Planet GNOME Italia

Luca Ferretti: A New Deal

2010-03-09T11:52:00+00:00

Guadatevi attorno... Il colore aubergine comincia già a fare proseliti. Per esempio qui, ma debbo dire anche nel mio armadio, dove già in tempi non sospetti è atterrato qualcosa.

PS Il mio commento serio sul cambio di rotta lo troverete sul blog di Flavia non appena avrò trovato 2 ore di tempo per leggere, comprendere, destrutturare e rielaborare personalmente le pagine di annuncio del nuovo brand e il post di Shuttleworth... e ovviamente trovato il modo migliore per comunicare alle alte sfere che il circle of friend messo in apice nun se po' vedè

Ulisse Perusin (ulisse): Aang!

2010-03-07T19:56:48+00:00

Con un tempo record di soli tre anni e mezzo, ho di nuovo cambiato il pc!
La nuova bestiolina si chiama Aang, è attrezzata con un Intel Core i5-650, 4 Gb di ram a 1333 MHz ed una scheda video ATi/AMD HD5570 da 1 Gb di vram. Per contenere il tutto ho riutilizzato un vecchio stupendo case tower (con le ruote!) che avevo in giro per casa.

Per sbaglio ho installato il sistema (Ubuntu) a 32 bit, per ora mi sa che me lo terrò così, la differenza è trascurabile. L’unico piccolo problema riscontrato è stato coi driver proprietari della scheda video, che probabilmente perchè più vecchi della scheda stessa, producevano un watermark nell’angolo in basso a destra con scritto “AMD – unsupported hardware”.
Ho risolto installando gli ultimi driver dal sito AMD, che fortunatamente sono predisposti per autoconfezionarsi all’occorrenza in comodi pacchetti .deb per Ubuntu; il watermark è sparito ma adesso sembra esserci un piccolo problema nello svegliare lo schermo: a volte uno può scuotere il mouse quanto gli pare, ma lo schermo continua a non ricevere segnale video e spegnersi di nuovo. Poi, a forza di scuotere, finalmente cede e si accende. Mah…

Albus, il mio vecchio pc, essendo ancora in grande forma, andrà probabilmente a prestare servizio da qualche altra parte.

Stefano Canepa (sc): Placida Signora » Blog Archive » Dichiarazione d’Amore alla mia Città

2010-03-07T14:08:37+00:00

Placida Signora » Blog Archive » Dichiarazione d’Amore alla mia Città.

Stefano Canepa (sc): Approfittando della confusione, Paperella si candida alle reg… on Twitpic

2010-03-06T18:25:42+00:00

Gianky la mette in ridere:

Approfittando della confusione, Paperella si candida alle reg… on Twitpic.

Luca Bruno (Lethalman): Google search wrong again

2010-03-05T12:47:27+00:00

Hello,
sometimes ago I posted twice about google search having wrong results.
Now it happens again after a few months (it's like google breaks page weights like every 4-5 months).
The search is "debian dpkg list", I really expect the mailing list info page but after 3-4 pages of google search (and also bing this time) I couldn't find it. With yahoo search it's at the first position (lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg).

Like for the previous posts, using different search engines matters and matches your needs.

Lawrence Oluyede (rhymes): Blogging @ Better Software 2010

2010-03-03T12:21:52+00:00

Monday I received a wonderful news: I’ve been invited as a guest blogger at the Better Software 2010 conference in Florence, the 5th and 6th of May.

Better Software is a national conference about the business of software, project management, development, agile, web 2.0. opensource and more. I’m really looking forward to attend. The conference program is rich and full of talks I’d like to listen to such as talks about iPhone development, OpenSpime, augmented reality, real world project development experiences, cloud computing, the business of startups in Italy, Balsamiq, user experience design and much more. I’ll have to multiply myself

I’ll cover the conference here on this blog and hopefully in realtime on my Twitter account.

Luca Bruno (Lethalman): Debian/GNOME bug triage ended

2010-03-03T10:11:21+00:00

Hello,
I'm writing about the work done in the bug triage weekend of the Debian/GNOME team, started at 27th Feb and ended in 28th Feb.
The result is great, 167 bugs have been closed and many more have been triaged and forwarded upstream.

Thanks to everybody who contributed, especially to whom has done it for the first time (well, you can still continue working on the remaining bugs ;) ).

Ulisse Perusin (ulisse): Yoga e DRM

2010-03-02T18:12:14+00:00

Questo è un estratto dal libretto di istruzioni di un tappetino da yoga di Decthlon:

Chissà se prima o poi doteranno questi tappetini anche di un chip per il DRM…

Luca Ferretti: U. M. Declassified

2010-02-26T22:29:00+00:00

Dai, ammettetelo. Con questo post avete pensato che fossi stupido. O quanto meno che avessi battuto la testa.

Ma adesso che sono state rivelate le specifiche del Music Store di Ubuntu (o quanto meno una FAQ). Possiamo andare a riprendere i seguenti passaggi e notare che...

"fico, gli stessi colori del logo"
"seguite la via nel bosco che porta alla casetta dei sette nani"
"la piattaforma di lancio per raggiungere la seconda stella a destra"

erano tutte frasi messe lì per indicare che l'accordo tra Canonical e 7digital (notare i colori del logo di quest'ultima, così come provate a cercare "seven" e "music") in quei giorni era ben bene evidente sulla "piattaforma di lancio" Launchpad.net, a causa di una (forse) disattenzione degli sviluppatori che avevano lasciato nel codice in bella mostra l'indirizzo di 7digital (per poi toglierlo qualche giorno dopo senza dichiararlo nei commenti al commit).

Ora, perché sto chiarendo tutto ciò? Beh, non certo per uno spocchioso gne-gne-gne-gne-gne, quanto piuttosto per mostrare a tutti il modo di ottenere un grande scoop, riassumibile nelle 3 seguenti caratteristiche/doti/capacità/altro:

conoscenza - bisogna sapere bene come muoversi nel territorio interessato, sapere dove e come andare a cercare
intuito - il guizzo di genio, la lampadina che si illumina d'improvviso senza che voi abbiate alcun controllo
una grandissima botta di culo - quella serve, sempre, in tutto.

Milo Casagrande (milo): What’s up

2010-02-24T22:15:23+00:00

Wow, I haven’t update this blog since November… long time ago!

I have to say to work has pretty much sucked up my life: have been very busy there (and probably will be more in the future). The cool part is that I have been working with different technologies, most of them unfortunately had to deal with Windows, some of them with both Windows and Linux, but it has been fun.

I’ve been playing around with JNA (Java Native Access), a bridge between the JVM and the underlying operating system: like JNI, but easier to use since what you only need to write is Java code. It all started with the problem of killing a process tree in Windows having only the root process PID: Windows, unlike Linux, will kill only that process PID, and the rest of the tree will be detached from where it was, staying alive.

The old way of killing a Windows process in our software was achieved with some kind of ActiveX magic (voodoo-poison, I say) and the use of the small Windows utility taskkill. Moving to use Windows functions to create processes, taskkill couldn’t be used anymore: what I experienced were strange behaviors (not always killing all the processes), and also lots of BSOD (still don’t know the exact cause, but removing the use of taskkill resolved the issue). Finding a way to kill a process tree in Windows has been a hard task: looking into MSDN is kind of a mystic experience. I find it a mess. But as always, when you find the solution to your problem, you find it easy and wonder why you didn’t think first about that.

So, to sum it up, if you need to create a process that spawns other processes, and you need to kill that process tree, these are the Windows functions from the kernel32.dll I used:

There are other things it is necessary to take into account, like the creation of the necessary structures, but basically you need to create a job object, create the process and attach it to the job object, and when it’s necessary, terminate the job object. All of this has been done with JNA, writing only Java, and is pretty robust: I tested it on a remote computer for 7 continuous days, creating and killing more than 500000 processes in batch of 4-5 processes at a time, processes that didn’t last more than 5-6 seconds (I even tested it for 3 days with 2-3 hours long processes).

An interesting part has been finding a way to check if a process was still alive, or had completed its run or had already been killed. The first implementation for this was using GetHandleProcessCount. Basically this functions checks how many handles a Windows process still has open, but with such many processes being created in a short timespan, I experienced OutOfMemory exceptions in the JVM (probably caused by many JNA Pointer objects being created and not cleaned up in time by the GC, but I didn’t investigate the cause). The solution has been using the WaitForSingleObject function, monitoring its return state. I only hope the API will not change with some of the too many Windows updates…

Now I’m playing with some really cool stuff: numpy and scipy. I’m trying to “embed” Python into our software, or at least to use numpy and scipy libraries and routines to avoid having to write complex mathematical algorithms when there are already valid and strong ones out there, and also to be able to write internal routines in an easier way with Python. I’m running some comparative tests right now (my computer at the office is still running): I’m trying to see if the same algorithm written in Java is slower or faster than the numpy/scipy internal functions. Right now I’m doing 1500 iterations over square matrices ranging from 10×10 to 700×700 calculating the determinant, and tomorrow I’ll implement the inverse of the matrix. Right now, looks like numpy is faster than Java on matrices from 150×150 and up.

Funny times ahead… also because on March 19th I’ll be heading to Chicago for the Desktop Help Summit with Shaun, Paul, Jim and other cool guys! Looking forward to that!

Fabio Marzocca (thesaltydog): Impiegare il BlackBerry come modem da Ubuntu

2010-02-16T18:49:43+00:00

Grazie a Thibaut Colar, ora è finalmente possibile usare il modem interno del BlackBerry per effettuare collegamenti internet anche da Ubuntu. L’applicazione sviluppata da Thibaut si chiama Berry4All e se da un lato il codice è estremamente efficiente nella sua funzionalità, purtroppo il sito web non offre molta chiarezza nell’uso, perciò cercherò di sintetizzare qui la mia esperienza, cercando di renderla quanto più lineare possibile.

.
.

Installazione dipendenze.
Berry4All è scritto in python, quindi occorre prima verificare se le seguenti dipendenze sono già installate:

sudo apt-get install python libusb-dev ppp python-usb

Download e installazione Berry4All.
Scaricare il software da questo link e salvarlo nella propria Home. Successivamente estrarre completamente il pacchetto compresso. Si verrà così a creare il folder bbtether nella Home, nella cui directory conf saranno presenti gli script per il collegamento alla TIM, facilmente modificabili per altri operatori.

Collegamento.
Collegare il BlackBerry tramite il cavo USB, aprire un terminale e digitare:

cd $/HOME/bbtether
sudo python bbtether.py tim

Nota: Se il vostro cellulare è protetto da password, l’ultima istruzione dovrà essere sostituita dalla seguente:

sudo python bbtether.py tim -P miapassword

A questo punto inizierà il colloquio tra il PC e il cellulare della RIM, fino alla presentazione a schermo dei dati di connessione. Es:

local  IP address 25.228.79.47
remote IP address 169.252.3.1
primary   DNS address 66.94.9.120
secondary DNS address 66.94.25.120

Siete collegati e potete navigare! Lasciate aperto il terminale. Berry4All avrà creato una connessione di tipo PPP con il provider.

Disconnessione.

Per disconnettersi dalla rete sarà sufficiente premere Ctrl-C nel terminale in cui Berry4All è in esecuzione. Attenzione: attendere che tutte le operazioni di handshake si concludano e l’applicazione esca normalmente riportando il terminale fino al prompt di sistema.

Nota: le prove sono state effettuate con Ubuntu 9.10, Blackberry 8320 curve, e Berry4All v. 0.3k. Esiste anche una versione GUI dell’applicazione, ma vista la semplicità d’uso, l’esigenza di ulteriori dipendenze e nessuna funzionalità aggiuntiva, ho preferito optare per l’uso da terminale.

Ovviamente si può aggiungere un lanciatore personalizzato, un’icona e qualunque altra cosa per rendere la user-experience meno spartana, tuttavia la sostanza non cambia…

Fabio Marzocca (thesaltydog): Il sistema operativo del futuro? L’applicazione.

2010-02-11T11:58:17+00:00

Molto interessante l’ultimo articolo di Matt Asay, il nuovo COO di Canonical. Matt prende spunto da una recente dichiarazione di Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO di Funambol:

“L’iPad rappresenta un nuovo paradigma di interazione uomo-computer. Il desktop è scomparso. Le cartelle sono scomparse. I documenti vivono all’interno delle applicazioni. Il dispositivo si trasforma nell’oggetto richiesto, è un non-oggetto, è ciò che vuoi che tu sia. Selezioni un’icona e diventa una calcolatrice. Nessuna cartella, nessun file, solo numeri proprio come avessi in mano una calcolatrice. Un altro tocco e diventa un blocco notes. Ancora uno ed è una cornice per foto. È il futuro del computing. L’iPad è il naturale sostituto del personal computer”.

Perchè questa affermazione? Perchè l’iPad semplifica l’esperienza utente trasformandola in ciò che effettivamente l’utente desidera, eliminando ogni complessità relativa al come ciò possa avvenire. Gli sviluppatori open source hanno recepito ciò con un certo ritardo, pensando forse che tutti anelino ad armeggiare nel codice sorgente, oppure che dispongano almeno della capacità di farlo.

Eppure ciò non è vero per l’utente medio e per la maggior parte del mercato. Occorre che le nostre macchine lavorino per noi e non viceversa. Nel mondo del post-PC, può l’open source svolgere un ruolo predominante?

Secondo Matt Asay, la risposta è positiva. Tuttavia occorre un open source completamente diverso da ciò che è stato inteso finora. Le comunità di sviluppo dovranno dimostrare assoluta attenzione verso le esigenze dell’utente finale, con particolare enfasi sull’interfaccia e sull’architettura di base.

L’open source ha bisogno della stessa lucidità di Apple in questo approccio, senza peraltro perdere la sua caratteristica di libertà. Da dove iniziare? Smettere di pensare al sistema operativo e concentrarsi invece sul network.

Apple può farlo perchè la sua politica commerciale non è fondata sulla vendita del sistema operativo, a differenza di Microsoft ancora legata a antichi criteri commerciali. Da quest’ultima considerazione ne deriva che l’open source è più vicino ad Apple che non a Microsoft. Linux è libero e il modello di business dell’open source non è fondato sulla vendita del sistema operativo.

Si tratta, quindi, di una questione di focus, che deve essere indirizzato sull’utente. I progetti commerciali open source di maggior successo saranno quelli che terranno sempre a mente l’identità dei propri utenti e non quella della sua comunità di sviluppo.

Marco Barisione (barisione): jid-to-email

2010-02-03T08:37:00+00:00

During the Christmas holidays I managed to find some time to write a couple of small programs related to the address book on the N900; they are nothing too fancy (no UI, no proper packaging, not the best code quality, etc.) as I wrote them for my personal use, but I still think it could be useful to share them with other people.

The one I’m talking about today is a simple command-line utility that adds an email address to your contacts based on the Jabber ID (or on the ID of other protocols). This is very useful to me as in Collabora we all have a roster automatically filled with the other Collaborans, this way I can automatically have their email addresses in my address book.

This cannot be done automatically for all the contact as, usually, it’s not true that a Jabber ID is also a valid email address (for instance it’s not true for jabber.org users), but it’s true at least for the GMail and Collabora servers.

If you want to try jid-to-email get the already compiled arm executable or the source code. Remember to take a backup before trying it, I don’t want to be blamed if something goes horribly wrong .

The program accepts two arguments: the vcard field for the IM protocol and a regular expression. For instance, if you cd to the directory where the program is and do “./jid-to-email X-JABBER @collabora.co.uk”, an email address will be added to all the contacts that have a Jabber ID containing “@collabora.co.uk”. Similarly “./jid-to-email X-JABBER ‘@g(oogle)?mail\.com’” will add an email address to all the contacts with a Jabber ID containing “@gmail.com” or “@googlemail.com”. You could also try using “X-MSN” to do the same thing for contacts that use their GMail address as MSN ID.

Please, let me know if you know any other server where the Jabber ID is always a valid email address.

By the way, this week-end I’m going to Brussels for FOSDEM: hope to meet a lot of GNOME people there!

Paolo Borelli (pbor): gedit 2.29.5

2010-01-25T20:57:18+00:00

I just rolled the tarball for the next development release of gedit. This release marks an important milestone, since we completed all the goals we had on our roadmap for 2.30.

In particular this release overhauls the internals of I/O handling in gedit by always using gio for file loading and saving (we only used gio for saving remote files) and by taking advantage of the new data conversion api added by Alex.

For the casual gedit user these changes should be pretty much transparent, since they do not introduce new features except for the ability of forcing different line endings (Window’s CRLF, old MacOS CR and the usual UNIX LF). However since they are affecting one of the most important parts of the gedit codebase we would like to ask anyone running the development version and in particular who uses files with encodings different from UTF-8, to heavily test file loading and saving and report any problem or regression.

Cosimo Cecchi (cosimoc): Long time no blog

2010-01-18T13:33:47+00:00

Hi there! It’s been a long time since I last wrote something on this blog, which reminds me how many things have happened in my life in the last year and a half.

As some of you might know, I’ve been working part-time for Collabora (on Empathy), helping fixing misc bugs and implementing nice things like file transfer, the accounts dialog user interface and the transition to the Mission Control 5 framework.

In the meanwhile I kept myself busy with my university and finally, last week, I took the last exam of my course! This means I’ll hopefully graduate on April Since November, I already started digging into my thesis, which will be aTelepathy implementation of the XTLS protocol, an end to end solution to crypt communication over XMPP.

In order for Telepathy to support channel encryption, some new interfaces need to be written. I drafted some proposals for this on the telepathy mailing list in the last few months, and I’m happy that Eitan Isaacson picked them up and turned them into something more concrete. In order to discuss with him and the rest of Collabora about the proposal, I’ll visit the Cambridge office at the end of the month, right in time to attend FOSDEM and the XMPP summit together with the Collabora gang.

After that, the items on my TODO list include:

draft a proof-of-concept implementation of the XTLS handshake into Wocky(I already started coding for this before I had to stop for my exams).
make sure the new Telepathy interfaces work fine in telepathy-glib
implement the interfaces into Gabble.

Hope to see you all in FOSDEM

Andrea Cimitan (Cimi): More on RGBA support

2010-01-09T10:17:43+00:00

Small post, just for the guys who don’t follow me on twitter.

For Ubuntu Lucid the desktop team started working on a patch which enables RGBA colormap by default, and adds client-side window decorations capabilities as well.
That means transparency to your applications and much more

Murrine will try to follow this trend, maybe slowly because I’m busy with other things, but something will happen.

For the braves, here’s the link to the bug.

Of course, donations to Murrine are always welcome!

Lawrence Oluyede (rhymes): Social programming

2009-12-31T11:26:53+00:00

Lately I’ve been finding myself amazed about the social turn that programming has taken in quite a while.

I started growing as a software developer thanks to the Internet, it and the people on mailing lists/forums/irc have shaped my skills, career and made me discover a lot of great things. I owe the Internet a lot. As Tim Bray says in his After Branding essay:

You are whatever the Net says you are. Deal with it.

It is pointless to start talking about what good open source and version control tools have done to the social side of programming because it’s there to see for everybody. Websites like Sourceforge and Freshmat were everything we talked about in the old days.

Nowadays Distributed version control is taking over and the reasons why are clear: we need to be more and more social and what better way to exchange knowledge than to distribute code?

If I could I’d change name of those tools to “social version control”.

What I love about sites like GitHub and Bitbucket is that they are trying to build real social networks around source code, every developer’s currency. I love it. The what is not new but it’s the how (like how easy it is to contribute) that changes everything.

I look forward to social programming.

ps. on Twitter there is an amazing community of software developers exchanging small tips or links every day. You MUST be on Twitter, really. I am.

Marco Barisione (barisione): Some lovely people out there

2009-12-13T18:07:54+00:00

Some lovely guy sent me this email:

From:    ****@gmx.de
Subject: Freedom!

Take your closed source crap out of this planet, nobody cares about it.

--
Freedom Lover
--
Jetzt kostenlos herunterladen: Internet Explorer 8 und Mozilla Firefox 3.5 -
sicherer, schneller und einfacher! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/chbrowser

Note the irony of using an email service that adds to your email an advertisement for Internet Explorer…

Marco Barisione (barisione): Essere inglesi

2009-12-12T14:57:27+00:00

Mettersi a litigare all’una e mezza di notte per decidere se la fila per i taxi deve andare da sinistra verso destra o da destra verso sinista.

Luca Cavalli (loopback): Lacrime

2009-12-11T09:30:27+00:00

Ho quasi le lacrime agli occhi…

Pur non avendo due monitor.

UPDATE: Leggendo il commento #81 sembra comunque che non sia ancora possibile selezionare immagini diverse. Aspettiamo ancora un po’…

Gnome, Desktop

Milo Casagrande (milo): Help the Help

2009-11-08T20:05:23+00:00

Today was the GNOME Docs meeting day, a planning session for things to come in the doc world of GNOME.

We needed to plan a little bit of work for the coming months (one or two months, not much more), and we decided to focus ourselves on small applications help, something in the order of small games, the calculator, and so on. This will be a good exercise for writing help for an application, and a good learning moment to learn Mallard and topic based writing.

Speaking of games help, since Mario Blättermann ported the Tetravex documentation from Docbook to Mallard, we said: “Why don’t we start from that, and see how we can expand it and work on it?”. Tetravex is not that complex game, and should be pretty easy (and fun) to work on what Mario created.

We wrote down a basic structure for how a game help should (probably) be structured, and it goes in the form of:

Gameplay (Introduction)
- Basic Gameplay and winning scenario
Strategy
- Multiple pages if necessary
Multiplayer
Tips and Trick

It’s a really basic structure, probably it’s not complete and it will need to expand as we move forward and we reach new kind of games, but for a starter, we think that should work. I’m not going to explain each of them, I think they are pretty straightforward and self-explaining.

So, if you out there would like to start a new experience in the wonderful world of GNOME Doc writing with a light task, we might need your help in writing games help.

Get in touch with the GNOME Doc team at: http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject.

Paolo Borelli (pbor): JavaScript in gnome

2009-11-05T22:33:49+00:00

Being away from home, bored and yet too tired to do something productive, I skimmed through the gnome-shell proposal mail thread on d-d-l and spotted the inevitable debate on the choice of javascript as a scripting language for the shell.

Personally I am not a big fan of js, quite the contrary, but lately I had to use it extensively (though not in gnome related context) and at the end of the day it is a language as any other. I am not saying it would be the one I would have chosen, but once you use it a bit and get to know its idiosyncrasies, you get what you need done and move on with life. After all any programming language sucks, each one in its own special way and some more than others, but they all suck.

Reading in the aforementioned thread the reasons why js was picked I would have been totally satisfied with valid answers like:

“It’s my project I and pick whatever language I please”
“Some of the more talented and experienced gnome hackers chose it. Trust them”
“It is not C++ or perl, so do not complain”

Beside given that javascript

has good free implementations
is widely used (not only in general, but at this point also by various big gnome projects)

I do not have any major problems with it. After all we have clean and consistent code bases written using GObject C conventions, I do not see why we should not be able to tame js as well.

That said, some of the rationales provided for choosing it in the above mentioned d-d-l thread really really trouble me.

js has no platform libraries, so we can use our own

What kind of reason is that? First of all when you embed another scripting language you are not forced in any way to use its standard libarary as well. Second, having a good standard library (or a large set of third party libraries) is a good thing: I thought we were focusing on implementing good applications instead of reimplementing and maintaining a “gwhatever” library for every problem in the world.

using js will attract web developers

That is plainly naive. First of all I have never hacked on something because it was written in a language, at most I have learned a language because something I wanted to hack on was written in it. Second learning the syntax of a language is nothing compared to learning library API, tools, workflows etc and even if I have not used js in gnome yet, I am pretty sure they differ a lot from what web developers are used to. Last but not least, I’d prefer to attract a single good developer than a hundred people not willing to invest an afternoon in learning a language/api/tool.

Emmanuele Bassi (ebassi): Old Before I Die

2009-09-08T20:50:41+00:00

è un mese che non faccio che pensare a questa strip di xkcd.

oggi abbiamo ricevuto il via libera (preliminare) al mutuo.

mi sento improvvisamente buttato in mezzo a eventi che non posso controllare — il tutto condito dal fatto che altri colleghi non sposati e più giovani del sottoscritto hanno già preso/stanno prendendo casa. non solo vecchio, ma pure underachiever.

Emmanuele Bassi (ebassi): Space…

2009-08-16T19:59:24+00:00

… the final frontier

le notti insonni che ogni tanto mi capitano vengono di solito messe a frutto recuperando serie tv che non sono riuscito a vedere. l’altra notte ho recuperato Castle¹. questa notte ho recuperato i primi tre episodi di Defying Gravity².

il fatto che venga marketizzato come Grey’s Anatomy in space sarebbe ragione bastante per crocifiggere i responsabili intorno al VAB. fortunatamente, dell’hype ho imparato a fregarmene in tenera età, quindi non mi sono lasciato abbindolare.

la storia, dopo tre episodi, sta cominciando a prendere forma. devo dire che la parte di esplorazione spaziale mi ricorda molto Virtuality³ con due principali differenze:

nello show di Ron Moore gli effetti speciali erano migliori
nello show di Ron Moore c’era Clea DuVall

la differenza numero uno porta ad alcune interessanti⁴ considerazioni su quanto una serie di fantascienza debba lavorare per evitare che la mia funzione suspension of disbelief non venga obliterata dalla magica funzione it’s fucking science, bitches⁵.

la differenza numero due è mitigata dalla presenza di un cast di volti noti di serie tipo: Reaper, Dead Like Me, Band of Brothers, Arrested Development.

sinceramente, sono in attesa. dato che si tratta di una serie da 12 episodi voglio vedere dove andrà a parare prima della metà, per esprimere un giudizio. la verità è che sono così in bisogno di una serie di hardcore sci-fi che qualunque metadone andrebbe bene.

di cui parlerò un’altra volta — per ora bastino: Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic, procedurale
obligatory Wikipedia page per chi non ne ha mai sentito parlare
seconda obligatory Wikipedia page
e per “interessanti” intendo “cringe-worthy“
ovvero: se mi dici che gli astronauti sono attaccati al pavimento da nano-fibre che creano il velcro più naturale dell’universo, va bene: ti credo. non mi puoi, però, far vedere oggetti che chiaramente seguono traiettorie da presenza di gravità — specialmente se cinque minuti prima hai messo in piedi una dimostrazione di assenza di gravità che sarà costata i suoi bei soldi in CGI

Andrea Cimitan (Cimi): Jolicloud preview

2009-07-02T00:09:51+00:00

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

Filippo Argiolas (fargiolas): Dear lazyweb

2009-05-25T18:25:31+00:00

Well, not so lazy… I’ve spent a couple of hours looking into this but didn’t find a solution.

Is there a way to set default size of a widget (or better just of a GtkDrawingArea) without limiting its minimum size?

It seems that the only way to have a drawing area of the size I’d want is to set a size request.

Thanks!

Matteo Cappadonna (mouser): Cribbio...

2009-03-12T10:52:00+00:00

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

Matteo Cappadonna (mouser): Mockup, Gtk e Clutter

2009-03-10T11:11:00+00:00

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

Luca Cavalli (loopback): Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

2009-02-20T09:04:22+00:00

Network Manager

WTF?!?

Gnome, Desktop, Ubuntu

Filippo Argiolas (fargiolas): HP Support: FAIL

2009-01-12T12:56:58+00:00

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 .
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!

Cosimo Cecchi (cosimoc): MediaManager, week 7

2008-07-15T11:20:21+00:00

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

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.

Marco Barisione (barisione): Idee confuse

2008-06-29T20:18:44+00:00

Da repubblica.it, clic per ingrandire

Marco Cabizza (feedback): iceweasel again ?

2006-10-19T12:19:04+00:00

I'm with Joss and Julien. Fuck Mozilla.

Marco Cabizza (feedback): happy birthday ( + 3 )

2006-10-01T00:46:32+00:00

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.