Posted by George Wright
Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
This summer I’ve managed to land an internship at Collabora Ltd to work on freedesktop.org projects.
Collabora’s current projects include Telepathy, Farsight and Nice. I will be working on something related to one of those projects.
So far we’re still in the brainstorming phase of what to work on, but Rob is keen that I work on getting TCP-like stream properties (flow control, ordering guarantees, retransmissions etc) into Telepathy’s “Tubes”, so that applications can communicate using stream-like Tubes over whatever UDP connection ICE has NAT-traversed. This will effectively provide a generic method for applications utilising either D-Bus or their own protocol (over a SOCK_STREAM) to communicate through NAT routers whilst still speaking something like TCP.
Of course, I would like to get the community’s opinions on the projects and most of all I’d like suggestions on other things I can spend my time hacking on which will benefit the populace at large. Any criticisms (constructive or otherwise) are welcome. The work will almost certainly be in glib but if there’s any relevant work that needs doing in KDE, Collabora may consider letting me work on that.
Posted in KDE, Computing, Cambridge | 4 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 07 May 2007 02:42:00 GMT
I’ve finally got round to booking the train tickets to get to Glasgow for aKademy this June.
If anyone in London is travelling to Glasgow the trains I’m on are:
London to Glasgow, 29/06/2007 - departing London Euston at 11:46 and arriving at Glasgow Central at 16:55. Virgin Trains.
Glasgow to London, 08/07/2007 - departing Glasgow Central 10:55 and arriving at London King’s Cross at 16:45. GNER.
Would be great if any KDE people are on either of those trains. For those who haven’t booked yet, those trains are the cheapest ones I could find on those days - it came to a total of £47 for two single tickets (both standard class), booked through the GNER website.
Posted in KDE | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:22:00 GMT
The second day of FOSDEM was good fun. The night before was not so fun. After having dinner with a bunch of KDE developers, I decided to go and try to find the hotel I was staying in. After two and a half hours of running around Brussels like a headless chicken carrying a few tonnes of computers on my back, I finally managed to get to the hotel we were staying in - the Hotel Continental.
For those who don’t know, the Hotel Continental was the cheapest hotel I could find using Google that was in Brussels. It’s literally right next to the Bruxelles-Midi station and a twin room costs 61.50 EUR per night. The downside? The room is terrible. The wardrobe door fell apart when we tried to open it, the room was tiny and there wasn’t a shower anywhere near the room. However, it wasn’t all terrible. The staff were exceptionally friendly and courteous, the beds were comfortable and the breakfast was quite nice, which made the whole experience much more pleasant than it could have been. If you don’t mind a cheap place to stay that’s nicer than a youth hostel I think the Hotel Continental is quite a nice place to stay.
As for the conference itself, I finally managed to meet Lorn Potter today. I’ve known him for years due to my interest/work in Opie and Qtopia but as he’s located in Australia I’ve never had the opportunity to meet him, so it was great to finally meet him today. The rest of the time was spent trolling on the Debian booth and being viciously attacked by Nattie of #debian-uk fame, who has now surpassed Jes Hall and Lauri Watts on my top ten list of people to hate for touching my hair.
Anyway - it was a great conference and I hope to see many of you again next year!
Posted in KDE, Computing | 5 comments
Posted by George Wright
Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:06:00 GMT
Today has been a long day for me. In my ineptitude, I booked a Eurostar from London to Brussels at 6:06 am which meant that I had to get up stupidly early (2:30am) to get to Waterloo on time. The Eurostar was a very good ride though, and it was made more interesting by tracking our route on Maemo Mapper using a GPS. Apparently the top speed we hit was 190.1 miles per hour somewhere in France, and the total journey time from Waterloo to Brussels Midi was 2h37m.
When we got to Brussels we managed to get spectacularly lost on the tram system to the University. Nobody told us there were TWO campuses in south Brussels both called “Universite Libre de Bruxelles”. Luckily the GPS was incredibly useful at this point as I had already added the GPS coordinates of FOSDEM to it and we ended up walking to the conference.
As conferences go, FOSDEM appears to be fairly typical of an open source one. There are LOTS of parallel tracks and it’s impossible to attend even one fifth of the available talks. There are literally thousands of people here and so I’ve been spending most of the day sifting through the crowds and trying to find familiar faces. I’m currently in the OpenMoko talk as it appears to be one of the most interesting projects of the year. They appear to be spot on as to their development model and organisation, but we’ll have to see how well it all goes. I personally am very excited by the prospect of taking the OpenMoko software system and hacking it onto my phone.
I hope to get to more talks tomorrow but for now I think I need to get some sleep and some university work done!
Posted in KDE | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:22:00 GMT
Thanks to the response of my previous blog about the NX client I’m now working on for the 770, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to allow GTK to interact with the client library I wrote would be to implement a D-Bus interface in addition to the standard C++ interface so that the library can work much more cleanly with other toolkits (and hopefully even other languages!). Unfortunately, this is going to be on hold for at least a few days while I sort out my university work… It’s going to be quite a cool project though!
For the first time this year, I’ve finally decided to go to FOSDEM. In previous years it’s always been during term time and as I was at a boarding school I could never go, but now that I’m at university I’ve decided to just take the plunge and go (besides, Alasdair Kergon told me that I absolutely had to come this year). If anyone I know is going give me a shout and I’ll see if I can find you amongst the large crowd of (possibly drunken) geeks! I’ll be leaving Waterloo on the 6:06am Eurostar to arrive in Brussels somewhere around 9:30am and returning on a Eurostar departing sometime around 9pm on Sunday.
Posted in KDE, Computing | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Sun, 18 Feb 2007 04:54:00 GMT
So recently I managed to acquire a Nokia 770 internet tablet (thanks to mjg59). It’s a really nifty device – the screen on it is unparalleled (except, obviously, for the N800 – whose screen is slightly better), and it has quite a nice Linux platform on it. The problem? It runs Hildon, which is GTK-based. The input methods are heavily integrated into the GTK on the device and using any other widget toolkit just doesn’t work (well, it does, but you’re going to need a physical keyboard).
In light of this, I decided to start hacking around with GTK. Its API is not as pretty as Qt in my opinion, but it’s not too shoddy. It just takes a bit of getting used to, although the really verbose function names and endless requirement to call them really annoys me (gtk_foo_bar_baz_lala_eggs_breakfast() anyone?).
Armed with NXClientLib which I developed for my Summer of Code project last year, I decided to try and port my NX client to Hildon. In typical style, I made the architectural decision last year to write the library in C++ and link to QtCore/QtXml simply because it made my life a whole lot easier (I would dread to think how much extra code I’d need to write if I didn’t have QString). Anyway, I’m currently in the process of gluing GTK and Qt together in perfect harmony (haha) so that NX can take over the world, but it’s proving to be less trivial than I thought it would be.
Some gratuitous screenshots:
The initial login interface
The window automagically changes the layout for the on-screen keyboard
I’m afraid that’s all there is to “Maemo NX” thus far. I’ve spent most of the time trying to learn how GTK/X11 works and also thinking how best to implement the whole thing. If anyone is an expert at X window reparenting in GTK I’d be most grateful if they could take a look at this code and let me know why it doesn’t reparent the X window whose ID is specified by int wid into the GTK window I create and then make the reparented window visible. It seems to reparent fine, as the window with id wid disappears, but there’s no sign of it in the GTK window. If I can’t get this to work I’ll simply use mozplugger-helper which does a fine job of reparenting a window, but the fewer dependencies I can have the happier I’ll be.
If anyone’s interested in the code so far, it can be found in the FreeNX subversion repository at http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/freenx/nxclientlib/maemonx/.
Posted in KDE, Computing | 8 comments
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:46:00 GMT
LinuxWorld is looming ever nearer.. under a week now until it starts! I’ve managed to get at least one other KDE developer to come - Ivor Hewitt - to whom I am eternally grateful for taking time off to help out. We have quite a nice set up too - Torsten Rahn has kindly supplied us with two KDE floor posters and I’ve got a Kubuntu floor poster courtesy of Jonathan Riddell. We will also have 20 of the KDE 10th Anniversary t-shirts to give away for free and another 200 KDE pins to sell. Not only that, but Canonical have kindly stepped in and said that we can borrow a machine from them for the duration of LWCE. It looks like LWCE this year is going to be the best yet!
In other news, Cambridge is getting hectic. Work is starting to stack up and 9am lectures are getting more cumbersome by the day. I’ve decided to rearrange the furniture layout in my room to give myself more usable floor space and I appear to be fanboying a maths student in my college. Hrmm.
The computer science stuff is still fairly elementary. We’re doing functional programming in ML and it’s not so bad. It gets a lot harder though so I’m not complaining! Physics is still very easy as we’re only doing special relativity which seems to be fairly easy, but again, the pace picks up later apparently. Oh well - it was my decision to come here to study!
Posted in KDE, Cambridge | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:47:00 GMT
The last day of aKademy for me - so it was rather uneventful. After sleeping the night on the bunk on top of Chris because of the bed cock-up the night before, we realised that we had overslept and that the cleaners were coming round to kick us out. I must say that I’m not disappointed to see the back of the accommodation.. I caught several illnesses and got very little sleep during aKademy this year.
Upon arriving at Trinity College Dublin, I just wandered around aimlessly for a while and then ended up in a pub eating lunch with Rich Moore and Richard Dale. Afterwards, it was unfortunately time for me to leave and get to the airport.
When people intend to leave, here’s some advice. There are buses that go to the airport from the bus station near the hostel, but they take a long time to get there and aren’t very comfortable. On the other hand, if you get to the road with huuuugggeee spike in it, there’s an “Aircoach” which will take you directly to the airport and it’s nice and comfortable. It took about 30-40 minutes in the middle of heavy traffic on Tuesday and cost me 7 EUR, as opposed to the 5 EUR the bus would have charged. I think the extra 2 EUR was worth it.
Finally, I’d like to thank Marcus for doing a great job with aKademy this year. There were relatively few mess ups and those that did happen weren’t his fault so much kudos to Marcus.
Posted in KDE | 2 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 25 Sep 2006 22:22:00 GMT
Day 2 of aKademy - the first day where no talks were scheduled. The joy of getting up at 10 instead of 8! The eV meeting happened today, but I didn’t attend as I’m not a member. Spent most of the time in the hacking room fiddling with Debian Sarge - on which I managed to get wifi to work. Thankfully it’s a fairly normal ACX100 chipset which appears to work quite well. Being able to remotely fiddle using ssh is a lot easier than trying to type on the keyboard that’s built in.
In the evening was the Google reception at Google Ireland. It was actually quite fun. On the way I talked to Rob Taylor who shares my weird obsessions with installing Linux on embedded things, and was very interested in the hardware on my phone (it’s an HTC Universal). I’ll probably be seeing more of him in the future as he’s based up in Cambridge (along with Rob McQueen and the rest of the Cambridge Debian/Ubuntu massive). Win.
The Google reception was rather fun. They had nice little sandwiches and various snacks to eat, but the major fun was obviously the large ice cream freezer they had full of snack size Ben & Jerry’s tubs. Hooray for ice cream when you have a sore throat! They held a raffle to give away an iPod, a laptop bag and a hoodie, none of which I won. I also heard amusing stories all evening about various members of staff at my future College from Rob McQueen.
Afterwards, we (mainly GB people with a few other KDE people tagging along) ended up in a fairly small and random pub. The highlight of the evening was obviously when one of us (no names..) got completely and utterly drunk. We have video evidence. Note: if you can’t sing, please don’t. It’s embarrassing, but you will realise this when you see our videos. :)
After the pub, we decided to eat and ended up at a fast food pizza place somewhere in Dublin. I had a milkshake which required you to suck your eyeballs out of their sockets in order to try and get it up the straw - yes, it was that thick. Afterwards, there was much amusement at the hostel as Chris Howells and I discovered that our room had been double booked and that some fairly random strangers were sleeping in our beds and that our magnetic swipe card keys no longer worked. We were angry. Luckily they managed to give us new beds so it wasn’t a problem, just a fairly large inconvenience at 2am.
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Posted by George Wright
Sun, 24 Sep 2006 20:20:00 GMT
Day 2 of akademy - things were smoother. I didn’t really pay much attention in the talks but instead decided to hack on embedded Debian and try to bootstrap Debian ARM on my phone. It was… interesting, to say the least.
Sarge appears to be hideously out of date (or the mirror I was using was out of date, but it was ftp.debian.org which would suggest this was the master mirror..). In any case, I managed to get it to boot fine after lots of fighting, but getting kdrive on there was slightly more difficult. I haven’t yet managed it, and I have decided that sarge is way too out of date anyway, so I’ll rebootstrap with Etch. More details to follow when I get somewhere…
In other news, Jessica Hall has decided that she has an irresistible urge to touch my hair. She will be duly punished.
Posted in KDE | no comments
