OSSPACK

Being at the GNOME UX Hackfest even for just one day was an energizing experience, sort of eye opener in a way. And it made me think about the situation GNOME is been for a while (desktop-devel being dead, foundation-list too alive, and things like that...)

I tried to remember what made me contribute, and I remember that it was posts like this, the ones that made me excited and pushed me to spend endless hours learning about C and this GObject thingie, so that I can improve the very desktop I loved to use, and I could help to prove to the world that great and usable products could be made the opensource way. At some point down that path, I made GNOME technologies a goal of its own.and I stopped focusing on creating a great desktop (prolly because up to some extend the experiencie of trying to implement those ideas was not as pleasant).

I have the feeling that we, hackers, have done a pretty bad job at encouraging our designers among the community to challenge us and push the boundaries and goals of our own technologies further, actually, we've let those boundaries to stop the designers' proposals. Bad, bad, bad idea.

This is an open letter to the GNOME design community:

Guys, *BE VOCAL*, really, please, challenge us, communicate, blog post like there's no tomorrow, propose your stuff, draw mockups, file bugs... take over the project!

It can be difficult at times, we hackers can be quite energy stoppers, but please, ignore us, push design back in our veins. I want jokes and fun back to the project, I want pirate hats in our hackergotchis, I want Rupert jokes, I want a new planet theme, I want crazy pictures of crazy GNOME hackers doing crazy things. I want that magic back, and I have the gut feeling you can bring that back guys. It is only through design that we will enter new grounds, innovate and excite new contributors.

Δευτέρα 8 Μαρτίου 2010, η προθεσμία υποβολής ενδιαφέροντος για παρουσιάσεις/workshops έχει τελειώσει αλλά όλα τα προάστια της Θεσσαλονίκης είναι χιονισμένα και παγωμένα. Τι άλλο πρέπει να γίνει για να καταλάβουμε ότι πρόκειται για ένα σημάδι από μια ανώτερη δύναμη με απώτερο στόχο να δοθεί μια μικρή παράταση;! Σας δίνουμε λοιπόν ακόμη μια βδομάδα να απολαύσετε το χιόνι, να φτιάξετε χιονάνθρωπους, να παίξετε χιονοπόλεμο αλλά και να αναλύσετε/αναπτύξετε την ιδέα σας.

Έτσι λοιπόν θα δεχόμαστε υποβολές ενδιαφέροντος για παρουσιάσεις/workshops μέχρι και την Κυριακή 14 Μαρτίου 2010.

Για όλους εσάς που ακόμη το σκέφτεστε, τι περιμένετε; Στείλτε μας ένα mai στο thessaloniki@fosscomm.gr περιγράφοντας την ιδέα σας και ποιος ξέρει, μπορεί να γίνετε εσείς ο νικητής του διαγωνισμού “Best ομιλητής Fosscomm 2010″!

Μέχρι τότε, από την κάτασπρη Θεσσαλονίκη, φιλάκια ρουφηχτά.

Εκ μέρους της οργανωτικής επιτροπής

Μπαχαράκης Χρήστος

/me loves constructive criticism and nice ideas. I think I have several times guided some development through my blog in order to try to accomplish the maximum number of people ideas and suggestions.

This time is not an exception. Eike put onto the table something I was already aware, and something I wanted to fix, so his comment just pushed me what needed.

However I feel the need to explain why I won’t make headers clickable as before (unless you have a very good reason that will convince me .

1. On the rewriting of KCategorizedView now the “header” is “everything”. Have a look at System Settings. You will notice the “header” is covering the whole area of elements in that block. In case we have such a “category drawer” (as it is called in the code itself), how can we “draw” it to say “hey you are going to select the whole group”. Imagine you could select several items in System Settings (you shouldn’t, despite in 4.4 SC it is possible), how could you notify that in a visible way to the user ?

2. I felt showing the same icons as Dolphin does was a nice idea. Dolphin has this icons for individual selection of items, and I think that was the best way to go.

3. For this improvement (still not in trunk) I have gone through the path of “disabling” plus and minus signs, instead of making them disappear. From some UI classes taken I have learnt sudden visibility changes on elements are not good for the average user.

So here you have got the video. As always, please feel free to comment, give ideas, suggestions…

LinuxMint is considered by many the best Linux desktop distribution, it is a Ubuntu based distribution and has some really great additions for desktop users on top of Ubuntu features. LinuxMint team has worked hard on porting mintMenu to Fedora.

mintMenu is currently stuck in review process, but hopefully it will come to Fedora repositories soon so everybody can test it and start using it.

We at Community Fedora Remix are looking into making mintMenu default Gnome menu for our next release.

A few days ago I released simple-scan 0.9.6. This version is the 1.0 release candidate.

There are two things I'd like to fix before 1.0:

• There may be some issues with scanning from an automatic document feeder (ADF). Please comment on bug 512553 if you are having problems. (I don't have an ADF to test).


• The generated PDF files do not JPEG compress the images. This is because the Cairo renderer does not support it. If you know of a C accessible library that can do this or even how to hard code this (the PDF files are just a single image per page) then please comment on bug 534122.

So, we put out Bugzilla 3.6rc1 today. That’s pretty exciting. We’re currently two months ahead of schedule on our 3.6 releases–the first time we’ve ever been ahead of schedule in Bugzilla’s history. Since this is a Release Candidate, it has Release Notes, which you should read, particularly because they contain the whole list of all the cool new features in 3.6. In addition to all the major new features listed, the Other Enhancements and Changes has a ton of improvements that many Bugzilla users will be very happy about.

We also released Bugzilla 3.4.6, which has some good bug fixes for the 3.4 series, so if you’re running 3.4.x, it’d definitely be good to upgrade to 3.4.6.

Work Towards Bugzilla 3.8

Yep, that’s right, that says 3.8. See, as soon as we freeze for one release, we start working on the next release immediately. So although we’ve been working quite a bit on getting 3.6 out the door, we’ve also been adding some new features for 3.8, since February.

Our focus for 3.8 is still pretty much the same as it was for 3.6–polish up things, finish any “unfinished” features, and generally make everything suck less as much as possible. However, 3.8 is also going to include some major new UI work, thanks to Guy Pyrzak, our User Experience Lead. Already, there is work on a new attachment details UI and a simplification of the Search UI.

Also, a few other features have been implemented recently for 3.8:

• Work is underway on a single-package Windows installer for Apache, MySQL, Perl, and Bugzilla.
• The voting system has become an extension, which also involved adding a few useful new hooks.
• You can specify “groups” as an argument when creating a bug via the WebService or email.
• The Assignee, QA Contact, and CC fields have autocomplete in the browser, via AJAX!
• You can restrict the visibility and values of custom fields by components.
• The Deadline field now has a Calendar widget attached to it.
• Bugzilla now sends email when a comment becomes private or un-private.
• You can undo “Forget Search” on the buglist if you forgot the search by accident.
• “Bug ID” fields can now represent relationships between bugs, like “Blocks”/”Depends On”.

Coming up soon, we also will have the following new features:

• JSONP support for the JSON-RPC WebServices interface, so you can do secure cross-domain WebService calls on web pages.
• There’s some work towards making Bugzilla use HTML 5.
• The ability to restrict the visibility and values of custom fields by classification.
• More JavaScript validation of enter_bug.cgi when filing bugs

Bugzilla’s Move To Bzr

So, for day-to-day development, the Bugzilla Project now uses the Bazaar Version-Control System, instead of CVS. Our tarballs and download instructions still use CVS, for now, but internally, for development, we use Bazaar.

Our instructions on using Bazaar are here:

Bugzilla:Bzr
Bugzilla:Patches

There is also a web view of the Bazaar repository for people who want to browse around our code.

CVS is kept fully in-sync with the Bazaar code, so if you checkout or update from CVS, you’ll be getting the same code that’s in Bazaar.

EOL of Bugzilla 3.0.x

When we release Bugzilla 3.6, Bugzilla 3.0.x will reach End Of Life, meaning that no new updates will be released for the 3.0 series, even if there are security issues discovered. We strongly encourage all Bugzilla 3.0.x administrators to upgrade to Bugzilla 3.4.x or 3.6rc1.

-Max

This is part of the Search’d series. Topics are taken from Search Engine keyword searches.

This second post is coming a bit late, but it is finally here. I’ve been getting ready for our World Wide Sales Kickoff. We will be kicking off our new fiscal year with great sessions for our worldwide group of partners. I’ll be presenting with two of my EMEA colleagues on Scaling Alfresco. I’ve chosen to tackle scaling our WCM product. It might even turn into some great information for a post or two here.

This weeks topic is one of the most popular searches that has lead to this blog: How do I enable the Sharepoint Protocol in Alfresco. At the outset let me tell you: I’m not going to explain how to actually configure the Sharepoint Services in this post, rather I want to point you to resource that take you through all of the steps of enabling the Sharepoint Protocol in Alfresco and how to use it. These are often over looked resources, but resources that can be really useful.

The first resource is the Installing and Configuring Alfresco Community Edition guide found on the Alfresco Community Download page (or on the Alfresco Content Community Site [registration required] in the Document Library under Documentation in the Installation and Configuration folder for your installed release of Alfresco Community. This guide covers the basics of setting up and runningg Alfresco Community (It is also a preview of the documentation available as part of an Alfresco Enterprise Subscription in the Alfresco Network site [Alfresco Enterprise Subscription Required].) You’ll find instructions for setting up and configuring Alfresco Sharepoint Services (on the server side) starting on the bottom of page 26.

The second resource covers using the Sharepoint Extension in Microsoft Office: Managing Alfresco Content from within MS Office Community Edition. (Requires Registration). This is also found in the Alfresco Content Community Site [registration required] in the Document Library but in the Tutorials folder.

These documents as well as others for using Share, Web Content Management, Document Management and Records Management can be found in the Content Community Site. You’ll also find presentations from past Community Conferences, Case Studies, White Papers and Webinars.

On Feburary 18th, Tehran Linux Users Group gathered in Cafe Prague (a nice cafe in Tehran) to celebrate KDE SC 4.4's release.

We had so little time to arrange everything and there were shortcomings, but it wasnt bad after all.

We gave a piece of [KDE] cake to everyone present at cafe, with a paper describing what FOSS is. Too bad we hadnt time to burn live discs so they can really try it immediately.

Also, at the end, we created a very little KDE domino. Not that we are good at it or something, it was just fun. It was our first time and it didnt collapse as beautiful as what we saw on TV. Maybe a bigger and better one next time ;)

I would thank Behnam, for helping me out with all stuff and Abbas, who was my partner on domino project ;)

I bought lemonade and a granola bar from a sidewalk lemonade stand yesterday. Yes, spring is here. This (hopefully) means less computery time and more outsidery time. Yes, I just made up the word "outsidery." Coining new words should be part of my curiosities this month...

As for actual things I want to explore:

• Jetpack - Last month I switched back to Firefox from Chrome because Chrome just didn't hack it for me as a web developer. One thing that Chrome had that I really liked was the extension mechanism. Basically. it was just some javascript. Jetpack is an extension that provides similar support for Firefox. After diving into Firefox extensions a few times and needing a lifeguard to get out, I thought I'd explore Jetpack to create simpler Firefox extensions.
• Android SDK - I offered to help a friend create an Android App. No pay was involved, but I have been provided a more recent Android phone to replace my Android Dev Phone, so I actually have something of an obligation to complete and app for Android as opposed to just poking around in it.