Why I Hate September
I hate September because it is in September that I finally get my mobile phone bill from GUADEC.
Total of 5 Calls while abroad 00:23:20 £31.402
Money grabbing tight fisted evil bastards. This includes a rate of £1.25 a minute to receive a call.
NP: Los Angeles, Flying Lotus
Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2
Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of fixes from the Amazing Matthew Martin:
- Stop playback when the disc is re-read (Matthew Martin)
- Only eject the disc if tracks were ripped (MM)
- Don't try and move the non-existant temp file when skipping (MM)
- Free the option context (Pierre Benz)
- Don't block until n-c-b quits when copying discs
- Fix playback track switching (MM)
Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1
Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Nothing that amazing here, sorry:
- Fix play+pause+play (#523182, thanks Matthew Martin)
- Add %ay, album year (#522909, Juan F. Giménez Silva)
GUADEC
Hmm, so I never did blog a GUADEC roundup. In two words: it rocked. Congratulations to Baris and everyone else who organised it!
In other late GUADEC news I finally reviewed the rest of my GUADEC photos and uploaded them to Flickr. I'll try and not take a month to upload next time, honest!
OH Wares
I've just been informed that Rob Bradford has one large "I3<OH" left. If you want one, then find him fast! The grapevine also says that there is a crack team of rouge OH Men on the loose, so watch out!
GUPnP Action
Action around GUPnP has been really hotting up recently. Jorn is back
from the dead studying and demonstrating that he hasn't lost
his touch by refactoring the various audio/visual widgets spread around our
toy projects
into libowl-av,
adding Vala bindings, and then writing
a MediaRenderer
implementation on top of that. This means we now have reference
implementations of the full media specification in the form of
gupnp-media-server (server), gupnp-av-cp (control), and gupnp-media-renderer
(playback).
Also Johan Kristell posted to the list for the first time with an implementation of the Digital Security Camera specifications, both server and client. GUPnP Network Camera currently only supports still images, but as it is based on GStreamer video can't be far away.
Erm...
case "$1" in
*.sh)
# Source shell script for speed.
(
trap - INT QUIT TSTP
scriptname=$1
shift
. $scriptname
)
;;
*)
"$@"
;;
esac
OPTIMISATION FAIL.
NP: Roseland NYC Live, Portishead
Zebu 0.1
As one of the maintainers of debian.o-hand.com I use the always wonderful pbuilder and cowbuilder to rebuild packages originally build for Debian Sid for Debian Etch, Ubuntu Gutsy, Hardy, and so on. Continually typing the commands to update the cowbuilders can get tiresome fast so last week I scratched the itch and produced Zebu.
As of version 0.1 it is barely functional but it does let you update or login to a cowbuilder. It requires that the cowbuilders are named /var/cache/pbuilder/*.cow and doesn't support "traditional" pbuilder rootstraps yet, but that is planned. Anyway, cowbuilders are the future.
If anyone else thinks this could be useful there is a tarball and a Bazaar repository. I must also thank the wonderful Ulisse Perusin for the rocking icon he created.
NP: Cosmos, Murcof
Wanted: Icon
I'm hacking on a small tool at the moment and need an icon for the launcher. A simple icon of a cow's head would be perfect: anyone know of something like this, or willing to quickly draw one for me?
Postr 0.12.2
Another point release of Postr which should fix Flickr authentication for good this time. Also the file size limit has been increased to 20Mb to match the new Flickr limits.
The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are being worked on next.
UPnP in Epiphany
One of the more useful features of the UPnP specification is that devices have a standard way of specifying a "presentation URL", a human-readable web page representing the device. For example, my SoundBridge has a web page which shows the currently playing music and lets me switch radio station, whilst my router's presentation URL is the administration page.
Useful, but not exposed anywhere. Until now...
This is a small Epiphany extension which adds all presentation URLs it finds to the Nearby Sites menu, just like the URLs discovered using Avahi. It needs a bit more work as it doesn't yet handle being unloaded or devices disappearing, but it is certainly usable now.
If anyone else wants to have a go with it, the source can be fetched using Bazaar from here. Watch out for the currently hard-coded paths...
GUPnP Documentation
What started off as a quick tutorial to writing a service using GUPnP turned into a week of reviewing and writing more GUPnP documentation. It's all landed in our Subversion repository now but if anyone wants to see how to write a UPnP client, implement the UPnP networked light bulb service, or just browse the beginnings of the glossary, then I have a local copy of the latest documentation online.
NP: Aerial, 2562
Sound Juicer "Harder Now With Higher Speed" 2.23.0
Sound Juicer "Harder Now With Higher Speed" 2.23.0 has finally been released.. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Hot new features!
- Port to GIO (Michael Terry)
- Update URL handling for New GIO World Order (Bastien Nocera)
- Fix display problems with the cluebar (Pekka Vuorela)
- Add audio preview when overwriting (Luca Cavalli)
- Use GtkVolmeButton instead of BaconVolume (MT)
- Fix crash when no profile is selected (Matthew Martin)
- Add []<> to the special character list (MM)
- Make the year and disc entries a11y (Patrick Wade)
- Fix error handling in CD playback (Tim-Philipp Müller)
- Require intltool 0.40
I really need some heavy testing on the GIO rewrite, so please try and extract tracks to as many different targets as possible. Although I expect confirmation that using an unmounted remote location currently fails, it should be possible to use this to write to Samba, OBEX-FTP, and so on.
20 Weeks
Over the last few weeks Vicky's previously invisible pregnancy has finally popped out. Much frustration ensued as this meant most of her clothes didn't fit any more, but that was soon relieved.
Postr 0.12.1
I just made a quick Postr 0.12.1 release to fix authentication with non-trivial HTTP handler strings. If you can't login to Flickr with Postr, then this release should fix it for you.
The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are being built now.
In other news postr.dev has seen a lot of development and is looking pretty damn neat at the moment.
GUPnP Bindings Generation
I've now finished the first draft of the bindings generation tool for GUPnP, which is now part of libgupnp itself. I've added both blocking and non-blocking wrappers, so if you wanted to get the external IP there is the choice of this for blocking calls:
char *ip; GetExternalIPAddress (proxy, &ip, &error);
Or this for non-blocking calls:
static void
external_ip_cb (GUPnPServiceProxy *proxy, char * ip,
GError *error, gpointer userdata)
{
// ...
}
...
GetExternalIPAddress_async (proxy, external_ip_cb, NULL);
I've ported my test applications to use the bindings, which are available in this Bazaar repository. It appears to work quite well, I just need to test it against all of the official service descriptions and add a few small features.
GUPnP Autogeneration
The problem with GUPnP is that (like DBus) when programming from C you need to specify the types of each argument when making a method call:
gupnp_service_proxy_send_action (proxy,
"AddPortMapping", &error,
/* In arguments */
"NewRemoteHost", G_TYPE_STRING, "",
"NewExternalPort", G_TYPE_UINT, external_port,
"NewProtocol", G_TYPE_STRING, "TCP",
"NewInternalPort", G_TYPE_UINT, internal_port,
"NewInternalClient", G_TYPE_STRING, internal_host,
"NewEnabled", G_TYPE_BOOLEAN, TRUE,
"NewPortMappingDescription", G_TYPE_STRING, desc,
"NewLeaseDuration", G_TYPE_UINT, 0,
NULL,
/* Out arguments */
NULL);
Now, that really is quite tiresome. It basically means that you need to have the service reference to hand when coding, because you need to know the name and type of each argument. Luckily for DBus part of dbus-glib is a binding tool which can create type-safe wrappers so that making method calls is much easier. Wouldn't it be nice if there was something similar for GUPnP, which generated inline functions with prototypes like this:
static inline gboolean
AddPortMapping (GUPnPServiceProxy *proxy,
char * in_NewRemoteHost,
unsigned int in_NewExternalPort,
char * in_NewProtocol,
unsigned int in_NewInternalPort,
char * in_NewInternalClient,
gboolean in_NewEnabled,
char * in_NewPortMappingDescription,
unsigned int in_NewLeaseDuration,
GError **error);
Well, now there is. I've put the initial code here but will be moving this into GUPnP itself shortly. The next task is to add asynchronous wrappers just as in dbus-glib, but that shouldn't be too hard.
Anjuta+Poky Integration
Yesterday I tested and rolled a new release of the Poky integration plugin for Anjuta, created by our fearless Sir Bradford. This is a very special piece of magic which lets you use a Poky SDK in Anjuta to cross-compile binaries without any pain, and will even deploy, execute and debug the binaries in a QEMU for testing. As part of the release process I had to test it, so I'll step through what I did as a brief tutorial on how to use Anjuta with Poky.
The prerequisites are Anjuta, the Anjuta Poky SDK plugin, and QEMU. These are all available for installation from our Debian repository for Debian/Ubuntu users, everyone else will have to build from source, sorry! You'll also need a Poky ARM SDK and QEMU ARM images from the Poky web site. The SDK is a tarball which contains a cross compiler with base libraries (glibc, GTK+, and so on) and should be extracted onto your machine (it extracts the SDK into /usr/local/poky). The QEMU image consists of a kernel and a ext3 file system which will boot Poky inside QEMU.
To start I fetched a checkout of Tasks and loaded up Anjuta. I don't have an existing Anjuta project for Tasks, so I used File → New → Project From Existing Sources to create a project using the checkout. At this point I could do native development using Build → Run Configure and Build → Build Project to configure and compile the source, but we want to cross-compile.
To activate cross compiling go to Edit → Preferences → General → Installed Plugins and enable the Poky SDK plugin. This will add a new page Poky SDK to the preferences dialog. We're using an external toolchain so set the SDK root to /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm and the toolchain triplet to arm-poky-linux-gnueabi. We're also using QEMU instead of a real device so set the paths to the kernel and root filesystem (remembering to uncompress the filesystem). We're now done configuring, so the preferences dialog can be closed. However notice that if you switch from using a SDK to building with a full Poky tree you can use the cross-compiler it produces directly, and you can also use an external device instead of QEMU: the only requirement is that you can SSH into it.
Now to do the build. Use Build → Run Configure to configure Tasks, passing any extra options you want. Note that if you want to debug your build in the future you'll need to enter CFLAGS=-g here to disable optimisation (autoconf sets -O2 -g by default, which isn't useful for debugging). The configure script is then ran with the right environment and options for cross compiling, and with any luck will successfully configure. Then hit Build → Build Project and watch the cross-compiler do its thing. When that has worked, you can prove to yourself that the right thing has happened.
$ file tasks tasks: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
We have an ARM binary, ready for deployment. Start the virtual machine with Tools → Start QEMU (this may ask for your root password to configure networking) and once it has booted you can install the project into the VM with Tools → Deploy. This will run make install to a temporary directory and then rsync it to the VM. Now you can either interact with the VM directly (if the application installed a new desktop file, then it should appear on the desktop), or use Tools → Run Remote to execute a binary directly: entering tasks will execute the freshly installed Tasks. Neat, huh?
For the final trick there is even GDB integration. Tools → Debug Remote will let you specify a local binary (to extract debug symbols from, say src/gtk/tasks) and a remote binary to run, and then start a GDB on the VM and connect to it. The binary will be initially running but paused at the entrypoint, so you can add breakpoints and then continue execution.
Hopefully this post has been a good overview of the integration available between Poky and Anjuta. In the future I hope to see Nemiver integrated into Anjuta, and gdbserver support in Nemiver, which would be a killer combination for Poky integration.
NP: One On Twoism, Various
Gypsy and Geoclue in Fedora
Thanks to Peter Robinson, both Gypsy and Geoclue are scheduled for addition to Fedora 9 Updates. Thanks Peter!
Ridicule
The problem for mainstream pop since the 70s is that metal has siphoned off many of the best freaks and losers.
It's not often you read an article in the Guardian about Adam and The Ants, Finnish Battle Metal bands, and being "cool", but today I did.
Galaxy Dark
I got a free bar of the new Galaxy Dark with my shopping yesterday, which is basically a dark chocolate (50%) version of a Galaxy bar. Well, I say that, but...
The smooth Galaxy way to enjoy dark chocolate... deeply smooth, intensely delicious and not at all bitter.
This should be called Galaxy Fail. It looks like dark chocolate but is pumped with sugar so it has a weird sickly sweet taste, nothing like the creamy taste of the original Galaxy. I predict this product will be binned soon.
Today's Second Geohack
I managed to wangle a Fire Eagle invitation this morning, so over lunch I grabbed the Python API Kit and threw it at the sample Gypsy client.
$ ./gypsy-fireeagle.py 00:0B:0D:88:A4:A3 got 51.861145 0.156275 Updated FireEagle
The first line is me running my script (this one is 64 lines, but it is half whitespace), telling it where my GPS is. The second line is the current position that my rather cheap and nasty GPS determined. The third line tells me that Fire Eagle has been updated with those coordinates.
Suffice to say I'm very impressed with Yahoo's geocoding software. My GPS never settles to an accurate reading and will happily jitter around a 20 metre wide circle for hours, but the location Fire Eagle is reporting me at is two doors away. I'm not exaggerating: it says number 9 on my street when it should be number 5. That is some incredibly accurate mapping they have.
Today's Geohack
Following hot on the heels of Yahoo's announcement of their Internet Location Platform, I wrote a quick 20-line Python hack to convert from latitude and longitude to a place name. Because the ILP doesn't yet expose the ability to go from a position to a WOEID we have to ask the Flickr web services to do this first (as Flickr is owned by Yahoo this is using the same backend). Once we have the WOEID, it can be then be looked up on the ILP and useful information obtained. Example speak more than words:
$ python geohack.py Using position 51.872330 0.161950 Got WOEID 12775 Got town Bishop's Stortford
Now to write a GeoClue provider which will fill in the locality information from the position. Long-term grand plans involve integrating all of this geo magic into Postr, somehow.
NP: Third, Portishead
Fire Eagle Invitation?
Does anyone out there on the Intarwebs work for Yahoo, or have a friend who works at Yahoo? I'd really like to give this Fire Eagle thing a go, specifically integrating Gypsy and GeoClue with Fire Eagle, but it's invitation only at the moment...
Update: I now have an account!
GUPnP Basics, Part 1
For the last few days I've been learning more about UPnP and testing it with the few devices I have around the house. One of these is a cheap ADSL router, which apparently has the lamest UPnP stack on in existence. It does however support the WAN IP Connection interface, so you can use UPnP to get the external IP address and manipulate the port mapping. I'll skip over the horrific security violations this involves, because it's a useful demonstration that the majority of people will be able to test.
Today we'll start simple and get our external IP address using GUPnP. The first thing to be done is to create a Control Point, which in the UPnP model handles discovery of resources, be them devices or services (a device can have multiple services). When creating a control point you can specify the URN of the resource you want to target. In this case we want all services providing WANIPConnection so we'd use urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:WANIPConnection:1. If you want to browse for all services then use ssdp:all (SSDP being the Simple Service Discovery Protocol).
static GMainLoop *main_loop;
int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
GError *error = NULL;
GUPnPContext *context;
GUPnPControlPoint *cp;
/* libsoup requires threading, so we have to initialise it */
g_thread_init (NULL);
g_type_init ();
/* Default GLib context, default host IP, default port */
context = gupnp_context_new (NULL, NULL, 0, &error);
if (error) g_error (error->message);
/* Create a control point targeting WAN IP Connection services */
cp = gupnp_control_point_new
(context, "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:WANIPConnection:1");
/* The service-proxy-available signal is emitted when any services which match
our target are found */
g_signal_connect (cp,
"service-proxy-available",
G_CALLBACK (service_proxy_available_cb),
NULL);
/* Tell the control point to start searching */
gssdp_resource_browser_set_active (GSSDP_RESOURCE_BROWSER (cp), TRUE);
/* Enter the main loop */
main_loop = g_main_loop_new (NULL, FALSE);
g_main_loop_run (main_loop);
/* Clean up */
g_main_loop_unref (main_loop);
g_object_unref (cp);
g_object_unref (context);
return 0;
}
static void
service_proxy_available_cb (GUPnPControlPoint *cp,
GUPnPServiceProxy *proxy)
{
/* ... */
}
Now we have an application which searches for the service we specified and calls service_proxy_available_cb for each one it found. Now, to get the external IP address we need to invoke the GetExternalIPAddress action. This action takes no in arguments, and has a single out argument called "NewExternalIPAddress". Yes, the naming scheme is stupid. GUPnP has a set of methods to invoke actions -- which will be very familiar to anyone who has used dbus-glib -- where you pass a NULL-terminated varargs list of (name, type, value) tuples for the in arguments, then a NULL-terminated varargs list of (name, value, return location) tuples for the out arguments. A simple implementation would be as follows.
static void
service_proxy_available_cb (GUPnPControlPoint *cp,
GUPnPServiceProxy *proxy)
{
GError *error = NULL;
char *ip = NULL;
gupnp_service_proxy_send_action (proxy,
/* Action name and error location */
"GetExternalIPAddress", &error,
/* IN args */
NULL,
/* OUT args */
"NewExternalIPAddress",
G_TYPE_STRING, &ip,
NULL);
if (error == NULL) {
g_print ("External IP address is %s\n", ip);
g_free (ip);
} else {
g_printerr ("Error: %s\n", error->message);
g_error_free (error);
}
g_main_loop_quit (main_loop);
}
Note that _send_action blocks until the service has replied. If you need to make non-blocking calls then use gupnp_service_proxy_begin_action which takes a callback.
So, that is searching for services and invoking actions in GUPnP. Next time I'll cover subscribing to state variables, and routers which can't count.
NP: Folk But Not Folk, Various
EphyDeli 0.3
EphyDeli is a Python extension for Epiphany that adds Post To Delicious menu and toolbar items for posting the current page to Del.icio.us. I know of several people who use it frequently and the last release was in 2006, so I've obviously mastered the Unix philosophy well here! This release was caused by those mean old Epiphany developers changing the API, many thanks to Thibauld Nion for noticing this and sending a patch.
To download it you can either grab the tarball or fetch the bzr tree.
It's Bubbling Hot
$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature temperature: 84 C temperature: 90 C
Maybe it's time to get a dedicated build machine, my poor laptop gets quite toasty when building Poky. Then again it seems happy enough, so maybe I should just use an external keyboard to avoid boiling my hands.
NP: Oneric, Boxcutter
Postr 0.12
A quick Postr 0.12 release, mainly to fix an annoying bug but there are some neat new features here too.
- Update the status bar after uploading
- Add a Switch User menu item
- Add Add/Remove buttons to the image pane
- Install the Nautilus extension to the new extension path
- Don't select groups when the name is clicked
- Don't display errors when posting to moderated groups
- Show a warning on exit if there are images to upload (thanks Germán Póo-Caamaño)
The tarball is here, and packages for Debian have been uploaded.
Postr 0.11
I finally got around to fixing the very annoying text wrapping problem in postr.dev, I thought I best release Postr 0.11:
- Add Send To Group options
- Add Privacy and Safety options
- Use a multi-line entry for the Description field
- Show the user's name in the status bar
- Fix the resizing of the preview
The tarball is here, and packages for Debian have been uploaded.
No Iain, I Am Luis Villa
Iain, you are clearly an imposter. And this perfect-sighted intruder, whoever he is, should be hunted down, because I am Luis Villa!
We're Hiring!
Here at OpenedHand Towers we've just announced some more job openings, so if you have skills in any of the kernel, X.org, GTK+, Clutter or OpenEmbedded then please have a look. We're also after user interface/interaction designers, junior designers (print/web/UI), and have an student internship for a programmer. Pretty much something for everyone!
GNOME Mobile Moduleset
I just committed to JHBuild three new modulesets, mobile-2.24, pimlico and matchbox, so that GNOME people wanting to develop against the GNOME Mobile platform can use tools they know to build everything they need.
- mobile-2.24
This changes GConf and EDS to use the DBus ports, and provides meta-mobile-platform which builds the complete platform.
- pimlico
This builds Contacts, Dates and Tasks, providing meta-pimlico.
- matchbox
This builds Matchbox Panel, Matchbox Desktop, Matchbox Keyboard and Matchbox Window Manager, providing meta-matchbox.
Also, Poky is building images nightly with the complete platform in, which will let you build and test software in a PDA-style environment with QEMU, running on x86 or a number of ARM-based devices (such as Nokia N800, Sharp Zaurus or OpenMoko).
Last week at the Collaboration Summit in Austin (which I couldn't attend for personal reasons) there was a day-long GNOME Mobile meeting, as a result of which there is now a long list of packages which need to be considered for addition to the Platform (such as HAL, Gypsy and Geoclue), and a few changes (such as replacing gnome-vfs with gvfs). I hope to review the proposals fairly shortly, so that we can hopefully make an initial GNOME Mobile 2.24 platform release alongside the Desktop release in September.
In other news, this is exactly what the Internet is for.
NP: Blue Moon Station, Solar Fields
Brain Gym
Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. Last week I watched, open-mouthed, a Newsnight piece on the spread of "Brain Gym" in British schools. I'd read about Brain Gym before - a few years back, in Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science column for this newspaper - but seeing it in action really twisted my rage dial.
Charlie Brooker in The Guardian gets deservedly angry over Brain Gym, after seeing an article about it on Newsnight (1, 2 on YouTube). The creator of Brain Gym was destroyed by Paxman, rather too easily to be honest.
NP: Voices, Vangelis (via Last.fm)
Ely
Today, we went to Ely. Nice (very small) city, with a rocking cathedral.
In other news, the new Lightroom 2 beta is very nice.
Dear Interwebs: Secure SMTP Relay Wanted
I'm looking for a basic SMTP relay which supports SMTP AUTH, TLS, supports the sendmail interface, and has a local mail queue, so that I can send mail from my laptop in Evolution (to localhost, or calls sendmail) and the shell (calling sendmail) when online or offline.
I need SMTP AUTH and TLS, which means nbsmtp, masqmail, and nullmailer are out. I want a local queue for when I'm not online which means esmtp, ssmtp, msmtp, and nullmailer are out (I'm not convinced that msmtp's queue scripts are reliable enough). Surely there must be a simple SMTP relay which will reliably manage a queue if the mail cannot be sent! If not, does anyone know of a good guide to configuring Postfix or Exim to do this?
New Gypsy Release
Coding Legend Iain has just released Gypsy 0.6, the all-new GPS multiplexing daemon which focuses on being lean and easy to use, and not on, erm, putting your GPS on the Internet or something weird.
Because I'm fairly lame there are not matching Debian packages yet, but I'll get around to that tomorrow. In other news, a very nice man called Ian Lawrence wrote a buzzword-compliant tutorial where he uses Gypsy to talk to a Bluetooth GPS, tests it with my Gypsy Status 10-minute hack, and then uses Django to redirect the user to the relevant geohash.org page.
NP: Remembranza, Murcof
