Create Launcher / Blog: Recent posts

Well, I needed to go away for most of last week for work, then turn around and travel for my wife's grandmothers funeral. Little to no coding done until arriving at her parents. I now have restored previous functionality with the new launcher object. I'm pleased with the results. I also realized I needed to change the code to make it read-all from the permissions standpoint if the user had their umask set differently. For some reason, it wasn't behaving appropriately so I just had to do an os.chmod() on it as I couldn't get proper permissions with os.umask() to work for some reason.... read more

Well, last week, I spent getting to know git. I having finished the tutorial I was working on, though. This week, I went to visit my parents in Oklahoma for a "working" vacation. Didn't really have any work to do, I spent most of the time with them.

To finish off the current working version, all I need to do is update the system and save custom options to restore functionality to the current released version. Then I will be able to begin finishing the rest of the implementation at which point I plan on releasing it as beta. I'm trying to decide also if I want to implement [en_US] for the Name and Comment fields. Feedback would be appreciated.

Well, I have put several hours into change from my object to ConfigParser as the object for the launcher. It is almost finished restoring functionality on par with 1.1.3+alpha.

Bzr also had a bug in it's bzr-git plugin which stopped working at 1.1.2+alpha hence no changes were noted on the coding page after this. I didn't like this, and it doesn't seem Cannonical or whoever maintains bzr-git is interesting in working very fast on the problem. So, I started learning about git tonight. It is not that different from bzr and I actually found a site that shows how to convert a bzr repo to a git repo. I did that, and set up git for my project and am now actually using both ignoring eachother's files. I have a common bash command I use to do commits for each one. I have also successfully pushed the git repo to sourceforge and the most current work code is now represented under "Code."... read more

I have decided to refactor my code so that ConfigParser is the basis for the launcher object. It will take some reworking and time, which will not add functionality, but it will ease extending the program to make Links and Directory menu items and make the whole program neater (coding-wise, not appearance or usage-wise), I think.

I decided to use the ConfigParser module with some modifications (prevent lowercasing the option and using "=" instead of " = " as the separator). That will speed things up quite a bit with the option of allowing me to use it rather than needing to write a fully extensible parser. I might do that in the future if I decide to implement more than just the basics for creating launchers.

I have also run into a bug in GTK that causes a floating point exception when I'm trying to change from a Application type to Link type. I think I can get around this, but may change my approach anyway.

Well, I'm afraid that I have had to work out of town this week so I haven't been able to work on the project this week.

I have done some testing on changing the interface necessary to make links. It results in a strange floating point error with no traceback. I think I can get around the error, but I think it is internal to GTK3 itself.

I also have an idea how I'm going to set up an extensible system to parse the .desktop files, but I'm doing some more research work on this.... read more

I now have the code set up where it will save to a system menu. I just need to package up the code and make the deb then upload it, which I plan to do tomorrow. It is getting late (1:21 AM where I am). It will be version 0.1.3+alpha. Next comes the harder part. Making a parser. I think I want to make it extensible for future use, so I'm going to need to take some time to develop it correctly.

After much fighting with debhelper and realizing I had made a stupid, stupid mistake in my script I used to package my tarball, AND having to learn some nitty-gritty about how to ignore certain files and how to include binaries (needed for the icon), I finally have a deb package rolled, from which I used the "alien" tool to roll an RPM package. They are available under the "Downloads" or "Files" section, depending on your view.

Yea! The status has been upgraded from pre-alpha to alpha. The saving functions except saving to a system location. It will save to the user's menu location and to a custom location as long as it is accessible to the saving user.

Stay tuned for further development!

I have been working on the basic code off and on for the past week or two getting it working to the point that I'm ready to begin non-root requiring file operations. I needed to learn a new Glade, the new GTK3 interface, how Python uses GTK3, and have recently switched to vim and have been tweaking it along the way as well.

Today, I have learned the Markdown language for posting on the Wiki and developed the first Wiki page.... read more