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

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.

(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

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.

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>

I am Pierre-Luc Beaudoin and obviously I’ve recently been added to Planet GNOME.  I am a software developer at Collabora in the Montréal office since I finished my studies in 2008. I have since then participated to WebKitGtk, QtWebKit and Telepathy/Empathy.  Most of my free time goes to my personal project: libchamplain - a map Gtk+ map widget (currently depending on Clutter for eye candy).  I hope this project will be embraced by the community, as a potential add-on to the desktop, answering to a specific problem almost untickled before.

My hobbies include improving OpenStreetMap’s map, photography, traveling, collecting small flags and learning German.

I was at linux.conf.au and I will be at FOSDEM 2009, don’t miss my talk “Bringing geolocation into GNOME“.

This feature allows you to publish your location (including complete address, latitude and longitude) to the contacts on your contact list only.  Of course, the level of detail can be tuned and limited.  The information is published using the XMPP protocol using XEP-0080.  To make a long story short, your XMPP server will need to support PEP.  Turns out that pretty much everyone but Google Talk supports it: you will still be able to receive your contact’s location, but your location won’t be published.

All clients implementing this XEP will be able to display your location.  Empathy will display your contacts location on a map using the map widget provided by libchamplain.

This feature will allow you to stay in touch with you friends, knowing where they are, and possibly, how late they’ll be at the restaurant!

Now the technical details. Upon startup, empathy will setup Geoclue to get your current position.  Geoclue will try to figure your location using all the resources you specified (among network, cell, GPS).  Upon connection, Empathy will send that information.

When you are receiving location information from your contacts, it will be stored until you decide to access that information.  Upon displaying the map view, if the information doesn’t contain a latitude and a longitude, Empathy will use Geoclue to geocode the user’s location.  Geocoding is converting a street address to a latitude, longitude pair.

Make sure you attend the “Bringing geolocation into Gnome” talk at FOSDEM 2009.

As the abstract states, if you ever wanted to work on a big project that still has a relatively understandable codebase, come and learn how you can participate! The talk will be very much about the WebKitGtk and QtWebKit ports, but it will cover all aspects of contributing to WebKit.

This release introduces small API additions from contributors and fix to 0.2.7’s changes.

Grab the release here.

Pictured above is the Map View plugin for EOG.

libchamplain 0.2.8 (2009-01-10)

Enhancements:

• Add a new constructor for ChamplainMarkers made of an image. (Lorenzo Masini)

Fixes

• Fix map recenter
• Fix licence hiding
• Fix map centering on startup

libchamplain-gtk 0.2.8 (2009-01-10)

Enhancements:

• libchamplain can now be installed in more exotic locations (Packz Enoch)

Now, who wants to write the code needed in F-Spot to display the pictures on a map with libchamplain? I can give help but C# isn’t my cup of tee (I am way too busy!).