GNOME Politics

Planet Gnome is bustling with anger/excitement over certain posts; people are agreeing, other people say these comments should be retracted, etc. etc. I usually don’t pay much attention to these sorts of things, I think the code does the talking (also on that note, anyone who codes in anything higher level than C is clearly a sissy), but I feel I have a solution for this: Bare knuckles, no rules fisticuffs. Forget all these ridiculously long winded posts and verbal exchange, just two guys in a circle, settling their differences like Gentlemen! (I won’t be running for the GNOME board)

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Time for a libjana-based gnome clock applet?

Just read Federico’s post about how intlclock draws its map and calculates the sunlight time. That’s a pretty incredible amount of overkill! Maybe they should look at the code in the JanaGtkWorldMap widget, that I personally think looks at least as nice ๐Ÿ™‚ JanaGtkWorldMap draws directly with cairo calls, using data from sunclock (the format of which is derived from xearth, apparently) – one linear gradient for the sea, filled polygons for the land mass shadows, then an extra set of filled polygons on top of that. The sunlight curve is a simple curve equation, rather than ray-tracing (which probably isn’t quite as accurate, no, but at this level it really doesn’t matter), components of which are cached on initialisation. Drawing happens in a (interruptable) thread so the widget never blocks for any significant amount of time, and after drawing once, the result is stored to a back-buffer. On top of this, as the widget changes size, it does adaptive LOD to reduce the amount of points being drawn. The widget has an option to render at a static size and scale that rendering instead of re-rendering when the size changes. It also has API to put custom markers on top of the map and widgets can be packed inside it. Drawing code could easily be replaced by gdk calls to boost speed (and I may well do this, cairo is slow :(). I’d like to think the API is easy to use too… Any takers?

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libjana journal progress

Been a while since I blogged about jana work, but not because it’s not been going on. The most recent thing to hit jana has been journal support (or ‘note’ support, as I like to call it). It could probably do with a little more at the GTK level, but there’s a GtkTreeModel and cell renderer to make visualising notes easy and pretty. Here’s the example app displaying notes, with justification set to centre: This just leave tasks support to do ๐Ÿ™‚ I’ve also been considering contacts support, to get the full PIM coverage, but given how much better libebook is to libecal, it’d probably end up just being restrictive and pointless…

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Borg

Just read Alex’s blog post about Android… Is this a joke? I’m really not sure, there are serious comments that point out some of the giant flaws in the various statements, and they seem to be answered seriously, but… I feel like I’m missing a joke ๐Ÿ™
I suppose Android is as good a bandwagon as the next…

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