After I rewrote Empathy's presence chooser to be seriously more awesome, one of the ideas that was floated was being able to use "Firefox-style" bookmarks to save your favourite status messages, allowing you to quickly add/remove messages without having to use the dialog (which is also a candidate for being rewritten).
Well, as my first bit of code to get back into the swing of things after being on break, I've hacked it up: screencast.
Git branch | Bug
Well, we're back from Melbourne. Got in this morning at 8am Perth time (saving $120 by booking a 6am flight is less appealing when you have to force yourself awake at 4am).
Sajee and Essie's Really Big Party (and commitment ceremony) was yesterday afternoon and it was a lot of fun. It was held at the old Glen Harrow manor house in Belgrave.
Someone is warming up for this afternoon...
(posted on Saturday April 18, 2009 at 07:08 AWST)
Arrived in Melbourne around midday.
Things (in this case car hire) are always more expensive than you expect. Not to worry, this trip is on Kevin Rudd. We're helping to support the Australian economy!
The Coles and the IGA we stopped at were both closed (public holidays!), thankfully a Subway and a Baker's Delight were both open, otherwise we would not have eaten since breakfast.
The gig was pretty awesome. One of the support acts (Skipping Girl Vinegar) were fun, we bought their album. Tim Freedman turned up with secret Whitlams (he ran into enough people who'd toured with the Whitlams previously in a pub last night, and convinced them to come and play, that he could have a whole band). Missy Higgins was really super awesome (and played quite a long set). Unfortunately we froze through, so skipped out on the Cat Empire (sad, but we were completely unprepared for that much cold — coats and a blanket would have been the right choice). Turns out it gets colder in the Yarra Valley than Melbourne-town. BOM tells me it was about 12C. Really we needed Melbourne friends who wanted to come as well, who could have provided the picnic and the blankets.
We had 30 minutes of pretty intense country driving to get to where we're staying tonight. I think I'm out of practice driving country, but I've never enjoyed it at night or in an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar location. Why someone feels the need to tailgate at 85kph through winding valley roads escapes me (sorry, I just wasn't willing to do 100kph when I couldn't see).
Anyway, curled up now with a cup of tea and clean hair. Will probably crash soon, since we've been up forever.
(posted on Sunday April 12, 2009 at 20:00 AWST)
Unanimous.
I hope a bunch of crank-jobs don't come up with a way to take your right back from you.
When are you going to fix it, Australia?
(posted on Friday April 03, 2009 at 23:37 AWST)
Lots of people have written Docbook syntax highlighters, but they all seem to required saxon or xesam and random bits of Java and in general it's not a lot of fun. What I wanted was a syntax highlighter that was able to work with xsltproc.
telepathy-doc already includes a script to insert example fragments that are part of a complete executable example, insert-examples.py. It was easy enough to hack this up to generate XHTML from Python Pygments, but then what?
Well, since telepathy-doc already overrides the standard gnome-doc-utils stylesheet, I just invented my own Docbook tag, <embedhtml> (XML purists, please commence your tears), that is written out by the Python preprocessor. A template that matches this tag is implemented that does a recursive copy of its contents into the output document. However, in the appendices, we want to include Docbook tags inside our syntax highlighted HTML (namely <xref> and <anchor>). So a second tag was invented, <embeddb>, which can match while you're in embedhtml mode.
The XSL stylesheet looks something like this:
<!-- this template matches the hack tag <embedhtml> and copies its contents verbatim into the output document. This allows us to embed XHTML directly into the output, e.g. from a syntax highlighter --> <xsl:template match="embedhtml"> <xsl:apply-templates select="node()" mode="embedhtml"/> </xsl:template> <!-- matches <embeddb> inside <embedhtml> to switch back to docbook --> <xsl:template match="embeddb" mode="embedhtml"> <xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/> </xsl:template> <!-- recursive copy in embedhtml mode, see http://www.xmlplease.com/xsltidentity --> <xsl:template match="@*|node()" mode="embedhtml"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()" mode="embedhtml"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template>(posted on Thursday April 02, 2009 at 18:20 AWST)
wjt has just blogged about the new off the record support in Empathy 2.27, including a privacy mode for video chat.
Awesome.
(posted on Wednesday April 01, 2009 at 10:56 AWST)
So, as of telepathy-spec 0.7.22, we have made available a new pure-Python parser for processing D-Bus API specifications written using the Telepathy XML namespace. This parser turns the XML into nice pretty Python data structures that you can do things with. One such thing is to generate HTML documentation using a templating system (we're using Cheetah); which looks something like this. At some point in the future, it will also be used to generate language bindings.
I mention this because those of us at Telepathy HQ think that our XML format is a pretty damned nifty way to specify D-Bus APIs, and we'd love to see other people getting on board. I know at least one other project is using our format, but I've forgotten who. If you want to give the new parser and HTML doc generator a whirl against your own spec, you can grab them from the telepathy-spec GIT repo. Bugs on a postcard.
In the course of today, I found myself wanting to access colours from the Tango palette in a document I was writing. Rather than just defining the specific colours I wanted by hand, I figured it would be quicker in the long run to generate a LaTeX package with all of the colours.
So, when you work from your home, you have to provide your own tea.
This has had the unfortunate side effect of turning me into a bit of a tea snob.
So while we were in Melbourne, we went to visit Tea Party (who have a website now, yay!), which is located in the Queen Victoria markets. We went around smelling teas with the help of Jonathan (who works there) and in the end left with a tube of mango sencha and something experimental, Australian Rainforest (which I think is similar to their Rainforest Delight, but also includes lemon myrtle). We could have bought more, but we already have at least 4 other open packets of tea at the moment (from diverse vendors).
It's really nice though (mango in tea: brilliant! Why had I never thought about it before?); so if you're a tea snob too, check it out!
(posted on Friday March 27, 2009 at 14:49 AWST)
It turns out that what I knew about first aid has mostly atrophied in the 10 years since I learnt anything.
I was walking back from the shops when I noticed a bunch of students pointing across the road and running over, and I realised that a man had collapsed there. He was breathing and responsive, but not very cogent. He knew what day it was, but wouldn't say his name. He wasn't visibly hurt and he said he wasn't hurt, but couldn't get up. He said he was dizzy, he didn't want an ambulance. He was either drunk, or ripped, or both.
Unfortunately this left me at a bit of a loss for what to do.
Thankfully someone else who'd stopped realised that he was probably trying to get to Bridge House (a shelter at the end of the street run by the Salvation Army). He agreed that is what he was trying to do. That someone ran off to get help from the Salvos, who came out. One of them recognised him and said they'd take care of him. I didn't want to gawk, so I left.
This is the first time I've ever wanted first aid knowledge in a real situation, and it turns out I was more or less completely useless. I'm thinking it might be prudent to go and relearn.
This blog post contains the contents of an email I've been meaning to write for weeks, but keep forgetting, but because it's Ada Lovelace Day, I've turned it into this blog post.
So I'm going to write about Pia Waugh, and why she's a hero of mine.
I wonder if there is a name for the reentry shock caused by when you come home from somewhere more exciting and you realise that you have to get back on with your regular life tomorrow.
Had a lot of fun in Melbourne. Had some chats. Over ate vegan treats. Went op-shopping. Chilled out.
It has been proposed that when we're back in April, that we actually take some time to have a proper holiday. It's an interesting idea.
Anyhow, we're back in Perth. Adopt the brace position.
This is a note for people in Australia or Europe who find themselves missing channels 12 and 13 under Linux on their Intel wireless card (check this with `iwlist wlan0 channel`).
Add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options:
options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom="EU"
GNOME 2.26 is here!
We managed to miss our flight to Melbourne this morning. Got our boarding passes but in the 20minutes we were in the baggage drop queue, they closed baggage check-in. Frustrating, because we probably could have pushed to the front of the queue and got on the flight ok. Qantas were nice enough to put us on the next flight, so it only delays our day by 3 hours.
However, they did then rub it in by delaying the flight we were meant to be on by 20 minutes, so I'm not entirely sure why we weren't allowed on it.
My Mum says we go to a lot of weddings, more than she did at our age. I posit that we simply have more friends than her.
Today was Kandace and Rick's wedding. It was really nice. I especially liked their vows (I thought they were awesome). Disliked the way the celebrant approached the little bit of discrimination that is the passage from the Marriage Act (N.B. that law is crap).
Sculpture by the Sea is on again at Cottesloe beach. Steph and I caught the bus there this evening and had a look and ate hot chips on the grass.
Saw Watchmen on Sunday. Enjoyed it.
Went to the UCC Fresher's Welcome on Friday night. Managed to accidentally skip a large portion of it, but wasn't incredibly bothered. Maybe I'm losing interest?
Have now worked for Collabora for almost 2 months. I'm really enjoying myself. Steph pointed out that I no longer sulk about the end of the weekend. Have almost written a fully functional Telepathy client for the docs.
GNOME 2.26 release notes are in progress. More help gladly accepted.
Not this weekend, but the weekend after, we'll be in Melbourne. Look out! It might be possible to find us gorging ourselves outside Lord of the Fries.
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