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Vala, Clutter and limoncello

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 all the day programming I find it very hard to write code when I come back from the office and I end up spending my time doing other things, like cooking.

Speaking of cooking, in Italy it’s quite common to make your own limoncello or other similar liqueurs so I finally decided to try making a basil-based limoncello-like liqueur. This kind of liqueurs is made using some 95% (190 proof) alcohol to extract the flavour form the lemon/basil/whatever and then the result is diluted with water and sugar. In Italy bottles of grain alcohol are available in most grocery stores[1], but here it seems impossible to find. I suspect that the only way to have access to it in the UK is to work in a lab where alcohol is used[2].

[1] And nobody that I know of tried to just drink it or used it to make other drinks stronger, so I was quite surprised when I discovered that pure alcohol is used in the US (in the states where it’s legal) almost only to make drinks stronger.

[2] Somebody in Cambridge reading this that works in a place where 95% alcohol is used?

Time goes by

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 :).

Back from foss.in

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! One of the best things about open source (and one of the reasons why I started to hack on GNOME) is that it’s easy to discuss with the developers. Don’t be afraid: report bugs and take part in discussions both on mailing lists and on IRC!

In other news, it seems that my facebook account was cancelled :'(. My profile disappeared, I cannot login anymore and when I try to reset the password I get an error saying that my email address is not registered. I used the form I found somewhere on the web site to contact the staff but I didn’t get any answer for now.

Automatic generation of .list files

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 so every project can benefit from it.

First of all you have to open your Makefile.am and move the myproject-marshal.list file from EXTRA_DIST to BUILT_SOURCES and add somewhere in the file:

myproject-marshal.list: $(myproject_SOURCES) Makefile.am
        ( cd $(srcdir) && \
        sed -n -e 's/.*myproject_marshal_([[:upper:][:digit:]]*__[[:upper:][:digit:]_]*).*/1/p' \
        $(myproject_SOURCES) ) \
        | sed -e 's/__/:/' -e 'y/_/,/' | sort -u > $@.tmp
        if cmp -s $@.tmp $@; then \
                rm $@.tmp; \
        else \
                mv $@.tmp $@; \
        fi

Then remember to remove the myproject-marshal.list file from your VCS (svn/git/hg/bzr rm).

The code will search for all the functions looking like myproject_marshal_RETTYPE__ARG1TYPE_ARG2TYPE and generate the myproject-marshal.list from them, regenerating automatically the list when you change a signal signature.

Update: fixed the blackslashes in the code that were misteriously eaten by WordPress.

Back from GUADEC[1]


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 city with wonderful food[2] helped a lot for the final result, this is why I’m so happy that Gran Canaria was chosen for the next GUADEC.

In Istanbul I finally met other people working on WebKit or on related projects and had a chance to discuss with them about the future development of WebKit. While meetings on IRC are useful and allow you to talk with people from everywhere, real life meetings give you a much more efficient channel of communication: how about a hackfest for people working on WebKit, FireFox and desktop programs using them?

[1] Actually I came back to Cambridge ten days ago but, as usual, I fail at writing blog posts at the right moment, I wanted to write this on Sunday but my flight was moved to Monday and then real life started again. [Insert here other childish excuses for being so lazy]
[2] I’m already experimenting some Turkish recipes, Collabora people in Cambridge should expect a Turkish dinner really soon.

Gnome 3.0 != Topaz

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!