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Photo © r0uzi, cc-by-sa.
Photo © r0uzi, cc-by-sa.
Davyd Madeley: Documentation BoF
Jul. 10th, 2009 05:54 amHow we're generating documentation in telepathy-doc.
There are three kinds of docs: facing developer (like a tutorial... what tool?), facing user ("how do I format my USB key"... Mallard), and the stuff you format from the API (gtk-doc).
Developer docs
HIG, GTK Drawing Manual, ... etc
Example code, descriptive prose, i18n, multi-programming-language examples (how??), link to the API references
telepathy-doc
DocBook, gnome-doc-tools, svg figures, and a ton of Python to play with the xml. DocBook purists don't like this (would rather do it in DocBook).
There are three kinds of docs: facing developer (like a tutorial... what tool?), facing user ("how do I format my USB key"... Mallard), and the stuff you format from the API (gtk-doc).
Developer docs
HIG, GTK Drawing Manual, ... etc
Example code, descriptive prose, i18n, multi-programming-language examples (how??), link to the API references
telepathy-doc
DocBook, gnome-doc-tools, svg figures, and a ton of Python to play with the xml. DocBook purists don't like this (would rather do it in DocBook).
Jono Bacon: The burnout cycle
Jul. 7th, 2009 12:40 pm"The burnout cycle" was devised by Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North
Teammates: among their teammates
Workers: involve your manager, enforce work hours, take breaks;
Private life: take time off; love your hobby; socialise.
- You start feeling like you need to prove yourself.
- So you work harder (putting more hours in rather than working smarter)
- So you ignore needs; erratic sleeping, eating disrupted, lack of social interaction
- panic and conflict: problems are dismissed, feel threatened, panicky and jittery
- Change values. Work is the only focus. Friends and family dismissed
- Deny problems. Cynical, intolerant, blaming colleagues and workload and lack of time.
- Withdrawal; no social life, often resort to drink and drugs and overeating or undereating; serious burnout begins.
- Odd behaviour. Changes in behaviour obvious; friends and family concerned. This is the "Is everything all right?" stage
- Depersonalise; feel worthless, no confidence, life feels mechanical and emotionless.
- Inner emptiness: empty, lonely, drink and drugs begin to be a real problem
- "Epic" depression; feel lost and not sure what to do; exhaustion; future feels bleak and dark
- Collapse.
Teammates: among their teammates
Workers: involve your manager, enforce work hours, take breaks;
Private life: take time off; love your hobby; socialise.
Background: what a window is (basic X stuff)
When you're in GDK you never see all this stuff, because it wraps it. You see widgets instead. But some widgets have multiple windows and some have no windows (GTK_NO_WINDOW) because they draw in their parent widget's window.
So, client side windows. Only use X windows for toplevel. Subwindows are emulated.
Why?
How does it work? Lots of clever stuff about emulating events. "Sounds easy but it's not".
Merged to git master already; X11 working fine; Win32 being written.
When you're in GDK you never see all this stuff, because it wraps it. You see widgets instead. But some widgets have multiple windows and some have no windows (GTK_NO_WINDOW) because they draw in their parent widget's window.
So, client side windows. Only use X windows for toplevel. Subwindows are emulated.
Why?
- No flicker, because you never see a partially-drawn widget. (Demonstration. Spontaneous applause.)
- Smarter redrawing; less copying.
- Easier to work across platforms (no X-specific stuff for X and so on). Much simplified. (more applause)
- Bling: you can do rotation and stuff (more applause).
- More bling: crazy clutter stuff that bounces around while you're working on it. "This is clearly not like a useful user interface" :)
How does it work? Lots of clever stuff about emulating events. "Sounds easy but it's not".
Merged to git master already; X11 working fine; Win32 being written.
Written for Fin, because I miss zir very much.
My health needs are few,
but water comes first.
I tell you, it's true.
My health needs are few,
And water is you.
I'm aching with thirst.
My health needs are few
but water comes first.
My health needs are few,
but water comes first.
I tell you, it's true.
My health needs are few,
And water is you.
I'm aching with thirst.
My health needs are few
but water comes first.
Out the window
Jul. 5th, 2009 08:53 amI am sitting in the foyer of the auditorium hacking and waiting for the next talk, which is on GNOME Shell, something I have a particular interest in. Just to show you how close everything is to the sea here, this is the view from where I'm sitting.
First off, I want to thank Google for giving out water bottles. This morning I forgot my lanyard with the name badge on it, and had to walk for forty minutes in the sun to the hotel and back. Google, you made it much less unpleasant than it could have been. Also, Nokia gave us towels and USB keys, and Intel are giving us coffee and ice-cream every day.
The flight to Las Palmas was delayed yesterday, and we missed some of the opening talks-- apparently RMS was singing. But we arrived in time for the lightning talks; I heard one on refactoring, one on KDE's triage team (which sounds like a great idea), one on improving OCR in Linux, and some others. Later I went back to the hotel and slept while other people were eating (my choice: I was quite horribly jetlagged) and then we all ended up on the roof talking about tech stuff until about midnight, when we dispersed.
There was a sign up saying "Don't try to upgrade your system: there are 700 of us here." The network has been getting a little overloaded. I'm now sitting in a talk about Bluetooth. People keep trying to pair with the speaker's devices.
I will take some pictures and post them. I haven't seen any actual canaries here, but perhaps I haven't been looking hard enough.
The flight to Las Palmas was delayed yesterday, and we missed some of the opening talks-- apparently RMS was singing. But we arrived in time for the lightning talks; I heard one on refactoring, one on KDE's triage team (which sounds like a great idea), one on improving OCR in Linux, and some others. Later I went back to the hotel and slept while other people were eating (my choice: I was quite horribly jetlagged) and then we all ended up on the roof talking about tech stuff until about midnight, when we dispersed.
There was a sign up saying "Don't try to upgrade your system: there are 700 of us here." The network has been getting a little overloaded. I'm now sitting in a talk about Bluetooth. People keep trying to pair with the speaker's devices.
I will take some pictures and post them. I haven't seen any actual canaries here, but perhaps I haven't been looking hard enough.
Cascade of attention-deficit teenagers
Jul. 1st, 2009 09:52 pmThe future of Metacity: It is fairly clear that Metacity will be replaced by its fork Mutter in the near future: Mutter is effectively Metacity 3. Although I have some loose ends to tie up in Metacity, it doesn't seem worth continuing hacking on Metacity 2 when the life is in the other fork. In addition, there are over five hundred bugs open against Metacity, more than I (as the only active maintainer) can humanly deal with. Mutter has far more contributors and the bugs will be far more easily dealt with.
CADT: However, this raises a problem. I can't just close the bugs because there's a new version: that would be repeating the GNOME 2.0 mistake which jwz called "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers". Therefore I will have to go through several hundred bugs and decide whether they are reproducible with Mutter, and if so reassign them. This will be a long and dreary job, and if anyone wants to help out I'd be happy to assign them a block.
Nargery: There is also a discussion about whether windows should be able to indicate to compositing managers that they are still working on drawing a window, to save the compositor diving in and drawing the existing pixmap, which may be uninitialised garbage. Some people question whether compositor-specific hints belong in the EWMH at all, or whether they belong in some separate spec.
Meme: Someone is asking "What was your first word?" Mine was "gone." My grandfather used to play a game with me when I was a baby. He would take an object, like a building block, and then hide it and say "Gone".
Links:
- freedesktop.org is in bad shape. We can all help.
- The building that fell over.
- Giant dominoes: Symbolic toppling. I keep reading that as "symbolic topping", which must be good on representative cake.
- The longest known word in ancient Greek.
