GnomeTorrent 0.1 is out!

All this began when I discovered jamendo. Shortly, it’s a website where you can listen CC-licensed albums and download them using BitTorrent or another networks. I found quite interesting albums and I decided to try gnome-btdownload for downloading them.

I found this software quite simple and nice, very much in the gnome style, but I couldn’t help to have X windows opened (one for each download/seed), mostly when X → ∞ (or at least a relatively huge number if you try to be nice and share as much as you get).

So I wanted to start hacking on this code and make it download multiple files at once in only one window and hide it in the system tray. I have finished writing my own code albeit I’ve reused all the BitTorrent part.

It’s my first whole desktop program that works and it’s an incredible feeling… I feel like the child who discovered computers years ago :)

I’ve setup a small webpage for the interested:

Gnome Torrent

The main window

Orwellian memory?

The last few days, some people at mailing lists and planets have been surprised about the new Nokia 770 based on Debian+GNOME.

Don’t you remember? It was in December 2004: Linux Technical Project Manager (GNOME/freedesktop.org) – Helsinki, Finland

Quoting:

At Nokia Multimedia we unite talented specialists with the latest technology to develop cutting edge solutions. If you would like to work in such an environment, why not join us as Technical Project Manager for GNOME/fd.o software development at our Mobile Enhancements unit in Helsinki, Finland. In this role your talents will be put to work developing mobile devices based on Linux and other open source projects such as GNOME and freedesktop.org.
[...]
Our platform team, located in Tampere and Helsinki, is constructing a software platform for mobile devices using Linux and other open source technologies within concrete product programs.

KDE surprise

Sometimes I use kmail as my mail client, and today I’ve discovered one thing from the save file dialog.

KDE file dialog sowing PO previews

It’s shows some pie chart for PO files. I like the idea albeit the icons are not very nice at this moment.

Firefox bookmarks rock!

From a long time ago, I’ve been looking for some piece of software to manage my tons of bookmarks in an intelligent way. Some time ago I tried bbps, but I had to put the bookmarks by hand, so it was clearly not enough.

Some days ago, I was designing some kind of ubuntu sidebar for MOTUs, and started using the bookmarks sidebar. Today I’ve discovered the search function. I guess it has been there for a very long time, but I didn’t noticed.

Screenshot of the search function

BTW, if you care about the Firefox theme, it’s LittleFox, and with View->Toolbars->Customize... you can arrange (almost) all the items in a single (menu|tool)bar.

prepare-ChangeLog-baz.py

Since I’m currently using bazaar for some of my personal projects, I wanted to have something like the famous preapre-ChangeLog.pl. I started to hack on the modified version for SVN, but the bazaar diffs were too different from CVS and SVN.

So I decided to play with python and pybaz, and got prepare-ChangeLog-baz.py.txt

It’s quite simple at this point, so it only tracks added, removed and modified files, but not “what has changed”. At this moment, it opens $EDITOR to let you specify the details for each file changed.

Some hints: Use REALNAME and EMAILADDRESS environment variables to set the corresponding ChangeLog fields. You need the python-bazaar package to got this script working. The package is waiting at MOTUNewPackages but you can fetch from python-bazaar1.1-0ubuntu1all.deb

Spatial mess prevention

Today, at #ubuntu-motu, I noticed the last update of nautilus package:

nautilus (2.10.0-0ubuntu7) hoary; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/02_ubuntuspatial.patch:
    - changes to the spatial mode. Close the folders by default while browsing.
      You can set "/apps/nautilus/preferences/no_ubuntu_spatial" to get the
      previous spatial behaviour.

 -- Sebastien Bacher   Thu, 31 Mar 2005 16:17:33 +0200

But I think, like quite others, that this behaviour may not be the best option. We could discuss that forever and lose a lot of our precious time.

Better than this, is to develop an alternative solution. Let the Technical Board, the sabdfl, or whoever has taken that decision happy, and let the user choose at the same time :)

Screenshot of new option for spatial behaviour

The dpatch is at 02ubuntuspatial.patch, or a new version of nautilus at nautilus2.10.0-0ubuntu8.diff.gz. My changelog:

nautilus (2.10.0-0ubuntu8) hoary; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/02_ubuntuspatial.patch:
    - use more consistent names (close_previous_windows) and add a GUI option in
    preferences dialog to set the default behaviour.

 -- Jorge Bernal   Sat,  2 Apr 2005 01:45:25 +0200

Back to normality

After some intenstive days I’m coming back to routine. Last weekend I was in Madrid and was just wonderful. What a lot of great people! :D

But that was not all, when I just came back to Zaragoza, some friends from Valencia were visiting, so I had two more intense days.

Anyway, these have been a great holidays. Now it’s time to fix the universe ;)

Today, the Ubuntu Hoary Release Candidate has been announced. In a week (April 6th), Hoary will be released, and the road to Breezy Badger will start.

Great times are coming.