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Back from Boston with an Emerillon release

October 14th, 2009 by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin

So I am finally back from the Boston Summit, a unique occasion to get updates on latest developments, and I am releasing Emerillon 0.1 for distributions eager to package.

Mandatory Greyhound rant

With a 3 hour delay on departure (making a total of 5 hours of wait in Boston’s 10 ℃ station), we managed to arrive 5 hours late in Montréal, due to a defective heater in the bus. Add moving everyone at 5 AM from that defective ’70s bus to a freezing ’90s bus with actually less seats than the previous one, and the fact that there was enough people to fill 3 buses in Boston, but only 54 managed to leave on the first one and you’ve got a complete picture of the fiasco.

I am not going to run in too much details but all this could have been so easily avoided. The delays were due to the fact that the bus that was supposed to bring us had been delayed at the US border. Fine, shit happens. What is not fine is that they waited until our expected departure time to get a replacement driver (since he had busted his legal driving time). See, it takes about 5 hours from the border to Boston. Knowing he was going to be late (and therefore busting his hours), the driver should have called his manager, which should have prepared a replacement driver for the next departure in 10 hours! But none of that happened. And, to top it all, there were no Greyhound dispatcher to be called by the Boston station employees to inform them of a missing departure bus. Complete utter fail.

Emerillon 0.1.0 release

Now for the fun part. With all that time on hands, I created 2 new plugins for Emerillon (Copy a link of the current view to online maps, and display map position in statusbar) and cooked a release including all the 5 submitted translations. Woot! Grab the release here. This is a preview release with no guaranty on plugin API stability. See the complete announce email.

Before anyone asks, I am using the gnome-colors Shiki-Wize theme.

For those who missed the original announcement: Emerillon is a map viewer. Aiming at simple user interface, Emerillon is a powerful, extensible application. It features OpenStreetMap based
maps. Use it to browse maps, search the map for places, placemark places for later quick access and more!

There are even packages of this release for Ubuntu Hardy from Mathieu Trudel. See his blog of the install instructions.

4 Responses

Paul Johnson writes:

October 14th, 2009 at 22:32

You’re doing it wrong: Montreal and Boston are both served via Amtrak (or are easily booked directly via Amtrak in the case of a VIARail connection). Amtrak usually gets the job done on time or close to it, I’ve yet to see Greyhound less than 4 hours late for what should have been a 45 minute ride for me, and Amtrak’s a good deal cheaper than Greyhound.

Anonymous writes:

October 15th, 2009 at 5:23

Do you plan in the future to provide navigation, routing, and turn-by-turn directions in emerillon?

Guyou writes:

October 15th, 2009 at 7:56

“Copy a link” is a really interesting feature. Viking has such one. But we called it “Open into”, whose compute the URL and open it with xdg-open command.
See http://viking.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=viking/viking;a=commit;h=92806042fbacaadd1a9216d01c7b2503ede459af

Nowaday, I think I will do this with gtk_show_uri function.

But both system are useful for user (IMHO) as a single click is enough to open the “web service”.

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin writes:

October 15th, 2009 at 8:38

Guyou, oh I didn’t even know it existed elsewhere I admit opening the link instead of copy is useful, but I intended this feature for users to use it in instant messages and emails.

Anonymous: this is not planned in the short term, and if it is, it’ll be based on web services.