficent environment for your small laptop.
I’m sure they will live together on my hard disk soon :)

2 July 2009, 00:09

28 June 2009


Andrea Cimitan
(Cimi)

Get a dramatic 2D graphics boost on your netbook

After having tried thousands of different drivers, kernel versions, patches etc etc… I’ve finally found a combination that made me excited (wohoo!).

I own a Samsung NC10 with an Intel Atom N270 and an Intel GMA 950 (i945). I’m running both Arch Linux (i686) and Ubuntu jaunty (lpia).

Few notes:

  • This how to should work with any netbook, since they share almost the same hardware.
  • I haven’t used a benchmark, but applications (Firefox, Gnome Do’s Docky, KDE 4 and more), and the difference is so visible that it doesn’t require a benchmark.
  • I don’t know if it depends on the lpia architecture (I’m running Ubuntu lpia) or some patches applied to the drivers, but Ubuntu’s 2D graphics are a little bit faster than my Arch Linux installation with kernel 2.6.30 and drivers 2.7.1 (same versions).
  • I had the boost in both Arch Linux and Ubuntu, though Ubuntu is faster.
  • I’ve compared the 2D graphics with Moblin too, but its newer drivers using UXA are noticeably slower (Firefox/Gecko is incredibly slow when scrolling heavy webpages like facebook or my custom gmail).
  • Newer Intel drivers (2.7.99.x and similar) support only UXA acceleration, and they perform a little bit slower than 2.7.1 without greedy migration heuristic (unfortunately that means a big difference). Greedy migration heuristic does not work with UXA.
  • With this new combination, 2D graphics are really close to my Windows XP installation (Firefox scrolling).

Instructions (Ubuntu lpia combination, adjust the steps to your distro):

  1. Install kernel 2.6.30 from this ppa (even if it has the “nc10″ tag, it doesn’t have custom patches and should work with any netbook).
  2. Upgrade your Xorg Intel drivers with the 2.7.1 version on the same ppa.
  3. Enable greedy migration heuristic creating an empty /etx/X11/xorg.conf with those lines:

    Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel"
    Driver "intel"
    Option "AccelMethod" "exa"
    Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
    EndSection

  4. Optional: install client-side-windows Gtk+ branch (helps Gtk+ scrolling and resize).

I really hope you will get the same boost I had, and I’m looking forward to newer Intel drivers: it is just question of time… the team rewrote both xorg driver and the DRM code to ensure a great future to these video cards, and the performance drop is physiological to the transition… I suspect UXA will achieve those performance in less than a year…

28 June 2009, 11:10

27 June 2009


Stefano Canepa
(sc)

La sicurezza dei sistemi informativi

Quando un informatico parla di sicurezza con i suoi colleghi finisce sempre per essere tacciato, quando va bene, di essere un paranoico, che in ufficio non c’è nulla da nascondere, ma mi aspettavo che sui PC dei palazzi di giustizia ci fosse un po’ più di sicurezza poi ho letto questo articolo sul Corrire della Sera: E Pippo entrava nei computer dei pm e mi sono cascate le braccia.

Tag Technorati:

27 June 2009, 09:54

26 June 2009


Ulisse Perusin
(ulisse)

Requiem


È morto uno strano tipo: uno con delle strane abitudini sessuali; uno a cui piaceva cantare; uno pieno di quattrini a cui piaceva evadere il fisco; uno per cui i concetti di “nero” ed “abbronzato” erano abbastanza confusi; uno che faceva ampio uso di cerone per mascherare il reale stato della sua pelle.

Purtroppo era quello sbagliato. Addio Michael.

26 June 2009, 14:14

25 June 2009


Luca Ferretti

Spore

Per giorni, settimane, mesi e anni ho letto e riletto e ririletto e ririletto ancora che GTK+ facevano schifo perché non si potevano fare dei temi fichi con quel sistema di theming assurdo, che Qt¹ era decenni se non secoli avanti, che questo e che quello.

Oggi, 25 giugno 2009, la situazione non è cambiata. Altrimenti ne avreste già letto notizia su arstechnica. Altrimenti vorrebbe dire che stamattina sono state rilasciate le GTK+ 3.2 (o magari le 3.1, dai, siamo ottimisti) e che io sono finito in un warp temporale degno di Donnie Darko.

Però, anche se in modo embrionale e un po' scollegato, oggi è finalmente giunto il giorno della riscossa e della conferma delle loro parole per tutti i delatori e detrattori di cui sopra. Per giorni, settimane, mesi e anni avete detto che se le GTK+ avessero avuto un sistema di theming moderno e magari basato su qualcosa tipo CSS, allora sì che si sarebbero prodotte cose belle, cose accattivanti, cose stilose, ma soprattutto prodotte in fretta e gran quantità.

Oggi² tutti voi criticoni espertoni³ potete cominciare a mostrare a noi poveri mortali la via per la magnificenza visiva: come già cripticamente anticipato, Empathy 2.27.3 supporta i temi di Adium, il formato di tali temi è basato su CSS ed è chiaramente descritto qui.

Per cui, serenamente, pacatamente, o per GNOME 2.28.0 vediamo di far uscire fuori almeno 3 nuovi temi per Empathy, oppure siete solo chiacchiere e distintivo, chiacchiere e distintivo, chiacchiere e distintivo.

Update (ovvero dimenticanze)
  • potete usare un comodo PPA per provare Empathy 2.27 in Ubuntu 9.04 (PPA fatto da persone serie, ovvero gli stessi sviluppatori di Empathy)
  • in alto i vostri cuori: Empathy 2.27.3 riesce a traferire perfettamente file verso Pidgin (controcorrente non abbiamo ancora provato)
[1] da pronunciarsi rigorosamente "chiuuutii"
[2] beh, non proprio oggi, ma fino ad oggi non ho avuto tempo di scrivere....
[3] capitolo 7 (espertologia), legge di Fitz-Gibbon

25 June 2009, 20:23

21 June 2009


Luca Bruno
(Lethalman)

The less consuming radio player ever

Hello,
multimedia always killed desktop performance, also audio with all such effect-based players out there. I've been using deezer for a long time, but sometimes I'm tired to see my desktop lagging.
I don't need that, I need random music from internet while I'm either programming or studying, and my computer has only 512mb ram and 2.4ghz amd64 (onLY??? yes nowadays it's a little amount).

Let's see what we can do using gst-launch:

while [ 1 ]; do wget -q -O - http://66.250.45.112:80/hard.ogg|gst-launch fdsrc fd=0 ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! alsasink; done

The URL above is a hard rock station :) The while ensures re-connection. I think performances are great, 6% cpu and 2% ram.

But there's yet a bettere solution (see comments):

mplayer http://66.250.45.112:80/hard.ogg

21 June 2009, 07:59

20 June 2009


Stefano Canepa
(sc)

ES: Development centre Madrid motivates SMEs to use open source — Open Source Observatory

ES: Development centre Madrid motivates SMEs to use open source — Open Source Observatory.

20 June 2009, 20:22


Ulisse Perusin
(ulisse)

Occhi abbottonati


coraline-e-la-porta-magica

Andate a vedere Coraline e la Porta Magica, è semplicemente delizioso! :)

Di Henry Selick, lo stesso regista del capolavoro che è Nightmare before Christmas, condivide con quest’ultimo la tecnica dello stop-motion, mettendoci però nel mezzo una discreta evoluzione dei mezzi tecnici, che danno all’immagine una fluidità ed una stabilità tali da far pensare al 3D.

20 June 2009, 18:39

18 June 2009


Marco Barisione
(barisione)

Parsing names

In the last weeks I have been asked several times to modify some components I’m working on to add the ability to split a full name in its components (first name, family name, etc.).
It looks like most people have great expectations about this working correctly but they get annoyed when it fails, and you can be sure it will fail. It will fail because it’s impossible to parse a name correctly, for instance:

Full name First Middle Last
Barack Hussein Obama Barack Hussein Obama
Pier Silvio Berlusconi Pier Silvio Berlusconi
José Rodríguez Zapatero José Rodríguez Zapatero

How can you do this automatically?

This becomes particularly silly if you cannot be sure that the string you are going to parse is actually a full name, for instance don’t try to parse a chat nickname. It’s true that gmail/gtalk uses your full name by default, but this is only a default and it’s true only for gmail.

To cut a long story short, please please please don’t try to parse names. You can see by yourself how hard it is, even if I’m just considering western-style names.
If you still don’t trust me here’s a quote from e-name-western.c, i.e. the file that does name parsing in libebook :):

* <Nat> Jamie, do you know anything about name parsing?
* <jwz> Are you going down that rat hole? Bring a flashlight.

On a side note when you are trying to understand why some code is broken you can find some funny commits, like the great EDS purge

Update: I found this “serious” bug in e_name_western_parse :D.

18 June 2009, 09:22

15 June 2009


Luca Ferretti

Gioia e Rivoluzione¹

Di cose da dire/fare/baciare/lettera/testamento ne avrei tante, ma tante, ma tante. Anche di cose di cui non parlare ma solo contemplare, come una icona ortodossa. Però sono affari che non vi riguardano :-P

Oggi non sono qui per criticare Crasso, ma per schernirlo... No, scusate, mi dicono dalla regia che non è possibile, che La Repubblica (nel senso del giornale) non ha ancora eseguito il solito trasferimento di fondi sul mio personale conto corrente alle Cayman per gettare la consueta settimanale dose di fango. Vabbè, parliamo di altro.

Vi va di partecipare con me ad una class action? Non proprio una class action, ma qualcosa di molto simile. I fatti sono i seguenti: è stato eseguito questo commit ormai da 7 ore e nessuno, ripeto nessuno, si è ancora premurato di rendere disponibili le icone necessarie a rendere il nostro amato ambiente grafico aggiornato e bleeding edge. Se anche voi come me trovate questa situazione insostenibile, scrivete una email di sdegno al vostro pusher di icone in stile Tango preferito (suggerimenti: Jakub Steiner, Andreas Nilsson, Lapo Calamandrei e Ulisse Perusin) oppure inondate il canale IRC #gnome-chat.

Nel caso gesti così estremistici non facciano per voi, almeno forniteci un minimo di riscontro. Come preferite che siano disegnate tale icone? Tenendo conto che verranno usate in ogni posto che sia GIO-enabled² preferite che siano:
  1. cartelle con sopra disegnato un simbolo fluttuante (a questa dovete rispondere "NO", che è la peggiore scelta) tipo i simboli che si possono aggiungere in Nautilus
  2. cartelle con sopra "incassato" o "timbrato" un segno, come le recenti icone di MacOSX (vedi qui)
  3. niente cartelle, quanto piuttosto immagine astratta rappresentante pile di documenti, immagini, video, altro (diciamo per estensione di come ora appare la cartella "Scrivania")
  4. altro
Io, per quello che può contare, sarei per una soluzione mista 2+3, usando immagini di cartelle con il relativo simbolo "incassato" stile MacOSX per le dimensioni da 32x32 pixel in su e immagini senza cartelle per le dimensioni 22x22 e 16x16.

[1] non sai quanto ci manchi, Demetrio; va bene che i cori angelici ti erano più consoni, ma quaggiù la situazione è drammatica. Ah, personalmente ti ho dedicato la mezz'ora di fuochi artificiali che ieri sera i fedeli parrocchiani hanno fatto in onore dei venticinque anni di permanenza del loro benamato parroco.
[2] quindi teoricamente Nautilus, sia nella navigazione a icone o a elenco, sia nel riquadro laterale, il pannello nel menù Risorse, il selettore di file nelle cartelle segnalibro e nell'elenco delle cartelle in home, in modo analogo a quanto succede ora con la cartella "Scrivania"

15 June 2009, 13:12

14 June 2009


Fabio Marzocca
(thesaltydog)

Discorso agli Ateniesi (Pericle 461 a.c.)


Qui il nostro governo favorisce i molti invece dei pochi: e per questo
viene chiamato democrazia.
Qui ad Atene noi facciamo così.

Le leggi qui assicurano una giustizia eguale per tutti nelle loro
dispute private, ma noi non ignoriamo mai i meriti dell’eccellenza.

Quando un cittadino si distingue, allora esso sarà, a preferenza di
altri,chiamato a servire lo Stato, ma non come un atto di privilegio, come una
ricompensa al merito, e la povertà non costituisce un impedimento.

Qui ad Atene noi facciamo così.

La libertà di cui godiamo si estende anche alla vita quotidiana; noi non
siamo sospettosi l’uno dell’altro e non infastidiamo mai il nostro
prossimo se al nostro prossimo piace vivere a modo suo.
Noi siamo liberi, liberi di vivere proprio come ci piace e tuttavia
siamo sempre pronti a fronteggiare qualsiasi pericolo.

Un cittadino ateniese non trascura i pubblici affari quando attende alle
proprie faccende private, ma soprattutto non si occupa dei pubblici
affari per risolvere le sue questioni private.

Qui ad Atene noi facciamo così.

Ci è stato insegnato di rispettare i magistrati, e ci è stato insegnato
anche di rispettare le leggi e di non dimenticare mai che dobbiamo
proteggere coloro che ricevono offesa.

E ci è stato anche insegnato di rispettare quelle leggi non scritte che
risiedono nell’universale sentimento di ciò che è giusto e di ciò che è
buon senso.

Qui ad Atene noi facciamo così.

Un uomo che non si interessa allo Stato noi non lo consideriamo innocuo,
ma inutile; e benché in pochi siano in grado di dare vita ad una
politica, beh tutti qui ad Atene siamo in grado di giudicarla.

Noi non consideriamo la discussione come un ostacolo sulla via della
democrazia.
Noi crediamo che la felicità sia il frutto della libertà, ma la libertà
sia solo il frutto del valore.

Insomma, io proclamo che Atene è la scuola dell’Ellade e che ogni
ateniese cresce sviluppando in sé una felice versatilità, la fiducia in se stesso,
la prontezza a fronteggiare qualsiasi situazione ed è per questo che la
nostra città è aperta al mondo e noi non cacciamo mai uno straniero.

Qui ad Atene noi facciamo così

14 June 2009, 15:54

9 June 2009


Fabio Marzocca
(thesaltydog)

La sfida di Greenpeace per il mondo dell’IT


Lo scorso febbraio GreenPeace ha lanciato la sfida “Cool It challenge”, chiedendo ai direttori generali delle principali aziende IT  di entrare in azione sul fronte cambiamenti climatici e prendere impegni concreti per:

  • fornire soluzioni IT agli altri settori economici come edilizia, trasporti e reti per la trasmissione dell’elettricità, misurandone accuratamente l’impatto;
  • fare pressioni per un accordo sul clima a Copenhagen;
  • ridurre le proprie emissioni e utilizzare energia prodotta da fonti rinnovabili.

In questa pagina Greenpeace riporta i risultati attuali della sfida, aggiornando i dati ogni 5 minuti. Nell’istante in cui scriviamo, guidano la lista a pari punti la Sun Microsystem e l’IBM, anche se il loro rating complessivo è di soli 29 punti su 100.

9 June 2009, 09:09

29 May 2009


Luca Bruno
(Lethalman)

Syx changes web and git hosting

Hello,
I'm officializing the change of web hosting and git hosting from googlecode to berlios:

The new website is up!
For several reasons, including reliability, we switched both the website and git hosting to berlios. Also the purpose of this change is to rewrite the website backend using Syx.
The mailing list and the bug tracker are still hosted at googlecode.

Some progress news in the while
We're working on a new memory management, object representation and garbage collector. On the other side the lack of time is making things harder for releasing the new version. Together with the above changes, new Smalltalk standard pieces will implemented as usual. I remind you the new code is in
the object branch.


29 May 2009, 23:10

24 May 2009


Paolo Borelli
(pbor)

London & gedit news

I just got back from a short trip to London, where beside work I also managed to sneak in some sightseeing and enjoy a dinner with Emmanuele and his wife.

In the mean time Jesse - who despite having opened a blogs.gnome.org account, is still slacking when it comes to actually blogging - has been rocking as usual. In the last days he decided to give some much needed attention to the External Tools plugin. As a result all bugs in bugzilla about that plugin are now resolved and new features have been implemented. In particular the plugin now supports language specific tools, which also means that we can ship a larger selection of default tools since they will not clutter your menu as the will appear only when editing a specific kind of files: if you have any good scripts for your favourite language that you think should be included upstream feel free to send them our way.

Beside the work on external tools, we also started to make some other changes that will be part of the next release. We decided to remove the ancient “Open Location” dialog that allowed you to enter an URI: these days you can enter an URI just fine from the standard file chooser and the common opinion among gedit developers was that nobody ever used that dialog. We instead included a Quick Open plugin that allows to quickly open files (or even switch tabs) with very few keypresses:  while you type it looks into different “providers” (currently open files, recent files, current directory, etc) to suggest you the file you are looking for. Since a video is worth thousands words, see for yourself:

gedit quick open

24 May 2009, 10:04

9 May 2009


Lawrence Oluyede
(rhymes)

Erlang talk

This morning I gave my talk about Erlang to a room full of Pythonistas (even people standing!) and it went pretty well considering the fact that was my first talk ever. I already posted the slides online on SlideShare.

http://www.slideshare.net/rhymes/erlang-and-python

9 May 2009, 12:35

30 April 2009


Lawrence Oluyede
(rhymes)

Offline

Tomorrow evening I’m leaving for a trip to London (yes, again!). Just vacation by the way.

I’ll be back on the 6th of May.

PyCon Tre is coming, in fact I’ll be in Florence from the 7th of May to the 10th to attend it. This year I’m going to speak for the first time. I submitted a talk about Erlang and Python but then I pretty soon realized that it should have been about Erlang and the outside world because there’s no direct connection between the two :-)

Anyway, I know that few people of the non-italian community will be there (Guido, Fredrik, Raymond, Anna, and many more) so I’ll see you all in Florence on the 8th!

30 April 2009, 09:10

17 March 2009


Emmanuele Bassi
(ebassi)

My Eyes

movies: visto Watchmen — altrimenti noto come Watchmen: The curse of the blue schlong1. a parte gli scherzi: best. movie. ever. andateci, e se riuscite andate all’IMAX. niente spoiler — anche se riuscire a spoilerare un film tratto da un fumetto scritto nel 1985 penso sia come spoilerare un film tratto da Guerra e Pace.

travel: due settimane fa sono andato a Portland, OR. città molto gradevole, ottima birra. tre posti: 1. stumptown, coffee shop; 2. voodoo doughnuts; 3. old town pizza. probabilmente, tra due settimane sono di nuovo negli States, questa volta a San Francisco.

clutter: mentre Marco usa Vala e Clutter 0.8, qui si rilascia il secondo snapshot per sviluppatori di Clutter 1.0. potrei anche mettermi di buzzo buono e aggiornare i binding Vala.

moblin: ancora qualche settimana…

GNOME: 2.26 in dirittura d’arrivo. grazie a Cosimo, il system log viewer potrebbe tornare ad essere utile per tutti gli esseri umani. grazie a Vincent, invece, lo screenshot tool permette di selezionare un’area del desktop.

  1. che immagino sarà seguito da Silk Spectre’s Chest e da At Ozymandias’ End, e vedrà Johnny Depp nel ruolo del Doctor Jack Manhattan e Orlando Bloom in quello di Nite-ol

17 March 2009, 09:14

12 March 2009


Matteo Cappadonna
(mouser)

Cribbio...

Stavo giusto guardandomi in giro per fare una bella patch a Nautilus, integrando il menù così come l'ho pensato e descritto nel post "Mockup, Gtk e Clutter".Ho installato jhbuild e mi sono scaricato/compilato l'ultimo Nautilus da svn; sgrufolo nel codice e trovo quello che fa per me (esattamente i file che si occupano di popolare/gestire il contenuto del GtkTreeView contenente i bookmark di

12 March 2009, 10:52

10 March 2009


Matteo Cappadonna
(mouser)

Mockup, Gtk e Clutter

Che dire.... è un pò che non scrivo, ma prima per il lavoro, poi per l'organizzazione del mio matrimonio, non ho mai molto tempo!Comunque, sgrufolando come al solito in giro per internet, mi sono imbattuto in questo interessante mockup:Molto carino, non c'è che dire. L'unica cosa che mi pare veramente strana è stata l'idea di utilizzare Clutter per creare un menù di questo tipo.Ora, io adoro

10 March 2009, 11:11

9 March 2009


Marco Barisione
(barisione)

Vala, Clutter and limoncello

During this week-end I finally found some time to start playing with Vala and Clutter. I would like to write a small game using them, but I’m not sure I will finish it because the more the time passes the less I seem able to write code in my free time. Now that I’m spending all the day programming I find it very hard to write code when I come back from the office and I end up spending my time doing other things, like cooking.

Speaking of cooking, in Italy it’s quite common to make your own limoncello or other similar liqueurs so I finally decided to try making a basil-based limoncello-like liqueur. This kind of liqueurs is made using some 95% (190 proof) alcohol to extract the flavour form the lemon/basil/whatever and then the result is diluted with water and sugar. In Italy bottles of grain alcohol are available in most grocery stores[1], but here it seems impossible to find. I suspect that the only way to have access to it in the UK is to work in a lab where alcohol is used[2].

[1] And nobody that I know of tried to just drink it or used it to make other drinks stronger, so I was quite surprised when I discovered that pure alcohol is used in the US (in the states where it’s legal) almost only to make drinks stronger.

[2] Somebody in Cambridge reading this that works in a place where 95% alcohol is used?

9 March 2009, 09:30

20 February 2009


Luca Cavalli
(loopback)

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope


Network Manager

Network Manager

WTF?!?

Technorati link icon , ,

20 February 2009, 09:04

3 February 2009


Emmanuele Bassi
(ebassi)

Let it Snow

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, admitted that the capital was not equipped to deal with the unusually heavy snowfalls seen on Sunday night.

“This is the kind of snow we haven’t seen in London in decades. We don’t have the snow-ploughs that we would otherwise need to be sure of getting the roads free,” he said.

Boris Bozza Johnson — noto anche come un sindaco per il loal, nella sua più riuscita imitazione di Letizia Moratti.

almeno non si è scusato dicendo di aver prestato tutto il sale a Parigi.

3 February 2009, 10:47

12 January 2009


Filippo Argiolas
(fargiolas)

HP Support: FAIL

Hey I’m back on planet gnome isn’t it cool? Many thanks to Lucas and Jeff!

Some of you may already know that I’ve been laptop less in the past three months. Since about mid September display started to behave odd: it randomly turns off the lamps until I close and reopen the lid, then after about half a minute it turns off again, then again on, and so on. Sometimes it even starts blinking like a crazy stroboscope :D .
Long story short, here is a little video of the crazy display. Awesome, isn’it?

Unfortunately this little issue is a bit difficult to reproduce, sometimes it does it the whole day, and believe me, it’s quite irritating, sometimes it doesn’t for several days… Sometimes it does it only early in the morning (cold lamps?).

I contacted HP Support and they argued it could be a motherboard issue.
A motherboard issue, at least in Italy is under a 2-year pick-up-and-return warranty.
So they sent it to their repair center (actually an external one: A-NOVO Italia, Saronno) and sent it back after about two of weeks with a nice HP headed sheet stating they didn’t find any issue at all and just restored the operative system (a laptop coming with a motherboard issue and they did just that?). They also installed and ran a couple of benchmarks and other test software that said everything was ok, and I guess nothing more.

Guess what… display started blinking again 2 days after.
I contacted again HP, already a bit upset, I talked with another technician and he said his colleague was surely wrong. I had no motherboard issue but just some lamp or hinge one. It was covered by one year warranty with the producer and one with the seller.

Ok, I then went to the seller and told them about the previous story.
They sent the laptop to the very same repair center with a long description saying that it was a bit an unpredictable issue, that it was just been there some week before and suggesting to test it carefully this time. It was the December 1st.

Three days ago I was called to take back the laptop. Same HP headed sheet, all tests were successful, no issue found. Oh, they did a BIOS update, damn you receive a laptop for repair twice with the very same issue and you just run some test and do a BIOS update? Seriously, a BIOS update?!

Needless to say screen started blinking again soon. You can see it in that video taken a couple of hours ago and I can see it in front of me right now.

I don’t know if I feel more upset or frustrated… still I cannot believe how a repair center can suck this way… they didn’t even try to replace the lamps! they didn’t even unmount the display to check the cables!

12 January 2009, 12:56

1 January 2009


Paolo Borelli
(pbor)

guitar playing on linux

For a change, a post not related to gedit. During the holidays I decided to dust off my electric guitar and have some fun playing. However when I gave up playing some years ago I sold my amplifier, effects and so on and I just kept my Hamer guitar. Since I just want to have some fun playing from time to time, instead of spending lots of money buying all the equipement I just bought a behringer UCG102, a nice small USB device to connect the guitar to the PC.

The device is detected correctly under linux and works great. However when it comes to the software available on linux the situation is not so great… surely not Plug&Play, especially for normal musicians that do not hack the kernel for a living.

First of all there seems to be a total disconnection between the people doing audio on the “desktop” (Pulseaudio, GStreamer, etc) and the applications for musicians, which seems to be mostly tied to the world of Jack. I understand that playing a dvd and professional digital audio recording have different requirements and design tradeoffs, but still, the user experience as of today is pretty bad and it involves manually launching sound daemons and so on. For instance when I try to run pulseadio and jack at the same time as described here, jack hangs.

At the moment, the working setup I have when I want to play, is to kill pulseadio and run jack with qjackctl manually.

Furthermore Jack on its own has its share of problems: leaving alone the UI of qjackctl (read below for even uglier ui issues), my biggest gripe with jack is that it seems to be able to deal with just one device at a time, so I cannot “route” the sound from the usb device to the pc soundcard/speakers/headphones.

Then we get to the applications. What I need the most is some kind of “guitar amplifier emulator” with effects and so on in order to get a nice set of heavy distorsions to play metal, some screaming overdrive to play rock, some elegant chorus to play fusion etc. Ideally this software would expose an “easy” ui where I just can reorder the effects by drag and drop and turn a few knobs to tune my sound.

What I found and which works pretty well is called rakarrack, which is pretty nice and includes some very good preset sounds… however the UI is… how can I say… maybe it’s easier to describe if I show a picture

Rackarrack Main Window

Rakarrack Main Window

I understand that musicians are creative people and that the usual gray UI is boring for them, but isn’t that a bit too much? Also why use fltk when there are nice, widely available, portable and even fancy toolkits that do not look like 1992 and actually take my dpi into account?

Next kind of app I tried are recorders, so far I gave a quick try to jokosher and ardour. Both look really promising. Unfortunately the first at the moment crashes on my system, but the guys in #jokosher have been really helpful and I’ll shortly try it further and report bugs etc; the latter is tad too complicated for me but it looks really professional and advanced. However even if it uses gtk, it suffers from the we-are-too-cool-to-use-the-default-theme sindrome… at least their built in colors are not as bad as rakarrack :)

I know there are a lot guitarists and musicians in gnome and I have been looking at this things just in the last days. Did I miss something obvious?  Are there any beautiful apps I have not yet seen? What do you use daily? Suggestions are more than welcome

1 January 2009, 22:35

1 October 2008


Luca Matteis
(sktrdie)

Ascolta a questo

Acidwolf

1 October 2008, 05:28

7 August 2008


Luca Cavalli
(loopback)

Tu tu tu tu tuuuuu…


Anche quest’anno è finalmente arrivato il momento del post delle vacanze, che poi è il vero motivo per cui questo blog è ancora in vita. Stavolta niente concorsi, niente indovinelli, sarebbe troppo facile. Non faccio molta strada, come potete vedere dall’inconfondibile profilo dell’isola sulla quale passerò le prossime due settimane e mezzo.


Image courtesy of Google

7 August 2008, 17:16

5 August 2008


Luca Matteis
(sktrdie)

Illuminated Displays

I have done some ncurses stuff lately and for whoever is interested in writing complicated layouts i advice to check this out: STFL. Hear this.

5 August 2008, 07:10

15 July 2008


Cosimo Cecchi
(cosimoc)

MediaManager, week 7

Hi everyone,

Last week I have been to Istanbul, to attend GUADEC. It has been an amazing time there, and I have been really happy to meet, socialize and share ideas with the other SoC students and some of the GNOME gurus :P

Together with Bastien, Clemens and Felix, we planned the next final steps for the MediaManager project. Also, it seems that Felix’ project (Cheese integration) will be one of the first clients to use my MediaManager library to expose cool features in the GtkFileChooser! :)

== Work to be done ==

- Write a set of widgets wrapping around the backend code
- Write a GtkModule that hooks up into the GtkFileChooser to achieve my ultimate SoC goal of integration with it.

== Timeline ==

I don’t know how much work I will be able to do in this following week until the 23rd of July, as I’m having some exams in this timeframe. Anyway, afterwards I’ll be home until the 10th of August at least and working again full-time on the project, so I came up with this plan, which would be perfectly synced with both the SoC timeline and my holidays :)

- 24th of July to 31st of July, writing of the widgets
- 1st of August to 5th of August, writing of the GtkModule
- 6th of August to 10th of August, final bugfixing & release

Feel free to mail me for any suggestions on the widget part or if you think your application needs some specific widget to use my library. I will start coding them in the next week, so there’s still time for thinking/designing.

15 July 2008, 11:20

12 July 2008


Cosimo Cecchi
(cosimoc)

GNOME 3.0 = Tabs!

It seems that the GNOME community has finally reached the long-awaited wide consensus about the future direction for the project. It’s all about tabs!

We’ve been discussing the issue here at GUADEC and it seems that many guys really agree this is the path we want to follow. I am pretty sure the guys from the release team will just support it as well, as all the community is so excited by the new stuff that is happening that we really don’t want to stop the effort now.

Also, it seems that GTK+ will help us by providing a cool API for that, so let’s just make it happen!

12 July 2008, 22:41

19 October 2006


Marco Cabizza
(feedback)

iceweasel again ?

I'm with Joss and Julien. Fuck Mozilla.

19 October 2006, 12:19

1 October 2006


Marco Cabizza
(feedback)

happy birthday ( + 3 )

I'm re-loving this CD, I think that the band itself is one of the best ever.

Anyway, as a not-so-late birthday present, we finally have compiz+AIGLX goodness on Debian. Honestly I was quite WTF, and so I have been for ages, seeing everyone being able to use such things before I could, but now, officially:

compiz + AIGLX work ( almost ) out of the box on Debian / MacBook

Just append:

Option "AIGLX" "true"

to the ServerLayout section, and, for better performance:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

to the Device section.

What pisses me off is that "we have a metacity compositor" which is not working and there are lots of forked compositors and none integrates nicely with anything, even if compiz's GNOME integration doesn't suck.

Still, configuring the keybindings is deep pain and non-trivial through GNOME. At least compiz has a ( pluggable ) gconf backend. At least.

For what still concerns Debian, i've filed two ITP's as Riccardo kindly forced asked me to do, and as it's said, they just need an upload.

Elsewhere, I've turned 19 the 28th September. Happy birthday to me.

1 October 2006, 00:46