Thoughts

Looking to replace Psi’s CVS repository with something less horrible, I’ve been investigating GNU Arch (which seems to offer the kind of things I want). While searching, I found a mail sent by Matthew Palmer. In the mail he discusses the need for community control of community projects, in contrast to a single person acting as gatekeeper to the project. This reminded me somewhat of my current position in Psi, where I take too long to check patches and commit them. Is this why we have Psi-PSZ? It doesn’t seem to contain anything that is a particularly bad idea. I haven’t checked all the patches (part of, or possibly all of, the problem), they may be badly written, which would get them rejected. The problem just seems to be that actually checking patches other than your own is a terribly dull job. The question that presents itself then is; what would happen if I was less stringent in my commital of patches? Would the world fall apart? Or would other people later make patches to replace the bad code when they come to extend it?

Today’s Psi Activity

I had a couple of minutes free around lunchtime today at work, so I quickly checked and committed PSZ’s patch to remember paths for file dialogs between sessions.

I then had a couple of minutes more, so I worked on tabs. They can now be positioned at the bottom instead of the top of the window. Tabs can be dragged and dropped at will between tabsets and the tabs themselves now contain icons, which become close buttons when moused over, hopefully fixing the horrible graphical glitch in the QT widget on OSX.

Not a bad day.

Categories: Psi
3 Comments »

I have a chair. It spins, and goes up and down and back and forth.
My old chair also did these things but not by design and with great risk of personal injury.
The new one’s better

Categories: Personal
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I was taking a workshop on graphics in Java for 2nd-year undergrads this morning. When presented with the error “Cannot find file: DrawHouse.java”, I was asked what it meant. It makes me wonder about the relative merits of learning to program it right first time, versus teaching effective debugging skills. I know one is usually taught that if a program is sufficiently well designed bugs can be limited but I wonder if having an entire module dedicated to debugging wouldn’t be overkill. I know most of my debugging skills have advanced when someone’s looked over my shoulder and said “why don’t you..?” or “don’t you know about…?”.

I have to give a seminar to my department on Friday, I was going to spend the afternoon writing that but my brain may now be unreachable for the rest of the day.

Remko’s started up an interesting discussion on the Psi forum about status states; do we really need 7 distinct states in jabber? So far no-one’s jumped to the defense of the full range, which seems interesting. I’m personally partway, I don’t want to have only two, as ichat does, and Remko’s interested in but I don’t see the need for seperate ‘Away’ and ‘Extended Away’ states, nor ‘Free For Chat’ and ‘Online’, although I see why they exist :
http://psi.affinix.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=2521

Categories: Computers, Psi, Work
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First: Happy note. I’ve committed Remko’s menubar patch, so Psi rosters can now have a menubar instead of/in addition to the toolbars.

Tabs are giving me pains though. I’ve basically lifted tab widget code from the kde libraries (love open source), because I saw they had several nice functions I was going to have to code myself. Most of them work. Most of them are great. The remaining one probably works, truth be told, but I’m too dense to work out how. I can’t get the blessed things to show a ‘close cross’ within the tabs when you mouse over them.

I’ve also decided I dislike my code for handling tabs within psi, so I’m going to nuke it and rewrite it soon. This has also cleared my head about how to do the chat management for the new chat dialogs (wayyy in the future), and also how to tab multiple window types together (I have *no* idea why you’d want to tab a roster, but I guess there’s nothing to stop you). This was brought on by my introduction (not committed) of a segfault when dragging and dropping tabs between windows. Too much pointer-passing has been taking place.

Mblsha’s gone and written another handy feature; windows will now snap together if they get close (on Windows only at the moment).

Categories: Psi
1 Comment »

Ok, I’ve converted my old wordpress hacks into a new wordpress 1.3 theme, so now everything is demonstrating my complete lack of css skills quite well. The main site, what little there is of it works again though, which is nice.
Apart from this, nothing to report. Signing off.

Categories: Web Site
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Things have been fairly hectic in the Psi community lately.
Mblsha has written some auto-resizing code for a couple of widgets, the roster and text inputs. What does this mean in real terms? You can now have your roster grow and shrink based upon the number of contacts online. This is nice. What’s nicer is the text input, which now (in a manner similar to ichat) grows and shrinks based upon the volume of the content you’re writing.
I’ve been writing tab code, so now (slowly catching up with nearly every other application on the planet) you can have your chats in a tabset, and switch between them appropriately. This pretty much works now, there’s a couple of minor bugs that need to be fixed, and then I need to address that fact that, basically, it’s incredibly ugly.
Remko’s been submitting patches: an internal rearrangement of status code, which paves the way for a better status change system, and a menubar for the roster, if you’re that way inclined.
Nolan tells me he’s rapidly approaching a submittable state with his MUC work, which is also great.

Psi-0.10 (faces of conversation) is obviously going to be a fairly major release in just about all respects. This inevitably means that the release cycle is going to drag on and on, which is a Bad Thing(tm). As a remedy for this, I’m going to make some interim snapshots. These are not going to be stable, and the aim is not for them to be rolled out in production environments, but I know that many people like to be running the latest and greatest versions. These development snapshot releases will at least give some sort of assurance that the devs think the features which are implemented are reasonably stable, although they won’t be feature-complete, obviously, and the usual disclaimers will apply as with all non-release builds; you break it, you get to keep all the pieces.

On a more exciting note, we eventually chose a slogan for Psi:
Psi: Kicks for communication

Bring on the Jabber client monopoly

Categories: Psi
4 Comments »

I’ve been neglecting my blog recently.
This is mostly because the test version of wordpress I’ve been running went mad and hated me. I’ve now upgraded to a newer development version, so this will probably go wrong in various other interesting ways. It’s currently taken over my website, and seems to be preventing any other content appearing. Go me.

Categories: Web Site
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