Review on GNOME 3 Application Development Beginner's Guide

A couple of days ago, I got contacted by folks at Packt Publishing to provide a review about GNOME 3 Application Development Beginner's Guide, written by Mohammad Anwari who has over 13 years of experience in software development and has been working with Linux-based systems and applications in GNOME, and Qt platforms.

I haven't got a chance to peek into the chapters yet but I'll be getting a free e-book to charge my eyes from very soon. Advertisements declare about the book describing GNOME 3 development environment installation on many popular linux distributions, best-practices from mockups upto running applications, accessing data with EDS, i18n and localization, Unit testing framework in GLib, Gdk and Gtk+ and multimedia programming with GStreamer among others which seem a lot in just one place. I'll hopefully scan it soon and provide more precise reviews thereafter.

Hire fresh talent!

It has been an adventurous year where in I have learned a bunch of cool new technologies underlying the GNOME desktop. Playing around is always in a state of motion but this post is to say I am looking for settling into a job now so if you are interested in hiring me, I'd love to see your call in my inbox. Feel free to contact me on chandniverma2112@gmail.com for any vacancies for a GNOME hacker.

Status of GlChess in GNOME Games

A while ago, I was found working on GNOME games. GNOME Chess work is on a hault due to lack of reviews at Telepathy's end and the focus has shifted to Allan Day's designs for the control-center's Date and Time panel but the effect of my work on gnome-games module was still lacking a write-up.

The long due promotion type selection dialogs have been given the correct place in the game where they pop up right after the player has moved a pawn to the 8th rank(row). This work-branch has been merged to master and here's how it looks while playing:

So now one has to select his pawn's promotion type when required and not predict his requirements before the game begins. The corresponding setting in the preferences dialog which was also not working as expected, has been reduced in favour of this.

3 Cheers for GNOME-Chess

Hip Hip Hurray!!!

My new MIT PGP Public Key begins with:


|1|0c50K2MmtiwQ/P5XwwbJeRMCS0g=|VvTt4wTC2

SCARY MOVIE 2013

I look like this now:

Happy Independence Day!
Now you can move!

Function, refresh! And talk your Hearts. Merging mood with contents :)

The number 13 is lucky for me in many ways :)


I see fresh flowers coming in ;)

I should give myself more outdoor exercises first.

Oh, wait but, I need to get short-sighted first!


and Lotus is still so fresh. ..but I miss the sweet smell of my Garden roses :)

Bella Swan vs. Harry Potter: The Queen's Gambit

Retrospecting.. A very adventurous year it had been.

I am not an inventor and love creating quality applications to learn more but the key is that I am always improving with time.

I have given some love to Vala(http://git.gnome.org/browse/vala) which will help it sustain life under water since what you see is just the tip of the iceberg and its the anomalous expansion that saves the Pacific.

Noting that the lines of codes added to GnomeGames was increasing at an increadibly fast rate, Robert quickly decided to break it off as a separate module and made a new repository : gnome-chess :) - my first visible effect on GNOME.
I rebase-merged (Thank Bob for some of his building blocks :) and pushed 65 + 10 commits onto the new repository as
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-chess/log/?h=chess-telepathy-networking-support-664946-rebase
and
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-chess/log/?h=chess-telepathy-networking-support-664946-communicate


We already have it in 2D and 3D versions both but there is always a 4th dimension associated to the game - the element of TIME. Its very crucial for one to play the right moves at the right time and use their brain to the fullest before moving or else the King is in danger.



Chess work is blocked due to some bugs in the language (or just its GIO bindings) which fails to build these branches ontime:

https://gitorious.org/glassrose-gnome/gnome-games/commits/glchess-telepathy-networking-support-664946-new-with-launcher-commandline
https://gitorious.org/glassrose-gnome/gnome-games/commits/glchess-telepathy-networking-support-664946-new-without-launcher-commandline
https://gitorious.org/glassrose-gnome/gnome-games/commits/glchess-telepathy-networking-support-664946-communicate
https://gitorious.org/glassrose-gnome/gnome-games/commits/glchess-telepathy-networking-support-664946-rebase-3

so I have filed a bug IMMEDIATELY to rectify the issue at its emergence:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690795
(http://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/commit/?id=5d0cb5e76dc0f4131adf67f33078d075ad52aa30 could be a culprit..)

..and have provided a TestTubeApp so that this bug is easy to test since it affects any of the many branches that diverge from Vala master since July 2011.

The last job to be done was providing safe filters for making use of the D-Bus APIs in telepathy-mission-control from the freedesktop(http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/) which was just a oneliner. :)

-        if (space == NULL || space[1] == '\0' || space[2] != '\0')
+        if (space == NULL || !(space[1] != '\0' && space[2] != '\0'))


Now, since Ganesha is my friend and since I KNOW the keys, I'll be accepting the offer that shows me the maximum Love (Power+Money honey) and Respect (Position).