Yet Another [À Compléter] » Circ

Important message : "You have to update your blog"

Jérémie Laval — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 13:20:56 +0000

Heya long time no post indeed which doesn’t mean that nothing had happened since July .

First of all I have to talk about my job which is taking most of my time lately and which, unfortunately, isn’t computer-related at all . It’s more an ingrat-summer-job-for-yet-undiplomed-student type of job (cleaning, tiding and sorting clothes and stuff in a warehouse) but to make it more enjoyable I still managed to snake my laptop in to do some hacking while I’m bored . Basically it means that Circ has well progressed and, in my opinion, progressed enough to issue a first beta.

The list of changes for this beta are :

Modified some parts of Circ to work in a APM (Asynchronous Programming Model) way. Now the GUI shouldn’t freeze anymore.
Added and updated plugins. New interesting plugins are the Autoconnect and Autojoin ones which, as their names imply, allow you to connect automatically to some network & channel. There is a basic configuration in ~/.Circ/Circ.conf that you can modify at your wish (I won’t explain here because most of the options are straighforward). There is also a Banshee plugin which let you spam your friend with what your Banshee is currently playing thanks to some D-Bus goodness, just type /np and see for yourself .
LOT of cleanup and refractoring of the code base (mainly in the PAC glue pattern and in the Gtk# frontend) which is resulting in more abstracted relation between Presentation and Controller (in fact now it shouldn’t be necessary to rewrite a set of controllers for a particulate frontend).
Some UI work like an improved notebook label widget (alert you when you receive message, has a close button…)
Switched VCS from Git to Mercurial which I found for the moment more simpler and direct than Git. The new webinterface and pull url is : http://hg.sharesource.org/circ/ . Use this one if you want to peek at the source code as the beta package contains only binaries (Monodevelop is still doing strange thing with me for the packaging part ).
A fair number of bug fixes which had been around for some times.

And finally the link to get these new features : http://netherilshade.free.fr/circ/Circ-0.1-beta1_bin.tar.bz2 .

Please delete your ~/.Circ folder before you run the new version.

Exhausted, happy and eager

Jérémie Laval — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 13:04:20 +0000

Exhausted : This week has been extremely tiring though very enjoyable. Indeed starting from last Saturday it has been an almost completely week of party for different reason (birthdays, occasions …). Enough to say that going to bed each night at 4:30am isn’t very good for the body (moreover with the different sort of drink taken).

Happy : I still managed to get some work done on Circ in form of several plugins which are sometimes useful, sometimes frivolous. I plan to write a post explaining how I made these plugins and a general tutorial on how to build Circ from git directly in order to stay ore up to date with these kind of changes (the plugins have already been in git main branch for some days now). NB: I didn’t forget Mono.Xna and I hope to be able to finish up my stuff in the coming weeks

Eager : Starting next wednesday I will start my summer job for the next month at GE (General Electric). I still don’t know exactly what type of work I will do but even if I don’t expect to work on computer-related subject every day I hope I will still be able to use my skill in computer science during this one month period at work.

Circ : update update !

Jérémie Laval — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:35:11 +0000

I made some interesting changes to Circ recently (where interesting = user visible).

First of all I redesigned a bit the internal working of Circ even if I want to port the entire presentation layer to a event-driven model like the actual model so this is a work in progress. Well the main advantage of the current core changes is that I fixed the wrong behaviour of Circ when someone is hl’ing you. Indeed, on precedent versions, the hl notification disappeared when you reopened the window even if you weren’t on the good channel tab, now this is fixed.

Together with that change I made a specific widget for notebook tab (greatly inspired from Stetic code) which show hl with an icon appearing in the tab, this widget also have a close button to easily part channel (though some people complained it’s not very usable so I will allow the user to disable this close button using the configuration file later).

I added preliminary work for some keybinding : you can type Super (Windows key) + Left/Right arrows to switch between channels and Ctrl + Super (Windows key) + Left/Right arrows to switch between opened servers. The problem is that I use a big hack to avoid too much key repetition as I haven’t found how to limit key repeat in Gdk (if someone has any input on that) so the behaviour may be a little jerky .

Apart from that I fixed a lot of little things like quit message, configuration file autocreation etc… so normally this release should work out-of-the-box if you run it for the first time. I also bundled Nini for those who hadn’t it in their package manager (which mean that the only external lib dependency now is Gtk#).

Visit the project page to download the new release (dubbed Circ-alpha2), as usual binary and source packages are furnished (but there is a bug in the autotool files which apparently comes from MD so I recommend the binary version).

To finish here is a little screenie to show you the new visual look :

PS: Work on Mono.Xna’s Audio part is going well, my WaveBankReader is now playing PongXna sounds but to finish this properly I still need to find how to retrieve important wave informations such as frequency and bit per channel, but thanks to Alan’s input I’m on the right way (thanks Alan ).

Capharnaüm #4

Jérémie Laval — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:56:06 +0000

(I think I’m starting to like these kind of post)

Yay today I passed my last written exam for the Baccalauréat. Physics/Chemistry was terrific but I found Math easy (which is good because my final mark will depend mostly on this exam mark). Now it just let some practical and oral tests in the following week but it’s not big deal : meaning I will much more time to work on what I like .
I found some time to add new features to Circ like a revamped parser infrastructure and now Circ take account of its conf file. I pushed my early work on the mirror but it’s still very buggy so I don’t recommend that you upgrade.
For all Ubuntu performance tuning fan out of there you should try these set of scripts : http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1397 . Basically they remove whitespaces and such from your Gnome’s XML files which improve speed launch of your app and their memory usage.
Monodevelop 0.14 is out with all the juicy features I described there and more. Yesterday I just discovered that you can know generate automagically properties from a field via the right-click menu. Terrific
I’m wondering what are the capabitilities of this Thrust thing and if it would run fine on Mono.Xna. Will test it when I find time.
Tomorrow I have to go to some sort of meeting to be introduced to the job I will make during this summer. Hu who found the dumb idea to make me wake up for 9am when I just finished my exams and when I’m going to a friend’s party this evening …

Capharnaüm #2

Jérémie Laval — Fri, 25 May 2007 08:30:40 +0000

… Où on mélange les langues.

I felt like testing new stuff today and my choice was Openbox ! I’m currently running it in my Gnome session and it’s bother quicker, more responsive than Metacity while keeping Gnome advantage (like native look of my Gnome application). Go on try it, it’s damn easy.
Dell has started to provide Ubuntu PCs to the masse even if European customers will have to wait this summer to know if they can buy Ubuntu boxes.
Stumbled open this article of the MoMa programmer that shows of to port Winforms applications to Mono. A good starting point if you want to do this kind of thing.
A good reflection which extend the sacro-saint principe of « premature optimization is the root of all evil » and the idea of simplicity/readability over performances. That won’t prevent me to write some performance tuning articles for C# this summer though (well if laziness don’t fall to early on me )
A friend blog post (see below for the blog link) introduced me to the concept of ZUI. It would be interesting to see this concept applied to a IRC client like mine (does it improve usability and productivity ?). So far I poked at the Piccolo toolkit which AFAIK limited to Winforms interop for now.

(Let’s switch language)

C’est génial de pas avoir cours le matin et de dormiiiir . Cet aprem deux heures de cours. L’été approche .
Dernière épreuve du bac de Sport passé mardi : le volley. A mon humble avis on a bien joué même si mes coéquipiers (et mes deux jokers) ne sont pas tout à fait d’accord .
Parce que je devais le dire, un nouveau blog qui vient de s’ouvrir avec des gens pas trop mauvais aux commandes (ouais même toi Poulet ). A savoir que j’aime tout particulièrement les articles de lasts
Je crois que j’avais d’autres trucs à dire mais je sais plus trop , j’éditerai si je m’en rapelle.

Time for a Alpha release (really alpha)

Jérémie Laval — Sun, 20 May 2007 18:22:02 +0000

One day an old sage said that what is the most important is to « release early, release often ». Even if I don’t rely comply with the first part, at least I can comply for the second . So here is the first alpha version of Circ dubbed 0.1-alpha1 : « some Mac users should go to hell ». I made two tarball versions, a buggy autooled-based one and a binary only one. For the autools I say it’s buggy because it asks for unnecessary dependencies (I reported the bug to MD folks so it should be fixed in a couple of day/week). The real dependencies are just Nini and Gtk# (and Mono of course ). I really recommend you to use the binary version if you want simplicity. To grab the tarballs just go there : http://netherilshade.free.fr/circ/#download.

In this release Circ supports :
- connecting server and joining chans with a multi-tabbed interface.
- possibility to change nick (the UI might not update though ).
- show connected users and topic (user are added when they connect but the disconnection part is not yet handled).
- basic nick auto-completion.
- highlight support with window blink.
- timestamps for message.
- plugins support (scroll down).

They are still a lot of bugs and things that don’t work (some part of the UI does nothing or are buggy) but well it’s not an alpha for nothing .

About plugins, I mostly stabilized the API so the plugins interface should be mostly usable. As a proof of concept I made two quick plugins for example purpose : one which connect Circ automatically to the default channels you set in X-Chat (buggy on Mono though, IMHO it’s a bug in fields capture in anonymous methods) and one which change your quit message to a fancy ones who show the number of days/hours/seconds… before the big Posix bug (I know it stupid but one of my friend requested it so ).

I still didn’t implemented the UI I want for the users to connect/join/quit servers/channels and thus I implemented three command in the CommandProcesser (which you can use in your plugins too). The CommandProcesser is a component where you can post special command assorted with delegate callbacks that get called when the user actually type your command with the arguments the user supplied. The three commands that you should know are :
- « /c irc.yourserver.org yourNick » : this command connects you to a server with the specified nick.
- « /j #yourchannel » : this command makes you join the specified channel.
- « /n yourNewNick » : use this command to change your nickname.

Quick note : fresh s/commit/push

Jérémie Laval — Tue, 01 May 2007 19:04:13 +0000

Just go and git-clone git://repo.or.cz/circ.git master, new features inside .

To introduce the post, let me show you what Circ now look like :

As you can notice there is a new UI style with resizable panel, distinct tabs for server-channel. It also show some features that I added to the backend like users fetching, topic support, timestamps etc…

In addition to the /j command I added the corresponding /c command which let you connect to the server you want (yes Circ isn’t limited to Epiknet anymore !) so my client is slowly getting useful .

I have also added two new « brainstorming » ideas. The first one is for the plugins part : when I designed the Plugin abstract class I though I could just put some methods/events to let plugins interact with the main program. The problem is that it limits what you can do to what I provide in these methods and we know that a developper doesn’t like to be limited . So I though about using something I called a « Shop ». As you know a Shop in real life is a place where you can ask for services and trade your own ones. Circ’s Shop follows the same principle, you can ask everything you want to it and it will provide you with every controls that Circ possess, meaning complete control on the backend and frontend via all the methods exposed by Controller. In other word you can do everything that Circ can do.
The second idea concern message parsing in the GUI. For example I may parse some links, replace smilies with image and also let users do other transformations via plugins. For that purpose I imagined a sort of « pipeline », basically Transformation are represented by function which are posted to a TransformationPool. The Input method of the Pool is connected to the MessageReceived event of the backend via the Controller and thus is called each time a new message arrives. Then each method inside the Pool parse the string and store particuliar transformation (text modification, TextTag adding, Pixbuff substitution) in a transformation container. At the end, when every functions have finished their job, the method responsible for showing the final message takes account of every transformation stored in the container and show the text accordingly. I think that in functional programming this thing is called an Arrow.

We are really progressing towards a real 0.1 release …

Circ website & GIT mirror up

Jérémie Laval — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:49:19 +0000

Just a quick note to inform everybody that I have set up a webpage and a GIT mirror for Circ, my IRC client written in C# blablabla…

The page is accessible both here on the blog and on an other server here.
The GIT mirror, generously provided by repo.or.cz (thanks for the service ), is accessible here : http://repo.or.cz/w/circ.git.

On the side of development news I have begun to implement common missing features like nick auto-complementation, topic support and user list update. I will push these change on the mirror when it’s done and maybe release a real 0.1 version. The actual tarball provided on the website is what MS folks would call a « Technical Preview » since it connects itself to only one server : EpikNet. If you want to join a chan just type : /j #yourchan in the entry widget. ATM you have user list, color goodness (with hl support) and automatic tab creation for each channel. A friend of mine suggested me some new UI idea for connecting new server and for general presentation so stay tuned.

Circ's followup

Jérémie Laval — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:18:59 +0000

I have done a little more work on Circ. First of all I added the missing LGPL headers in the main git branch. I have also refractored a little the Presentation part doing a UI redesign of the GTK# frontend. In fact I’m redesigning it to follow as closely as possible the Gnome HIG.

Reading the HIG made me realize that today, with all this 3D interfaces buzz, things are getting a lot less accessible for people who suffers from some deficiency. That’s why I want to implement some stuff from ATK in order to provide maximum accessibility for these people who deserve to be able to communicate on IRC like any other geek. I may also use AT-SPI but the main interface to it seems to be only Corbra/Bonobo ATM which is far from being efficient in C# code even though there is apparently some work to get a D-Bus binding which would be better and simpler for me to implement.

Definitely, I think that Accessibility must be one of the key feature of Circ. Integrating libcontrast in contrast was already a smallish step towards that goal but there is more work to be done before telling that Circ is accessible.

Lazy mode activated

Jérémie Laval — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:41:48 +0000

Comme je me sens en forme (cf le titre) je sens bien un petit post en anglais

As the title suggest I’m now in Holidays (17 days doing nothing ) and I’m currently in the garden, lying on a long chair with the sun, the birds and of the course the computer on my knees .

Ok apart from that I wanted to say that Circ is almost finished and if nothing go wrong (I hate to give schedule and then to not follow them) I should have a beta something soon. From the buzzy point of view I have added some nice things : dropped my homemade plugin system for the newly released Mono.Addins, ported the interesting libcontrast to a managed C# version one (in action on the screenshot), and mostly tuning the thing in accordance with the ouput of FxCop and Gendarme. As a screenshot is worth all word here it is :

I just have to adapt a little the Controller code, do some UI improvements (any input would be nice ) and it will be mostly finished (I would like to re-work on the Tapioca backend too but that will be for a later time).

On a side note, Miguel announced that Mono will ship a so-called cross-plateform GUI (I say « so-called » because IMHO a NCurses thing isn’t really the first class GUI you would expect from a modern language/plateform )

EDIT: Here it is after 3 hours of more works :

Damn I had to add a little Thread.Sleep in the presentation thread to avoid a randomly bad assertion (the parameter of gtk_text_attributes_ref was detected to be null oO, still now I don’t understand what the purpose of this function) and the corresponding segfault.