This is the archive for November 2006. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Using autotools to detect Python modules

Wednesday, November 29, 2006 ★ 00:18 ★ Categories Gnome, Programming ★ Permanent url

Dear lazyweb,

When detecting Python GTK/Gnome modules in configure.ac, should I use this check:

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(pygtk, pygtk-2.0)

...or this check:

if ! $PYTHON -c 'import gtk' > /dev/null 2>&1; then 
  AC_MSG_ERROR([Python module 'gtk' not found])
fi

The pkg-config call requires the development packages from distributions, which I doubt are needed. On the other hand, what purpose serve the .pc files for the various Python GTK/Gnome packages if we don’t use them in configure.ac at all?

Any clue? Contact me (uws) on irc.gnome.org or mail me. Thanks!

Update 1: I received some responses.

If you don’t wrap stuff yourself, the PyGTK development stuff isn’t needed and the import gtk (with import pygtk; pygtk.require('2.0') prepended) suffices.

However, this fails when $DISPLAY isn’t set.
Update 2: Loïc Minier (from Debian fame) pointed out that using runtime checking for Python modules is a far better way and a lot more distro-friendly because their build infrastructure does not have to compile/install/run unneeded dependencies when creating packages (in addition to other problems like NFS home dirs and such). Just listing the dependencies in a README file and handling run-time errors gracefully should be enough.

Why the Gnome community rocks

Monday, November 27, 2006 ★ 16:43 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Within 12 hours after I released Gnome Specimen 0.1 I received:
- 5 new translations: Finnish, Russian, Italian, British English and Vietnamese (in additional to my own Dutch translation)
- about 5 “thumbs up” responses on IRC
- 14 questions/tips/feature requests (some of those duplicate) in various e-mails
  Thanks for the positive feedback. This is really motivating.
  
  Changes in my Gnome Specimen bzr branch so far:
- Added translations
- Did some path mangling to allow Gnome Specimen to run from the source directory (useful for hacking)
- Changed the double-click behaviour on the font listing pane to add all styles of a font (instead of just expanding/collapsing the treeview)
- Disabled text ellipsizing so that you can preview longer texts (or large sizes)
  More to come in the future!
  
  Gnome Specimen 0.1 is out!
  
  Sunday, November 26, 2006 ★ 17:23 ★ Categories Gnome, Programming ★ Permanent url
  
  Note: Gnome Specimen 0.2 is available as well.
  
  I’m proud to release the first version of Gnome Specimen, a simple tool to view and compare fonts installed on your system. Gnome Specimen currently features:
  - A list of all fonts available (the left pane)
  - A list of font previews (the right pane)
  - Configurable preview text and font size
  - Configurable foreground and background colors used in the preview pane
  - A Dutch translation
    
    Planned features:
  - A simple preview for the currently select font (without adding it to preview pane)
  - Remembering the list of previews between restarts
  - Perhaps others; I’d love feedback
    After a long struggle I won the battle with autotools, so the application now obeys the standard configure, make, install routine, has working i18n infrastructure and puts a menu item in the Graphics section of your Gnome menu.
    
    Go grab it now: Gnome Specimen 0.1 tarball
    
    (The Gnome Specimen bazaar-ng branch is available as well. bzr branch that url to get it.)
    
    Update: Translators, the default sentence is a so-called Pangram, a sentence containing all letters of your alphabet. The Pangram Wikipedia article may list one for your language as well. Please keep this in mind when sending me translations! For your convenience, I’ve put up gnome-specimen.pot . Download this file, rename it to your-language.po (eg. nl.po for Dutch) and send it to me.
    
    I18N rant
    
    Friday, November 24, 2006 ★ 15:39 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url
    
    Dear Novell gnome-main-menu (former slab) developers,
    
    Next time please do not merge changes to translations (changing standard terms used by the Gnome-NL team) without us knowing. Also, there were major regressions (lots of fuzzies) after the so-called unapproved `translation updates’.
    
    I’ve also removed crap copyright notices for people who never contributed to this translation. It was translated from scratch by me, not by SuSE/Novell people. We’re working hard to get things translated correctly, please bear with us.
    
    Thanks for listening.
    
    Volkskrant frontpage
    
    Wednesday, November 22, 2006 ★ 10:46 ★ Category Politics ★ Permanent url
    
    Today (the day of the Dutch national elections), my `politicalgotchi’ was printed on the frontpage of one of the largest newspapers in the Netherlands, de Volkskrant, together with the name of the party I will be voting for.
    
    I did some counting, and a left wing coalition based on these 150 heads is perfectly possible: PvdA 30, SP 47 and GroenLinks 13, summing up to 90 seats…
    
    Stemadvies
    
    Tuesday, November 21, 2006 ★ 23:11 ★ Category Politics ★ Permanent url
    
    (For my readers not speaking Dutch: this is my voting advice for the Tweede Kamer elections in the Netherlands, which will take place on November, 22nd.)
    
    Muine 0.8.6 is out!
    
    Monday, November 13, 2006 ★ 19:22 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url
    
    We’re happy to announce a shining new Muine (everyone’s favourite music player) release: Muine 0.8.6
    
    This release, codenamed Parecía muerto, pero reapareció features cool new Tango icons, has better metadata loading, fixes some annoying bugs and actually runs on the latest Mono release. Furthermore, lots of code has been cleaned up and several translations have been updated. Read the official changelog here.
    
    Get it while it’s hot from the download page (for distribution package links) or get the muine 0.8.6 tarball (in case your distribution is slacking). Let us know what you think by filing bugs!
    
    Enjoy!
    
    It seems I passed
    
    Wednesday, November 8, 2006 ★ 16:07 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url
    
    Wow, I scored 9.8 (out of 10) for my statistics course! Final result (weighted average with exercises) is a 9.6, which is (let’s brag some more) rounded up to the maximum possible score when converted to an integer: 10.
    
    Fuzzy menu icons
    
    Sunday, November 5, 2006 ★ 01:05 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url
    
    Dear icon heroes,
    
    Great work on defuzzying the icons I see on my desktop. Thanks Andreas Nilsson, Josef Vybíral and other Tango People.
    
    Fuzzy menu icons
    
    However, most menu items are still fuzzy on my machine, while there are perfectly sharp icons available. Why aren’t those being picked up correctly? See for instance the sound-juicer icon: it has sharp 16×16, 22×22, 24×24, 32×32 icons and a scalable SVG as well. However, none of these show up in my menu. Why not?
    
    Update: Bug 343437 seems to be fixed!
    
    Gnome business cards, part 2
    
    Saturday, November 4, 2006 ★ 13:47 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url
    
    Erik, I actually use my Gnome business cards and hand them out to people I meet on conferences and other meetings.
    
    I know the logo used on the cards is no longer the official Gnome logo, but it was still acceptable when we got ourselves these nice cards. I agree new batches (if any) should use the new logo, but there’s really no reason to stop using the current ones.
    
    Gnome business cards
    
    Friday, November 3, 2006 ★ 00:40 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url
    
    Máirín Duffy did some Gnome business cards mockups recently. Just for your information/inspiration: Gnome-NL, the Dutch i18n team, is using these cards for quite a while now:
    
    Front of my card. Ignore the blur; the real ones are sharp…
    
    The back side of our cards is configurable. Mine (and others as well) looks like this:
    
    Back of my card
    
    Update: follow-up on this post
    
    Spam floods
    
    Wednesday, November 1, 2006 ★ 22:28 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url
    
    Lately I’ve been flooded with spam. Below is chart of daily spam counts between February 2004 and October 2006. As you can see the numbers have been growing lately… and yes, those numbers are day counts.
    
    In fact it’s even worse: these are only the detected spams; the last couple of weeks I find about 10 spams each day in my inbox (mostly random words with an attached image with the actual spam text), so this is even an optimistic view.
    
    The black bars are the spam counts for each day; the red line shows week averages.
    
    Die, spammers, die!
    
    Los Amantes del Círculo Polar
    
    Wednesday, November 1, 2006 ★ 00:58 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url
    
    Another film broadcasted during the “Spanish summer” progamme by the Dutch public broadcasting service: Los Amantes del Círculo Polar.
    
    A really intruiging film (with absurd scenes) about Otto and Ana, both palindrome names, who meet as kids and grow up and loose each other. Circular lives, circular names, circular love. Some things end, but their love lasts forever…
    
    Abre Los Ojos
    
    Wednesday, November 1, 2006 ★ 00:48 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url
    
    A couple of weeks ago the Dutch public broadcasting service had a “Spanish summer” programme featuring Spanish cinema.
    
    One of the films was Abre Los Ojos, the Spanish original of Vanilla Sky, both starring Penélope Cruz.
    
    Although I did see Vanilla Sky years ago, I had forgotten several parts of the story, so some scenes came as a surprise after all. Pretty interesting to see two identical stories in two different films, highlighting other aspects…
    
    Crash
    
    Wednesday, November 1, 2006 ★ 00:41 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url
    
    A while ago I visited Crash (directed by Paul Haggis) in the local cinema. Several story lines intertwine and overlap during the film, and they all show (Americanesque) racism issues in the city of Los Angeles.
    
    Tragic scenes and such… not too much of my liking, though.