Recent blog entries for zeenix

More Network Light fun

When I wrote GUPnP Network Light, I thought of it as just a simple example application that demonstrates how easy it is to implement UPnP devices and services using GUPnP. However there is one man, Mr. Hugo Baldasano Calleja who being an electrical engineer is very much interested in light bulbs and has recently been writing control point for Network Light.

While discussing about his code with him on IRC, I started to wonder how would a simple control point GUI for Network Light look like. I realized that it would look exactly the same as the Network Light itself. Since Hugo had already made it possible for multiple instances of Network Light to co-exist happily on the same network/machine, I decided to turn Network Light GUI to be a Control Point that controls all the Lights on the network, not just itself. The change is already in the trunk and will be released soon. Here is a screenshot:

Syndicated 2008-09-07 11:07:00 (Updated 2008-09-07 12:22:56) from zeenix

GSSDP 0.6.2 and GUPnP 0.12.2 released

Jorn made minor releases of GSSDP and GUPnP today. The main purpose of which is to fix the build on Rawhide. Here is the release announcement:

GSSDP 0.6.2
===========

- Reannounce resources after max_age / 2 - 1 instead of after max_age.
 [Peter Christensen, Jorn Baayen]
- Remove unnecessary call to g_thread_init(). [Zeeshan Ali]


GUPnP 0.12.2
============

- Support returning actions outside of the 'action-invoked' signal handler
 in service implementations. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]
- Add explicit dependency on gthread. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]

Syndicated 2008-08-31 19:57:00 (Updated 2008-08-31 20:17:33) from zeenix

XChat or irssi+screen+ssh?

Ever since I started to IRC from my Linux machine, not only I had been a happy (almost) user of XChat for years but also I wrote an XChat plugin for Guile. All that changed when I moved to Finland three years ago and was educated about the benefits of the combination of irssi+screen+ssh, the biggest (perhaps the only one) of them being the persistence connection to IRC. Since then I had been using that combination. After three years, I am having doubts about the choice I made at that time.

XChat might not be able to provide me with a persistent connection to the IRC world but it still provides lots of small features that irssi does not (and in some cases can not) provide that really does matter in the end and one would expect in a modern IRC client, e.g hard-to-miss notifications when I get new messages, saving of logs and DCC-sent-files directly on my local-machine etc.

I switched to back to XChat a few days ago. I mostly feel good about coming back to it but still miss the persistent connection to IRC. Especially when I suspend/resume my laptop. After resuming, XChat happily assumes that everything is exactly how it was before I suspended the laptop and it takes a while in realizing that it needs to re-connect to all networks. In most cases the network connection doesn't take long but in case of very busy networks like ircnet, it takes a lot of time and is therefore a source of annoyance.

The reason I am discussing this here and not doing anything about it is that I currently don't have time do anything about it and if someone has already solved this problem somehow, I would like to know.

Syndicated 2008-08-24 17:46:00 (Updated 2008-08-25 12:08:55) from zeenix

GUPnP soon in Fedora

Peter Robinson had made RPMS for GUPnP package for a while now but it was until recently that someone got a chance to review them. The first (and IIRC the only) issue that came out was that the build was breaking for all our apps. Here is what was happening:

We call g_thread_init() in each of the application because libsoup requires us to do that. If I understand correctly, libsoup needs the threading system to be initialized for locking stuff that is actually a part of glib. While we don't mind putting this call in each of our app, we assumed that libsoup requiring us to make this call will itself link to libgthread-2.0. That assumption is true about libsoup-2.4 built/installed from vanilla release tarballs, subversion repo and debian/ubuntu packages but on Rawhide, it turned out to be false.

I (and a bunch of other developer hanging out on #gnome-hackers) had a chat with Dan Winship about this and in the end he agreed to put gthread-2.0 in libsoup-2.4 pkg-config. He said that it will be a while before he can make a release so we decided that we ourself link the apps to gthread-2.0 until then.

Peter has already put the required patches into his packages. Here is page to track the status of the packages and as of this writing two of the packages have already been approved. A big thanks to Peter for his efforts to make GUPnP easily available to Fedora world.

Syndicated 2008-08-13 21:12:00 (Updated 2008-08-14 10:55:03) from zeenix

We have plugins

Just pushed my commits to gupnp-media-server SVN trunk. Now we support plugable media providers, which can be written either in Vala or C. Also included in these commits is gstreamer-based metadata-extractor. Still not done (due to lack of time :() is a standalone media provider based on this extractor, GIO and SQLite.

Syndicated 2008-08-05 15:58:00 (Updated 2008-08-05 16:09:12) from zeenix

Now a GNOME foundation member

I just received e-mail informing me about the successful processing of my application for GNOME foundation membership. Thanks to all the people who vouched for me. My agenda as a member will be to:

• continue contributing wherever/whenever possible.
  
• make sure GNOME has full-blown support/integration for UPnP.
  
• not let the people who think of Mango Lassi as an original desi drink and are agaisnt the idea of GUADEC in Finland, gain power in the foundation. :P
  

Syndicated 2008-07-29 09:05:00 (Updated 2008-07-29 09:12:46) from zeenix

back from finnish forest

I am back. Had a very relaxing one week in the Finnish summer cottage. Lots of fishing and plenty of nice food to eat. Yes! there was Sauna almost everyday and yes! 'swimming in the lake naked' breaks were included. I had a crappy GPRS connection so I did some twittering for the past few days.

Syndicated 2008-07-28 12:00:00 (Updated 2008-07-28 13:26:18) from zeenix

Out in the forest for a week

I am on a one week vacation starting from tomorrow afternoon. I'll be in a summer cottage in the middle of a forest and might not have any internet connection at all. I am taking my laptop with me, but I'll try to resist hacking. Lets see how successful I am. :)

Syndicated 2008-07-19 23:04:00 (Updated 2008-07-19 23:08:58) from zeenix

Trouble with gmail and o-hand.com

I hadn't been getting replies to any of my mails to o-hand dudes but I just thought they are either on vacation or just too busy doing more important stuff. Yesterday I caught Matthew on IRC and it turned out that he did reply to my mail(s). I became a bit worried and searched my "Spam" and "Trash" to see if it ended-up there for some reason but i didn't find them there. I got a bit worried and looked into the archives of o-hand hosted mailing lists that i am subscribed to. It turned out that I haven't been able to receive any mail after 10th of June from o-hand.com mail server.

Getting really worried, I hit the "Help" link in gmail. Turns out that I can either go through a stupid automated troubleshooting procedure that didn't help at all or I can post my problem to a discussion forum that is sometimes visited by the gmail admins but mostly they assume that your problem will be solved by a user. I did post about my problem there but since this morning I am unable to find that forum anymore. Err..

I don't know on which end the problem exists but if you are reading this mail and you work at either o-hand or google, kindly investigate this issue.

UPDATE: I figured out the issue. Eric created this cool looking "@gstreamer.net" alias for me once and I had been advertising that all around. Turns out that I even used this alias/redirection to subscribe to (o-hand) mailing lists. I subscribed to clutter ml using '@gmail.com' address and I instantly got the messages from the list. I'll write to Eric in hope of getting the lost mails but I must stop using this alias/redirection no matter how cool it is. <sigh>

Syndicated 2008-07-19 22:26:00 (Updated 2008-07-20 00:07:37) from zeenix

The Istanbul story

Time flies and it's already been a few days that I am back from Istanbul. It was a lot of fun. Great presentations, discussions and hacks in the mornings and Shisha and beer in the evenings.

Had lots of discussion with a lot of people about GUPnP, how it can be used for UPnP integration in GNOME and what features they would like to see in gupnp-media-server. My talk went pretty well and this time the demo really did work on the wireless network available at that time. :) The only issue was that it was scheduled at the same time as the Lightning talks and because of that only a few (~10) people could attend.

Talking of talks, my favorite was Michael's talk about Moonlight. There were many other nice talks as well like Quim's BoF, where he nicely explained Nokia's relationship with Open Source world in general and GNOME in specific, and OH people's talk on Clutter and the cool new features in Clutter 0.8.

There was a big debate going around on git vs bazaar. Although I was on git's side myself, I couldn't help but appreciate how reasonable the bazaar advocates/developers were. I had a lot of discussion with them and bombarded them with lots of straight questions. Unfortunately, I felt that I failed to convey my concerns about bazaar and how they (my concerns) can not just go away by simply me trying out bazaar myself.

Regarding next year's GUADEC/Akademy on one hand, I am very sad about Tampere's bid to be rejected but on the other hand I am really glad that it'll be in Canaries. Before you get me wrong, I don't think Galicia would have been less than perfect spot either. One thing that many people don't know about Canaries is that it's "the" vacation spot for Finnish people. So if you look even a bit Finnish or hanging around with Finnish (looking) friends in there, don't be surprised if the locals start to talk to you in (very broken) Finnish. :) Seriously, I am speaking from experience. So much for keeping GUADEC away from Finland. :)

Syndicated 2008-07-13 20:26:00 (Updated 2008-07-17 22:15:33) from zeenix