Going on vacation tomorrow for a week of orienteering in Sälen, Sweden. The terrain will vary from a more classic swedish orienteering for the first two stages and the go over to an alpine terrain with more open areas and higher altitude differences for the third and fourth stage. The last stage seems to be back to more classic terrain again with a mix of small hills and marshes.

In total the event (in my class) will be about 30km as the birds fly which should translate into something like 45-50km of terrain running over the course of five days. Hopefully I’ve exercised enough, I’ve tried to do 4-5 sessions per week over the last couple of weeks and luckily Guadec had little impact on the overall fitness as this week felt really good.

Somewhat back to normal routines after a week in beautiful Istanbul. As people reading Planet GNOME have seen from others, it was a great Guadec this year.

I found the schedule to be a bit uninspiring but that left more time for discussions and hacking. Among the sessions I went to I really enjoyed going to Alp’s session about Webkit and Blizzards on Mozilla. Some really interesting things coming from these projects.

Kris did a great job wrapping up the current state in GTK+ during his now traditional ‘GTK+ State of the Union’ talk and happy to see that the discussion around future GTK+ is getting started throughout the community. I spent a lot of time this year talking and listening to peoples feedback on the proposed plans. Realized that some things have been a bit left out from the discussions after the hackfest and that we need to do a better job at communicating what we plan to work on besides the cleanups and enabling of future development.

Finally a warm welcome to Stormy as executive director of the GNOME Foundation Board.

Posting this just before going to bed for an early rise to fly to Guadec in Istanbul. Unless someone gets sick last minute the entire Imendio crew will be arriving tomorrow and staying at the Golden Horn Sultanahmet.

See you all there!

This is something I’ve had to checkup a few times so I figured it would be useful both for myself and for others to keep around in a blog post.

To remove a remote branch you created in Git just push to it like:

$ git push origin :name-of-branch

Was playing around a bit with a synchronous network library that I wanted to use from a GTK+ frontend. Obviously this wouldn’t work too well as the UI would be blocked while waiting for the library to return from it’s network calls. So I wanted to run the network operations in the background using a thread but still get the callbacks in the main thread to be able to update the UI from there.

I ended up writing a small class I called AsyncRunner which is a small proxy to call methods in a various thread and get the callback in the main thread. It’s using the GLib Mainloop so it would only be useful in the cases where you actually have one.

require 'thread-sync'
class MySyncClass
  def foo_method(arg)
  end

  def bar_method(arg1, arg2)
  end
end

sync = MySyncClass.new

# In order to get the methods of MySyncClass asynchronous it is wrapped in an AsyncRunner.
async = AsyncRunner.new(sync)

async.foo_method('test') do
  ui_update()
end

main_loop = GLib::MainLoop.new
main_loop.run

I’m really excited to see how well the Ruby (on Rails) community have received Git. A big reason is probably the awesome service GitHub but there are several other goodies coming out from the Rubyists.

Yesterday I blogged about the GitCasts and today I learned about Gitjour. It’s a tool to announce and make available repositories over Bonjour so that you can list and clone repositories available on the local network.

To serve a repository simply call:

$ gitjour serve
Registered gringo.  Starting service.

You can then list and clone it with:

$ gitjour list
Gathering for up to 5 seconds...
=== gringo on Tabasco.local. ===
  gitjour clone gringo

Stumbled over the site GitCasts which publishes regular screencasts about using Git. Should be worth a look for anyone who which to learn more about Git.

http://www.gitcasts.com/

Was playing around a bit with the Twitter4R library the other day and realized that in order to make it to work on Mac OS X (Leopard) you need to also require ‘time’. Or you will get an error similar to lib/twitter/model.rb:268:in `init’: undefined method `parse’ for Time:Class (NoMethodError).

A small snippet to display my public tweets:

require 'rubygems'
gem('twitter4r', '0.3.0')
require 'twitter'

# Required on Mac OS X Leopard
require 'time'

twitter = Twitter::Client.new

hallski_timeline = twitter.timeline_for(:user, :id => 'hallski')

hallski_timeline.each do |status|
  puts status.text
end

Last week I sat down and wrote bindings for Loudmouth. This means that anyone who want to write an XMPP enabled application with GTK+/Ruby now have an asynchronous library that integrates perfectly with the GLib mainloop.

It also gives me access to testing and writing small scripts using Loudmouth with the beauty of Ruby.

Here is a small example showing the bindings in the current state:

require 'loudmouth'

conn = LM::Connection.new
conn.jid = 'myjid@mydomain.com'

conn.open do |open_result|
  if open_result
    conn.authenticate('username', 'password', 'resource') do |auth_result|
      if result
         puts "Authenticated, do your stuff"
       end
    end
  end
end

GLib::MainLoop.new.run

So far I have only bound the asynchronous calls and I am not sure whether I will bind synchronous ones in the future.

If you want to try them out or even better, help out by improving them or write example code. Create an account at Github and watch/clone the repository. It’s named loudmouth-ruby.

I ran into a slight problem when I tried to create a type registered subclass in Ruby/GTK+. This is done by adding type_register in your class definition. This worked fine until I tried to pass arguments to the super class constructor through the super() call.

In my previous example, I passed the arguments like usual to the super call. It turns out that when you have registered your class with the GObject type system (which I didn’t do in that example) it overloads the super() call and you need to pass the arguments as a hash instead.

Here is an example subclassing Gtk::Button that sets the button up defaulting to underline mnemonics.

require 'gtk2'

class MyButton < Gtk::Button
  type_register

  def initialize(label)
    super({:label => label, :use_underline => true})
  end

  def signal_do_clicked(*args)
    puts “Clicked”
  end
end

w = Gtk::Window.new

b = MyButton.new(”My _Button”)
w.add(b)

w.signal_connect(:delete_event) do
  Gtk.main_quit
end

w.show_all
Gtk.main

Kudos to Kou for showing how to do it.