Krzesimir Nowak has worked on improving the C++-bindings in GNOME for some time know. He’s very familiar with both C++ and how to create GObject C++-bindings.

Aidan Delaney is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton in the UK and uses Cluttermm and Clutter-box2dmm for teaching.

I’ve added them as maintainers in the DOAP files for Cluttermm, Clutter-gtkmm, and Clutter-box2dmm already. I guess that makes it official.

Thanks for agreeing to take over, guys.

• A US-hosted server with ssh access
• A browser
• ssh

I’ll assume you have the last two. The easiest way to get the first is in the form of a web host. I use Dreamhost which offers unlimited bandwidth for a pretty good price.

The first step to getting things to work is to login to the US-based server using the following command.

ssh -D PORT_NUMBER username@example.com

For the port number, it’s best to choose a number between 1024 and 49151 while avoiding any commonly used ports. Basically, avoid those listed here. In this example, I chose port 8421.

What this does is setup a SOCKS proxy on your local machine at the port given that can be used to tunnel traffic through to a remote machine, in our case a US-based server. Obviously, this connection needs to be maintained the entire time you want to send traffic through to the remote machine.

Now we just need to tell our browser to send all traffic through this port. In Firefox, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings. You should be presented with a window similar to this…

You’ll notice the 127.0.0.1 (localhost works too) and 8421 in the SOCKS host fields. That’s all that’s required. If you later want to revert just chose ‘No Proxy’ again.

Now you can close the preference dialog and should be able to enjoy surfing the Interwebs as an American. Fuck yeah!

Up until a few weeks ago it had stayed at that level. But a few weeks back Robert Roth appeared out of nowhere and started triaging bugs and submitting new patches and updating old patches. He’s been keeping me busy reviewing and applying patches. With his help the bug count is now at 146. Still high but very good progress. So, thanks Robert!

The big new feature so far this cycle is Control Groups support. Jason Baron from Red Hat has added an option to view the control group information for each process. This is a work in progress. I’ve included an early patch in the 3.3.2.1 release. If you find bugs or just want to follow the progress please visit bug #663644. Also, thanks to Lennart for his input on how best to implement this.

With many bugs squashed and a few new features, the 3.4 release stands to be The best release ever (TM).

As Murray pointed out, I’ve been working on SyncEvolution for the past couple months. Recently I added support for getting reliable phone information using the Bluetooth Device ID Profile (DIP). This data is used to match a Bluetooth phone with suitable syncEvolution configuration templates. In syncEvolution, templates are predefined in order to make setting up a sync session easier and less error-prone.

The problem with using the DIP information is that it’s just a hex number. For this information to be more useful, we need mapping from IDs to names. A list of companies IDs is freely available. For products this is a different story. As each company assigns numbers to its products, there is no centralized list mapping products to their assigned IDs.[1] So, we have to make our own list.

Below is a small python script that checks if your phone supports the Device Id profile and asks you for the model of the phone. It produces a file that you can either attach to, or copy into, an email and send to me (email address is in file). Oh, and don’t forget to turn on your phone’s bluetooth.

Bluetooth Device ID Inspector

Thanks!

[1] If anyone has device ID to product name mappings for a particular manufacturer we’d be grateful to have this info.

When you come to registration on Saturday you’ll find representatives from some of the best tour operators in Berlin. Here’s what will be on offer.

• Walking Tour (€10): Hit the pavement with the guides from Insider Tours. They’ll give you some great insight into some of Berlin’s most interesting places.
• Bike Tour (€18): For the two-wheel inclined, the folks from Fat Tire Bike Tours would love to show you around.
• Segway Tour (€45): Hey, we’re all geeks, so maybe you’d prefer seeing Berlin from a gyro-balanced electric transporter. The folks from City Segway Tours can help you with that.

You should also feel free to book tours with other tour operators on your own. We’ve listed a few on the wiki for you.

Oh, and remember to sign-up for the Football and Volleyball matches taking place Monday, August 8th, 7-9pm if you want to play.

By popular demand, we’ve reserved beach volleyball courts for your volleying pleasure. The time (Monday, 19:00-21:00) and location (see the map below) of the volleyball and football matches are the same.

You can sign-up for the volleyball match here and the football match here.

See you there.

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Pre-registration event
Location: c-base
Connection: S-Bahn & U-Bahn Jannowitzbrücke
Date: August 5th
Time: 16:00-22:00
Sponsor: Igalia

Many of you will be arriving on Friday and what better way to start a week of talks and hacking than at our pre-registration event taking place at c-base, Berlin’s world famous hacker space. Here you’ll be able to enjoy drinks sponsored by our friends at Igalia. You’ll also be able to complete your registration here in order to avoid the crowd on Saturday morning. At registration you’ll get your WLAN access info for the university, food voucher for the university cafeteria and have a chance to sign up for one of the day trips we’ll be announcing soon.

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Beach Party
Location: The Box at the Beach/Beach at the Box
Connection: S-Bahn Tiergarten
Date: August 7th
Time: 19:30-02:00
Sponsor: Intel

Sunday’s party takes place a few blocks from Berlin’s green lung, Tiergarten (Animal Garden). The evening will begin with a BBQ and open bar on a sand beach along the river Spree. At 11pm will be moving inside where we’ll have 2 rooms with different music styles. The larger of the 2 rooms, we’ve got a local DJ that’ll get you dancing. In the smaller room, we’ve got a more DIY form of music, karaoke. That’s right, we’ve slyly slipped the karaoke in after the open bar.

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Football Match
Location: Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark
Connection: U-Bahn Eberswalder Strasse
Date: August 8th
Time: 19:00-21:00
Sponsor: SUSE

What’s GUADEC or Akadamy without their yearly football friendly? This year’s event is sponsored by SUSE who is providing t-shirts & refreshments. Please use the football match sign-up page on the wiki if you’d like to participate.

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Island Party
Location: Die Insel (The Island)
Connection: S-Bahn Treptower Park or Plänterwald
Date: August 9th
Time: 19:30-02:00
Sponsor: Collabora

Tuesday’s party takes place on the Insel der Jugend (Island of the youth) in Treptower Park. Walking along the Spree from the Treptower Park S-bahn station you’ll eventually approach an arching bridge that leads to the party venue. Once there, you’ll be provided food and drinks accompanied by soul/funk music all care of Collabora. You can hang out inside, on the sun deck or take a walk around the small island.

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So, that’s what we’ve got planned. Remember, all events will require that you are registered and have your conference pass with you. We look forward to greeting you in Berlin.

Accomodations

Some of the deadlines have passed to get the conference rate at selected hotels. However, some still offer this rate till tomorrow (June 30th). So head over to the accommodation page and book your room. Berlin is very popular in the summer, so get your room booked early… meaning now.

Registration

If you’ve not registered yet, please do. For us, as organizers, it helps a lot if you register as early as possible. For you, though, it’s even more important. Pre-registering will help you get through the conference check-in faster, get you into the parties (beer!), and will be needed for a few other things we’ll be announcing soon.

Workshops and BoFs

The last four days of the conference will be all about getting stuff done. We’ve got lots of space for ad-hoc workshops and BoFs but are offering to let projects and groups who know they want to get together a chance to get there sessions onto the official schedule. The deadline for this is this Sunday (July 3rd). So go propose a session now. Btw, there seem to be a lot more KDE sessions proposed so far than GNOME ones. So, please propose your sessions GNOME folks!

Volunteering

The local organizing team will not be able to make this a great conference without help from the community. We’re looking for volunteers to help us with many aspects of the conference. If you’re able to help in any capacity please head over to our volunteer wiki page and sign up.

Even if you can’t make it to the conference but are familiar with Berlin you can help by going to the wiki and simply creating and filling pages with information about Berlin that’ll help attendees enjoy their stay.

Sponsors

Our sponsor page has gotten a little more colorful recently. Thanks to all our sponsors for making the conference possible.

Keynotes

Last but not least, we’ve announced the keynotes for this year. Check out interviews with Thomas Thwaite (designer and technologist), Claire Rowland (user experience guru), and Dirk Hondel (Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel). In addition, there will be one community keynote from both KDE and GNOME each; details coming soon.

As always more info to come so keep an eye on the news. Hope to see you in Berlin.

That conference was of course the 2nd MeeGo Conference. I’d gone to the 1st conference in Dublin in November and written a rather lenghty account. The two conferences had very different feels and it wasn’t due to geography.

The big news at the San Francisco conference was that there was no real news. The keynote had no big announcements: no new devices, no previously unannounced partners. As opposed to the Dublin conference where there was hope for such news, this conference had an expectation of such news. The lack of announcements caused the conference to feel rather less inspiring. While it’s nice to see MeeGo making headway in the in-vehicle infotainment and set-top box markets the lack of a handset device is weighing on the project.

Another obvious and expected difference to the Dublin conference was the much reduced visibility of Nokia. There was a large Qt presence of course. Other than that however, there were very few Nokia logos and fewer Nokia employees came to SF than to Dublin, although there were still quite a few.

Some of the most interesting talks were about the openness and transparency of the project. I’ll simply point you to a very good account of this at LWN.

I was happy to come away with an ExoPC Slate. This is the same hardware as the WeTab which my colleague Jon demonstrated running Maliit on GNOME 3 a few weeks back. These were given out to those who attended the Introduction to MeeGo SDK. The session covered the MeeGo SDK, AppUp SDK, and the AppUp Encapsulator.

Besides the conference it was nice being back in The States. I’m the only American working for Openismus and for the other 4 it was their first trip to the US. I think in the end they were for the most part pleasantly surprised. These Europeans tend to believe what they see on TV.

Happy designing!