This is how I created the Wine-Doors DEB packages on Gentoo.

1. I recommend emerging “debhelper” since its used by quite a lot of packages, this will pull in dpkg too. If you don’t think you’ll need debhelper, just emerge dpkg.  Emerge fakeroot too if you don’t have it.
2. If you’re not using debhelper, you can skip this step.  The Gentoo version of man doesn’t support the “–recode” option so in “/usr/bin/dh_installman” change:

   complex_doit "man --recode UTF-8 ./\Q$orig\E > \Q$tmp\E";

   To

   complex_doit "man ./\Q$orig\E > \Q$tmp\E";

3. dpkg-buildpackage will fail because of a missing file “/var/lib/dpkg/status”, create it.

Now you should be able to create DEB packages with “pkg-buildpackage -d” (the -d disables the dependency checks which is probably what you want since your dpkg database will be empty)

Grab it here.

I have a midi-hifi connected to my desktop via digital since I listen to a lot of music and it works great with OSS, but not with ALSA.

Most of the time I keep Skype open, but as soon as someone sends me a message or I open a Skype window it steals the sound.  I have to quit my audio player (or whatever else was using the sound) and Skype and start them both up to get sound back to where I want it.

I had been holding off installing Pulseaudio for a while because to my knowledge a lot of apps didn’t support it yet, and I though crappy sound was better that no sound.  I gave it a try anyway.

The compatibility with OSS and ALSA seems superb.  Banshee built with Pulseaudio support and WINE built with alsa works flawlessly side-by-side with my sound-card using the OSS driver.  I’m sure I could have don’t this with ALSA, but I doubt it would have done it as well or as easy.

So to all the people that are complaining about Pulseaudio: Shut up and give it a try. It’s not really evil, quite the opposite.

One of the things that really slows Wine-Doors down is the code that figures out whether a package is installed/available or and upgrade, so I decided to investigate why.

In this example I created a list of 1000 numbers (0-999) and randomly choose a number from that list, which I then give to my 3 search functions, linear_search, binary_search and python_search.  Each search function returns the number of iterations needed to find the item in the list (or None if its not in there, which would be worrying) and a function decorator prints the time it took.

Value we are searching for is '760'

Performing linear search
linear_search took 0.668 ms
Found test value in 760 iterations

Performing binary search
binary_search took 0.085 ms
Found test value in 26 iterations

Performing python search
python_search took 2.234 ms
Found test value in 0 iterations

linear_search iterates through each item in the list one by one. binary_search (I call it binary_search, but its not really, it uses a custom algorithm) starts at the middle and heads in which ever direction makes the most sense, if it is heading in the right direction it speeds up, and if not it changes direction and slows down.  python_search just uses the following code:

def python_search( list, value ):
    if value in list:
        return 0:
    return None

python search failed miserably, and this is the recommend way to determine if a value is in a list so you’d think it would be the fastest. linear_search came second which really surprised me, as I was certain it would come last. But wow, binary_search really killed both of them.

Why doesn’t python use something like this internally to speed this kind of thing up?

I’ve been running Virtual Box’ in seamless mode with a Linux host and a Windows guest and it is very impressive, but I wouldn’t call it seamless for 2 reasons.

1. Windows are not managed by the hosts window manager - like they are with things like WINE.
2. All the icons in the systray should be in the notification area, and so should things like the Windows Start Menu - see how VirtualPC integrates the Windows Menu with the Mac OSX dock.

If these things were fixed, then it would be seamless.

What really annoys me about python lists (and tuples) is that their ‘append’ method returns ‘None’.  This effectively renders the append method useless when working with custom classes that offer a dict like interface via __getitem__ and __setitem__.

Take the following code for example.

class MyClass( object ):

    def __init__( self ):
        self.dict = {}

    def __getitem__( self, name ):
        return self.dict[name]

    def __setitem__( self, name, value ):
        self.dict[name] = value

myclass = MyClass()
myclass["list"] = ["foo"]
myclass["list"].append( "bar" )

You’d think that myclass[”list”] now contains [”foo”, “bar”]. It actually contains None (the append methods return value).

I was playing with some Linux images on my HTC Universal (aka Xda Exec, Jasjar, etc), when I realized that most of them sucked.

I built my own GPE image using OpenEmbedded, It’s based on the Angstrom distribution so there’s a package manager (ipkg) with plenty of apps ready to try out, pretty cool. Wifi in this image seems far more stable than any other image I’ve tried.

GPE has one of the best mobile browsers I’ve ever used, and some excellent PIM apps, but seems to lack an app for making use of phone functionality.

I’m currently investigating adding support to Conduit for syncing GPE devices.

What works:

• Touch screen
• Wifi
• Keyboard (although the map is a bit out)
• Suspend/Resume
• Sound
• Screen rotation using the panel applet

What doesn’t:

• Battery applet
• Wifi applet (network config tool works fine though)
• Phone/SMS capability
• Starling Audio Player (segfaults)
• su - when logged in as a normal user - “chmod u+s /bin/su” as root to fix.

How to install:

• Find a SD card (I used a 1GB card) and create two partitions; a ext2 partition and a swap partition; make sure the ext2 partition is first. I recommend making the swap partition 256mb.
• Extract the rootsfs onto the ext2 partition.
• Copy these files onto your Universal, these are needed to boot Linux.  Make sure they are kept together.

To run Linux, just start haret.  Feedback much appreciated.

When I was at Guadec I met John Stowers, the developer of GNOME application Conduit Synchronizer. Conduit is something I had heard about a while ago but only vaguely remembered, I’d never seen it in action, and most people I talked to never really though it went anywhere or was still under active development.

Read the rest of this entry »

So its been a few days since Guadec (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) ended, and I’ve still not blogged about it.
It was nice to see a few familiar faces, and meet some more.

What rocked:

• Keynotes - They were all pretty good, I especially liked the ones on usability and the future of the ‘net.
• Employers - Passing out their business cards and contact details.
• Welcome party - Beer was OK, and there were lots of great people. Officially there was 1 FREE beer (token) per person, but the staff started giving out more tokens as the night went on. — Nice one.
• SMASHED (Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers) - it was on a boat!
• SWAG - All registered attendees received a nice laptop bag with all of the sponsors logos on, a couple of t-shirts (with Guadec and Bazaar on them), some leaflets and maps of istanbul, a whopping great 4GB Mandriva Flash pen drive and other various Imendio and Gnome branded goodies.

What didn’t:

• Mark Shuttleworth did not turn up to SMASHED.
• The FREE beer at the Google party was awful, there we tons of free beer tokens left everywhere.
  The DJ also had the music so load that it completely killed conversation (and would not turn it down), and to top it all off, not a single person from Google showed up. — Nice one Google.

All in all it was a pretty good first Guadec for me, I will definitely be going next year.