Ili Estas Simioj

There’s not a lot of these tech or open-source conferences in my area. The only ones I can list off the top of my head are the Ottawa Linux Symposium (but that’s only hard core kernel stuff) and the Desktop Developers Summit, and both of those cost quite a bit of money.

So I get really excited when some cool, free (as in beer) and collaborative conference happens. This Saturday there will be a BarCamp at my university. In fact it will be in the same room I had linear algebra in only two hours ago. Usually I wouldn’t look forward to going to school at 8:30 (!) on a Saturday morning, but this is a special occasion. I don’t think any one in Ottawa will read this, but if you are from Ottawa put a comment on my blog so I at least know you exist. The details and schedule are on the BarCamp wiki.

Behind programming and linguistics/syntax, planning urban transportation is my third favourite intellectual activity. This is of course why a spend a few days last year researching and designing a subway system for Ottawa. In no way is there sufficient population density in this field of urban sprawl they call the nation’s capital to make a subway cost effective, but it is still an exercise I enjoy. Trying to find the optimal routes for a number of subway lines it kind of like solving the travelling salesman problem. There are many close-to-perfect answers that are easy to find and only one perfect answer that is impossible to find, but the challenge of trying to get as close as possible is fun.

This week I have been researching flights and train voyages to get to LugRadio Live in Wolverhampton this summer. The trick is finding the fastest and cheapest route from Ottawa to Wolverhampton. Even though Ottawa is the capital, it is quite small and so the only direct flights to the UK from here go to London Heathrow. That would mean I would have to get off the plane after a 7 hour flight and get on the train for another 2.5 hours. If I want to get a plane to Birmingham or Manchester I will have to transfer in Toronto, Montreal or London Heathrow.

For $50 I could take the bus to Toronto, but the bus terminal is downtown, and the airport is 30 minutes west of the city with no rail links. Also for $20 I could take the bus to Montreal - at least there they have rail access to the airport. If I decide to transfer in London I would be able to easily take the tube to any train station which would lead me to Wolverhampton. I love the Tube. Travelling to London scores high on my list because of it as you’ll see below.

Okay finally on to the real reason for this article. I present Laszlo’s Law of Urban Transportation:

“The quality of urban transportation planning in any given city is directly proportional to the time it takes to get from the main passenger airport, to the main passenger train station, and from there to the city centre and back to the airport.”

In the paragraph above, train station can be replaced by bus/coach terminal and the law will still hold. You should notice that I didn’t specify the distance but instead it should be measured by time. This is because for big cities there is no option. The new Hong Kong airport is really far away from the city because with mountains on one side and the ocean on another, there isn’t much room. However there is a high speed train which will still get you to the airport in 24 minutes. This is about the same or maybe even less than Ottawa who’s airport is quite close to the city.

You should also notice that I didn’t exclude taxis or even specify that it must be public transportation. You could probably increase the ranking of a particular city by taking a taxi and shortening the time it takes to complete the airport-train-downtown loop. This is only because in some cities this is the only way. In Prague there are three subway lines that go north, south-west and south-east. Unfortunately the airport is a 20-30 minute taxi ride due east.

From what I have seen and guestimated so far, the cities that have the shortest airport-train-downtown loop are Geneva, Switzerland and Sydney, Australia. I have been to Geneva and I remember that the train station is a short walk from downtown and for a few Euros you can take a 5 minute train ride to the airport. Of course they had to put the airport close because of all the damn mountains. I suspect the same is true with Sydney but I have never been there. Based on looking at Google Maps, it seems that the airport is 4km from the train station and the train is only 1 km downtown. Way to go Sydney.

At the beginning of this year I was sitting in my dorm room listening to LugRadio, thinking about how awesome the open source community was and how much I wished to be a part of it. Up until that time my entire open source contribution amounted to a few patches and bug fixes with Amarok. I imagined what it would be like to help out the community, get kudos from everyone online, and piss my pants laughing with the dudes from LugRadio.

It’s not that I couldn’t contribute. I had two years of Java experience from high school, but I had no idea how to do C++ so I struggled when trying to make a difference hacking on Amarok. I also went the Ubuntu Breezy Summit in Montreal and tried to join the Ubuntu Documentation Team, but I didn’t have the initiative to start writing something on my own. It seemed much too difficult to start contributing even though I had novice programming skills.

In March 2006, Jono mentioned on LugRadio that someone had started the code for his JonoEdit idea. He also mentioned that they desperately needed contributors to write code in Python, and that everyone should come on board now while the code was small and easy to learn. I already knew Python and it was my favourite language, so I took his advice.

I only mention this now because back then I never would have thought that in less than a year I could go from writing useless Python scripts on a Saturday morning, to being hated and envied by the massively hilarious dude I hear every second Monday morning. In my book, that’s quite an accomplishment.

I guess my point is that no matter how hard you have tried to contribute and integrate yourself into a new community, and no matter how many times you feel like you have been rejected, all you have to do is keep moving until you find your passion and it will be smooth sailing after that. It turns out my passion is programming in Python, and now I’m responsible for a large part of Jokosher.

There has been a lot of talk lately about Ubuntu Feisty including non-free components by default. While I believe that non-free is bad, the Ubuntu guys have the chance to make the situation a lot better for new users. Currently new Linux users who depend on hardware that only has proprietary drivers will blame Linux for not working with their system. There is no way to tell the user that if they bought hardware with open drivers it would work. Instead they are just left in the dark and the new user comes away with a bad impression of Linux.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that if we educate people about free software then they will understand the difficulties we are having and can make the right choice next time they buy hardware. They may still use binary drivers, but at least they will be using Linux, and a few small steps in education can go a long way.

If you have been following Windows Vista, you may know that it will include a feature called “Windows Performance Index”. This is supposed to give the user a single number that represents the capability of their system. This is especially important now that Intel has decided to stop putting megahertz numbers in their chip names. If it can be boiled down to a single number, it will be a lot easier for the average user to understand. Here is a screenshot of this feature in action.

My idea is to do the same thing except for free software:

As you can see, at the top of the window there are links to help pages that discuss various issues about free software. Then there is a list of all the known software packages installed on your system that have restrictions of any kind. Beside that is a gigantic number which is your Free Software Index. Right now its just the number of packages you having installed, but there could be different values for packages with patent vs. non-free issues and drivers vs. regular software. At the bottom there is a refresh button, which would search for more non-free software and a close button.

You could also have a button next to the package names which describes what it does, and what (if any) free equivalents are available, as well as an uninstall button for each package. This would be awesome to see in the next Ubuntu so that if it comes with non-free software by default, you could quickly know which packages they are, decide if you absolutely need them, and quickly uninstall them if you don’t.

After the gigantic Jokosher pimpfest that was the Ubuntu Developer’s Summit, Jokosher v0.2 has been released, and #jokosher on irc.freenode.net is swarming with Ubuntu folk trying to jump on the bandwagon and compile gstreamer CVS as fast as possible. Thankfully for the Ubuntu users, this is rather simple because of Aq’s wonderful script which will download, and compile Jokosher and Gstreamer CVS all in one step. You can download Aq’s script, or the source tarball from the download page.

There are lots of new features and improvements over v0.1, the most important of which is that it doesn’t suck anymore, and you can actually accomplish useful things. Also we have support for third party extensions a la Firefox, so if anyone wants to write one (there are examples included with the release), or help improve our cool API, give us a shout.

Finally, I have managed to get all the Jokosher dependencies for w32 with the exception of one — Gstreamer — which also happens to be the most important dependency. I am definitely not looking forward to intalling all the Gstreamer build dependencies on Windows. If Gstreamer people knows a better way, or if this is at all feasible, please let me know.

Is it not the case that one person could build Gstreamer for w32 and then just copy the folder to any other windows computer? I mean it’s all binary compatible right? If I do ever get it built, then we could just tar-up the entire directory with Gstreamer and Jokosher and make that the w32 version. It would be about 100 times the size of the Linux tarball, but it would be worth it.

Last week I discussed how nice it would be to have graphics in your application use gettext to translate all the strings in the image, and render a localized version on screen. I showed how this would help usability, and improve the overall look and feel of the desktop. I also discussed several ways to accomplish this, many of which would require cooperation from various libraries.

I decided that if I wanted to get it done, I a) had to do it myself, and b) would have to do it programmatically on a case by case basis to ensure that things like text wrap or overflow are handled uniquely for each image. Here is the original image that Jono made using the Gimp:

Now here is a rendering of my GTK widget which uses Cairo to try and accomplish the same thing:

As you can see the images are identical with the exception of the font. Currently I am using cairo.show_text() in Python. However in the cairo reference manual it says:

NOTE: The cairo_show_text() function call is part of what the cairo designers call the “toy” text API. It is convenient for short demos and simple programs, but it is not expected to be adequate for the most serious of text-using applications. See cairo_show_glyphs() for the “real” text display API in cairo.

However Cairo does not provide a way to get font glyphs, and documentation says that you must get the glyph yourself. Being a person who doesn’t know anything about how glyphs are stored, or how to get them in C (let alone Python), I’m kinda stuck.

If anyone has an example of how to make text beautiful with cairo_show_glyphs(), or any idea how to do glyphs in Python, please let me know!

A while back I submitted a bug to Tango, because the word processor icons for bold, italic and underline were a bold, italic and underline ‘A’ respectively:

I wrote in the bug that, like almost everyother word processing application I had ever used, the icons should be a bold ‘B’, an italic ‘I’ and an underlined ‘U’. The response to my bug was that to be fair to every language that the application supports, and to avoid making a new icon set for every language, they decided to use ‘A’ for all three icons. In reality however, I would imaging that a Japanese or Russian user might be confused by the latin character in the icon. So in every case, this is suboptimal.

One of our primary goals for Jokosher v0.2 is internationalization support. Like everyone else, we now use gettext. Another one of our goals is LADSPA effects support. In fact, Jono was so excited about implementing audio effects, he made this beatiful banner which sits at the top of the instrument effects dialog:

It goes without saying that images like this one make Jokosher a much prettier application, and benefits the overall user experience. We could also use different colours for the images at the top of different dialogs so people could easily remember which part of the application they are in. This would be more useable than the current state of all the buttons and dialogs looking identical. In fact this is one of the demos that was given when Cairo came out; many buttons on the screen each with their own random variation generated at runtime. Now computers are fast enought that we can use SVG and Cairo to do fancy vector graphics on the fly. Jokosher uses both, and we really like the results.

As soon I saw the intrument effects image Jono did, I told him two things: “That looks awesome!” and “It’s not going to work, and you’ll have to get rid of it.” The second of course refers to the fact that i18n is now a priority for Jokosher, and that image has English text in it. Now we have a problem.

Luckily this problem can be easily solved by using gettext and rendering the image at runtime. In other words, librsvg + gettext = awesomeness. One very hackish way I thought of to do this was loading the SVG as text, doing a quick find of all fields, replacing them using gettext, and then feeding the altered XML into librsvg. I’m not sure if this would work. Nor am I sure if the SVG specification has a translatable=”yes” tag like in glade XML. If not, there could at least be a switch somewhere which would make librsvg treat every string as translatable and call gettext, in exactly the same way glade does!

This would unleash awesome new possibilities to make GTK apps the most beautiful ones known to man. And it would help usability too, by allowing the bold, italic and underline Tango icons to use the user’s native alphabet and character set. If anyone has any other ideas for how to accomplish this, please let me know. I really don’t want to have to take the instrument effects image out of Jokosher 0.2.

Last weekend it was very hot. So me and my family went up to my uncle’s house on the lake. But of course when we get there, my uncle requests my help to fix his Internet Explorer. Right after you launch IE, it closes itself. But he has no idea what would be causing the crash.

I have seen this before, so I immediately uninstall and extra ‘toolbars’ that the crazy internet has installed in his browser. Turns out that after uninstalling the Yahoo! Toolbar, IE works fine (well actually not fine — but that’s how its supposed to work).

Of course the next thing I did was install Firefox. Then if that ever happened again, he wouldn’t be stuck without internet. But this raises a question in my mind. It wasn’t some dodgy spyware or anything that broke his browser — it was Yahoo!. I think Yahoo! is a respectable company, and they have a reputation to maintain. So why would their plugin for IE be so unstable?

This is relevant to me because we are in the process of creating the Jokosher 0.2 extension API. I would really like it if someone as popular as Yahoo! made an extension for Jokosher. But I would not like it if a user installs an extension and gets rewarded with Jokosher crashing immediately after startup.

We could just use DBUS and keep every extension on a long leash and a separate process, but that would hinder possible integration with the core code. We could also use a lot of exception handling, but that would only work if there was an exception, and not if there was a freeze.

The other possibility is that Yahoo! didn’t have the source code for IE so bugs of that kind could not be found during their testing. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it at all and just trust the extension writers. Or better yet would be the creation of extensions.jokosher.org where we peer review everything. Of course the only problem with that is that I don’t feel like reviewing every single extension. Any suggestions?

Jokosher Update: Since the launch or 0.1, I have been mostly working on getting translations working. We have all the strings in the POT file with the exception of instrument name (but I’m working on that). If anyone feels like translating please go to: http://launchpad.net/products/jokosher/trunk/+translations
We already have four languages more than 50%!

I bought a new MP3 player a few days ago. Its one of those Windows Media Player “Plays for sure” devices which uses Microsoft’s media transfer protocol. On Linux there is libmtp but I would much rather have a USB mass storage devices that I can copy files to and from on any computer. Luckily the iRiver lets you change to UMS (USB mass storage) through a firmware upgrade. Of course the firmware updater program requires a Windows XP machine with WMP 10 installed. Once the firmware update is complete, its back to Linux.

The main reason I bought this player is because it has long (45 hour) battery life and Ogg support. I wonder why iRiver makes the default firmware require WMP 10 when that terrible program doesn’t even support Ogg? I mean if someone was really going to make use of the Ogg support, they won’t be the kind of person who uses WMP.

One problem I had with the player — and all other UMS players is that you — can put files in folders, but within each folder the songs are not listed alphabetically. Instead they are listed in the order you copied them to the player (presumably is just grabs the lowest disk address first). This is a problem because now all my albums play in the wrong order, unless I meticulously add them in the correct order.

As a UMS, this iRiver T10 does not support any regular playlist formats. I’m pretty sure on Windows using MTP you can add playlists, but on Linux using UMS you’re kinda stuck. No m3u or pls or any other kind of XML. However it does have this “QuickList” feature which lets you hold down a button and add the currently playing song to a playlist, like the iPod’s “On-The-Go” playlist.

So after making one of these I got the idea that I could make playlists and put all my songs in the correct order. But that would mean using the T10 interface then stopping, plugging in and transferring the playlist data somewhere else on the drive so I could create another one. Instead I just opened the playlist up in my trusty hex editor and reverse engineered it.

Luckily the iRiver playlists (*.pla) are not difficult to understand. They have a 512 byte header, followed by the paths for each song relative to the root of the drive. Each path takes up 512 bytes (the ascii data followed by null characters). For some reason every second byte throughout the whole file is 0×00. Is this UTF-16 and I am just using non-complex characters?

Anyway, I put it all in a python script. To make a playlist of the entire folder in alphabetical order just do:

ls | ./iRiverPlaMaker.py MyPlaylist.pla

You should run this on the iRiver disk so all the paths are correct and correspond to the root of the disk.

The family computer in the living room (of the house that I am now moving out of) was recently converted to an Ubuntu machine. For about the last three years I have been trying different ways to keep it running smoothly. The last configuration was Windows 2000 with a limited account and a software firewall, but even on dial-up, the spyware and the worms got to it.

This computer is mainly used by my younger sister and younger brother for homework and surfing the internet. The three most used programs are Word, MSN, and Limewire. So I thought this would be a perfect use case for Ubuntu — and it is. It’s working flawlessly so far, even with sleep, but that’s because it has apm not acpi.

Anyway I’m not here to tell you my Ubuntu success story since everyone knows how it ends; the computer never has to be reinstalled or rebooted ever again!

I’m here to tell you about why I love libglade. Everyone knows how it is good for creating GUIs, even though the interface sucks, and how it takes a lot of the work out of programming. But in my case it was the XML that saved the day since it is easily readable to humans and does not need to be compiled.

The above is a screenshot of gnome-ppp when it is connecting (like I said the computer uses dial-up). My younger sister will sit at the computer and think, “Oh, ‘Log’ as in ‘Log-on’”, and will click the log button. But instead it brings up a window showing the log of all the modem commands sent during the connect process. Now she is confused, and we don’t want the user to ever be confused.

For some reason she can’t remember not to click on this button. So I opened up the glade file using this command:

gedit `locate gnome-ppp.glade`

I then searched for the gtkButton with the text “_Log”, edited, saved, and voila!

This particular program has instantly become much more usable for her — something that could never be done on Windows or MacOSX. Score for open source!