Yay Toys

I discovered last night that if you register serial numbers for both Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, and Super Mario Kart: Double Dash, Nintendo will send a GameCube CD containing the original Zelda and Zelda II, as well as the N64 Zelda games. Neat. It just so happens that I have those games, so I registered them. They claim it’ll take about two weeks for them to send it out. That should be fun.

My file server was running out of space (only about 800MB left for websites/cvs/e-mail and 570MB for shared files), so I went out and bought a 120GB harddrive. It’s working well so far, but I think it’s time to get a server that has more than 2 PCI slots and 4 power cables available.

GalagoWatch – Presence Push

Tonight, most of the work needed for the GalagoWatch was completed. GalagoWatch is a nifty little API for saying, “I want to capture all presence info as it happens,” or “I want to capture all presence info on this service” or “on this account” or “for this user,” etc.

The API is theoretically finished, but not yet tested. I got side-tracked, and adding away status and away message support to the gaim-galago plugin, and am in the process of adding emblem support to the GalagoGtkPresenceIcon widget. Although I should really be asleep right now, I figure I’ll get that done, set the widget up with GalagoWatch support, and get most of the bugs out.

I’m told that jdub’s speech went really well. I’m hoping I can get a copy of it. It’s too bad I couldn’t be there in person to hear it 🙂

Back Home

I got back home today from a trip to my Dad’s house. I haven’t visited him in awhile, so I went to visit for a couple of days. We took a trip to San Francisco and just kind of walked around Fisherman’s Wharf for a bit, had a good time, and caught up on stuff.

At one point, we started heading back to the car when all of a sudden, a guy on a bike headed right toward us. He screamed to get out of the way, and my dad pulled me back just before he almost hit me. I wondered for a second what his hurry was, when all of a sudden, a black van and a black car came chasing after him, full-speed. They were out for blood. It was, to say the least, a bit odd to see.. Kind of like in the movies.

Other than that, great trip. I’m looking forward to getting back to hacking on projects, and spending time with friends.. School starts Tuesday. It should be an interesting semester.

Galago Screenshots!

I started work today on the first Gtk widget to use Galago. It’s a simple presence indicator icon. It’s a bit hacky, as it polls every 10 seconds for new status, which can make things slower than they should be. However, the GalagoWatch API that’ll be coming in galago soon will deliver new presence and association information directly to anything that uses it, so this problem will go away soon.

Anyhow, I have a test program, and two screenshots. The first is doing a presence query for myself while I’m online and non-idle, and the second is when I’ve become idle:

Online Presence

Idle Presence

Perrty.

Gaim-Galago

A lot of good presence work was done on Galago today. Presence feeds can now return a list of presences for the user sent to it, which is useful on such things as IM. Say, for example, a program requests presence for user ChipX86, but neglects to specify a service or source account, since it just doesn’t care. The feeds can now return lists of presences, containing, say, Yahoo and AIM presences.

So I got tired of playing with a test presence feed, and wrote a plugin for Gaim that would provide presence information. So far, it’s working rather well, except for the fact that Gaim’s current concept of status royally sucks. I’m working on it, but am having difficulties creating an easy to use API that handles status exclusion. I talked to Kevin Stange, and he suggested using slots, which could work.

So, with that concept, protocol plugins would define one or more slots, each with an exclusion boolean flag set to TRUE or FALSE. Status types would be registered into a slot. The typical status types, such as Offline, Online/Available, Away, Extended Away, etc. would all go into an exclusive slot, while status types such as Mobile, would go into a non-exclusive slot.

The idea is to have this covering all aspects of status. The state of the user, what the user is connecting from (cell phone, etc.), and anything else. Not everything would have to be displayed. There will be type hints used for that, and prpls can still specify what to show. However, there will be a lot more flexibility in what kind of states can be chosen. Available messages will be doable for protocols that support them, for example.

Also, this will be core/UI split, which has been needed for awhile.

I should have status done within the month, if all goes well.

Depending on what happens tomorrow with my girlfriend, I may or may not start the galago-gtk widgets module in CVS. If I get something really cool, I’ll post a screenshot.

Another Sad Day

The first news I read when I woke up was the passing of Mark Finlay. Unfortunately for me, like Ettore and Chema, I didn’t know him personally or talked to him online, but I have kept up with his blog. I had respect for him. He seemed like a really good guy, something that is backed up by all the people praising him on Planet GNOME.

I’d like to take a moment and say thank you to all of the people who bring what I use every day to reality, keep it maintained, and provide support for it. They don’t have to. None of us do, and I know open source developers see “Why haven’t you fixed my bug yet?” more often than “Thank you.” To any users of any software reading this, thank your developers. It’ll make their day, and sometimes it helps to be reminded that what they’re doing is wanted, and you never know how long they’ll be around…

Good bye Mark. Thank you.

Galago – Finally some progress!

After four days of hacking, Galago now provides enough structure for a program to act as a feed for presence information, and for others to request that information. This includes information on a user’s service, the status(es), away message, etc.

There’s currently only one method for requesting presence. It blocks until it receives a response, but there will be two more methods. The first new method for receiving presence information will be a function that takes a callback function as a parameter. The program can continue going on its merry way, and the callback will be called with the new presence information when it’s finally available.

The second new method will be to use a GalagoWatch. GalagoWatch will be used for both presence and associative information, but for now, I’ll concentrate on the presence. You initialize a GalagoWatch, feed it the information needed so it can do its queries, set a callback function, and then start it. Any time the user’s presence information changes, the callback will be called with the new information. This would be useful for widgets and such.

It’s exciting to see it come together. Once I implement those and clean up the server a bit, I’ll be writing a Gaim plugin that acts as a feed, and a widget to display status information for the user passed to the widget. Exciting 🙂

Best Bugs

I was having a chat with my brother earlier about software bugs, and I started trying to remember about the best bugs I’ve encountered in software I’ve had a hand in. Below are my list of favorite bugs that I found entertaining. I’m kind of curious as to what other people would choose for their favorites.

My favorite bug would have to be Gaim’s flying buddies. When the rewrite of the Gaim buddy list was commited, in 0.60, we had a fun little bug where the drag-and-drops weren’t completed. This triggered a Gtk bug (I think it was Gtk’s bug?) where the nodes in the GtkTreeView would fly around the screen a bit from point A (where the node originally was) to point B (where the node is now). When the buddy list was off-screen, this made it particularly fun. As these were flying around, we quickly named them Flying Buddies.

Between classes one semester, I wrote a Snake game for my TI-89 calculator. It was rather easy to do, but I had an off-by-one error that generated what I called “snake droppings.” When the snake ate one of the blocks on the screen, it would of course extend. As soon as the tail started moving again, it would leave a pixel or two behind, hence the name.

My third favorite bug was during the development of my BilliardZ game for the Sharp Zaurus SL-5×00 PDA. Occasionally when hitting a ball, a big black hole would open up on the board, and the ball would disappear in it. Playing pool with black holes littering the table is a little inconvenient. I’m still not sure what caused it, but I ended up fixing it.

Speaking of bugs, something messed up on gnome-blog. I’ve spent over an hour trying to get it working again. Works now though.

(Update: I somehow lost the top paragraph. I don’t know how, but it’s back. That should provide more context.)

Galago Presence, Gaim Status

So far, the Galago framework is coming together rather well. I don’t have anything that runs and communicates yet, but a lot of the base framework has come together, and I expect to build test programs by next week (assuming all the other busy things in my life don’t take up too much time).

At the moment, I’m working on the Galago Presence stuff. I’m running into design problems that I also have with Gaim’s status rewrite. This is to be expected, since the two are essentially the same thing.

The main issue I had in the Gaim status rewrite is that I wanted to generalize status types, and provide a mechanism for multiple types to be set at once. This also requires that some times exclude other types from being defined. Unfortunately, this creates a big mess when registering status types.

My vision for Gaim status is to cover all aspects of a user’s status. Their online state, offline, away, brb, idle, whether they have encryption enabled, mobile communications, etc. The display in Gaim would be the same as it is now, with the exception that the Away menu would be a little different, as would the away dialog. Icons would still appear in the list.

The problem comes when we want to say, “away implies online” or “online excludes offline” or “I’m online, away, but hidden.” It can get confusing, so it needs to be done in a simple fashion.

Now, back to Galago and status. How detailed should status information be? We probably don’t need to know every little detail like we do in Gaim, but maybe we do? How do we standardize it then? It’s easier when we have control over the source tree in Gaim and can make status IDs all match, but when we have third party applications defining their own IDs, it doesn’t work so well.

The approach I’ve taken in the Galago presence code currently is to separate it out into a status type (an enum defining OFFLINE, AVAILABLE, AWAY, EXTENDED_AWAY, and HIDDEN, currently), a status name (“BRB,” “On The Phone,” “Away,” “Online,” etc.), and an optional message (such as an away message). I believe this is sufficient for most purposes. It won’t allow the applications using Galago to display a mobile or game indicator or other such things, but it will give the generic status to those applications.

Another option is to do what we have above, but allow a person to have multiple statuses. That way, they can indicate they are away and are using a mobile device. This should be broadcasted as one presence packet, as presences for a single person on one protocol are not additive. The last one sent is the one that gets seen.

There’s still an issue with applications sending odd statuses, like the user is away and available at the same time, or they’re offline and online. I guess that’s up to the individual programs to fix. We can’t do all their work for them.

It’s still not as flexible as what Gaim’s status model will end up being, I’m sure, but it works sufficiently for most cases, in my opinion. If the user wants any further information on the user’s status, they can check their buddy list or whatever else is providing the detail.

With that in mind, I’ll probably move forward in that direction.

The Future of the Linux Desktop?, Part I

It seems there are a lot of interesting things being developed lately. I’ve been reading about GNOME Storage, which is a really cool concept. I haven’t played with it yet, or looked into the code, but I think that if done right, it can really add to the desktop experience. Perhaps it could be used as a feed for Galago.

Linux as a desktop system has, in my opinion, a lot of potential. Though I wouldn’t recommend it at this point to most people I know, I do hope for a day when I can. The reason why it has so much potential is that anybody can modify the source of any program to provide the integration, assuming there’s not an API and plugin architecture that would do the job. Of course, we all know this, but think about it. Work like Dashboard or Gnome Storage just wouldn’t be all that doable under a closed environment without a lot of collaboration and licensing between Microsoft and any other companies. Unless of course there’s an API available there, but MS APIs only go so far.

There’s a lot that can still be done. My goal with Galago is to be able to automagically retrieve information related to the task at hand on almost any supporting program, in a desktop-neutral fashion, and to have an indicator of a person’s status wherever you see his/her name, e-mail address, or other contact information. But this is just one small part.

I want to see a desktop where when I open my report for school, I can instantly see on the side of my screen or somewhere icons for the other files related to this report, URLs I accessed to find the information, and the status of any people on my buddy list I worked on the report with. I’d prefer not to see this in a big white window on the side, like Dashboard does and Galago will do, but something more integrated into the environment. How, I’m not sure yet.

Something else that may be neat to see in the future is a revision control feature built somewhere in the backend. I believe Gnome Storage has this in their plans, and I hope it ends up being a part of the desktop experience. I’ve had clients and family members complain that they accidentally deleted or overwrote a file they were working on, and wanted me to recover it. If this was built right into the system, their documents would be safe.

Drag-and-drop install/uninstall of applications is another feature I’d love to see. This was something that Mike Hearn brought up the other day. If a person could download a single package and drag it to their desktop to install, and then drag it back to the trash to uninstall, it would simplify package management for the user dramatically. Of course, this requires that we finally get packaging sorted out and standardized, but this isn’t likely to happen any time soon. However, his autopackage project does provide an interesting form of package management that I wouldn’t mind seeing take off. The rest could be abstracted through GNUpdate.

At this point, I’d like to bring up how cool the stuff Robert Love is working on. It’s one of the upcoming things that are really exciting me.

I had more I was going to bring up, but it slipped my mind, so I think I’ll end this post….. now.

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