drboblog

I got back from Chile three days ago, and now I’m sufficiently caught-up with the goings-on of the past four weeks, it’s time to summarise what I did on this World Challenge expedition.

The expedition was split into four different phases: acclimatisation, project, main trek, and rest and relaxation. After flying into Santiago (via Paris), we did our acclimatisation in La Campana National Park, climbing the eponymous mountain and camping for three nights. Climbing La Campana was tough, and in hindsight, probably tougher than the main trek up Guane Guane.

Our project phase was in Iquique, where we re-painted an old people’s home, then part of the school in which we stayed. It was quite fulfilling, but somewhat longer than it could’ve been; we spent several days wandering around Iquique relaxing, when we could’ve instead had a longer main trek.

The main trek was in Lauca National Park at high altitude; we had to spend several days acclimatising to 3500masl in Putre before we could ascend to our base camp at Parinacota (4500masl). At Parinacota we had to spend more time acclimatising, before we attempted (and succeeded) a climb up Guane Guane. The views up on the altiplano were fantastic, and I’ve got (perhaps too?) many photos of llamas, alpacas and vicuñas.

Our rest and relaxation phase was a little short, but we managed to pack in most of the things San Pedro de Atacama offers, including sandboarding, a trip round the Valley of the Moon and a trip to see the El Tatio geysers.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who has the time, money and driving force. Some of us are already thinking of going back to have an attempt on Mount Parinacota!

I’m slowly putting photos up on Picasa before I go off on holiday again for a week on Monday.

The time has finally arrived, and I’m off on my travels in four days. I’ll be away from the computer for up to two months, spending a month trekking in Chile, then a month doing various other things. I might be back in time for the GNOME 2.24 string freeze, but I should definitely be back in time to see the release. In my absence, I obviously won’t be able to do any further work on this cycle, but I think all my current contributions are pretty much complete anyway. I won’t be replying to mail for at least the period I’m in Chile.

I won’t be around to see them get into the archives, but Stefan Ebner has been working on packaging both Diary (now called “Almanah” due to Fedora issues) and Hitori for Ubuntu. My thanks to him for his hard work on that, and patience in helping me fix all the nasty little autofoo problems.

I’ll try to make an Almanah (Diary) 0.4 release before I go, but I want to leave as long as possible for translations to catch up with the several string changes.
Almanah 0.4.0 is out! The main change for this release is to rename it and fix some problems preventing it being packaged, and so it should be compatible with old databases. The build requirements haven’t changed.

It’s been a long time coming, but here’s Hitori version 0.2!

As a short overview, the new version introduces:

• Dynamic board sizing (allowing for boards from 5×5 to 10×10)
• Rendering improvements, a Tangoisation, and a conversion to use GtkStyle
• Relicense to GPLv3+
• A new user manual!
• Improvements to the algorithms, halving memory usage in the best case
• A new icon by Jakub Szypulka
• A desktop file

Hitori now depends on GTK+ >= 2.13, so it may not be easily compilable on some distributions, which is an unfortunate side-effect of using the new gtk_show_uri function.

As before, please contact me to report bugs.

I don’t really have any plans to extend the program any further, but if anybody has any ideas, I’m open to them.

I’ve just released Diary 0.3.1. This is a pretty simple release, fixing a crasher bug, improving corner-case encryption behaviour, adding a French translation by Jean-François Martin, a swizz icon by Jakub Szypulka (and a corresponding desktop file), and finally adding basic search support.

There are no dependency or config changes with this release, so upgrading should be seamless. Any bugs should be reported to the Diary product on GNOME Bugzilla.

Update: I’ve just released 0.3.1, which is a semi-brown-paper-bag release to fix build failure when compiling without encryption support, as well as fix the desktop file translation.

Just a note: totem-pl-parser has moved out of the totem product in GNOME Bugzilla and into its own totem-pl-parser product. Sorry for all the bugspam moving the old bugs generated.

I have been led to believe I started this model matchstick train nine years ago (when I was eight); a present from my grandmother. I’m pleased to say it’s now finished!

Of course, that wasn’t nine years of hard work. Anybody would be hard-pressed to get me to do that; it was an initial spurt of activity, followed by years of bits of the model just sitting on a shelf. I picked up construction again last year, and I’ve been working on it on and off since then.

Unfortunately, it’s not as well-built as it could be, with several of the structural parts of the model not being square (or even flat, in places) due to mistakes I made all those years ago. Still, I think it’s turned out OK!

Next, I think I’ll finish off all those Airfix models I’ve neglected over the years. There are about three helicopters in various stages of misassembly or decay waiting for some love.

In GNOME news, I’m hacking on getting YouTube upload support into Conduit, with the eventual aim of adding a Conduit plugin in Totem to allow video upload to any supported video website. I’ve been having awful trouble with the Python GData API (again), but I think it’s just about sorted now. I got the first video uploaded ten minutes ago, and it’s cleanup from here on!

It took a little longer than I’d have liked, considering the simplicity of the patch, but I’ve finally added support for high-resolution videos in Totem’s YouTube plugin.

Compare:

On the top is the old, low-resolution video, and on the bottom is the spiffy new high-resolution video, automatically downloaded using YouTube’s fmt=18 option if your connection speed is set to 1.5Mbps or higher. As per Bastien’s testing, we can’t use the fmt=6 option due to it not being supported for many videos.

The difference may not be immediately obvious due to the window being so small for the screenshot, but it is visible — just look at the left-hand side of the hut’s roof. Enjoy.

Using my exam leave productively, I’ve tidied up and released version 0.2 of my diary editor. This version fixes the crash some people were getting with version 0.1, and introduces database encryption and printing support.

The new version should seamlessly upgrade plaintext databases to encrypted ones, and uses the key from /desktop/pgp/default_key in GConf. If you don’t want encryption support – perhaps, for example, as it depends on GPGME – you can compile with –disable-encryption.

The printing support allows you to print the entries in a specified date range in a simple format — nothing suitable for binding for posterity’s sake, unfortunately. It’s there nonetheless.

Get the Bazaar branch from my website with bzr branch -r tag:V_0_2_0 http://tecnocode.co.uk/diary, from Launchpad, or download the tarball!

We’ve now cleared away the set from another WHP production, this time of Abigail’s Party (photos!). I can’t say it was the best play I’ve ever done; it was a departure from the normal type of comedy play we do, and although change is nice, I wouldn’t want to do another like this. I did not really find it funny, and while the five actors were doing phenomenally on stage, the script itself was what I didn’t like. That said, the audiences on all three nights appeared to really enjoy it, so perhaps I’m being too critical.

I was quite disappointed with how the lighting came out, and that’s entirely my fault. Having set it all up and gone through the dress rehearsal, I adjusted it to cover the few dark spots there were, and thought that was the end of it. However, by the time we were half-way through the first performance it was obvious to me that there were still some not-inconsiderable dark spots in a few areas which bugged me throughout. They weren’t bad enough for the audience to notice (as far as I could tell), but were in no way dismissable.

In GNOME news, I’ve been unable to do anything except bug triaging for the past few weeks, due to a combination of exam revision and this play. Once my exams are over (in another couple of weeks), I hope to be back to working on Totem, ready for a GIO-filled 2.24 release.

Last weekend was my training weekend for this summer’s World Challenge trip to Chile. My World Challenge team spent two days camping in Buxton, with one of the main exercises being a 17km hike on Saturday.

For the hike, I had my GPS logger turned on, and collected rather a nice log for the round trip. As I alluded to previously, however, I can’t find a way to extract the data from the logger on Linux. Since mtkbabel explicitly can’t yet support the M-241, I had to extract the logs on Windows. Still, they turned out well.