The Evil Blog

Xesam GLib 0.4.0

It’s been a long under way. Longer than I had hoped. But here it is. Feature packed and with tonnes of new code under the hood. I am fairly confident that it is not too unstable though. Hurra for unit tests! Excerpt of NEWS file:

* Strip some public symbols that should have been private (Biebl)

* Add .spec generation for Fedora (and Suse, untested) (Colin)

* Make Hits an abstract class (derivations SequentialHits and SparseHits are implemented but not part of the puclic api) (Kamstrup)

* Virtualize all methods on the Hit class (Kamstrup)

* Remove the xesam_g_hit_get_data method as it exposed implementation details, for fast hit access you can now look up the field ids with xesam_g_hit_get_field_id() and use those to retrieve field values (Kamstrup)

* Remove xesam_g_{session,search}_get_field_map(). Clients no longer have direct access to the field maps. This was an implementation detail. (Kamstrup)

* Add 'auto-continue' property on XesamGSearch (Kamstrup)

* Add support for user-data in Search and Hits objects (Kamstrup)

* Enforce single header includes. From now on it is only allowed to include xesam-glib.h, not all the object headers (Kamstrup)

* Removed the last traces of dbus-glib generated GTypes from the public headers (Kamstrup)

* Add an example of how to use XesamGDBusSearcherSTub to examples/. This can be used to proxy dbus Xesam Search interfaces to other names and paths (Kamstrup)

* * An easy to use iterator interface to XesamGHits (Kamstrup)

* Implement xesam_g_search_request_extended_data(). This is an experimental feature, so don't make you life depend on it! (Kamstrup)

Downalod: xesam-glib-0.4.0.tar.gz

API docs: Xesam GLib 0.4.0 API docs

Anecdotal Rant

The ChangeLog of xesam-glib-0.4.0 contains this line:

By coincidence this also fixes the last blocker bug for 0.4 which was that "hits-removed" and "hits-modified" signals on XesamGSearcher where not included in the gtk-doc output.

Please note the words “blocker bug”. Yes - I consider missing documentation for libraries blocker bugs. This is evidently not the case for all library writers. Not that Xesam GLib has perfect documentation, but I do think that a library without proper documentation is just a smidgeon better than a binary blob.

Other Rocking Xesam-News

Pinot with Xesam support anyone?

Strigi continuing work on their (already working) Xesam interface

Relax!

Kick back and let the good stuff come to you! Crank up the volume on your stereo and let the beats rip those ears! The usual Xesam heroes is working for you today!

Dear Lazy Web

Lately I have been having a problem with Mugshot. You see I’ve enrolled half of the office as Mugshotters and everybody are fairly happy with it. The problem is that I’ve also made a few Ubuntu converts, and now that they’ve upgraded to Hardy, Mugshot no longer works.

I’ve been trying to compile it following my Gutsy tutorial, and the compilation does indeed follow through. This gives my a Mugshot notification icon, sitting grayed out in the panel, unable to ever log on. I suspect it is something Firefox3-related.

Dear lazy web. Please help me.

I swear my wife did not read my whineful-pony-post from last night, but today she gave me my birthday present a few days early:

This baby can drive in dirt, water (sailing), and snow. Screw you guys and GUADEC. Who wants to hack anyway. I’m out!

Who wants a friggen pony anyway. I hope the kids wont get too jealous… *wroooom*

I am not going to GUADEC this year and it it really upsetting me. There are so many exciting things going down in the (Gnome) community these days that I don’t even want to list them because that would just upset me even more.

I tried to convince my employer that it would be for their benefit if I went, but I knew it was no exactly the usual stuff, or directly related to my work, so I can’t really blame them. Atleast said employer is paying me to hack on FOS software, so all is not lost.

Bummer, bummer, bummer. Life sucks[1]. I want a pony.

[1]: At this particular moment when the family is sleeping and I am up alone it sucks. A few hours ago the kids where great, the sun was shining, and everything was bliss, but allow me to indulge in my missery.

Ok. I admit it. I have been updating my PGO-feed far too many times in the hope that Vincent or Lucas posted some news about their mysterious Gnome3-document (or maybe I am not allowed to say Gnome 3?).

So to avenge this I’ll do a bit of secrecy and foggy clue dropping myself…

I am indeed working on something big. I am not gonna tell you what it is. And in fact if the stars align in a certain way you will never have to hear about it. So, to the foggy clues

• It is way cool
• Crazy cool features
• Involves a lot of coding that I have very little spare time to do
• Does not involve any “rewrite from scratch” of anything (yet)
• Very long term goal
• Announced at the very earliest in 6 months, probably later, if ever
• A yellow submarine stranded on an empty beach
• Gnome-related
• Cases upon cases of beer
• You may be able to gather enough information around the dusty corners of the web to figure out what I am up to. At least if you have crazy Matrix-like skills and a lot of spare time
• The gauntlet have been thrown, and I’ve picked it up
• Charged by a hither to unknown combination of a micro wave oven and baby formula
• Will involve some cool patches targeting upstream libs
• Profit! Insane profit!
• Xesam is part of the greater puzzle

(I had to drop a few red herrings in there to make it trickier for all you wise-guys)

I just released Xesam GLib 0.3.0 onto the wild. You can grab xesam-glib here.

News in this release:

• The far biggest item to hit xesam-glib has been the query handling API. It contains tools to parse queries and user search strings as well as a generic QueryBuilder interface you can plug in to convert Xesam queries to what ever you like (SQL, Lucene, SPARQL, GObjects)
• A security issue related in XesamGSearch (see next point)
• Take care to treat all interfacing with a XesamGSearcher as dealing with an untrusted source. Search engine hackers are notoriously evil people, we all know that ;-P

Tarball: xesam-glib-0.3.0.tar.gz

API docs: documentation for xesam-glib-0.3.0

The Winners

The are a handful winners to my latest pop quiz. The correct answer was “Nice weather today”. As many of you knew Denmark is not exactly renowned for its good weather, hence “Nice weather today” not exactly being a regular expression. The last item (the expression/extortion one) was just chugged in the bucket to have something that looked like what programmers normally perceive as a regular expression.

Messages, Micro Blogging, Yarrr!

I think I must admit that I failed my micro blogging test. Even though I honestly tried to make it easy for myself it just really did catch on to me (I will keep trying though). I think that I just have too many communication channels to administer already. Perhaps a wicked alliance of Empathy, Soylent, and Xesam can be used to revive the  ☠ [Yarrr!] project?

Which of the following is not a regular expression?

• Super!
• That was odd..?
• Nice weather today
• How are you doing?
• Regular ex(press|tort)ion

As I’ve mentioned I am honestly trying to jump on the micro blogging band wagon, by trying out Twitter and Jaiku. Some may recall that I wrote a Twitter module for deskbar a little while back. This is of course not fair for Jaiku. So here, grab yourself a juicy Jaiku module for deskbar (no dependencies). Just drag the link onto your deskbar applet module list to install it (found in the preferences).

I added a small fix to the deskbar Twitter module as well, so if you had troubles with the last one this might work now. You can install it the same way as the Jaiku module.

Obligatory screenie:

Ok here is my vision for Gnome 3. Note that it is not a finished proposal due to my still crazily hectic home life. But release early release unfinished as they say.

I purposely left out some details because I felt them irrelevant at this point (and they would probably get us discussing the wrong things).

I really hope we can keep the momentum in this discussion.