So, more wireless applet hacking today. This time I fixed the build so it installs all the nifty pam magic. Patches for all. Apply this patch to the latest wireless-tools development version, and unpack/apply this one to gnome-applets CVS. You’ll want to pass something like —sysconfdir=/etc to configure to get the pam stuff working.

[Disclaimer] I have only tested this on my own machine, which is running Fedora Core 1. Other RedHat systems will probably work. Basically, “ESSID=<essid> /sbin/ifup <interface>” needs to work, and you need consolehelper.

Spent some time today and yesterday hacking on the wireless applet some more. Now you can double-click a network to switch to it (sets the essid and gets a dhcp lease). I was thinking of what the applet should do while its in the process of switching. Getting a IP can take some time. For now, at least, I just made it insensitive with a “switching…” message.

Anyway, I finally sent a patch to Jean today (the wireless-tools maintainer) for the scanning stuff. Hopefully it’ll make it into the next wireless-tools release. It’s a shame I didn’t get this stuff done before the feature freeze….

I also spent a few minutes on recent-files stuff this week. I reverted the (unstable and unfinished) changes I made last year, and applied a patch from bugzilla that fixed some NFS file locking issues. I think by gnome 2.8, dbus will have matured and maybe we’ll be able to rewrite recent-files as a dbus service instead of the file spec we have now….

I’ve been hacking on the wireless applet a bit the last couple days. This is the result:

Right now it just lists the access points and the quality. It would be sweet if you could switch to another essid from there, etc.

Paolo has been working on recent-files stuff. I feel guilty for not helping him yet, so maybe I’ll work on that tonight.

My Dad’s old car (which I have been driving) was getting in pretty bad shape, so I bought a new (used) car on Saturday. It’s a green VW Passat. It’s totally sexy. I took pictures but don’t have them up anywhere.

Work isn’t taking as much of my time now, which is good I guess. Unfortunately, after hacking all day at work I have little desire to hack on GNOME, which is bad. The API/ABI freeze is on Monday and recent-files STILL isn’t ready to go in. Paolo has been working hard on a new document model and other good stuff, though, so maybe we’ll make it. OO.o has its own implementation, though, so we need to coordinate with those guys on what is happening…

Wow, talk about some shocking news. Chema Celorio died last night after a skydiving accident.

Chema was the person who got me involved with GNOME. I saw his post to the gnome-love mailing list, and decided I wanted to help out. He was more than willing to guide me along, often sinking quite a bit of time into answering my questions, etc. I met him for the first time in real life this summer on my first trip to Boston after being hired. He was staying at the company apartment in between sales trips. One night we were bored and watched a bunch of video he had recorded from his jumps. Chema lived life to the max, and he will certainly be missed.

See, I knew I wouldn’t keep this thing updated.

Going to Boston again on Sunday. Mucho trabajo to do. Things have been going pretty well, though.

A week or so ago I was messing around with creating panel applets in C#. Originally, I tried to wrap PanelApplet, but that didn’t go so well. I ended up writing some super hacky C glue to do the job. It worked pretty well. I think if I get a chance I might look at trying to wrap PanelApplet again. It really shouldn’t be that hard. After all, PanelApplet is pretty much a standard GObject.

I started on a tutorial on writing nautilus context menus and property pages in python. I’ve wanted to do this for a while now. These components are super easy to write in python. Plus you can do hella cool stuff with them, so I think it may be attractive to newbies.

Do not, under any circumstances, see the movie “Cabin Fever”. Worst. Movie. Ever.

If you’re feeling brave, you should totally check out the latest red carpet client. It supports apt rpm repositories and multiple servers now. It’s very sweet. There is a fairly recent one in the ‘rcd-snaps’ channel if you want to try it.

Yeah, so, it took me a while to get the metaWeblog support working with Seth’s blogger applet (as some of the planet gnome readers may have noticed). Seems to be working well now though.

GNOME 2.4 is coming out soon. Best GNOME Ever. I don’t think I did anything, though, except fix a couple bugs. School really had me busy during the end…

PyGTK 2.0 was released! This is great news! I have some libwnck bindings laying around that I’m going to try to get in now. I originally made them so I could easily test the window migration extensions to gtk/wnck I was working on. That kind of flopped though (I am lazy, plus the community did not seem very interested in it).

Someone filed this totally sweet bug report against the recent-files stuff the other day.

I’m trying out Seth’s blogger applet. Testing 1..2..3….

I’ve been listening to music for like 12 hours straight now using the latest Rhythmbox from CVS. I’m happy to say that it hasn’t crashed even ONCE during this time. The UI feels snappy, and everything Just Works (with the exception of it not playing a couple of my mp3s, but whatever). MAD PROPS TO WALTERS AND THE REST OF THE RHYTHMBOX TEAM!

So, what I’m trying to say is, if you gave up on Rhythmbox back in the day, give it another chance. Oh, here’s a screenshot.