Lucas Rocha: New Zenity maintainers

Zenity's Easter Egg

Zenity is a simple and nice tool. It’s the module that got me started in the GNOME project and community when Glynn passed the ball to me. I’ve been the Zenity maintainer for almost 5 years now. It’s time to move on. I’m now passing the Zenity maintainer post to Luis Medinas (of Brasero fame) and Arx Cruz. So, if you have a pet bug or a patch pending review, they are the ones to ping from now on. Long live to Zenity!

Lucas Rocha: Weather and Places

Holland Park

It’s interesting how people perceive weather differently depending on where they live. That became more clear to me when we moved from Salvador (Brazil) to Europe where we lived two years in Espoo/Helsinki and now live in London.

Salvador is the place where I was born in Brazil. It’s a city in the Northeastern coast. Weather is roughly the same throughout the year with temperatures varying between 25°C and 34°C. Maybe this is why weather is rarely a subject people talk about on a daily basis. The temperatures are generally nice. sunny, and warm most of the time. It’s a given.

In Espoo/Helsinki – and Finland in general – weather is a central aspect of life. The seasons are very well defined and quite distinguishable. Certain things can only be done during certain seasons. You have things like skiing holiday and Summer cottages. People get quieter and more introspective during Winter and more lively and talkative during Summer.

A similar thing happens in London – even though the weather is much less extreme than Finland. We get this foggy and dull weather most of the time. So, when Summer comes with some very sunny and shiny days, you really try to enjoy it outdoors as much as you can. It’s not something you get all the time. It’s special.

I learnt to enjoy cities where the weather is not a given. I had to. Each season has something different to offer. They bring you a more clear sense that each year is a cycle. Sometimes cold. Sometimes colourful. Sometimes wet. Sometimes shiny.

Gustavo Noronha (kov): Google’s pacman doodle in Epiphany/Midori?

Google has had a very nice idea today, to celebrate Pacman’s aniversary: they made their logo become a playable HTML5 pacman. If you’re wondering why your WebKitGTK+ browser is not being able to play the game here’s why: Google is doing User-Agent sniffing and denying you the fun, sending a static image that you can click to perform a search instead of the game.

If you make Epiphany or Midori identify themselves as Chrome or Firefox, the game will work. I really don’t get this User Agent sniffing bullshit coming from Google. If you go to gconf-editor, and under epiphany->general set the user_agent key to “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-gb; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Firefox/3.8″ it works. I’m starting to seriously consider User Agent spoofing for *.google.com as a quirk on WebKitGTK+. Lame.

Update: as a protest, I’m making blog.kov.eti.br and kov.eti.br say Chrome/Chromium are not supported, by doing User Agent sniffing.
Update2: it’s been pointed out to me that the game is not HTML5 - it’s actually smart usage of divs, and flash *urgh* for the audio

Gustavo Noronha (kov): WebKitGTK+ and WebM

So you probably heard about WebM, right? It’s the awesome new media format being pushed by Google and a large number of partners, including Collabora, following the release of the VP8 video codec free of royalties and patents, along with a Free Software implementation.

It turns out that if you are a user or developer of applications that use the GStreamer framework, you can start taking advantage of all that freedom right away! Collabora Multimedia has developed, along with Entropy Wave GStreamer support for the new format, and the code has already landed in the public repositories, and is already being packaged for some distributions.

I just couldn’t wait the few days it will take for the support to be properly landed in Debian unstable, so I went ahead and downloaded all of the current packages from the pkg-gstreamer svn repository, built everything after having the libvpx-dev package installed, and went straight to a rather unknown, small video site called Youtube with my GStreamer-powered WebKitGTK+-based browser, Epiphany!:

If you’re running Debian unstable, or any of the other distributions which will be lucky to get the new codecs, and support packages soon, you should be able to get this working out of the box real soon now. Check the tips on WebM’s web site on how to find WebM videos on youtube.