I had been nominated to candidate for X.org's Board of Directors this year (actually two years, because members are elected for a two years term each) - and was actually voted for and elected.

During this year's elections a number of questions came up about several issues, partly regarding the financial situation of the foundation, partly about how the board members communicate with each other and the regular members. It basically all boiled down to the number one perceived issue with the X.org board:

    It's transparency. Or rather the lack thereof.

It's generally accepted, that even some of the actions required by the By-Laws (like meeting minutes) have been somewhat neglected. As a result of the discussions, Eric Anholt has now published the irclogs on members.x.org, thanks for that! Also the irc channel for the regular board meetings (#xf-bod on irc.oftc.net) has probably not been advertised enough since its opening to the public. It is also safe to assume that this hasn't been done by intention, but just by lack of time - the daily schedule of most open source people is extremely cluttered (geez, when did I last blog?!?).

I want to promise that I will try my very best to push for transparency as much as possible, maybe starting by taking/polishing minutes after the next (my first) irc meeting.

I'm quite exited about the days to come .
And that is a good thing, because I'm pretty sure it will be - say - a little bit less thrilling after a while... as with all good things .

Banshee 1.5.4 is out, with cool new features and lots of fixes! This is our fifth release in preparation for our big 1.6 release at the end of March.

Banshee Community Extensions

We have made a 1.5.4 release of Banshee Community Extensions as well. This includes the Alarm Clock, Lyrics, and Mirage extensions, and several others.

Mirage Similarity Engine

The Mirage extension has been modified heavily, dropping the old “Automatic Playlist Generator” in favor in integration into the playback controller – adding shuffle-by-similar, and into the Play Queue Auto DJ – adding fill-by-similar. Mirage calculates the acoustical similarity between two songs.

Play Queue Auto DJ, fill by similar Anonymous, Opt-in Usage Data

Under Preferences, you can choose to "Improve Banshee by sending anonymous usage data" back to the Banshee developers. This collects information on what version you're running, what OS, library size, slow SQL queries, and a whitelisted subset of your preferences. This information will help us choose better defaults and see what parts of Banshee are used most and can be improved.

The 30+ people running a development version of Banshee and already submitting data are using 11 different language locales, have a median screen resolution of 1440x1024, and a median music library size of 5k songs. I'm working on some analysis/viz software to crunch the data - stay tuned! Other Notable Improvements

• Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
• Add support for Nokia N900 phones
• Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
• Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
• Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
• Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
• Fixes to GIO backend
• Many crash/startup fixes for OS X build
• Fix several memory leaks

More Information

As always, check the release notes for more detailed information, screenshots, and download links. Thanks to everybody who made this release happen!

Miguel recently blogged about a trick for loading an executable assembly as a project inside MonoDevelop. I have now added native support for this feature, which means that it is now possible to directly open a .exe or .dll as a project, or add it to an existing solution. Also, MonoDevelop will get the list of source code files from the debug info of the assembly (when available). For example, this is what you get when you open gmcs.exe:

OpenGarrobito, is the fruit of the philosophy of free software, because source code is shared, you can create fancy layouts at ease, and are applicable to our needs as I am passionate about the multimedia computer, and worked in a distribution based on my beloved openSUSE and resulted openGarrobito.

For the realization of this release, I am taking a very useful tool that works in the cloud, called susestudio, which compile multiple multimedia programs that are used in Linux, because in the ordinary distributions that are distributed on the Internet and groups that distribute Linux users, do not incorporate multimedia codecs and many multimedia programs, due to licensing issues, I gave myself the task of compiling them into a single distribution and make it public.

But that is exactly what we can do with openGarrobito:

1. Play our mp3 with amarok
2. See our movies with VLC
3. Shingles and DVDs with DeVeDe k9cpy
4. Convert Video devede
5. Edit images with gimp
6. Edit sound with audacity
7. Edit Video KDEN-live
8. Perform our jobs college or office with OpenOffice
9. Browse the Internet safely with Konqueror or Firefox and Google Chrome.
10. Organize our photos with Digikam or if you prefer using Picasa

And now, in this release you can play your favorite games like Nexuiz or openarena.

Countless numbers of applications we can give to this distribution, which is constantly evolving, is currently running under the latest version of openSUSE’s 11.2, and default desktop is KDE SC 4.4.

You openGarrobito has the latest security updates, and all the software on this date until 11 February. I hope you will enjoy it this distribution

Link for download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengarrobito/

Link of my blog: http://decks.260mb.com/

Since the last two months i've been looking and enjoying watching javascript code using gjs and seed.
I fell in love by this language and how easy is to code around it. The worst part of this journey and what it become difficult to write a full application with it was that the gjs and seed are very different and it's very easy to spot bugs on them. But thanks to their maintainers (they've been very helpful) we hopefully get things more stable and bug free.
The lack of documentation is other problem that these implementations have. Hopefully i found someone with the same problem around the web that is trying to get this problem fixed and making javascript one of the finest language bindings for GTK+.

Now my contribution for documentation is this statusicon example that should be work on seed.
I found a bug on gjs that should be fixed on the next GTK+ release and i should get the working version on gjs done too.

So here's statusicon.js available on my people.gnome.org page.

With this i try to get some ideas and try to write one of the first full GNOME applications using javascript!

PS: Thanks to Alan Knowles for helping me with some seed specific stuff since i wrote this initially for gjs.

Yesterday I installed Virgin Media broadband at my new house. Virgin Media? Am I insane? Well, unfortunately my new house is 4.5km away from the exchange and the fastest ADSL connection is less than 2 Mbits, so Virgin was my only option. Anyway, I digress. The reason for the post is to help out any other Linux users who want to use Virgin Media.

When I plugged in the router and went to view a website on my computer, I was redirected to an activation page, where I had to enter my name and postcode and stuff like that. Except that the first page you go to checks to make sure you're running Windows or using a Mac. Thankfully, Konqueror and Opera both let me change my browser identification string so that Virgin's servers think I am using Windows. So far, so good. The next problem comes a few steps later when the 'Next' button doesn't respond. A quick view of the page's source shows that Virgin is trying to set the browser's homepage using some bad JavaScript. It also shows that after trying to do that, it was just going to redirect to another page anyway, so I was able to copy that URL into the address bar and carry on. I don't remember what the URL was, but if you look for the function called 'next()' in the source, you'll see it there. A few pages later it prompts you to download and install their special tools. There's no option to skip this, but if you click on 'Next', it starts the download and then goes onto the next page anyway. You can just ignore the download.

After all that, your connection should be activated. Mine was, anyway. Now I get about a 4 Mbit connection instead of the slow 2 Mbit ADSL connection. Which is still slow, considering Virgin Media advertise it as a 20 Mbit connection, but I wasn't expecting anything that good from Virgin Media. After all, they are just NTL with a new name.

Introduction

Writing a Banshee extension and getting it into users' hands has never been easier. We have started a new sub-project called Banshee Community Extensions (BCE), collecting various existing extensions under one source repo, bug tracker, and autobuild setup.

Its source is hosted on gitorious, dramatically lowering the barrier to committing and sharing your code publicly.

This centralization makes things easier on translators and packagers, too. And users get access (without manually downloading/installing) to the fruits of the extension community's labor.

Creating a Working Extension in Minutes

It's ridiculously easy to make a new extension. Install Banshee 1.5.3 (including the devel package), or build/install the latest from git master instead. Then,

git clone git://gitorious.org/banshee-community-extensions/banshee-community-extensions.git
cd banshee-community-extensions
./create-extension Foo
make run

This creates, builds, and runs Banshee with your extension. Go to Edit » Preferences » Extensions to enable it, and see it appear:

We already have seven extensions migrated, and one brand new one!

• AlarmClock
• Awn
• ClutterFlow
• LCD
• Lyrics
• Mirage
• RadioStationFetcher
• StreamRecorder

And, we have 13 maintainers already!

We have bleeding-edge openSUSE/SLED packages available, and Ubuntu packages should be ready in time for Banshee 1.5.4 next week.

If you've been putting off some extension idea you've had, delay no longer! Read the full Extension Writers Guide, and get started today!

Thanks

Thanks to Chow Loong Jin (aka hyperair, our fearless Ubuntu packager) for broaching the idea behind BCE, and to Bertrand Lorentz for teaming with me to get things to this state - in just two weeks!

It’s been over a week now since I came back from the fantabulous FOSDEM, and have had a chance to digest a lot of the conversations I had whilst there. One of the conversations I had was with a senior developer who was in a sort of Special Interest Group. He mentioned to me that his management had asked the SIG to formulate a plan for where they wanted to see their project in five years, and how they aimed to get there.

It is almost one week after the 10th edition FOSDEM (Free Software Developers European Meeting) (http://fosdem.org/2010/) took place in the city of Brussels. As is usual, lots of Free Software developers, promotors and fans attended to the event. Different from other years, this time I had the chance to live on my own the FOSDEM spirit and had the chance to meet some FLOSS supporters from different projects, seeing the almighty improved KDE 4.4 being successfully presented under 640×480 adverse projecting conditions. In addition to this, lots of openSUSE people at the openSUSE booth

For those of you who couldn’t attend to FOSDEM or for those who attended and want to see it again, here some of the videos of the talks are available for download. Additionally, you can visit the official FOSDEM youtube channel, enjoy… and don’t forget: Have a lot of fun

I tried to start supertuxkart, the marvelous race game, in openSUSE_11.2 (x86_64 if that matters) but it failed with the following error:

$ supertuxkart
Data files will be fetched from: '/usr/share/games/supertuxkart/'
AL lib: pulseaudio.c:382: Context did not get ready: Connection refused

The problem is a configuration setting in /etc/openal/alsoft.conf. Just uncomment the drivers line and remove pulse from the drivers line in that file and supertuxkart starts to work again.

It can be easily tested with the command openal-info. Before the change one get the error message shown above, and after one gets useful information.

I got this problem solved, due to a discussion on the ubuntu forums. Thank you guys.

Hopefully this short note is useful for someone.

Update (16 Feb 2010): just today openal was updated from version 1.10 to 1.11 and with the new version supertuxkart started without problems