Gnome

If anyone mentions Dropbox to me one more time, I will scream. I'm sure it's a wonderful solution, but I have deep misgivings about handing my data over to someone I don't trust. Besides, my synchronisation needs are not that complicated. Here are my high-level requirements: Two way synchronisation between multiple clients and a central server. Automatic syncs - no requirement for manual triggering. Graceful handling of network outages, suspends, etc. If using ssh, running from within my X session (so that it can access my ssh-agent) Some assurance that my data will not be passed to other people (e.g. by running everything on servers I control, or encrypting all the data with keys only I hold) Regular backups of the central data. ...

This weekend I've been messing about with gstreamer pipelines so that I can spam the world with YouTube videos. Go me! Let's see if it shows up on Planet Debian. Next weekend I'll be teaching my brother how to triage Debian GNOME bugs. :)

It turns out to be possible to persuade emacs and epiphany to play nicely together. Opening URLs in Epiphany from Emacs Sometimes Emacs presents you with clickable hyperlinks (in info documentation, perhaps). To customize the browser in which these are opened, I am using the following in .emacs: (setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-generic browse-url-generic-program "gnome-open") There are also specific epiphany-related functions, but I'm using the default gnome program for the moment. This can be configured via the default applications dialog. ...

Last night, I was granted permission to edit/close bugs on GNOME's bugzilla. Because of the logarithmic way in which the points system works, I now have three more bugzilla points than I did this morning. :)

My attempt to learn to use emacs continues. Today's discovery: I can enable emacs-like keybindings in GTK text fields (well, Readline-like) - this includes form fields in Epiphany. I have remapped C-w to backward-kill-word, to be more like Readline. I'm working up to writing some lisp to make common tasks easier... like writing blog entries, perhaps. I'll need to synchronize my .emacs files somehow... but I need to make more of an effort to use emacs over vim at work.

Oh Pete, I deliberately didn't use your name because I wasn't attacking you in particular; I was aiming at the completely misleading article whose pagerank you (and Digg) increased to the point where it achieves higher results in searches for "XDS drag and drop" than the XDS specification itself. Please don't take it personally. Of course, you still fail utterly for not providing any explanation of why you were so pleased to have this feature in your original post, and for not linking to, say, the GNOME 2.20 release notes, the relevant bug, or just writing something that won't feed anti-GNOME trolls for the next five years. But I'm glad to see that I've at least provoked the former, even if you also called me an ass at the same time. :) ...

Recently, people linked to a random news site claiming GNOME has added "XDS support" in 2.20. XDS is an extension to the XDND drag-and-drop protocol. This is very misleading. The headline reads as if GNOME has not had any drag-and-drop support until now, which is ridiculous. The Digg headline was even worse: "GNOME Gets Real Drag n' Drop Support with XDS". Bullshit. What actually happened is that Nautilus (the GNOME file manager) has received a patch to support this extension in the main window bit. It will probably help File Roller act more intuitively with respect to dragging files to Nautilus windows, and it is a good thing. It won't work with Nautilus's list view, yet. It is also possibly the least interesting of the new features in GNOME 2.20. It deserved one sentence tagged on to the File Roller bit of the release notes. I am not going to "scream with joy". ...

This evening, I have been made acutely aware that the gnomevfs Python bindings lack up-to-date documentation. Gnome-VFS is a pain to use anyway, but not having a complete reference manual is a bit of a problem. One of the projects with quite a bit of buzz at GUADEC this year was GVFS. It's going to fix all the bugs in Gnome-VFS, and make our lives much happier. It'll be based upon FUSE... so, a very Hurdish approach. In fact, it will probably get ported to Hurd translators, which will be quite fun. ...