Marco Barisione’s Weblog

Some lovely guy sent me this email:

From: ****@gmx.de
Subject: Freedom!

Take your closed source crap out of this planet, nobody cares about it.

–
Freedom Lover
–
Jetzt kostenlos herunterladen: Internet Explorer 8 und Mozilla Firefox 3.5 -
sicherer, schneller und einfacher! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/chbrowser

Note the irony of using an email service that adds to your email an advertisement for Internet [...]

During this week-end I finally found some time to start playing with Vala and Clutter. I would like to write a small game using them, but I’m not sure I will finish it because the more the time passes the less I seem able to write code in my free time. Now that I’m spending [...]

It has been a year since I moved to Cambridge from Italy. It feels weird, but things go well here so for now I’m not planning any other change.
Clearly I need to cook a cake for this event .

Clearly IRC, Jabber, MSN, facebook, feeds, several news web sites, emails, etc. were not enough to waste all my time so today I started using twitter. Let’s see if I will get bored in some days or if I will become addicted.

I’m to lazy to write a full blog post on foss.in, so I will just say +1 on what Olivier said.
What I can add is that I met a lot of competent people that are interested in Telepathy and Farsight, but some of them seem scared to communicate more with the developers. That’s just wrong! [...]

Can someone please explain me why the British railway system is as bad as the Italian one but much more expensive?

Stuart: Pierre-Luc Beaudoin and Alp Toker implemented video support in WebKit GTK using GStreamer months ago, but probably (I never tried it) it needs some more love before being fully working.

When you use a VCS that makes it easy to manage several braches, it’s easy to get conflicts in the .list file used to generate the C marshallers. I recently fixed this problem in WebKit stealing some code used at least by various Telepathy components and by avahi-gobject, and I want to share the solution [...]

Doesn’t this look like the GUADEC t-shirt?
GUADEC was great and talks turned out to be more interesting than what I was expecting after all the decadence discussions, this is also proved by the fact that I managed to stay awake during all the talks despite having a party every day . Being in an awesome [...]

The Empathy team is proud to announce you that the next release of our fantastic instant messaging client will use tabs for both accounts and groups. This important change will bring Empathy closer to GNOME 3.0 following the path of other popular applications, like Totem, Banshee and gcalctool.

See bug #542675 for more details.

What the release team just announced sounds like a good plan for Gnome 3.0 and also a good strategy for other future major releases. Kudos to them and to the GTK+ developers!
I’m sure that they will give us more details soon both on the planet and on the relevant mailing lists.
Hurray for Gnome 3.0!

I’m blogging from my n810[1] while having breakfast, in a hour I will be on a train to Heathrow, destination: Istanbul. See you all at GUADEC!
[1] Having a real keyboard is fantastic, but how do I insert the angular brackets?

After my desktop computer died over a year ago I have had no space for mp3s on my hard disk, so I only used the music on my mp3 reader.
A week ago I was able to free some gigabytes of disk space and finally I put my music back on my computer. The first problem [...]

Why I love icecream:

$ (time make) 2>&1 | grep real
real 21m52.649s
$ make clean > /dev/null
$ PATH=/usr/lib/icecc/bin:$PATH
$ (time make) 2>&1 | grep real
real 8m15.954s

Note that about 4 minutes are spent linking the program, not compiling.
And then, while waiting, you can watch the hypnotic icemon showing where your source files are [...]

$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
368 cd
355 l
274 git
231 vi
131 u
130 q
101 find
94 time
86 grep
79 svn

Some clarifications:

“l” is an alias for “ls -lhA –color”
“u” is an alias for “cd ..”
“q” is an alias for “exit” (I also use CTRL-D for that)
“time” is there because I use “time make” to [...]

“People who open a blog should be identifiable and they should ask people writing comments to be identifiable too.”
– Maurizio Gasparri, from punto-informatico.it
Do I have to use my passport every time I write a comment on a blog? And what do I have to do if the server is hosted in another country?
The sad thing [...]

Dear LazyWeb,
  Every time I log into GNOME I have to disable the “Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard” option in “Keyboard Preferences” if I want to be able to use the numpad on my external keyboard. Why disabling it once is not enough? How can I permanently disable this option?

Matthew is leaving the house to move to London:

I wonder why I took a OS/2 Warp box (21 floppy disks + 14 for the bonus pack), a KDE bag and a linux.conf.au 2007 bag…

The LazyWeb was not that useful but I was able to find a plugin that does what I need. It is listed in the plugins page on xchat.org but for some reasons I didn’t find it the first time I searched.
The notify channels plugin has every basic feature I need, and it’s also simple enough [...]

Dear LazyWeb,
  Is there a way to get a notification pop-up every time someone says something in some IRC rooms? But only in some configured rooms! I don’t want a pop-up for every message in every room as I’m paid to work, not to read IRC.
I’m using xchat-gnome and no, I don’t want to use xchat.

King’s College Chapel by Jonathan Rawle. License: More King’s College Chapel pictures on flickr
Sorry Alban, next month we will swap desks .

Everyone on Planet GNOME is starting a new job, so now it’s my turn: tomorrow I will move to Cambridge (this Cambridge, not one of the other ones) where I will work for Collabora.
It’s sad to leave so many friends here but I will work on cool technologies like Telepathy, Cambridge is very nice (the [...]

Today Emanuele and I defended our thesis (but the graduation ceremony will be on Friday)!
The topic of the thesis was the Telekinesis project, a system to easily transfer files on a LAN without having to configure a Samba share or something similar. The project is based on the Telepathy framework, Empathy and telepathy-salut, a [...]

You know that your country is becoming a banana republic when the three main news items of the day are about three separate cases of corruption regarding important politicians.
Image courtesy of Emmanuele Bassi
The Minister of Justice Mario Clemente Mastella (UDEUR, center-left coalition), his wife (president of the Regional Council of Campania) and other members of [...]

When using drop-down lists it’s not always a good idea to preselect something. Why? Because someone will forget to change the default selection and you will get the preselected item, usually the first one in alphabetical order. Do you want an example? Look at my IELTS certificate:
Click for bigger image

Half a day of downtime is bad, but two major outages in less then ten days are too much! It seems that Unixshell (barisione.org is a virtual XEN server hosted by them) is having some serious connectivity problems and they don’t know what redundancy is, even if on their web page they say:

Built-in redundancy through [...]

Whoever used g_hash_table_foreach() knows how painful is to use since C doesn’t have closures, so you have to create a struct to pass local variables to the callback.
Jean-Yves Lefort wrote a patch for bug #500507 (now marked as accept-commit_now) that finally adds iterators to hash tables. Using glib 2.16 you will be able to do [...]

On Friday, I took my last exam!
Now it’s time to work full time on my thesis (I should graduate in January) and to start to look for a good job. Speakig of which, I already got some interesting proposals but if you are interested here is my résumé (PDF, HTML in Italian and [...]

Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar (Burma), Quebec and Italy are excluded from the Android Developer Challenge. Probably Italy and Quebec are now in the axis of evil, American bombs are coming.
Just joking! Quebec and Italy are excluded because of local restrictions and I’m not surprised as we have plenty of stupid laws. For [...]

It seems that I’m the only one who won’t receive a N810 discount code .

Just applied for the N810 Maemo Device Program, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the next weeks.
Nokia, give me a discount code if you want to see Telepathy based file transfers on the N810!

The hackergotchis for our server’s users have been updated for Halloween by Alessandro!

Ahoy!
Gnome 2.20 has a new Clearlooks version, known during development as Gummy. The main new features are blue scrollbars, fading tabs and rounded toolbars.
Clearlooks (gummy)
ClearlooksClassic
If you don’t like the new theme you can use ClearlooksClassic, or just disable the single features you don’t like. To do so, just open (or create if it doesn’t exist) [...]

Beamer is a LaTeX class that allows you to easily create presentations. It contains several themes, but they are a bit ugly, so I wrote a new theme (named Torino) that I’m going to use for the slides for my graduation dissertation.
The look of the theme is based on a layout by Novell/SUSE and the [...]

I usually prefer oven ready lasagna as it doesn’t need to be boiled before assembling the dish, but you can also use dried or fresh lasagna or prepare the pasta on your own. In the latter case you can use the lasagna recipe written by Fabio Rosciano.
If you are using non-oven ready pasta you have [...]

Yet another recipe for the GNOME Cookbook, the Italian translation of the recipe is on my cooking blog.
Molten chocolate cake is a dessert, probably created by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, that looks like a normal small cake but has an almost liquid center. It may look difficult to cook, but the recipe is indeed very simple and [...]

Here’s another recipe for the GNOME Cookbook, the Italian translation of the recipe is on my cooking blog.
Eggplant parmesan, “parmigiana di melanzane” in Italian, is a typical dish from southern Italy. The name has nothing to do with the city of Parma, as it is placed in northern Italy, or with the Parmesan cheese, as [...]

I wrote a plugin for nautilus-sendto, so it can send files using Empathy; the code is not in SVN or in bugzilla (because it requires functions not yet merged with Empathy) but it’s already working.
Empathy contacts displayed in nautilus-sendto
Sending a file with nautilus-sendto (Ogg Theora video, 156 kB)
More screenshots and videos are available on the [...]

Ten years ago the GNU Network Object Model Environment project was announced by Miguel de Icaza. Happy birthday GNOME!

Buenos días, amantes de la libertad!

I need an icon, under (L)GPL, for file transfers in Empathy as the current icon (stolen^Wcopied from gossip) is a bit ugly and 16×16 only. This icon would be used in the menu for the “Send File…” command, in the status icon when someone has offered a file and as the icon for the file [...]

At GUADEC John (J5) Palmieri announced the GNOME Cookbook project, this delicious dessert is my first contribution to the project, I hope you like it! The Italian translation of the recipe is on my cooking blog.

Ingredients

4 eggs
3/4 cup (150 g) sugar
1 pound (500 g) mascarpone cheese
salt
1 3/4 lbs. (800 g) strawberries
1/2 lemon
2 tbs. rum
3/4 lbs. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Havoc, the jhbuild moduleset for Telekinesis was written before deciding any technical detail on the project, so it builds everything including avahi! As soon as the project becomes usable by someone other than me I want to remove unneeded libraries and add a comment suggesting to skip libraries which have recent versions packaged for common [...]

As said in previous posts, I’m working on a SOC project, called Telekinesis, to make easy to transfer files over a LAN.

For now I modified telepathy-salut (the Telepathy connection manager that handles link-local connections) adding file transfer support, but at the moment chat programs are not yet able to use it so it’s still completely [...]

Alberto, why did you chose NSIS to build setup programs? I don’t like it because its scripting language seems a mix between assembly and shell scripting and it doesn’t even have flow control statements, you have to use Goto!
Moreover you have to do manually everthing, for instance to copy a file that later can be [...]

I never dropped my (six months old) Macbook to the floor or mistreated it, nevertheless the chassis got broken where the lid touches it . Am I the only one with this problem?

My ex roommate wrote a tutorial on OpenGL shaders to do Photobooth-like effects. It would be great if someone could wrote a GStreamer plugin and integrate it with Daniel Siegel’s SOC.

The sad thing is that my video driver does not seem to support shaders even if they are supported by the 945GM chipset .

NerdOCRACY, the server hosting barisione.org, moved to lighttpd as it’s less resource-hungry and easier to configure.
I had only some problems with WordPress, to have clean addresses like www.example.com/about instead of something like www.example.com/?p=123 it uses this htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

I resolved using server.error-handler-404 as suggested on snippets.dzone.com:

$HTTP["host"] [...]

My SOC application has been accepted!
Update: The project is now called Telekinesis.

Reading some comments on my SOC proposal I have the impression that someone didn’t understand what I’m going to work on, I don’t want to write yet another Samba-like program but an application to send files over a LAN without the need to share folders.
Systems like Samba or FTP are useful at home or work [...]

When using CVS I always use cvspurge (from the CVS Utilities package) to delete the auto generated files that are not deleted by make distclean, this is useful to test local and uncommitted changes in the otherwise clean source tree.
This is why some months ago I wrote a purge extension for Mercurial. Now my code, [...]

There are many solutions to share one or more files, from setting up a Samba share, to a personal directory in a HTTP or FTP server, they have one big common flaw: they do not “just work”. As a consequence people often use services relying on an external server (such as email and chat), or [...]

This morning I committed GRegex to svn, so glib 2.14 will have regular expression support. GRegex is a wrapper around the PCRE library by Philip Hazel that has several interesting features:

Faster than GNU regexp
Good Unicode support
Advanced constructs, such as positive and negative look-ahead and look-behind assertions, named sub-patterns, etc.
Normal (Perl-like) matching
Partial matching
DFA matching to find [...]

My two years old mobile phone died, so I bought a Nokia 6111, a small, nice and very usable phone.
This is my first Bluetooth mobile phone, so I tried for the first time Bluetooth on my MacBook. On Debian it works out of the box (you only need the bluetooth package), but Debian doesn’t have [...]

Not as useful as the Gnome clock applet, but still useful when you are forced to use Windows XP, WinCalendarTime replaces the standard Windows clock with an enhanced one, if you click on it a calendar is displayed.

This new version contains only some bug fixes. I’m using Windows only a few hours per month, so [...]

GtkSourceView is currently licensed under GPL but it should be relicensed under LGPL, the main authors agree on this but we have to ask to every contributor. Is anyone volunteering to get all the permissions?
I have extracted a list of contributors from the ChangeLog, but it may be incomplete and contain translators, that should be [...]

Recently Miguel de Icaza blogged about version 2 of gnome-main-menu, available from Gnome’s SVN, so I decided to give it a try.
I’m using gnome-main-menu both on my every day environment (Gnome 2.16 from Debian Experimental) and on the Gnome I build from SVN using jhbuild. For the latter I patched gnome-desktop and gnome-panel with the [...]

After the last post I was asked where to find GRegex and how to use it, GRegex is not yet in GLib, probably it will be included in GLib 2.14, and GLib 2.14 will be probably used by Gnome 2.20.
If you can’t wait for GLib 2.14 you can include a copy of EggRegex, as it’s [...]

Recently Emmanuele Bassi asked for help on reviving GFloppy as it’s old and mostly useless. Paul Betts and Riccardo Setti (giskard) accepted the invitation and are working on gnome-format, an utility that will be able to format any removable disk (USB pendrives, etc.) Here’s some screenshots but remember that gnome-format is in alpha stage!

I don’t [...]

This should be my first post on Planet GNOME (thanks jdub), so hello everybody!
So, who am I? I’m Marco Barisione, an Italian student of Computer Engineering at the Politecnico di Torino.
For my third-year dissertation I wrote a new syntax highlighting engine for GtkSourceView 2 with Emanuele Aina, now the code is in the soc-2006 branch [...]

A month ago my desktop computer died, Windows XP (both the installed version and the installer) was crashing while booting and using Linux live CDs I was only able to get kernel panics.
As a student of the Politecnico di Torino I can have a free copy of Windows Vista Business and other Microsoft products [...]

After the post on the “Empty Trash” button in the trash folder, I’m looking for other small changes in GNOME 2.17, i.e. the development version for GNOME 2.18. These are not the big changes everyone can see like the new Control Center, but those small things that are improving GNOME version after version.
In the following [...]

I know that it’s a small and simple change but I really like the new “Empty Trash” button displayed in the trash folder.

This is a useful change for normal users, as the menu item is not easily discoverable, so thanks pbor!

While working on GRegex (Perl-style regular expressions for GLib) I discovered that arrays of string pointers can cause lots of relocations.
Relocation is the process of adjusting the pointers whose value is unknown at link-time, such as the pointer to a function is a dynamically loaded library.
In PCRE (the library used by GRegex) there is a [...]

When developing my web sites I need to test them with Internet Explorer, after all it’s the most used browser. As my home computer (running Windows) died, I tried IEs4Linux.

The stable version of IEs4Linux can run Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 and 6. If you want to run IE 7 (or better the GUI of IE [...]

Cooking is one of my preferred hobbies, so I opened a new cooking blog in Italian at TarteTatin.it. Tarte tatin is a French upside-down apple tart, I chose it as the name only because it sounds well :).

In these days using the Internet is a real pain for lots of Italians. The former TLC monopolist claims that the problems are due to viruses, but this does not explain why the service with the biggest problems is DNS, host name resolution requires at least 10 seconds! This is why I have been using [...]

As already said we are going to have spell checking in GTK+. No more GnomeSpell, GTKSpell, SexySpellEntry, the gedit plugin, all using different libraries for spell checking and with several different problems!
I’m working on the glib side of this project, GSpell will be the low level spell checking library that will be the base of [...]

Blob Sallad is the most addicting and unuseful program I found in this month!

On the home page there is a (mostly working) JavaScript version of the game or you can download the source code for Linux.
UPDATE: to compile the program you need libsdl-dev and libcairo2-dev. The most recent version is at the end of the [...]

Behdad Esfahbod proposed to add spell checking, based on the Enchant library, to GLib and GTK+.
I tried some existing spell checking tools for GNOME:

GtkSpell3, the development version of GtkSpell.
SexySpellEntry, part of libsexy.
The gedit spell checking plugin.

Some time ago I wrote with Emanuele Aina some code forked from gedit. This, temporarily called GnomeSpellChecker, is unreleased and [...]

I want it!

The hackergotchis used on nerd.ocracy.org and on planet.ocracy.org have been updated by fina to a new christmas version!

Today gnome-panel decided to forget the layout of the upper panel :(, here’s a screenshot:

I had a productive weekend, no I didn’t studied or coded anything but I cooked three cakes!
A danubio, with sausage and stracchino cheese:

An amalfitan cake with ricotta cheese and pears:

And a lemon cream cake.

Someone does not know how DNS work…
The best sentence is “At the time of writing Verisign had not responded to questions about how these extraneous domains have been registered.”

I am no more able to recognize spam just from the subject, these are some emails received in the last days:

Java open source
processor output
september mcdonalds
release team
Google opened
ARM floating point
app maintenance
spamassassin failure

The last one is really funny as SpamAssassin is failing to detect at least the 70% of the spam I receive.

Yes, it’s random (as far as a program can generate random numbers) but people do not understand randomness.

Recently I bought a white MacBook with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo, 1 GB RAM and a 100 GB hard disk. It’s a good, and relatively cheap, computer and I can run Debian, Windows and Mac OS X.
On the Internet there is a lot of documentation about the MacBook and Linux, the best guides [...]

Preparing sushi at home is not so difficult as you may think.

To learn more about sushi read the page on Wikipedia and Rolling Your Own Sushi written by Mark S. Hutchenreuther.
Some tips for Italians:

If you can’t find Japanese rice (it has nothing in common with basmati!) use vialone nano.
Nori (the seaweed used to roll the [...]

I want to do an automatic weekly backup of the blogs hosted on my server. The scripts I found require you to specify the database name, the user name and the password in the script. However this is not an option because I want to do the backups without modifying the script when I add [...]

The Italian GNOME community has a new planet.

I released the second alpha version of WinCalendarTime. WinCalendarTime replaces the standard Windows clock with an enhanced clock that displays a calendar when clicked, similar to the standard clock used by GNOME.

I need to share my mails between Linux and Windows, so now I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird sharing the database on a FAT file system. However I HATE THUNDERBIRD! It always corrupts its database and the filters.
Now it’s time to try the alpha version of Evolution for Windows.
First things I noted:

It’s 47 MB!
Why does it ask [...]

Both my purge extension and my patch to use add_path in the Windows installer have been pushed to crew so they will be included in the next release of hg.

Muntyan’s proposal for the Summer of Code 2006 has been accepted. This is really good news because he will integrate the new highilighting engine I and Emanuele Aina wrote as we do not have the time needed to do that.

When using CVS I always use cvspurge (from the CVS Utilities package) to delete the auto generated files that are not deleted by make distclean.
Mercurial does not have a similar feature so I wrote an extension for it that behaves like cvspurge.

Today our Prime Minister let us know that anyone who doesn’t vote for him is an asshole.