Package management

I was just thinking about current status of package management and software installation/unistallation under the free desktop, and a "maybe stupid" idea came to my mind. I think that distros should start providing a dbus service concerning packages, so that the current desktop can easily interact with package installation and unistallation.

It would be in fact really nice to be able to drag and drop an application to the trash to unistall it completely. Or simply be able to install required dependencies from an installer file...

To be useful, this service should be able to provide informations about files and packages, as well as status about running tasks...

India

It has been almost 2 weeks that I am in India. This country is very surprising and very different from all hat I saw until now, it's raining the whole day, and at the same time it's hot. People here are very nice and very helpful but very lazy :)

This is also the most bureaucratic country I have seen until now, to get a phone prepaid SIM card you have to fill-in forms, attach your photo, sign everywhere, submit the form, and wait until it get processed... To open a bank account you need to fill a 8 pages form, attach your photo, sign everywhere, bring a recommendation letter from a bank client... I think that they like forms, signatures and xerox copies of passport in this country :D

I came to India to study for 1 year at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology of Bombay, and I was pleased to find that almost every computer in this institute is using free software, even in the administrations, a GNU/Linux system is there, and most of the time it is running the Gnome desktop. Maybe all developing nations should follow India's path in this domain, and make use of free software, my home country : Morocco is actually very bound to proprietary software, and this is too bad...

I had CS courses here, especially one about machine learning, and I started thinking about making use of it for the Freedesktop, I'll maybe write a paper about this once i get some free time.

Macbook and ubuntu on macbook

Last Monday I got my Macbook :) A really nice piece of hardware, i was surprised by the overall quality of it, as well as the quality of packaging (yes this is my first mac) The only glitch i have with its is that it overheats :s but anyway that's not a very big concern.
Yesterday, I installed Ubuntu GNU/Linux on this Macbook, that wasn't very complex (I am missing Gentoo already), now I'll have to copy over all my files from the desktop, and prepare my departure to India... yayyyyyy !!!

MSN connection manager

Didn't have much time to blog (nor to work on telepathy) this last week.

Currently we have a usable msn connection manager for telepathy as well as a better python msn library, this new library : pymsn (previously known as libivy) now makes use of glib signals and does integrate seamlessly with the glib main loop :)

Concerning the connection manager, it supports conversations and presence signaling and handling. and I am currently working on the implementation of avatar support :)

Cohoba connected to msn
 

Telepathy & msn

Yesterday i had the first running Msn connection manager for Telepathy, with the help of Telepathy guys i got both Tabby and Cohoba working with this Msn Connection manager :)
Now I am working again on libivy to bring back switchboard support (I removed it during the refactoring) let's hope that the connection manager will be ready by the end of the week :)

Telepathy & libivy

Those last days I have been working on Telepathy, a wonderful framework for IM, I am currently aiming to bring MSN (eurk) to this framework by using libivy.
Unfortunately libivy is no quite ready, and I had to refactor it in order to make use of glib instead of python's asyncore and asynchat :D the refactoring is alsmost done, and I'll be able to bring MSN to telepathy.

Exams... only one day left

Yesterday and today i was taking exams, yesterday's exams where quite easy for me, but today, Operating system Exam was damn hard, or rather damn stupid ... That exam was not really made to evaluate our knowledge about operating systems, but rather a way for the person who made it to brag about her knowledge, and make students feel stupid ... The questions were about some small implementation details, and were full of traps ... I hate this school, I really hate it, and I am happy I am going to leave to India next year :)

Gstreamer ... what's next ?

Currently audio and video players on the Linux Desktop are starting to embrace Gstreamer to deal with audio and video ... that's really a good thing that helps avoiding duplicated efforts, and that also helps focusing on enhancing things instead of reinventing the wheel ...
The next step, would be a unification of meta-data storage. This would greatly ease multimedia players development, as well as user experience, since meta-data could be shared between all players, and user won't have to re-import all his media file again ...

React & libxmpp

React, is a generic asynchronous IO library built around the Reactor pattern, currently it only support socket IO, but it will be handling more than that in the near future.

Libxmmp, is an xmpp client library, that is built on top of React, it's not very mature yet. but it's quite usable.

Last Thursday, I gave a presentation about React and libxmpp, the presentation was very short for such a complex project.

I spent my Saturday moving React from Make to SCons, but i am not yet very pleased with this. I think i will be moving to autotools.

Both library are MIT licensed. I'll be releasing them as soon as possible :) once cleaned up.

hello from gnome-blog

I just discovered gnome-blog (http://www.gnome.org/~seth/gnome-blog/) , and i am giving it a try.