pterjan's diary

  A look at KDE in upcoming Mandriva 2007.1 Spring

I did install a KDE system inside VirtualBox to be able to reproduce a bug about gnome-power-manager under KDE. VirtualBox is nice for that as the guest OS sees the battery of my laptop and gets the ACPI events when I unplug the AC.

I was surprised by the new nice looking splash (it is fullscreen but I reduced it to post here). I would have added some space between the KDE version and the icons, but that's a detail.

The new menu icon also make the left part of the panel look nice

But the right part is still bad with the ugly (not even anti-aliased) clock font:

However, Beranger has more valid concerns about the panel and some people report a very large icon when using big panel.

  Upcoming holidays in Austria

I'll have two weeks off in May, and as Sky Europe currently has a nice special offer, I'll go to Vienna (5€ per ticket + various taxes and fees = 83€ for the round trip from Paris).

Now I have to decide if I spend the two weeks there, or if I move around to see other nice places. I am very interested in any advice from people living around there or having already been there, regarding both places to visit and hosting.

  FOSDEM

FOSDEM 2007 finished one week ago. Last year I postponed posting about it and did not publish my slides at all (about Ruby-GNOME2), so this year I post while it's still hot.

First, I did not take a lot of photos this year (and they are quite bad...) but here they are.

FOSDEM 2007 was better than the previous one, like every year (I attend FOSDEM every year since at least 2003, I don't remember exactly but I have a 2003 T-Shirt). You always meet a lot of nice people, drink a lot of good beer, wake up early on Sunday to see a presentation which gets cancelled, see a lot of great conferences by the people who do the free software... For people who missed it, main conferences are available online, for the beer I cannot help you :)

This year Mandriva had a (hidden) room at FOSDEM. That was an opportunity to meet some contributors who I had never seen yet, and to have some interesting discussions, even if the WE is short, and while discussing for one hour you miss 3 interesting conferences.

On Sunday in the Mandriva room, we first got a presentation of EDOS testing framework, then guillaume gave a presentation of Youri and I gave a very short presentation (odp, pdf) about the (bad) state of policy definition and enforcement in Mandriva, to start a discussion on this topic. We then decided on how to proceed and now have to do it :)

I also participated in the largest keysigning party I had ever seen (108 registered people, about 75 present).

See you next year !

  Fatals Picards in Helsinki

The great (but not famous enough) French band Les Fatals Picards will represent France for the Eurovision contest !

If you don't know them and you understand French, you need to listen to their albums (I think my favorite is Droit de véto). The song they wrote for Eurovision does not tell how funny they are, but only French people would have understood.

  Time to git ?

I'm still not familiar with git. Imendio's release of giggle is yet another motivation to learn...

Anyways, I uploaded the rpm to Mandriva, maybe I'll really use it :)

  Tray update

Reading a discussion on IRC, I revived a small Ruby script I had written last year in ten minutes after someone asked for it on LinuxFR. It basically creates a small trayicon telling you if you have new packages available, original isn't it ?

So, I decided to port it from gtktrayicon to GtkStatusIcon, and it was really trivial. The code is more simple now, and even better (I no longer hardcode the icon size).

2c2
< require 'gtktrayicon'
---
> require 'gtk2'
14,15c14,15
<                               $icon.set(Gtk::Stock::NO, Gtk::IconSize::SMALL_TOOLBAR)
<                               $tooltips.set_tip($tray, "\n#{count.to_s} new packages available:\n#{packages}", nil)
---
>                               $icon.stock=Gtk::Stock::NO
>                               $icon.tooltip="\n#{count.to_s} new packages available:\n#{packages}"
17,18c17,18
<                               $icon.set(Gtk::Stock::YES, Gtk::IconSize::SMALL_TOOLBAR)
<                               $tooltips.set_tip($tray, "\nThe system is up to date.\n", nil)
---
>                               $icon.stock=Gtk::Stock::YES
>                               $icon.tooltip="\nThe system is up to date.\n"
28,32c28,30
< $tray = Gtk::TrayIcon.new("update")
< $icon=Gtk::Image.new(Gtk::Stock::REFRESH, Gtk::IconSize::SMALL_TOOLBAR)
< $tray.add($icon)
< $tooltips = Gtk::Tooltips.new
< $tooltips.set_tip($tray, "loading...", nil)
---
> $icon = Gtk::StatusIcon.new
> $icon.stock=Gtk::Stock::REFRESH
> $icon.tooltip="loading...";
47,50c45,46
< $tray.add_events(Gdk::Event::BUTTON_PRESS_MASK)
< $tray.add_events(Gdk::Event::BUTTON_RELEASE_MASK)
< $tray.signal_connect('button-release-event') { |w, e|
<         menu.popup(nil, nil, e.button, e.time) if e.button == 3
---
> $icon.signal_connect('popup-menu') { |w, button, time|
>         menu.popup(nil, nil, button, time)
63d58
< $tray.show_all

  The power to share

Today my La Fonera received a nice gift from Hong Kong

It's a 9.5dBi antenna from eBay ! I can now get rid of my microwave oven :)

And it even came with a flashing heart so that I can tell this little box how much I love her !

  Hello from London

I'm currently in London for a large Week-End. In this city, churches do business, even when under heavy work :

Yesterday I visited the Photographer's Gallery where you can currently see (among other ones) great pictures by Philippe Chancel taken in North Korea. I enjoyed a small breakfast in their cafeteria (nice lemoncake). Then I went to the National Portrait Gallery where I especially enjoyed recent works.

I had a Fish and Chips in the first pub I met but was disappointed by the beers they offered (Foster, Stella, Kronenbourg) and then walked to the Tate Modern which is very large. They have a lot of different galleries, so I'm sure you will find some that you enjoy. I was impressed by the amount of famous surrealist works. I then had a cup of tea in the Bramah Museum where they bring it with a sand-catcher so that you drink it at the perfect time.

  Evolution maintainance

Today I reported a crash on Evolution Data Server, and then found it was a duplicate of an old bug. It has been reported 8 times over the last 1.5 year, is marked as critical, but nobody takes care of it.

This bug is quite annoying as I can't re-send a given mail so I'll try to fix it, but I'm a bit worried about Evolution maintainance.