Monument

I think I'd like a new challenge. If anyone out there could make good use of a creative C/GTK/C++/Qt/object Perl/Python hacker based in Philadelphia with the ability to work in the US and EU, they can find my resume/CV at http://is.gd/thurman.

I wanted to write a post about a happy memory to do with programming and networks.

Many years ago I used to help teach programming on a Scripture Union camp called Transformers. Our lab was at the top of a hill, with a large window looking down the grassy slope and facing a similar window in the building at the bottom. That building was the radio studio. The radio show broadcast all day over our wired ethernet network, and was played by a spare machine in every lab. After several hours of broadcast there was a lag of several seconds.

One day, someone requested YMCA by the Village People. When the song started in the programming lab, we looked down the hill to the studio. The radio crew were dancing, so naturally we stopped talking about recursion and started dancing too. This repeated itself on several following days, until people elsewhere who weren't in on the joke kept complaining on IRC about the same song being played constantly.

The joke was to play it late in the afternoon so that there was a large lag. When you're dancing to the same music as people you can see, but with a lag of ten seconds or so from what they can hear, it's surprisingly amusing.

Fortunately, someone took a photo:



I think my favourite part of this picture is the kid on the right who is quietly getting on with his assignment.

I just wanted to say thank you to Eric and Diana, whose birthday present for me arrived in the post this morning. In memory of all those hours developing Gnusto, it's a documentary about text adventures, Get Lamp:



I'm really looking forward to watching this. Thank you both!

When people IM me out of the blue, so that I'm working in another program and a notification pops up, very often what they're sending me is a URL they want me to look at.

I would rather like it if notifications which contained only a URL had a "Follow" button, like this:



Then I could either dismiss the message, or go and see what they were talking about, without having to switch back to Empathy on the way.

I raised bug 640917 about this today, in case anyone else happens to agree with me that this would be nifty.

It would be rather useful if there was a PermittedHours field in the .desktop file spec. It would list the hours during which the program could be run. That's not just for kids, it's also for me, in the manner of LeechBlock:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Some Program I Use For Work
Comment=But let's say I don't want to be tempted to spend all evening working on it
Exec=foo
PermittedHours=9-17

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Aisleriot
Comment=And I definitely shouldn't be playing this during work hours
Exec=aisleriot
PermittedHours=0-9,17-23

I wonder how best we could do per-user settings, though.

My idea is to prevent launching the program during those hours. What would happen if the system saw the program was still running when the time had expired, I'm not sure. Maybe nothing, or maybe it would put up a notification telling me I have five minutes to quit or the process gets it.

I know nanny does some of this, but I wonder whether it's generally something that should exist in application launchers.

What do you think? Worth suggesting to them?

Every contact database program I know has a "nickname" field. Today I was thinking that I use the same values in that field for EXIF tags, and what I'd like to see is a plugin (or better, to see it coming out of the box) with a button on each person's contact record. The button would query Tracker, and then launch gthumb or the local equivalent to show images of that person. The button would not display if there were no such images.

Something like this (on Maemo, though the principle is the same for GNOME):



(It's interesting to consider whether the plugin should assemble the list and then pass it to gthumb, or whether gthumb should be extended so that it can be passed a switch to display all pictures known to Tracker with a given tag.)

Of course, Tracker also tracks things other than images, so you could also have buttons for wordprocessor documents, emails, and so on. I could do this (in a while, when I have some time); would any of you want it?

I have had this sitting half-written in my projects directory for far too long, so I present: Imgur Integration version 0.20. imgur.com is a website which allows you to host arbitrary images without creating an account. This program includes a DBus service which allows posting of images to imgur.com, a command-line interface to the DBus service, and an Eye of Gnome plugin to do the same. It is not an official client, but I have talked to the imgur admins and they are happy about its existence.

So when you open a picture, you have a menu option that uploads it and opens a browser at the right page, with no configuration, thus:



You have to turn on the plugin in eog after installation (Edit > Preferences > Plugins > Post to imgur.com). If I package this, I may make it turn on automatically, since it's a little hard to find this.

As originally conceived, it would have also allowed you to use libsocialweb to tweet/dent the resulting URL. I took this out for now because libsocialweb also has API to post pictures, and I wasn't sure how best to do it. There is still a rather useless dependency on libsocialweb. Sorry about that.

eog seems not to look in /usr/local/share/eog/plugins, only /usr/share/eog/plugins. You may therefore have to set --prefix appropriately, or simply copy the files from /usr/local to /usr by hand after installation. Sorry about that, too.

There was a partially-written libsharing plugin for Maemo which used the imgur DBus service, but it's not finished. It could be finished, if people would like it.

Other thoughts on how the program could develop are in the README. You can download the program or look at the source control. This is quite a rough draft. Patches and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

Further to my previous post:

Here's a live AJAX-based version you can play with. It's not very fast unless the word is cached, and it only takes at most a word of context (unlike the real thing, where the context is everything you've ever typed), but it should serve to demonstrate the principle.

Now to release the code, and to look into patching existing VKB systems.

I'm hereby releasing a public beta of robotfindskitten version 2.0 for MeeGo. I've been sitting on it for far too long. This is a complete rewrite in Qt. It's only designed for the netbook; I haven't tested on the handset. It should work fine on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference.

Links:

• The RPM is here, mirrored here. Install it with rpm -i rfk-2.0.0-1.i586.rpm.
• Screenshots: the launcher, the front screen, a game in progress.
• The source is in git here, mirrored here.
• Doxygen of the source is here, mirrored here.
• If you know nothing about robotfindskitten, see robotfindskitten.org or Wikipedia's article.

If you lot like this, it will go into the Garage.  There are some issues I still need to consider; let me know what you think:

• Is it a good reimplementation of Maemo rfk?  Is it a good implementation of rfk in its own right?
• Is it playable?
• Are dialogue boxes a reasonable implementation of the popup messages?  On Maemo I used banners (thus), which were perhaps less intrusive.
• For those of you who know Qt and C++, I would appreciate some code review.
• On the handset it's still going to vibrate when robotfindskitten.  Do you think it should bleep or something (or miaow) on the netbook?

I think Planet GNOME will be getting this as well because my feed setup doesn't have tags specific enough; I apologise in advance.

Woke up quite early, packed up my suitcase, and hacked for a while. Got stuck on the correct (fairly complicated) commandline to pass to qemu; kudos to Ian who woke up, recited it to me, and then fell back asleep again. After that I went downstairs and had breakfast, then caught a taxi to the airport.

The driver asked us whether we wanted to take the toll tunnel, which costs €3. One of the other passengers said yes, but he only had sterling, and was that all right? The driver made the sign of the cross at him.

The plane ride was long, dull, and uneventful, so I spent as much time hacking as my battery and lack of network connection would allow. I took this photo of another plane out of the window, and wrote about clouds. And it was wonderful to be back with Fin, Alex, and Rio, as always.

It's been quite a conference. Thank you once again to all the organisers, and to everyone who made it what it was. Perhaps we'll all see one another in May in San Francisco.

The rest of my conference posts:

• Sunday: the flight over, church, setting up
• Monday: writing a presentation
• Tuesday: giving a presentation, and a brewery trip
• Wednesday: clearing up, and free laptops