GNOME: driving to the sky, one step at a time
In the new GNOME 3.x series there has been a push to integrate the user’s online accounts into the desktop. At the same time we have been working on a new set of core applications for finding and selecting the user’s content. Documents is one such application. It lets you view and search your documents that are stored both locally and online.
GNOME 3.6, which will be released in September this year, will have lots of improvements and new features in this regard. One of them is the integration of Microsoft’s SkyDrive file hosting service. Go to the Online Accounts panel in System Settings (hit the super key or the Activities button and type “online”) to enable your Windows Live account, and you will be able to access your SkyDrive from Documents just as you are now able to do with your Google account.
Here, in these screenshots, you can see that I am viewing the PDFs of the famous Linux Device Drivers (3rd edition) book which are stored on my SkyDrive account.
The development of this new and exciting feature is being tracked here. You can either wait for GNOME 3.6 to come out in September, or you can get the latest copies of gnome-online-accounts, gnome-documents and libzapojit to try it out.
Anand Wins World Chess Championship (again)
Viswanathan Anand successfully defended his World Championship title against Boris Gelfand today, which makes him the world champion for the fifth year in a row.
Forcing Google to show a mobile OAuth approval page
I did not find this mentioned anywhere on the Internet. Hopefully someone might find this helpful.
This stupid bug had me confused for the last couple of months. It turns out that the Google-specific btmpl parameter does not work as documented. Neither do they recognize the Nokia N9′s user-agent as a mobile phone browser.
Not unsurprisingly, Android phones work, and so does the iPhone.
Here are the relevant user-agents, in case someone out there needs them.
- Nokia N9: Mozilla/5.0 (MeeGo; NokiaN9) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) NokiaBrowser/8.5.0 Mobile Safari/534.13
- HTC Wildfire: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; HTC Wildfire Build/FRG83D) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1
- iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3
It appears as if they are grepping for the names of well-known mobile platforms instead of just looking for “Mobile”. I am surprised because Google does not seem to have an Android branded or iPhone branded page as some people (like Facebook) have.
New Beginnings
I submitted my M.Sc. for review last week, quit my job at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and moved from Helsinki to Brno yesterday. On 1st March (ie. day after tomorrow) I will be joining the Desktop Development Team at Red Hat.
The last few months were a bit hectic. First, trying to wrap up the thesis and then running around to get the visa paperwork ready, but now I am very excited. It would be great to work full time time on free software and that too for a company like Red Hat. I am really looking forward to increasing my work on GNOME in particular, and free software in general.
Remembering 26/11/2008
A flash mob was organized at Mumbai CST to to pay a tribute to the people who lost their lives on 26/11/2008.
