Open Word

Our baby boy was sick the whole week and I dedicated my time to him; hence there was no mentionable progress with the project. He is now feeling better and I’m back on track.

I’ve decided that usability testing will be postponed until the integration with nm-applet is done and the functionality can be tested as whole. I’m now converting the assistant to GObject (YES, I should have done that in the first place..) and try to rush to finish the assistant so that I can start the integration.

There has been some progress on the svn.gnome.org account and the problem is under investigation. I should receive the account very soon Like you haven’t heard that before

Last week I told you I’m going to use Betawiki for translations. If you want to give it a try follow the instructions and get on to it. Be aware that Betawiki is work in progress so don’t expect it to be flawless. If you encounter bugs or other problems join and bitch at #mediawiki-i18n@freenode.

Betawiki makes it really easy to get up-to-date translations:

#!/bin/sh
#########

base_url=http://translatewiki.net/sandwiki/extensions/Translate/libmbca

# fetch the list of available po files
echo “check po.list”

wget -nv -N $base_url/LINGUAS.txt -O LINGUAS

# get the files
for code in `cat LINGUAS`;
do
echo “check $code.po”;
wget -nv  -N $base_url/$code.po;
done

echo “translations fetched”

I’ve tried to get rid of memory leaks, but still many remain. If you feel brave you can grab an alpha release of libmbca (still working on that svn.gnome.org account) and give it a try. There might be some odd behaviour, but if you find something or just want to say hello, please join at #kesakoodi@ircnet or contact me directly. I’m available at least on Monday from 8:00 AM UTC+3:00 onward. And remeber to read the README.

btw, BlueZ patches from last week got accepted.

toys and raincoats

I finally received the hardware I was promised. Thanks Elisa! I now have Huawei E169, Option iCON255, Vodafone VMC HSDPA 3G and Nokia E81. I also received two raincoats that are hot, hot, hot! (in every way) Here’s some cute pictures (little blue, I know):

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I implemented the USB and Bluetooth pages. There’s some nice screenshots at the end of this post.

I also went off irritating people at BlueZ development mailing list:

Hello list!

I’m developing a project[1] that needs to provide the user a way to
select[2] a Bluetooth device from a list of discovered devices.

I noticed that gnome-bluez applet has a very nice device selector and
that got me browsing though the code. Unfortunately I discovered that
bluez-gnome creates only a static library libcommon.a that contains the
device selector (common/bluetooth-device-selection.c) for private use.

Now there is two options the way I see it. Either I have a private copy
of bluez-gnome package or bluez-gnome is made to be a shared library.

The first solution would be easiest for everyone because no extra work
would be required. But it’s just generally A Bad Idea to have multiple
programs using same code privately and so on..

The second solutions would be optimal. If bluez-gnome provides a shared
library 3rd party software could utilize it in sane way. I’m quite sure
there are many applications that would benefit from common bluetooth
widgets; like CUPS for bluetooth printer setup, Evolution for vCard
sending, <your favorite application that communicates with BT devices>..
Here is the lame part: I’m busy with my project, so someone else should
do all the work
OK, maybe not all the work, but I can not promise anything.

What do you think about the idea? Is this something not worth the
trouble and I should just STFU or is this viable?

best regards,
Antti Kaijanmäki

[1] http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/MobileBroadband
[2] http://www.kaijanmaki.net/kesakoodi/bt_draft.png

P.S.
Here are some wishes from top of my head regarding the device selector:
1. remove the caption of the list
- let the developer provide a caption best suited for
his application
2. put the filter in GtkExpander
- Filters are not used for by the most of the users, thus it’s
convenient to have them hidden by default.
3. make the filter completely hidden
- this combined with the 1. would make the widget appear just
like GtkTreeView
- this is already achievable, but there seems to be a bug. If both of
the filter fields are hidden the caption is still shown.
See an attached patch.
4. have alternative filters in right-click pop-up menu
- very handy for tight places
5. add property for selected device name. It’s always nice to be able
to show the user a nice name instead of bluetooth address.
- see an attached patch.

bluez-devel email archive at SourceForge.net has had its last update on June 18th so no bonus for you. Here are the patches (there is a memory leak though..):

• hide_filters_box_when_not_needed.patch
• add_selected_device_name_property.patch

Bastien Nocera replied that the API would need a lot of work before it’s in the shape for being made public. I decided to include a private copy of the widget for now and switch to public library when it becomes available. I also made the modifications I needed as you can see in the screenshot below.

Next week

Work for first translations should begin. And guess what. We will be using Betawiki as it is part of this years Kesäkoodi and Niklas Laxström is a close friend of mine.

I am hoping that someone who speaks native English would step up and review the UI strings before I create the translation template. Any volunteers? Send me an email.

I’m on schedule, but I’m a little bit concerned about the quality of my current code base. Fortunately there is time for testing and polishing. Hopefully I finally get my svn.gnome.org account so that I can start pushing my code to public repository.

USB modems!

I got couple of USB modems one day to play with. They were Huawei E220 and Option iCON 225. They didn’t work out of the box with my ubuntu 8.04. Huawei has working driver shipped with 8.04 (option), but there is also an another (airprime) that sometimes steals the device. After blacklisting the airprime module Huawei worked nicely except that /dev permissions were wrong.

iCON 255 didn’t work with the stock option driver, but I stumbled upon a new driver hso which is developed by Option International. Unfortunately the dongle I had didn’t work with the driver. The driver didn’t recognize the dongle even though the usb-id was set (I checked the source). Hopefully and most probably that gets fixed for Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10).

Screenshots

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Here’s the serial page, whoo! Do not stare the strings too closely. I really need someone who speaks native English to purify the UI strings before translations. Still no account for svn.gnome.org, so you can’t see what a mess my code currently is. I will not be working tomorrow, because it’s Midsummer’s Eve, so do you self a favor and grab a nice cold beer and think what Freedom means to you. At least I will

I just hacked together a planet for this years summer coders. I could say it’s quite ugly because I just glued it together from Planet and my main site template. enjoy!