La vie personnelle du chat
Specto
0.3.1: a small bug fixing release
Jul 12th
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 into a huge refactoring endeavour like the 0.3 release was.
Notify-OSD compliance
Mar 20th
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 people complain, it’s all Ubuntu’s fault now :)
Specto 0.3 release candidate 1
Jan 15th
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 Wout Clymans for working so passionately on this release for over a year.
Improved Specto startup times
Dec 6th
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.
Profiling Specto (and whole Python applications in general)
Nov 25th
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 and start refreshing them. During that time, there is a notably high CPU usage spike (surprisingly, no noticeable hard drive I/O), as shown below:
The Joy of Merging, and Google Code Hosting bug integration with Bazaar
Sep 7th
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 bazaar revision history graph can be obtained simply by doing bzr visualize if you have the bzr-gtk package installed.
Specto featured on Linux.com
Mar 15th
This guy totally understood the way specto works and was intended to work!
Watching changes in your Google Documents
Oct 13th
I just discovered today a nice, unintended feature of Specto: being notified when you or one of your collaborator changes your google document.
