Behdad Esfahbod's daily notes on GNOME, Pango, Fedora, Persian Computing, Bob Dylan, and Dan Bern!

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McEs, A Hacker Life
Thursday, August 31, 2006
 Mariano

Good news this late in the GNOME release cycle is that: Mariano is back and ROCKING on gnome-terminal crashers!

 Metro Lines I Have Used


Got at b3co.com! (by way of Luis)

Wednesday, August 30, 2006
 Links and Notes

Older stuff that totally rock:

Saturday, August 26, 2006
 Evolution, #3

First, thanks again for all the comments on previous entries. I filed a bunch of bugs this morning and updated those entries to list the bugs. The bugs typically contain more informative less ranty comments, as this blog is a space to reflect my frustration and bugzilla is not. The "Close Window" bug in particular is much more clear than the post.

Bugs filed:
(Yay for copy/pasting hyperlinks working so great in Firefox and Blogger.) (The bugs contributed 2.5% towards me getting to the next bugzilla level!)

Before going on, I like to mention that unlike some comments suggest, the Evo hackers are very active and willing to fix bugs. I say so from experience on the few Evo bugs I've been CC'ed on. It's just that there's not many of them...

Rant of today comes from the last of bugs listed above:

With certain HTML mail, but not only spam, Evo stops updating the mail view and keeps viewing the same message no matter where you move away...

I have two options at that point: 1) double-click on each message to read them in a separate window, 2) restart Evo. The tip from yesterday comes handy at this time.

I also see a milder version of the problem when on certain other HTML mail, it takes a few seconds before Evo updates to show any other message. I call it the "pray period" as I'm typically praying that it gives up after a few secs and I don't have to restart the thing.

Friday, August 25, 2006
 Evolution, #2

Thanks for everyone who commented on my previous post. I'll be filing Evo bugs starting immediately. It just was that all the bugs seems o annoying that I blindly assumed they should have already been filed. Afterall I can ear a good part of a bugzilla point filing them. That doesn't mean that I stop this series of posts though!

This hit me again right now, so I let it out. Number 2 Evo annoyance for me coming from a Pine background. As I said already, I unset the "Hide Deleted Messages" option in the "View" menu, and expunge manually after going over my incoming mail and deleting those that don't need any further action.

But did I tell you that expunge is ctrl+E and close is ctrl+W? And I'm still using the qWErty keyboard layout, sigh...

And the thing takes its time to quit.

Evo Tip of the Day: killall + bash-completion is an Evo user's best friend.

Update: Bug filed. From the bug report:

I use Evo to read mail. I don't use "Hide deleted messages" and expunge manually using ctrl+E. And ctrl+E is next to ctrl+W that is a shortcut for
"Close Window".

Moreover, other than the "Close Window" option, there's also a Quit option in the same File menu, and that's got a ctrl+Q shortcut. I really cannot understand the different between Close Window and Quit. Actually I thought I do. I opened a composer window and chose Close Window in the main window, expecting that maybe my composer is not closed... but it was, and Evo quit.

So, for the reason stated in first paragraph I suggest removing the Close Window menu entry and its shortcut from the main Evo window. As I mentioned in second paragraph, that option has not been any useful functionality anyway, so removing shouldn't cause any harm.

The composer and individual message views should still have "Close ctrl+W" like they do currently.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006
 Evolution, #1

Ok, I really have to start this series. I'm not calling it "Evo Sucks" just yet because some of the issues (like the one in this post) are really funny and make for a good laugh. Here it goes:

I use the threaded view because that's how I like to read my mail. I also have selected to see deleted messages (with an overstrike) until I expunge them manually, for two reasons: 1) I'm used to this way, 2) without this option, threaded view is absolutely useless as deleting the message up in the thread makes the thread jump to a new location, depending on the date of the next message. Ouch!

But here is the funny part: the Evo toolbar has got three interesting buttons: Delete, Junk, Not Junk. Now think about it for a minute...

Observations:
If you are wondering why the "Junk" and "Not Junk" buttons are not merged into a single button, and why the "Delete" button doesn't turn into "Undelete" if a deleted message is selected, you see how funny Evolution can at times be.

Update: Filed this, this, and this.

Monday, August 21, 2006
 Ill-minded Blogger

Apparently Blogger has decided to remove all links and images from my feed, even if I've chosen for full blog entry in the feed...

First it was with pre tags, now with everything. Time to reconsider moving blog.

 Vertical Pango Updates

Mathrick, my Summer of Code student, and I spent last night implementing support for multiple directions in a single layout. I left for sleep but he finished it, which in fact finishes his SoC project too. Read on his blog.

Update: If you don't see images and links, it's ill-minded Blogger removing them. Just follow the link to my blog entry and see them there. :-(

Update 2: Previous entry about vertical Pango.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006
 Vertical Pango

To whet your appetite for now:

All the code is in Pango HEAD and cairo master. All the details have got to wait until tomorrow. Took 36 hours of work. Better really sleep.

Monday, August 14, 2006
 Object oriented approach Revisited

So, seems like you do see such things more frequently these days, just that they are blogged instead of filed as bugs!

(anyone knows why blogger.com front page brings my X server down to its knees? All I did before noticing this was enabling accessibility framework at GNOME level. Why does that have anything to do with the X server?)

Tuesday, August 08, 2006
 Cairo 1.2.2 and Pango 1.14.0 released

After spending almost the entire week working with Carl Worth during GUADEC to get cairo 1.2.0 out, a bunch of very nasty bugs were discovered. So, after a few weeks of work, we actually spent most of the past 48 hours getting the bugfix release out. Everyone, make sure you upgrade to cairo 1.2.2. Over 150 commits in 6 weeks for a bugfix release is only possible with Git. Go Get It.

In other news, a boring Pango 1.14.0 was released too. Compared to 1.12, most notable change is update to Unicode 5.0 character database. There were quite a bunch of almost-ready patches in bugzilla adding new API, but a (-n almost) sudden request from the release-team to release Pango 1.14.0 well before the GNOME release forced me into closing this cycle without much new API. 1.15 should branch pretty soon and get a lot of new API, committed more casually as time will catch all the errors :-).

I intentionally make Pango 1.14.0 require Cairo 1.2.2 as 1.2.0 is really broken for various reasons, specially for printing and for vertical font stuff (mathrick spent quite a few weeks trying to get his stuff work where it turned out to be a bug in cairo 1.2.0.) Now I can go back to hacking Firefox+Pango. More about that to follow.

Monday, August 07, 2006
 iBot

As if Segway was not enough, last week I observed an iBot in Dundas square, passing the street, including passing over the streetcar rails, on its two wheels. Impressive technology.

Friday, August 04, 2006
 Baiters Teach Scammers a Lesson

Fun read, specially the "Baited by Shiver" tattoo exchange that I read over a bowl of pop-corn.

Thursday, August 03, 2006
 Object oriented approach

Gtk+ bug you don't see everyday.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006
 RiRa is back

DNS problems are resolved now. RiRa is back online.