Awn News & Commentary (ANC), 2008/03/21

Obviously, I haven't done one of these in a while. There are a few reasons for this. For one, my workload has gotten a bit larger. Additionally, Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out recently...it's ridiculous how much time that game eats up, and I'm only halfway through "adventure mode".

But seriously...both the forums and the bug tracker have been relatively quiet. It's difficult to figure out exactly why that is. However, there have been a few things that have happened in the past month or so.

Moonbeam has a summary of what happened in the week following my last post. Additionally, he has been working on the framework for an applet that can use either the Gecko engine (used, most notably, in Firefox) or the WebKit engine (used in Safari) to render HTML. Hopefully, this will alleviate some of the problems that people have had trying to get some of the HTML-based applets to run properly. Unfortunately for us, moonbeam has become rather busy in real life lately, and so there may or may not be very much progress on the features/applets that he's been working on.

Andrewsomething, a longtime bug/answer triager for both Awn and Awn Extras, has finally taken the plunge (so to speak) and joined the Awn Extras developer team. His first contribution is the "Remember the Milk" applet, and for his next undertaking, he is seeing if there's any interest in a simple note applet.

It is interesting to note that two new, experimental branches have appeared for Awn recently. One, created by moonbeam, focuses on refactoring the launcher/task/applet effects framework so that it's easier to add new effects, and uses cairo's surfaces instead of Gtk+'s "pixel buffers" to manipulate the images. This allows for more complex effects to be used, while keeping the overall effect smooth (and potentially hardware-accelerated).

The other branch was created by longtime Awn contributor haytjes. He's working on fixing the "custom icon" feature. Currently, there are several bugs which prevent that feature from being very usable.

And finally, I'd like to give a quick Planet Awn roundup. Moonbeam has a very good post on the architecture of Awn and why it's not possible (currently) to have features such as parabolic zoom. Our fearless leader, Neil, has (finally) written a post about the recent Awn/Awn Extras release, and our upcoming plans for the projects. Hopefully, his presence on Planet Gnome will continue to give Awn more publicity :).

Awn News & Commentary (ANC), 2008/02/15

I'm taking a break from both trying to make a <tbody/> scroll vertically without a horizontal scrollbar present and playing "Link's Crossbow Training" to write up what's transpired in the past several days in Awn-land.

The Awn Curves branch was partially merged into awn-core-testing. I say "partially merged" because meek is merging it in parts, due to the complexity.

The big event was when Neil finished reviewing the awn-core-testing and awn-extras-testing branches and merged them into their respective trunks. Among the benefits is that users of reacocard's Ubuntu Gutsy repository can now use the shiny new features that those of us on the (very) bleeding edge have been using for a while now.

I should also point out that Neil has added both moonbeam and myself to awn-core, in recognition of our work on both the testing branches and our respective personal branches. This means we have commit access to Awn's trunk branch and more bug/blueprint triaging privileges.

As a result of the big merge, we now have a new roadmap. What used to be Neil's big rewrite for 0.3 (code-named fandabbydosy) has been spread out over several releases. See the roadmap link for details. One important item to mention is that we plan to release version 0.2.4 of both Awn and Awn Extras on Monday (02/18).

In Awn Extras, most of the changes have been bugfixes. A patch was added to the media-control applet for Quod Libet support.

Finally, I'm holding a contest for Awn users/enthusiasts. In the near future, I'd like to have a post with screenshots and videos showing off all of the new features and applets in Awn/Awn Extras. Unfortunately, I suck at doing that sort of thing myself. :) So, I'm giving the Awn community the chance to show off their customized docks.

The only restriction on the screenshots and videos is that you license them under a Creative Commons license. I will, of course, attribute all media to their proper creators :) Ideally, the screenshots should be as hi-res as possible, but any resolution is welcome. The same goes for videos.

The deadline is Feb. 21, because I'd like to write the post by the end of next week. I'll choose a set of media that looks the nicest (with the help of the people in #awn) and use that as the basis of my next Awn post.

So if you wish to participate, please post the URL to the media, the attribution information you wish to use (your name or nick), and which feature/applet you're highlighting on the forum thread or as a comment here.

Avant Window Navigator News and Commentary, 2008/02/09

Given the lack of releases of Awn, I figure that there needs to be some record of what's happening in Awn-land ever since we got version 0.2.1 of Awn and awn-extras out the door, other than the mish-mash of posts on the forums.

Awn

Here's a (most likely incomplete) list of the new features in awn-core-testing, mostly taken from the branch whiteboards:

• A simple mouse wheel task scrolling implementation
• Sort applets in alphabetical order in awn-manager
• Xfce support (build flag: --with-desktop=xfce4)
• desktop-environment-agnostic support (build flag: --with-desktop=agnostic): this requires GLib 2.15.x and above, because it uses the new GIO library to replace the GnomeVFS code.
• GKeyFile configuration backend support (build flag: --without-gconf): this adds a compile-time option to build a .ini-style configuration backend, instead of GConf.
• Freedesktop.org Desktop Entry wrapper API: Desktop entry files are used all over the place in both Awn and awn-extras, so I wrote an API that wraps both the GnomeDesktopItem and EggDesktopFile APIs, depending on your desktop preference. Note that the Xfce backend also uses EggDesktopFile, because I found out that libxfce4util's desktop entry implementation was read-only, and read-write-support was needed.
• File/directory monitoring wrapper API: The Gnome implementation uses GnomeVFS, the Xfce implementation uses ThunarVFS, and the agnostic implementation uses GIO.
• Python bindings for all of the new APIs
• Vala bindings (auto-detected at build time)
• remove the gnome-panel dependency by writing a launcher/desktop entry editor in Python (including custom/stock icon chooser)
• changed awn-manager applet interface

Note that everything except the first two items are also in my desktop-agnostic branch.

awn-extras

Since the 0.2.1 release, a number of new applets and other changes have occurred in the awn-extras tree.

New applets

• Affinity (yes, that Affinity)
• Arss (Applet to view feeds)
• Awn Terminal
• Cairo Menu
• Clock/Calendar
• Comic
• Digg
• Digital Clock
• File Browser Launcher
• Last.FM
• MiMenu
• Mount
• Pandora
• Places
• PyClock
• Shiny Switcher
• Standalone Launcher, Taskmand, Taskmand-applet: an alternative to the built-in launchers and task manager.
• Terminal Services

Other changes

• Rewritten build system
• Shared libraries for applets to use: libawn-extras (with python bindings) and AWNLib (for Python only)
• The GMail applet has been renamed to the Mail applet and has been completely rewritten. As a consequence, it no longer uses libgmail.
• Stacks: experimental GUI
• BlingSwitcher: Due to the lack of both a maintainer and a license, this applet will most likely be removed from the tree. However, an archived copy will be linked on the forum and the wiki.

Distribution support

Our resident Debian/Ubuntu packager, gilir, successfully got Awn (the dock) into the official Hardy repositories, specifically universe/gnome, as avant-window-navigator. Unfortunately, there are some QA problems with the awn-extras applets package, awn-core-applets, but gilir is working very hard to get that resolved before the package freeze. He is also working on getting said packages into Debian sid.

Meanwhile, in Gentoo-land, there are official ebuilds for both Awn and awn-extras, named gnome-extra/avant-window-navigator and gnome-extra/avant-window-navigator-extras, respectively. Since the xeffects overlay is defunct, I'm working with the team behind the desktop-effects overlay to get the awn-core-testing and awn-extras-testing branches in as working "live" ebuilds. Of course, this comes after I was alerted via an awn-extras bug that one of the desktop-effects developers described the build system as piss-poor. Being the author of the new build system, I was a bit offended. Luckily, the lead developer for that overlay was more level-headed than the stereotypical Gentoo developer whose comment started it all. I'm still waiting for an apology from said developer, but I'm not holding my breath.

Wiki

A community member has contributed a wiki for our project. We've been using it for both end-user documentation (Installation, FAQ) and internal processes. In particular, the applet developers have been collaborating on some applet development guidelines which should be followed if a person would like their applet to be included in the awn-extras tree.

Other

In non-Awn/Awn Extras news, there have been reports that the Gimmie project has added Awn applet support, in addition to its current support for the gnome-panel.

---

The changes I've listed for Awn and AWN Extras are currently being reviewed so that they'll be merged into trunk in the near future. In the meantime, you can grab the test packages from the Awn Testing Team's PPA (for Ubuntu users), install Awn and Awn Extras from the desktop-effects overlay (for Gentoo users), or simply install from source (making sure that you uninstall any previous version of Awn/Awn Extras first!).

The Result of Boredom

(@flickr. Created at O'Reilly Maker [Via Ajaxian]. Under a CC-BY-SA license.)

OpenWrt + dnsmasq

Note to self: the OpenWrt wiki, particularly the dnsmasq page, is a very useful resource for understanding why my XMPP server won't talk to the GMail or LiveJournal XMPP servers. (Hint: filterwin2k is a very bad configuration option for XMPP servers. Stupid default option.)

This'll be interesting...

I switched my DNS host from zoneedit.com to editdns.net, because ZoneEdit doesn't support DNS SRV records. They're needed for XMPP server-to-server federation support. My XMPP address is <${my_second_level_domain} at ${my_second_level_domain} dot com>. Note that this is different from my email address.

If I haven't seen it, It's new to me!

I learned something new today: it seems that <button>s have a type attribute, and default to type="submit". Obviously, this doesn't apply to IE, which defaults to type="button". Makes my life just a bit more annoying. On the other hand, I don't have to use <input type="[submit|reset]"/>, which apparently makes it a bit easier to style.

Mark Pilgrim's System Administration for Dummies

(Note: Originally written on 2007/11/11. It's been languishing on my computer since then.)

To begin with, I have to say that, like many people on the "Internets", I enjoy reading dive into mark for its sharp wit and no-holds-barred writing style, no matter who employs him.
His latest post is no exception. A few things bothered me about it, though.

For one, it (implicitly) assumes that you're going to be installing MySQL™ on your Ubuntu™ desktop machine and start using it to develop some application that needs a relational database for X, Y, or Z. However, ignorant CEOs and CIOs also read things written on the Internets, and when they happen to find this post via their Google™ search du jour for new technology to integrate into the fold, they'll turn to their system administrators and ask, "Why do I pay you so much when all I have to do to install a relational database is click a button a few times?" Thank you, Mr. Pilgrim, for devaluing system administrators in one fell swoop.

Another part that bothered me was the end. Here's how I imagine your average Ubuntu™ user's thought processes: "OK, I've installed this MySQL™ thing. Now what? How do I access this server thing? I have to use some sort of client, right? What kind of client do I get? Can I just search for 'mysql client' and do the same thing? Oh crap, that's for the terminal!" There goes that whole anti-"sudo make me a sandwich" argument. I guess it would be different if this HOWTO was in serial form.

On the other hand, it seems to be a much better experience than installing DB2™ on Ubuntu™.

Common Sense and Websites

Just recently, I ran across the third Wordpress weblog in my feed list that had been hit with spam via what I assume to be the vulnerability fixed in version 2.3.1. It only shows up in feed readers, because it uses CSS to hide itself on the regular pages. That CSS is stripped by most feed readers' sanitizing process that removes all markup that may be malicious.

The striking thing about it is that all of the weblogs were related to web development: one was on a personal browser developer's website, one was a prominent web development news site, and the most recent one was the official weblog of a web browser. Now, I'm not necessarily putting the single browser developer at fault, since web applications aren't necessarily his area of interest. His webhost should make sure that classic security holes (like PHP's register_globals option) are turned offor disabled. On the other hand, the other two sites should know better. The web development news site has a significant number of posts on web application security, and the browser vendor deals with the security of its product every day, so surely they should be monitoring (or at least, find an automated process to monitor) feeds such as the ones at the National Vulnerability Database, in case exploits are discovered for any web applications that they may have installed.

To everyone else, if you can, please make sure that your webhosting environment is properly secured. Also, definitely subscribe to the news feeds of all the web applications that you run, because more often than not, there will be security vulnerabilities discovered, so you should upgrade as soon as possible in those cases.

Attention Gmail Developers: Please Address This IMAP Issue

I figure this is worth a shot, given that this blog is hosted on a sister application.

To the developers working on Gmail: I would like to know your position on comment #3 in flameeyes's post from a Claws-Mail developer. Are you or are you not following the IMAP specification in this respect? If not, why not? Additionally, can it be fixed?

OiNK: The Best Kept (Open) Secret on the Internet

Everywhere I turn, there's a new post lamenting the fall of the mighty OiNK music torrent tracker. Yes, it's a pity, but what's surprising to me was the number of people who actually used it (and blogged about losing it after the takedown). It's like these people want to say, "Yes, I was a part of the secret organization before it disbanded!" It's an odd sort of sensation reading those posts; those of us who were also contributors to "the cause" say to ourselves, "Right on, brother! Fight the power! I, too, miss what has been wrongfully taken away from us!"

As I think about it, it gets more and more surreal. Why are we sad about something that is plainly an illegal means of retrieving goods? Is it because of the slightly better feeling in our conscience that says, "it's OK, I'm helping others who can't necessarily find this music any other way through seeding", rationalizing it as a sense of community and giving back? I am boggled.

Avant Window Navigator 0.2.1 Released

After about a month of bug reports, segmentation faults, patches, and prodding of the core developers, we finally have a new release of everyone's favorite composited dock, AWN.

After some prodding on IRC, I created a branch of the 0.2 release branch, called 0.2-stable-testing. Here's how I described my workflow on this branch in the forums:

• I get patches from IRC/forums/launchpad. If they aren't on launchpad, I ask that they go there so I can put a reference to them in the commit message.
• When the patch is on launchpad, I add the stable branch to the bug with the status message "fix in progress".
• I install/run awn with the patch applied, and check the console. If there are no extra assert/CRITICAL/WARNING messages, and I don't crash within 10 minutes, I commit the patch (usually with whitespace fixes, etc.) to the branch, and push to launchpad.
• I change the status message on the bug to "fix available" and note the revision that the patch was applied on.

In all, there were a total of 13 recorded bugs fixed in my branch. About halfway through, I posted a call for a bugfix release:

So apparently, AWN is now on the front page of launchpad. This inevitably means more users, and more of the same questions about crashes, etc. occurring with the 0.2 release. Many of these crashes have been addressed in my 0.2-stable-testing branch, and I am pleased to report that several people are actively testing this branch and indeed finding it stable. So, I propose that the rest of the patches in my branch be reviewed (you can find them at the bottom of the branch details page), and a point release (0.2.1) be made.

Additionally, I don't think it's in our best interests to have the only available method of retrieving awn-extras be through bzr (even though I am a strong advocate of bzr). We need, at the very least, a snapshot of awn-extras to be released. Preferably, the buggy clock applet should be fixed, moved or removed before this happens.

The result is where we are today. There are only two things that concern me about this release: Two minor features crept in, and I had found a bug the night before, but was too tired to file it. I have been opposed to adding new features (however minor they are) in a point release, because it's convention to leave new stuff to version bumps of one of the more major versions (e.g., 0.2 to 0.3, or 1.0 to 2.0). There's a good reason that most projects do this, too. New features (especially those that are untested)bring new bugs, which is not ideal for a bugfix release.

Thanks are in order for moonbeam (who wrote most of the stability patches), mhr3 (who reviewed said patches), and njpatel (who released it). It sounds like 0.3 is going to be very interesting. Hopefully I can get my desktop-agnostic branch finished and merged.

The Lessig lecture at the UW

I had the great fortune to listen to Professor Lawrence Lessig tonight. I've been a fan of his ideas (free culture, code as law, etc.) as well as his presentation style. Well, I got to see all of that at the lecture. His speaking style is even more impressive in person. He tied together a good deal of the work he's done over the years, including a preview of his new work on corruption, which the audience wanted him to speak on in the the Q&A that followed the presentation.

The presentation itself is a little hard to explain for me, because it dealt with so much material, and yet I didn't miss a heartbeat of it. The first part of the lecture dealt with the question posed in the title advertised: Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)? Short answer: yes and no, but don't assign morality labels to businesses (much like you shouldn't assign them to technology), because they're interested in only one thing: making the shareholders happy. The second part explained the "new" model of content distribution and ownership, and how Google and Facebook, for example, still don't exactly "get" it (c.f. the Google Maps API TOS or the Facebook Apps Developer TOS).

In all, I am very glad that I got to see Lessig speak in person when he came around to this area of the country.

Edit: Here's a tangentially-related Slashdot post: Google As The Next Microsoft? Also: Not Evil != Unselfish

Gmail's new "features", not bugs: A review

I, like many people on the Internets, was ecstatic at the announcements of IMAP for Gmail and the blogosphere-dubbed "Gmail 2.0". I'm all for a faster Gmail experience, not to mention an implementation of the mail retrieval protocol that was developed at my alma mater. However, my enthusiasm waned in two parts, when I actually tried out these features.

When IMAP was finally enabled on my account, I opened up claws-mail and configured it to use Gmail as its mail source. When it did the mail sync operation, I noticed that it didn't populate the virtual "label" folders properly. By that point, I gave up and did something else. I learned later during my blog reading that Gentoo's flameeyes had the same problem. If you look at the comments, you'll see that Claws-Mails's developers have acknowledged the problem as Google's fault. As a(n annoyed) developer, I would agree with their assessment. As a pragmatic developer, however, I agree with flameeyes's assessment: The Claws-Mails developers should follow Postel's Law.

Part two: trying out "Gmail 2.0". Regardless of how I feel about the blogosphere's echo chamber (and by extension, the mainstream media's echo chamber), I'm using that term for it because it's convenient. Yeah, it's a cop-out. Anyway, this refactoring of Gmail's dynamic JavaScript engine seems to me, to be a step back, in terms of speed (or at least, perceived speed). Sometimes when I change tabs back to Gmail, the message list column is squeezed horizontally, as if I changed my browser window size to 200x900. When I change label views, there tends to be a lapse between unloading the old label's mail and loading the new label's mail. This leaves a big green box in the interim.

I do realize that these features are relatively new, but you'd think user/unit testing would catch these things.

TODO List, 2007/10/29

Avant Window Navigator

• Finish file monitor wrapper
• Fix python bindings for awn.DesktopItem
• Fix launcher bugs
• Add test programs for filemonitor wrapper and desktop item wrapper
• Fix inter-process config handling

Pidgin Status Updater

• Add project/source code to Launchpad
• add Jaiku support (use xmlrpc-c)
• put HTTP requests in a separate thread
• cache cookie-based user authentication

Website

• Make pages unobtrusively load dynamically
• Add section on Avant Window Navigator

RFC 5023

The Atom Publishing Protocol has finally been published as RFC 5023.

Whew.

Hurrah! Congrats to the authors/contributors!

"Bonjour/Zeroconf/DNS-SD bookmarks"...

...is totally a misnomer. They don't let you share lists of bookmarks within a network (which is what I want to do), but rather, it is a list of all of the web servers advertised via Zeroconf in a particular network. Just needed to get that out.

xmingw overlay and "competing" software

Via the Freshmeat feed, I just noticed this thing called the "MinGW cross compiling environment" that looks like it does more or less the same thing as my xmingw overlay, except that it's not distro-specific. (It's not my fault that the portage concept is awesome.) I took one look at the mercurial repository, and found that it consisted of exactly one shell script. Wow. It's a big one, too. It currently supports 26 packages and is roughly 2000 lines long. My overlay, on the other hand, supports over 200 packages (with at least one shell script per package), and I probably don't want to know how many lines of code that is. I'm surprised that the number is over 200. Well, sort of. Its Bazaar repository is currently on revision 466, and apparently I've had this branch for a little over a year. That latter part's news to me.

In related news, as I type, I'm building Firefox 2.0.0.5 via xmingw. The Windows XP machine that I use is going loco, and many programs (including Firefox) crash when I try to use them. Strangely enough, my self-compiled version of Pidgin runs just fine. So, in that spirit, I'm trying to see whether a self-compiled version of Firefox will do the trick as well.

Edit: I was going to mention with regards to the Mozilla (including NSPR and Firefox) build process that they have a upside-down perspective of what "build" and "host" means, in comparison to 99% of the other autoconf-based projects out there. Usually, the "host" is the platform that one is compiling for, and "target" is the platform on which the compilation is taking place. Yes, it does make sense the way that Mozilla is doing it, but it's the opposite of everyone else, which makes it annoying to build. Well, that reason and the fact that it is a horribly monolithic build process (see OpenOffice.org, imake-powered X build process)

Re: GNOME Online Desktop

I just finished looking at the slides from the GUADEC presentation on the GNOME Online Desktop and the associated screencasts. The concept of installing software from a browser like that (given that I have some idea of how it works) is ridiculously awesome. More importantly, I would like to see how they design the following:

an HTTP library that shares cache and cookies with the browser, and supports asynchronous operation with the GLib main loop out of the box

OK, so right now, Gtk+ and friends currently have libsoup, which fulfills the latter requirement. The former requirement seems to me to be much more complex. First, do you require compatibility with multiple browsers (complexity becoming O(N*M) for varying N and where M is the number orf browsers to support), and if so, what do you do with browsers which seemingly don't provide an API? (I bring this up because I have no idea whether Opera provides one.) Now, imagine that they chose only the Gecko/XULRunner libraries to be compatible with. That API is always changing, so does this mean that the resulting library will also be unstable?

As an aside, I wonder whether this will also be available for Windows. Of course, this assumes that D-Bus will be available for Windows at some point in the future.

Website finally updated, hooray!

After years of malnourishment and two weeks of development, my little old static website (now using a smaller domain name!) is live. The old website, like the new website, was created via a templating system. However, the former website's templating system was homegrown using PHP4 classes (disgusting, I know...but that's all I could use at the time). Even more disgusting about my system was that it was HTML comment directives plus a regular expression parser. I was so young and naïve, and I hadn't taken a compilers class yet. So this time around, I said "screw it" and went with a) my favorite language, Python, and b) the template software that I had been using for my Trac-AtomPub plugin (yes, not -atompp anymore, per the lengthy discussion on the atom-protocol mailing list).

The Journey

As the new website was a chance to experiment with new things, I decided to take the plunge and use HTML5 to markup my website. And with any sort of experimental technology, there were many problems.

First, I tried to use the genshihtml5 plugin, but strangely enough the code was a bit buggy (e.g., it was missing an import), and I could never figure out how to get it to output proper HTML5 while still removing end tags from tags which don't need them, e.g. <link/>, while retaining them for tags which require one, e.g., <script/>.

Next, I tried to use html5lib's Genshi-Stream-based tree walker. For some reason, it simply would not output any data. I don't remember all of the details, but I do remember inserting a lot of print statements in html5lib to see if I could find the bad piece.

Finally, I gave up and made Genshi just output XHTML plus the extra HTML5 tags. I figured that all of the debugging trouble simply wasn't worth it for the timeframe I had envisioned.

(As an aside, I do plan on submitting the patches that I've made as a result of this...exercise (for lack of a better word) so that they can be integrated in future releases of the respective software.)

Actual usage of new HTML5 tags was...interesting to debug. If you're writing HTML5 and not XHTML5, and you're viewing the page in Firefox, this is what the DOM tree looks like (according to Firebug):

<figure _moz-userdefined="" />
<img src="..." alt="..." />
<legend>...</legend>

For comparison, this is what it looks like when rendered as XHTML5:

<figure>
<img src="..." alt="..." />
<legend>...</legend>
</figure>

That completely broke my CSS files, as I was using child/descendant rules utilizing the new tags. This sort of thing is why I love using Firebug.

Testing

I've really only thoroughly tested this website on Firefox 2.x (Windows & Linux). I just checked it on Opera 9.20 (Linux) and a relatively old development version of Gtk-Webcore (AKA WebKit), and the only bug that I see (in both of them, strangely) is some sort of CSS error in calculating the spacing for the <dd/> box for "Special Skills" in my CV.

Future

Future plans include packing both the CSS and the JavaScript, via csstidy and packer, respectively. Right now there are several bugs with regards to integrating the two applications with my build system. csstidy interprets white-space values incorrectly, particularly the vendor-specific values. I'm currently trying to integrate packer via this nifty little python module that uses ctypes to create an interface with Mozilla's Spidermonkey JavaScript engine. Unfortunately, there's a recursive reference somewhere in base2, and the module is choking on it, so I have to figure out how to resolve that (if possible). Another future plan involves making the site fully dynamic in that the page layout stays the same, while background XMLHttpRequests retrieve the page contents when internal links are clicked. Obviously the current behavior would be retained as a fallback.

Anyhow, there are more details about how I made my website on the colophon. Bug reports, suggestions and feature requests are welcome!