Mono « Andrew Jorgensen

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Hack Week Three

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

It’s been another exciting and worth while Hack Week. Sadly I had a number of high priority Mono updates to push to SuSE so I probably spent only about half of Monday through Wednesday hacking. Thursday through Saturday were spent at the Utah Open Source Conference (more on that soon). The real highlight for me was spending the week with Aaron Bockover, Hubert Figuiere, Sandy Armstrong, Gabriel Burt, Brad Taylor, Mario Carrion, Brian Merrell, and Jared Allen. Technically I’m not on their team(s) but they kindly let me bum rides off them and eat their snacks. Good times.

I’m really looking forward to new features for Banshee like the Muine -like interface and the new track editor. Good stuff happens at Novell. Seriously.

DigitalMe

My hack week project was to package DigitalMe and get it ready for distribution. DigitalMe is Novell’s Open Source, Open Standards, InfoCard (CardSpace) Selector, part of the Bandit Project. I am not the best person to ask but I think I can summarize it as like OpenID but you can also generate your own credentials. The project needed some help or it would not get into openSUSE 11.1 or SLE 11 so I volunteered my time. We’re almost there, but not quite. I will post a link to the package repository when it’s done and with some luck we’ll get it submitted to SuSE before feature freeze.

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gnome-keyring-sharp 1.0.0

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Of necessity I have decided to release gnome-keyring-sharp-1.0.0. The release is nothing more than r87622 from SVN.

Debian has been using r87622 as 1.0.0 for some time now and there have been no commits since October of 2007. openSUSE has been using a much older version (how old, I don’t know) but GNOME Do 0.6 will depend on gnome-keyring-sharp 1.0.

I don’t have any kind of change log to post since as far as I can tell there has never been a formal release.

gnome-keyring-sharp is a fully managed implementation of libgnome-keyring.

When the gnome-keyring-daemon is running, you can use this to retrieve/store confidential information such as passwords, notes or network services user information.

Sources are at http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/gnome-keyring-sharp/gnome-keyring-sharp-1.0.0.tar.bz2

My apologies to authors Alp Toker and Gonzalo Paniagua if I’m stepping on their toes. I did try to contact Alp last week to get him to sign off on this.

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Hack Week Two – Day 5

Friday, February 15th, 2008

Numbers dwindle at Hack Week on the 5th floor of Novell Provo

It’s been a good week. Reportedly last year’s Hack Week was more… enthusiastic. Hopefully this isn’t the last one. I got a handful of little things done and gave a shot at a couple of others.

Giver on Mono.Zeroconf

Giver, a simple file sharing application, was written against avahi-sharp for service discovery. This means it can only be used on a system that runs Avahi (which excludes SLED 10, Mac, and Windows). Using avahi-sharp can also be error-prone because you have to write your own event handlers and resolver thread. Aaron Bockover recently released a DNS-SD abstraction library called Mono.Zeroconf (which has actually been used for some time in Banshee). I ported Giver to Mono.Zeroconf. In theory this should mean that Giver can run on SLED 10 now and could be more easily ported to Mac and Windows. I’ll have a go at getting it to build on SLED 10 next week.

Tasky

Tasky is a simple task management app (TODO list) for the Linux Desktop and probably this year’s best hack week project. Aside from being a pretty sweet app it has a back-end to synchronize to Remember The Milk. Let it be understood that I am not claiming a developer role. I did the packaging for it, put it in the openSUSE Build Service, and got it ready for submission to SuSE for inclusion in future distributions.

Tomboy Remote

Wade Berrier has been working on an sqlite data-store for Tomboy (some of that work was already done). He got some criticism from a user who likes to look at his notes from the command-line while logged in remotely. I wrote a simple console application called tomboy-remote that can list and search your notes, show you a specific note, and allow you to safely edit a note. It should be trivial to add other features. Underneath it uses Tomboy’s D-Bus interface. This requires that Tomboy be running already but Boyd Timothy and I have talked about turning Tomboy into a D-Bus-activated service with a separate front-end.

Update: A short screencast is available.

Posted in Mono, Projects, Technology, openSUSE | 4 Comments »

Hack Week Two

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Hack Week Two
Novell’s second ever Hack Week
February 11 – 15

I didn’t get to participate in last year’s Hack Week because I was working in another part of the company at the time. This year I may get interrupted occasionally to help get Mono 1.9 out the door on time. In any case I may try to hack up an XRandR 1.2 preference management service for GNOME. I’d like my laptop to automagically switch to my desktop monitor when it’s plugged in, and ask me what I’d like to do if it doesn’t already know.

Update: Simon Holm Thøgersen wrote me to point out that Søren Sandmann is already well into this effort.

I had another idea for a virtual bluetooth keyboard (so that I could type at my N800 from my desktop) but that’s not as interesting now that I’ve got an N810. Maybe I’ll work on specs for a geo-location extension to XMPP instead? Aw nuts, that’s already in progress too!

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XPInstall for Plugins

Friday, November 16th, 2007

One of my first assignments on the Moonlight team was to create an installer for Firefox so that users would be able to click on a single link and have the plugin installed and working without having to restart the browser. Thanks to reasonably good documentation on Mozilla’s site the installer is done.

XPInstall actually provides you with two ways of installing add-ons (extensions, plugins, themes, etc.). The newer method uses an Install Manifest to describe the add-on. The older method uses an install script. We’d love to use the newer method but unfortunately it requires that the user restart the browser.

At first I got a lot of reports that, even using the older install method, people had to restart their browsers to get the plugin working, or at least open about:plugins. Turns out there’s a JavaScript method, refreshPlugins, to reload the plugins, and optionally to reload open pages (to load the content the plugin is supposed to handle).

The current status is that the installer works well for both the Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 profiles (without and with a CLR). Another cool thing to mention is that the current 64-bit 1.1 installer is under 7MB (compressed) without any real work on optimizing for size.

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Moonlight in Boston

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Last week I was in Boston to meet with the rest of the Novell folks working on Moonlight. The food was awesome, the city was awesome, the team is awesome, and the Red Sox are going to win the World Series.

Personally I worked on various issues related to having Moonlight run in your browser without needing root privileges to install it. Hopefully we can announce something about that soon.

I did get to do a bit of touring, including about half of the Freedom Trail and mass at the Old North Church (the one where they put the lanterns to warn of the British invasion). Later I met up with Jonathan, Andreia, and Everaldo. We ate at Dick’s Last Resort, looked at the harbor seals outside the New England Aquarium because $19 was a bit much for our taste (can’t expense that), and then tried to find Chinatown which was pretty anti-climactic. Probably that’s because it was Sunday evening. We had fun along the way.

It’s refreshing to finally be on the open source side of Novell. There’s a lot of passion, diversity, and talent and the atmosphere is different, more fun but that’s not precisely it. There are a lot of jobs (mine had become one of them) where you do what you’re asked to do because it’s your job and it’s best not to think about if you’d like to do it. There is some of that here but not so much.

Miguel de Icaza

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Andrew Jorgensen