Technology Temple

Aloha planet,

as you may know, Get­ting Things GNOME is a todo-manager soft­ware that, among other things, can syn­chro­nize the things-you-really-should-be-doing-instead-of-reading-this-post with var­i­ous sources.

One of its most pop­u­lar fea­tures is the abil­ity to syn­chro­nize with Remem­ber the Milk.

For the next release of GTG, I’ve writ­ten a new ver­sion of that syn­chro­niza­tion, with fea­tures a vari­ety of nice things. Among those:

• back­ground sync (set up once and for­get about it)
• sup­port for RTM recur­rent tasks
• roll­back­ing of par­tial syncs
• on-the-fly sync from GTG to RTM

Before releas­ing that, how­ever, I’d like to do have it well tested,  to ensure that no harm is done to your pre­cious todo items, so.. I’m look­ing for testers!

If you have the 5 min­utes nec­es­sary and you’re inter­ested in try­ing new stuff even before it hits a PPA, execute

tar czf gtg_backup.tgz .local/share/gtg/  #just in case, backup of your gtg install (if any)
sudo aptitude install bzr
bzr branch lp:~gtg-user/gtg/all_the_backends_merge_requests  gtg_backends
cd gtg_backends
./scripts/debug.sh -d #this lauches a debug version of GTG that doesn't touch your own GTG tasks

And go to Edit->Backends to start (your exist­ing GTG tasks won’t be touched, so you’re safe).

You’re more than wel­come to play with the other back­ends as well (and report bugs, as they should be ready for being released as well). Those are, at the moment:

• twit­ter
• identi.ca
• tomboy
• gnote (needs devel­op­ment ver­sion of gnote)
• launch­pad
• local file

If you find a bug, please report it to https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gtg (link­ing this post).

If you don’t fine any, leave a com­ment here, so we can know that we’re good (^_^).

Thanks!

Hello planet!
I’m back from GUADEC. It was my first con­fer­ence about open source and it was great.
I’ve found par­tic­u­larly inspir­ing the talk by Guil­laume Desmottes about Telepa­thy and Epiphany, which can be great to extend GTG pos­si­bil­i­ties in col­lab­o­ra­tion.
The talk by Jake Edge about pro­mot­ing free soft­ware projects was also very inter­est­ing, in par­tic­u­lar for the young Lightspark project (that went com­pletely unno­ticed for a few months before show­ing up on planet GNOME).

Thanks to the excit­ing talks and peo­ple at GUADEC,   the GTG team (even the peo­ple who were not there!) has been work­ing fer­vently on a nice rewrite of some parts of GTG core, along with a lot of unit-tests. Hope­fully, a lot of bugs will be closed thanks to this, and GTG will be nicer to code.

Some of the GTG peo­ple at GUADEC. From left to right: Bertrand Rousseau, Karlo Jez, Lionel Dri­cot and me.

As for my Google Sum­mer of Code on Get­ting Things Gnome sup­port for mul­ti­ple back­ends, this week has seen:

• a port of my Evo­lu­tion plu­gin as a back­end (that was the last one planned)
• refac­tor­ing of the Twit­ter plu­gin to get autho­riza­tion through Oauth (using  the tweepy library, thanks Tante for the hint)
• docs, docs, docs

Next week, I’ll keep doc­u­ment­ing and test­ing. I should also write a guide on how to write new back­ends. See you next week!

Try­ing to keep up with the old rule “Release early, release often” I’ happy to announce release 0.4.2.2 open source flash player.

This appar­ently small point release actu­ally includes the biggest fea­ture plan­nend for the upcom­ing 0.4.3 release, namely Gnash fall­back on older SWF clips.  Lightspark cur­rently relies no Gnash for any Flash con­tent that does not require AVM2 (Action­Script 3) support.

I would also like to explain an issue that many users and testers reported. Fire­fox is not able to han­dle mul­ti­ple plu­gin for the same file type! Not even if only one of those plu­g­ins is actu­ally enabled. So, if lightspark is installed along­side adobe’s player or Gnash no flash con­tent will be dis­played. This is a fire­fox bug, I’ve reported the bug and pro­posed a patch that is cur­rently wait­ing the review.

The source of the release is as always avail­able on launch­pad. Binary pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Mav­er­ick will be avail­able on the usual PPA (in a cou­ple hours from now, Launch­pad seems pretty busy at the moment). More­over, since the last announce­ment lightspark has been also included in the debian exper­i­men­tal suite (thanks to Didier Raboud and Luca Falavigna).

Stay tuned, and fol­low the roadmap

This week in “Get­ting Things Gnome!” devel­op­ment of mul­ti­ple backends:

• As for yesterday’s post, we can now auto­mat­i­cally import (some) Evo­lu­tion mails in GTG
• I’ve been work­ing on the Remem­ber The Milk back­end to speed it up. Since RTM allows only one API call per sec­ond, any­thing cacheable must be cached.
• I’ve been test­ing and fix­ing the couchdb back­end. Now it syncs on ubuntu one with­out error on my machine. It would be great if some­one is will­ing to test it. Keep in mind that ubuntu one is sync­ing couchdb data­bases every ten min­utes or so. Instruc­tions on how to test are here.

Next week, I’ll be at GUADEC! I really don’t know if I’ll have the time to work on this at all, but if I do, it will be all about the RTM backend.

See you in Den Haag (or L’Aia, in Ital­ian. I won­der why..)!