making things suck less

More Kopete Webcam Love and Yahoo! patches!

mattr — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:27:39 +0000

First up, Michael Cole came in with some fixes earlier in the week on the Yahoo! protocol side for being able to better use webcams. Now Frank Schaefer has come through with the some fixes on the low level side of the webcam stuff. Frank's patches fix a number of issues, including:

loading and saving of the video settings
device registering, unregistering, and switching
some problems with the GUI (bug# 188177)

Not one to lag behind, Michael also came through with some other fixes to Kopete's Yahoo! support, so from those we've got fixes for:

Downloading avatars when a person comes online while you were online.
Email notifications (you now get an unread count when there's more than one, and a notification with a subject when you receieve a single email while online)
Webcam announcements are now sent to the other user, meaning that they'll get a notice saying that you are sharing your webcam with them.
A login fix that allows people to see the notice that they typed their password wrong or are locked out.

Both the webcam and Yahoo! patches are in 4.4 and trunk (or will be shortly). Awesome work guys! Keep those patches coming in!

Yahoo Webcam Fixes for Kopete

mattr — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:48:03 +0000

So i just committed a rather nice patch from new contributor Michael Cole that fixes a few things in Yahoo with regard to webcams and avatars.

You can now accept webcams from Yahoo users and send your webcam to other users. Avatars that are now also downloaded and stored properly.

Michael mentions that the other user doesn't see an notification when you send your webcam to somebody (IOW, they have to request it still) and that avatars only download when they're changed while online.

Either way, it's nice to see some webcam love come our way. Thanks Michael!

First version of QtPersistence released

mattr — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:24:16 +0000

So, awhile back, I asked about an ORM framework for Qt. I didn't find much else in that category, and nobody else had any thing that was feasible either. I appreciated the suggestions about QDataStream, the XML stuff the Kadu folks are doing, etc, but I really wanted a database - perhaps because I'm crazy like that.

Anyways, I spent about 6 weeks of spare time, and started the QtPersistence project - which is releasing it's first version today - and because I'm blogging about it, it's now official.

The release notes are here and the tarball is here. I'll probably do another release in about two weeks that does a better job of setting up various bits of project infrastructure but I got something that works passes its test suite, so I'm putting it out there. As always, constructive feedback is welcome.

Update: I left out the most important thing! The source code repository is on Gitorious at http://www.gitorious.org/qtpersistence

kde bugzilla ui changes: feedback wanted

mattr — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:29:59 +0000

If you've been reading the kde-core-devel mailing list, there's been some talk recently about bugzilla, how much it sucks, whether we should switch, and alternative tools to switch to. However, only one person told me about something that could be improved. So, in order to get feedback on whether or not our customizations that are currently live on bugs.kde.org are hindering vs. helping, I've changed the layout on bugstest.kde.org back to the standard default bugzilla layout.

Please, if you use kde's bugzilla currently, take some time to test out bugstest.kde.org. When you do this, please send feedback. The feedback should be something that we're doing on the live site that is done better by the test site. It can be good or bad!This can be in the form of a bug report in bugs.kde.org against the bugs.kde.org product, or sending me a simple email. Please include changes that you want made, or specific issues with the site so that I can at least look at fixing them.

I get that a lot of KDE folks are not happy with our current Bugzilla. I'm glad that you want to have good tools to work with. So far, I haven't really seen anything that's better. I've only seen systems that do things differently, which means that we can emulate that with Bugzilla, most likely. That's after using Jira, Mantis, Flyspray, Bugzilla, and Redmine, and an old version of RT. Why not work on improving our current tool? If you think that Bugzilla has fundamental problems that require switching, I want to know what those are too.

i can haz object persistence with Qt?

mattr — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:50:43 +0000

ok, so before i spend time going and creating something totally awesome to do object persistence with Qt, I have a question.

Have people already done something like this?

What I Know:

I know about Kandau already. I looked at it, and it's Qt/KDE 3 only, and I don't really want to spend the time to port it to Qt/KDE 4, mostly because I didn't like the way you had to use it.

I'm not too interested, at the moment, in using the Ruby bindings to Qt (which would then give me access to DataMapper and/or ActiveRecord), but depending on what's out there, I may go that route anyways.

Akonadi:

Before somebody suggests Akonadi (which is awesome), it doesn't really fit my use case at the moment. I'm looking for something pretty simple, and I'm not concerned with exporting data to other apps right now.

devenv 1.0 released

mattr — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:37:03 +0000

Just made the first release of a small project of mine that I wrote to handle my various projects and development environments. It's called devenv and the homepage is at Gitorious. 1.0 is the "it works good enough for me so here it is" release. It's designed only for zsh, so if you try to run it on not zsh, it will crash and burn.

Would love some feedback, patches, etc. Future ideas include commands/scripts for updating source trees for a project, doing a better job of handling branches, and anything that I notice that I start to do a lot that will keep me from typing, cause I'm lazy.

Patch Friday – 10/09/2009

mattr — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:12:43 +0000

I got patch friday done this week. I committed some header cleanups and a user-submitted patch to fix unsetting your Jabber mood. The jabber mood fix will be in KDE 4.3.3. The last two patch fridays before this one have been a wash. The first was because I was traveling over the weekend, and the next because my daugther was sick (but is better now).

I haven't checked reviewboard or bugs.kde.org in awhile for patches that are ready, so if you have one that you think is ready (especially if you're the patch author) then feel free to email me a link to the bug or reviewboard post.

Monday – 09/21/2009

mattr — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:14:12 +0000

boot camp this morning. worked a lot of the little muscles.

got a recent kde bugzilla snapshot imported into the BZ 3.4 sandbox. Will need to end up redoing it in order to make sure that I can do the data conversion properly. Also need to do the one for the 3.2 install.

Had to retie one of the tree's down this evening after dinner before the storms hit. That tree needs to hurry up and be 2 years old so we can remove the supports and let it stand on it's own.

Got all the virtual hosts set up for my bugzilla sandboxes, merged in the latest basket master from kelvie, and pushed some more changes to gitorious for the ssh tunneller applet i'm working on. All in all, a very productive today. Hopefully tomorrow is too!

Sunday – 09/20/2009

mattr — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:10:10 +0000

up before 7. breakfast, playing, shower, then off to best buy. C. got a new case for her Pre and I picked up a copy of Snow Leopard with a $25 gift card I won at work.

Lunch, then slugging away at the rest of the edging that didn't get done yesterday. Finished the edging, the rest of the make-it-look-really-pretty work will come next weekend I think.

Weekly review tonight after S went to bed. Lots of small tasks added, and head mostly emptied. Lost steam about 10:45 when I couldn't think anymore, so I hit the sack.

Saturday – 09/19/2009

mattr — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:16:23 +0000

slept in a bit. off to Lowe's in the morning to get supplies for the front edging that we're redoing. took one of the cars to get inspected during S.'s naptime.

Managed to get the last remaining bits of a feature done for Kopete. Need to play with it about a week before I get it committed though, since it's a rather fundamental change.

C and S both running mild fevers this evening. Probably caught something at a playgroup. Hopefully they get better soon and I don't catch it.

Patch Friday – 09/18/2009

mattr — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 01:43:51 +0000

boot camp workout class this morning. more heavy weights today, although in a bit different style. ended up doing step ups with 65 lbs of weight in each hand. could barely lift the weights up enough to make the step.

Got Fedora 11 reinstalled on the laptop while at work. Always nice when you can install 1.2GB of updates during a meeting.

2 patches committed today for Patch Friday. One adds a warning on 'clear' to the chat window, and the other fixes up a ton of bugs in the Gadu-Gadu contact list support. Thanks to Dominik Geyer and Jakub Grandys for the patches!

Thursday – 09/17/2009

mattr — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:56:06 +0000

up and out the door at the normal time. work was largely uneventful and only semi-productive due to my lack of focus.

got home and poked again at getting rawhide to work on the laptop. decided in the end to say "screw it" and started a backup before going to bed.

Wednesday – 09/16/2009

mattr — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:20:13 +0000

Got a good run in this morning since there was no boot camp.

Reviewed a nice patch adding contact images to the chat members list of the chat window. Should go in once it's cleaned up a bit more.

Rebooted my laptop, which turned out to be a big mistake as I hit some 100% X usage bug with the intel driver. Rebooting into an older kernel seemed to fix it. Spent most of the evening poking at that, so nothing else productive got done.

Tuesday – 09/15/2009

mattr — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:19:52 +0000

drive to work was painful today. Combine leaving the house 5 minutes late with the extra traffic that exists thanks to school being back and session and you get stop and go traffic on the tollway.

updated my local copy of the qt git repository so i can play with some of the new stuff in Qt 4.6 now that the Tech Preview has been released. One of the new things that I want to try is the DOM api that's now available with QtWebKit. I'll probably port Kopete to that in order to have one to one compatibility with the Adium themes.

Poked at various bits after S went to bed. Tried fixing some Kopete MSN crash bugs, but of course, couldn't reproduce any of them. Also ended up poking at KDevelop since the git support wouldn't let me switch to a different branch from the UI.

Monday – 09/14/2009

mattr — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:55:15 +0000

Happy Birthday to my brother, who turned 25 today!

boot camp this morning was hard. lots of heavy weights meant my muscles were tired but I don't think I'll be sore later today or tomorrow because of it.

got the gnome bugzilla bits checked out from bzr, no thanks to the network at work. hopefully some of this will come in useful as KDE upgrades it's bugzilla to KDE 3.4.

lots of work done on the bug editing template for the kde bugzilla upgrade. that's coming along nicely and the new layout as a whole is coming together quite well.

Sunday – 09/13/2009

mattr — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:09:26 +0000

Had to get up a little earlier today (6:45am). Dilbert comic today was rather disappointing in terms of quality funniness. Can't be good all the time I suppose.

More time with the family today. Lunch at Chili's with the in-laws. It was the first time out to a restaurant for S. since she was 2 weeks old.

Naptime, shortened some blinds we'd bought and hung up earlier in the weekend, then hit the SimTower pretty hard.

Dinner over at the in-laws again. Brother in law leaves later in the week. Bedtime for S., more SimTower for me in addition to some laptop window shopping

Saturday – 09/12/2009

mattr — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 03:00:29 +0000

yay! weekend! got to sleep in until 7:30 when S got my wife and I up for the day.

Brother in law came in town from Atlanta this afternoon, so over to the in laws for dinner and visiting.

Simtower during nap and after S went to bed. also started on my GTD weekly review.

Friday – 09/11/2009

mattr — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 04:00:41 +0000

boot camp today. about as bad as i expected. 50 minutes of running will do that to you.

patch friday resulted in 4 committed patches and 2 more put into the queue that I didn't get to. Also got several comments via the blog. thanks! I'll try to respond to those as soon as I can.

Patch Friday!

mattr — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:54:31 +0000

I've deemed Fridays to be "Patch Fridays". This means that I will be doing various things with patches. I review patches, test patches, commit patches, etc. So, if you've sent me a patch, or stuck one on review board, or I've seen one from you on bugs.kde.org, then if I haven't done anything with it before a Friday, it'll most likely be handled on a Friday.

For this Patch Friday, I've (so far) got four patches to commit: two gadu gadu patches and two chatwindow patches.

Why Friday?

Because I had a lot of patches that I knew I needed to take care of, and today just happened to be the first day I could get to them. So I've decided that I'm going to stick with it.

Can I send you just any patch?

Well, not really. I'd prefer it if they were areas that I spent a lot of time on. For now, that would be:

Kopete
bugs.kde.org
Basket
Anything for the kdesdk module
KatePart
KDevelop

The last two areas are only areas that I'm marginally involved in, and so I'll be passing patches for those two pieces of code through the proper channels before committing them. Basket patches will go through my git repository of basket on GitHub before going into Basket's master repository that Kelvie Wong, the Basket maintainer, has.

Every Friday?

Yeah, pretty much, unless I'm travelling or otherwise indisposed.

Got Patches?

Friday's not over yet! Send me your patches!

Thursday – 09/10/2009

mattr — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:06:28 +0000

Up at the normal time this morning. Ran a bit late due to starting a 'yum update' while I was getting everything else ready that took longer than I thought to finish. Decided to cancel it before leaving.

Nice rain on the way home from work. Weatherman said it should be raining the majority of the weekend and there is thunder making its self heard as I write this. I'll take the rain. We need it.

Created a yum repository for the VirtualBox packages that I'm self-compiling due to the lack of updates for VirtualBox in the rpmfusion repositories. Also poked a little bit at the new layout that I'm working on for KDE's bugzilla. Also played a little bit of SimTower after installing the new virtualbox build before heading to bed.