5:55 AM

Time for a litl change

2010-07-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

Last week was my last with Novell.

This week is my first with litl.

Novell was a great place to work and I recommend it to anyone. I will miss the Mono Accessibility team, but the beauty of being an open source project is that I can just pop into IRC or review some code on ReviewBoard when I'm feeling nostalgic.

At litl, I'll be working with Brad and his crack team to make the channel experience EVEN MORE AWESOME.

If you're wondering "what will the impact be on Tomboy/Snowy/etc?", the answer is that you can expect more polish on the Mac version of Tomboy now that I'll be dogfooding it every day. And it looks like I'll be switching Snowy to use lxml. Nothing else should change. I still intend to be as involved in GNOME as Stewie will let me. ;-)

Recent Releases: Tomboy 1.3.1, Snowy 0.1, Stewie 0.12

2010-06-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

'Yo Quiero Tomboy Online', remixed from 'Benito Chihuahua'

Monday I made two releases: Tomboy 1.3.1 and Snowy 0.1.

Tomboy 1.3.1 is our second development release of the cycle. So far we have been focusing on bug fixing, cleaning out old patches from bugzilla, and removing use of APIs that are deprecated for GNOME 3.0. Some highlights of 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 are:

New topic-based help from Paul Cutler and others on the GNOME docs team should provide a more useful way to get help when using Tomboy.
Panel applet support is now disabled by default (distributors, please use --enable-panel-applet when configuring) to drop most GNOME 2 dependencies (many thanks to Javier Jardón for this, and Aaron Borden for other API usage updates).
Alejandro Cura added libproxy support to web sync, and there was much rejoicing.
If you're hacking on Tomboy and are sick of having to install to test your changes, you'll be glad to hear that make run finally works again.
We added a couple of hidden preferences that we may expose in the Preferences UI this cycle: hiding the tray icon is handy for folks who use Docky or gnome-do instead of the tray menu (Matthew Pirocchi), and deleting notes without being prompted for confirmation may speed up your workflow (Jeff Stoner).
Brian Mattern fixed a bug noticeable on Ubuntu, where the panel applet wasn't using their fancy new icons.
In bullet list land, Owen Williams fixed an irritating printing bug, and Stefan Schweizer fixed some keyboard navigation issues.

I'm really glad to have so many contributors helping out this cycle, as I've been splitting my time between two babies. First, here's a cute picture of my awesome son Stewart Daniel Kekoa Armstrong, who was born on May 16th:

Stewie 0.12

The other baby is Snowy, the AGPL Django app that will power the upcoming Tomboy Online free web service. We had planned on releasing according to the GNOME schedule, but wanted to wait until we added OpenID support to limit how many times alpha testers need to wipe their databases and start over again. ;-)

So today, I am proud to offer our first development release of Snowy: 0.1, the Chihuahua release. Ripped from the headlines, here are the features:

An implementation of the Tomboy web sync REST API (the same API that Ubuntu One implements for note sync)
OpenID support, so you can log in with your Google/Launchpad/whatever account
Read-only online note access (notes can be made publicly readable in the admin UI for now)
A friendly Tomboy-like web UI for accessing your notes, supporting rich text, note links, note pinning, full-text search, etc
An initial unit test suite

Although Brad Taylor wrote most of the initial app, and I did a lot of the sync related work, I'd really like to call attention to some of our awesome contributors who have made this release possible:

Leon Handreke improved our sync code, fixed a ton of our unit tests (on multiple occasions), and added OpenID support so that you can log in with your Google account or any other OpenID, instead of having to remember a new username/password pair for our little service. He also made some slick improvements to our note search UI.
Sander Dijkhuis made improvements to our web UI, improved the ease of testing deployment by adding a fake mail server, and has been active on bugzilla and in IRC helping people work through deployment issues.
Benoit Garrett, Stuart Langridge, and Olivie Le Thanh Duong have made numerous contributions to the REST API, OAuth support, and upstream django-piston, which is the library we use to achieve those features.
We've also had great contributions from Adam Ziolkowski, Andy Duplain, Jordan Keyes, Mike Gorse, Ray Wang, and Shayne Macaulay.
And we'd love to add your name to this list! We need Python hackers, designers, HTML/CSS pros, Javascript wranglers, testers, Django deployment experts...and I could use a babysitter, too.

Please join us in #snowy on GIMPNet, or on our mailing list, and help us bring Tomboy to your web.

Last Call for GNOME Summer of Code 2010 Ideas! Student proposal period starts Monday!

2010-03-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

On Saturday a small group of SoC mentors will sort through the list of ideas on the wiki, clean them up, remove those we don't want to recommend to students, and highlight those we find especially alluring.

If you have ideas for your project, you have today and tomorrow to add them to the wiki before our meeting. Please place new ideas in the "Other Ideas" section.

The student proposal period starts Monday. If you want to help review student proposals, please sign up as a mentor. If you don't use your full name and include details when applying to be a mentor, we may not know who you are, so if you choose to do that please email me, Ruben, or Daniel with your link_id so we don't reject you. :-) We have to be careful because there are some sneaky or confused students out there who try to sign up as mentors.

The ideas page will be under tight control after our meeting on Saturday, but it will still be possible to add ideas if you check with folks in #soc-admin or on the GNOME soc-mentors-list first.

Tomboy 1.1.4 Brings Automatic Synchronization

2010-03-10T07:45:00.000-08:00

Monday I released Tomboy 1.1.4. Last month's 1.1.2 release was actually the first to feature automatic note synchronization (herein referred to as 'autosync'), but in 1.1.4 the feature is less annoying and you can actually turn it on in the Preferences UI. Here's the only possible autosync screenshot:

Here are some facts about autosync:

It assumes the server is always right when conflicts occur, so if you actually found Tomboy's conflict-handling UI useful, don't use autosync
When a sync occurs, it desensitizes all note windows, because Tomboy sync is still a bit insistent on believing in transactions.
But in theory this should never be a problem for you, because Tomboy will never sync while you are editing a note. It will wait until *at least* one minute has passed where you have not been editing.
Besides this desensitization of note windows, there is no indication at all that a sync has occurred. Next cycle, I intend to use libnotify bubbles and/or status icon changes where they make sense to let the user know if new updates have been downloaded, or if the sync server appears to be down, etc. Right now this feature is totally silent, though you can get a few details if you run from a terminal with --debug.

It's unfortunate that I've been too busy to publicize this feature until so very late in the cycle. I'd appreciate any testing, feedback, bug reports, etc. At this point all I can say is that it Works For Me.

Other sync-related news:

Rumor has it that Ubuntu One note sync can no longer mangle your notes, unless you use their web editor, in which case the mangling is much less severe than in the past. I keep getting emails from Launchpad saying that Rodrigo has fixed yet another of the old irritating bugs, to the point that I've lost track and think he may have gotten the last of them! :-) This is great news for U1 users, who previously suffered from a few serious sync bugs.
I've started the ball rolling on deploying Snowy on GNOME servers (this would be known as Tomboy Online, if the marketing team approves...I still need to email them).
We have another Snowy planning meeting this weekend.
Many thanks to Leon Handreke and Sander Dijkhuis for their valuable contributions to Snowy in git.
Tomdroid 0.3.1 is out, and although it doesn't yet include web sync, the merge is impending!

Another feature in Tomboy 1.1.4 makes me very happy, might upset Tomboy old-timers, and could possibly cause Alex Graveley to destroy my very soul:

By default, when you rename a note, Tomboy will no longer automatically update all of the text that used to link to that note. Instead, if other notes link to the renamed note, Tomboy will show you a dialog (lame, I know, I intend to bind GtkInfoBar for next cycle to eliminate all dialogs in Tomboy) that lets you choose what to do. Here's an example screenshot, with the Advanced section expanded:

Some have argued that automatic link renaming is part of Tomboy's magic, but many many users (including me) consider this dark magic to be a serious potential data loss bug. If you've ever had a note called "Linux", and renamed it to "openSUSE", and been dismayed to find that everywhere in your notes where it used to say "linux" it now says "openSUSE", you know what I'm talking about.

In the future, I'd like to allow folks to have more control over note linking behavior. Many users have expressed a desire to turn off automatic linking, or to be able to link arbitrary text to another note (not just text that matches the note's title). Enough people have asked for it that it'll probably happen, though of course patches would make it happen faster.

Next time you hear from me, Tomboy 1.2.0 should be out, and we should be making progress on getting Tomboy Online deployed!

Tomboy 1.1.1 Released, Tomboy Online Plans Solidify

2010-01-27T09:07:00.000-08:00

Tomboy 1.1.1 Brings New Ones

After a brief release hiatus, I bring you Tomboy's latest development release: version 1.1.1!

Probably the coolest new feature in this release, courtesy of Stefan Cosma, is support for Windows 7 Jump Lists, which are totally awesome and should be added to GNOME.

Jump Lists In Action

Another cool fix that will make Dave Richards (and everyone else who has ever wanted to copy and paste a Tomboy note into an email or OpenOffice.org document) very happy. Gabriel Burt fixed a long-standing problem with gtk# to enable this (requires not-yet-released gtk# 2.12.10), and patched Tomboy to make rich HTML available in the clipboard. Thanks dude!

Pasting rich note content into Evolution (click for OO.o Writer and plain-text email examples)

I was planning on having a preview of automatic background sync in this release, but I just didn't get as far as I wanted on it. I'll be merging that feature in before the next release, though.

But while I was playing with autosync, I was doing a lot of restarting Tomboy, and got tired of the 2 second startup time. Most Tomboy users always run it, so startup time is not a huge deal, but for developers this just gets irritating after awhile. So I rejiggered some startup work to be delayed, causing the Tomboy icon to show up within about 0.5-1.0 seconds on my machine. This pleased me, so I included it in Tomboy 1.1.1. Take that fascist scum!

The Future of Snowy and Tomboy Online

You may have seen Brad's blog last week about our Snowy meeting. If you read the meeting minutes, you'll see that we're shifting our focus to be a little more goal-oriented. Our plan is to get a Snowy instance on GNOME servers as soon as the sysadmin team will let us. This instance will be Tomboy Online, and its needs will drive core Snowy development. We'll start with a private alpha and go from there.

Right now we're working on a Tomboy Online roadmap that breaks outstanding work into basic tasks so that contributors know where they can help. Once this roadmap is in better shape, I'll be blogging again to let you know what our plans are and how you can help us.

In the meantime, if you have any resources to share on automated testing of web sites, REST APIs, and overall web/server security, I'd really appreciate it. Ponies are great...pwnies, not soo much.

By the way, if you have opinions about GNOME hosting Free web services like Tomboy Online, please take Stormy's survey on GNOME Foundation goals for 2010! :-)

New Tomboy Releases with Ubuntu One support on all platforms, and other goodies in the Tomboy world

2009-11-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

On Monday I announced our new stable release, Tomboy 1.0.1, and our new development release, Tomboy 1.1.0. They both share the following fixes:

Official support for Ubuntu One (and any other server that implements the Tomboy Web REST API and uses OAuth 1.0a...Snowy uses OAuth 1.0). This patch comes from friend and Canonical employee Rodrigo Moya.
Always show note icons in the recent notes menu.
Link to correct version of our help document on Windows and Mac.
Translation updates, etc.

With Tomboy 1.1.0, you also get these fixes and features:

New D-Bus methods for manipulating notebooks thanks to Clemens Buss.
New Synchronize Notes menu item for the panel applet.
Cleaned up the sync dialog so it shouldn't cut off text anymore.
A ton of great fixes for Windows users from Stefan Cosma, and printing should now work on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Translation updates, other fixes, and another new D-Bus method from Matt Jones.

For openSUSE users, packages are available in GNOME:Apps:Tomboy and GNOME:Apps:Tomboy:Unstable. Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic users can use packages from our stable PPA or our development PPA.

But the most exciting things happening in the Tomboy world right now aren't really about Tomboy at all. :-)

You may have already seen Eitan Isaacson's new Note Statistics add-in. It's not the first add-in like this, but it seems to be the most comprehensive, and it's up on github for added coolness. I'm trying to decide if I should add this to the upstream Tomboy add-ins, or use it to kick-start a community add-in repository. Any opinions?

Back on the subject of Ubuntu One and note synchronization, I want to first say that Snowy, the AGPL web service for Tomboy notes, is still an active project, and we still plan to have Tomboy Online in beta in the next few months. Having both main developers on the same team at Novell just means we both get busy with work at the same time. :-)

Manuel's Tomboy Online Logo Mockup

But recently, Manuel Holzleitner has posted some mockups for the following:

A front page for Tomboy Online
A new website for Tomboy
A new project website for Snowy
New logos for all
(Somewhat hidden) A new layout for Snowy:

Manuel's Tomboy Online Mockup

I'm not a designer or UI expert, but I'm a big fan of these mockups. For one thing, I've been wanting to revamp the Tomboy website for a long time now, and Manuel's idea of unifying the design of all of these sites seems obvious in retrospect. I also think the proposed logos are ridiculously cute and web-appropriate. There seem to be a few folks interested in helping us out with our HTML/CSS, etc, so I'm really looking forward to having a better-looking Snowy in the near future.

Once we expand our test suite a bit and work through our deployment story, I don't think there will be much standing in the way of a Tomboy Online alpha running Snowy.

Manuel's Snowy Logo Mockup

Of course, in the mean time, people can use Ubuntu One, since those guys were awesome enough to use the same REST API for sync as Snowy uses. In fact, as I've mentioned before, Rodrigo and Stuart from Canonical both helped out with the design of this API, and even the implementation in Snowy. It's still proprietary software, but at least the guys working on it are awesome. ;-)

And if you have been wanting to get your notes from Tomboy to Ubuntu One to your Android device, there is now working code to do this in Tomdroid's web-sync branch. Thanks to Benoit Garret holding my hand, I was even able to contribute a patch. :-P With Benoit's latest code in bzr, you can now sync Tomdroid with Ubuntu One. There are still a few fixes needed to make this releasable, but for anyone who's looking to get involved in Android development, here's a fun project to hack on for you!

In a similar story, Cornelius Hald has been updating Conboy (a C port of Tomboy for Maemo devices) so that it, too, can sync with Ubuntu One. It already supported Snowy sync last I heard, so the only hurdle was (again) supporting the changes in OAuth 1.0a. Last week Cornelius got it working, so I wouldn't be surprised if he has a release soon.

In other fun news, about a month ago Mohanaraj Gopala Krishnan emailed me to discuss a presentation he was planning for the FOSS.my conference in Malaysia. The topic of the presentation was Tomboy, Snowy, web sync, Ubuntu One, etc etc. Go read his fun slides on his blog .

That's all for now! I'll talk to you again after non-Canadian Thanksgiving.

One-click install for Banshee Telepathy Sharing Extension 0.1.1

2009-11-19T23:03:00.000-08:00

Over the course of the summer, you may have read Neil Loknath's various blog posts about his Summer of Code project that lets you share your Banshee music library with your Telepathy contacts.

Well, it's pretty cool stuff, and now that he's started making releases, it's a great opportunity for people to try it out and give him feedback.

If you're using openSUSE 11.2, you can get version 0.1.1 of his extension through this handy one-click install link.

Note that my little repository includes upgrades to telepathy-gabble, telepathy-mission-control, and gnutls. You'll need to log out/in or kill all telepathy/empathy/mission-control processes before the changes take affect.

If you're like me and prefer to build Banshee from source and Neil's extension from source but don't want to reinstall your entire Telepathy stack from source, just install telepathy-gabble and telepathy-mission-control from my repository (this will cause a few gnutls packages to upgrade as well), and you'll be good to go.

Let me know if you have any issues, but let's consider these packages officially unsupported, could break your Empathy, impregnate your cat, etc.

Tomboy 1.2 Planning Meeting Today

2009-10-08T11:31:00.000-07:00

"Cows are plentiful in Segovia?", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

In one hour (12:30 US Pacific time, 19:30 UTC), we'll be holding our cycle-ly planning meeting to make some plans for the next Tomboy release.

If you want to comment, listen, volunteer, or heckle, please join us in #tomboy on GIMPNet.

Oh, by the way, if you've been wanting to follow Tomboy updates on Twitter but you find me way to garrulous, you can now follow @tomboy for some peace of mind. We have @tomboy on identi.ca, too.

Tomboy Hits 1.0

2009-10-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

It's been just over five years since Alex Graveley made the first commit to Tomboy CVS, unleashing a brilliantly simple note-taking application for people who just wanted to Get Stuff Done.

Tomboy Back In The Day (click for Alex's blog post)

Three years ago (right after I joined the project), Tomboy became a part of GNOME 2.16. It was about this time that Boyd Timothy joined the fun and became a co-maintainer with Alex. Much of the polish in Tomboy and many of the features you take for granted such as notebooks, synchronization, and bulleted lists appeared during his stewardship. After helping with sync, I was "promoted" to co-maintainer, too.

After Boyd and Calvin Gaisford (of Giver and Tasque fame) left to start their own company last year, I was left as the sole maintainer. I'm trying to do my part to build on the legacy left by Alex and Boyd. Fortunately for me, Tomboy seems to attract cool people like Chris Scobell, Stefan Schweizer, Benjamin Podszun, and dozens of others who have contributed major features and fixes.

One of the funny little things that tends to come up at Tomboy planning meetings is the version number. Tomboy's been around for five years now, and really it's been a pretty solid app for the majority of that history, especially once it became part of the GNOME desktop. So why is it versioned like some alpha product?

Tomboy in your dock (click for full-screen shot)

Tomboy runs on every major operating system, is used by 50 kabillion people every day [citation needed], and even if we have more grand plans, Tomboy today really does help people Get Stuff Done.

So we're calling our new stable release 1.0, the first release of the 1.0.x stable series. The next big stable release will be 1.2, etc etc. I hope this arbitrary change will instill a sense of confidence in users, and maybe even get people thinking about what "Tomboy 2.0" might mean.

Here's what's new in Tomboy 1.0 since the 0.14.x stable releases:

WebSync add-in lets you synchronize your notes with the upcoming Tomboy Online web service, your own server running Snowy, or any other server implementing the new Tomboy Web REST API, which will soon include Ubuntu One and Midgard. Big thanks to Rodrigo Moya and Stuart Langridge from Canonical for their help on this.
NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in from Michael Fletcher (disabled by default) finally lets you edit your note files outside of Tomboy safely, even while it's running, opening the door for all sorts of ad-hoc sync solutions if you don't want to use a server.
Underline add-in from Mark Wakim (disabled by default).
Faster start-up.
UI improvements in note searching.
More keyboard shortcuts.
Loads of bug fixes.
Updated documentation (a complete revamp is on the way for the GNOME 2.30 cycle).
Notes and other files migrated to new standard directories.

I'm really excited about this release, because to me it represents a foundation. A lot of cruft has been cleaned up. Tomboy is leaner and meaner. Note and configuration files have moved to standard locations, making backups and upgrades better. Accessing those note files is now a less scary proposition. This is a good foundation on which we can build Tomboy's future.

With that in mind, here are some features I would love to tackle for Tomboy 1.2 if we can:

Automatic synchronization.
More work on Snowy, Tomboy Online, and social features integrated right into Tomboy.
Note sharing via Telepathy, and maybe even collaborative editing.
A new innovative workflow for managing simple task lists (with integration points for EDS or Tasque wherever it makes sense).
Customizable, themeable, simplified note UI.
Rethinking notebooks and search.
Better gnome-shell integration.
Better Tomboy experience on Mac OS X.
Additional memory and performance enhancements.
Your ideas and patches!

Personally, I'm really inspired by GNOME 2.28's "Made to Share" slogan, so I expect that will be a running theme in Tomboy 1.2.

I'll make sure to announce when we pick a date and time for our roadmap planning meeting, which is when we will choose what features we really want to focus on this cycle.

You may have read that we now have an official PPA for Ubuntu users. This is all thanks to Alan Pope and Jorge Castro. Since the announcement of the PPA a few other people have joined the tomboy-packagers team so I'm looking forward to being able to provide instant gratification to Ubuntu users on any distro since Jaunty, whether they want the latest stable or the latest development release.

In openSUSE land, the GNOME team is working on a specific organization for repositories like this, but I have the packages ready in my home project, so if you want Tomboy 1.0.0 for openSUSE 11.1 or later (including SLED 11), you can get them here for now:

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.15.6 Released, ~/.tomboy is no more

2009-08-25T08:27:00.001-07:00

"Light Hearts", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Yesterday I released Tomboy 0.15.6 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The biggest change is invisible to most users: we've gotten rid of ~/.tomboy.

Anybody who's backed up their notes or created Rube Goldberg-esque sync solutions is familiar with this hidden directory holding note files, user-installed add-ins, and various bits of configuration. As of today, ~/.tomboy is no more. We've separated out notes, configuration, temporary files, and even the log, and relocated them according to FreeDesktop.org standards on Linux, and appropriate conventions on Mac OS X and Windows. Everything will be automatically be moved. Details available on this wiki page.

The benefits of this move to users are:

Users who are already trained to back up directories like ~/.config and ~/.local won't have to remember to add ~/.tomboy to that list (same argument for ~/Library on Mac OS X)
Folks who want to set up their own ad-hoc note sync will now have a much easier time, because they can just sync the notes folder. Use any popular method of synchronizing a directory (rsync, iFolder, UbuntuOne, Dropbox, whatever), and combine that with our NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in, and you should be good to go. You'll miss some benefits of our sync infrastructure, like conflict handling, but you'll gain one big feature missing from Tomboy: automatic synchronization.

If you maintain some tool that expects Tomboy note files to live in ~/.tomboy, please update it to also look in (by default) ~/.local/share/tomboy. Thanks!

In the previous release I cleaned up the Search UI according to input from Andreas and Kalle at GCDS:

The original Search UI: Pretty with a lot of wasted space and one useless feature (click for full window)

The updated Search UI: Cleaner, lest wasted space (click for full window)

Other changes since the last time I blogged:

New underline formatting add-in from Mark Wakim
Keyboard shortcuts for changing font size
Improvements to HTML export
Less command line output unless you run Tomboy with --debug (this actually has a positive impact on performance, by the way)
Add "Get More Add-Ins..." button in the Preferences UI
In SSH sync, we no longer force port 22 if no port is specified

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

See you in Gran Canaria!

2009-07-02T04:48:00.000-07:00

Pounding a bowl of cereal. Almost time to leave for my flight!

On Sunday I'll be giving a talk about the UI Automation spec, and the work of the Mono Accessibility team. If you're an a11y nerd, or your day job is Winforms or Silverlight app development and you want to automate that shit on Windows and Linux, or you just don't believe that I am currently bearded and want to confirm for yourself, please check it out.

I'd also love to talk to people about Snowy, Free web services, GNOME's online desktop strategy, Batman, and the future of Tomboy.

Dark Victory is really good so far. Doesn't stand on its own...you need to read The Long Halloween first (and therefore should read Year One before that).

A few weeks ago I drafted a blog with updates on Snowy, and just ran out of time to finish it up and post it. But there is some basic info I want to share, so here's an updated excerpt:

We are really excited about all of the positive feedback we're hearing about Snowy, and the upcoming Tomboy Online service. We were reluctant to announce the project before we could confidently host it, but based on the excellent feedback and participation we've received so far, it's clear that we did the right thing by announcing early.

The day I blogged about Snowy, I left for San Diego to participate in my friends' wedding. When I returned on Monday, I had a lot of catching up to do! Here are some of the recent happenings:

Brad set up a Snowy mailing list, and a Snowy product in GNOME bugzilla.
Og Maciel has begun work on a virtual appliance for Snowy, and in the process of doing so has helped to unearth some bugs (our first mailing list activity). Thanks Og!
Ryan Paul of Ars Technica fame as written a great article about the current state of Snowy.
Rodrigo Moya and Stuart Langridge have continued to help us refine our REST API, as they work on implementing it for Ubuntu One. Stuart contributed patches to upgrade our authentication from HTTP basic to OAuth, and I finally pushed it upstream, along with corresponding support in Tomboy (based on some handy dandy code from Bojan Rajkovic). I am really grateful for their help!
We have our first localization! Thanks to Viatcheslav Ivanov for diving in.
The Midgard project has implemented our REST API as well, and intends to add support to Conboy (Tomboy ported to C on Maemo) as well.

This is all after less than a week of Snowy "going public"! This is an encouraging sign that we are on the right track with API design and modularity of implementation.

So that is my updated paste from the draft. The rest was all technical details on the design of the API, and how much Rodrigo, Stuart, and Brad all rock, etc etc. I'll post about that soon...for now I'm going to focus on getting a demo server up for you all to play with!

For those to whom I owe a drink, your day of reckoning approaches!

Tomboy Bug Squashing Day: Tuesday June 16th

2009-06-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

Everybody!

Some of our beautiful Tomboy contributors have organized a bug and test day on June 16th, 2009. It is officially scheduled for 8AM-5PM PST (3PM-Midnight UTC), but I expect people will be around before and after. :-)

We're going to be focusing on UNCONFIRMED and NEEDSINFO bugs, outstanding patches, and stuff targeted for the current cycle.

If you want to work on patches, that's great, but anybody can help regardless of their background and abilities. Just show up and we'll help you get started contributing by squashing some bugs!

Check out our wiki page for all the details.

If you're starving for Snowy updates, you might want to join our mailing list. I'll be writing more soon about a lot of the exciting happenings with Tomboy's best friend on the web.

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.15.1 Release Brings New Online Note Synchronization Preview

2009-05-27T07:28:00.000-07:00

"Red Westie", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

On Monday we released Tomboy 0.15.1, the latest development release on the road to 1.0. It features a lot of the same fixes from 0.14.2, and some other improvements:

Preview of new Web Synchronization add-in
Work around problems on Windows caused by having multiple GTK+ applications modify PATH
Search for phrases by surrounding them with quotes, save the width of the Notebook pane, and other improvements to the search UI
Better HIG compliance in synchronization UIs
All the same fixes from 0.14.2
And much more!

I'd like to talk to you a little bit about this "Web Synchronization" add-in. From a feature perspective, the biggest problem with Tomboy has been how difficult it is to synchronize your notes between multiple computers, and to share your notes with your friends and colleagues. We have note synchronization but it's hard to set up unless you have your own server. You can share notes with Giver, but that has its limitations as well. And how do you view your notes when you're on a device without a Tomboy notes client?

A long time ago I blogged about how great a free "Tomboy Online" web service would be as a fix for these issues, but I never had the time to follow up on it. Until now.

Snowy, Your Tomboy Notes Online

Meet Snowy. Snowy is a project started by Brad Taylor to bring your Tomboy notes online. It's "Tomboy's best friend on the web", as Brad says. Here is what you can expect from Snowy in the coming weeks and months:

"Tomboy Online" - a free hosted service (running Snowy), where anybody can create an account for securely synchronizing their notes.
Fine-grained privacy settings to let you mark your notes as public, private, or shared with specific friends.
Edit your notes directly in your browser!

Editing notes in Snowy

Brad started Snowy in his spare time, and recently our team at Novell had a Hackweek at our disposal. So last week, Brad and I decided to really get this project off the ground. It is still an extremely new project, but we feel it's far enough along to solicit feedback and contributions from the community. Some basic facts about the project:

Snowy is AGPL-licensed. I firmly believe that our community needs to step up and start offering competitive AGPL web services. If we want to stay relevant, that is!
Snowy is developed in Python on the Django web framework. Most people who expressed an interest in working on this were most familiar with Python for web apps.
Snowy is developed in GNOME git. If you watch the commits list, you've no doubt seen the recent activity.
Snowy is easy to deploy on your personal server. If you don't want to trust Tomboy Online with your notes, you can still use Snowy to give yourself web access to your notes, or just to provide a more convenient way to synchronize.

Snowy is brand new! I hope in the screenshots you see the potential, but I'm sure you also see how much room there is for improvement.

What works:

Tomboy<->Snowy note synchronization
Online note-viewing
User registration
Database administration and other fancy Django stuff

Logging in to Snowy

Where we need help:

Authentication review, OAuth
HTML/CSS/JS to prettify everything
Design and implement all that cool note-sharing stuff
Little features like copying a friend's note into your collection, or downloading/emailing/printing any note straight from your browser
Security audit
Your ideas!

You may be wondering how Snowy and Tomboy communicate for synchronization. I will talk about this more in a future post, but we have designed a REST API for web synchronization. This API is easy to consume from the client end, and easy to implement on the server end. This means we should have no trouble adding sync capabilities to Tomdroid and other Tomboy note clients. It also means that if you don't like Snowy, you can create your own web service that implements the same API, and still use the same web synchronization add-in included in Tomboy.

We still have a lot of work to do to make synchronizing and sharing your Tomboy notes effortless and fun! Outside of Snowy, here are some things we'd like help working on:

Automatic background synchronization in Tomboy
Web synchronization support in Tomdroid
More features in the web synchronization add-in, like:
- One click to get from your Tomboy note to its Snowy page
- Control your sharing preferences for a note without opening your browser
- Easy access to friends' notes

By the way, if you plan on using Tomboy 0.14.x for a long time, you'll be able to use the Web Synchronization add-in, too! When we launch Tomboy Online, downloads will be available for 0.14.x users on all platforms.

Stay tuned for more updates, and a demo server for everybody to play with!

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.14.2 Released - 25% Faster Start-Up!

2009-05-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

"Running Shep", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Last week we released Tomboy 0.14.2, a new stable release with a lot of fixes cherry-picked from the development branch. We remedied a couple of crashes, squashed some weird errors and behavior, and we even improved memory usage and start-up performance. Here are the highlights:

Start Tomboy in 25% less time
Fix random start-up crash on distros like Ubuntu 9.04
Recognize presence of FUSE when built into kernel (not as module)
Fix error when opening New Note Template on Ubuntu 9.04
Stop seeing "this/that/other" as a file link (whoops!)
Don't crash when opening invalid or improperly-formatted notes
Better error-reporting on Windows
Updated cross-platform documentation
Updated translations

This start-up performance fix was also in 0.15.0, but I didn't realize how significant it was until after I'd already announced it. We found that this simple fix saved us around 25% on Tomboy start-up. On my system, start-up time was cut from 4 seconds to 3 seconds (these are warm starts, I did not have time to test cold starts).

These traces were created using Ruben's patch and Federico's graphing tool. You can click them to see the full graphs (note that apps run slower with tracing turned on). Compare the numbers for setting up our AddinManager in 0.14.1...

...versus the new numbers for 0.14.2...

The funny thing is, all I did was change a couple of lines in our Mono.Addins initialization code to reflect the latest recommendations of the maintainer.

This "free" boost isn't even part of the low-hanging fruit I keep talking about when it comes to Tomboy performance optimizations. I'm working on another fix that should cut down on memory consumption, too, and you should expect performance improvements in every release this cycle. If you would like to help us set up an automated way to track memory usage and start-up time in Tomboy, that would be an awesome contribution. :-)

Following the GNOME schedule, our next development release, Tomboy 0.15.1, is scheduled for May 25. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements!

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.15.0 Development Release Brings New Features and Fixes, Even For 0.14.x Users!

2009-05-06T07:03:00.001-07:00

I'm very pleased to announce Tomboy 0.15.0, our first development release on the road to Tomboy 1.0. A few of the improvements in 0.15.0 are:

New NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in supports editing of your note files in other programs (think Dropbox).
The first of many improvements to start-up time, by not rebuilding the add-in registry every time Tomboy starts. This also fixes start-up bugs on a few distributions, including Windows.
Random start-up crash in GConf fixed.
Many improvements to the printing add-in.
Better note and URL auto-linking.
Console output on Windows command prompts now works correctly, for better error reporting.

See our NEWS file for information on some usability improvements, better GMime support, Mono.Addins upgrade on Windows, and more.

Please visit our download page for source tarballs, Windows installers, and Mac disk images. Note that the Windows installer is still a work-in-progress, and for now you should always uninstall the previous version of Tomboy before installing a new one.

NoteDirectoryWatcher Add-in Available for 0.14.x Users on Linux, Windows, and Mac!

NoteDirectoryWatcher in Action

For years, users in various situations have tried setting up ad-hoc note synchronization solutions by syncing their ~/.tomboy directory between computers. This has never been supported, and because Tomboy would not notice outside changes to note files while it was running, could easily lead to data loss and confusion. Thanks to Mike Fletcher, we are one step closer to supporting this group of users. With this add-in enabled, if another process modifies your note files, Tomboy will notice the change and update appropriately (after a short delay).

The great thing about add-ins is that we can make this feature available for download to all of our 0.14.x users. Source is in git, but you can download this cross-platform binary, drop it in ~/.tomboy/addins/ , enable it in your preferences and try it out! As this is our first release of this feature, bugs are expected, so please report any problems you experience. :-)

Please remember that sharing your ~/.tomboy is still not recommended, because it contains a bunch of add-in metadata that should not be shared unless you have identical set-ups on each system. In an upcoming version of Tomboy, we will be getting rid of ~/.tomboy and following the FreeDesktop XDG specification, so note data and add-in configuration will be stored separately. If you care about our migration from ~/.tomboy to XDG directories, please read my proposal on the bug and leave your comments.

Upcoming Releases

"Droplet", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Some of the fixes in 0.15.0 will be coming to our next 0.14.x maintenance release: 0.14.2. Expect news about this in a few days.

Our next development release, 0.15.1, should include some new features in note synchronization, better Windows support when multiple GTK+ apps are installed, and the typical assortment of fixes and improvements. We are planning to have a bug day soon where we'll milestone a lot of our outstanding bugs. I'll let you know when we have a date. :-)

Lastly, after the last Tomboy planning meeting, we developed a roadmap for our next stable release, which, pending a few specific improvements, will be versioned 1.0. I'll be writing more about this in the future, but for now, feel free to check it out, and if you are interested in helping, toss your name in there!

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy Notes on Android: Olivier Bilodeau Releases Tomdroid 0.1.0

2009-04-21T09:03:00.001-07:00

During the fall, Olivier showed up on tomboy-list announcing a school project he would be working on: Tomdroid, a Tomboy note reader (and eventually editor) for the Android mobile platform that drives the wonderful G1 phone. After a few months of development, the first "baby-eating" release is available for testing. Olivier mentions a number of nasty little bugs in this first release, but he is already working on fixing them, and people are already starting to poke around with the code and find ways to help.

Tomdroid: Tomboy Notes on Android

Obviously, having access to your Tomboy notes on your mobile phone is a huge win. Even when they are read-only, you can:

Access your grocery list without having to call your wife (which only proves that you weren't listening in the first place)
Quickly access your notes about obscure system configurations when visiting a client site, instead of googling (ever worked for a client who stood over you shoulder, and wasn't too impressed by your frequent googling?)
For me, I often forget to add contacts and calendar events until I am repeatedly burned, but it's pretty common to have that info floating around in my Tomboy notes.
And the number one win: you can have the schizophrenic dude next to you on the bus review the draft of your latest blog post (this keeps him busy, making it less likely he will stab you in the face)

See? Tomdroid just saved your life.

As a G1 owner, I'm extremely excited about this project. I downloaded the Android SDK just so I could start playing around with the code. Olivier has communicated extensively with us on tomboy-list and in #tomboy, and one of the really nice things he's done is initial work on an XML schema for the Tomboy note format. This will be extremely useful to maintain, as it is inevitable that Tomboy notes will being to be read and edited via interesting new clients.

If you're looking for a fun (because it's Tomboy-related) and hip (because it's mobile) project to work on, I recommend spending some time with Tomdroid. New projects are always fun, for example you could work on tighter integration with phone features (like phone numbers, contacts, calendar, and web), or you can start playing with note editing (maybe a nerdy markdown editor would be a good fit?).

Ideas for getting your notes onto your G1:

Manually copy ~/.tomboy/*.note to your G1 periodically. Verdict: Lame
Write Tomboy add-in that hooks into HAL, notices when a G1 is connected, offers to push notes to phone (could be a button that appears in the note toolbar, a libnotify bubble, or even a totally automatic process). Verdict: Instant win, minus the requirement to plug in your phone.
Implement Tomboy online service, and corresponding sync functionality in Tomdroid. Verdict: Epic win, may not be ready for a few months.

Pushing your notes to the G1

Those are great ideas. While drafting this post last night I really liked the second one, so here you can download my quick hack job that Gets It Done. Drop Tomdroid.dll into ~/.tomboy/addins, or `make && make install`. Many thanks to James Wilcox for his incredible vision and Aaron Bockover for all the Banshee code I stole to make interacting with HAL devices brain-dead simple. Right now you just get an item in the Tools menu in the note window, but clearly there are better things that could be done. Patches welcome, I'll dump this into git as soon as I get rid of the excess Banshee code I brought in.

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.14.1, the future, and a word about Gnote

2009-04-20T10:35:00.001-07:00

Tomboy 0.14.1 Stable Release for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

I'm very proud to announce Tomboy 0.14.1, which represents the beginning of our stable support for Tomboy on all major desktop platforms. Here are some of the major changes since the 0.12.x stable versions:

Tomboy is now fully supported on Windows and Mac OS X
Printing has been rewritten using the Gtk.Print API, fixing many bugs
25% reduction in memory usage and slightly faster startup
Significant memory savings with very large note collections
Improvements to HTML Export add-in
Improvements in note and URL linking
Many fixes to note synchronization and D-Bus API
Process now named "tomboy", not "Tomboy"
No longer writes to disk every 40 seconds

Searching Notes in Windows

All in all this has been a pretty great cycle for Tomboy. Windows support has been the most-requested Tomboy feature for awhile, and in fact some of my first work on Tomboy three years ago was to make it work at my old Windows-only job. The Windows version has generated interest from a whole new set of users, but most importantly to me, it has gained us several new contributors! Benjamin Podszun, for example, rewrote printing to remove our dependence on the obsolete libgnomeprint, then went on to fix several other bugs and to triage the rest. Since I am not generally a Windows user, it is important to be able to depend on contributors from that world to keep an eye on things.

The Mac port is a little less mature, and we will probably need to get more involved in in the GTK+ implementation on that platform to ensure solid support. Nevertheless, though there are quirks, we are happy to support Tomboy on Mac OS X, too.

Tomboy in your dock (click for full-screen shot)

If you are a GNOME Do user, you may currently be enjoying the wonderful Tomboy plugin, which provides instant access to your notes, and convenient creation of new notes.

Instant note access with GNOME Do

With Tomboy 0.14.1 we have striven to create a solid base on which to build the future of Tomboy. Cross-platform support has given us new contributors and a cleaner code base. We have gotten rid of most of our use of obsolete GNOME APIs. We are off to a great start on profiling and making performance enhancements. Note synchronization is stable on all platforms. Now is the time to make Tomboy really shine.

Looking Forward

For Tomboy 0.16.0, we have a few more fun things planned. The community is having the planning meeting tomorrow, so we'll have our official roadmap soon, but some features I'm currently excited to work on are:

Automatic note synchronization between Tomboy(s), G1, iPhone, and the web.
Continued improvements to memory usage and overall performance, especially on startup (lots of low-hanging fruit here).
Figuring out how best to integrate with gnome-shell, which currently has no specific plans for applet support (which means it's a great time for us to figure out how to make applets awesome in GNOME 3.0!).

The great thing is that most of this work is easy to do in parallel, so now is a wonderful time to join in the hacking.

An old Tomboy Online mockup, stay tuned for news!

A Note about Gnote

Some people have started asking about Gnote, Hubert Figuiere's line-for-line port of Tomboy to C++. Our stance on Gnote is that it is counterproductive to maintain identical software in two languages. It will be harmful to the community, especially as these two apps inevitably diverge. It will result in duplication of effort, duplication of bugs, and a lot of wasted time for those who are trying to add value to the user experience.

Tomboy is not going away, and it will continue to be developed on the extremely productive Mono/GTK# language platform. Anyone thinking about distributing Gnote should consider the impact on users and their data. When we develop, we should always be asking ourselves, "is this adding value for our users?"

Tomboy has a vibrant community, a happy relationship with GNOME, and an exciting future. If you'd like to help us out come to tomorrow's planning meeting, join us on our mailing list, or just start hacking!

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.13.5 Brings a Better Windows Installation Experience

2009-02-16T23:55:00.000-08:00

Today I released Tomboy 0.13.5. It has a bunch of nice fixes, including updates to Benjamin Podszun's Gtk.Print rewrite of Tomboy's printing add-in (making printing available on all platforms). For Windows users, this is the first time that you should be able to easily install gtk-sharp and Tomboy without having to muck around with your system. But we wouldn't want it to be too easy, so there are some caveats.

From http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Installing/Windows :

Instructions for installing a Tomboy Windows release

Upgrading from Tomboy 0.13.4 or earlier

Uninstall Tomboy.
Uninstall any existing versions of gtk-sharp you may have installed.
Continue with Installation instructions.

Installation

Install Novell's gtk-sharp 2.12.8 or newer.
Restart.
Run Tomboy installer 0.13.5 or newer.
Enjoy!

Importing notes from Linux (optional)

On your Linux box, copy all of the *.note files out of ~/.tomboy .
On your Windows box, quit Tomboy.
On your Windows box, copy all the *.note files from Linux into %APPDATA%\tomboy .

Please please please don't hesitate to file bugs for any problems you experience.

Thanks so much to Mike Kestner for working his ass off (on his own time) updating the gtk-sharp installers, making them easier to develop and build, and fixing the issues reported by Tomboy users. Apps like Tomboy, Banshee, and GNOME Do would simply not exist without all of his hard work.

Tomboy 0.13.3, Tomboy 0.12.2, Tasque 0.1.8, and Giver!

2009-01-26T07:25:00.000-08:00

There have been some very important Tomboy and Tasque releases in the past month or so that I have neglected to share. I think it's true that Twitter removes a lot of the motivation to blog. Here are the takeaway points:

Tomboy 0.12.2, an update to the stable series, fixes a nasty bug that could cause notes to be mistakenly deleted during synchronization. Versions of Tomboy affected by this bug are: 0.12.0, 0.12.1, 0.13.0, 0.13.1. If you are using any of these versions, and you like to use sync (or set note contents via the dbus interface), please upgrade now! Note that this was fixed in the unstable series in Tomboy 0.13.2.
Yesterday I finally made new Windows/Mac builds. You can get binaries for Tomboy 0.13.3 at our download page.
Last month we released Tasque 0.1.8. It fixes problems communicating with RememberTheMilk.com and a kabillion other bugs. Windows and Mac binaries are available at the download page.
Ankit Jain has started reviving Giver development. For one thing, he has Windows builds available for download (an obviously useful feature for a file sharing tool).
I've discovered the best theme for openSUSE: Shiki Colors with the Shiki-Wise color scheme and the GNOME-Colors icon set.

Shiki-Colors Theme (click for larger version)

So what else is going on? Tomboy 0.13.3 features some fixes that cut down my memory usage by 25% (with ~200 notes). It should also speed up start-up time if you have a big note collection. One user with 621 notes reported a change from 11 seconds to 4 seconds when he upgraded! The fixes were almost all related to extra work done on a per-note basis, so the memory and performance wins are most significant on these large note collections.

That being said, there is a lot more work to do on memory and performance. Ruben Vermeersch blogged about adapting Federico's timeline tracing tools to chart Tomboy start-up performance. This is going to be extremely helpful in figuring out where we're slowing things down. And as for memory usage, I have only fixed the low-hanging fruit; there are more wins to be had! If this is an area of computer science that you find fun, all help is welcome. :-)

Tomboy Startup (click for full-size graph)

My day job of working on the Mono Accessibility team has kept me pretty busy, and it's been hard lately to find time to work on Tomboy and Tasque. Sure, my team understands when I take a few hours every couple of weeks to prepare a Tomboy release, but that doesn't provide enough time for big feature work or difficult bug fixes. For example, we knew about the problems with Tasque and RememberTheMilk.com for a month before we were able to fix it and get a release out. Fortunately, Novell has its cool "ITO" (Innovation Time On) program. I accumulate 4 hours of ITO every week; that's basically the equivalent of 10% time! As I used up all of my regular time off with hospital visits last year, I scheduled four days of ITO during the week of Christmas. I was able to use that time to review a ton of outstanding patches for Tasque, fix the bugs in the RTM and SQLite backends, and make it easy to build on Windows and Mac OS X. This is also when I did all of the memory fixes for Tomboy. So a big thanks to Novell for supporting me in this work.

Lastly, I'm really excited about Ankit Jain's work on Giver. I never worked on Giver, unless you count the moral support I lent during that first Hackweek. :-) But I am amazed at how many people are asking for updates, Windows and Mac versions, etc. As somebody who works from home, Giver isn't that useful to me, but apparently it is very popular and more people are learning about it every day. With Ankit's help, this project may not be so dead after all. You can help him out by testing his Windows builds, trying latest SVN, filing issues, and hanging out in #giver on GIMPNet.

Mono Accessibility 0.9 Released!

2008-11-26T05:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Brad announced the first release of the Mono Accessibility team's work, which started a little less than a year ago. It's pretty exciting for us to put out this developer preview release; I'm interested to see what people make of it.

The goal of the first phase of our project, which will culminate in a 1.0 release early next year, is to make Winforms applications accessible in Linux with traditional at-spi tools like Orca and Accerciser. In 0.9, we offer support for most Winforms controls (Button, Label, ComboBox, ToolStrip, WebBrowser, etc). In 1.0, we will be rounding out this support to include the remaining controls (DataGridView, TreeView, custom controls, etc), in addition to fixing bugs and improving stability.

It may not sound that exciting to enable accessibility for Winforms apps. After all, you probably aren't using very many on your GNOME desktop today. However, there certainly are some cool open source apps out there (Paint.NET, NClass, etc). And the main benefit will be for overall Linux adoption. There are many businesses, large and small, schools, governments, non-profits, etc...that are stuck on Windows because they have custom applications written using APIs like Winforms. One goal of the Mono project is to provide a migration path for these potential Linux users. Accessibility support is often a requirement, so by making these custom Winforms applications fully accessible in Linux, we are enabling Linux adoption scenarios that would have been too expensive before (rewriting your internal tools is not cheap or easy).

If you are not familiar with our project, let me briefly explain what it is we are doing:

We are implementing Microsoft's "User Interface Automation" (UIA) specification on Linux. During the first phase of our project, we are focusing on the "provider side" of this specification, which offers interfaces that are implemented by the accessibility/automation "provider" for a given control. This is similar to implementing ATK interfaces for a GTK+ widget, if you are familiar with that. We have been writing UIA providers for all of the Winforms controls.

The other half of our work this phase has been creating a bridge from UIA to ATK. This bridge translates between UIA interfaces and ATK roles/states/etc. This is the piece that makes a Winforms application look like a GTK+ app (or any other app written in a toolkit that exposes a11y info over at-spi) in a tool like Orca.

It's pretty cool the way this fits together. Next year, after 1.0 is released, we'll begin the second phase of our project. It includes two major efforts:

First, we will be making Moonlight accessible in the same way we have made Winforms applications accessible. We will create UIA providers for Moonlight controls, and they will automatically gain accessibility via the exiting UIA<->ATK bridge.

Second, we will implement the "client side" of the UIA specification. This is a set of interfaces designed to allow an accessibility tool (think Orca) to interact with accessible applications. It is similar to the at-spi interfaces, and we will in fact be implementing it as another bridge, this time translating "client" UIA calls into equivalent at-spi calls. The benefit here is that as Windows developers create accessibility and automation tools using the UIA interfaces, they will be portable to Linux (and vice versa).

Accessibility is a great feature for users and potential customers. Automation support is invaluable to testers, software QA, and even users who just want to streamline common tasks. With the release of Mono Accessibility 0.9, we are growing the landscape of accessible applications. We look forward to your feedback (and bug reports)!

Got a G1, Yay Linux!

2008-10-27T04:22:00.000-07:00

So I caved and got a G1. I may write an in-depth review after I've had it longer, or I may not, but here are the highlights:

Rock

I can has source!
No need to print from Google Maps when I leave the house.
Better reception in my house with T-Mobile than I had with AT&T.
ConnectBot SSH client works great with my screen+irssi setup.
Used ShopSavvy at Sports Authority yesterday to convince Ellery it was worth getting her a shiny new pair of rollerblades. Hold phone up to barcode, see local and online price comparisons.
Used Shazam to find out what's playing on the radio. Hold phone up to speaker, wait a few seconds, prompted with all the info you could desire, including a link to download via phone at Amazon MP3 store.
Unlock screen shows when my alarm is set to go off.
Keyboard surprisingly comfortable to use.
Camera image quality decent.
Easier than I thought to patch HAL (or just edit .is_audio_player) so that G1 Just Works in Banshee:

Click for larger view, obligatory F-Spot Awesomeness

Suck

My thumbs are a bit fat to use on the touch screen (I have somewhat-deformed wide thumbs). So, no one-handed use.
No visual voice mail.
When interacting with a phone service, like voicemail, and you are prompted to enter digits, I go into freak-out mode, because I look at the screen and it is blank, so I have to unlock, then find the dialer so I can hit a number, which can be kind of tricky depending on how the call started. I can probably flip out the keyboard and use that, but as I said, I'm in a panic.
Not sure how to carry this thing. It comes with a sleeve/pouch/thingy, and for now I put it in there and then in my pocket, but now it takes two hands and an extra few seconds to answer my phone. What do people do? I'm used to having a crappy phone that can live in the same pocket as keys and other dangerous items!
Camera slow, worthless in low-light situations.

Really looking forward to Tomdroid!

Tomboy Planning Meeting Tomorrow

2008-10-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

In case anybody's interested, we're having our planning meeting for this development cycle in #tomboy tomorrow...

Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 1930 UTC
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=23&year=2008&hour=12&min=30&sec=0&p1=224

That's 12:30 PM PDT, 8:30 PM BST, etc etc.

Everybody is welcome!  We've started a wiki page to gather ideas before
holding the meeting, so check it out here, and add your name if you're
attending, along with any ideas you might have:

http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/DevMeetingZeroPointFourteen

Topics to dicuss:
* Features for this cycle
* Cross-platform updates
* Plans for bug/patch days to clean up bugzilla

My personal goals for this cycle:
* Solid Windows binaries with every 0.13.x release
* Experimental Mac binaries with every 0.13.x release
* Power through bugzilla, with a major focus on memory/performance
issues and other long-standing embarrassing bugs (like note renaming
problems).
* Better community management on my part, frequent bug/patch days, not
letting patches rot in bugzilla.  Basically, enabling our awesome
contributors instead of frustrating them!

Tomboy Preview for Windows and Mac

2008-10-20T02:55:00.000-07:00

Please To Try

At the end of August, I told you about my little project to bring Tomboy to Windows users. Well, last week I finally merged that code into trunk. And then Friday, the excellent Mono team released a Mono 2.0 installer for OS X, and I found that my Windows build of Tomboy finally worked pretty well on the Mac, too. Of course, some platform integration there would be nice...

Click for full-screen shots. Notice that I added a menu for tracking open note windows, and attached the classic recent notes menu to the dock icon. This is not the most elegant solution, but I wanted Mac users to play around with it and share their own opinions. I'm very open to changes here. :-)

I didn't have any plans this weekend, so I present to you "preview builds" of Tomboy 0.13.0 for Windows and Mac OS X. I'm distributing them with the disclaimer that they are not widely tested, though in my own testing I have found no bugs that would make me worry about loss of data. Just consider yourself warned, and please back up your notes.

If you find any bugs, or have ideas for better platform integration, or find issues with install, please please PLEASE file bugs!

Click to file a bug for Tomboy on Windows!

Click to file a bug for Tomboy on Mac OS X!

Mac Instructions

Install Mono 2.0 for Mac OS X.
Download and mount the Tomboy disk image.
Drag Tomboy to Applications, run!
(optional) Copy your notes to ~/.config/tomboy

Mac Known Issues

Shortcut keys all use Control instead of Command.
The Bugzilla add-in doesn't work.
In the note window toolbar, notebook names can be ellipsized oddly.
Hand cursor doesn't show when hovering over links, but they're still clickable.
No keybindings support.
No i18n support.

Windows Instructions

Install Medsphere's GTK# SDK installer (the runtime installer should work, but in my testing it did not install a particular registry key needed for Tomboy to recognize its presence).
If you are running Windows Vista, you may need to follow additional instructions to work around an installer bug.
Restart your computer.
Download the Tomboy installer.
Double-click to install!
(optional) Copy your notes to %appdata%\tomboy

Windows Known Issues

Menu rendering issues.
Two console windows appear briefly when Tomboy starts (fixed in Mono.Addins SVN).
No drag and drop from other apps into Tomboy (appears to be unimplemented in GTK+ for Windows).
If you try to run Tomboy twice, it should show the Search window instead of launching again, but sometimes it will not show the Search window until you have interacted with Tomboy in some other way (by hovering over a window or clicking the tray icon, for example).
No i18n support.

Big Thanks

This was actually a pretty easy job, thanks to these folks:

Eoin Hennessey, who pioneered a lot of this work in his banshee-osx git branch, which he and Aaron are merging into Banshee trunk this week. Among other things, he created Mono bindings for Imendio's excellent ige-mac-integration library, and scripts for building app bundles.
Andrew Jorgensen, Thomas Wiest, Marc Christensen, and Geoff Norton of the Mono team. These guys have been rocking hard on Mono's Mac story, and it shows. Thanks especially for getting me a build of MonoDevelop in time for my Saturday hack fest!
Aaron Bockover, who keeps threatening to do a Mac release before me.
Brad Taylor and his old Medsphere cronies, who whipped gtk-sharp on Windows into shape.
All GTK+ developers and porters, especially those at Imendio!
The entire Tomboy community, especially Dmitry Kostenko, Doug Johnston, and Samuel Vandamme for their patches to help make Tomboy on Windows a reality. You guys are awesome!

Touching Banshee, Porting Tasque

2008-09-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

Toward a more clickable Banshee

I've written on a patch to make the artist and album text in the Banshee track info display interactive. 95% of the time I am listening to my library on shuffle, and sometimes I hear a song and decide I want to hear more from that artist or album. Well, with my patch, you can click on either to perform a search on your library.

You can also right-click and add the album or all tracks by the artist right to the play queue, which is my favorite Banshee trick now. Have you ever used the Banshee Play Queue? It's really cool...if you're listening on shuffle and you add a bunch of stuff to the play queue, it will play those items in order and then go back to shuffling through your library (or whatever you were listening to before you shoved stuff into the queue).

Click to see low-quality demo on YouTube.

So why is this still just a patch and not in Banshee SVN? Well, really, it's kind of ugly, don't you think? Here's this pretty Banshee UI with some gross hyperlink-looking text in the middle of it. What do you folks think I should do?

Use a different color, like "Selected"?

Only change the text color on hover?

Both?

The only thing I like right now about having it colored all the time is that it makes the feature more discoverable. But is it worth it? Any thoughts on the appearance or behavior of this feature? If you build Banshee from SVN, give it a try and see what you think!

I'm busy lately so if somebody else wants to mess with this bug, be my guest. It won't get into SVN until after Banshee 1.4 is released, anyway. ;-)

Tasque Goes Cross-Platform

I couldn't sleep Thursday night, so I yanked some of my code from tomboy-portable2 and got Tasque going on Windows. Then I decided Tasque is simple enough to play with that I'd better get it going on Mac OS X, too. This weekend I even put together I nice little disk image for Mac users. Big thanks to Eoin Hennessy for creating Mono bindings to Immendio's Mac/GTK+ integration library. The next Tasque release will be equally supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac, so feel free to start filing bugs.

Really this is just an excuse to try stuff out for Tomboy.

Tomboy 0.12.0 Released

2008-09-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I unleashed the latest stable Tomboy release. This has been a less active cycle than usual, but in 0.12.0 you can experience the wonder of:

New Tasque add-in

Add "New notebook..." menu item to Notebook toolbar button

Many fixes to note synchronization

Improvements to Bugzilla and HTML Export add-ins

Tray icon ported to Gtk.StatusIcon

Support for --debug, --trace, and --profile when running Tomboy

The following contributors were especially helpful in making Tomboy 0.12.0 happen: Boyd Timothy, Alex Graveley, Alexey Nedilko, John Anderson, John Carr, Jon Lund Steffensen, Łukasz Jernaś, Romain Tartiere, Sebastian Dröge, Stefan Cosma, and Stefan Schweizer. A big thank you to them, and to our hard-working translators, too!

The lack of activity during the 0.11.x cycle has disturbed me (especially because it's mostly my fault!), and I've written to our mailing list about how I think we can do better this cycle. One easy way you can help is by voting for your "favorite" Tomboy bugs.

I'll write more about plans for our next stable release after we have our dev meeting, but you can be sure that I haven't forgotten our proprietary compatriots. I'll be merging the tomboy-portable2 branch into trunk Real Soon Now.

Hack Week III: Tomboy Joins The Dark Side

2008-08-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

Tomboy on Windows Where It Belongs

As you all know, my job here at Novell is to migrate all worthwhile desktop Linux applications off of that ridiculous platform and onto Windows so that we can do away with this nasty open source stuff. Unfortunately I haven't yet gotten the paper work to close up my code for the latest victim of this effort, so for now dirty open source hippies can get it here:

http://svn.gnome.org/svn/tomboy/branches/tomboy-portable2/

Somebody even impersonated me and posted instructions and current limitations on our mailing list (soon to be replaced with a 1-900 number offering support for a reasonable fee).

And here's an image of what it looks like. Windows has a really awesome feature where you can press your "Print Screen" button, and then you dig around in the menus to find the excellent Microsoft Paint application, at which point you recall that you can produce a "screen shot" by "pasting". Then you save in one of a myriad of excellent file formats, and you have an image of what you were doing on your computer! You can then share it with your friends like so:

What do you think? Excited to end the Linux charade and switch to a solid and hip platform like Vista? Woo!

I feel very silly today.

Utah Open Source Conference

I was fortunate enough to get to join my friends and coworkers in Provo for this Hack Week. I normally work from my home office, so I'm having a blast seeing everybody. Today we're working at Salt Lake Community College as part of the Utah Open Source Conference. I'm actually talking with my buddy Brian Merrell about the efforts of the Mono a11y team (you know, my actual job). It should be fun, we've got some neat slides and we are both cool people so I don't really see what could go wrong. The UTOSC team has done a ridiculously awesome job setting up this conference, so I'm really excited to see everything come to fruition. We had a sweet speaker dinner last night but moron that I am I forgot my camera so you just have to take my word for it!

This Tomboy stuff still needs a bit of work so off I go. Hopefully having Tomboy run on more platforms will help us attract more users and developers. I know it's a popular request so I'm pretty serious about getting it supported in trunk. Later guys!

Minor releases: Tomboy 0.11.2 and Tasque 0.1.7

2008-08-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody! Today I made two minor software releases:

Tomboy 0.11.2 features build fixes, a fixed crasher or two, and improved HTML Export functionality.

Tasque 0.1.7 makes translations actually work, and adds cool tooltips to tasks that show associated notes.

Due to time constraints, these releases do not have any silly names attached to them. I'll make up for this next time. ;-)

Tomboy 0.11.1 Released

2008-08-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

I finally got some time this weekend to take care of some irritating Tomboy bugs, so today I present to you Tomboy 0.11.1, "A PhD in Horribleness":

New tray icon code using GtkStatusIcon (kill libegg, #349265, Stefan Cosma).
Fix crashers: #544406, #460642, #544996, #523035
Fix bugzilla addin to accept bug IDs of one or more digits (#533024).
Fix behavior when start note is recreated (#508982, Jon Lund Steffensen)
Include .mdb files during install. Allow --debug, --trace, and --profile options when running Tomboy.
Translation updates: ar, bg, ca, de, es, et, fr, gl, he, nb, nl, oc, pt_BR, sk, sv, th, vi, zh_CN

Major things left to do before 0.12.0 is released: Finish port to GtkPrint, fix major outstanding bugs in synchronization, and, if there's time, do some work on startup performance. All help is welcome, especially on the GtkPrint stuff! :-)

GHOP Awards Ceremony

2008-07-14T18:14:00.001-07:00

I just finished a great weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area, thanks largely to Google and their Highly-Open Participation Contest (GHOP). As you may already know, Google worked with several open source projects to run a contest for high school-aged students to complete tasks ranging from translation and documentation to coding and other bug fixes. Vincent Untz, Andre Klapper, and Behdad Esfahbod, Lucas Rocha, and Christian Kellner ran things from the GNOME end, and did a great job. Unfortunately the awards ceremony for GHOP grand prize winners was scheduled for this past Friday, and they were busy at GUADEC. Since I had been involved in GHOP as a mentor, I volunteered to represent GNOME at the ceremony. Later, I found out that the Mono project was unable to send a representative as well. Their side was largely administered by Miguel de Icaza and Michael Hutchinson, and Michael asked me to represent them since I was already going to be there. So although I was probably the least-involved mentor at the ceremony, I was also the only one with two students. :-P

GNOME's Grand Prize Winner: Patrick Hulin

Patrick is a junior at Hopkins School in New Haven, CT. He finished several tasks, often swooping in to get the job done after another student bailed. He submitted fixes to Totem and ported baobab from gnome-vfs to gio, in addition to documentation and GTK+ performance tasks. I had a great time meeting him and his parents on Friday. I'm always encouraged to meet teenagers who actually *enjoy* math, and find opportunities to learn about software development. Patrick is going to be a counselor at a local computer camp this summer, brainwashing^W teaching teens the ways of code and circuit. We had a blast in the lobbies at each Google building, watching on a screen as the world's search queries scrolled by.

Mono's Grand Prize Winner: Dan Abramov

Dan is from St. Petersburg, Russia, and came to the ceremony with his mother (who had an awesome camera, I hope I get to see some of her photos from the trip). He's a largely self-taught 16 year old dynamo. He made some nice contributions to Mono, including Gendarme analysis rules and MonoDevelop addins and documentation. One of my favorite moments of this trip is when I was asking Dan about his future plans, did he intend to go to university in Russia, pursue Computer Science, etc. He told me that although he felt confident programming in managed languages like C#, he wanted to understand more about the low-level details. He asked me if I had read Joel Spolsky's article on "leaky abstractions", and described how sometimes .NET/Mono programming could be like that. I could only laugh with joy that this guy was already reading (and understanding) Joel.

I think it's pretty clear that these students have a huge head-start in computer science. Everybody was interested and excited about open source software. I got a lot of questions about what it's like to work on open source software all day at Novell. Being there, it really felt like I was looking at the next generation of open source leaders. I can only hope they stick with it instead of going down the boring path of being a doctor or a lawyer or something. ;-)

Thank you Google for encouraging these kids, and providing incentives like GHOP and Summer of Code to keep them in our world.

The Visit

It was pretty cool to meet the mentor representatives from other open source projects, some of whom were actually Google employees. Friday was a busy day, what with touring the Google campus, having the actual award ceremony, being interviewed for YouTube (eep), and stuffing my face. We saw presentations about App Engine (by Guido van Rossum), Android (Romain Guy), Google infrastructure (Jeff Dean), and testing at Google (Bharat Mediratta and Mike Bland).

My favorite talk by far was the testing one. Bharat and Mike are among the better pair presenters I've seen, so it was a joy just to watch them. But the subject matter is dear to my heart. At my last company I was often frustrated with how difficult it was to proliferate best practices (specifically TDD) even within a single team. I was fascinated to hear how these guys just decided to fix the testing problem at Google, guerrilla-style. They introduced the awesome Testing on the Toilet newsletter, devised testing training and certification programs for projects and employees, and introduced "test mercenaries" to spread skills where needed by hopping from project to project, staying only a few months with each. Ingraining these practices in a company's culture is a singularly difficult problem. Their example is inspiring, though of course it requires constant ongoing work, and it might be difficult to convince any company to invest such significant resources into a never-ending program like that. I've been following the Testing on the Toilet blog for awhile, but meeting these guys was truly invigorating. I wish there had been time to chat them up afterwards!

The Rest

Over the weekend, Ellery and I visited our old stomping grounds at San Francisco State University, Stonestown Borders, and West Portal. We had a fun dinner with Liz and Bernat at Mozzarella Di Bufala. It was nice; I really do miss my friends sometimes. :-) Later we visited some family in the East Bay.

The rest of my photos can be seen on my picasaweb. By the way, Lazyweb, do you know how to tag all photos in an album at once?

Recent Hacks: irc2wiki.pl and xchat-nick-pidgin-status.py

2008-06-25T09:08:00.001-07:00

The Mono a11y team has weekly iteration meetings in IRC, and we post the logs to the Mono wiki. Our version of MediaWiki doesn't automatically prettify IRC logs, so for awhile I was using Jamie Zawinski's irc2html.pl to create HTML tables. Today I hacked it up to produce MediaWiki tables instead. I call it irc2wiki.pl. Fixes welcome (or better suggestions).

Also, I now live on IRC. Some people prefer to get me through IM, so I always have Pidgin running, but my online presence is mostly reflected in my IRC nick. I'm forgetful, so I kept noticing that I was "available" in Pidgin even though my IRC nick was "sandy|lunch", or that when I changed my nick from "sandy|brb" to "sandy" my Pidgin status would stay the same. I decided to automate that shit. Based on a bunch of useful code from Arstechnica's Ryan Paul, I present to you my first xchat plugin, xchat-nick-pidgin-status.py:


#!/usr/bin/env python

# Sets Pidgin status from XChat nick, assuming you use a style like:
# mynick => Available (status "Workin")
# mynick|busy => Away (status "busy")
# Hobbled together by Sandy Armstrong from code
# written by Ryan Paul (segphault) of Ars Technica:
# http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/pidgin-2-0.ars/4
# http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/29/send-twitter-updates-from-xchat-using-python

import xchat, dbus

# Describe the plug-in metadata for XChat
__module_name__ = "Pidgin Status Plug-in"
__module_version__ = "1.0"
__module_description__ = "Set Pidgin status according to XChat nick"

# Specify status ID values
STATUS_AVAILABLE = 2
STATUS_AWAY = 5


def nick(words, word_eol, userdata):
  # Get new nick
  if len(words) < 2:
    return None
  new_nick = words[1]

  # Check for status
  pipe_index = new_nick.find("|")
  if pipe_index > 0 and pipe_index < len(new_nick):
    message = new_nick[pipe_index + 1:]
    # set away with status message
    set_status("", STATUS_AWAY, message)
  else:
    # set available
    set_status("", STATUS_AVAILABLE, "Workin")


def set_status(name, kind, message):
  # Create a new saved status with the specified name and kind
  status = purple.PurpleSavedstatusNew(name, kind)
  # Associate the specified availability message with the new saved status
  purple.PurpleSavedstatusSetMessage(status, message)
  # Activate the new saved status
  purple.PurpleSavedstatusActivate(status)


# Initiate a connection to the Session Bus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()

# Associate Pidgin's D-Bus interface with Python objects
obj = bus.get_object(
    "im.pidgin.purple.PurpleService", "/im/pidgin/purple/PurpleObject")
purple = dbus.Interface(obj, "im.pidgin.purple.PurpleInterface")


# Associate the nick function with the /nick command in XChat
xchat.hook_command("nick", nick)

Tasque 0.1.6 Released

2008-06-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I released Tasque 0.1.6 to a legion of hungry Linux users. I can't believe it's been three months since 0.1.5 was released! You can expect to see 0.1.7 a lot quicker, especially because there are some good patches in bugzilla that just need a bit of review.

As you might expect, Tasque 0.1.6 is our best release yet. There's a new task entry widget at the top of the main window, and due dates are parsed right out of the task text. Plus, there are the usual handful of bug fixes, including a few crashers.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Dear LazyWeb: TiVo, MythTV, Decisions

2008-06-08T08:46:00.001-07:00

So we have a TV in the bedroom now. We generally watch TV in the living room, where we have an old Series 2 TiVo that does the job. Now, in the bedroom, we miss the essential TiVo features: accessing recorded shows and pausing/rewinding/fastforwarding live TV.

As far as I can tell, these are my options:

Buy a new TiVo + subscription for the bedroom.
Set up a MythTV box in the bedroom that can get content from the other TiVo using tivodecode.
Buy a MediaMVP or AppleTV and somehow rig it up with tivodecode so I can access content from the other TiVo. This doesn't allow me to pause/rewind/fastforward live TV, though.

Buying a new TiVo has the following costs:

New TiVo box: $99
New TiVo wireless adapter: $59
New TiVo subscription: ~$6/mo
Total over one year: $230

Option 2 is setting up a complete MythTV backend+frontend and deploying it in the bedroom. Considering that I'd have to buy a complete PC with a TV tuner, and I'd want it to be attractive and quiet, this would probably be $500-$800. Alternatively I could set up an ugly backend and an attractive frontend, but I doubt that would be any cheaper. This would allow me to have complete TiVo functionality (and more) in the bedroom, and would prevent me from falling further into the TiVo lock-in trap. It's a very tempting solution, but I'm put off by the initial cost.

The Hauppage MediaMVP seems pretty cool. It's hackable, can be made into a MythTV frontend if I ever decide to go down that road, and is super-cheap at $150. The only problem is that I'd either have to use Windows to serve it content, or hack it with MediaMVP Media Center, which doesn't seem very easy to use.

I'm not sure if I can use an AppleTV on my standard def TV. Its only advantage over the MediaMVP is sheer processing power (and easy-to-use interface if I used the provided software). It costs $229.

I guess I have to decide if manipulating live TV in the bedroom is important to me. If not, I could get a MediaMVP or AppleTV and rig up something on the server side to pull content from my TiVo and prep it with tivodecode. This could later be expanded into a full MythTV setup when I feel ready to invest in backend hardware.

However, if pausing/rewinding/fastforwarding live TV is a must, then it seems the more efficient choice is to buy another TiVo.

So, LazyWeb...what should I do? Do you use MythTV? Any compelling reasons that I should invest in setting it up?

Busy busy busy

2008-05-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

If you've been desperately waiting for my weekly UIA status update, I'm sad to report that I'll no longer be posting those. You can track the team's progress via the development schedule page on the wiki. Never fear, if I have something interesting to share, I will make sure to post for you!

I've started helping out with Tasque maintenance, so I triaged a bunch of bugs and applied some patches. I think we'll be ready for a new release soon. I like working on Tasque; it's a fun project.

I installed openSUSE 11 Beta 3 in a VM last week. It's looking pretty good! The new intlclock applet is very cute with its weather integration. In openSUSE 10.3, I struggled a lot with package management...YaST's GTK+ interface was easy to use but crashed a lot, zypper had a very nice CLI but was ridiculously slow, and I ended up using the ncurses YaST UI, and leaving it up all day so that I could avoid the slow repository updates. In openSUSE 11, things are worlds better:

Zypper is wicked fast, and is now my favorite way to manage packages. All it lacks is tab-completion of package names, but running `zypper se somepackage` is so fast that I don't mind too much. ;-)
YaST's GTK+ interface has been updated to GTK2 (so it fits in with the rest of my desktop), no longer pops up a kabillion windows when you install packages (so I can, you know, use my computer while I install stuff), and seems really stable. I found some usability problems, but Sunday I wrote a patch and this morning Michael Meeks committed a modified version of it. YaST's GTK+ code was really easy to follow, by the way, considering I'd never looked at it before. Kudos to the YaST team!

I hope Firefox is better on openSUSE 11. Maybe it's just my crufty 10.3 install, but I've always had freezing/crashing issues with FF2 and FF3. It seems to be running fine in my openSUSE 11 VM, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Looking forward to doing a clean install of openSUSE 11 on my main machine soon.

Oh and by the way, I'd like to toss out a quick immature Fuck You to Blogger for never auto-saving my posts, constantly crashing Firefox this morning, and having some weird display problem where the "Compose New Post" page has teeny tiny fonts. I guess I shouldn't care too much about the display of the page, since I apparently can't use it to write posts anymore. Normally FF3 restores the contents of text boxes after a crash, but for whatever reason this is not supported by Blogger. Hooray for using Tomboy as a text editor. :-/

Next, spiders...

Tomboy 0.10.2 Released; Please update your distro's packages if you want sync to work!

2008-05-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

I just released Tomboy 0.10.2, which addresses a problem in newer distros where the output of `mount` has changed for FUSE shares.

This really needs to get into openSUSE 11, Ubuntu Hardy, etc, or else note synchronization works very poorly. If your distro has a policy of not taking new releases but you can take patches, here's a very simple patch against 0.10.1:

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/tomboy/branches/gnome-2-22/Tomboy/Synchronization/FuseSyncServiceAddin.cs?r1=1980&r2=2008&view=patch

I look forward to upgrading sync to use GIO or Conduit in the future so that we can avoid these areas of fragility in our code base.

Tomboy 0.11.0 released, et UIA

2008-05-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

This morning I released the first development release in the 0.11.x series. Tomboy 0.11.0 features Boyd's Tasque add-in, the beginning of John Anderson's rewrite of the printing add-in (goodbye libgnomeprint!), and even a patch or two from our founding father. The new printing add-in lacks a few features, most notably text styling/formatting. We'll make sure to get it fixed before 0.12.0 is released, but if you want to see it fixed faster, patches are welcome. :-P

Last week didn't feel very productive at work. I made one commit and a table mapping winforms controls to UIA ControlTypes. I don't really understand where the time went. :-( How many hours did I lose wrestling with my Vista VM, or exploring the Mono implementation of the WebBrowser control? Fortunately, as the table shows, I have PLENTY of work to do! So I'd better get to it...

Mario Kart Wii Friend Code

2008-05-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

Forgot to mention...got Mario Kart Wii. Beat all 50CC races but still can't beat Jordan. I don't think there's ever been a video game where I could beat my friends. :-)

Here's my Mario Kart friend code if anyone's into that junk:

3265-5667-2633

I'm too busy right now to rant about the absurdity of this friend code garbage. You can probably divine your own identical rant if you know that this 12-digit code is not the same as my 16-digit Wii friend code, which (as far as I can tell) is good for basically nothing.

UPDATE (sorry for planet spam): I'm not really playing much Mario Kart, so I haven't been putting in anybody's code. I left this post up because people seem to be using it as a resource to find other players. Don't expect me to join in, but please have fun!

UIA Status, All Moved In Edition

2008-05-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

Moving was...exhausting. When I can find my camera, I'll post pictures of my new bedless office. In the mean time, here's what I've been up to in UIA Land:

Last couple of weeks

Started work on UIA providers for CheckBox, Label, and NumericUpDown. Extracted common functionality into abstract base class suitable for most Winforms controls.
Began writing tests of WindowProvider for Forms.
Worked with Andres to get child controls, specifically Buttons, mapped from UIA to ATK. Fun refactoring of UIA<->ATK bridge. :-)
A few dozen more unit tests of MS implementation, and associated fixes.

This week

Compile list of all SWF controls we need to support, and work with Calvin on a schedule for implementing them.
Fully implement the providers I started last week.
Help with mapping signals/etc between UIA and ATK.

Why do we bother with Linux? Also, UIA status, and Twitter revisited...

2008-04-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

The Question

My good friend Aaron is a PhD student in Geology at Penn State. We've known each other since we were toddlers, and connect on many levels. He uses Matlab and god knows what other crazy software to write molecular simulations for his experiments, but he's not the same kind of geek as I am. After reading about Banshee on my last blog, he comments:

I really like reading your blog. I click on all the links and feel like I'm learning something. I do have one question though. When you are working to create these programs for Linux does it ever feel like you are reinventing the wheel? It seems like a lot of time and effort is spent creating linux versions of programs that already exist. Sure there are a few new features that are neat but the bulk of the work seems like recreation. I'm totally missing the point here right?

I've been thinking about this for a few days now. I'm not going to waste time arguing specifics about Banshee, bringing up examples of truly new and unique software on Linux, or explaining how even when we are reinventing the wheel, it is a worthwhile and fulfilling endeavor. Instead, in the spirit of Passover, I will address the general question, "four children" style:

So, why do I spend so much time working on Linux, when a no-cost proprietary solution may already be available?

The free software zealot says: "I will not use software unless it is free (as in freedom). Whether or not a proprietary solution exists is irrelevant; I have problems I need to solve, and if there is no free software that solves it I will create a new project. It is simply unacceptable to sacrifice my freedom for the sake of convenience. As Benjamin Franklin said, 'Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.'"

The pragmatic user or programmer says: "It is in my best interest to use free software. If I find a bug or wish there was a certain feature, I can talk directly with developers about it, pay somebody to fix it, or fix it myself. I don't have to wait until it's in the best interest of some corporation. I don't have to be afraid of being stuck with unsupported abandonware."

The young developer says: "Reinventing the wheel is half the fun of writing software! Even if there *is* an existing free software project that mostly does what I want, I'll probably start one from scratch because then I can do it *my* way. If it's useful to others, then that's great, too. Duplication is par for the course in the software world; after all, weren't there plenty of media players before iTunes, and aren't there still? If there are multiple operating systems, applications, or web sites that appear to serve the same need, then you just need to look closer to understand what niche each is for."

The user who does not understand enough to know the difference says: "My friend/child/administrator set up my computer with Linux. If popular software isn't available on Linux, I'm usually lucky enough to find a suitable free alternative. I get free updates and no weird restrictions on how I can use my computer."

My own answer is a mix of those. Sure, sometimes when I'm writing code that could literally be copy/pasted from some Microsoft engineer's workstation, it's a bit frustrating. It's frustrating that other companies rarely see fit to release their code. But in reality, most code that I write isn't like that at all. It's written to solve a specific, unique problem, and when I solve that problem I feel fulfilled. Using and writing free software gives me warm fuzzies. And as a developer and demanding user, it is very important to me to have access to source code, so that I can fix bugs and add features I care about. Nobody at Apple ever cared about the problems I had using iTunes to burn CDs (every version and OS), and I couldn't do anything about it. That's the opposite of feeling warm and fuzzy.

I'd be interested to see how other developers answer this question, though.

Yay, UIA

Andres has started adding support for firing ATK events, so now we can see Windows Forms appear and disappear, as expected, in Accerciser. It's been fun working with him on this...I get the feeling we'd be a good pair for XP, if he wasn't on the other side of the globe. :-P I've written a lot of unit tests against Microsoft's classes and fixed ours to match that behavior.

This week I'll be continuing with that, and probably working with Andres to expand our event support. I'm excited to be able to send and receive standard window and button events. But I guess I'm easily excited?

Yes, Twitter

I've been experimenting with twitter, because it turns out people I care about are using it in non-masturbatory ways. I'm looking for a better client that I can read on *my* time (instead of being IM'd whenever a friend updates). Gtwitter isn't getting updates for some reason and Twitux requires newer GNOME libraries. If I start checking for new tweets more than twice a day I'll have to do something about this...

LugRadio Live 2008

2008-04-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

First off, I want to thank John Anderson (sontek in IRC) for letting me join his motley crew of Utah Linux hackers this weekend. Ellery was a little concerned that I might wake up in a tub of ice, but instead I woke up in a bed with Joe. Who would've thunk? Trevor (heartsbane) was a blast to chill with all weekend. My only regret is that the weekend went by so fast that I didn't have much time to hack. John, however, managed to find the time to completely rewrite Tomboy's printing addin to use GtkPrint, which really rocks considering our cross-platform focus for this cycle. Also, we were possibly violating the GPL with borrowed GEdit code, so I feel a lot more warm and fuzzy about the new code. ;-) Joe started working on classic bug #350990, which has caused a few users to really bork their notes by making a few renames. This is awesome because that bug is evil and Joe went through the pain of reinstalling his laptop and getting the whole Mono stack set up so that he could help.

Banshee 1.0 was a massive hit at LRL. I worked the openSUSE booth for a few hours each day, and lured dozens of people into my Banshee spiel/demo with the new absolutely rocking Banshee tee-shirts. I spread the word that Aaron and Gabriel would be giving a sweet demo, and sure enough, even though they were relegated to the hard-to-find lightning talk room (only 30 minutes, WTF?), we managed to pack in a full house. Watching Aaron and Gabriel is really an experience. I'm not going to use the word synergy because it's against my religion, but I'm amazed at the flow these two have even though they work half a continent away from one another. The talk was a hit, the demo was a hit, and you can check it out on Google Video.

The only thing that sucked, and yes I will call this out, is that network availability at LRL was complete crap. It's pretty hard to demo podcasts, bitchin' Last.fm integration, internet radio, or DAAP support without an IP. Incidentally, it's also hard to submit patches, live blog, or get the latest source from SVN. For shame, guys, isn't there a solution for this? This was the one shitty thing at LRL and I would gladly pay ten times the entrance fee if it would help fix this.

On Sunday, it seemed that half of the people at LRL were wearing Banshee tee-shirts. Hells yeah!

The best thing for me was just meeting everybody and hanging out. I got to talk a lot with Christian Hammond, but I was bummed to miss his Review Board presentation. I finally met Alex Graveley and Miguel, who are such a blast to hang out with. Some people really get it, and it's just refreshing to talk to them. Alex gave a pretty sweet demo of streaming virtual machines, which is actually something I've spent a lot of time thinking about so I was glad to see somebody doing something about it.

I didn't really get to talk to Robert Love, unfortunately, but his Android talk was fairly convincing. I asked him if Android was going to be a real community-driven project, with non-Google folks having commit access, making architectural decisions, etc. I was thinking of the transition Apple has made with WebKit from "here's a code drop" to having a really great community project. Rob assured me that Android would be like that, and I trust him because he knows about economics and hawks and stuff. I'm not much of a Java fan, but I think I'll download the SDK and start messing around a bit. Hell, I may finally be convinced to buy a smartphone.

You can see all of my pictures on my picasaweb.

LugRadio Live Rocked, and UIA progresses

2008-04-14T14:14:00.000-07:00

So I'm on the plane back to San Diego after spending all weekend in San Francisco at LugRadio Live, and HOLY CRAP that was an awesome time. It could be that it was my first open source conference, or that I stayed with some awesome Utah hackers, or that I got to meet a ton of colleagues in person for the first time...but man I'm glad I went. Soon I'll post about the details, but for now I'll talk a bit about how the UIA implementation is going.

UIA Continues at a Reasonable Pace (watch out for dangling participles!)

For now we're sticking with the design approach I discussed last week for connecting the Winforms UIA providers to the UIA<->ATK bridge. But I didn't work much on that, because there are some issues with atk-sharp that Andres is busily hacking away at. Instead, I've been writing unit tests against Microsoft's implementation to pull out a ton of constant values that we need. This was really boring so I wrote a little program to automate it, though it's not very general. I think it would be cool to expand it to parse through MSDN documentation for some given classes and generate the boring unit tests for the appropriate fields/constants/etc. As it is it probably took me as much time to write the test generator as it would have to write the tests manually, and it's not terribly reusable. :-P I'll write more about it if it grows.

This week I'll continue writing unit tests, though I have some catching up to do because I spent Friday largely offline, and ditto today, so I've got to see where the team is. There's still plenty of work to be done in the providers and the core; they're just harder to test right now.

Tune In Next Time...

I started writing about LRL but it just got too damn long and I have work to do. But for now, I will fire the first volley in what is sure to be an extensive character debate. Here's young Aaron Bockover to share with you his impressions of LRL, through the magic of the karaoke Rickroll:

Moving, UIA Progress

2008-04-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

Moving

Looks like we'll be moving from San Diego to Las Vegas some time around May 1st. We're having some trouble finding a decent home to rent, but I'm hoping that will all resolve itself in the next few days.

UIA Progress

Last week, Andres committed a ton of fixes to get stuff working in the UIA<->ATK bridge. I spent a few days working on my end (winforms and providers), until we finally got this:

So that was exciting. Our friends on the Mono team helped us figure out that some of our problems were caused by the fact that Winforms actually has a current dependency on GTK+ to get theme colors! The initialization of GTK+ before we load our UIA<->ATK bridge was causing runtime failures. We have filed a bug on it, and will probably be removing the GTK+ dependency in Winforms (see bug for details). Currently we work around it in our patch to Winforms.

Of course, the implementation to achieve this wasn't really too great. My providers were depending directly on Andres' bridge. So now it's time to start working more on the "core". I'm experimenting with it now. Here's an updated version of my old diagram, color-coded to differentiate between MS assemblies and our new assemblies:

Notice that I have removed the core, and in its place is the MS-defined UIAutomationProvider assembly. I played around with different designs, but there is a fundamental problem in that MS intends all interop between providers and *their* core to happen via a static class called AutomationInteropProvider, that lives in the UIAutomationProvider assembly along with a ton of useful interfaces. Well, we can't add new public interfaces to that assembly, but when messages come to the AutomationInteropProvider they need to somehow get to the bridge. And I'm trying to avoid excessive reflection.

So right now I'm assuming that I can define a good bridge interface in a new assembly, UIAutomationBridge, that only depends on MS's UIAutomationTypes assembly. A class in the UIA<->ATK bridge assembly implements that interface, and the AutomationInteropProvider uses reflection only once in order to find that class. This prevents me from using interfaces in the UIAutomationProvider assembly in the bridge interface, but I think this will be okay...we'll just have to pass a few things around as plain old objects, and document what the client can expect from them.

I'm thinking that this AutomationInteropProvider class is already designed to represent the "core", so I'm just going to run with that idea this week and see where it takes me. It's all happening in the olive and uia2atk projects.

My winforms providers are a little nicer now, but they're not much use until the bridge grows a little bit. So this week I'll focus a lot on these design issues, and also I need to write unit tests against MS's implementation to derive a bunch of constant values.

It should be a fun week; I like this sort of stuff.

Yahoo releases alpha del.icio.us Firefox extension, with Firefox 3 support!

2008-04-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

2.0.39 alpha released! Check out the announcement. Please keep in mind that this is an alpha...if you want something guaranteed not to eat your bookmarks please wait for the beta which they will announce more widely.

I think I'm all out of excuses now, time to upgrade to Firefox 3!

Just (GNOME) Do It!

2008-04-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

GNOME Do is da bomb. 0.4.0 makes me a better man.

That is all.

(Sorry for the ridiculously lame title, btw)

Tweeters, UIA Status

2008-03-31T08:51:00.000-07:00

Climbing, Addiction

I took last week pretty easy, since I was still kind of wiped out from being sick. This allowed me to be refreshed and ready for my weekly Thursday rock climbing. This week our usual group was supplemented by new friends and some friendly geeks (it was almost a BarCamp reunion). I had a pretty good climbing night, and then we went out for dinner at Shakespeare's Pub which is always fun.

Dinner with a big group is interesting and fun because there are usually two or three main conversations going on, and the center of those conversations may shift around the table. What was weird at this dinner was that any time there was a lull in the conversation, the geeks produced their smart phones and (presumably) caught up on email, feeds, and general internet happenings. At the other extreme, if somebody made a particularly witty comment, these same geeks raced each other to Twitter it.

It was kind of surreal...I generally consider myself too plugged-in, so I avoid highly-addictive services like Twitter. During the recent San Diego fires, I did find Twitter the best source for fire news, but in general I've made a conscious effort to *not* join that community. I really wonder what these services do to a person's attention span. When spending time with tweeters, I get the feeling that if I am not a constant source of interest or entertainment, they will be quickly drawn back to the web via the nearest terminal.

Previously I've thought about how convenient it might be to have a cool smart phone that I could develop software for, but now I fear that my addictive personality would quickly fall victim to these pitfalls.

I kind of get the feeling that hyper-plugged-in people are not so much the creators of Web 2.0 as they are the "product" for some weird Web 2.0 economy. Although, they could just be geniuses with much more time and energy than I have... ;-)

UIA Status

In other news, I made some good progress last week. I have a hacky little patch to winforms that initializes the providers via reflection, and exposes a FormAdded event to get notified when forms are created. I really want to stress that this is just a proof-of-concept to get the pieces connected for UIA, and is not ready (for various reasons) to be proposed for inclusion in Mono. Anyway, this initializes our new UIAutomationWinforms assembly so that it can create providers as Forms are created. I also made a little more progress on the WindowProvider and ButtonProvider, but they haven't been my focus so they are still incomplete. I wanted to work more on our "core" that will connect the UIAutomationProvider assembly with the winforms provider and the UIA<->ATK bridge, but ended up getting stuck reading a lot of documentation about the Microsoft implementation.

Andres has done some awesome work to get the bridge working, so I'll be working with him to get the end-to-end model working. It will be very nice to have a thin vertical slice of our entire infrastructure working, so that we can at least see winforms windows in Accerciser. I'll be working on the core and improving providers this week.

Summer of Code Deadline Extension

Also, the deadline for submitting proposals to GNOME for Summer of Code 2008 has been extended by one week. I spent a lot of time this weekend reviewing the proposals we have received so far, and plan on spending next weekend in much the same way. There are some really great proposals in there, but it will be good to see what another week brings us. I don't expect to do any mentoring (I didn't propose any Tomboy ideas this year), but it's fun to help out with the whole process. My main role this year will be getting on people's backs about deadlines and overall status. ;-)

Yeah, I think I'll attend LugRadio Live USA

2008-03-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

LugRadio Live USA 2008 looks like it's going to rock hard, and Southwest has cheap fares, so I think I'll go this year.

But before I book a hotel room or bother friends in the east bay...does anyone have an open couch, or a hotel room they want to split costs on?

I figured I'd go up Friday morning and leave Monday morning.

Fevers and hacking go together like rocks and rollerskates

2008-03-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

So I was pretty sick last week, running a high fever for several days. Consequently, I didn't get a whole lot done. But here's my status since my last update...

I talked with Jonathan Pobst and Geoff Norton to figure out how we should hook into the winforms implementation...Calvin, Andres, and I had been discussing the idea of implementing the UIA providers directly in the winforms assembly. Turns out we really can't be adding anything public to winforms or even adding additional dependencies, since we need to match the Microsoft implementation. Therefore, we'll be trying the following approach:

Winforms UIA Providers are implemented in a separate assembly (WinformsAutomationProvider).
When the Winforms assembly initializes, it will use reflection to initialize required UIA assemblies like the provider implementation (and possibly the UIA<->ATK bridge).
The WinformsAutomationProvider assembly will use reflection to hook into an internal Winforms event that will allow providers to be created as new forms and controls appear. This internal event may need to be added to Winforms.

I made a diagram of this to help me visualize the interaction. It assumes the existence of a UIA "Core" that would sit in between provider implementations and potential bridges. This would be a more flexible design, but there's no reason we can't just have our provider implementations go straight to the UIA<->ATK bridge if that makes the most sense.

In the future there will be at least one more provider implementation (Moonlight), and potentially there could be other bridges if we needed to target other accessibility platforms. Anyway, the big question mark in there is who is the one to initialize the bridge. That's probably a piece of conditionally-compiled code sitting in the core, though I haven't really thought much about it.

So I've been working on provider implementations for Form and Button, with some success. I also experimented with a couple of ways to set up the internal Winforms event. By the end of this week, I will have created the infrastructure for the WinformsAutomationProvider assembly, which will include my Form and Button providers. I will have a patch to Winforms that initializes that assembly, so that I can dynamically create providers as forms are created. I may also work on the Core or whatever else needs to be done.

I'm looking forward to a more productive week.

A week in Cambridge, a11y status, new Tomboy release, and other hacking

2008-03-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

So I spent last week in Cambridge, getting to know Mike and Andres, who just joined the Mono Accessibility team. Aside from consuming massive amounts of seafood, I became a lot more familiar with the project and the entire accessibility landscape. I do wish I'd seen more of Boston, though.

I'm going to start blogging a sort of status report every Monday, to keep everybody informed about what I've done and what I'll be doing as part of implementing UIA on Linux. This is the first such entry. Last week was kind of a wash for development, but I did help get Mike and Andres set up, verify some of our unit tests against the MS UIA implementation in my new Vista VM, and delve into winforms code. We need some way to know when new Forms are created so that we can register them in the UIA-ATK bridge, but once they are created, I believe we can implement the UIA "provider" interfaces with just regular access to the public members of forms and their controls. Though I've been warned that it may be necessary to hook in a bit lower in the winforms code...

This week I intend to start implementing some basic UIA providers (window, button, etc). I'll drop some code into winforms to alert me when new forms are created, and since the UIA-ATK bridge is not quite ready, I'll write a few tests directly against the provider interfaces. Should be fun!

In other news, Boyd just released Tomboy 0.10.0! This is a nice release with a lot of polish. I think people are really going to like Notebooks...I'm looking forward to feedback that should let us know if we were right or wrong in going with Notebooks instead of free-form tagging (which is totally supported in the implementation, if anybody wants to write an addin or dbus client). I'm sure that we'll get a lot of good suggestions from our users, as usual. Soon we'll have a meeting to plan our next release, so keep your ears open!

I've also been spending some time on Tasky, which I'm liking a lot better than the other task programs I've tried. In general I like RTM's Gmail extension for Firefox, but its mouse dependence really slows me down. My favorite RTM/Gmail feature is how I can type in a task like "lunch today" or "release tomboy 0.10.0 march 10th", and it will become "lunch" or "release tomboy 0.10.0" with the proper due date set. I've implemented this for Tasky, though I don't yet support as many natural language phrases as RTM/Gmail does (we don't appear to have a cool library like Chronic for .NET). Hopefully some variation on my patch will make it into trunk, as I think this is the easiest way to type in tasks with a due date. What do you think?

Other things I'd love to hack on when I have time: offline Tasky for RTM, DAAP client support in Banshee trunk, and better refactoring support in MonoDevelop (like typing out a new method call, right-clicking the method, and choosing "Implement method"). I'll save my Tomboy thoughts for a future entry...

A Few Firsts

2008-02-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

Monday had some pretty interesting firsts for me...

First day with a 30-second commute, instead of a 30-minute one.
First day where getting to my desk didn't require a badge and several security checks.
First day writing software for citizens instead of soldiers.
First day writing free software full-time.
First day working for Novell.

Yes, the rumors and tabloids are true: I've joined Calvin's accessibility team. I'm really psyched with this turn in my career. It's a nice change to support a cause that is more aligned with my own values. Not to mention that I'll be working with a bunch of engineers that I really respect, and from whom I hope to learn a lot.

Plus...I've always wanted to take my dogs to work! ;-) Working from home is...interesting.

Oh, and another first: this is the first day where I've been allowed to take a picture of my work area! Behold!

Just imagine a bowl of cereal by my headphones, a dog under the desk, and OpenSUSE on my awesome company-provided 24" LCD, and you'll see what I see right now.

Cheers!

Hackergotchi Me, Please!

2008-02-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

UPDATE 3.14: Thanks to Manuel for my new hackergotchi! Woo hoo!

P.S. Thank you to Bart and Dave Neary for their versions, which were also quite good.

Previous text:

I appear to be in need of a floating head. Anyone willing to give it a go? I think this would be a good picture for it...but I've been wrong about this before (click for full resolution version):

[Picture removed...it was huge! Thanks everyone]

I'm really enjoying My Own Kind of Freedom. I'm about 12 chapters in, and I'm amazed (but never surprised anymore) at Brust's ability to put me right back in the Firefly 'verse. I think I'm most pleased with his Jayne and River POVs. The style is just perfect.

UPDATE: Book was great. Can't wait to reread.

Brust Releases Free Firefly Novel!

2008-02-05T08:48:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite fantasy authors, Steven Brust, wrote a Firefly novel some time ago, but was unable to get it published due to licensing issues. Well, as promised, he has published My Own Kind of Freedom as a free download on his website.

I haven't read it yet, but I'm eagerly looking forward to it. Brust never disappoints in style or characters, so I can't wait to see what he's done with the crew of Serenity.

Like most writers, Brust is basically a starving artist, so if you appreciate this or his other works, please consider donating a bit on his website.

Spoilery discussion is going on in the comments of this post at Steven's blog.

Lessig on Obama

2008-02-05T07:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Chris Ball for linking to Lessig's Obama video. I often feel, after watching a Lessig presentation, that he has taken thoughts and feelings that I harbor but have been unable to express, and crystalized them into a digestible format.

I find the republican candidates unacceptable, and since Clinton and Obama do not differ significantly in their platforms, the only criteria for choosing are character, experience, and potential for support (ie, ability to follow through on the platform).

Obama clearly wins on character in my mind (and in Lessig's). I do not feel that Clinton's experience is particularly useful or applicable, though I could be wrong there. And although Clinton's political prowess may enable her to gain congressional and popular support, the optimist in me hopes that Obama's character will be able to achieve similar results without sacrificing his (and our) principles.

Now I just need to register to vote...

Epic Fail

2008-01-29T06:50:00.000-08:00

I have to leave for work in 10 minutes, where we are entertaining out-of-town team members for whom I would like to appear sharp and professional.

My electric razor's battery died just as I finished shaving the right half of my face.

I like how the "battery low" indicator only started flashing after it died. Although it's possible I failed to notice it as I was busy shaving my face. I'm definitely not a fan of the quickly-decreasing battery life of this new razor.

Murphy, 1.
Sandy, 0.

Let's see how the rest of the day goes...

Bullets of the Past Week

2008-01-28T05:15:00.000-08:00

I had the most perfectly constructed burrito ever in the history of the world, from the Chipotle in Escondido. Late dinner, no crowd, first visit to this location.
One week later, I had the most disastrously constructed burrito ever in the history of the world, from the Chipotle in Escondido. Late lunch, very crowded. I'm a little nervous to make a third visit.
On Tuesday I flew Delta for the first time in years, and was pleased to see that the in-flight entertainment system ran Linux (a Red Hat derivative, I think). I wasn't that pleased to see the in-flight entertainment system rebooting. My seat neighbor quipped that he hoped that wasn't the autopilot system failing. The return flight had no such rebooting.
Delta needs to work on the volume levels of their in-flight entertainment system when the PA kicks in. I eventually gave up and went back to the iPod because I was tired of having my ears blown out.
I climbed well Wednesday night, but just as I was ready to leave somebody showed me an awesome bouldering problem that I was too exhausted to really try. Looking forward to climbing this week.
I saw Superbad. Holy crap. Amazing. I could not stop laughing. McLovin! This was my first test of using Amazon Unbox via my TiVo. The download speed was abysmal. Netflix would have been more efficient, and the local Blockbuster more convenient. Once downloaded, it was nice to use my finely-tuned TiVo muscles to manipulate the movie, though.

It was actually a pretty good week.

I hate rebates

2008-01-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

Rebate mistakes of the last six months:

iPod nano - Purchased for $150, with a $150 rebate. Fat nano came out the week after the rebate expired. This became an over-the-top present for a lucky cousin. Not worth it.

VMware Fusion - Purchased for $??, with a $20 rebate. Expired with 2007. Worth it.

New Tires - $50-$60 rebate (advertised as "free" 4th tire). Don't know when it's due. It's in Ellery's hands. :-) Worth it.

Can I really call myself an adult? I think I need to accept that, for me, items cost whatever I pay for them at the point of sale.

I hate rebates.

Middle-click on Tomboy Applet

2008-01-12T09:02:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Bug resolved with patch that adds a gconf preference defaulting to false. There is no UI to toggle this preference. The relevant key is /apps/tomboy/enable_icon_paste.

As posted to tomboy-list...

With regards to bug #359167, does anybody actually use this feature?

Most GNOME applets let you move them by middle-click-dragging. With Tomboy, when you middle-click on the applet (or notification icon), any text in the clipboard is pasted to the Start Here note, which is opened for you. I don't think this is documented anywhere.

Would you care if this feature went away?

Personally, I never use the Start Here note, so I'm probably not qualified to judge whether or not it is a useful feature.

Halloween

2007-12-19T06:04:00.000-08:00

Pictures from Halloween have finally arrived:

Bringing Freedom to Web Apps: Introducing Forkolator

2007-11-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

For a while now the back of my mind has been crunching away on web apps/services. It probably started with my work on Tomboy note synchronization, which is disappointing in that we were unable to provide centralized note storage for our users...they'd have to provide that themselves. So of course the idea of providing that service via the Online Desktop is very attractive, but it inevitably leads to demand for a web app for interacting with those notes. Hmm...

Recently, Luis' posts on Gmail have really got me thinking about where free software fits into this whole web apps/services sphere. And then I went to BarCamp...

Erik Pukinskis talked about how he believes that web apps are killing free software. That Gmail takes away even more freedoms from you than Outlook ever did. That even wikipedia.org and wordpress.com cripple your ability to meaningfully exercise your freedoms. For example, you may be able to access and modify the source of the wordpress software, but you can't use your modified source on your data at wordpress.com. Useful web apps/services are not distributed to users in the same way as traditional software. So how can the open source methodology thrive in this situation?

Erik's idea for solving this is Forkolator. Imagine you're using your favorite web app. You find a bug or think of a feature you'd like to implement. What do you do? Think for a minute of how you would hack on wordpress or mediawiki. Is it a worthwhile investment of your time? Now imagine that you can just click a button that says "Fork this page!". You are taken to a personalized instance of the web app with all the same access to your data, and you can drop into a web-based IDE and tweak your branch live. You can file a bug report that points directly to your live branch, and if the dev team merges in your changes, you can choose to switch back to using the upstream service or keep running your own branch. Maybe the dev team chooses not to accept your changes. With normal free software, you can build your own from source and live happily ever after. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do this with popular web apps, and not lose the advantages of having hosting and social data handled by a reliable entity?

Right now Forkolator is a web-based IDE which can be forked and modified live. Your fork is not integrated into revision control yet, and the problem of borking your PHP code isn't really addressed. But these are technical hurdles that should be easy to overcome. The difficult problems are staggering:

1. Security.
2. Privacy.
3. Stability.

So Forkolator isn't hosted anywhere yet.

This post is pretty long so I'll have to write later about different ideas for addressing these issues with respect to user data. To sum up insufficiently, Erik believes that the data layer of the app would probably have to be well-defined and untouchable by forkers.

I think that Erik's idea is one that we need to explore. I think it could takes us to a whole new level of community development. I think a combination of social and technical measures can address the huge unanswered problems. We really need people with experience in hosting, security, etc, to hop on the mailing list and weigh in with their opinions. How would you solve these problems? We need to know how start so that we can begin hosting this thing!

Oh, and we need to talk about the GNU Affero GPL at some point...

Slides from my talk

2007-11-12T09:59:00.000-08:00

Talking at BarCamp San Diego

So I wasn't really sure what I wanted to talk about at BarCamp, and I've been way too busy to prepare anything. Since this was my first BarCamp, I didn't really know what to expect. I assumed my audience would mostly be Mac-toting, TextMate-using Rails developers, with a healthy dose of open source enthusiasts (and probably not too many free software zealots).

So with that in mind, I thought I'd talk about .NET, and whether or not geeks in general should use it, weighing its technical strengths against its source. My approach was to show that .NET was a compelling platform in a few minutes, and then set up the grounds for a discussion about whether or not it is in our best interests to consume a Microsoft product like that. I did *not* want to talk about whether or not free software zealots should be interested in Mono, because that's just exhausting. I threw the slides together Saturday morning, tweaked them a bit while at BarCamp, and presented on Sunday.

What I learned

People came to my talk who really just wanted to hear more about .NET or Mono. This slowed things down a bit, but I'm glad I was able to help.
30 minutes goes by much faster than you think.
Telling people they can interrupt and ask questions at any point is counter-productive to trying to power through slides and then have time for a discussion. We didn't really have time.
BarCamp folks are awesome and forgiving even if you're not the best presenter.
Most people want to be presented to during these 30 minute sessions, so it's important to have a strong focus and a clear message. I didn't really have those, but it still went well I think.
Scheduling your talk against one entitled "How To Make Money Online" is not a great idea after half the people you meet have identified themselves as "entrepreneurs". At least I didn't have to watch it!
Turns out I'm not that bad of a presenter when I know what I'm talking about.

Sandy, Presentator

Friday night I came home from work, somewhat exhausted, with the goal of starting my slides. I thought I'd try Google Presentations and see what all the fuss was about. Bad idea. I spent almost half an hour preparing five shitty slides, without having time to think about where I really wanted my presentation to go. And I found myself making bullets, just because, the same way I've always felt compelled to make stupid bullets when using PowerPoint/OO.o/etc. I went to bed frustrated.

The next morning I realized it just wasn't going to happen. I had only a couple of hours to clean up and head to BarCamp. Then I remembered somebody at work using a cute little XUL app to prepare Takashi-style presentations. It was perfect! Please load up my slides and press ctrl+e to see how easy it is to write slides in that style. I had a blast, and it was really fast and easy to tweak them on the fly when I had an idea. Plus, I had no problems hacking the CSS and XUL/JavaScript to handle little things I wanted to work differently (EM=>Red in EVA mode, ability to use images without specifying height/width, etc). I managed to do a pretty good job presenting without rehearsing, though if I had a more difficult/subtle topic/message or a longer presentation, I think practicing would be really important.

The downside: my slides only work in XUL-based browsers. I've only tested them in Firefox.
I'm sure there's a way (or easily could be) to do the same sort of thing using S5. I'll look into that for next time.

BarCamp San Diego 2

I have more thoughts about BarCamp, but I think I'll just write about them later. I will say I was a little sad that there were no hackfests, but it's not like I tried to organize one, so I can't really complain. Unconferences are both awesome and weird, and this was my first. Looking forward to the next one!

My Growing Skillset

2007-11-11T05:04:00.000-08:00

I can pick locks now.

Yeah.

Woah

2007-11-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

Eric Pukinskis just gave a super-awesome presentation entitled "Web apps are killing free software! (and how to save it)". His surprising teaser answer: a web-based IDE.

I went in to heckle, I came out totally energized. In my opinion, the IDE is the least important part of the whole thing.

I'll post more later. Hopefully he'll set up a website or upload the code or something soon.

Quote of the Day: Paul Graham

2007-11-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don't beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.

-Paul Graham, The Future of Web Startups

BarCamp San Diego

2007-11-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

I'll be attending BarCamp San Diego next weekend (November 10th-11th), which will be my first experience with anything like that. I'm extremely psyched...I hope the massive overtime I'll be putting in next week won't impair my ability to hack. A friend of mine (and rock climbing partner!) will be there, too...she has an awesome idea for a web app to hack on, which would be a pretty neat change of pace for me.

Will any other GNOMEers be there? They say if it's your first time at BarCamp you have to present (sounds familiar). I was thinking about talking about Mono or leading a discussion about how .NET should be approached by geeks, considering its source. People are writing a lot of free software using the .NET framework (I'm not even talking about Mono here), so it's an interesting topic to me.

If anyone's interested in hacking, doing some sort of GNOME-related presentation, or just meeting up, let me know.

Tomboy needs your help!

2007-11-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

I just mailed tomboy-list to let everybody know that I won't be around to help much this release cycle (stupid real world!). The big bummer here is that I won't be able to work on automatic background synchronization, which Tomboy really needs to bring sync to the level of AWESOME.

So, as I said in my email, if you've been waiting for the perfect moment to dive in and be a free software hero, then now is your chance. Mess with the wiki page I linked above, send in patches, draw mockups...do whatever it is that you do so well! I'll help by reviewing patches and doing whatever polish/integration work I can do in January before the UI/string freezes.

Oh, and keep in mind that we're still looking for a hero to revamp our tagging UI, too.

With your help, Tomboy sync in 0.10.0 will be legen-

...wait for it...

-dary!

Planet Ben Collins-Sussman

2007-10-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone link to these great recent blog posts by Ben Collins-Sussman of Subversion fame.

This discussion on why DVCS is currently too much to ask for 80% of programmers (not necessarily 80% of free software developers) was a great read, especially with the comments. I once moved a 30-person project from Visual SourceSafe to Subversion, and I had to face a political battle with process folks in addition to resistance from some 80%ers. Most 80%ers just didn't care, because all they ever needed/wanted to know was "svn up" and "svn commit" (in TortoiseSVN, of course).

And here's a really informative post on consuming meat responsibly, sustainably, and ethically. You don't have to read it if you're allergic to non-technical posts.

And just in case anybody hasn't seen it, here's a link to the fantastic "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)" talk he did with Brian Fitzpatrick. I refer to this whenever I'm in doubt about how a maintainer should behave (since it's kind of new for me).

Burned again by Google Reader

2007-10-05T07:43:00.001-07:00

I really like Google Reader. But one "feature" keeps biting me in the ass:

When viewing 500+ unread items, I'd say the "Mark all as read" button (Destroyer of Worlds) is just a wee bit too close to the frequently poked "Refresh" button. The first time I got burned by this I wrote a nice email to the Google Reader team, but I guess they still think it's a good idea. I guess it's not a big deal that I have no way of finding out what those 500+ items were that I had yet to read/skim/star/share/skip. Yesterday I took matters into my own hands:

Thank you Greasemonkey. You can find my little script at userscripts.org. It is based on this other script by Scott Cowan. I never thought I'd use Greasemonkey, but Google Reader is just far too dangerous in its unaltered state!

I will say, though, that the addition of search in Google Reader helps to alleviate the loss of all those unread items. It was a long time coming, but it works great. :-)

Thanks again, Murray!

2007-09-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

Read this while skimming a sneak preview of Ubuntu 7.10:

"Note, by the way, how differently open-source projects present themselves to end users: Compare the release notes for Gnome 2.20 to the release notes for OpenOffice 2.3, and then tell me which group looks more serious about communicating clearly with the user base."

Comments like this would simply not have happened without Murray's hard work. I'm sure I didn't read anything like this about the 2.18 release notes. The bar, it has been raised...

Amazon MP3 Store

2007-09-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

Kudos to Amazon on their new MP3 store. This is the first (mainstream) iTunes competition that has been of interest to me. I don't like subscription services and I am immediately turned off by DRM that is even more restrictive than FairPlay. The prices (especially on albums) are nicely competitive with iTunes, and in fact the user experience is really nice for circumstances when you don't have an iTunes install near-to-hand. Offering plain MP3s at double the bitrate is nothing to sneeze at, either!

Unfortunately the Amazon Downloader, which is required for album purchases, is Mac/Windows-only. Clearly since I use iTunes to purchase music this isn't an obstacle for me, but I certainly hope that they realize how well-suited their store is to freedom-loving Linux users, and provide a native client. Amazon is a huge consumer of free software, so I'm sure they have the development expertise to port the Downloader.

For now, Amazon trails iTunes when it comes to customer reviews of their MP3 downloads, but I fully expect this trend to reverse itself in short order (come on, this is Amazon.com!). Also, the selection on Amazon is currently not as complete as iTunes. Does anyone know if Amazon offers tracks not available on iTunes?

So thanks Amazon for saving me US$4 on my copy of Josh Joplin's Jaywalker album, with no pesky DRM to remove and superior audio quality!

(Unfortunately it doesn't seem quite as good as The Future That Was...available on iTunes but not at Amazon...purchased by Ellery in CD format a few years back)

UPDATE: Thanks for the informative comments! In the Lame category we have Amazon charging $0.10 extra for the "Explicit" version of a track. In the Rock category we have a promise from Amazon in their FAQ to provide a Linux version of their downloader, and info that Radiohead is available on Amazon but not iTunes (much appreciated!). In the Self Defense category, I definitely support Magnatune and indie labels, but I'm not going to boycott artists I like just because they're signed to an evil label. And although I love the freedom given to me by Magnatune, the purchasing experience on Amazon is superior IMHO. I'm confident that Amazon's offering will force competitors to innovate in turn, which should only benefit consumers like me. ;-)

That reminds me...

2007-09-14T16:26:00.000-07:00

All of this discussion about distributed source control systems got me thinking about a little piece of abandonware I wrote last year to help me manage permissions in a Subversion repository I was administering. I kept meaning to release it, but it needed a lot of polish so I kept waiting. Nowadays I don't do much svn repo administration, so I have less incentive than ever to work on it, and it still needs polish. I haven't worked on it in almost a year.

But it's a great excuse to mess around with a DSCM and see what all the fuss is about. I picked bzr because it has Windows support, and because if it bugs me I'm more likely to hack on Python code than a bunch of C and Bash.

bzr co http://www.gnome.org/~sharm/svnservant

If I ever get around to cleaning up this very "my first pygtk app", I'll post a proper introduction.

In the mean time, I'm using bzr* 0.15 because that's what comes with Feisty. I'm also using Meld 1.1.4 to view my diffs, but its bzr support is nowhere near as good as its svn support. Olive-gtk is alright, too. Any suggestions for bzr bliss?

Oh, and thanks to John Carr for starting this page on using bzr with GNOME svn. Awesome, dude! Why did I have to find this by accident?

Start Here

2007-08-17T20:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks jdub for adding me to Planet GNOME!

For those who don't know me, I'm Sandy Armstrong. I co-maintain Tomboy, and right now I'm working on note synchronization.

I've been working on Tomboy for about a year now. My claim to fame is
consistently failing to finish my project of refactoring Tomboy
for easier porting to Windows and other platforms.

I live with my wife, Ellery...

...in San Diego...

...with a couple of strange creatures.

Some Background, streamofconsciousness-style

I grew up in Cincinnati, OH. I have a friend who went to Space Camp while I was busy sticking keys in electric sockets. I moved to Sacramento, CA to start high school around the time the GNOME project was announced. In the late 90's I installed LiteStep on my computer because I wanted it to look like GNOME. I didn't really know what GNOME was, but I knew it looked cool. When my buddy Gary was the first in the neighborhood to get DSL, I made him take a break from downloading music, Simpsons episodes, and porn to burn me a RedHat 5.1 CD, which I promptly installed on my grandmother's computer, much to her chagrin. These days, my mom runs Ubuntu and so do I, with a sprinkling of Gentoo on the server side. I lived in Las Vegas for awhile, but somehow never got a chance to hang out with Steven Brust. Oh, well.

Tomboy Online Mockup

2007-08-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

Ellery caught me sketching out some mockups for a hypothetical Tomboy Online service. She took pity on me and sketched up something more presentable (click for larger version):

The idea is pretty simple. Somewhere out there (maybe on online.gnome.org?) you have an account for synchronizing your Tomboy notes. It's cool because you get free storage space for your notes without having to set up your own server. Then you can use Tomboy's new note synchronization feature to sync your notes to/from that server. The bonus aspect is the web app shown above. Features include:

Ability to read all of your notes from any web browser on any computer when you log in.
Notes maintain their formatting, tags, links (URLs and links to other notes), etc.
You get your Recent Notes menu just like in real Tomboy, including note pinning.
You can search your notes, or browse by date or tag, just like in real Tomboy.
By default notes are private, but you can make any note public to allow your friends to see it (see the lock icon on the note?).
From your Tomboy Online page, you can see new public notes from your friends in the Friends sidebar.
Notes can be printed in a nice format.
You can download any note (yours, a friend's, whatever) in its native .note format, which automatically imports the note into real Tomboy.

I think this service would be an awesome addition to the Online Desktop initiative. The mockup is very Tomboy-centric, but in reality this could be integrated into something like Mugshot or another existing service.

What do you guys think? I'd love to work on something like this during the next development cycle. We just have to solve the infrastructure problems, and it seems like the Online Desktop guys are interested in helping us out.

And before you ask...I don't think online note editing is a short-term goal here. I don't really want to rewrite Tomboy for the web. :-)

It's Alive! in Tomboy 0.7.3!

2007-07-31T05:43:00.001-07:00

Tomboy 0.7.2 Released!

2007-07-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

This is the first release that I've done myself, so it's extra special to me. ;-) Aside from bug fixes and patches from the community, cool new stuff includes the transition from a custom plugin infrastructure to Mono.Addins, and Boyd's Tasks addin that adds task integration to Tomboy.

Now I just need to get tomboy-sync stabilized, so it can go into the next release...

Tomboy Note Synchronization

2007-07-03T05:45:00.000-07:00

I got back from Provo on Saturday, after spending three days and about 45 hours hacking on Tomboy note synchronization with Boyd during the last half of Novell's Hack Week. I'm down to about 7 hours of time off left at my real job, but damn was it worth it! For those interested, below is the email I sent to the tomboy-list, peppered with a few related hyperlinks.

Hi Tomboy fans,

As you may have seen on Boyd's blog, I visited Boyd at Novell HQ
in Provo to help work on Tomboy Synchronization during Novell's Hack
Week. We made awesome progress, and we feel pretty confident that
sync will go into the next stable release. I've broken this update
into the following sections:

1. What is Tomboy synchronization?
2. What can I expect to see in the next release?
3. Technical details
4. What about Conduit, etc?
5. What about note sharing?

1. What is Tomboy synchronization?

With the Tomboy synchronization feature, we aim to solve a very
specific user problem: one person running Tomboy on multiple computers
who wants to keep all their notes in sync. It is very common for a
user to have (for example) a desktop and a laptop, with no obvious way
to move notes back and forth between them. Our solution is providing
100% note data synchronization between these computers.

We know some people are interested in more sophisticated sync
scenarios, like two users syncing a subset of their notes. This is
certainly doable, and the work we've done on sync would allow this to
happen via an external app, but there are currently no plans to add
these advanced sync features to Tomboy 0.8.0.

2. What can I expect to see in the next release?

If you watch Boyd's demo and check out the screen shots, that's a
pretty good indication of what we plan to deliver. You will be able
to synchronize all of your notes via a central shared location. This
location may be an SSH share, a WebDAV share, or *any* mount point on
your local file system.

We will provide extremely simple support for conflict resolution
during sync. Conflicts include modifications to the same note on
different computers, creating different notes with the same title on
different computers, etc. Our current solution here is to prompt the
user to either delete or rename the local version of the note. Any
ideas on how to make this is as brain-dead easy as possible would be
appreciated! :-)

3. Technical details

All syncing is actually done via local mount points. In the cases of
WebDAV and SSH shares, we utilize FUSE filesystems (wdfs and sshfs,
respectively) to mount the shares locally. We then use the same sync
backend to perform filesystem operations for sync. FUSE support is
detected at run time.

We will be writing up more details about our sync implementation as
soon as we get a chance. For now, feel free to play with the code in
the tomboy-sync branch (though of course back up your notes before
trying sync, as it's not bug-free yet).

4. What about Conduit, etc?

Conduit is a cool program that helps you sync between various
different applications and web services. It has support for Tomboy,
allowing you to sync between Tomboy and Evolution, GMail, BackpackIt,
and other apps/services. So why aren't we just throwing out support
behind Conduit (or another sync framework)?

Basically, we felt that Tomboy note synchronization is a must-have
feature for 0.8.0, and Conduit is still new and we haven't had much
time to test it. We wanted our users to have a sync solution that had
no risk of data loss (which can happen when a note moves to an
application or web service that is not aware of Tomboy-specific
features), and we wanted it to work right out of the box.

That being said, Conduit is an awesome project, and the work we have
done (which includes patches from the Conduit team!) will enable
Tomboy to work even better when syncing via Conduit. So our users
will have the option of a more advanced sync solution with Conduit if
that interests them.

5. What about note sharing?

Some of you may be thinking "I only have one computer...I don't care
about sync, I care about sharing my Tomboy notes with my friends!"
Well, this isn't something we're adding natively to 0.8.0, but the
work we've done for synchronization makes sharing a much easier
problem to solve. In fact, we now have support for easily sharing
notes to friends on a local network with Giver, another cool
Hack Week project. The interaction here is so incredible...I wish my
computer was powerful enough to record a demo of how awesome it is.
You just drag a note to your friend's face in Giver, and when they
accept the note it just pops up as a new note in their Tomboy! It's
super cool.

Well that's everything. We'll send out more updates as sync
progresses. Remember, if you try out the code in the tomboy-sync
branch, BACK UP YOUR NOTES FIRST. We will bring the code over to
Tomboy trunk as soon as we feel comfortable trusting everyone's notes
to it.

We really look forward to hearing any ideas our users or developers
might have for making Tomboy Synchronization really rock! If you're
interested in hacking on this (there is still some work to do), let us
know. We will put up some technical documentation on our sync
implementation as soon as we get a chance to write it. ;-)

Best,
Sandy

Even fantasy authors aren't fooled!

2007-06-26T05:31:00.000-07:00

Steven Brust uses Ubuntu. But then again, he's a cheap bastard and former programmer, so maybe it's silly for me to get all warm and fuzzy about this?

Name has been changed to protect the creepy

2007-06-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

--- Log opened Sun Jun 24 09:18:16 2007
09:18 -!- Irssi: Starting query in GIMPNet with creepy_loser
09:18 [creepy_loser] hi
09:18 [creepy_loser] sandy
09:18 [sandy|away] hey
09:18 [sandy|away] what's up?
09:18 [creepy_loser] fine
09:18 [creepy_loser] :)
09:18 [creepy_loser] snd you
09:18 [creepy_loser] and u
09:19 [sandy|away] good, what can I help you with?
09:19 [creepy_loser] hmm
09:19 [creepy_loser] you should write me where are u from ?
09:19 [sandy|away] why?
09:20 [creepy_loser] for be your friend maybe
09:20 [sandy|away] hmm...do you know that I'm a dude?
09:20 [sandy|away] full name is "Sanford"
09:21 [creepy_loser] where is sanford ?
09:21 [sandy|away] I'm Sanford
09:21 [sandy|away] that's my name
09:21 [sandy|away] sandy is a nickname
09:21 [creepy_loser] :)
09:21 [creepy_loser] where are u sanford ?
09:21 * sandy|away sighs
09:22 [creepy_loser] my dude friend :)
09:22 [sandy|away] so I'm going to ignore you now
09:22 [sandy|away] just fyi
09:22 [creepy_loser] and i fuck you now
09:22 [creepy_loser] :)
09:24 -!- creepy_loser [~creepy_losers_computer@creepy.losers.ip.address] has quit []
--- Log closed Sun Jun 24 09:24:37 2007

EDIT: The log didn't pick up the fact that he tried to query for my avatar (I don't have one). This is a private message from somebody who was in #gnome briefly, where I was lurking.

Thank you Firefox, Google, and Ben Goodger

2007-06-13T07:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Firefox2 saved my wife a lot of trouble and frustration.

Ellery visited her MySpace to see what was new, and noticed a strange message in her inbox. Figuring it was spam, she brought it up so she could delete it. An official-looking MySpace login page appeared, which seemed strange to Ellery, but she figured it was probably a timeout or something so she went to start entering her email and password.

And then Firefox2 saved the day by intervening, explaining that the page looked like a phishing page, and offering a link that said "Get me out of here!". It probably looked something like this:

What does your web browser do when you visit that link?

Ellery and I have been internet junkies for awhile now, and honestly I feel pretty invincible in my day-to-day browsing. While I've often had to help friends and relatives out of spyware/virus/phishing situations, it has never happened on one of my computers. So when Firefox2 came out with anti-phishing technology, I was happy for their sake, but never figured it would matter for a sophisticated internet snob like myself.

The really scary thing here is that phishing is generally a web problem, not an operating system problem. When the goal is to get your passwords and take over your internet accounts, it doesn't matter whether you're browsing the web from Windows, Mac, or Linux -- you're still vulnerable.

Thankfully, we have Firefox2 available for all of those platforms. So thanks to the whole Firefox team, including Ben Goodger who is awesome. And also thanks to Google for maintaining the list of known phishing sites, and for working hard to make the web safer for everyone, even know-it-alls like us.

Feeling Feisty?

2007-04-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

About 14 months ago I switched to Ubuntu Linux (from Gentoo). It's been a good ride. Dapper Drake was awesome (my mom still uses it), Edgy Eft was a good upgrade, and now the Feisty Fawn has arrived.

Cool stuff:

New Tomboy ;-)
Installer offers to migrate settings from Windows, if you have it installed.
Fresh install. Double-click latest Naruto ep. Totem opens, tells me it can't decode divx/xvid/whatever, but it thinks I should install some codec packages, and after clicking OK a few times the packages are installed and the video starts playing. I didn't have to restart Totem (or my machine, of course) or even press the play button again. It was awesome.
Similarly, getting desktop effects and proprietary video drivers going was just a few clicks; no manually editing configuration files. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that my video card is too slow for such things.
Feels faster.
All the other great improvements moving from GNOME 2.16 -> 2.18.
Magnatune and Jamendo available directly from Rhythmbox. That means free access to ~35,000 streaming tunes.
Lots of French hip hop available from Jamendo.

Uncool stuff:

Migration assistant didn't offer to bring over my Firefox settings from Windows. I had to do it manually. :-(
When I tried to play MP3s and AACs from Rhythmbox it just errored out. It should be as friendly as totem. I had to install -good, -bad, and -ugly all on my own.
Jamendo and Magnatune won't work right now for some reason...must be camera shy, since I only brought up Rhythmbox to take a screenshot.
Buying tunes from Magnatune requires too many steps and interaction with three separate apps.
Lots of French hip hop available from Jamendo. ;-)

Token boring screenshot:

Token spinning cube screenshot:

Recent Fosters

2007-04-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

Izzy was afraid of everything. After hanging out with us for a little while, she got adopted instantly.

"Pebble" is a dumb puppy. He spent last night with us but I think he'll be staying at Helen Woodward now until he's adopted.

So I'm writing this post from Picasa...but what's irritating is that I took the time to make comments on each of these pictures, but those comments aren't part of this post at all. :-( I'd really like to see Google improve the Blogger-Picasa-PicasaWeb integration. (UPDATE: These pictures showed up in my blog's Picasa Web Album with the correct comments)

I made my first Picasa Web Album, too.

Still, although I like all of the Google services, I wonder if I wouldn't be better off with Flickr.

One last dig at Google...when making a link here in Blogger, I have the following option to specify a gopher: URL. Wha? Shouldn't this just fall under "Other"?

G'day!

Summer Plans

2007-04-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Lessons from Summer of Code

So, GNOME didn't accept any Tomboy-related projects for Summer of Code 2007 (Mono did accept a neat one, though). On the whole, this was not due to any shortcoming in the proposals themselves. We received 14, and several of them were very good. In fact, most of the students who submitted good proposals for Tomboy have been accepted by other organizations this year, so the end goal of getting these students involved in open source is achieved.

So what happened? Basically, I posted ideas that I hadn't really thought through, and though they might have made interesting projects, they didn't have any obvious value to GNOME as a whole. When students saw the ideas post on the wiki page, they might have thought that as long as they had the best proposal for a given idea, they would be accepted. This was not the case.

Revision Control: This was the first Tomboy idea listed at the GNOME SoC Ideas page. We got 8 proposals for this idea. I would have been happy to mentor at least 3 of those proposals. But here's the thing: why would anyone use this feature? If you want revision control on your notes, you probably want it on all you data, in which case you want a system-wide revision control system, not a custom GUI in each application. The only use case I can think of where this feature makes sense is for simple or formal note synchronization (that is what I would use it for). But I failed to list this when writing the idea and its benefits, and most students did not focus on it at all. In the end, these proposals received low scores from most mentors, and the highest-rated students ended up being accepted by other organizations.
Encrypted Notes: This feature represented an edge case for Tomboy. It would only be useful to users who are paranoid enough to want to encrypt a few notes, but not paranoid enough to want to encrypt their whole file system. And this set of users would also have to be really into Tomboy, since there are already applications specifically designed to store secrets. We received a good proposal for this project, but most mentors were not convinced that this would really be used by anyone.
Todo/Task Lists: This was my favorite idea, and I think it had the most relevance to GNOME as a whole, but it was one of the last ideas on the wiki page, and we only received two related proposals. One proposal was so well thought out that we will probably use it in our own implementation of this feature. The student who wrote this proposal was accepted by GNOME for a higher-priority idea instead.

So what are the lessons here?

I (or whoever) need to only list ideas that have a clear benefit to GNOME as a whole, and that have a high probability of being supported by other mentors involved in the ranking process.
Any piece of the idea designed to be reusable by the rest of GNOME needs to be implemented in C, or there will be a backlash. This is unfortunate but understandable. Any ideas that violate this rule should probably be listed with the Mono project instead.
Most proposals will be for listed ideas. It is better to list no ideas then to mislead 8 students into writing good proposals for an idea that has no chance of being accepted.
Corollary to above: make sure students know that just because a maintainer is interested in seeing proposals for a particular idea, that doesn't necessarily mean the rest of GNOME will be convinced by it (and in fact, it doesn't even mean the mentor who listed the idea will be convinced by it, which, to be fair, I did state on the wiki page)

So I'm bummed I won't be mentoring anyone this summer, but really the fault is my own for getting too excited and listing inappropriate ideas. I sincerely apologize to any students who may feel burned by this.

Plans for the Rest of the Summer

So I'm finally starting to have free time for coding again (SoC and other obligations being over for me). Here are my goals for the summer:

Get win32 support into Tomboy for 0.8.0. I've really dropped the ball on this, and it's going to take serious work to get it ready now.
Make a "Note This With Tomboy" extension for Firefox or Epiphany. I have basically done this for Epiphany, but unfortunately there are some limitations when writing Python extensions for Epiphany that may lead me to switch to Firefox (which is my browser of choice, anyway). This is inspired by the cool bookmarklet you can use with Stikkit to make a stikkit of the page you're viewing.
Poke around with Todo/Task list support in Tomboy. It would be cool to sneak this into 0.8.0.
Help out with note sync for Tomboy, and make sure there is some sort of win32 support.
Clean up and release svnservant before it suffers from bit rot.

When Bullies Win

2007-04-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

I'm fairly upset about this whole Kathy Sierra thing. She's been an inspiration to me and others, and her teaching/presentation style is such a breath of fresh air. The Head First books have really raised the bar for all the tech writers out there. Kathy's blog is one of my favorite things to read on the web; and now some asshat sickos have threatened her in ways that make her fear for her safety.

Kathy won't be speaking in public, or maintaining her blog. Whatever her next move, it will be limited and restrained. I don't think she's wrong or weak to do this, but I do hope that she's able to return to a sense of balance in her life. Nobody should have to live in fear.

Anyway, of the options Kathy has discussed for the blog, I'm probably most in favor of the "real group blog" idea. Though I'll certainly miss Kathy's unique style and perspective.

Amen, Joe

2007-04-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

Joe Shaw really hit the nail on the head with this post:

http://joeshaw.org/2007/04/05/468/trackback/

If Tracker takes over the world based on its technical merit, that'd be fine. But right now Jamie's attitude really turns me off of his project. Beagle works fine for me, so I have no incentive to switch, anyway.

And since Jamie forgot to propose Tracker as the solution to the Gimmie/BigBoard conflict, one of his fans did it instead:

http://www.beatniksoftware.com/blog/?p=58#comment-21950

I find that most people who are looking for alternatives to Beagle (and other Mono apps) make the argument based on politics instead of features. So I guess it's nice that people who refuse to use Mono have choices. But the memory usage argument is less and less relevant with every Beagle or Mono release.

Tim is back, thank god

2007-04-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

A little early from his exodus to South America. Apparently he was basically held hostage by FARC and had to get choppered out. I'm still reeling from this news.

What the fuck?

He says he has other stories, too. About girls and parties, I hope.

Summer of Code == Week of No Code

2007-03-27T16:01:00.000-07:00

176 valid proposals received by GNOME.

14 proposals for Tomboy work.

8 for Revision Control for Tomboy Notes.

3 for some sort of Evolution integration (tasks, appointments, etc).

2 for Encrypted Tomboy Notes.

1 for Networked Tomboy.

0 lines of code written by me in the last week or so. ;-)

The Bullets of My Life

2007-03-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

(not a whiny post about my job)

Google Summer of Code 2007 has opened for applications! Of course, GNOME is participating this year. If we get any good proposals for Tomboy, I'll be mentoring, which is pretty cool.
I wrote the draft for the "History" page for the new GNOME website. Of course, it won't go up for a month or so. For some reason it took me like 2 weeks to crank out a couple of straight-forward paragraphs. I really need to practice writing more...
Although I haven't done any huge Tomboy work, I've done a bunch of little things that have been eating into the time I should be spending doing the refactoring I announced a month ago. Unfortunately I can only really spend about 8 solid hours per week on Tomboy. :-( But, I documented my work, and hopefully I'll get some feedback so I can start moving things into the main code base. Followed soon after by WORLD DOMINATION (well, no, just better Windows support, but still!).
Guys and gals, I added this "Shared Items" thingy to my blog, and you should check it out! When I'm in Google Reader, if I see something I think should be shared with the world (often it's not even geeky programmer stuff), I click the little "Share" button and it shows up in this widget on my blog. So you should check it out from time to time!
Yes! Exclamation points are definitely "in"! (so is putting punctuation where it should logically go: outside the quotation marks, unless you're quoting the punctuation!).
Ack! Almost forgot! GNOME 2.18 was released yesterday, so now I'm jonesin' to upgrade my Ubuntu installation to the beta of Feisty (whenever it comes out...).
I'm a little peeved that "refactor" and its various permutations are not recognized by most spell-checkers as words. I mean, shouldn't spell-checkers in geeky programs like Firefox and blogger include words like that? Incidentally, "blogger" is in blogger's dictionary, but not Firefox's.

Warning: May blow your mind

2007-02-23T16:36:00.000-08:00

Links for today

Somebody on a planet (Luis Villa maybe?) pointed me to this cool post about tags:

http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-they-dont.php

That post referenced this awesome post that makes the best argument I've seen for throwing out categorization schemes for digital content (hint: there is no shelf):

http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

The first post was from the guy who runs librarything.com, which I think is extremely sexy. I think it may be able to suck me into the social web in a way that Xanga, Friendster, and MySpace couldn't. If you treasure books, check it out:

http://www.librarything.com

Row, row, row

2007-02-21T23:32:00.000-08:00

Paintings

One of the things I used to like about my job was how the walls were decorated with amateur art, much of it created by employees. When I needed a break, I would take a long walk from piece to piece, occasionally finding something that really reached me. One day a while back I was walking to my cube and noticed that the paintings in my area (the entire second floor) were all being taken down. I asked if we were getting new ones, but it turned out we were getting something else. Billboard-sized promotional posters with soldiers and weapons and satellites, all larger than life, with catch phrases to convey the company's strengths.

The posters were not just huge, but they protruded about three or four inches from the wall. And it turned out they had so many of these that they put the extra ones _inside_ our closed area (which previously had no art). Our aisles are not even big enough for two people to pass without one turning, and this did not help.

So this was obviously done because we have customers in our area sometimes and we want to convey a professional image. The effect on me has been the constant reminder that my job is to increase the efficiency with which we take lives. No matter the reasons, this is not something I'm comfortable with.

The posters are still causing claustrophobia in our closed area (a closed area is a large secured room -- ours is most of the second floor -- that is approved by the DoD for various classified work). They have taken down a few in the halls outside my area, and art is beginning to reappear.

But anyway, I've been checking out the new art downstairs since I can't relax in the halls upstairs. One of our employees is very talented in landscape, which I enjoy. My current favorite is a watercolor of a rowboat partially docked on a wooded river or lake bed. I don't know the names of colors, but I love looking at this painting. Some days, like yesterday, my eyes are drawn to the water, which perfectly reflects the overhanging trees, the distant mountains, the setting sun. Other days, like today, I can only stare at the row boat. It's dark, and its composition seems to shift more than the water's.

If I liked to contemplate art at home, I'd buy it.

Returning The Favor

For a long time I've been a consumer of free software, thought-provoking blogs, and of course Wikipedia. What has kept me from contributing back on a regular basis? Anyway, I'm trying to rectify that. It's been going well and I'm feeling really good:

Tomboy work is very rewarding. Whether I'm hacking on the new portable-tomboy branch, trying to fix last minute bugs before the upcoming release, or contributing to Bugzilla/IRC/etc, I feel like I'm doing something that matters to me and to other people. I don't know why I took such a long hiatus from working on it.
I'm trying to be more proactive on the various mailing lists I'm subscribed to. It's nice to be able to answer questions about products like MonoDevelop.
Sometimes I even comment on blogs I read from planet gnome, etc.
If I see a problem in a Wikipedia article I'm reading, I fucking fix it. Seriously, it only takes a couple of minutes. Wikipedia doesn't work if people don't interact with it, and I'm so tired of just taking.

So I'm trying to be a better citizen in this free culture that I claim to support. I really hope I can keep it up. It's fun and it makes me feel good. A nice departure from my job ;-)

I Was Just Trying To Help

It was me. I put up the sign in the first stall of the men's restroom that says "Nobody's Perfect. If you're standing up, please lift the seat." And you know what? It worked! I stopped seeing pee all over the toilet seat! Imagine that! Then recently we had a bunch of customers in for some sort of thingy, and I went to use the restroom and noticed my sign was gone.

Then I looked down and noticed there was pee on the seat.

Oh well, at least I had a few months of not having to clean up old man pee.

Crap.

2007-02-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

I miss my dad.

Weird

2007-02-06T06:03:00.000-08:00

Bugs and Superstars

Robin Williams came to me in a dream last night to tell me that he disagreed with the approach taken in my patch for Tomboy bug 404739. He said he didn't like unpredictable UIs that can change on you without warning. I think he was advocating disabling the "Import Sticky Notes" option instead of completely removing it (this only happens when a user has no sticky notes).

I'm still not sure how I feel about it. But if you've never ever used the Sticky Notes applet, and you're using Tomboy, what are the chances that you'll ever try Sticky Notes? In which case having the "Import Sticky Notes" option at all is a confusing waste of space. And if you do decide to try Sticky Notes, the next time you start Tomboy, the Import option will be there. Mr. Williams compared it to those irritating Microsoft Office menus that by default only show common or recently used options, but with all due respect to The Mork, I don't think the situations are the same at all.

Silly Distros, the Sticky Notes applet is for old bearded hackers who can install it on their own

I'd like to be able to remove the plugin entirely, but distros are still shipping the Sticky Notes applet even though it's no longer a default part of GNOME. I don't like when distros ship both Sticky Notes and Tomboy; it's like the old days when everyone shipped 5 IMers and 4 web browsers. As a hypothetical new Ubuntu user just discovering applets, how do I choose between two identical-looking notes applets?

The description for "Tomboy Notes" is "Simple and easy to use note-taking". For "Sticky Notes" it is "Create, view, and manage sticky notes on the desktop". Yes, they're both good apps. Yes, they represent two very different ways of managing notes. But to 80% of users they are the exact same thing. So distros, pick one for your default install, and offer the other in your package repsitory. Why is this so hard?

In Other News, Visio Sucks

That is all.

The NFL is to the Free Software Movement as...

2007-01-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

After explaining the draw of the Chargers vs Patriots game, and talking about the various superstars, Ellery stated:

Tom Brady is a visionary. He's like the Havoc Pennington of football!

Wow! What an interesting leap of an analogy! This is further evidence that I have THE COOLEST WIFE EVAR!

Using ssh-agent to stop getting prompted OVER AND OVER AGAIN for GNOME svn+ssh password

2007-01-06T21:29:00.000-08:00

I'm mostly posting this as a reminder for myself, since I'm probably the only GNOME developer who didn't know how to do it. But if you're tired of getting prompted for your ssh password three times during `svn co`, and several other times throughout a hacking session, this command is for you:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

If you're running GNOME, chances are ssh-agent is already running when you log in. The above command prompts you for your SSH password then adds your SSH key (at least, that's where I keep my GNOME SSH key) to the running agent. And that is the last time you'll have to enter that password until your next log in.

This was very exciting to me...

UPDATE: I guess seahorse (slated for inclusion in GNOME 2.18) does the same stuff, but graphically.

Rocky Balboa

2006-12-23T06:25:00.000-08:00

Wow. I can't believe how great Rocky Balboa was. This is a movie for Rocky I fans. If you were hoping for Rocky to bring peace to the middle east the same way he ended the cold war in Rocky IV, this is not the movie for you. Forget what the previews look like; go see this movie. Let Rocky end with dignity.

Some goals:

Refactor Tomboy to isolate platform-specific code to make win32 (or kde, mac, whatever) porting less of a hack. Possibly do this by moving code into a Tomboy.Platform.dll. Investigate how other projects do this sort of thing.
Kick ass on the prototype I'm building at work. Take names.
"Finish" svnservant; and seriously, move the repo to Google Code Hosting. Release the damn thing!

I'd like to make some progress on the first and last there over this break, but we'll see. It would be nice to play some Zelda, too. ;-)

I left work early to play Zelda

2006-12-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

But damn was it worth it.

Other Wii-related thoughts:

The white shiny reflective Wii is a dust magnet.
Wireless controllers are a new thing for me and I'm LOVING them, especially when the dogs are around.
I realize that I don't have a very active social life, because the only people I can call up to invite over for Wii tennis are my sister and Scott from the Wii line. Although, I'm trying to rectify this.
Link-as-a-wolf can roll stones around with his nose. If you have ever been to the park with Tycho you know why Ellery and I find this endlessly entertaining. Link-as-wolf resembles Tycho in many other ways as well.

Non Wii stuff:

Hoping to meet like-minded people and spread the Ubuntu love, I went to a Linux Installfest run by the local Linux Users Group. I did help a couple of people out, but as a social thing it was kind of a failure. Everyone there was well past retirement, and most had worked in the defense industry. We certainly got along, and I liked them well enough, but in this case the only thing we had in common was Linux. Maybe one of their monthly meetings will have a different turnout? Still, I see it as yet another sign that we should be looking to relocate.
Ellery's increased animal rights activism (and her slow journey into veganism) is starting to challenge some of my preconceived notions. For example, I'm not sure how to reconcile my desire for scientific/medical progress with the condition of lab animals. I'll need to be doing some reading about this. One of the great things about being married to Ellery is that we challenge each other, and promote growth in ourselves as individuals and as a couple. But even when our values are well aligned, I can be slower to change than she is. I'm really proud of her decisions, and I sense that I will eventually make many similar decisions.
Work is still lame. It's a great company with great people, and I'm treated really well, but I have found that I'm just not compatible with their culture. I should write more on that another time.
In less than a week I'll be in San Francisco! It feels like going home. I've loved that city since I first visited in 4th grade. Growing up in Cincinnati, I used to dream of living there. In 7th grade we had to fill out some survey about our life goals, and when asked where we wanted to go to college, all I knew was that I wanted to go somewhere in San Francisco. Moving to California only confirmed those feelings. I really hope we can find a way to move back to that area.
Google Reader is the best way to keep track of blags (and anything else with an RSS or Atom feed).

Wii

2006-12-04T06:02:00.000-08:00

Of all the things that could have dragged me into the blagosphere...

I just don't get it. I'm not much of a gamer. Why did I have such a debilitating case of Wii-envy last week? No matter... Target had plenty Sunday morning, if you were willing to get there a little early. I got up at 3, feeling a little silly about the whole thing. My vague goal was to get there before 5, but I couldn't really imagine not being the first one there. After all, it's two weeks since launch! I took my borrowed copy of Godel, Escher, Bach, figuring I'd spend most of the morning sitting in the car reading. Well, there were plenty there. Some folks had been there since 10 the previous night. I ended up getting ticket 19. 18 was an employee from that Target who knew that there were 42 systems, which was reassuring.

Met some cool folks in line (and a friendly but somewhat intense fellow who writes for GamePolitics.com). One guy a few places back declared "OK, this is officially the nerdiest thing I've ever done." I've made one too many math jokes to agree with that, but I understood the sentiment. He couldn't convince any of his friends to accompany him, but I'll bet he'll have no trouble getting them to play with the system. ;-)

Got my system + Zelda by about 8:30. They didn't have any controllers, which was a real bummer. I bought a nunchuck on Friday because I saw one and was getting really paranoid, which ended up being a good idea. No store that I'd called had Wiimotes (yes, I'm going to say Wiimote, Mr. GamePolitics.com guy!). My new line buddy Scott (number 21) suggested Toys-R-Us a little ways away. Seemed like a good idea, considering they opened a 9 so we might have a chance of sneaking past the console line to get to the accessories before they sold out.

What struck me about Toys-R-Us was how little they cared about the people in the line. At Target, we had a guy come out some time between 5:30 and 6 to let us know exactly how many systems there were, that there were plenty of games, and that they had no extra controllers. This allowed us to plan. He came out periodically (even after he handed the tickets out at 7 so we could all go grab coffee) to check on us, and to let people at the end of the line know that if they were number 43 or later, they wouldn't be getting a Wii. When it was time to get our systems at 8, we all lined up outside in numerical order. He let us in 10-12 at a time, and once he got word that the previous group had their systems and was out of the electronics department, the rest of us could go. It was very smooth and controlled.

Scott and I got to Toys-R-Us a little after 8:30. The line was long, and growing. The people up front told us that they had already handed out tickets (for 30ish systems). But nobody was letting the 20+ folks at the back of the line know this. I went back there and told them, but about half stayed (probably didn't trust a random guy hanging out at the front of the line -- without being in the line). At 9 :05 Toys-R-Us finally opened, and they basically just opened the doors and let us all rush back to the video game department. I got there pretty quick and grabbed two Wiimotes (there were only 4 sitting on the table, and I didn't want to risk anything). Scott got there an instant after me, and was glad I'd snagged him a Wiimote since the others had already disappeared. As he was reaching for the last nunchuck somebody else snatched it. Nobody was really interested in the classic controllers (I have GameCube controllers, personally).

I felt bad about grabbing controllers that probably should have gone to the folks who were waiting in that line, but this is a social system, and it would be useless to me if I couldn't play my wife in Wii Sports tennis. Incidentally, Ellery really enjoyed it. She destroyed me in boxing. Now if only I could figure out how the hell to catch a fish in Zelda...

If anyone knows me and wants to be Wii friends, my code is 3586 5381 2329 2184.