I’ve been having issues with Google Talk for some days now.  At first, I didn’t bother to look for the source of the problem, but right now I can’t event see all my online contacts (and that’s no mater which Open Source IM client I use).

I’ve started telepathy-gabble with debug to get the right error message:

<error code=”500″ type=”wait”><resource-constraint xmlns=”urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas”/><text xmlns=”urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas”>Too many stanzas sent per day.</text></error></iq>’

It all looks like my account had been suspended for sending too many messages but it isn’t the case.  It is funny because empathy was giving me “Messages is too long” error messages and pidgin was saying “Unauthorized”.

So where’s the problem? Did my account get high jacked to send spam? are there issues with the Google Talk XMPP servers (I recall people having issues yesterday)?

I think the utilmate solution will be to just create an account on a real XMPP server and drop Google Talk at once.

Update: problem solved, the service is back to normal.  Go figure what happened!

This Arstechnica article is quite interesting…

Also, NPAPI support is already in the Gecko web rendering engine.

I’d like to correct a perception here: NPAPI plugins are supported in QtWebKit (current SVN and future releases) and WebKitGtk.  In fact, Marc Ordinas i Llopis made it work months ago!

Alberto, starting from your prototype UI, I let my mind free.  I think the flow feels simpler, and it is less cluttered to the eye.  Since all lists are searchable, I removed the search area.  I moved the buttons under the font list because I think that we always select a font in this order: Font face, font weight and style, then size.

I still think we might need more labels to explicitly tell the user what is listed in the font list.  This version also has the advantage that if a font name is too large, you can always resize the window.

Anyway, that was my 2 cents I am no HIG specialist.

1. refactor existing code (commenting out lines that I plan to remove). Check that it works. Commit.
   
2. cut commented code. Check that it works. Commit.

That’s a feature I was missing in Gedit: the ability to quickly switch from the header file (e.g. a .h file) to the body file (e.g. a .cpp file) and vice versa.  So I wrote a plugin!

See the plugin’s page for details.

Got a question on IRC today about the licensing of a specific file in GStreamer CVS, as it was under a MIT license instead of the LGPL license. While we strive to keep our licensing simple by making all new code LGPL or in some specific cases dual licensed, there are a few cases where we got code which is under the MIT or BSD license. This create a situation where we have some files in a directory under the LGPL while others are MIT for example. While I think he have kept things on an even keel within GStreamer, I have noticed that there is a lot of confusion in the open source community in general, about how you deal with MIT and BSD code in a GPL/LGPL context. In some extreme cases I have even seen people just cut’n pasting the MIT code into their GPL project believing that the MIT ‘do what you want license’ includes the right to relicense the code. It does not.

Anyway, to clear up the details for myself I contacted Luis Villa to get some help understanding some of the possible corner cases. Luis then pointed me at this great resource from the Software Freedom Law Center for understanding how MIT and GPL code can co-exist in your codebase. I absolutely recommend reading over this to better understand the implications.

Seems lots of users are complaining about the lack of supported protocols in Empathy. In fact all protocols implemented in libpurple are easy to enable with empathy thanks to telepathy-haze. All you need is a .profile file describing some features, the icons to use, etc.

So I’m adding those profiles by default now but I need some info about protocols I never used myself: gadugadu, myspace, qq, sametime, simple, snpp, zephyr.

1) I need to know yes or no those features are supported:

• chat-p2p - Private chat.
• chat-room - Chat with multiple users, the XMPP/IRC way, not MSN-like which is private chat where we can invite more members.
• chat-room-list - List public rooms on a server, like XMPP/IRC do.
• voice-p2p - Private audio call
• contact-search -
• split-account - account are in the form of user@server.com, in that case the “@server.com” can be omitted and replace by a default value. For example gtalk profile have that feature so you can type “myaccount” and it will be translated magically to “myaccount@gmail.com”
• registration-ui -The possibility to register a new account on the server, like XMPP.
• supports-avatars - Does contacts have avatars, can I set my own avatar.
• supports-alias - Does contacts have alias, can I set my own alias.
• supports-roster - Is there a list of contacts for that protocol?
• video-p2p - Private video call

2) For protocols having split-account feature I need to know the default domain to use. For example the gtalk profile says to use “@gmail.com” if the user didn’t type his full ID.

3) For each of those presence I need to know yes or no they are supported by the protocol:

• offline - obvious
• available - when you are online, ready to chat
• away - when you are af, automacitally when you don’t touch your computer for a while
• extended-away - whn you are afk for a long tim, automatically set when you are away for a while
• hidden - You are online but don’t want others to know that
• do-not-disturb - You are working on other things and don’t want to chat

4) What is the name I should display for qq and xnpp?

If you are able to answer those questions please let a comment or send me and email.

Thanks.

Lots of things is happening recently on the empathy front:

• Empathy is now officially the IM client of GNOME 2.24!
• The ubuntu desktop team considers Empathy to replace pidgin by default for intrepid. I think OpenSuse is investigating too.
• Empathy 2.23.6 got released. Note the version is now 2.x as we now follow GNOME versioning.
• I upated the roadmap.

Some time ago I blogged about cdparanoia switching from GPLv2 to LGPLv3 on our request. After that time we have been discussing in the GStreamer community about licensing and what is the exact and implicit licensing promise we are and have been making with GStreamer. The conclusion was that since the LGPLv3 is more restrictive than the LGPLv2 we do not want LGPLv3 dependencies in gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-base. As mentioned before we always tried to be very serious and coherent with our licensing in GStreamer and suddenly reducing the rights we offer application and plugin developers is not something we feel should be done without very good reason. This is a policy I hope also other important libraries decide to follow, personally I would think it would be a very sad thing if Glib and Gtk+ for instance started taking away rights from their users without a very well reasoned explanation.

Luckily Monty is a very kind soul, and starting from yesterday there is a new version of cdparanoia III out, 10.1, which is dual-licensed under the LGPLv2 and the GPLv2. So even in the future there will be cdripping support offered in GStreamer gst-plugins-base package.
So go to the cdparanoia download page and get yourself this minty fresh version of cdparanoia. We recommend distributions to update to this version as soon as possible to ensure there are no licensing conflicts in their distribution.

I was watching The Daily Show yesterday and Seth Rogen was on as the guest. For those who doesn’t know him, he is a comedian who has starred in movies such as Superbad, Knocked up, Pineapple Express and the upcoming Kevin Smith movie ‘Zack and Miri Make a Porno’. Anyway when listening to him it struck me that I had heard that exact voice and accent somewhere else recently. Then it struck me, vocally Seth Rogen and our own Luis Villa are identical twins. So if you are doing a podcast and Luis is not available for an interview take comfort in knowing you can hire Seth Rogen to do the interview instead and nobody will know the difference.

Here's a script I use to speed up compilation at work. Since I work at Collabora, I call it collaboratively. It's a prefix to a command (used in the same way as sudo or nice) which sets up icecc (Icecream) and ccache to work nicely together.

#!/bin/sh
# ~/bin/collaboratively
# Typical usage: collaboratively make check
PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:/usr/lib/icecc/bin$(echo :$PATH | sed -e s@:/usr/lib/ccache@@g)
export PATH
MAKEFLAGS='-j -l3'
export MAKEFLAGS
exec "$@"

Some more explanation of what it does:

• First, I want the gcc wrappers (actually symlinks to ccache) in /usr/lib/ccache to be invoked. This uses ccache to make sure I don't actually recompile source code that hasn't changed.

• Next, I want to use icecc, which distributes builds around the office. We run an icecc scheduler on the office server, which also contributes two CPU cores and lots of RAM to the compilation effort.

• To prevent infinite recursion between icecc and ccache, I have to make sure ccache isn't in my $PATH for a second time! My bash and zsh dotfiles automatically set up ccache, so in practice it does need editing out.

• When distributing builds, make should be parallelizing as many compiles as feasible - I use the flags -j -l3 to run an unlimited number of parallel compilation processes, but stop when the load average reaches 3 (the number of CPU cores I have, plus 1, seems a reasonable maximum load-average).

apt-get install icecc-monitor and run icemon to see whether this is all working - if it is, you should see compile jobs going off to other hosts.

One of the tasks we gave Sebastian Dröge when he joined us here at Collabora Multimedia was to make sure we had a decent deinterlacer plugin in GStreamer. There had been a plugin in bugzilla for quite some time which contained some code culled mostly from the tvtime application by Billy Biggs. I had spent quite some effort back in the day tracking down the needed people to relicense that code to the LGPL, but it still needed quite some work to be functional. Sebastian has been cleaning up the code and also ported all assembly code in there to C so that it works on all platforms (the assembly code is still in place for relevant platforms). The code for this ‘deinterlace2′ plugin is in gst-plugins-bad currently where Sebastian is fixing up the last niggling issues. But for the adventurous the code can be grabbed from CVS. Below are two screenshots showing a interlaced video with and without the use of the deinterlace2 plugin.

So here is a screenshot using a playback pipeline with the deinterlacer plugin inserted:
gst-launch filesrc location=clip.vob ! decodebin2 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! deinterlace2 ! xvimagesink

And here is the same clip using a pipeline without the deinterlacer:
gst-launch filesrc location=clip.vob ! decodebin2 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

The clip isn’t of the best quality to begin with, but it was the only one I found with interlacing on my disk. But if you click in and look at the two pictures you do very clearly notice the interlacing creating a jagged look of the second image.

This new improved deinterlacer should be very useful for some DVD’s and DVB transmissions, so once we get this fully integrated both DVD watching and DVB watching in Totem should be a very nice experience.

After getting a lot of updates on the GStreamer DVD menu support bugzilla entry, I figured it was time to make sure Jan Schmidt got some well deserved credit for the work he is doing getting the GStreamer DVD support fixed. Up to know people have had two choices for GStreamer based DVD playback, either Seamless which is a stand-alone DVD player, or using Totem. However the DVD playback you got in Totem using GStreamer up to know has been fairly basic, without DVD menu support for instance. With Jan’s ongoing work on his new resindvd plugin we are on the way to having full featured GStreamer-based DVD playback in Totem.

The resindvd plugin currently resides in plugins-bad, and Totem will automatically use it if you have it installed (and do not have the dvdnav plugin installed). Below is a screenshot of Totem displaying a fully functional DVD menu using the new resindvd plugin.

Only hick up I had was that was something weird happening in the Pulseaudio sink, so in the end I had to kill Pulseaudio to get audio to work when playing DVDs.

So if you like me are very excited about this stuff Jan is doing be sure to test it out and file bug reports if any of your DVD’s fail to work properly. You can also ping thaytan on IRC and tell him you will get him a beer at the next free software conference he attends

Everybody have heard that WebKit is the new cool kid.  Here is one reason: it is rather easy to hack on.   My colleague at Collabora, Siraj Razick, mixed up QWebView and QGraphicsItem to allow developers to put the Web inside a QGraphicsScene.  As he demonstrates, you can do crazy graphics with that.

From there, I went to look at how we can implement the same behaviour we have in one of the popular mobile browser these days.  Here’s the result: stefani.ogg (Stefani is the name of our hacking app).

In this video, you can see that each time I click on a paragraph, its content is zoomed to fill the screen.  If you click again, you get back to the full page view.  At all time the page is live and active (it isn’t a static image), although that can prove to be an issue (like mistakenly clicking on a link while in full page view).

You can try it if you want, just keep in mind that this is a quick prototype and it doesn’t really support scrolling yet.  The code is here: http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/pierlux/stefani.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/pierlux-zoom 

Now more details on how this works: on double click, I do a hitTestContent() at that position.  With a patch we wrote, you can access the HitTest’s bounding box.  That is how I determine on what to zoom.  After that, it is simple mathematics, signals and QTimeLines.

Granted this method is rudimentary and does not always gives the best result, it works with patched current available API.  A more elegant solution (which we may write in the future), would be to use a DOM API and access the node that was clicked on.  From there, you could go up the DOM tree and see if a particular div would be more interesting to zoom on  (ie, if a <p> tag is contained in a <div>, zoom on that <div> might also contains the title of the paragraph).  But first, we have to write that Qt DOM API :).

I guess I am not the only one to try out Pitivi from time to time to check its progress. Edward has been working on Pitivi, GStreamer and Gnonlin for quite a few years now, but of course urgent tasks at work has tended to take presedence of course, leading to a pace of development which hasn’t always been blazing. But a lot of things seems to be coming together these days. When  I checked out SVN head of Pitivi today I had a much better experience than before as almost everything I tried work fine for me. I was able to import both an AVI and a MP4 file into Pitivi and easily trim of some uneeded stuff of the clips. I was also able to output them in nice looking Ogg files using Dirac video. All this worked without any hickups on Pitivi’s side. I tried both using Vorbis and FLAC for audio output. Vorbis worked perfectly, but FLAC had some issues with audio/video syncronisation. This is probably caused by a GStreamer bug as embedding FLAC in an Ogg file together with video hasn’t really been widely tested up to now. Sebastian Droge is on the case so hopefully it will be sorted soon

But in addition to having reached a point where it has a stable foundation things have also started to pick up pace for Pitivi on the developmer side of things. With two Google Summer of Code students and multiple other community developers starting to dive into the code there is a good chance for Pitivi starting to take much bigger leaps in functionality between releases going forward.  My hope at this point is that we can offer a version of Pitivi by Christmas which contains most of the functionality the hobbyist want. So you can edit your Christmas recordings using Pitivi.

Anyway, if you are interested in Pitivi development the best place to keep abreast of things are of course #pitivi on irc.freenode.org.

Screenshot of our editing friend:

Stuart: Pierre-Luc Beaudoin and Alp Toker implemented video support in WebKit GTK using GStreamer months ago, but probably (I never tried it) it needs some more love before being fully working.

When you use a VCS that makes it easy to manage several braches, it’s easy to get conflicts in the .list file used to generate the C marshallers. I recently fixed this problem in WebKit stealing some code used at least by various Telepathy components and by avahi-gobject, and I want to share the solution so every project can benefit from it.

First of all you have to open your Makefile.am and move the myproject-marshal.list file from EXTRA_DIST to BUILT_SOURCES and add somewhere in the file:

myproject-marshal.list: $(myproject_SOURCES) Makefile.am
        ( cd $(srcdir) && \
        sed -n -e ’s/.*myproject_marshal_([[:upper:][:digit:]]*__[[:upper:][:digit:]_]*).*/1/p’ \
        $(myproject_SOURCES) ) \
        | sed -e ’s/__/:/’ -e ‘y/_/,/’ | sort -u > $@.tmp
        if cmp -s $@.tmp $@; then \
                rm $@.tmp; \
        else \
                mv $@.tmp $@; \
        fi

Then remember to remove the myproject-marshal.list file from your VCS (svn/git/hg/bzr rm).

The code will search for all the functions looking like myproject_marshal_RETTYPE__ARG1TYPE_ARG2TYPE and generate the myproject-marshal.list from them, regenerating automatically the list when you change a signal signature.

Update: fixed the blackslashes in the code that were misteriously eaten by WordPress.

So my mother has been visiting this week for the first time since I moved to Cambridge. Her trip here is actually quite a big step for her as its the first time she has really travelled since she had her brain surgery some months ago. And while she is still struggling somewhat with anxiety attacks I think the change of environment has been good for her.

Anyway, as part of her visit I took here into London last evening to watch Mamma Mia the musical at the Prince of Wales theater close to Leicester Square. I think it was the first musical I have seen live since I saw Phantom of the Opera as a kid. I actually ended up enjoying the show quite a lot and while I would think the cast might be a little tired of doing the show at this point it didn’t come through at all. Instead they seemed very enthusiastic and energetic. I was positively surprised how they had managed to tie the various ABBA songs lyrics together into a relatively coherent narrative.

So while I do not see myself becoming a regular on the London musical theatre track I do suggest that anyone who has family visiting them in the UK might consider a trip to the London West End as a good way to entertain their guests.

I'm going to the Cambridge Folk Festival this coming long weekend (Thursday 31st July–Sunday 3rd August). The person I was camping with is probably not going to make it, having just had an operation; does anyone want her ticket? The face value is a hundred British pounds; she'll take substantially less. Let me know by the medium of your choice if you're interested!

So a little later than ‘everybody else’ I am now back from Turkey. Wim and I had both decided we needed some vacation and since we where going to Turkey for GUADEC it would be a great opportunity for us to travel around and see the area. Our original plan included climbing Mount Arrarat and visiting Georgia and Armenia, but trouble getting climbing permit combined with some german tourists getting kidnapped on Mount Arrarat by Kurd sepratists got us to adjust our plans. We ended up instead travelling down to cities such as Urfa (Edessa) and Harran, spending some days in Cappadocia and finally visiting Pamukkale and Ephesos. Had a blast of a time although Wim seemed a little less enthusiastic about females of the Korean and Taiwanese variety than me. Could of course just be that ‘Hello Kitty’ panties fail to get his sap boiling

For anyone travelling to Turkey I think spending 2-3 days in Göreme is an absolute must. It is a charming backpacker town with a lot of the hotels carved out of volcanic rock. A little gimmicky in the sense that the locals no longer live in the rocks for the most part, but the area is something which just have to be experienced.

Although we enjoyed the food I think it is safe to say that neither myself or Wim will be eating salad with cucumber and tomato, sprinkled with a little lemon anytime soon. 10+ days in a row is enough for a while

One thing I started wondering about while travelling around was the enormous expectations by local people for what an EU membership would mean for the people of Turkey, ranging from the EU solving all minority rights issues for Kurds, Armenians and Alavis, west European living standards and salaries for everyone, to solidifying Turkeys secular traditions. While the EU will for certain help push Turkey in the right direction on these issues, I can’t help but wonder if a future EU membership for Turkey might end up being a big lettdown compared to the expectation level I experienced.

Doesn’t this look like the GUADEC t-shirt?

GUADEC was great and talks turned out to be more interesting than what I was expecting after all the decadence discussions, this is also proved by the fact that I managed to stay awake during all the talks despite having a party every day . Being in an awesome city with wonderful food[2] helped a lot for the final result, this is why I’m so happy that Gran Canaria was chosen for the next GUADEC.

In Istanbul I finally met other people working on WebKit or on related projects and had a chance to discuss with them about the future development of WebKit. While meetings on IRC are useful and allow you to talk with people from everywhere, real life meetings give you a much more efficient channel of communication: how about a hackfest for people working on WebKit, FireFox and desktop programs using them?

[1] Actually I came back to Cambridge ten days ago but, as usual, I fail at writing blog posts at the right moment, I wanted to write this on Sunday but my flight was moved to Monday and then real life started again. [Insert here other childish excuses for being so lazy]
[2] I’m already experimenting some Turkish recipes, Collabora people in Cambridge should expect a Turkish dinner really soon.

On September I finish my studies of computer science, so I start to search a job. I really enjoyed my current job at Collabora maintaining Empathy, I learned lots of things about the Free Software world and I would like to keep working on free software related projects if possible. My CV is available online here.

Do you guys know any company around the free software and GNOME looking for new employees? You can contact me by email to xclaesse@gmail.com

I am complete back in sync with my time zone now, I can write about GUADEC :)  It was my first GUADEC ever, and my second conf ever (the first being the excellent FOSDEM).  It was wonderful, I met lots of nice people and learned a lot.  The most promising projects I’ve seen were libcanberra (new sound library), Soylent and Banshee (I hadn’t tried the 1.0 release yet).

I seem to always be a bit depressed the first week after a conf.  As one of my fellow traveler said, it is as if we were in a summer camp for a week: living close, eating, traveling, doing all together… no wonder I feel a little depressed back home!

Istanbul was unbelievable.  It holds so much history, more than I even expected.  The food was exquisite, in all the restaurants I’ve been.   The language was too bad, given that I had a small handbook and barely left the tourist neighbourhood. I certainly plan to visit more of Turkey someday.  You can see my pictures here.

(Part 1 of an ongoing series: shiny things in telepathy-glib)

16:46 < epmf> tp-glib is made of magic

—#telepathy, 2008-04-15

Rob pointed out today that I'd been promising to blog about telepathy-glib for several months and still haven't done so. I think there's too much to cover in one blog post, so I'll start with the oldest part - implementing a service (typically a Telepathy connection manager).

While telepathy-glib is (obviously) intended for Telepathy implementors, I think the ideas we've been implementing are likely to be useful for any D-Bus API, particularly flexible/complex APIs where an object implements many interfaces.

Some background: service-side code generation

(credit: daf)

Supporting D-Bus in the GObject world has always involved quite a lot of code generation. The core API of dbus-glib is heavily reliant on varargs functions, which aren't type-safe and are easy to get wrong.

dbus-glib contains a program called dbus-binding-tool, which is meant to generate reasonably sane GObject APIs for D-Bus objects. Unfortunately, it seems to be intended to generate a whole GObject at a time.

Early versions of telepathy-gabble used dbus-binding-tool plus a script called gengobject.py to generate API stubs for the exported objects; developers then filled in the blanks, and hey presto, we had a GObject on D-Bus. This was fine up to a point, but had a couple of major drawbacks.

Whenever we changed the D-Bus API (quite common during the early development of Telepathy), there was a very laborious and error-prone merging process. We ended up with the following process:

• copy the D-Bus introspection XML from the telepathy-spec repository into a directory xml/pristine (actually, the canonical form for the spec was Python for a while, and we had a script that exported a contrived object onto D-Bus and introspected itself to get the XML - but that's another story!)
• preprocess the introspection XML to add the dbus-glib CFunctionName annotation, resulting in a directory xml/modified
• run dbus-binding-tool and a Python script gengobject.py to generate C source in xml/src
• three-way-diff the old version of xml/src, the new version of xml/src, and the real C code in src to create a new version of src
• pray that the diff process hadn't randomly exchanged functions' implementations
• update the resulting code in src so it worked
• check the whole mess back into darcs
• hope that nobody else had made changes that would result in darcs conflicts

If you haven't yet gathered, this was a bit of a nightmare.

Also, it was very easy to return the wrong thing from a method without noticing - because all the APIs were varargs, the compiler didn't notice, and the first we'd know about it was a mysterious segfault under certain circumstances.

commit 355ef78d98d6fc65715845d56232199162cab12a
Author: Steve Frécinaux <steve istique net>
Date:   Thu Aug 17 11:48:20 2006 +0200

    Interface support for bindings.