Gnome on John Stowers

GNOME Tweak Tool 3.10 Improvements

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:25:32 +0000

ROS + Gtk

Python Bindings to the Pointcloud Library

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 02:00:00 +0000

python-pcl

ROS and Gtk for Laboratory Control

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:15:32 +0000

ROS + Gtk

A Change

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:15:32 +0000

2011 has been an interesting year. Between the stupid earthquakes and the pressure of finishing my PhD, I have been silent because I have had nothing interesting to talk about (cf. twitter…).

But there is a light at the end, I’m on track to complete my thesis, ‘Biologically Inspired Visual Control of Flying Robots’, in December/January.

I’m excited to say that I have accepted a job at the Institute of Molecular pathology , in a research group studying the mechanisms of visual flight control in insects. Technology wise, it is a perfect fit; the experimental apparatus involves a multi-camera real-time flight tracking system and estimator for multiple targets in an augmented reality flight arena. It is open-source (ish), and python/numpy. Research wise, it allows me to investigate some of the assumptions and unknowns in the biomimetic control systems I implemented during my PhD. And it is in Vienna, 1st Feb, 2012!

End of an Era: PyGTK

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:48:08 +0000

I just released PyGTK 2.24, which will almost certainly be the last major PyGTK release. The future of Python on the GNOME platform is PyGObject + GObject Introspection . From my experience over the last few months porting a number of my projects, the future is bright.

In a cruel twist of irony, the state of PyGTK on Windows and Mac has never been better. The credit for the windows work (and some great documentation improvements this cycle) must go to Dieter Verfaillie

SOC Report: Week 1

Sat, 31 May 2008 16:13:55 +0000

Well the first week of summer of code has finished. This week I spend my time evaluating and testing the various options available to (semi)automatically wrap C code (libsyncml ) so that it is accessible from Python. My priorities when evaluating the options go something like,

Capability - the tool should be able to (semi) automatically wrap a large majority of the libsyncml api. Any customizations required in order to make the wrapping more complete should be readable and maintainable by people other than myself.

Back To Reality

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:48:45 +0000

Conduit 0.3.5: Enough Excuses

I am a terrible project maintainer. It has been a full 3 months since the last Conduit release, and I have run out of excuses. First I got distracted by online desktop shenanigans, then by Opensync and Ubuntu things . I got caught up in moving Conduit to GNOME SVN . Then I got distracted by JHBuild on windows . Finally I lost my nerve and went on holiday, not touching a computer for 3 weeks. Enough is enough!

One Thousand

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:06:55 +0000

Conduit recently reached 1000 commits, and with it came together some functionality that has been brewing for a while.

Far far far improved nokia n800 support
- You can now sync files, photos, music, and videos to your nokia n800 in an intelligent way (i.e. its not just a dumb file/folder sync).
- The ability to transcode said data to the most appropriate format for the device. FFmpeg/Mencoder is used to transcode audio/video , and gtk.Pixbuf is used to convert photos . The converters use conduits built in dynamic modular plugin system, so if someone wants to write a audio video converter using GStreamer then please contact me.

What Ever Happened To?

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:34:04 +0000

There are a number of lively discussions currently going on in desktop-devel with regard to new module proposals [1]. This reminded me of a few projects I used to follow that I have not heard from in a while. Hoping not to offend any of the developers I therefore ask,

What ever happened to?

Gnome Formatter A HAL pretty formatting utility, so I may finally easily format my USB keys. Description here , and here

Expanding the Sync Space

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:55:17 +0000

No screenshots this time, but still good news. Conduit tries to be a good citizen, integrating itself with GNOME technologies. Recently the following hacking has been going on (not all items are complete)

A Eye Of Gnome plugin allowing photo upload/sync to Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, Facebook (soon)
Gnome user documentation
Themable icons
Patches to improve FSpots DBus interface to allow two way syncs with photo sites
Continued work on OpenSync integration. We have limited support for arbitary opensync plugins!

Conduit Is Online Desktop

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:10:34 +0000

After a short hacking hiatus, soul searching, and general uncertainty regarding Conduits place in the Gnome Online Desktop plan, we the Conduit developers have decided to keep doing what we do best ; adding awesome features, and making Conduit into the best desktop synchronization service for the free desktop. I invite you all to spot the new features in the image below;

Going through the new features one by one;

Misc Updates

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 11:34:36 +0000

Conduit

For all those that are interested I just released Conduit 0.3.1 , the second development release in the series. The release includes a heap of bug fixes and some interesting new features including;

Evolution Support (memos and tasks) using evolution-python
Ipod calendar and tasks support
Support SmugMug and Picasaweb

Goals for the next release include

Supporting box.net
Google notes support
100% test coverage of the core sync engine

The thing that keeps me interested in conduit is the speed at which we are progressing. Each new dataprovider added has a benefit proportional to the number of already included dataproviders; for instance adding evolution support opened up the ability to do tomboy notes <–> evolution memos, as well as evolution memos <–> ipod notes, etc.

Conduit Architecture and Updates

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:31:41 +0000

A lot has been happening on the Conduit front of late, and I probably should have blogged about it earlier. Unfortunately, it has seemed as though I have made 5 steps forward and 4 steps back with every hour of work on the project, so why, and whats up?

Background

I will be dropping a 0.3 release to coincide with the release of GNOME 2.18. This will be a developer release designed to get things working well before a stable 0.4 release some time after.

A Metadata Enabled GNOME

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:41:27 +0000

When Tracker was proposed for GNOME 2.18 I was one of its staunchest supporters , arguing that a GNOME wide unified metadata storage system would enable a richer desktop experience, and take GNOME beyond its competition. Tracker did not make the cut for GNOME 2.18, and will no doubt be proposed again for GNOME 2.20.

To help people see the potential of a GNOME desktop using Tracker I have been working on two projects for the past little while. Both of these are components of my larger vision of a metadata rich GNOME desktop. These initial attempts just focus on making tagging [1] a more consistent experience for all GNOME apps. Consider the examples and screenshots (for a file called nice) below;

Bling to Get Excited About

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:09:57 +0000

Some interesting things have popped up in the FOSS world in the last few weeks. Some of you may have seen these, others may not;

XFCE got some substancial bling
- XFCE 4.4 screenshot tour - look at the compositing window manager
- Another tour
- A nice list of XFCE goodies
New GNOME bling
Distro bling

What have I been doing

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 02:52:25 +0000

So its been a while since I have posted but there is some interesting news to report;

Conduit has a new developer - confusingly also named John
I am speaking at Linux.conf.au both at the GNOME Miniconf and the Main conference
I have some interesting Topaz style demos to show soon
Conduit 0.3 is going to rock
- Opensync will be supported (to some degree)
- The UI is starting to really ROCK, and improved treeview to display dataproviders, and improved canvas performance.

Collection of Thoughts

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:05:20 +0000

This wont be a particuarly coherant post, More a collection of links that I dont want to lose, and that others might find interesting. Also some updates on the foo that I am working on.

Is anyone offering odds on America going to war with Iran in the next 6 months?
- These stories make me nervous….

One of the great things I like about free software is that there is always something exciting around the corner. Sometimes it just takes way to much procrastinating to find out about it. Here are a few things that I am looking forward to in the next 6 months;

Conduit and Other News

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:52:49 +0000

So I finally got around to releasing Conduit 0.2.0 , which, while having many limitations, is relatively useful and safe to use on a daily basis. I have been swaped by university work at the moment, as this is the last week, but I hope to be back developing again soon.

Other Things on the hack-agenda over the next few weeks (months)

Albatross work
Refactoring Conduit to be more MVC
Thinking about synchronization as it can be applied to all of GNOME

Conduit v0.2.0 Coming Soon

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:31:56 +0000

I have been working really hard for the last month on getting the Conduit core to a v0.2.0 ready state…. However after talking to a few people I have decided to delay v0.2.0 by a week to give more time for testing, and to increase the usefullness of some of the included dataproviders (Flickr and Fspot in particular).

The rationale behind this is, however cool an Idea Conduit is, it is only as useful as the things it can be used to sync with. I want this release to make a big splash, so I want the ability to sync with included GNOME apps to work really well. This means focusing a lot of testing on the Tomboy and F-spot datasources, and the Flickr datasink.

Conduit 0.1 Released

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:43:50 +0000

After a solid month of work I just release v0.1 of Conduit.

Conduit is a synchronization solution for GNOME which allows the user to take their emails, files, bookmarks, and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.

This version is the first version which is actually usable so I thought I would release it to gather feedback, particuarly about the GUI, and how people interact with the application.

GNOME on the horizon

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 21:38:48 +0000

My responses to this well composed post of GNOME constructive criticism.

Interesting and well written post. I am also not a gnome expert, only a user and part time developer. Here are some suggestions regarding each of the points you made;

Firstly a few general comments. Personally on Ubuntu Dapper Beta, Gnome is considerably faster than KDE in my experience, but this may just be a variation of the placebo effect!. Either way all the recent GNOME performance work has sped it up considerably since the version in Breezy!

Epiphany is AWESOME!

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:55:45 +0000

After reading this post I have now switched from firefox to epiphany. I would have done so earlier if this was hyped during the (or Davyd’s ) 2.14 release notes!

My favorite features (so far) are

Extensions (especially integration with liferea)
When a page cannot epiphany offers the GCace or Archive.org version
Starts faster
Taggable style bookmarks!
Deskbar integration
Download manager (with notification area icon)

I would recommend any gnomie out there to switch to epiphany today!

Gnome Documentation System

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:27:01 +0000

Just started hacking on my attempt to implement some sort of more modern documentation system for the gnome user guide.

So far this involves a few components; a modified version of moinmoin 1.5, a hacked version of yelp with xml-rpc support, and some python scripts.

Basically the idea is that moinmoin now supports docbook generation and has a nice xml-rpc interface. So the idea is that periodically the wiki version of the gnome-user-guide is crawled and docbook is generated. Also, yelp can fetch the latest version of the documentation from the wiki and display it.

Gnome Documentation

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 01:08:19 +0000

Well by virtue of having a working jhbuild install of Gnome 2.13.91 I have volunteered myself to update the nautilus section of the gnome user docs. Well what a Job that is shaping up to be!

I have been rewriting a lot of the docs and taking a heap of (matching) screen shots along the way so when I finish (which will be in a day or two) the new user guide will be rocking!

Successful build of Gnome 2.13.91 using jhbuild

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 01:02:53 +0000

Well after a little bit of fluffing around, but an otherwise streamlined build process I got a installation of Gnome 2.13.91 going. Thanks a lot to the following links

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveCDCustomizationHowTo http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLiveCd_2fHowTo

The first thing I notice about the new version: fast! Nautilus and startup have become a lot faster. I really like the eog simplification that has gone on, and the fusa stuff seems to work really well. I will go and file a few bugs about the operation of nautilus and the blinging new search feature. Now I can move onto the next step of my “automated livecd using jhbuild master plan”