Coder's Log

I just rolled out Boxes 3.11.92 , which is going to become 3.12 in a week. Apart from lots of fixes and minor improvements like addition of keyboard shortcuts for improved accessibility for example, there are some note worthy changes against 3.10: Dropped use of clutter and clutter-gtk: While it was a good idea to mix gtk+ and clutter at the beginning of the project to make most of the animations and transparency controls possible, Gtk+ gained new API over last few years to make most of what Boxes needed, possible. So I decided to attempt to remove clutter* from the picture and I'm glad to report that my attempt was a success. This means: Less animations: Some of the animations we had are still not possible with Gtk+ (at least not in any easy/nice way) so they had to be dropped but they are nothing really essential to how Boxes work and were only good for impressing first time users. I'm talking about box thumbnail flying around the window for transitions between d...

I just rolled out Geoclue 2.1.1 ! Since my last post with Geoclue update, there has been lots of changes. You can find a list of all the changes here but here are the highlights: Modem geolocation: If you got a 3GPP modem, geoclue will now be able to use that to locate you (with neighborhood-level accuracy) using opencellid.org . Additionally if your modem has GPS capability, geoclue can use that as well and as you know GPS is the most reliable geolocation source. One issue with GPS currently is that it takes a while before it can get a lock on and reason for that is that we currently have no support for A-GPS . I'll be talking with Aleksander Morgado during the weekend about how we can add that support but if I've understood correctly, it will need more work in ModemManager than geoclue now that it has all these other sources. Geoclue locating me using 3GPP source WiFi geolocation: In my last relevant blog post, I mentioned that we'll be implementing this ...

For those who haven't heard the news yet, I'll be joining Red Hat UK and terminating my Red Hat Ltd, Finland branch contract starting Nov 1 2013. Naturally, I'll be myself moving to London soon along with my wife and cat. I'm about to embark on a trip to Canada and US to attend Boston Montreal  and Google Summer of Code mentor summits and I'll return on Oct 22. Two days after that I fly to London to start the hunt for a decent apartment. Once I have an apartment, my wife and cat will come over as well. That's all folks.

Wow! Its been months since I last blogged. I have a good excuse and a bad one. The good one is that I've been extremely busy with trying to get some of things ready for GNOME 3.10. The bad one is that w/ me sharing all important events on all 3 major social networks, I don't feel too motivated to put all those into blog posts (yes, I'm very lazy). As you probably already know, I've been working on Maps, geolocation and geocoding apart from Boxes in 3.9 development cycle. Although there is still a lot of work to do in all these, I'm really happy with what we achieved in a short amount of time: Maps : There was  desire and design page for a map application for GNOME but I didn't see any implementation. I looked around and found out that  Mattias Bengtsson had already a repository so I helped him start the project. Currently it only allows you to some basic things you expect from a map application, like searching for places and finding your location but f...

Just like every year, I'm a mentor in Google Summer of Code 2013. This year I'm mentoring two students: Mattias Bengtsson , who will be working on implmenting route search in Maps . Since the Maps project was actually started by Mattias himself before he even thought of SoC and he has been working on maps (in general) as his fulltime job for 2 years now, I feel very confident about him being able to deliver. Kalev Lember , who will be working on implementing the new date&time panel in GNOME control center. Kalev has been contributing to different GNOME projects and has been very active in Fedora packaging business. Having had the pleasure of pair programming with him last week, I feel very confident about him delivering his project as well. So I got two awesome students, what could be better? There is the coincidence that both of them are located in ̶G̶o̶t̶h̶a̶m̶ ̶C̶i̶t̶y̶ Gothenburg, the very same city where one of our designers, Andreas Nilsson lives in. Since ...

We just rolled out Boxes 3.7.92 and have now entered code freeze. This means that apart from translations and doc updates, Boxes is ready for the stable 3.8 release (due next Monday). So whats new you ask? Since Boxes 3.6, we have been hard at work, making Boxes an app that is so awesome that it makes you want to use virtual machines if you are not already. :) Boxes is now a lot more reliable, has improved and more impressive UI and has cool new features: Add USB redirection support in new VMs and option to add it into existing VMs. i-e You can use your USB devices (camera, flash drive etc) plugged into host from the guest operating system. Smartcard support . This means if you have an appropriate reader device, you can use that to read information from your smart cards (credit/bank cards etc) from your virtual machine boxes. Automatically download and installation of all virtio and QXL drivers, and spice-vdagent as part of Windows XP and Windows 7 express installati...

I have been meaning to do this for a while and now I finally managed to do it:  Here you'll find tutorial on Boxes . I know the sound quality and volume isn't good and there is other mistakes/issues but I'm not too ashamed as this is the first time I've done this and tools that I needed/wanted were all breaking on my Fedora 18 laptop. UPDATE:  I uploaded an updated version of this tutorial with slightly improved audio. To improve it further, I'll have to re-record the audio or the whole video but right now I don't have time for that. Perhaps in a few weeks..