Planet Kesäkoodi '08

August has passed, but work continues. I am leaving for Metz, France tomorrow to live there for 9 to 10 months, and the Kesäkoodi final report for the project will have to wait at least for some days - we will see about how easy it will be to get an Internet connection. At least there’s wifi on the campus, I hear.

The usability report of Moodle Quiz UI’s direction in the future has not gotten any discussion. I only mentioned it in one forum posting though so that is understandable. I will have to promote it further once I have time again, to really get the community thinking about the issues that came up in the usability testing, which were, after all, rather primitive.

This software did benefit from this summer’s work, but it is far from good in terms of usability yet.

I finally got my Summercode report written. This means that when I get confirmation that it is good enough for the project coordinators, my project is over. However, I will still be giving a short presentation regarding the project at the Openmind conference on Tuesday October 7th in Tampere, Finland.

I must say this summer was a great experience. I would like to thank everyone involved, especially the people who tested my work and gave great feedback. The project coordinators and all other people responsible for organizing and sponsoring the project also deserve credit. They are the people who made this all possible. Thank You!

For now I think I'll take some time off from Ardour and maybe fill my coding desires by writing a LV2 plugin. This is something I've wanted to do for some while, but never got it done. Nevertheless there is still some work that should be done regarding Ardour's export, which I will tackle some time later.

Anyway, here is the report, and as a bonus, the not-yet-published presentation slides I used at the finals.

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I now have packages in my PPA ready for testing and I’m working with asac to get them included to Ubuntu repositories. If all goes well, we just might see the fruits of my work in the next release of Ubuntu. Exciting isn’t it?

This was for me the last week of Kesäkoodi. There’s still a closing report on it’s way and Openmind conference is coming so I’m not going anywhere. I will push updates through this blog on the Ubuntu inclusion and other important stuff.

Not yet at least. I was sick for few days and actually worked mostly on page translations this week to get it working. But I also wrote some more documentation, but it is not yet published. The wiki page translation should now work with some caveats, and it doesn’t yet have all the features I wanted. See a very simple example here.

It can now display the languages and how complete and up-to-date they the translations are approximately. Suitable translation is not yet automatically selected for the user, but at least the user can now see which languages are available and view them, as opposed to the previous version.

This projects ends in a week. It has been very nice, and I still hope I can recover a little from the problems encountered in this task. Let’s hope the summer doesn’t end this week also, even though I already have done my schedule for next study year in the university.

My Ardour summercode project is getting very close to it's end. The last few days I've been working on minor bugs, GUI tweaks and integration of the new export dialog into Ardour.

If you are up to building Ardour yourself, please check out my branch and do some testing. Everything should be functional now, but there might still be some bugs. Region export is one thing that is not yet functional and will need some planning before it is re-implemented, since the current model has caused a lot of confusion. Again, the best place to report bugs is #ardour @ freenode

For the next two days I'll be writing my final report and maybe touching up a few places here and there in the code. When I get my report done, I'll publish it here with some final screen shots. Until then, Happy Testing ;)

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I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to, but I’m pretty pleased anyway. Most of my time went to polishing and testing  on Intrepid (new library versions, new trouble) and everything should be working now.

I also made official releases of mobile-broadband-provider-info and libmbca, but I haven’t announced those yet. Packages for intrepid and hardy are available.

Next Week

I haven’t had a lot of time to spent with NM lately. I’ve done the packaging that was scheduled for next week so there’s time to really push NM integration.

I will also start poking the ubuntu people. Hopefully they will poke me back

This update is somewhat delayed, a bit too much even in my opinion. There has been some problems with the wikipage translation design I started with, like broken and complicated caching. I’m now trying a different approach but I’ve already spend more time on this than the two weeks I have allocated for it. Tomorrow I have an exam, but I’ve planned to spend the rest of the week to try to get something usable out.

After that I change to the other items, two way changes and documentation. If I can finish them quickly I could resume working on the wikipage translation if needed. In any case it looks like that I don’t have time to work on the optional features.

After a lot of work this summer, my Ardour summercode project is nearing its end! All new features mentioned in the project plan are implemented, and it's time to start polishing things up.

The full blown export multiplication mentioned in the redesign document ended up being a bit too complex to operate (and implement), so we decided to use a tabbed model instead. Instead of tabbing only formats (as in this mockup), we decided to tab the whole file section, ending up with a dialog like this:

• 

One thing I've been working on, which is worth mentioning is the preset system. The export configuration is split in two parts: A "local" part consisting of the timespans and channel configurations and a "global" part, which is the format and filename configurations. When the user saves a profile, the global part gets saved to the user configuration directory, and the local part into the sessions files. This way presets can be loaded and saved almost transparently in multiple session, with making changes to both parts. A name matching system for guessing local configurations based on the global configuration was also discussed, but implementing something like this is a job for the future.

So now I have less than two week left of my project, and a few things still need to be done:

• Integration with the rest of Ardour is not as good as with the old dialog, so I'll have to edit (context) menus in the rest of Ardour to get the new functionality integrated as well as possible.
• CD Marker export is not functional in the new dialog. The code for this already exists, so it shouldn't be much work.
• A progress indicator dialog should be made.
• Some improvements to the GUI should be done
• Export Preset and Format XML-file should be made exchangeable

The three first items in the list shouldn't take long to implement. Improving the GUI is more complex. Some parts can be easily improved, but others (like the channel selector) would require writing a rather complex new custom widget. For now I will concentrate on fast improvements.

The last item in the list is something that has been discussed in IRC, but might take too long to implement to get it done during this project. The problem with the current model is, that format profiles are referenced via an id, which is serialized into the XML file to keep things consistent. If users were to exchange format profile files, these ids could conflict, causing problems. Thus, ids with two part must be used: one part is for identifying the format, and the other for verifying that it was created on this specific system. If an id with a conflicting identifier is imported into the system, the situation should be recognized, and the id modified to fit the current system. The same applies for preset files.

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I missed one week. I’m sorry for that

So what have I been up to..

NetworkManager Integration

Need to say more?

Well maybe a little. My changes are currently only available from mbca branches of NetworkManager and network-manager-applet. I’m currently discussing with Dan Williams about merging my changes to trunks.

My NM branch doesn’t have anything vital for the assistant, but I’ve added some functionality in order to have Nokia mobile phones recognised by NM. That functionality really needs to be added to HAL some later time.

Some Bad News

I have to drop support for Bluetooth and arbitrary serial devices.  Sorry, no can do.

My assistant has the support, but NetworkManager does not. This is propably going to change some day, but for now we just have to seddle for devices discovered by HAL: USB, PCMCIA, ExpressCard and built-in devices.

Your Country Needs YOU!

I got the database repository finally up and running and there’s even one contributor already. Needles to say that’s not enough. Take a look at the instructions and participate! Make the wold a better place

String Freeze

libmbca strings are now frozen. Head your browser to Betawiki and participate.

The Bughunt

I hunted down  GTK bug #546378 and while I was at it I also spotted #545982. Let’s hope 2.12 will also get the translation bug fixed

here’s a nice picture to proof:

Next Week

I’ll provide fresh packages for Ubuntu Intrepid and Hardy through my PPA.

I took a minute to install xvidcap and make a recording of LASH in action. Xvidcap is a nice program although it seems to be prone to crashes and also has some other bugs, as you can see from the video.

The following clip shows how one can interface with LASH using various means such as command-line tools (lash_control), GUI applications (patchage), and even via generic D-Bus service browsers (qdbusviewer).

Also included in the clip is a demonstration of LASH's client auto-recovery feature. This means that a crashed client can be manually restarted and LASH will automatically attach it to the project it was originally part of. (In the future LASH will also be capable of restarting crashed clients all by itself.)

Here's the clip (9.9 MB, MPEG-4), stay tuned for more!

As a result of a change of plans, I started to implement the reordering tab last week. That is: I decided to implement all the functionality before doing usability testing with the actual application. This was due to the fact that it was not easy enough to get teachers as usability test subjects during July. Instead of hunting, I decided to put my energy into implementation.

Thus, the question ordering/paging tab is well underway and will, if all goes well, be finished by next week.

The feedback from the Moodle community about the demo published last week has been very positive, though I have gotten some very interesting development ideas, too. So that is something to be glad about! :)

I will write a status report tomorrow (propably), but here’s little something for the brave.

my NetworkManager branch:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/NetworkManager/branches/mbca NetworkManager

my network-manager-applet branch:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/network-manager-applet/branches/mbca network-manager-applet

network-manager-applet must be configured using –with-mbca switch to enable Mobile Broadband Configuration Assistant.

My son was sick the whole week and I didn’t get much done. But I managed to create couple of SVN repositories with my new and shiny account.

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/libmbca:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/libmbca/trunk libmbca

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/mobile-broadband-provider-info:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/mobile-broadband-provider-info/trunk mobile-broadband-provider-info

Packages for Ubuntu Hardy are found from my PPA.

The time for stats ended a little over week ago week. I added little new features, like per hour granularity and counting of active translators instead of edits and there is now a simple GUI to generate a code that can be included in pages for those who don’t care to remember the parameters.

My current task is wikipage translation. I have been waiting for this task and I’m very excuisited to see what will come from it. The basic system should already work and it is being tested on an example page. That means it is possible to mark content for translation, translate it, and changes to the content will invalidate the translation. But as you can see it is still missing a lot, like for example selection for language.

Last week of summercoding was not very productive for me. I have mainly been working on Ardour's export instancing/multiplication widget, or more specifically the model behind it, and operations related to the model. The any-number-of-four-different-components-connected-arbitrarily-from-top-to-bottom model is a hierarchical graph, i.e. a bunch of nodes with a bunch of parent and child nodes. And since this model is represented in a GUI that shouldn't jump around, both parents and children have to be ordered.

Well, things got a bit complicated and I experienced a lack of motivation for the first time this summer. To be honest, having done maybe a bit too much work now and then, I had it coming. So, I decided it is time for a vacation. Next week is dedicated for relaxing and, hmm... relaxing :)