I took some time today to update my wireless patches to latest GNOME CVS, and the latest development release of wireless-tools. If you would like to try it, here are instructions:

1. Get the latest wireless-applet and wireless-tools patches
2. Get the latest wireless-tools (version 27pre22) and apply iwlib_jwillcox_scanning_27pre22.diff to it, install it, etc.
3. Unpack the wireless-applets patch tarball thingy in the root of the gnome-applets tree. Apply the gnome_applets_jwillcox_wireless_v4.diff patch. Run autogen, make, etc.
4. Enjoy.

This still only works on Red Hat systems due to the usage of consolehelper. You can fix that by putting appropriate root-getting-and-essid-setting-and-renew-dhcp-lease bits for your distro in the wireless-applet-helper script.

Update:

Screenshot for those of you who haven’t seen it.

So, I’ve ditched MovableType in favor of WordPress. I have to say I’m fairly impressed with it. The installation (including the MT import process) was incredibly simple and painless, save one problem with the dates for the imported entries which was hosing the RSS feed.

Hooray for Free Software.

Nautilus

I actually did some nautilus hacking recently. It had been a while, and it was pretty fun. I added desktop item editing to the property window.

It’s pretty simple. Way better than the UI in gnome-desktop-item-edit, IMO. Anyway, Dave branched nautilus the other day and that’s now in CVS. Now someone needs to fix the UI for adding new launchers/links :)

Work

I also added yum support to the Red Carpet daemon this week. This should be particularly interesting to Fedora users, since there seem to be a lot of apt and yum repositories for that (and rcd supports both now). I haven’t committed the patch yet due to some other stuff going on, but if anyone wants to try it just mail me.

Also, Petreley sucks. That is all.

So, haven’t blogged in a pretty long time. Lots has happened. Most notably, I got engaged to my long-time girlfriend, Amy! We set the date for July. I’m really happy! :)

Just got back from BrainShare. It was pretty cool. I took some pics, but I don’t have them pulled off the camera yet. I think we were all kind of in awe about the number of Large Monkey Buttons plastered all over :)

the floor near the mono booth

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.