Posts

More Network Light fun

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When I wrote GUPnP Network Light, I thought of it as just a simple example application that demonstrates how easy it is to implement UPnP devices and services using GUPnP. However there is one man, Mr. Hugo Baldasano Calleja who being an electrical engineer is very much interested in light bulbs and has recently been writing control point for Network Light. While discussing about his code with him on IRC , I started to wonder how would a simple control point GUI for Network Light look like. I realized that it would look exactly the same as the Network Light itself. Since Hugo had already made it possible for multiple instances of Network Light to co-exist happily on the same network/machine, I decided to turn Network Light GUI to be a Control Point that controls all the Lights on the network, not just itself. The change is already in the trunk and will be released soon. Here is a screenshot:

GSSDP 0.6.2 and GUPnP 0.12.2 released

Jorn made minor releases of GSSDP and GUPnP today. The main purpose of which is to fix the build on Rawhide. Here is the release announcement: GSSDP 0.6.2 =========== - Reannounce resources after max_age / 2 - 1 instead of after max_age. [Peter Christensen, Jorn Baayen] - Remove unnecessary call to g_thread_init(). [Zeeshan Ali] GUPnP 0.12.2 ============ - Support returning actions outside of the 'action-invoked' signal handler in service implementations. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen] - Add explicit dependency on gthread. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]

XChat or irssi+screen+ssh?

Ever since I started to IRC from my Linux machine, not only I had been a happy (almost) user of XChat for years but also I wrote an XChat plugin for Guile. All that changed when I moved to Finland three years ago and was educated about the benefits of the combination of irssi + screen +ssh, the biggest (perhaps the only one) of them being the persistence connection to IRC. Since then I had been using that combination. After three years, I am having doubts about the choice I made at that time. XChat might not be able to provide me with a persistent connection to the IRC world but it still provides lots of small features that irssi does not (and in some cases can not) provide that really does matter in the end and one would expect in a modern IRC client, e.g hard-to-miss notifications when I get new messages, saving of logs and DCC-sent-files directly on my local-machine etc. I switched to back to XChat a few days ago. I mostly feel good about coming back to it but still miss the persi

GUPnP soon in Fedora

Peter Robinson had made RPMS for GUPnP package for a while now but it was until recently that someone got a chance to review them. The first (and IIRC the only) issue that came out was that the build was breaking for all our apps. Here is what was happening: We call g_thread_init() in each of the application because libsoup requires us to do that. If I understand correctly, libsoup needs the threading system to be initialized for locking stuff that is actually a part of glib. While we don't mind putting this call in each of our app, we assumed that libsoup requiring us to make this call will itself link to libgthread-2.0. That assumption is true about libsoup-2.4 built/installed from vanilla release tarballs, subversion repo and debian/ubuntu packages but on Rawhide, it turned out to be false. I (and a bunch of other developer hanging out on #gnome-hackers) had a chat with Dan Winship about this and in the end he agreed to put gthread-2.0 in libsoup-2.4 pkg-config. He said that it

We have plugins

Just pushed my commits to gupnp-media-server SVN trunk . Now we support plugable media providers, which can be written either in Vala or C. Also included in these commits is gstreamer-based metadata-extractor. Still not done (due to lack of time :() is a standalone media provider based on this extractor, GIO and SQLite.

Now a GNOME foundation member

I just received e-mail informing me about the successful processing of my application for GNOME foundation membership. Thanks to all the people who vouched for me. My agenda as a member will be to: continue contributing wherever/whenever possible. make sure GNOME has full-blown support/integration for UPnP. not let the people who think of Mango Lassi as an original desi drink and are agaisnt the idea of GUADEC in Finland, gain power in the foundation. :P

back from finnish forest

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I am back. Had a very relaxing one week in the Finnish summer cottage. Lots of fishing and plenty of nice food to eat. Yes! there was Sauna almost everyday and yes! 'swimming in the lake naked' breaks were included. I had a crappy GPRS connection so I did some twitter ing for the past few days.