The place is great and even thought quite warm, it is very windy so you don’t feel it much.  Has anyone been able to add Las Palmas (and get weather) to the Gnome Clock? It seems to be in the location.xml, but not showing up when typing.

I’d like to kudos the swchag selection: useful stuff that can have multiple reuse! Not to point fingers at LCA, but I didn’t need 2 rubik cube of different sizes conference branded (but it came in a linen bag!).

Any how, I am giving a talk tomorrow (Sunday the 5th) with Henri Bergius about the Location aware desktop. Don’t miss it 11:30, Room 2 “Cámara”.  The slot is quite short so don’t really expect demos Who needs demos when you can try it by yourself!

You shouldn’t miss either of the 9 talks Collaborans will be giving during GCDS: Sumana (our project manager) prepared an extensive list.

Make it happen here: http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/vote.php?id=13

Photo (cc) by caribb: a typical sight during elections in Montréal, Québec.

It is my first participation in a such an online election, non national election.  Of course I am exited to be part of it.  Unfortunately, electronic voting makes a quite boring “Election’s night”.   I am used to the 3 or 4 hours of febrile waiting before the people’s choices are announced.  Where are the exit polls?

It took quite a lot of time to finalize it because we were quite busy and quite frankly while this is sexy, it isn’t a very important feature in Empathy :-).  In the following screenshots, you’ll discover that things have changed a lot since the original announcement.

First of all, the markers now include more information about the contact.  This uses the new markers in libchamplain.  It works nice for now (as I only have 3 or 4 contacts publishing their location), we’ll see with usage if the markers are just too big.

The map is now interactive: right clicking on a contact will bring up the same context menu you get on the contact list.

The Preferences UI was reworked to be simpler.  The previous UI left space for an hypothetical Manual address mode which was dropped.  The rationale is that Empathy shouldn’t have to care about addresses.  If you want to change the address, change it in Geoclue.

This is new since January: the tool tip now include your contact’s geolocation information.  This is the only part of all the geolocation changes that are present even if you don’t build with Geoclue or libchamplain.  It was impossible to display a map there as ClutterGtk doesn’t seem to like such windows hehe. We already know it is partly ugly and contains duplicate information It will be improved before final release.

Finally, the contact information dialog now displays a map and the detailed information about the contact’s location.

Don’t miss the FAQ that I populated with questions I was often asked during development.  Report bugs on the Geolocation component of Empathy (you can also see that we have work left to do).

I am not the only one who worked on this exiting feature, here are the details:

• Alban Crequy worked on the XMPP support and reviews;
• Dafydd Harries did the early work on the XMPP support;
• Guillaume Desmottes wrote the XMPP PEP code (the same used for OLPC) and reviewed the code;
• Pierre-Luc Beaudoin did the UIs, the libchamplain and geoclue integration and pursued the XMPP support;
• Xavier Claessens reviewed many times.

I can’t wait to see more people using this and show up on my map!

I started the project only last Monday night, but you can already do this with it:

• See your current address and postion according to Geoclue
• List installed providers and their provided services
• Set an address on the Manual provider
• Set the address for the current network on the Localnet provider
• List previously configured addresses in the Localnet provider

Just the last items save the user of having to use dbus-send incantations.   For the screenshot lovers, here’s your dose.

The project is still quite embryonic.  It is my first attempt at using Python for such a task and I lack knowledge (and quite frankly time) on how to create the project’s infrastructure (almost as if I am missing autotools — scary!).  If someone is willing to contribute that or point me the doc I’d appreciate!

Try it!

The problem resides in OpenSSL’s license which requires :

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
must display the following acknowledgement:
“This product includes cryptographic software written by
Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)”
The word ‘cryptographic’ can be left out if the routines from the library
being used are not cryptographic related :-).

and (because of its dual license)

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
software must display the following acknowledgment:
“This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project
for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/)”

This requirement as been marked as GPL incompatible.  Therefore, any GPL application using it is in license violation. While the OpenSSL FAQ stipulates that you can use it with GPL applications, this opinion is not shared by everyone. This is a quite big unadvertised licensing problem.

Now, I am not a lawyer but I can point to some existing solutions to this problem:

1. Fix Python to not use such a poisonous (to GPL) licensed library.
2. Do not use Python’s SSL code and use other implementations such as python-gnutls.  This solution less appealing as replacement libraries often don’t completely cover python’s API.
3. Relicense your GPL application to “GNU GPL  with the OpenSSL special
   exemption.” (as wget did) and add mentions to OpenSSL in your advertising materials. This solution is sometimes hard to implement as you have to contact all past contributors.

• Support for proxies
• Support for custom map sources
• A way to list the available map sources
• Support for 2 new built-in map sources: Cycle Map and Osmarender
• A bunch of new function to allow more control on the UI
• A nicer, more flexible Marker API
• Nicer default markers: they are now grey, have rounded corners and cast a shadow!
• Notification when the view is loading content and when it’s done
• Support for locking down available zoom levels
• A more intelligent cache that can be purged
• Bindings (in the works): Perl, Python, C# and C++

Of course being a development release, the API isn’t entirely stable yet.  For instance, the code surrounding the ChamplainMapSourceDesc introduced this weekend is subject to be reviewed in the next weeks.

Yet, this release is a big step forward introducing a lot of the desired features while leaving some for an upcoming release (such as the ability to draw lines on the map).

You can grab the tarball or clone the source code.  You can read the NEWS or read about the API.

On a side note, libchamplain as been officially proposed as an external dependency for GNOME 2.28.

• Is my_object_get_type listing in the .types file?
• Is the section correctly identified in your doc and -docs.sgml?
• And today’s discovery: is your object struct declared as a typedef?

To make that last point explicit:

typedef struct
{
  GObject parent;
} MyObject;

will produce minimalistic documentation while

typedef struct _MyObject MyObject;

struct _MyObject
{
  GObject parent;
};

will produce complete documentation with properties, signals and object hierarchy.

Consider yourself warned!

ChamplainView is the map view that displays the map.  It needs a ChamplainMapSource from which it gets the map.  There are specialised objects that inherit from ChamplainMapSource such as ChamplainNetworkMapSource and the upcoming ChamplainLocalMapSource (or what ever it will be named by the end of the SoC).

champlainNetworkMapSource* champlain_network_map_source_new_full (const gchar *name,
    const gchar *license,
    const gchar *license_uri,
    guint min_zoom,
    guint map_zoom,
    guint tile_size,
    ChamplainMapProjection projection,
    const gchar *uri_format);

As you don’t want to fill all this information each time you create a new map source, libchamplain currently provides helper constructions:

ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_mapnik (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_cyclemap (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_osmarender (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_oam (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_mff_relief (void);

We think it could be interesting to replace these by a Factory to which you pass an enum value to get the constructed ChamplainMapSource.  You would probably be able to add your own map source constructor (as you can implement your own map sources).  You would probably be able to get the list of available map source too.

The question is: is this overkill? the best way to do it? is there something similar in glib or gtk to get inspired from? We base most of the API decisions by looking at other Gtk+ widgets, but this particular object seems to be a different case.

We are asking for your ideas.

First, you need a USB key.

Then, you use unetbootin to flash a copy of FreeDos to your key.  You can use the built-in FreeDos distribution.

Download the BIOS flashing utility from your motherboard manufacturer and put it on the USB key.

Reboot your computer and force it to boot from the USB key.

On the FreeDos boot menu, select Live CD.

At the A:\> prompt, enter b: then Enter.

You will now have access to the files contained on your USB key.  Follow your manufaturer’s recommanded steps to flash your BIOS.

Who wants to give me a one-year subscription to last.fm? It is only 27 € (if you pay in US$).  My username is  plbeaudoin.

I am also open to suggestion for a free (as in speech) service that works as well as last.fm, has content and has built-in support in apps…

Update: Thanks to Benjamin Podszun for his gift! On a site note: last.fm, while I understand that the concept of subscription is new for you, the page describing the status of your subscription is 1) very hidden, 2) lacks details.

This functionality means a lot of possibilities for libchamplain: better accessibility, smaller bandwidth needs, smaller cache footprint, more context data and finally themable maps.  These can be very useful if you are running on different platforms such as Maemo 5 or a desktop: bigger fonts, more contrast, tango colors!

(oh and by the way, this is the new default markers: more on them in a later post)

Unfortunately, another very interestant SoC idea didn’t make it to selected list: a glib based OSM data API.  That would have made it very useful to access the downloaded data.  But hey, that will be for later!  Thanks to all the students that submitted a project idea on libchamplain

J’en suis venu à la conclusion qu’habiter là-bas aurait été bien - puisque de toute façon la météo est comparable à Montréal - mais seulement si ce n’était pas du temporaire.  Dans le fond, j’ai quitté ma routine pour aller y travailler pour 3 mois et j’avais hâte de revenir pour revoir mes amis et ma famille.  De plus, il y a des choses que je tolérais là-bas puisque je savais que c’était temporaire.  Par exemple, je n’aurais pas tolérer de ne pas avoir de bureau d’ordinateur où travailler (avec un écran plus grand que 12″) à long terme.

D’un point de vue échange culturel, la Finlande m’a beaucoup surpris.  Premièrement, le finlandais ne ressemble à aucune autre langue que je connais.  Heureusement, tout le monde parle anglais.  C’est une chose que j’ai encore plus apprécié après mon passage à Sankt-Petersburg où il était très très difficile d’obtenir de l’aide dans n’importe quelle autre langue que le russe.  Les goûts culinaires finlandais sont particuliers: pizza pêche-poulet-fromage bleu, boulettes de viande au jus de bettrave, le salmiakki ou poisson panné avec la peau en sont que quelques examples.  Mais après une petite indigestion la première semaine (qui s’apparantait à la tourista), j’y ai survécu.  Il y a même des endroits où on mange très bien - mon favori étant Zetor biensûr!

Comme j’avais plein de temps libre, j’en ai profité pour faire le tour de la mer Baltique.  Ainsi, j’ai visité Turku, Stockholm, Tallinn, Sankt-Petersburg et Porvoo.  Je serais bien allé à Riga, mais il n’y que des bateaux à partir de Stockholm.  Tout ça, tout en ayant la chance d’aller à Hobart en Australie pour assister à LCA et aller à Bruxelles pour assister à FOSDEM.  Disons que j’ai produit un peu trop de CO2 à mon goût.

Stockholm était magnifique alors que Sankt-Petersburg était extraordinaire: riches lieux et dépaysement culturel garantis.  Je regrette de n’avoir eu que quelques jours dans chaque de ces villes.

C’est triste de revenir ici où le service en transport en commun est déficiant.  À Helsinki, il y a autobus, tram, trains de banlieue, train interurbain à toutes les heures pour les 2 prochaines grandes villes et bateaux à l’heure pour Tallinn (en été).  Pourtant, Helsinki est une ville à peine plus grande que Québec!  Peut-être un jour aura-t-on des trams ici aussi.. vers 2020!

I’ve just tagged some bugs or enhancements with the gnome-love keyword.  If you ever wanted to contribute to libchamplain, I think these bugs should be rather simple to fix/implement.

In other news, I selected a list of bugs and features that needs to be fixed before a 0.4 release is made.   Such a release will happen before Gnome 2.28 as I plan to ask to be an external dependency (as Empathy, Eog-plugin and f-spot will have use for it).  The list of bugs is listed in on the mailling list.

Libchamplain is part of Gnome’s Google Summer of Code.  There are already some libchamplain ideas. These ideas are planned for 0.6 release, but the work need to start this summer! Students: apply!

Yes, you did read f-spot! Anders Mørk-Pedersen started a f-spot plug-in to display the geolocation information of your photos!  It even works with multiple selected photos.  Now the poor Anders is so busy with school that it is stuck in a demo state. Anyone interested to help should ping us about it!  libchamplain in f-spot was made possible by Stephane Delcroix’s hard work both to libchamplain’s bindings and clutter’s.

Along the python and managed bindings, perl bindings have been announced.  Emmanuel Rodriguez is writing them with support from the perl community. He’s also contributing unit tests in perl.  These have already proven to be quite useful!

Finally, I decided to give it a try and create a website and logo for libchamplain.  I quickly made the site by borrowing Cheese’s website hehe. The logo represents a jigsaw puzzle piece of a world map as libchamplain is a module to add to existing applications to add maps. I tried to tango-ify it as much my capabilities allow me, if you have a better touch here’s the svg.  Since I have so much use for The Gimp and Inkscape, I donated to the Libre Graphics Meetup!

That was a short résumé of what happened in libchamplain recently, excluding the 53 files changed, 3591 insertions and 1165 deletions.

Faites de même! (via Paypal)

(Not an actual screenshot, edited to remove non FOSS people)

Now, it is not as if I could be friend with them - after all I know their name/face because we attended the same conferences or read Planet Gnome.  I don’t want to be that excessive Facebook-friend-adder.  I personally draw the line by asking myself “Would that person know/remember who I am?”, therefore I try to only add people that I’ve talked with in real life.

Facebook chose the word Friend to identify the persons I allow to see my information.  It is a rather strong word because some of the people in my “friend” list are just acquaintances and they mix with my best friends!  Yet, they are people I’d like to keep informed about.

Thanks Facebook for forcing me to think about what defines friendship before breakfast

Pour commencer, il faut un visa pour entrer en Russie.  J’ai déjà eu besoin d’un visa pour la Turquie et l’Australie, alors je me disais que ça ne devrait pas être aussi compliqué pour la Russie. Erreur.  Il faut 10 jours, avec ton passeport à l’ambassade de Russie pour traiter la demande contrairement aux autres pays où le tout se faisait soit à l’arrivée, soit électroniquement par l’agence.  De plus, c’est nettement plus cher: 160 € pour moi et 60 € pour Alban.  La différence s’explique au fait qu’il est citoyen européen et moi canadien.

Deuxièmement, il faut réserver hôtel et trains. Il faut passer par une agence de voyage idéalement.  L’hôtel est en quelque sort responsable pour vous en Russie, elle étampe votre carte de frontière et vous donne un certificat prouvant que vous êtes bien son client (au cas où on vérifie vos papiers).

Dernièrement, il faut apprendre l’alphabet cyrillique.  La Russie sera le pays que je vais visiter qui a le moins de lettres communes avec le français, l’anglais ou l’allemand.  J’ai déjà débuté et ce n’est pas si pire.   Fait cocasse, j’avais prit le temps de traduire mon nom phonétiquement en cyrillique mais la version qui est sur mon visa est plutôt différente La prochaine fois, je suggérerai un orthographe héhé  Je suis Пйер-Люк Бодoн, plutôt exotique non?

Pendant mon voyage, je vais au moins essayer d’aller voir un ballet et de visiter les palais des tsars!  Vivement le 13 mars!

For the new readers, libchamplain is a Clutter based map displaying widget.  It intends to be a light embeddable map widget for all applications with nice eye candy.  For instance, the current API concentrates on how to draw markers and display maps rather than parsing raw GPX data.

Some days before FOSDEM, work started on libchamplain 0.3.  This version will be the development version leading to libchamplain 0.4 (kind of using the same numbering schema than Clutter).  Along with all the promised features (routes, custom map sources and being bindings friendly), this version will have a better code base.  It is already much cleaner than the 0.2 series, and yet a lot of work is left to be done.  I had written a MVC version of the code and I am slowly merging this work (from the MVC branch) back into master.  Also, one of the biggest change is that libchamplain and libchamplain-gtk are now under the same git tree.  Packagers will hate us a little now, but it should provide simpler to maintain in the future.  All bindings will also be under the same tree, in the bindings directory.

There is a new demo portraying an animated marker. See demos/animated-marker.c.

Anders Mørk-Pedersen has been around before FOSDEM working on managed bindings for libchamplain.  With Stéphane Delcroix special touch, they got them running.  They are merged, and I think, ready to be tested.  Now, I am not telling you yet what those bindings are going to be used for… 

Denk Padje offered his help working on the python bindings.  While we got somethings to generate, neither of us are python specialist.  We could use some help.  The branch is bindings-python.  Once the bindings are running, examples will be written.

Libchamplain could certainly profit from Google’s Summer of Code.  Ideas such as having map drawn locally from raw map data and supporting more map sources and map projections (at least one that doesn’t make Greenland the size of South America) will probably be added to Gnome’s pool of ideas.

Now that we have a mailing list, I think a proper web site should come next.  I would also like the project to have a neat logo.  But nothing too fancy as it is a library after all.  May be someone could come up with something like likes of Geoclue’s logo, but may be as a puzzle piece (clearly indicating that it is a library).  Also, I like the Tango colors

That’s it for Febuary.

À Stockholm, Gabriel nous attendait sur le quai.  On a fait un tour rapide du vieux Stockholm (Gamla Stan) et on est allé à l’hôtel déposer les sacs.  Ensuite, on s’est dirigé vers le parc thématique Skensa.  Sur la même île, il y avait le fameux musée du bateau Vasa.  C’est un bateau dont j’ai entendu parlé dans mes cours d’ingénierie, puisque le bateau a coulé quelques minutes après sa mise à l’eau, c’est une erreur à ne pas refaire!  Le bateau est très bien préservé, il a été entièrement plastifié après avoir été retiré de l’eau vers 1958.

Pour souper, on est retourné dans Gamla Stan où on a trouvé un restaurant avec spécialités suédoises.  Moi je voulais absoluement manger des boulettes.  C’était aussi un bar à scotch.  C’était en fait le seul endroit au monde où on peut boire un scotch Glenfiddich de 15 ans, directement du tonneau!  Laissez-moi vous dire qu’il est assez fort!  Je l’ai coupé avec pas mal d’eau.

Dimanche, on s’est levé trop tôt pour visiter le vieux quartier car la majorité des choses ouvraient à midi.  Alors on s’est rabattu sur le musée Nobel qui s’est avéré être très intéressant après tout.  Après cela, on est allé visiter une église, avant d’aller voir le changement de garde devant le palais.  La journée était déjà terminée, il fallait regagner le bateau pour Helsinki.

Sur le bateau, on est allé voir 2 films pour passer le temps.  Sur l’heure du souper, il s’est mit à venter beaucoup et le bateau brassait pas mal.  Ça m’a prit plus d’une journée pour arrêter de sentir ce mouvement lorsque je m’assoyais à table!

Je garde un très beau souvenir de Stockholm, dommage que je sois ici et non là-bas!

Les photos sont sur flickr, et elles sont presque toutes géotaggées.

Update: it turns out I forgot to mention that Rodney Dawes has worked on NPAPI plugins for WebKitGtk+ for months, but Marc completed the work, and ported it to Qt too.  Therefore, Rodney also deserves congratulations!

I have the impression that the talk was well received, it certainly boosted my interest into spending long nights infront of the screen pushing libchamplain forward much more!

All of the demonstrated code is already available.  For EOG plugin, see the EOG-plugins svn repo, a release should be available in the Gnome 2.28 timeframe.  For the Empathy Geolocation, it is available in my empathy repo, and the telepathy parts already have been released.  This feature should be merged first thing in the 2.27 development cycle, allowing a smooth testing period before 2.28.  As for Emerillion, it was the first public mention of this promizing application.  It shall be announced in a close future.

To make this presentation, I used clutter-toys/opt, a clutter based presentation tools.  The slides are defined in a xml file.  I enhanced it to support embedded maps.  So if you add the following xml code, you’ll have an interactive map of Brussels, with very usefull places marked, right into your slide! Grab the branch into my clutter-toys repo.

<map width="600" height="500" zoom-level="13" latitude="50.84" longitude="4.37">
      <marker latitude="50.842966" longitude="4.35153">Porte Noire</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.845127" longitude="4.349878">Mannequin Pis</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.848548" longitude="4.353633">Délirium Café</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.821391" longitude="4.39393">Université Libre</marker>
</map>