Month: August 2012

Why can’t we be friends?

During GUADEC, I took the time to do a little exercise.

Most times, I don't really pay any attention to trolls, let alone doing something to convince them that they are wrong. However, in the recent years there has been a rumour around that in the context of GNOME, there has been a growing tension between Red Hat and Canonical employees.

In order to exemplify and nurture the healthy coexistence of two rival companies within a community that strives for a symmetric and balanced treatment to all parties, I've been going around camera on hand to see how well Canonical and Red Hat employees like each other:

Unfortunately, things got out of hand, and the experiment only had limited success, here are a few subjects exposing inappropriate behaviour:

These last incidents have already been reported to the pertinent authorities.

Jokes aside, it is an immense pleasure to work with such an amazing community, full of remarkable people, employed or volunteers, you all rock guys.

Vala bindings for NetworkManager

As part of my current duties at Canonical I have to deal a lot with different parts of the Linux middleware stack. GSettings, dconf, PulseAudio…

Most of what I do these days is Vala and C (preferably Vala) and once I started dealing with NetworkManager I noticed the lack of Vala bindings for the GObject wrappers. My first reaction was to just write the whole thing in C but eventually I figured the whole thing was easier to maintain if I just took a week to write the bindings.

After a few bug fixes upstream in Vala and NetworkManager, the Vala bindings are now part of NetworkManager upstream.

Here's an example on how to get all driver names for each device:

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using NM;
static int main (string[] args)
{
var client = new NM.Client();
var devices = client.get_devices ();
for (uint i = 0; i < devices.length; i++)
{
message ("%s", devices.get(i).driver);
}
return 0;
}

Bug reports and patches are more than welcome! Please, give the bindings  a try as well, they could use some real world testing.

The latest tarballs already include them, I expect them to land in Ubuntu Quantal soon, make sure to file bugs against OpenSUSE and Fedora and other distros if the packages are not deploying the bindings yet.

I would like to thank Jens Georg (phako), Juerg Billeter (juergbi) and Dan Williams (dcbw) for the help debugging issues, reviewing patches and other guidance.

Happy hacking!