[GNOME] PiTiVi for the future

I'm thrilled.  I just attended a presentation for PiTiVi and the current state of it  is delightful.  One of my favourite new features is minutely backups.  However, I'm also very pleased with the factoring out of a lot of GStreamer work to GST (GStreamer Editing Services).  Saving thumbnails, quick import, and quick generation (if the input and output formats are the same) are all awesome.  A big thanks to Jean-François Fortin Tam for all his hard work, and I look forward to the next release.

[GNOME] Wifi at the Rialta

At first I thought it was poor wifi from the host that was preventing me from connecting, but thanks to Dan Williams' blog post, I'm glad to have a solution.  He mentions using dhcpcd, but I instead updated Fedora 17 dhcp packages using updates in koji (see redhat bug #662254, comment 18 to get to the koji task).



I finally made it to A Coruña today.  I took a bus from Madrid and enjoyed the scenery.  There's apparently a suburb called Rialta in A Coruña as well and my first attempt to bus to the hotel turned out to be quite the detour.  Whoops. :)  Now to sleep, and tomorrow, be productive. :)

[GNOME] Going to GUADEC?

My Air Canada flight to Madrid, along with a few fellow Gnomies, has been delayed by 10 hours (we fly in the morning), so I won't be making it to the pre-registration event and may be a bit late for the start.  :)

Even if it kills me

[GNOME] Smoothing serialisation

Tomorrow I'll elaborate on some challenges, but for now I'll summarise the past two weeks

• spent most of the first week on school stuff.  I'm a Masters student and thesis work doesn't really stop, so unfortunately, I ended up with meetings and some overwhelming stuff




• I did get a letter to ebassi at the start and got to think about his wonderful response




• spent the second week




• designing tests


• designing interfaces


• creating tests


• determining modifications required to pass tests


• implementing modifications

I pushed them over the past few hours to git. :)



Current state of XML serialisation

• a GObject can be automatically serialised if all you want is




• to serialise its public properties.  Depending on how you handle an object's properties, this could be enough, as long as the internal logic isn't hiding anything that wouldn't restore itself when the same properties are again set.  I think this is similar to what json-glib serialisation automatically handles.


• to serialise types that GValue can transform into strings, including enums, or objects that only contain one of these three.

What's coming this week

• The interface you'll want to implement to manually handle parts of serialisation (e.g. non-public property data). I've been using thesis code to test this from the start.  I'm sadly not allowed to share my thesis code, but I'll be using general examples in the code I'll commit over the next few days.

Next two weeks

• Collections, I want to have automatic support for a bunch




• GList is hard, because its ParamSpec just calls it a gpointer, so I need to figure out how to identify it, but GHashTable gets to be a GHashTable.  


• Gee's collections seem like they might be easier




• ask glib people more about serialisation interface requirements for glib.  ebassi briefly mentioned the idea in the last e-mail, so I should get back to him with some more concrete questions.

Stuff to consider

• Data other than public properties.  Is this desirable?  ebassi's response to my last e-mail the other week made me think it's not that desirable.  Right now I have tests for private properties (that fail) and public and private fields (that fail).  I sort of like the idea of automagically serialising as much as possible.


• Merging with glib.

Note: I use "serialise" with -ise in my writing, but the code uses "serialize" through out.  



Tomorrow I'll talk about issues I ran into and a couple bugs I filed. :)  #vala and #gnome have been lovely, if a bit peaceful, for help so far.  So has looking at more source code for libraries than I ever expected. :D

[Technology] GTest

So, I'm using GTest for testing GXml's testing, and today I figured out how to prevent my entire test suites from being aborted when one test fails.



So, right now, instead of using g_assert () as I'm accustomed to in my tests, I use g_test_fail ().



Also, I'm setting g_log_set_always_fatal (G_LOG_LEVEL_ERROR); after g_test_init () (which sets it to include warnings) but before g_test_run (), because sometimes code I want to test uses g_warning () (like calling g_type_from_name () when you want it to return 0).