Standings and Exert Features

As of this evening, 5 quarters are finished. The prognostication standings:

Mike: 5
Maggie the Monkey and Jackson: 2

Been adding some new features to exert the last couple weekends. Last weekend, it was a couple new icons for swimming and cycling:



I also hacked EntryCategory editing and creation in the Preferences dialog. It supports editing of category names and icons, plus a "visible" checkbutton to indicate if you want the category shown in the Entry dialog combobox.

This weekend, I added a status tray icon and menu.



I've got a list of features I want to add, but I will probably kick out another release soon. The Garmin device support deserved a release months ago.

Hockey talk

Jackson took a group of us non-Canadians to a Bruins/Blackhawks game in Boston last fall, and rekindled my interest in the Blackhawks. Seeing as Jackson has posted his picks for the first round, I figured I would post my completely novice guesses just so I can belittle him if I happen to guess correctly.

West:
'Wings d Preds in 6. Ellis is gonna win 2.
Sharks d Flames in 4. Flames are going down hard.
Avs d Wild in 6. Wild are too boring to win.
Stars d Ducks in 7. Could go the other way in 7.

East:
Montreal d Boston in 5. Boston will win one at home.
Pittsburgh d Ottawa in 5. Crosby with 16 points.
Caps d Flyers in 6. Caps are gonna drop one at home, probably game 1.
Rangers d Devils in 7. Though I couldn't care less.

If you place any bets based on these picks, I will expect my usual commission.

gio-sharp

Been getting quite a few requests for libgio bindings. I whipped up a new module in mono svn to provide an unstable binding for people who want to experiment and help refine the API. It is my intention to eventually, most likely in gtk-sharp 2.14, merge this binding into gtk-sharp and eliminate the standalone package. Until then, it will install per the Mono Guidelines for Unstable Library Deployment outside the GAC.

For the extremely impatient and adventurous, you can find it at trunk/gio-sharp. You will need GAPI from trunk/gtk-sharp to build it. It still throws tons of generation warnings. I have made zero attempts to use it. It has no docs. If it melts your laptop, don't complain to me.

Feel free to file bug reports for anything out of order. I'll try to be responsive to any reports, and as always, patches are welcome.

Enjoy.

Hack Week II Exertion

This week was Hack Week 2 at Novell, and I decided to spend the week adding Garmin Forerunner import support to exert. I had hoped to maybe move on to some heart rate graphs and lap display, but time ran out.

All track, lap, and run data is importing correctly into the exert sqlite database, at least as far as I can tell from some sql querying. The visible entries are coming in cleanly and displayed properly, but there may still be some glitches in the lap summary and GPS track point data.

Here's a rather boring screenshot of the end result.



Current support is limited to the ForeRunner 305, but it should be easy enough to add other devices if people are interested. I just didn't feel like implementing the entire protocol up front.

The code is on svn at sourceforge. I will probably hold off on a release until I can display more of the data visually. I want to add heart rate graphs, route maps, and lap tables. Maybe next hack week...

IOChannels and Spawning

For the most part, we like to avoid wrapping as much of glib as possible, instead preferring the .Net framework capabilities. We hide as many GList and GHashtable parameters as possible, for example.

I've received several comments in the past that the .Net APIs for IO and process spawning didn't really match up to the glib API. Taking this feedback, I spent the last couple days wrapping, testing, and documenting a new glib-sharp binding for g_spawn_* and GIOChannel.

Here's an example usage from the docs:

using GLib;
using System;

public class SpawnTest  {

        public static void Main (string[] args)
        {
                new SpawnTest ();
        }

        MainLoop main_loop;
        IOChannel channel;

        public SpawnTest ()
        {
                main_loop = new MainLoop ();

                try {
                        Process proc;
                        int stdin = Process.IgnorePipe;
                        int stdout = Process.RequestPipe;
                        int stderr = Process.IgnorePipe;
                        GLib.Process.SpawnAsyncWithPipes (null, new string[] {"pwd"}, null,
                                                          SpawnFlags.SearchPath, null, 
                                                          out proc, ref stdin, ref stdout, 
                                                          ref stderr);
                        channel = new IOChannel (stdout);
                        channel.AddWatch (0, IOCondition.In | IOCondition.Hup, new IOFunc (ReadStdout));
                } catch (Exception e) {
                        Console.WriteLine ("Exception in Spawn: " + e);
                }

                main_loop.Run ();
        }

        bool ReadStdout (IOChannel source, IOCondition condition)
        {
                if ((condition & IOCondition.In) == IOCondition.In) {
                        string txt;
                        if (source.ReadToEnd (out txt) == IOStatus.Normal)
                                Console.WriteLine ("[SpawnTest output] " + txt);
                }
                if ((condition & IOCondition.Hup) == IOCondition.Hup) {
                        source.Dispose ();
                        main_loop.Quit ();
                        return true;
                }
                return true;
        }
}

I'd appreciate it if anyone who has been missing this functionality in Gtk# would try it out and let me know any issues you find, or places the API can be improved.

Exert 0.1

I've spent a little spare time hacking on exert recently and have reached the point where it has all the features I use from my online running log. I decided to switch over to using it for my log, so that means I need to maintain database compat from now on. I figured I might as well release it in case anyone else was interested in playing with it.

There's a source tarball available, and I used the opensuse build service to provide packages for 10.3 and fedora. Enjoy.

Moko Bindings

One of the comments on my last blog entry suggested a libmokoui binding. Since it was a nice small target, I went ahead and whipped up a binding for it this afternoon. It took me longer to write the tutorial I added to the wiki than it did to produce the binding.

Granted this was a very simple binding, since it is small and the source code was written perfectly for the GAPI parser's consumption. It also has no auto* magic. The tarball contains generated sources which could be copied into your project and compiled and installed as a private assembly. There is really no point to GAC magic for an assembly with no guarantees.