With the old dialog you had a window for each file transfer but this could be a problem if you are transferring more than a couple of files at the same time. So this week I rewrote the file transfer dialogs and submitted the patch to add file transfer to Empathy (see bug #462172).

The new file transfer dialog

The new dialog is copied from Epiphany but I had to make some changes because we cannot open automatically each received file, so I added a Firefox-like clear button. The thing I don’t like in the window is that it communicates the current progress in three different ways: the percentage (“30 %”), the number of transferred bytes (“8.4 MB of 27.6 MB”) and the remaining time (“00.05”).

Sending a file

Receiving a file

Every person going through the corridor where I was sitting yesterday seemed scared by the two strange things in the power sockets, be quiet! They are not weapons of mass destruction, just the best power adapters we found in Vercelli. And, in spite of them, we didn’t break any power socket unlike everybody else here at the Etap hotel.

Now it’s time to try to find a way to reach the Stansted airport in spite of the weather, this page is not very reassuring .

Update: I’m now at home, a lot of trains were cancelled but luckily mine was on time.

If you are at the Etap hotel and you get “Error: The maximum number of subscribers has been reached” just find someone with Internet access that can route you and make him type this as root:

echo 1 >> /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

Then you should type (as root):

route del default gw 10.71.0.1
route add default gw route add default gw $IP_WITH_INET_ACCESS

Tip kindly provided by em .

This week I worked on adding file transfer support to Empathy for the Telekinesis project. Empathy with my patches (the code is not yet in SVN trunk) can exchange files using every connection manager that supports file transfer, that is just telepathy-salut (aka bonjour, aka XEP-0174, aka link-local messaging) for now .

libempathy, the non-GUI library wrapping the telepathy interfaces, will get a class to handle file transfer channels (i.e. org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Channel.Type.FileTransfer) and a class for single file transfers, which are just IDs in Telepathy.
The dialog, in libempathy-gtk, was copied from Gossip, I’m going to modify it later to better fit our needs and to solve some problems, for instance now you cannot choose the file name, only the directory where to save the file.

This work is far from perfect but I can already show some screenshots and videos:

Receiving a file

Sending a file (Ogg Theora video, 150 kB)

Receiving a file (Ogg Theora video, 138 kB)

Tomorrow I will arrive at the Birmingham train station around 5 PM. See you all there!