Earlier this month, Owen Taylor announced Reinteract ("a system for interactive experimentation with python"). I've been wanting something like this for a while now.

In this article, we're going to turn it into a ROX application. In the past, this has meant taking a copy of a program and renaming and changing things to fit the ROX application structure. The trouble is, the ROX version and the original upstream version diverge over time. So, we're going to look at how improvements in tooling can make things easier for us.

SourceForge.net has provided us with excellent service over the years considering the charge (free!), but it's often very slow to respond now (see this thread). Therefore, I'm experimenting with paid hosting. Please try it out and see what you think!

Due to the huge amount of spam that has been posted here over the last few days, I've had to block the creation of new accounts (there are over 300 bogus registered users currently). If you need an account, just write to the mailing list and ask. Sorry for the inconvenience!

The 2007 Zero Install survey is now up, so please submit your feedback there!

There's also some discussion on the LSB packaging list about third-party installation, including Zero Install.

Spending too much time organising your windows instead of getting things done? Tiling window managers aim to handle the layout for you. In this article, I'll show how to configure Ion 3 to work with ROX.

One of the great advantages of open source for library authors is that you get access to your users' unit test suites. Ensuring that your library passes its own test suite before release is good, but sometimes your users are relying on features (or undocumented behaviour) you didn't test. Running their tests too can give you extra confidence, and it's easy to make this happen automatically in your release script.

Recently I created a small command line python utility to process some stuff on a TCP socket connection. I used the standard python SocketServer class because it was dead simple to use for my purposes.

However, as the requirements of the utility grew (a GUI), I hit the main problem with SocketServers - they block - which is not so good for GUIs.

So, instead of using nasty old threading, I worked out how to use gobject.io_add_watch() to do everything in the gobject/gtk main loop. This makes it very simple to have this run in a gtk UI without needing threads.

Note: An updated version of these instructions can be found on the Ubuntu page.

Can we get rid of ROX-Session? It should be possible to integrate ROX with your existing session manager. In this experiment, I configure a fresh Ubuntu installation to run ROX, without using ROX-Session.

Following on from the work to allow adding ROX applications to the Xfce panel, I've created Zero2Desktop. This adds a launcher for any Zero Install application to the GNOME or KDE Applications menu. To run it:

Having Zero Install check for updates once a month or so is handy, as it keeps you up-to-date, but it's pretty annoying that you have to wait for the check just when you're trying to start a program. Especially if there aren't any updates available anyway! I've just committed some new code to do the checking in the background, using the D-BUS notification daemon to let you know if there are updates. This screenshot shows what happens when I run Inkscape: