As scheduled, we just released Banshee 1.6.0! This release has been a long time coming, and we're really proud of it.

A more detailed backstory

We originally intended to release 1.6 last fall, but we got caught short on time, and ended up calling 1.5.1 a stable release so distros would feel comfortable picking it up, but of course the weird versioning has caused quite some confusion.

We continued the 1.5 series with 1.5.2 though 1.5.7 betas, leading up to this release: 1.6.0. The process really started 14 months ago when we branched off 1.4, and master became the workplace for 1.5. It wasn't even until after we branched that Alexander Kojevnikov, now one our most prolific contributors and a maintainer of the project, got involved!

Beautiful numbers

53 programmers contributed to Banshee 1.6 just since 1.5.1, and over Banshee's full history, 142 programmers have contributed. I think these are astounding numbers. And these don't include Banshee Community Extensions, which started two months ago today and already includes 15 extensions and 19 maintainers.

We fixed 265 bugs since 1.5.1 as well (over 500 since 1.4), added dozens of new features and enhancements, and had over 2,000 beta users opt-in to report anonymous usage data that we will use to make Banshee better.

Banshee 1.6

Here are some of the new features in Banshee 1.6. Read the Release Notes for more detail, screenshots, and enhancements not listed here.

• Play Queue Auto DJ
• Sync Device From Playlist
• Grid View
• Type-ahead Find in Track, Artist, and Album Lists
• Automatic Scoring
• New Shuffle Modes
• Audiobooks Library
• Library-folder Watcher
• eMusic Importer/Downloader
• Internet Archive Extension
• YouTube Extension
• Improved Metadata Handling

A community effort

Thanks to everybody who has helped make Banshee such a success! Tremendous thanks go to Bertrand Lortentz and Alexander Kojevnikov, who over the last year in particular have contributed countless hours writing their own patches and reviewing others', triaging bugzilla, being active on IRC and the list, and generally being great maintainers of the project. They have invested in Banshee, and the effect on Banshee's quality and the community's growth is evident.

You can tap into the Banshee community and energy in many ways – read Planet Banshee, follow us on Twitter, lurk in the #banshee chat room, subscribe to banshee-list, monitor bug activity, and keep up with the latest code. We're a friendly, productive bunch, so stop by if you have a question or idea, if you want to contribute or you just want to learn how you can make your own project better.

Hello everybody,

I want to share some ideas about the success of the Russian openSUSE community, and try to answer the question about its popularity. As you can see it is one of the top places:

The reason for the high popularity of this distribution in Germany is of course the fact that the German SuSE distribution and the main branch of development is located in Nuremberg. Popularity in the U.S. is due Novell – an American company, and of course the language is English. But why are so many people in Russia choosing openSUSE?

Good question. One of the main things that influence the choice of distribution – the quality and localization. The global community plays a top role for quality of distribution and local make it appropriate for Russian language users (of course a local community can be as part of a global community).

Perhaps most important is the documentation. And of course, not everyone wants (or can) read the documentation in English. Everyone wants to read the documentation in their native language. The distribution may be in a good shape and stable, nice and convenient, but without documentation it will use very few. Translated documentation is very important to the community. The translation must have a high quality, understandable, and as it must be kept up to date.

For the community its also profitable that 2 guys from the community working for Novell (in Nuremberg and in Prague). This provides better communication between “developers – community”. It helps to be closer to the project. This allows you to always be aware of all the major news of the project. And of course the translation is much better if they are engaged not just as a translator, but the employee who works on the distribution.

Of course this also applys for software. Although it is not as important as documentation, it still makes an impression on the quality of distribution. Everyone wants to work with the software in their native language %)

A successful community is a group of people who love openSUSE, who understands why the software should be free, who wants to make openSUSE better and better… every day.

Continuing my series of getting the openSUSE Community engaged in how better to improve itself, I thought I would look at Transparency and Communication. So what do I mean by these two? If we look at the definitions of these two: Transparency - Lack of hidden agendas and conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making. Minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements, dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all for verification.

ruby-dbus has for a long time not worked on the default Ubuntu desktop. I thought I had fixed it in 0.2.12 but that was only for the server side. In fact, clients had another bug and I have released version 0.3.0 today to fix it.

NEWS:

Bug fixes:

• Fixed "undefined method `get_node' for nil:NilClass" on Ubuntu Karmic (Ticket#34).
• Get the session bus address even if unset in ENV (Issue#4).
• Improved exceptions a bit: UndefinedInterface, InvalidMethodName, NoMethodError, no RuntimeException

These are by Klaus Kaempf:

• Make the signal dispatcher call all handlers (Issue#3).
• Run on Ruby < 1.8.7 (Issue#2).
• Avoid needless DBus::IncompleteBufferException (Ticket#33).
  
• Don't ignore DBus Errors in request_service, raise them (Ticket#32).
  

Features:

• Automatic signature inference for variants.
  
• Introduced FormalParameter where a plain pair had been used.
  

RPMs can be found via Webpin.

On Saturday a small group of SoC mentors will sort through the list of ideas on the wiki, clean them up, remove those we don't want to recommend to students, and highlight those we find especially alluring.

If you have ideas for your project, you have today and tomorrow to add them to the wiki before our meeting. Please place new ideas in the "Other Ideas" section.

The student proposal period starts Monday. If you want to help review student proposals, please sign up as a mentor. If you don't use your full name and include details when applying to be a mentor, we may not know who you are, so if you choose to do that please email me, Ruben, or Daniel with your link_id so we don't reject you. :-) We have to be careful because there are some sneaky or confused students out there who try to sign up as mentors.

The ideas page will be under tight control after our meeting on Saturday, but it will still be possible to add ideas if you check with folks in #soc-admin or on the GNOME soc-mentors-list first.

Finally found the time to travel to the Prague SUSE Office, together with Thomas who was holding a 2 day security design lecture there.

I myself did not have much tasks except to meet people, say hi and see if anything
comes up to discuss, so I mostly did my regular work.

Thomas lecture was a success as far as I see, the hospitality of our SUSE colleagues was very great and the hotel nice.

I took several trips into the inner city to take pictures.

Tuesday: Trip with the 50mm lens on the Nikon D90. Found that 50mm is not well suited to architectural photography, only long shots really possible. Took some nice perspectives though.

Wednesday: Trip with the 35mm lens. Better, I also took some more shake-free pictures of the castle. Enjoyed the Globe Bookstore, recommended by skh.

Thursday: Trip with the 18-200mm Zoom Lens. Went up to the castle, took an interesting cathedral entrace shot, some panaromas and a bit of voyerism shots ;).

Changes in this release:

LDTPv2 hang in Ubuntu 10.04 is fixed
Don't navigate table cell, as it causes more resource and time in OpenOffice calc
Added new API simulatemousemove for DnD test (VMware Workstation / Player Unity-GHI feature)
Patch by Ara Pulido for b.g.o bug # 612311
Listen all Window events, else new application like Firefox is not listed
waittillguiexist now can wait for state as well
hasstate can wait for given time till the state is True

Special thanks to Eitan Isaacson [1], Ara Pulido [2], James Tatum [3], Anupa Kamath [VMware, India], Slava Podokshik [VMware, USA]

Download source:
http://download.freedesktop.org/ldtp/2.x/2.0.x/ldtp-2.0.4.tar.gz

Download RPM from
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anagappan:/ldtp2:/rpm/
Will schedule deb build in openSUSE build service tomorrow

For detailed information on LDTP framework and latest updates visit http://ldtp.freedesktop.org

For information on various APIs in LDTP including those added for this release can be got from http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/user-doc/index.html

Report bugs - http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/wiki/Bugs

IRC Channel - #ldtp on irc.freenode.net

[1] - http://monotonous.org/
[2] - http://ubuntutesting.wordpress.com/
[3] - https://launchpad.net/~jtatum

Today is Ada Lovelace day - an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science ((thanks Sankar for reminding me, although I signed the pledge some time ago already, I would have certainly forgotten it completely in this "moved to a new team" frenzy ;-)).

I'm going to introduce to you one of the most brilliant mathematicians of her era, a heroine that lived in difficult times where women were not admitted to the universities and scientific societies. Despite all the obstacles, she significantly contributed to number theory and her findings helped to solve one of the greatest mathematical mysteries of all times - Fermat's last theorem. Ladies and gentleman, Sophie Germain.

Sophie was born in 1776 into the middle class French family. She discovered magical world of numbers and mathematics as a teenager, to a great dismay of her parents who in the effort to prevent their daughter from pursuing such an unfeminine career used to confiscate her candles and remove heating from her room so that she couldn't study. But in the end, it was her father who financially supported her research and her efforts to break into the male-only community of mathematicians.

In 1794, Ecole Polytechnique was opened in Paris, but unfortunately, its gates were closed to women. In order to pursue studies anyway, Sophie assumed an identity of drop-out student, monsieur Le Blanc and was submitting answer sheets under this pseudonym. It was only after course supervisor, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, astonished by her brilliant answers, insisted on meeting the talented student when her true identity was revealed.

She quickly moved from homework assignments to more difficult problems and being interested in number theory, she had to come across Fermat's theorem sooner or later. She proved the theorem for particular type of primes, making an important step towards the final proof on which later generations of mathematicians could build. In later age, she also explored elasticity theory and received grand prize from Paris Academy of Sciences for her research on the subject. Sophie died of breast cancer in 1831. A particular type of primes (if n is prime, 2n+1 is also prime) is called "Sophie Germain prime" in her honour.

My choice of extraordinary female scientist to blog about was not random - I wanted to introduce a pioneer woman in some field to illustrate how much prejudice and institutionalized misogyny  women had to (and sadly, sometimes still have to) overcome to succeed just as well as men do. Using the words of Carl Friedrich Gauss ("the prince of mathematician") in one of his letters to Germain: "A taste for the abstract sciences in general and above all the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare: one is not astonished at it: the enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius."

Many thanks to these brave heroines who paved the way to us, modern women in technology and science.

References: Wikipedia, Simon Singh's book (Fermat's Last Theorem - highly recommended read)

Marcelo Lira (PySide developer) announced moments ago on the PySide mailing list the technical preview of PySide-Shiboken:

Hello folks,

today we got the Shiboken generated PySide bindings in a good enough
shape to do a proper release
with tarballs and all the required niceties, instead of rough git
urls. Keep in mind that this is an alfa release,
or a "technical preview" as the kids in my lawn are used to say, some
modules are missing and bugs are not
hard to find.

This PySide release contains bindings for the following modules:

* QtCore
* QtGui
* QtNetwork
* QtWebKit
* QtSvg
* QtXml
* QtTest
* QtOpenGL
* QtSql

Feel free to try your Python code with this version of PySide. You
know how it works: more users == less bugs.
As long as you guys tell us about the bugs: http://bugs.openbossa.org

A noteworthy fact is the first release of the Shiboken C++ binding
generator. Yay!
We strongly encourage it's use to produce non-Qt C++ bindings for
Python, it will make your life easier.
If it turns out to be not so easy, come and talk with us on #pyside
channel (Freenode).

Here follow everything needed for this release, in order of compilation.

API Extractor, version 0.4.0
http://www.pyside.org/files/apiextractor-0.4.0.tar.bz2

Generator Runner, version 0.4.0
http://www.pyside.org/files/generatorrunner-0.4.0.tar.bz2

Shiboken, version 0.2.0
http://www.pyside.org/files/shiboken-0.2.0.tar.bz2

PySide, version 0.3.0
http://www.pyside.org/files/pyside-qt4.6+0.3.0.tar.bz2

You will notice that the size of the generated bindings for the Qt
modules in no way resemble the figures from the Boost.Python version.
And talking about Boost: packagers, be aware that no component depends
on Boost::Graph anymore. Yay^2!

P.S.: cgoncalves, thanks for all the code. And to everyone else that
provided bug reports, patches, beers, etc.

And I followed by adding the usual pos-release-announcement announcement:

Don't want to get your hands dirty and have headaches due to compilation
issues? That's bloody easy! Get this very same release version already
packaged for your distribution from the openSUSE Build Service! Packages
(32bit and 64bit) available for the following distributions:

- openSUSE 11.0, 11.1, 11.2 (for both Qt 4.5 and Qt 4.6 version available),
and Factory
- Fedora 11 and 12
- Mandriva 2009.1 and 2010

You can install PySide package by adding the proper repository from
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/pyside:/shiboken/
to your package manager (zypper, yum, urpi, smart or any other rpm-md
compatible) followed by the installation of package 'python-pyside'.

But (!) in case you are all a bleeding-eye person, or simply if you want to
take an extremely important role on the development by testing it and
reporting back to developers, you can even get the regularly snapshots taken
from PySide's Git mainline by adding the devel repository[1].

Or if you happen to be from the old-school and love PySide Boost based you can
still install and use it[2].

I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate and thanks the PySide
team for their magnificent effort given to the project. You guys rock!


[1] http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/pyside:/devel/
[2] http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/pyside:/boost/