Planet Easter-eggs

Even if I recently stated I lost some of my faith in XCB, I still sometimes hack things to add support for it.

These last days, I've worked on a D-Bus port from Xlib to XCB. The port was quite straight forward, since there's only a little piece of D-Bus using X, which is dbus-launch.

I though D-Bus was a good candidate, since it's part of the Freedesktop initiative. Therefore, I was expecting a warm welcome and some enthusiasm from a fellow project.

My contribution got one useful review, and a cold reply from Thiago Macieira (a KDE/Qt/Nokia developer):

No, sorry, I don't agree.. I've just checked and my Solaris machine doesn't have XCB. Please do not remove the X11 code. You may add the XCB code, but you cannot remove the X11 code.

This is not really the kind of answer I expected, actually. I then reworked the code to please Thiago, and added some #ifdef to add XCB support to D-Bus, with a fallback to libx11 where XCB would not be available.

Havoc Pennington replied:

Given that libX11 now uses xcb as backend, I don't understand the value of porting to use libxcb directly when there isn't an issue of round trips or other stuff. It will just make #ifdef hell, while the X11 API is an API that works on both xcb and non-xcb platforms. Maybe people should be thinking about porting xcb to non-Linux platforms? The X protocol should be the same on other UNiX, so xcb in theory ought to work fine if you just compiled it on Solaris/BSD, same as GTK or dbus or Qt would work fine.

The last part "Maybe people should be thinking about porting xcb to non-Linux platforms?" is still unclear to me, even though I asked Havoc to explain what he meant.

Finally, Thiago refused to merge the patch:

[…] thanks for the patch, but like Havoc I am unsure of the value. We can't drop the X11 codepaths now because too many systems exist without XCB. Adding the XCB codepaths only made it more complex, even though you did a good job.

I can't disagree with that conclusion: using both XCB and X11 make the code unreadable for little gain. That's why I did replace libx11 by XCB directly in the first version of the patch. On the other hand, D-Bus people does not seems to really care about making their software evolve in the right direction, even if that requires users to upgrade their systems.

I think D-Bus using and depending on XCB would have been a good point to push adoption of XCB. Unfortunately, it seems you can't even rely of projects of the same initiative (i.e. Freedesktop) to work together to make things a little bit better.

After 5 years of existence, XCB is still not so obvious to people, and making it adopt is going to be a challenge for the next years. The upside is that new X.org 7.6 will bring XCB with it, as part of the katamari.

Since I have started to use Org-mode, I though it was missing something to have appointment locations on a map. Of course, it's easy to get a LOCATION property from an entry, and then browse-url on Google Maps.

But it is too easy for me, so once again I said: challenge accepted! I will bring Google Maps into Emacs!

After several hours of work, the google-maps-el project shows a map!

It fully implements the Google Static Maps API and the Google Maps Geocoding API.

You can type M-x google-maps and type some place to see it marked on map. Of course you can do much more, as seen in the screen shot above.

I've also completed all of this with a small org-location-google-maps which simply show a Google Maps' map for the location of an event in Org mode by pressing C-c M-l in an Org buffer or in the Org agenda.

wbmclamav est un module webmin pour gérer Clam Antivirus.

While customizing Emacs this last weeks, I had the need to customize also the color theme.

Color themes are always a pain in the ass to edit, because you're supposed to read color strings like #aabbcc and guess what colors they represent.

This is why I wrote rainbow-mode, a minor mode for Emacs that will highlight strings that represents color, using the color they represent.

This support hexadecimal syntax, HTML color name, X color names and rgb() CSS syntax.