Tag: Specto
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A program's obsolescence
In 2005, I had a crazy idea upon which I started the Specto project. Initially, I thought I’d call my revolutionary piece of software WhileYouWereOut (continuing the world’s tradition of ill-chosen project names), because it really was about solving a core “want” in my life: to leave my computer alone and catch up with events…
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Specto 0.4 released
I’ve been holding off a Specto release for way too long. See my previous post on the matter for some insights into why Specto 0.4 was released after Duke Nukem Forever. This development hell streak ends today. If there are still people out there using this piece of software, go grab the new tarball. Distro…
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The most annoying Specto bug ever
There is this infamous bug in Specto where emails that are not in English would show up with messed up encoding: It is the single most infuriating bug I know in Specto, annoying me daily. Today, I spent three miserable hours trying to fix it, and went 90% of the way towards that goal. It now…
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Adopt a Specto
As you can see I haven’t touched Specto in quite a while. I’m not going to start fixing things or implementing new features myself anytime soon. This is because: I consider Specto “good enough” and I lack the time/hacking skills to devote to it I spend lots of energy on other projects such as PiTiVi.…
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0.3.1: a small bug fixing release
I just released Specto 0.3.1, not long after 0.3 (in terms of commits), after having addressed some bugs myself. The changes are minor and I don’t expect regressions, so it should be pretty safe to upgrade from 0.3. Maybe I can start a habit of actually releasing stuff more often, if we don’t again plunge…
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Notify-OSD compliance
After much bikeshedding, I delved in Specto’s code for a few hours this morning to get it working with Ubuntu 9.04’s controversial notification system daemon. The ability to set notification durations is now gone, and Specto only displays actions in the notifications if they are “allowed”. This should not impact users of vanilla libnotify. If…
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Specto 0.3 release candidate 1
Since hell is freezing over today, I’ve been nailed to my chair to prepare a new Specto release, at last. Uploaded packages, checked release notes, and reworked the website. Now, 0.3 RC1 is available for the masses, go test it! If no significant problems are found, this will become Specto 0.3 final. Special thanks to…
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Improved Specto startup times
After my post on profiling Specto’s startup, Wout Clymans put on his Hero Hacker Hat and fixed the major problem that was causing Specto to do too much work for nothing. Now, Specto starts in 2 seconds instead of 10 seconds. What happened there? Well, for making sure that we are using the same “internal”…
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Profiling Specto (and whole Python applications in general)
A few months ago (when we still thought we were about to release 0.3 “real soon now” ;), I noticed that Specto is noticeably slow to start up, even on warm starts (when it is not the first time you launch it). It always takes at least 6 seconds to paint the list of watches…
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The Joy of Merging, and Google Code Hosting bug integration with Bazaar
This graph makes me happy. As it shows, I have been quite merge-a-holic in the past few weeks, and I think it has been my most productive time of the year working on Specto (once I finally gave up trying to fix up the mess in a “perfect” way when we migrated to bazaar). This…