Omphaloskeptical belated musings

Today I wanted to synchronise my data across my laptop (Ubuntu Hardy) and my mobile phone (Nokia E61, Symbian S60). I decided to reduce my expectations from the start and went for the easy kill: a one-way, one time import of only my contacts, forgetting about notes, calendars and what not. After some investigation involving gnokii, Gammu and friends I stumbled upon that marvellous framework called OpenSync. It's been developed for more than 3 years and displays a huge list of supported devices, protocols and software. It is currently undergoing an important rework towards version 0.4 but today it is recommended to use the latest stable release: version 0.22 from march 2007. I thought it was worth giving it a shot. Everything went well, installation and setup were reasonably straightforward following that post on Ubuntu Forums and I was impressed by GNOME's bluetooth support working out of the box. My hopes went very high when I noticed that Multisync, OpenSync's GTK frontend, was able to handle two ways synchronisation of all my data. Unfortunately, after a couple of hours of fiddling with the thing I went out of luck: the contacts weren't goin' in! I was able to have at best 5 or 6 contacts sent to the phone. Shame :/ Solving real life issues while having fun coding is so enjoyable that I decided to fire up a good old iPython shell and started to look around the different possibilities of interaction I had with the Nokia E61. I settled for the following 3-steps technique, simple and efficient:

1. Export contacts from Evolution into separate vCard files, one for each contact

Thanks to the excellent Evolution's Python bindings coming straight from the Conduit project fame it is as simple as that Evolution-to-vCards script.

2. Transfer all the vCards to the Nokia E61 over bluetooth

ObexFTP does the trick in a one-liner:

obexftp -b [PHONE MAC ADDRESS] -c E:/Others/Contacts -p [VCARD FILES]

3. Import the contacts from the files

Go in Contacts > Options > Copy > From memory card.

That's it!

All contacts were imported even the problematic ones. I still noticed some glitches in the final result such as encoding problems and missing avatars but well, that will do for now. Next time: OpenSync development version.

Long time no blog and that's for good reasons! I have been very busy for the past month with the upcoming Elisa 0.5 which is now shaping up quite nicely thanks to the amazing developers gathered around the project.

The main goal of the 0.5 is to make it really easy to integrate any kind of services in Elisa (think social networking, shared music libraries, VOIP, etc.). It required quite a shift in the way the user interface was built up. As a side effect, that meant rewriting part of the Elisa UI as we know it. If you check out the branch today you will not have the media centric UI we were used to because it has to be rebuilt. Until it's reborn a nice plugin browser will welcome you: we call it "the shelf" plugin. See for yourself:

Screencast of Elisa's shelf plugin

As usual it's a bit laggish because of the screencasting but in real life it's perfectly fluid at 60fps with virtually 0% CPU usage. For those who are eager to contribute please be sure to go straight to the contribute page which has been updated with brand new step by step tutorials.

On the software engineering side of things, I'd like to thank a great deal all the Bazaar team and specifically Aaron Bentley for its awesome Bundle Buggy merge tracker that allows us to get our head around the code by following the "Decentralized with human gatekeeper" workflow quickly described on the Bazaar website.

As usual code is available:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elisa-developers/elisa/0.5 elisa

The telmatobius jelskii is a semi-aquatic frog from Peru for which breeding takes place in streams. That's how Elisa 0.3.4 was born, in the streams of ideas flowing towards improving the solid basis we already had. Following the idea that Elisa should not get between you and your media, a lot of small yet important details related with how the user interacts and feels the user interface got in the release.

People eager to try it can get the tarballs from the official website. Unofficial Ubuntu packages are also available for Gutsy and Hardy on the packages page.

Telmatobius frog from northern Chile [1]

For people into frogs, this "[...] species is locally affected by harvesting for both food and traditional medicine, and by water pollution (from agrochemicals and domestic waste)." and is part of the Red List of Threatened Species.

[1] Thanks to José Grau de Puerto Montt for making this photo available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

This is a huge step in the life of the project since this new version features a brand new user interface. It aims at "enhancing the usability of Elisa and also at giving to our users this polished and sophisticated look and feel that makes great software." says the release announcement.

The team did an awesome job to make that new bling happen. Since words will not be as impacting as a video could be, here is a screencast also uploaded on various video sharing websites (YouTube, etc.):

You can also find screenshots and more details about Elisa on the official website.

I really recommend anyone to try it out since the fundamental changes made to the UI have really transformed the user experience. Of course any feedback will be more than welcome!

A crazy idea popped into my mind this week-end: showing off some bling!

Python and Pigment coupled together allow you to do really nifty stuff in no time. Hacking what's shown in the screencast takes about 500 lines of code and customising the layouts and the animations is a matter of minutes.

For this I thank Arek who is in deep need of that stuff since MacSlow aka the bling master left him.

The whole thing is made with the Pigment library (itself coded in C/GObject/OpenGL). This sample runs pretty smoothly (50 FPS) using nearly no CPU even on my shitty Intel 915 (synchronisation to VBlank is still missing with DRI though: please Intel, save my life!).

ps: code is available in Pigment subversion repository