Thursday, August 4, 2005

West US photos, TranquilPC, XSettings and randoms things

As always, I forget to blog as often as I should. I sometime wonder if I should continue this blog..
Western US :

My trip in June was great, National Parks were awesome, as well as Las Vegas and San Francisco. I did a lot of photos (791, available here), and thanks to Hugin, Autopanog and Enblend, for the first time, I was able to generate panoramas without using Windows and Canon proprietary software !
Tranquil PC :
Unfortunately, my Tranquil PC has died, after almost two years running 24h a day, 7 days a week (the first one died after 6 months of operation and was replaced by the manufacturer). Concept was good but not that reliable. I've replaced it with a Shuttle Zen (which uses an fanless external power supply, just like laptops) which ended to be more powerful than my main PC.
Xsettings from KDE
As part of new features for the upcoming Mandriva 2006 (beta 1 is out, try it now), we wanted to better integrate all GTK+2 applications (such as all Mandriva tools, which are written in perl-GTK2) in KDE. To do this, using Owen reference implementation of Xsetting protocol, I wrote a small xsetting daemon for use in KDE, which reads KDE configuration files, make it available through XSettings (when applicable) and monitors KDE "KIPC" (which are just notification done using X atoms to tell KDE applications they should reload their configuration and apply it) to change XSettings accordingly. With this, when changing font in KControl, all GTK+ applications change their fonts too. This will allow us to put back stock buttons in our tools (ie better integration in GNOME) since they won't be shown when used under KDE (better coherency).Oh, and when doing this, I discovered a bug in libgnomeui2 (not filled yet) which discard Xsetting for toolbar style.
Randoms thoughts:
Oh, BTW, Bastien, it has been this way since we shipped Totem as a supported software, ie August 28 2003, because Totem is available in Video menu (titled as "Totem Movie Player") and Sound menu (titled as "Totem Media Player"). Why ? Because at that time (and even now in my opinion), Totem is one of the best player for movies and also for music files (when playing a random file downloaded on the web, not for playing your song library, in that case Rhythmbox is more appropriate) or webradio. Too bad for you, you wrote such a good application :)
The flickr folks did it again : they added some datamining in their databases so they could propose "interesting" photos for each day and also cluster tags. Now, each time I go there, I know I'm going to spend too much time looking at beautiful photos.