My blogspace - Kjartan Maraas

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:02 -0400

Benoit, sorry for encouraging Mariano to release a fixed tarball for you. I should have waited until you could do it yourself, and I take full responsibility for bypassing you and not following due process.

The incentive was never anything but to have a working tarball in the 2.18.0 beta, so I hope we can still use the end result since the changes made were trivial and only affected docs.

Please reconsider banning the tarball, and again, sorry for the confusion :-)

Dear Spammer

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 19:55 -0400

This is your unique chance to prove for us that the spam prevention solution set up to protect my mail address here: kjartan.maraas@pilot.oslo.kommune.no is worth the cost.

If you want to do this for the rest of the mail addresses in that domain do not hesitate to contact me on the above mail address to get a copy of our mail address database.

Thanks kindly for all your help

Long time no blog!

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:27 -0400

Note to self: I really need to get my act together on the blog end and get myself set up with some software to help make it easy. If anyone sees a no.po file in GNOME CVS anywhere please lead me in the right direction so I can exterminate it for Joe's pleasure.

It's blogging time again...

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 18:59 -0400

So, four months passed and another release went out the door. I need to get into more regular blogging it seems. The real reason I'm writing this today is to get one of those fancy lookin' pirate adornments :-)

Started applying some patches for gnome-terminal this weekend and I was glad to see Dennis commited his HIGification patches too. They've been sitting in bugzilla for way too long. Also commited Alan Horkan's patch to free unused fonts early so on the whole gnome-terminal should be using less memory than ever in HEAD CVS.

On that note I think we really need to blow some life into the memory reduction work again, or at least do some publicity work since it seems to have slowed down a bit again. The wiki page is there and people should feel free to add tasks and thoughts there at any time. I think we're in better shape than ever though, so maybe that's the reason the effort seems to have been slowing down.

Going to go through bugzilla for the modules I'm involved with the most and make sure every UI and string related patch gets in early this cycle and I urge all maintainers to do the same. We've had string changes and HIG fixes sitting in bugzilla for many release cycles without getting them commited which is bad. I'm also going to drop off the all-bugs alias for a while since it's just way too much mail to handle and just becomes a time sink.

Building GNOME from CVS using jhbuild continued...

Sat, 28 May 2005 23:07 -0400

Got most of jhbuild running now but there are still problems:

- mozilla doesn't install the nss headers so I had to copy them from mozilla/public/nss and mozilla/private/nss to $(prefix)/include/mozilla-{$MOZILLA_VERSION}/nss to get evolution-data-server to build
- librsvg fails to build with gcc4 because of -Werror being set
- nautilus-cd-burner needs a patch to work with the latest HAL
this is available in the fedora core rawhide srpm
- gstreamer doesn't build with api docs
- gal doesn't pass make install because of some problem in with the api docs
- gal installs gal.pc but evolution is looking for gal-2.6.pc

Building GNOME from CVS using jhbuild

Sat, 28 May 2005 12:19 -0400

I've been trying to get a full jhbuild running for GNOME 2.12 lately and ran into a couple of problems which should be fixed now hopefully.

There are a few problems with building API docs here and there, and a couple of other issues that I have commited fixes for like broken translations and regular build fixes. Johan also commited a fix for jhbuild to use HEAD of hal and dbus for 2.12 and the stable branches for 2.10. Seems to be working just fine here at least.

I'll continue to work towards getting a full build running with no problems and file bugs against modules with problems and workarounds where I can find those.

Couldn't make it to GUADEC this year for various reasons, but I miss being there and look forward to seeing you all next time, if not earlier somewhere. Enjoy the conference! We'll be drinking beer Irish style agaian before you know it :-)

And the snow came late...

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 20:45 -0400

So it looks like the 2.8.3 release went mostly ok. The 2.10.0 work definitely rocks and the wiki is really alive and cooking these days.

After 2.8.x I've spent most of my time running valgrind on GNOME and it's looking good so far. A few leaks found and some other cases of bogus memory management fixed. I also started porting some pieces away from the deprecated widgets and doing general cleanups in various modules. There's a lot of cruft all over the place that should be excised.

On the topic of header includes - we have tons of files that do things wrong here. It would be nice if the coding style guidelines for GNOME said something about this in my opinion.
The de-facto standard seems to be to:

include <config.h> first in every C-file
avoid having <config.h> in other headers
start at the bottom of the stack when ordering includes

This gives something like what we see in GTK+:


#include <config.h>

#include <stdlib.h>

#include <string.h>

#include <glib.h>

#include <glib/gprintf.h>

#include <gobject/gvaluecollector.h>

#include "gtkalias.h"

#include "gtktreemodel.h"

#include "gtktreeview.h"

#include "gtktreeprivate.h"

#include "gtkmarshalers.h"

Also, I think it's mostly agreed on that including the specific header you need from a library is better than to include the catch-all headers like <gtk/gtk.h>, <libgnome/libgnome.h>, <gnome.h> and so on.
It definitely makes it clearer what parts of a library is being used in the file at least, which is a good thing when trying to port to newer widgets later on.

The sparsing, valgrinding and cruft-excising tour is coming to a module near you real soon now (tm)

Update

Sven Neumann pointed out to me that using the specific headers was ok within a library but that the catch-all headers are the documented way to use GTK+ at least. Thanks for that clarification.
The point I tried to make was that there's room for improvement when it comes to following *any* standard from what little I've seen in CVS.

Lock'an'loll!

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:38 -0400

Finally took the time to get GNOME 2.8.3 out the door. Not too far behind schedule this time either. It has a whole bunch of bug fixes in almost every module in there.

I also filed reports with the patches for vte from fedora in GNOME bugzilla so we have them archived. Put up a test tarball at http://www.gnome.org/~kmaraas/vte-0.11.12.tar.gz so please test that one if you have issues with the current release. This tarball is really just current CVS + patches from Fedora.

Played 9-ball badly last night, but it was fun anyway. Just need to get in the zone for this weekend and I'll be all set :-)

o/~ It's boogie time o/~

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 10:10 -0400

Just mailed d-d-l and r-t a diff of the package list for 2.8.3 compared to 2.8.2. It looks like we'll have another rocking release with loads of fixes etc.

There are still a few packages missing so I thought I'd post here too to get more visibility :-)

- gnome-vfs and friends need a release

- evolution and friends need a release

- control-center needs a release

Anyone see anything else missing?

I'll try to get the release out this weekend, but I'm not sure when I'll find the time. Probably not until late sunday evening european time. We'll see...

Here we go again

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:08 -0400

Another stable release on the horizon...

I've been doing a lot of valgrinding lately and I think we've gotten most of the important leaks fixed. Next step is to see if valgrind can shed some light on any of the crashes on the 2.10.0 milestone list. Tried running valgrind after enabling a11y today and that showed a lot of leakage in gok, gnopernicus, at-spi, and friends...I think there was close to 1 MB leaked after just logging in and out again...

Played another 9-ball tournament last weekend and got in 9th out of 50 or so. Pretty happy with that, but there's definitely room for improvement. Time to fire up foobillard and play, play play, play... :)

I'll nail those suckers next time...

Congrats to big N (I can see why Nat was persuaded now ;-) on the great hula launch. Definitely looking forward to seeing success in that camp...

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 18:36 -0400

Picking up the pace...

It's been a while and a lot has happened since I last blogged.

On the GNOME front there was the 2.8.2 release before christmas, and since that there's been a lot of work triaging bugs and fixing stuff for 2.10.0. People have kicked serious ass and gotten the bug count down to an almost managable level, but there's clearly more triaging work left for anyone who's interested. I got myself a copy of VMWare to use for work related testing, and I'll be able to use that to test out a few of The New Kids On The Block

With regards to life in general it's been a nice and warm winter, almost no snow and around 0 degrees C for a long time now. Christmas was nice, new years too. Still three pool tournaments left this season and I need to pick up the slack there if I want to have a chance of moving up to the next division next season.

Went to a couple of concerts the last couple of months too. If want to get the best of the Norway you need to check out these two, Magnet and Thomas Dybdahl. I went to see both in december and I was totally blown away by Thomas Dybdahl. Maybe because I had no expectations when I went there, but that doesn't really matter.

And finally, let's see if we can keep the frequency in this blog to something less than three months :-)

Here we go again

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:26 -0400

Release is imminent!

So, we're closing in on another stable release. I want to give a big thank you to all the developers, documenters, translators, bughunters, users and other people involved in getting this release out the door. We're getting the releases out there in a timely fashion and still managing to maintain both quality and a steady inflow of new features which is a feat in and of itself. It's always a pleasure working with you guys and gals :-)

I'm off for a trip to to the countryside for a couple of days and will be back on friday. We're heading off for a relaxing couple of days here: Wolf-gang Hotell for a bit of relaxation, work related stuff and hiking, drinking and much needed socializing.

The coming weekend the series kick off with a 9-ball tournament and it's going to be fun to see how that's going to work out. I guess it'll be uphill for a couple of months before I see any results (if I get time to practice). On the bright side our club got 5th place in the european chamionship for veterans (40+) so there's inspiration to be had there...

Time to pack the fishing gear and hiking boots...

By the way, have I mentioned that Valgrind ROCKS!?

Been slacking again...

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:41 -0400

Time flies when you're having fun I guess. Been busy lately and haven't updated this little thing called blog. Getting back into the groove at work has been hard, but I guess I've gotten rid of most of the holidayish feeling by now. Just about to start upgrading our messaging solution for 15.000 users before we roll it out to the remaining 30k so it's best to keep sharp I guess...

I've spent the last couple of weeks using valgrind and sparse on GNOME modules. This has resulted in a ton of reports in bugzilla and a load of leaks fixed. There's still loads of stuff to test and file bugs against so get to work and get stuff fixed for GNOME 2.8.0 :-)

Looking forward to getting back on track with the pool training as well. Haven't really played since before summer and I'm badly in need of practice now. The series start soon so I need to hone whatever skills I have to have hopes of getting anywhere this season. Keep your fingers crossed :-)

Eventful week...

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 12:14 -0400

This last week sure was hectic. It started off with a trip to Halden, a nice little town close to the swedish border. I played a pool tournament there and came in fourth. Really happy about that, but I guess I'll get less handicap next time around ;-) More practice and Micke won't beat me at 6UADEC :-)

We also went to a concert with a "local" band called WigWam. After reading their website I found out that they were originally from New York and emigrated to Norway in the seventies. They also entered the qualification for the european song contest to represent Norway, and I think we would have scored higher if they had won the local contest if this year's winner is the standard...

After that I went right back to Oslo on sunday to pack my bags for GVADEC. Two quick telephone calls and I had tickets for the night train and hotel room outside Kristiansand.

I really liked GUADEC this year, but since I missed the pre-conference weekend stuff it felt like it was over almost before it started. I'll try hard to make it to Boston in October to make up for that.

It's not just food and beverages that are expensive in Norway it seems. Travelling from Kristiansand to Bergen robbed me of 400 NOK for the train to Stavanger, 900 NOK for a hotel there and then 600 NOK for the boat to Bergen...should have gotten a flight from Kristiansand it seems...

On the bright side, the boat trip gave me time to run valgrind against all of gnome-applets and I've got patches for quite a few leaks in there that are going into bugzilla this weekend. I'm thinking we need a new mailing list for stuff like running valgrind/memprof/sysprof and discussing how to improve stability/performance of GNOME as a whole, but I'm not sure we have the momentum to make them useful yet. Hopefully more people will want to join in on the fun :-)

First Post

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:50 -0400

This is my first blog post