that I always liked about OS X was fading between backgrounds on the desktop. So I quickly hacked up a 20 line prototype for libeel to do something similar. Screencast below:
I’ve become envious of various web frameworks ability to access data with ease. It’s become so easy to lookup, manipulate, and persist data objects that developers can focus more of their energy on user-interaction.
In the hopes that it will become like this for desktop applications, I started putting together a simple data-mapper for GObject. It is incredibly basic in its current state, but I intend to add features out of my own needs.
Only a simplistic Sqlite backend is currently implemented; but the idea is to support numerous data sources such as json, yaml, and libgda.
It’s written in Vala and consumption looks something like the following.
That will be simplified more when Vala bug #528436 is fixed. Fixing this bug will allow for automatic boxing/unboxing of variables into GValue’s. That means you will not need to use Condition.str_equal, but Condition.equal instead.
While I do love git, mercurial, bzr and all their hype, I can’t help but wonder if the time spent on deciding on a DVCS is keeping people from writing cool software. With the curiosity if GNOME is decadent, perhaps we should just hack for a while and see what comes of it. I remember the reason I played with GNU/Linux in the first place is because of all the cool software that was available. Perhaps we’ve spent so much time going enterprise’y we forgot how to have fun.
On a lighter note; Aaron, Gabriel et. all, the new Banshee fscking rocks! It’s an app I regularly show to people at the office who are curious about GNU/Linux.
I’ve pretty well switched to Git, however I enjoy mercurial more. But since the whole point is being able to work and interact WITH the community, it makes sense to work friendly with the masses. For better or worse, that seems to be git.
Miguel mentioned to me once he would write git# during the next hackweek, I fully intend to hold him to that
Today I wrote a layer of abstraction over the libmrss syndication parser. The goal was to have something that would be enjoyable to use from C and Vala and wrap well into other languages. I really like how json-glib works, so I copied the format used there.
Do you enjoy working with the low-levels of full-text search engines? Do you have experience with Lucene (java, py, or c#) or Xapian, or tsearch2, or similar? MySpace is looking to hire immediately. Send your resume to christian at myspace dot com.
Did I mention we are based in beautiful Beverly Hills, California?
So to continue with my “rewrite breadcrumbs a new way ever night this week”, I put one together last night using GtkCellRenderer’s instead of actual GtkWidget’s. I’m liking it a lot more. It uses a GtkListStore for storage. You pack cell renderers and work with attributes just like normal with other GtkCellLayout systems.
Now why am I making a breadcrumbs widget? Well, for Marina, I’d really like the movement between syndication articles and data sources to be easy to navigate. For example, lets look at this screenshot from the codebase in mercurial.
I’d really like to have the full breadcrumbs across the top, so you see one of two components at a time. When the selected breadcrumb is a source (Folder, Search, Syndication), the viewing area will show the list of articles in that source. When the selected breadcrumb is an article, you will see the article alone. This will hopefully solve my “too many things to see at once” issue with current rss readers.
So right now, you still see a GtkVPaned splitting the list and article view, that will go away soon.
So if you have any ideas for what you would like to see in a syndication reader, please leave me a comment. The core of the code base utilizes twisted and a fair mix of louie for a cross-platform eventing engine. It’s time to really focus on the UI and user interaction, which is not my forte.
Have I mentioned how incredibly badass Deferred’s are in twisted? Oh yes, I have.
I’m headed up to Washington state in a few hours for my cousin Timm’s funeral. Timm had served in the United States Army for the last 5 years. He had been on leave for about the last year and working on a degree at Washington State University.
He was just recently called to head back to Iraq. This would have been about his 3 tour in Iraq alone. He also served in Korea and Afghanistan I believe. The post-traumatic stress he incurred while in Iraq was so bad, he felt it necessary to take his own life instead of heading back.
I can no longer have my family return, but I hope all of yours returns safely. And soon.
