Older blog entries for nyo (starting at number 32)

Cool. Tomorrow is the day of Great Victory of Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. I'd like to thank our grandfathers and grandmothers for that victory and for our future. For this weekend I'm going to the village, further from big city to breath some fresh air and see cool earth of green. :)

As for my packages. I hope, vorlon will accept goobox 0.9.91-1, and if not, there's already a 0.9.90-3 ready with fixes for all bugs, recorded to BTS. Other packages are nice.

BTW, installed windows XP home edition today. It has quite nice UI. It looks also object oriented and some OO things are even more developed than GNOME ones. :)

Oh, shit. Sarge is finally frozen. Nice. They're planning to release on 30th of May. Nice date. The only bad thing is that many of maintainers are students and have exams this time. As for my packages. They're in nice state, excepting goobox. One more day and 0.9.91-1 would be in Sarge. But now it's frozen and I should either make 0.9.90-3 for Sarge or make release team accept new upstream release. Waiting for answer from vorlon. I wonder what's the problem to accept a BUGFIX new upstream release (really no new features). If I'll backport fixes for current Sarge's Goobox bugs, it will be actually the same as new upstream version, so why don't just accept it...

Gnome Art package won't be in Sarge as it didn't make it in time. Sad, but true.

Other packages are nice.

Woohoo, I finally fixed a very weird bug in Goobox Debian package. I tried to find that segfault for a month, but I didn't have time to work on it with more attention. Then I tagged the bug with "help" tag and rased its severity. And Stephen Gran did a diff between the previous version, that worked and the current version (Thanks!). He found that gnomevfs sink was used to write files in new version instead of file sink like in older version. That's great for GNOME integration, but stupid me forgot to just add gstreamer0.8-gnomevfs package to dependencies and because of that, people who don't have it (say they're don't use GNOME) got a segfault. So I fixed that little (as it really is) bug, updated to new upstream version and uploaded with urgency=high to mentors.debian.net. Tommorow, my sponsor will upload it to unstable and in about two days it will enter Sarge. So we'll have a working goobox in Sarge. :)

The simplest console music player with full GNOME integration ever:

#!/bin/sh

for FILE in $*; do

gst-launch-0.8 gnomevfssrc location=$FILE ! decodebin ! gconfaudiosink

done

Whoa, checked out gst-editor. What a nice tool. Especially it's great to show people the design of GStreamer and it's flexibility. Looks just great (though needs some UI work, if we're talking about it)! Now I love GStreamer even more. :)

Oh shit. I was looking some movie clips and forgot that there was food on the frying-pan. Now It's ruined. Very sad, I'm going to sleep hungry. :-\

Oh, right after posting metacity-hating entry, I googled about some ML archives on the topic. And I found a nice post about what applications need to do. Well, maybe this feature will ever work someday. I'm going to do mass bug filing about that thing. And the first bug goes to Seahorse. :)

One more thing I hate. :) It's metacity 2.10 focus stealing prevention feature. No, really, it's a nice feature. But it doesn't work. Really. As svu said, there's one more victory of "Usability" against the common sense. And the worst thing that it can't be turned off (at least w/o recompilation). What happened? Is it really hard to add a GConf setting? Here's an example. I'm using Seahorse (GPG key manager) and it's seahorse-agent. When I try to send a signed message with Evolution, the seahorse-agent dialog shows up BELOW message window. As Evolution waits while its work finishes, the UI freezes. That's all, folks. (c) Looks like the program halted. I click the close button and the click "Yes" to the "Kill the prog?" dialog. Try again... The same. WTF? Oh, ah, I only should minimize/rollup the message window (Alt+Tab doesn't show dialogs now, nice!). But how should I know that? I'm not using the fucking "Window List" applet! (Window Selector is much more useful) It tries to be smarter than me. Again. If that won't be fixed, I'll consider changing the WM (whoa, let's see how non-metacity WMs work with GNOME!).

Another thing I hate is that some programs (Right now - Gossip, Rhythmbox) always shows their fscking icon in the notification area and I can't turn it off. I wonder why do I need to be notified of that Rhythmbox is running while I already listening my music? Gossip has some excuse, because it shows its current status (here/busy/away), but still, I'd like to see its toggleable. I only want to see a Gossip icon, when there's a message for me. The HIG says that permanent notification area icon is acceptable, but it should be disableable in program preferences and be off by default. I mailed gossip-dev mailing list about that, but looks like they won't add a preference for that. They do want to implement something more advanced, like MSN-like toasters or an applet. Too sad, notification area is great for notifying about that things. It's simple and cute. I like the simplicity of Gossip and if they'd just follow HIG in the scope of notification area usage, it would be much better. If we're talking about me, I would be happy if there was a hidden GConf setting for that.

Today, I found a really nice toy - Splashy. It's a completely user-space frame buffer boot splash system. Though it is in development right now, it's already very nice. It does not require any kernel patches and has few dependencies. So I installed it (there's a deb on the web site) and rebooted my machine. It was so cool. I got a simple image with a progress bar below during all the boot process until GDM start up. I hope that splashy will develop quickly so it could be included in Debian Sarge release. There's also a #splashy IRC channel on the Freenode, where Splashy's developers chat.