Matthew Walton’s Blog

After literally half an hour of further effort, I managed to get Dasher to link when built against the Maemo Chinook SDK. Hurrah!

Okay so it took a manual edit to the Makefiles. I think I’m going to have to consult somebody who knows this whole autoconf/automake business a bit better to see how I can get the Glade libraries referenced properly.

Then I need to get it to actually start up as it currently tries to dereference a null pointer and segfaults. This is probably due to my fairly cavalier #ifdefing out to get it to compile. Now I need to go back and figure out which bits are actually needed and how to get them to work.

Ultimately of course the UI under Maemo is going to be a bit different, especially once I get the thing working as an input method, but for now I just want it to work at all!

Just to let you know that yes, I’m still alive and doing the usual things, no nothing massively exciting has come along for me to write about, and yes I have been playing too much City of Heroes. Check out the gallery for a few screenshots from City of Heroes EU.

In other news, I think I finally figured out how to do the positioning system for Growl. It’s not the total solution I originally intended, but it’s probably more practical to do it this way than the way I wanted to do it — which was far beyond my small mind’s ability to cope with.

But before I can engage on that again, time for work.

Here’s a blast from the past. I finally dug out a GuidePost installer from years ago because I was being nagged about it, so here you are Z: GuidePost 0.6a.

For the curious, GuidePost is a simple text-based editor for GuideML, the XML application used for h2g2 articles, and other DNA-powered sites on bbc.co.uk. I wrote it many years ago and haven’t touched it since, largely because it’s a Windows app and I don’t do those anymore. I do keep meaning to do a Mac version, but haven’t found the time yet.

Firstly the hysterical laughter. I know I mentioned it last in the topic, but it’s very, very funny and deserves to go first, so first it has been put.

With that out of the way, what else was I going to write about? Ah yes. Towel proceeds. It needs a good deal more polishing, but it’s gradually getting there for another release, this one with significant enhancements. The things I’m aiming for are:

• metadata caching in saved playlists, leading to improved load times
• don’t have GDK markup errors on track titles with double quotes in
• use GStreamer 0.8 (done)
• use GStreamer for metadata reading, instead of id3lib, libvorbis and libflac
• metadata editing using GStreamer
• miscellaneous UI improvements
• anything else that seems like it’ll fit

After that, the next release will likely dual-build with gtkmm 2.5, which is important because there are some handy new widgets I would find useful, lots of nice bug fixes and stock icons for play, pause etc.

Another project I’m starting to help with related to Towel is gstmm, the C++ bindings for GStreamer. They use the same system as gtkmm does, so they should be eminently compatible with a gtkmm application such as Towel. Development has unfortunately been stalled for quite some time, so hopefully Bryan Forbes and I will be able to get something passably wrapping GStreamer 0.8. And hopefully it won’t take us all year to do it.

Last night was the penultimate Tai Chi before Christmas. Not many people came so we didn’t do a new move in the longsword form, but instead spent quite a while doing Chi Kung and pushing hands. Learned some interesting things, improved my technique in one kind of movement particularly. Then we revised the longsword form as far as we have reached, which was useful to pick up on the details that tend to get lost in those first few weeks after doing a move where you’re more worried about which arm to stick out than the finer points of the move. Curiously, everyone at Tai Chi thinks the way Christmas is handled by the shops is very irritating. Where are the people that the shops are doing what they’re doing all this for?

Not sure what I’m doing for Yule yet this year. We shall see. The full moon group are doing a Yule ritual, so it’s likely I’ll go to that. It is highly likely to be a significant improvement on doing one solo.

NaNoWriMo continues. My novel is now flagging slightly behind the 60,000 word pace. It’s difficult to keep up the momentum once work starts to take over, and my sudden urge to restart hacking on Towel doesn’t help very much. For the uninitiated, Towel is a fairly simple audio player for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. It started off as little more than a pretty GTK+ frontend to GStreamer, but now it’s a little more complicated than that, as the playlist system is rapidly becoming more and more complex. I think it may have reached its natural limit now, and is gradually getting filled out with missing functionality.

Recently I’ve been working on getting it to compile on my native 64bit Linux system, which wasn’t too hard because it was fairly intelligently coded the first time around (actually the most serious problem was with printf format strings generating warnings about variable sizes). The nastiest work was porting to GStreamer 0.8, which should have been done a long time ago but is done now and works quite nicely.

Currently I’m implementing properties dialogs for groups and tracks, which will help people figure out what the checkboxes in the groups and tracks views are for as they can be set from the properties dialogs as well — this is until GtkTreeView gains proper tooltip support, but I suspect that might take a while and may even be a GTK+ 3.0 feature. Also on the list are metadata caching, so Towel doesn’t have to probe every file in the library for its title/artist/length data every time it starts up, better handling of file read errors (there are going to be some holes exposed by the metadata caching system, as previously we relied heavily on all the files being read at startup), and general UI love for the library window.

Moving onward, there’ll be a release, then I’ll port to gtkmm 2.5 to take advantage of some useful new features, such as ellipsizing labels and stock icons for play, pause, stop and so forth. For now I intend to keep the project at SourceForge, but it’s going to have to move into a Subversion repository somewhere at some point; I just can’t be doing with CVS anymore.

And many thanks to Bryan Forbes, who says he’ll do some testing and offer assistance with the UI design.

Now I just need to get hold of Jonathan again…