tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131993952024-03-29T04:27:43.424+01:00knocte :: MonoTemaThose who say it can't be done shouldn't interrupt the ones who are doing it.knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-13311487913357853552021-12-18T17:50:00.003+01:002021-12-18T17:50:23.289+01:00geewallet 0.4.300.0 released!<p>10th of my 21-day quarantine*! And to celebrate, I'm going to release a new version of <a href="https://gitlab.com/nblockchain/geewallet">geewallet</a>. It's not that I blog about geewallet releases often (or blog at all, lately), but this one is a special one for me. We decided to call it <strong><big>0.4.<u>300</u>.0</big></strong></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd8A_8w-W6IFlJznYc-F1_RKnBOF0ZiUCWji2H8vkMqX08Y3P82wJv4r22YZL4GCJ6Y9Oj8X2CGxuL_-3NouNGlAbWXtSwT0rk2dz2j0S3XLGJqdzEtkXdaH12PVJmjsjaCpvt/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="335" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd8A_8w-W6IFlJznYc-F1_RKnBOF0ZiUCWji2H8vkMqX08Y3P82wJv4r22YZL4GCJ6Y9Oj8X2CGxuL_-3NouNGlAbWXtSwT0rk2dz2j0S3XLGJqdzEtkXdaH12PVJmjsjaCpvt/w596-h335/300.jpeg" width="596" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>The highlights:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We fixed the GTK theme for our <a href="https://snapcraft.io/geewallet">snap</a> package. (Long version of the story: ever since we upgraded our snap generation process to take place in Ubuntu 20.04 instead of Ubuntu 18.04, the theme stopped working so the app was not showing anymore with the default theme of the system, but with the default Gtk theme, which is very <i>plain</i>. Even if you might consider this issue important, we haven't had time to look at it because we've been very busy finishing <a href="https://gitlab.com/nblockchain/geewallet/-/commits/rc/LN-m10/">Lightning support</a>. Sorry.)</li><li>The chart rendering doesn't use SkiaSharp anymore, but good-old Cairo. This fixes some UI glitches that we had in the GTK frontend. (Long version: for this, we didn't just draw the chart using Cairo in our Gtk frontend, we actually wrote an implementation of the Shapes API for the Xamarin.Forms' GTK backend, and we contributed the work upstream: <a href="https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/pull/14235">https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/pull/14235</a> . Hopefully they merge it soon so that we don't need to use our own forked repo/nuget anymore.)</li><li>Fixed a crash when pairing with a cold-storage wallet. (Long version: user might not know that pairing is only allowed against another geewallet instance; low-hanging fruit bugfix which I shouldn't have neglected for so long, I know.)</li><li>Fixed a crash when scanning some QR-codes that contained unknown parameters in the bitcoin URI. (Long version: I was actually in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador">El Salvador</a> and when trying to use a BTM, I found this bug! Apparently some BTMs here add an extraneous "chivo" param in the URI's querystring, in case the wallet being used is the one from the government; not sure why. In this case, geewallet was failing fast instead of ignoring the unexpected <i>intruder</i>.)</li></ul><div>The less important (not user-facing) work:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Our CI now checks that our Android, macOS, and iOS frontends don't break. Previously the only frontends that we built in CI were the Gtk one (Linux) and the Console one (cross-platform, it's just terminal-based).</li><li>We do snap package generation in GitLab now instead of GitHub. This is good because Microsoft keeps changing the Linux VMs being used in the GitHubActions service so we cannot keep up fixing things that just break out of the blue (so, they break independently from what we change in our commits, which is very confusing!). (Long version: we had to use GitHubActions because GitLabCI uses docker under the hood; so given that snapcraft uses systemd, it conflicts with it; now we use a "docker in docker" approach to be able to run in GitLabCI; which also allows us to publish the snap package as an artifact in the GitLabCI pipeline, not just publishing it to the Snap Store; this way, in case you somehow need a previous version in the future you can grab it from there, something that you couldn't just via snap AFAIU).</li></ul></div><div>Limitations:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Even though this wallet supports two ETH currencies (ETH itself, and DAI), we don't recommend their use at the moment because of the high fees and long confirmation waits these days. This is because the wallet waits for an ETH transaction to be mined (to make sure it didn't run out of gas, and if it did, report the problem to the user), but these days this wait is longer than the time-out. The short-term fix for this is either a) assume it will never ran out of gas, since our address is not a contract anyway (so I guess it can never run out of gas, right? feel free to prove me wrong, my ETH knowledge is not top-notch), or b) have some UI indicating that a transaction has been sent but not accepted by the network yet. The long-term fix is to have off-chain (Layer2) technology supported by the wallet, but we don't know which technology we will choose for this, and of course we're giving priority to the first Layer2 technology: Lightning (which is only compatible with BTC and LTC). All this aside, the wallet works well with ETC (an Ethereum-compatible technology). Anyway, this doesn't worry me too much because... what is the ETH blockchain used for these days, mainly? NFTs and DeFi pyramid schemes. In case you didn't get the memo, most of the former (if not all) <a href="https://twitter.com/loishh/status/1470340143970230277">are</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/maxkeiser/status/1468588944661098499">scams</a>, and the latter are all of them mainly based on dubious <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)">centralized</a> <a href="https://www.circle.com/en/usdc">stablecoins</a> (which could suffer fractional reserve and therefore cause bank runs, as <a href="https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/1470843764843458560">Elizabeth Warren has already warned about</a>).</li><li>Despite this wallet being implemented with .NET (F#), our Windows compatibility story is very poor :'-( We ran into limitations of the Microsoft's AOT technology being used for UWP apps (required by the official process required to publish it in the WindowsStore) in the past. Nowadays apparently you can publish apps in the WindowsStore without these limitations, but we haven't tried again. Maybe by the next time we give it another go, we might have moved to <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui">MAUI</a> already (which means WinUI instead of UWP under the hood). As always, if this is your cup of tea, we accept MRs!</li></ul><div>BTW on the topic of F#, I augmented my tiny C#-to-F# tutorial to include Python (so Python devs can try how it feels to switch to a more typed approach without the need to be so verbose, thanks to F# type inference!), as both languages have a very similar style (indentation based, no curly braces!). <a href="https://github.com/knocte/2fsharp/blob/master/python2fsharp.md">Check it out</a>.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>* And on the topic of quarantine (which was increased from 14 to 21 days for me just because of the omicron panic) I just wanted to share some rambling that is in my head: if the omicron strain is more infectious but at the same time is less dangerous (I think it was only yesterday that the first death happened because of it, right? at least the first one covered by the media) than the others, then wouldn't this be a good outcome? Or rather, a least worse one. I mean, if this variant gets more prevalent around the pandemic, this coronavirus might actually become just the next flu, right? So: endemic, but with much less mortality rate. I don't know, hopefully something along these lines happens, just sharing some positive perspective! Be safe.</div><div><br /></div><div>NB: if you're looking for this version in Android, please be aware that the validation from Google takes a bit of time, hopefully the update will be available in the Play store in less than 24h.</div><p></p>knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-56696680282841116222020-01-05T17:31:00.004+01:002021-12-18T17:32:41.673+01:00Introducing geewallet<div class="p1">
Version 0.4.2.187 of <a href="https://gitlab.com/nblockchain/geewallet/-/blob/frontend/ReadMe.md">geewallet</a> has just been published to the <a href="https://snapcraft.io/geewallet">snap store</a>! You can install it by looking for its name in the store or by installing it from the command line with `snap install geewallet`. It features a very simplistic and minimalistic UI/UX. Nothing very fancy, especially because it has a single codebase that targets many (potential) platforms, e.g. you can also find it in the Android App Store.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What was my motivation to create geewallet in the first place, around 2 years ago? Well, I was very excited about the “global computing platform” that Ethereum was promising. At the time, I thought it would be like the best replacement of Namecoin: decentralised naming system, but not just focusing on this aspect, but just bringing Turing-completeness so that you can build whatever you want on top of it, not just a key-value store. So then, I got ahold of some ethers to play with the platform. But by then, I didn’t find any wallet that I liked, especially when considering security. Most people were copy+pasting their private keys into a website (!) called MyEtherWallet. Not only this idea was terrifying (since you had to trust not just the security skills of the sysadmin who was in charge of the domain&server, but also that the developers of the software don’t turn rogue…), it was even worse than that, it was worse than using a normal hot wallet. And what I wanted was actually a cold wallet, a wallet that could run in an offline device, to make sure hacking it would be impossible (not faraday-cage-impossible, but reasonably impossible).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So there I did it, I created my own wallet.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
After some weeks, I added bitcoin support on it thanks to the library NBitcoin (good work Nicholas!). After some months, I added a cross-platform UI besides the first archaic command-line frontend. These days it looks like this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/knocte/geewallet/master/img/screenshots/maciosandroid-balances.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="800" height="366" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/knocte/geewallet/master/img/screenshots/maciosandroid-balances.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What was my motivation to make geewallet a brain wallet? Well, at the time (and maybe nowadays too, before I unveil this project at least), the only decent brain wallet out there that seemed sufficiently secure (against brute force attacks) was WarpWallet, from the Keybase company. If you don’t believe in their approach, they even have placed a bounty in a decently small passphrase (so if you ever think that this kind of wallet would be hacked, you would be certainly safe to think that any cracker would target this bounty first, before thinking of you). The worst of it, again, was that to be able to use it you had again to use a web interface, so you had the double-trust problem again. Now geewallet brings the same WarpWallet seed generation algorithm (backed by unit tests of course) but on a desktop/mobile approach, so that you can own the hardware where the seed is generated. No need to write anymore long seeds of random words in pieces of paper: your mind is the limit! (And of course geewallet will warn the user in case the passphrase is too short and simple: it even detects if all the words belong to the dictionary, to deter low entropy, from the human perspective.)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Why did I add support for Litecoin and Ethereum Classic to the wallet? First, let me tell you that bitcoin and ethereum, as technological innovations and network effects, are very difficult to beat. And in fact, I’m not a fan of the proliferation of dubious portrayed awesome new coins/tokens that claim to be as efficient and scalable as these first two. They would need not only to beat the network effect when it comes to users, but also developers (all the best cryptographers are working in Bitcoin and Ethereum technologies). However, Litecoin and Ethereum-Classic are so similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively, that adding support for them was less than a day’s work. And they are not completely irrelevant: Litecoin may bring zero-knowledge proofs in an upcoming update soon (plus, its fees are lower today, so it’s an alternative cheaper testnet with real value); and Ethereum-Classic has some inherent characteristics that may make it more decentralised than Ethereum in the long run (governance not following any cult of personality, plus it will remain as a Turing-complete platform on top of Proof Of Work, instead of switching to Proof of Stake; to understand why this is important, I recommend you to watch <a href="https://www.pscp.tv/w/1ZkKzAXMMWexv">this video</a>).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Another good reason of why I started something like this from scratch is because I wanted to use F# in a real open source project. I had been playing with it for a personal (private) project 2 years before starting this one, so I wanted to show the world that you can build a decent desktop app with simple and not too opinionated/academic functional programming. It reuses all the power of the .NET platform: you get debuggers, you can target mobile devices, you get immutability by default; all three in one, in this decade, at last. (BTW, everything is written in F#, even the build scripts.)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What’s the roadmap of geewallet? The most important topics I want to cover shortly are three:</div>
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>Make it even more user friendly: blockchain addresses are akin to the numeric IP addresses of the early 80s when DNS still didn’t exist. We plan to use either ENS or IPNS or BNS or OpenCAP so that people can identify recipients much more easily.</li>
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>Implement Layer2 technologies: we’re already past the proof of concept phase. We have branches that can open channels. The promise of these technologies is instantaneous transactions (no waits!) and ridiculous (if not free) fees.</li>
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>Switch the GTK Xamarin.Forms driver to work with the new <a href="https://github.com/GtkSharp/GtkSharp">“GtkSharp”</a> binding under the hood, which doesn’t require glue libraries. (I’ve had quite a few nightmares with native dependencies/libs when building the sandboxed snap package!)</li>
</ul>
<div class="p1">
With less priority:</div>
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>Integrate with some Rust projects: MimbleWimble(Grin) lib, the distributed COMIT project for trustless atomic swaps, or other Layer2-related ones such as rust-lightning.</li>
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>Cryptography work: threshold keys or deniable encryption (think "duress" passwords).</li>
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>NFC support (find recipients without QR codes!).</li>
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>Tizen support (watches!).</li>
<li class="li1"><span class="s1"></span>Acceptance testing via UI Selenium tests (look up the Uno Platform).</li>
</ul>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Areas where I would love contributions from the community:</div>
<ul class="ul2">
<li class="li1">Flatpak support: unfortunately I haven’t had time to look at this sandboxing technology, but it shouldn’t be too hard to do, especially considering that there’s already a Mono-based project that supports it: <a href="https://github.com/hbons/org.sparkleshare.SparkleShare">SparkleShare</a>.</li>
<li class="li1">Ubuntu packaging: there’s a patch blocked on some Ubuntu bug that makes the wallet (or any .NET app these days, as it affects the .NET package manager: nuget) not build in Ubuntu 19.10. If this patch is not merged soon, the next LTS of Ubuntu will have this bug :( As far as I understand, what needs to be solved is <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mono/+bug/1520033">this issue</a> so that the latest <a href="https://code.launchpad.net/~usd-import-team/ubuntu/+source/mono/+git/mono/+ref/ubuntu/eoan-proposed">hotfixes</a> are bundled. (BTW I have to thank Timotheus Pokorra, the person in charge to package Mono in Fedora, for his help on this matter so far.)</li>
<li class="li1">GNOME community: I’m in search for a home for this project. I don’t like that it lives in my GitLab username, because it’s not easy to find. One of the reasons I’ve used GitLab is because I love the fact that being open source, many communities are adopting this infrastructure, like Debian and GNOME. That’s why I’ve used as a bug tracker, for merge requests and to run CI jobs. This means that it should be easy to migrate to GNOME’s GitLab, isn’t it? There are unmaintained projects (e.g. <a href="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/banshee">banshee</a>, which I couldn’t continue maintaining due to changes in life priorities...) already hosted there, so maybe it’s not much to ask if I could host a maintained one? It's probably the first Gtk-based wallet out there.</li>
</ul>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And just in case I wasn't clear:</div>
<ul class="ul2">
<li class="li1">Please don’t ask me to add support for your favourite %coin% or <token>.</li>
<li class="li1">If you want to contribute, don’t ask me what to work on, just think of your personal itch you want to scratch and discuss it with me <a href="https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/geewallet/issues/new">filing a GitLab issue</a>. If you’re a C# developer, <a href="https://github.com/knocte/csharp2fsharp">I wrote a quick F# tutorial for you</a>.</li>
<li class="li1">Thanks for reading up until here! It’s my pleasure to write about this project.</li></ul>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I'm excited about the world of private-key management. I think we can do much better than what we have today: most people think of hardware wallets to be unhackable or cold storage, but most of them are used via USB or Bluetooth! Which means they are not actually cold storage, so software wallets with offline-support (also called <i>air-gapped</i>) are more secure! I think that eventually these tools will even merge with other ubiquitous tools with which we’re more familiar today: password managers!</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
You can follow the project on <a href="https://twitter.com/geewallet">twitter</a> (yes I promise I will start using this platform to publish updates).<br />
<br />
PS: If you're still not convinced about these technologies or if you didn't understand that PoW video I posted earlier, I recommend you to go back to basics by watching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4">this other video produced by a mathematician educator</a> which explains it really well.</div><div class="p1"><br /></div><div class="p1">PS II: Apologies if this blogpost shows up in planets again, as it might be a side-effect of updating it to fix broken links or typos.</div>
<br />knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-37647165570663451752019-01-23T08:55:00.002+01:002020-02-08T08:34:41.045+01:00WORA-WNLF<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; min-height: 14.0px}
li.li1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'}
ul.ul1 {list-style-type: hyphen}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
I started my career writing web applications. I had struggles with PHP web-frameworks, javascript libraries, and rendering differences (CSS and non-CSS glitches) across browsers. After leaving that world, I started focusing more on the backend side of things, fleeing from the frontend camp (mainly actually just scared of that abomination that was javascript; because, in my spare time, I still did things with frontends: I hacked on a GTK media player called Banshee and a GTK chat app called Smuxi).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So there you had me: a backend dev by day, desktop dev by night. But in the GTK world I had similar struggles as the ones I had as a frontend dev when the browsers wouldn’t behave in the same way. I’m talking about GTK bugs in other non-Linux OSs, i.e. Mac and Windows.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
See, I wanted to bring a desktop app to the masses, but these problems (and others of different kinds) prevented me to do it. And while all this was happening, another major shift was happening as well: desktop environments were fading while mobile (and not so mobile: tablets!) platforms were rising in usage. This meant yet more platforms that I wished GTK supported. As I’m not a C language expert (nor I wanted to be), I kept googling for the terms “gtk” and “android” or “gtk” and “iOS”, to see if some hacker put something together that I could use. But that day never happened.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Plus, I started noticing a trend: big companies with important mobile apps started to stop using HTML5 within their apps in favour of native apps, mainly chasing the “native look & feel”. This meant, clearly, that even if someone cooked a hack that made gtk+ run in Android, it would still feel foreign, and nobody would dare to use it.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So I started to become a fan of abstraction layers that were a common denominator of different native toolkits and kept their native look&feel. For example, XWT, the widget toolkit that Mono uses in MonoDevelop to target all 3 toolkits depending on the platform: Cocoa (on macOS), Gtk (on Linux) and WPF (on Windows). Pretty cool hack if you ask me. But using this would contradict my desires of using a toolkit that would already support Android!</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And there it was Xamarin.Forms, an abstraction layer between iOS, Android and WindowsPhone, but that didn’t support desktops. Plus, at the time, Xamarin was proprietary (and I didn’t want to get out of my open source world). It was a big dilemma.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
But then, some years passed, and many events happened around Xamarin.Forms:</div>
<ul>
<li>Xamarin (the company) was bought by Microsoft and, at the same time, Xamarin (the product) was open sourced.</li>
<li>Xamarin.Forms is opensource now (TBH not sure if it was proprietary before, or it was always opensource).</li>
<li>Xamarin.Forms started supporting macOS and Windows UWP.</li>
<li>Xamarin.Forms 3.0 included support for GTK and WPF.</li>
</ul>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So that was the last straw that made me switch completely all my desktop efforts toward Xamarin.Forms. Not only I can still target Linux+GTK (my favorite platform), I can also make my apps run in mobile platforms, and desktop OSs that most people use. So both my niche and mainstream covered! But this is not the end: Xamarin.Forms has been recently ported to Tizen too! (A Linux-based OS used by Samsung in SmartTVs and watches.)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now let me ask you something. Do you know of any graphical toolkit that allows you to target 6 different platforms with the same codebase? I repeat: Linux(GTK), Windows(UWP/WPF), macOS, iOS, Android, Tizen. The old Java saying is finally here! (but for the frontend side): “write once, run anywhere” (WORA) to which I add “with native look’n’feel” (WORA-WNLF)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
If you want to know who is the hero that made the GTK driver of Xamarin.Forms, follow @jsuarezruiz which BTW has been recently hired by Microsoft to work on their non-Windows IDE ;-)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
PS: If you like .NET and GTK, my employer is also hiring! (remote positions might be available too) ping me<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<br />knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-18758070074115904132015-03-17T02:56:00.000+01:002015-03-17T02:59:37.921+01:00How do you upgrade your distro? A tale of two workarounds<p>Every classic <i>Linuxer</i> would know why it's very handy to dedicate a separate partition for the /home folder of your tree: you could in theory share it between multiple OSs that you installed in your box (which you choose to run when you start your computer).</p>
<p>Now, I'm guessing that many people reading and nodding to the above, will also know that sharing /home/ is one thing, sharing $HOME (/home/yourUserName) is a completely different beast.</p>
<p>For example: you have a stable distro installed in your box; you decide to install a new version of that distro along the old one, in the same box. You run the new distro with a new account tied to the old /home/yourUserName folder: KABOOM!!! Weird things start happening. Among these:
<ul><li>The newer versions of your desktop or desktop programs don't run properly with the settings saved in your .dotDirectories (they are to blame because they didn't probably have a settings-conversion feature).</li>
<li>The newer versions of your desktop or desktop programs have a buggy settings-conversion feature; because your program does not run properly, or as well as it would have run if it had been ran for the first time with no settings saved at all.</li>
<li>The newer versions of your non-buggy desktop or desktop programs convert your settings to a new format. Then when you go back and run your old distro again, your old-versioned programs stop working because they see settings in a new format which they don't understand. (This is impossible to fix, or very hard.) It's very important that this scenario works, because the migration to the new version of your distro may not be immediate, it may take you some days to figure everything out, and until that happens, you want to still be able to run the stable version of your desktop and desktop programs</li>
<li>Etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>To workaround these problems, I have a strategy: I use a different /home/ sub-directory for each distro installed in my system. For example, for distro X version A.B I use /home/knocteXAB/, for distro Y version C.D I use /home/knocteYCD/. The advantage about this is that you can migrate your settings manually and at your own pace. But then, you may be asking, how to really take advantage of sharing the /home folder when using this technique?</p>
<p>Easy: I keep non-settings data (mainly the non-dotfiles) in a different /home/ folder with no associated account in any of the distros. For example: /home/knocte/ (no version suffix). Then, from each of the suffixed /home/ subfolders, I setup symlinks to this other folder, setting the appropriate permissions. For instance:
<ul><li>/home/knocteXAB/Music -> /home/knocte/Music</li><li>/home/knocteXAB/Documents -> /home/knocte/Documents</li>
<li>/home/knocteYCD/Music -> /home/knocte/Music</li><li>/home/knocteYCD/Documents -> /home/knocte/Documents</li><li>Etc.</li></ul>
You may think that it's an interesting strategy and that I'm done with the blog post, however, when using this strategy you may start finding buggy applications that don't deal very well with symlinked paths.
The one I found which annoyed the most was my favourite Gnome IDE, because it meant I couldn't develop software without problems. I mean, they were not just cosmetic problems, really:
</p>
<ul><li><a href="https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5225">Debugger not stopping on breakpoints</a>.</li><li><a href="https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27097">Builds breaking with obscure error messages.</a></li><li><a href="https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27098">Debugger opening file in the IDE which was already open, duplicating two tabs for the same file.</a></li><li>Etc.</li></ul>
<p>So I had to use a workaround for my workaround: clone all my projects in $HOME instead of /home/knocte/Documents/Code/OpenSource/ (yah, I'm this organized ;) ).</p>
<p>I've been trying to fix these problems for a while, without much time on my hands.</p><p>But the last weeks a magical thing happened: I decided to finally sit down and try to fix the last two remaining, and my patches were all accepted and merged last week! (at least all the ones fixing symlink-related problems), woo!!!</p>
<p>So the lessons to learn here are:</p>
<ul><li>Even the slickest workarounds have problems. Try to fix or report settings-conversion bugs!!</li>
<li>Don't ever quit trying to fix a problem. Some day you'll have the solution and you will realize it was simpler than you thought.</li>
<li><a href="http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/realpath.3.html">realpath</a> is your friend.</li>
<li>MonoDevelop (master branch) is now less buggy and as amazing as (or more than) ever (</PUBLIC_SERVICE_ANNOUNCEMENT>).</li></ul>knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-73910442605551406482014-05-20T23:58:00.000+02:002014-05-26T21:45:17.880+02:00Banshee GSoC-2014 projects under Gnome umbrellaHere we are, at the beginning of a great summer!<br />
<br />
This time,
Google has given plenty of slots to the GNOME project, so we could
accept many participants, including 3 brilliant students to work on the
Banshee project. In case they haven't blogged about it, or didn't give
much detail, I'll elaborate a bit about what they will be aiming to do
these months:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Nicholas Little will be working on creating a new extension for
Bluetooth synchronization, and if time permits, refactoring our MTP
support. In regards to the latter, if you have an Android phone you
might have experienced some bugs getting it to work with Banshee lately (our MassStorage synchronization support is great, but the latest versions of Android have been deprecating this mode in favour of MTP, which we never supported very well); we
have been working hard on fixing them, but Nicholas is going to try to
give it that extra push at the end of the summer, which I'm confident he
will do very well (he was the developer who brought Symbian support for
the masses -or rather, for his Nokia N95 ;) -, on Banshee 2.9.0). And
you may be wondering, why do we need Bluetooth sync? Well, we understand
that it's much slower than USB or Wifi, but:</li>
</ul>
<ol>
<li>
USB can work for the first sync, but whenever you update your
library, I never remember to connect my phone again with my cable, or
I'm too lazy to do it. Now imagine that whenever your phone is near your
computer (and of course if you have Banshee running), they could
negotiate together to update the sync without the need of moving a
finger!</li>
<li>Wifi could work also for the use case I just explained, but getting
Wifi to work, compared to Bluetooth, would involve creating an app for
the phone that could talk with Banshee. And we all know what are the
problems associated with that: we would need to be cross-platform for at
least the 3 main mobile platforms out there (well, iOS wouldn't even work neither with this nor with Bluetooth, because there are no public APIs to integrate with the music database of the OS, sigh iTunes...), and that means a lot of
maintenance burden (even if we choose a same-language native platform
like Xamarin), and a user experience that is not so seamless (as it would require the user to install an app first).</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li>Marcin Kolny, which has convinced us that he will do a great job
given his great patches and the fact that he's already very involved in
opensource (maintainer of C++ bindings to GStreamer if I recall
correctly), will be working on integration with AcoustID. To summarize it
very bluntly, AcoustID is the open-source alternative to Shazam, so thanks
to this, if you have many tracks in your library which didn't get
ripped properly with tags, or you got from some friend which is not very
metadata-driven ;) then you will be able to fix this situation! We will
be likely reusing the MetadataFixer extension that we already have in
Banshee, to not reinvent the UI wheel.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>
Dmitriy Petukhov, a very motivated Russian student, will be
helping us get two extensions in shape, which were developed in the last
GSoC (more details about this in my <a href="http://knocte.blogspot.de/2014/05/gsoc-2013-with-gnome.html">previous
blog post</a>), but were not ready for mainstream yet. The
FanArt.TV extension, which retrieves artist logos and shows them next to
your album icons, needs some caching (we could even violate FanArt.TV
service's ToS if we don't do this) and UI polish (our ListView widget
doesn't play well with differently-sized images, so we need to modify
this custom GTK widget to allow rendering rows with different heights).
The SongKick extension works great, but also needs caching, and it
especially needs GeoLocation to maybe even work autonomously (imagine, you don't even know what SongKick is, and because you installed the
banshee-community-extensions package of your distro, you suddenly get
told that one of your favorite bands is soon playing a gig near your city!).
</li>
</ul>
As you can see, most things are work under-the-hood this year, with little UI work. That's good for me because I'm no design expert. However, there is one area which we could do with some help: the new backgound tasks that will be implemented will need a way to notify the user (i.e. SongKick: when a new gig is discovered; AcoustID: when new/better metadata is found). In this respect, maybe Hylke Bons (our chief designer for the <a href="knocte.blogspot.com/2014/05/belated-gnome-net-hackfest-post.html">last Gnome .NET hackfest</a>) and Garrett LeSage (assistance that Hylke proposed now to avoid getting himself swamped!) will be able to help! (BTW, if you're interested in participating in this year's Gnome .NET hackfest, message <a href="https://twitter.com/gnomeuser">David Nielsen</a>, which started to plan it recently.)<br />
<br />
I'm very happy about starting the mentoring of these projects this
year. And I'm specially jealous about my students... I became mentor of
GSoC myself without being GSoC student first! (Maybe I should switch roles
in the future?)<br />
<br />
Wish them good luck! It was actually just yesterday when GSoC really started! (gotta love mondays)
<p>
<strong>UPDATE</strong>: Fixed embarrassing typo: I meant AcoustID, not OpenID!
</p>knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-21292509896493490602014-05-05T12:41:00.001+02:002014-05-21T20:56:30.929+02:00GSoC 2013 with GnomeSo let this be a belated report about previous GSoC! sorry for the delay.<br />
<br />
In summer 2013, Tomasz Maczynski worked on Banshee as a GSoC student, and he did great work! He developed a SongKick extension, and a FanArt.tv one. Both were worked on in the <a href="https://gitorious.org/banshee-community-extensions/">banshee-community-extensions repository</a>. They work very well but there are a few downsides about this work, which we didn't have time to fix:
<br />
<ul>
<li>The FanArt.TV extension depended on some Banshee API that hasn't been added yet to mainline. The patch to add it lived in bugzilla for a while, in a bug about a feature request to have images in the artist list. The reason for not committing the patch even if I had already reviewed it was because I was wary about it, since it allowed FanArt.TV to hook its ArtistList widget, but wouldn't be really extension friendly. What I mean is that if there was other extension that wanted to also attach a different ArtistList, it would conflict with FanArt extension when enabled at the same time. The ideal thing would be to expose this functionality as an extension point, so that if more than one extension attached a new kind of ArtistList widget, the user could switch between the two from the UI when both extensions were enabled. When I mentioned this in the bug, awesome Banshee-extension developer Frank Ziegler jumped in and created the extension interface necessary for this. I've been reviewing the patches in the last days (couldn't do it before because I really wanted to release 2.9.1 and 2.6.2 versions before landing this work) and I'll likely commit them this week.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The FanART.TV extension uses <a href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/hyena">Hyena</a>'s ListView widget to show images. This is the main widget that Banshee uses for showing the tracks in the main view. It's a great custom widget because it allows very fast rendering of data coming from an SQLite database, but it wasn't optimized for rendering images. The main disadvantage of it is in the case that images have different heights, because the ListView will just allocate a height for each row equal to the tallest of the images used. This means that the widget shown could be a bit ugly if you have many artists in your library and some of them have very differently sized images. Tomasz worked on this a bit, but couldn't finish it because of lack of time (we have a WIP patch). But fortunately this will be fixed this summer!</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Both SongKick and FanArt.TV don't implement caching yet. This is not only important to save bandwidth from the point of view of the client, but also from the point of view of the server! (We could even violate their ToS if we didn't implement this, IIRC.) Fortunately this will be fixed this summer!</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>SongKick extension provides several ways to discover gigs: searching by city, by artist, etc. It even suggests you artists extracted from your library that composed songs which you marked with a high rating! But IMO this is not enough, SongKick extension should even be smarter and query ahead of time looking for your favorite artists *and* near your area (doing the latter via GeoLocation). Fortunately this will be fixed this summer! (and we will use Gnome infrastructure for it)</li>
</ul>
<br />
That is all folks! Stay tuned for the next blog post, which will explain the plan for GSoC 2014 (this year I get to mentor three students!).knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-26625462718241907512014-05-04T00:18:00.000+02:002014-05-05T16:53:55.708+02:00Belated Gnome .NET Hackfest postOMG, I should feel embarrassed about posting such a belated blog post (yes, the hackfest was more than 6 months ago), but oh well, at least I can say I have enough excuses:<br />
<ul>
<li>I got my house refurbished in the last months, which has been such a long planning endeavour, and a real stressful PITA while it was being done.</li>
<li>Before the above started, and after it was finished, I had to move, so that's 2 moves! (I hate moving)</li>
<li>I've been kind of busy in regards to Gnome-related contributions: we released <a href="http://banshee.fm/2014/02/18/banshee-2-6-2-released/">Banshee 2.6.2</a>, <a href="http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-sharp/tree/NEWS">GStreamer-Sharp 0.99.0</a>, <a href="http://banshee.fm/2014/03/18/banshee-2-9-1-released/">Banshee 2.9.1</a>, and a big etcetera (including pre-mentoring for GSoC! more about that in a subsequent post).</li>
</ul>
So this doesn't leave enough room for blogging, which is a necessary but a less appealing task. But I have to say it somewhere: the hackfest that David Nielsen organized was amazing, the best kind I have attended so far, as I came to meet for the first time some awesome hackers such as him, and:<br />
<ul>
<li>Hylke Bons, sparkleshare creator, Red Hat designer.</li>
<li>Mirco Bauer, smuxi creator and debian developer (mono packager).</li>
<li>Jo Shields, debian developer (mono packager), Collabora sysadmin. </li>
<li>Robert Nordan, Pinta contributor.</li>
<li>Jared Jennings, Tomboy contributor.</li>
<li>Stephen Shaw, ex-Novell coworker (build developer), and currently at Xamarin. (Yes, I was Stephen's team-mate when at Novell, but had never met him in person!)</li>
<li>Stefan Hammer, Tomboy contributor and hackfest local-host.</li>
<li>Timo Dörr, Tomboy and Banshee contributor, GSoC student. </li>
<li><a href="http://www.dllimport.eu/">Stephan Sundermann</a>, GSoC student for GStreamerSharp and Bindinator.</li>
</ul>
<br />
(BTW I didn't include the awesome Bertrand Lorentz, fellow
Banshee co-maintainer and GtkSharp gatekeeper, in the list,
because I had already met him before, it wasn't my first time!). <br />
<br />
And it was with the latter Stephan (not Stefan) the one I ended up spending more time with, because we decided to work on the new GStreamerSharp bindings since the 2nd day of the hackfest (the 1st day I mainly worked with Bertrand to release Banshee 2.9.0, our first Gtk3 compatible release, which he already blogged about).<br />
<br />
So what was special about this work?<br />
<ul>
<li>GStreamerSharp 0.10.x releases were not compatible with GStreamer 1.x releases, so this had to be fixed soon. However, much of the architecture of this old version of the bindings used many manually crafted binding code.</li>
<li>Stephan, by using the new Bindinator (a GObjectIntrospection metadata parser that outputs GAPI metadata, that allows generating .NET bindings, created by Andreia Gaita) in his GSoC, created a better foundation for the new bindings.</li>
<li>He targetted GI metadata from GStreamer 1.0 and 1.2 versions (the jump from 0.10 to 1.0 was a big and not easy leap, since lots of APIs were modified and deprecated).</li>
<li>We needed to polish them enough to make Banshee be able to consume them without glitches.</li>
</ul>
"Polish" sounds like easy work, but it wasn't. We fixed lots of crashes, and we contributed fixes to GObject-Introspection metadata upstream. And we proposed big patches for the <a href="https://github.com/mono/gtk-sharp/tree/master/generator">gtk-sharp GAPI generator</a>. And of course we updated our Banshee <a href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/tree/src/Backends/Banshee.GStreamerSharp">managed playback backend</a> to the new GStreamerSharp API.<br />
<br />
Main kudos should go to him though. I mainly added Banshee expertise, gtk-sharp contributing expertise, and lots of motivation (or at least I thought).<br />
<br />
We had a big success: a Banshee playing audio with GStreamerSharp. Unfortunately video playback was freezing. But some months later after the hackfest we fixed it, and we released first GStreamerSharp 1.0 preview, which we called "<a href="http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-sharp/tag/?id=0.99.0">0.99.0</a>", and we released the first Banshee release that depends on this work: <a href="http://banshee.fm/2014/03/18/banshee-2-9-1-released/">2.9.1</a>.<br />
<br />
And it was my first time in Austria (and in Vienna). Overall a great experience, and I need to mention our awesome sponsors:<br />
<br />
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 223px;">
<a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img alt="" height="213" src="https://wiki.gnome.org/Travel/Policy?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=sponsored-badge-simple.png" width="213" /></a><br />
<div class="wp-caption-text">
The GNOME Foundation, providers of the GNOME desktop</div>
</div>
<br />
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 530px;">
<a href="http://www.univie.ac.at/en/"><img alt="" class=" " src="http://public.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/public/logo/UNI-Logo_RGB_01.jpg" height="142" width="520" /></a><br />
<div class="wp-caption-text">
The University of Vienna and the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry, our venue sponsors</div>
</div>
<div a="" class="wp-caption alignnone" gt="" href="http://www.collabora.com/" style="width: 364px;">
<img alt="" src="http://www.collabora.com/logos/collabora-logo-small.png" height="116" width="354" /></div>
<br />
<div class="wp-caption-text">
Collabora Ltd, Open Source Consulting</div>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 624px;">
<a href="http://www.norkart.no/"><img alt="" class=" " height="220" src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/741277/NORKART.jpg" width="614" /></a><br />
<div class="wp-caption-text">
Norkart AS, Norway’s premier supplier of Geographic Information Systems and related consulting<br />
<br />
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 211px;">
<a href="http://www.novacoast.com/"><img alt="" height="55" src="https://www.novacoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/novacoast-logo-trans-200px.png" width="201" /></a><br />
<div class="wp-caption-text">
Novacoast IT, Professional Services and Product Development</div>
</div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.schottenpoint.at/"><img alt="" src="http://homepage.univie.ac.at/s.hammer/files/schottenpoint.jpg" height="97" width="452" /></a></div>
</div>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 462px;">
<div class="wp-caption-text">
Hotel Schottenpoint, our hotel partner</div>
</div>
knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-34052943778257991292013-06-14T11:29:00.000+02:002016-10-03T15:36:43.006+02:00Modernizing blam's autotools (or shaving the yak to move out from GoogleReader...)Before focusing my spare time completely on the GSoC* (as I have mentoring responsibilities this year \o/ ), I wanted to solve a problem that cannot wait after July...<br />
<br />
Yes, I've been victim of Google's cuts too... And I was wondering, where should I move? Feedly? ThingyBob? Well, I shouldn't make the same mistake twice, right?<br />
<br />
Actually, some time ago I was using a desktop app to avoid relying on software that I cannot control (yes, vendor lock-in, the most important thing that open source tries to solve, right?): Thunderbird. But somehow the convenience of a web app (that I can access from any computer) and the hassle of using my mail client for RSS reading made me move to the web.<br />
<br />
I should be able to find a replacement that no company or individual can "take down", and which feels less clunky than Thunderbird for reading RSS. So, enter <a href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/blam">blam</a> (in the future I'll figure out how to sync its state between computers, maybe using SparkleShare?, to achieve that same convenience that a web-app provides), that Gnome app that has strangely managed to not catch my eye until now...<br />
<br />
Well, maybe because if I install it from debian sid and I try to import my very first RSS feed from my GoogleReader list it doesn't work? Well, apparently it is a bug that is already fixed upstream, thanks to Carlos which has modernized the way that the program deals with XML and serialization.<br />
<br />
Then I went ahead and tried to compile master myself... and guess what, the autogen.sh execution fails. Here the yak shaving begins, when I feel like this when trying to fix the autotools stuff:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/234/765/b7e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/234/765/b7e.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Fortunately, after some tinkering (and some copy&paste from banshee's build scripts), I managed to fix the problem, and also modernized a bit some things (like using the brand new ".ac" extension instead of ".in" for the configure script, or using properly the AC_INIT and AM_AUTOMAKE_INIT macros,...).<br />
<br />
Anyway, the real thing to highlight here is that while I was fixing this stuff and pushing to the repository...<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.roflcat.com/images/cats/I_Don_t_Know_What_I_m_Looking_At.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.roflcat.com/images/cats/I_Don_t_Know_What_I_m_Looking_At.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
<br />
... I saw some really good stuff committed by Carlos: <a href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/blam/commit/?id=37d85d36c84ee285ffc2096b1e4fb5207aca1445">using the new .NET 4.5 C# async patterns to get rid of those ugly callbacks</a>! Kudos to him.<br />
<br />
And if you're willing to help more with our autotools housekeeping, please do, I still feel this <a href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/blam/tree/autogen.sh">autogen.sh</a> is way too long and needs some ironing.<br />
<br />
* And if you're wondering what's up with GSoC (aka Google Summer of Code):<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>I had Nicholas Little lined up to work on Rygel+Banshee integration, but sadly he couldn't apply due to work commitments (hopefully he will still work with me on it in his spare time).</li>
<li>I had Rashid Khan lined up to work on Cydin+Banshee integration, but sadly there were not enough GSoC spots for him :( (fortuntately he told me he still wanted to work on it with me in his spare time).</li>
<li>I had Tomasz Maczyński lined up to work on <b>Banshee integration with more REST APIs</b>, and fortunately he was selected! So expect some nice FanArt.TV and SongKick plugins soon!</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-37614219292679667672012-05-01T21:39:00.005+02:002013-06-24T11:38:22.414+02:00Apple and LastFM can still receive open source loveHere we are in an era in which ad-based services (like LastFM) and closed-products (like Apple ones) are on the rise.<br />
<br />
But contradicting what you may think, open source is still friendly to them.<br />
<br />
If you have an Apple device supported by libgpod* and you're an avid user of LastFM's scrobbling feature, you can today configure Banshee to send all the songs that were played on your device to your LastFM account the next time you connect your device while you have Banshee running.<br />
<br />
Pretty handy, especially if you own a device that doesn't have internet connection these days (something definitely not on the rise). You should thank our new Banshee developer Phil Trimble for doing an awesome job on implementing this <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536389">feature</a> (and on resisting to not sending me to hell when I made the patch reviews...).<br />
<br />
The next version of Banshee, in the 2.5.x series, should include this feature. Until then, hold on to your seats! (or <a href="http://banshee.fm/contribute/write-code/">compile it</a> yourself from <a href="http://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/tree/">master</a> ;) )<br />
<br />
* Beware: not the last generation ones! you would have to donate to libgpod project if you want those recognised.<br />
<br />
PS: If you're a developer and want to extend this feature to other kind of devices, you should just implement the interface IBatchScrobblerSource in the corresponding Source class of your device. If you want to make it scrobble to a different service than LastFM, just create a Banshee addin (<a href="http://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/tree/src/Extensions/Banshee.Sample">simple sample here</a>) that subscribes to the ServiceManager.SourceManager.SourceAdded event to then later subscribe to the IBatchScrobbleSource.ReadyToScrobble event from it, to later make the corresponding HttpWebRequests to the scrobbling service.knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13199395.post-3674159897648737832011-05-08T17:09:00.006+02:002014-05-03T18:29:41.012+02:00#gtk#The title of this post is the name of the <a href="irc://irc.gnome.org/#gtk#">GimpNet IRC channel</a> that some people are recently using to talk about the <a href="http://www.mono-project.com/GtkSharp">.NET bindings of gtk+</a>.<br />
<br />
I had never seen this channel with people in it at all in the past. I guess the recent interest comes from the fact that <a href="http://github.com/mono/gtk-sharp">gtk-sharp master</a> is already targeting Gtk+ 3.x API and some people are starting to use it to port things.<br />
<br />
One example is <a href="http://live.gnome.org/Hyena">Hyena</a>, the awesome library that Gnome projects F-Spot, Banshee and PdfMod use (am I missing some other?). I started the port some weeks ago and all I have received is positive feedback, encouragement, and also a lot of help! For example Olivier Dufour (which I guess he will be recently known as one of the superstars that brought DVD support to Banshee -- work finished but still unmerged) who helped with accessibility and warnings, and Mike Kestner (father/maintainer of all these GAPI-based *-sharp bindings) which helped reviewing my patches to the binding and fixing other issues I reported (and of course for making huge efforts, in the first place, to have the bindings ready for the 3.x cycle, with even some GObject-Introspection experimentation, which I guess is still in the early stages and not enabled yet).<br />
<br />
Stay tuned for the progress! (as new contributors have expressed interest in helping out soon). <a href="http://git.gnome.org/browse/hyena/log/?h=gtk3">Branches</a> are being created so you can join the effort if you feel like (<a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?type0-0-4=substring;short_desc=gtk3;field0-0-0=product;type0-0-1=substring;field0-0-1=component;field0-0-4=longdesc;value0-0-2=gtk3;query_format=advanced;type0-0-3=substring;value0-0-3=gtk3;field0-0-3=status_whiteboard;value0-0-4=gtk3;short_desc_type=allwordssubstr;field0-0-2=short_desc;value0-0-1=gtk3;type0-0-0=substring;value0-0-0=gtk3;product=banshee;product=f-spot;product=hyena;product=pdfmod;type0-0-2=substring">bugs in bugzilla too</a>, to track what's pending).knoctehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00267496347097861887noreply@blogger.com2