Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade broke my gmail in prism
90 days ago
I upgraded to Lucid today. Process went smoothly. First impressions, even though I kinda liked the brown / orange, I think I’ll get used to a dark theme and the aubergine presence pretty quickly.
First noticeable breakage is my fancy offline gmail in prism (a firefox add-on that provides dedicated firefox windows to “web applications”). That, oddly enough, tend to break often so I talk a lot about.
So here is the journey from breakage to resolution.
When I try to run the thing, it always crashes when loading gmail (the progress bar stage after login). It doesn’t work on the command line either, I only get a “segmentation fault” output.
I run the thing through strace to realize that it’s crashing when accessing information about extensions. Expecting a lot of troubleshooting down the road, I decide to try something completely different: I’ve heard that Google Chrome’s “Create shortcut to web application” works a lot better than prism so I give it a shot. Well, yes it does work but it doesn’t support offline gmail (on linux) or firepgp (for gpg signed and/or encrypted emails) so I’m back to looking at getting this prism to work.
Realizing that my hacks around prism are probably pretty old and that it’s probably all nicely supported into ubuntu, I decided to look for packages.
Found and installed prism-google-mail and xul-ext-gears. Now I was able to log into gmail but offline mode was deactivated and when I tried to restart it, prism wouldn’t even start (and didn’t even gave an error message).
I moved my ~/.prism/ and I got it to work again. Turns out I am experiencing this bug: Firefox does not start with certain addons installed. To work around it, I did a little shell wrapper that deletes the compatibility.ini file in question.
Now I have a gmail prism that starts but no offline mode. To install an add-on under prism you need the status bar to bring up the Tools -> Add-ons dialog. To enable it, you need to edit your webapp.ini and set status to yes. My webapp.ini was at:~/.webapps/google.mail@developer.mozilla.org/webapp.ini
Once I had that enabled, I noticed that Gears was installed for my prism instance. Turns out that xul-ext-gears installs gears for firefox and for any prism instance too. That was welcomed!
However, I was still out of luck trying to enable offline mode. It was behaving exactly as if I didn’t had gears installed. I found a bug related to this and it the bug someone was talking about modifying stub.js.
This rang a bell.
I needed to modify the stub.js when I created my own gears package to workaround the prism / gears deal the first time I did that. So I looked at my references and did it again. Turns out, it’s easier with the ubuntu package since it is already installed, I modify the file in place, restart my prism instance and voilà!
Anyway, I filed a patch hack and explained the fix so all this is probably (and hopefully) of little or no interest now.
— Olivier Bilodeau
Android-Montreal presentation about Traceview
96 days ago
Last Thursday I gave a presentation titled Android SDK’s Traceview tool – Why should you care? at android-montreal.
Here are the slides. However, I suggest you click to load the fullscreen version because without the animation you’ll be missing some content.
A video of the presentation is available thanks to Christian. I presented in French and the video is quite long (I was very verbose) so you have been warned.
You can also grab the slides in PDF format and slides with speaker notes in PDF format.
Slides are available under 
Have a good one!
— Olivier Bilodeau
Tomdroid 0.3.1 "fundationem"
146 days ago
Yes, yes beautiful! The 0.3.0 0.3.1 version of tomdroid is out. A little long in the making, it’s finally over and it’s great! The full announce is available here (and here’s the update for 0.3.1).
As said earlier, this version’s major highlights are snappy startup (thanks to Benoît Garret!), better user interaction and overall polish.
Actually, this release is somewhat a foundation towards more work in several areas thus the cheesy fundationem code name. As you all guessed, fundationem is the latin source for foundation meaning the “action of founding” and it’s what we’ve been doing here so it all makes sense doesn’t it?
the new stuff
“So what is in these new layers of ugly concrete you call a foundation?” you want to ask me? Well, not much as I’ve already told you but:
startup improvements
We no longer parse all notes on startup, we use a database and on a device like android it’s a day and night difference, I mean “multi-second feels kind of hanged” startup vs a “snappy I’m ready for you” one.
application size
We used to use a very big but powerful date library to understand tomboy’s dates inside the notes. This library was not suited for a mobile device, with a size of over 300kb.. Fortunately, an API introduced in 1.5 allows us to do the same work without this big library. It was dropped, at the cost of requiring 1.5 at minimum but according to this report more than 99% of the devices out there are using 1.5+ so I’m not worried.
new bugs!
I’m sure I introduced some nasty new note parsing bugs while trying to fix #364850 and #483101. People with fancy notes, please give this version your weirdest notes and report any bugs in our bug tracker!
the future!
note creation
In the near future, you should see an attempt at editing notes with minimal formatting opportunities. It will probably be a lot of experimentation and we will need user feedback to get things right and cover a lot of different use cases. Tomboy is a software that is so flexible and “out of your way” that I can’t think of all the ways people use it.. And of course, people will expect the same functionality in tomdroid.
sync
Benoît Garret created a branch that can do notes synchronization over the web using the Tomboy Web REST API for notes in the cloud. Currently, Ubuntu One offers a note synchronization service and then there’s a soon-to-be-released service called Tomboy Online hosted by Gnome that will actually run Snowy. For a bit of background, Snowy is the effort that lead to Tomboy’s Web REST API, so you can think of it as the reference implementation. It is available under the AGPL meaning you’ll always be able to run the same software as Tomboy Online on your own server! Isn’t that cool? You want a private note store for your business? You can too!
Anyways, all this to say that sync is a big deal and that in the near future Benoît’s effort will be integrated into Tomdroid.
Now, I’ll repeat the NEWS portion I mentioned in the announce email but you can skip that if you want.
Version 0.3.1 – fundationem (fixed with a tie wrap)
- Fixed important parsing issue with notes in +xx:xx timezones (#520543)
- Fixed error-reporting of date parsing errors
- Only one error displayed per synchronization attempts instead of one per note
Version 0.3.0 – fundationem
Android 1.5 or later required
- Instant startup — database back-end instead of files (Benoît Garret)
- New “Sync from SD Card” menu item that will populate the notes database with the notes in tomdroid/ on the SD card (Benoît Garret)
- Significantly smaller App (went from ~380Kb to ~35Kb)
- Note list is now sorted showing last modified notes first
- Notification when “Sync from SD Card” is complete
- Note title no longer shown in the note text
- Fixed note parsing errors (#364850, #483101)
- Fixed phone numbers in note titles (#512204)
- Improved help messages
- Improved error reporting to the user
- Removed the “Load from Web” not-so-useful feature (Benoît Garret)
Download the latest Tomdroid here
Any problems? Please open up a bug report.
Have an idea for an enhancement? Please register a blueprint.
If you want to provide any additional help (translation, code, website, testing, publicity, etc.) feel free to subscribe to the tomdroid-dev mailing list and propose help.
Thanks for your attention and stay tuned for Tomdroid 0.4! (or maybe 0.3.2?)
— Olivier Bilodeau
Comment [1]
Encrypted emails (PGP) in gmail running in prism
210 days ago
I’m a prism fan. I mentioned it twice already here so I won’t recap the reasons why.
Today’s lesson is how to get email encryption in gmail through prism.
To get OpenPGP (so gpg) email encryption to work in gmail the best I’ve found yet is a firefox extension named FireGPG.
I searched if the extension worked under prism and support was requested in 2008 and added early last year.
So, yes, it works out of the box. The only glitch is that in order to install an extension into a prism app, you need to open the said prism app then open the add-ons window and drag and drop the extension’s .xpi file into that window.
Happy signed and/or encrypted emails!
— Olivier Bilodeau
We Are The Strange Review
216 days ago
Some notes I took a while ago that I completed tonight in an attempt to close down some open todo tasks ;)
Reading an old wired magazine, I’ve come across the We Are The Strange meme.
I listened to the phenomenon. First, after a few minutes you wonder what you are watching. But then at some point you soon realize you are watching something truly unique and creative whether you like it or not.
Anyway, it’s not for anyone but definitely worth your time if you are into gaming, art or the blend of the two.
Oh and by the way, there is definitely a lot of VJ-ing potential in there. More on that later! :)
— Olivier Bilodeau