Jannis Pohlmann

Jannis

I am an open source enthusiast, student and musician from Lübeck, Germany. In my free time I enjoy hacking on Xfce and Lunar Linux. I've been a member of both teams since about 2005. Besides developing software, I love to listen to and play music (Guitar, Bass and Drums) and hang out with friends.

Contact me via jannis@xfce.org. My public PGP key is 0x354AFBA6. You can download it from here.

My CV is also available for download.

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Saturday, July 17 2010

Final exams, diplom thesis and thunar-volman

By Jannis Pohlmann on Saturday, July 17 2010, 14:25

I guess it’s time for an update.

This week I passed the last of four final exams in computer science and human-computer interaction at my university. Not only am I pleased that nine months of learning are over; I am also blessed with excellent grades. And while my understand of good grades is similar to that of money (nice to have it but nothing to focus on and/or brag with), I have to admit that this time I’m at least a little proud of myself. Five years at the university are slowly coming to an end, the first friends are leaving town and it will soon be time to take the next big step in life.

I cannot leave this city before writing another thesis, however. Thus, I am currently looking for a Diplom thesis at the university or at companies related to open source technologies. If you happen work for such a company with interesting thesis ideas or opportunities, please let me know. The thesis is supposed to take about 6 months, ideally starting early in September. After that it’s time to pack my stuff and look for an employer. I’m hoping for a position in open source software development. Areas I’m particularly interested in include Linux, mobile computing, desktop-related technologies as well as renewable energy, environment protection and open government. I’m here to make a difference.

On to something else. A few weeks ago I was offered sponsoring in order to work on thunar-volman for a few days. I accepted the offer, so for the entire next week from 2010-07-19 to 2010-07-26 (including the weekend) I’ll do some sponsored work on porting Thunar and thunar-volman to udev and GIO! The goal is to finish all major features (storage devices, cameras etc.).

Yesterday I did some warm-up hacking on tumbler to verify that if I’m still up to the task. The results: a new ffmpegthumbnailer-based video thumbnailer plugin (written by Lionel Le Folgoc), a new PDF/PostScript thumbnailer plugin based on poppler-glib and a new tumbler release (0.1.2). The master branch contains another commit adding arbitrary URI support to the PDF/PostScript thumbnailer but for that you’ll have to wait until the next release.

That’s it for now, I’ll be a lot more active next week. Take care everyone!

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Wednesday, November 25 2009

News From Busyland

By Jannis Pohlmann on Wednesday, November 25 2009, 16:29

This is just a short heads up concerning Tumbler. I just merged Philip’s last critical commit to complete support for specialized thumbnailer services into master. We’ll have to give this some testing but I’m quite optimistic that we’ll be able to release 0.1.0 this weekend or next week. A new release of Thunar will follow shortly after that in preparation for 1.2 (to be released along with Xfce 4.8), supporting virtual and remote file systems based on GIO.

I’ve been pretty occupied lately. Aside from learning for my final university exams I finished my short thesis on porting Thunar to GIO. I already got the very positive results back and I’m going to publish the official version of the thesis soon. Unfortunately, being busy has started to cause not-so-positive developments as well. I haven’t had much time to hack on anything lately and my attendence of FOSDEM 2010 is uncertain. I might still go but I failed to organize anything related to Xfce this year, leaving us without a devroom and talks. So it’d be more like a private meetup rather than an organized team trip with the goal to represent Xfce.

Another consequence of me being busy is that Xfce 4.8 might include less features than planned, at least with regards to the ones I had in mind. For now let’s just hope that I’ll find a little more time for hacking the next months. It doesn’t look too well right now but who knows…

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Tuesday, September 8 2009

Long Overdue Update

By Jannis Pohlmann on Tuesday, September 8 2009, 01:17

I haven't posted anything in a while, but I'm not complaining. The last month I've been mostly busy pretending to be busy. Ok, to be honest, that's not entirely true. Over at Xfce, we have achieved a lot in August:

  • We've moved all Xfce repositories (including the goodies) over to Git. Kudos to Brian for doing most of the work.
  • All Xfce translation updates are now submitted via Transifex. Thanks to the Transifex developers for all the support and for being such a friendly bunch. It amazes me that Dimitris, the founder of Indifex, is also active on our translations mailing list to support people!
  • The migration of the Thunar core to GIO is complete and has been merged into the main development branch. The overall delta was 2.9MB, although admittedly, a big part of that is due to the removal of ThunarVFS, so I can only take credit for about 16,000 of the 24,335 insertions and 6,000 of the 41,356 deletions.
  • We've kicked off the Xfce 4.8 development cycle on August 16th. The schedule and all other details are available on the wiki. Xfce 4.8 is scheduled for April 12th, 2010. Expect development releases of the various core components soon!

Other things I've been planning to blog about but didn't have the time to:

  • Samuel is still busy setting up Buildbot. With less time than he had hoped for at hands this might still take a while.
  • I was provided with a free Linutop 2 in June. I'd like to thank the Linutop company again for this gift! So far, I've only found the time to give it a few test boots but I'm planning to set it up as a Xfce test machine soon. Its limited hardware makes it much better platform than my rather powerful laptop and/or virtual machines for testing the speed and memory demand of Xfce.
  • My thesis is progressing slowly. I think I have at least 3/4 finished now. I'll keep you posted about the result. I'm hoping to kick off the six month learning phase for my final exams before October because a friend of mine is already waiting for me. ;)

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Tuesday, June 16 2009

Preview: Browsing SFTP with Thunar

By Jannis Pohlmann on Tuesday, June 16 2009, 02:40

It feels like I'm finally getting somewhere. My GIO migration branch of Thunar now generates thumbnails using the D-Bus service provided by Tumbler (which is still in development but almost ready for a release). It has no references to ThunarVFS anymore, except for one function required by Thunarx, the Thunar extension library. The next step will be to prepare thunarx-2 with a ThunarVFS-free API. All plugins shipped with Thunar itself need to be updated. ThunarVFS will be moved out of the Thunar tarball and into its own, so that applications depending on it will still work. And then we only need to fork the HAL based volume monitor from GVfs and of course thunar-volman needs to be rewritten on top of GIO ...

Anyway, just a few moments ago, I did something I thought is worth sharing: I browsed one of our servers remotely over SFTP! Mounting still needs to be done from the terminal but after that, you can simply type in the SSH or SFTP URI and it will display its contents. Thumbnails are generated over D-Bus. Here's a screenshot:

Update

Thunar can now mount remote URIs on demand:

FTP browsing also works:

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Friday, June 5 2009

News Update

By Jannis Pohlmann on Friday, June 5 2009, 01:25

A lot of things are going on lately and it turns out I'm way to busy to update my weblog on a regular basis. So, this is just a short post to keep you all updated.

Last two weeks

  • I took a new student job at the university, at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, which I love most. I'll be working on haplotyping algorithms.
  • I went to Barcelona and had a great time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit overall. Stephan and I were very productive. One evening during dinner we discussed our development and release process and later started writing it down. The result is a beautiful document that still needs a bit of polishing. I hope it'll serve as a good foundation for the development and release process of Xfce in the future. Several others commented on it and it looks like we'll give the proposed concept a shot after we've switched to git and all that.
  • Even though the week in Barcelona was great for Xfce, I was disappointed with how it went with regards to the cooperation between Xubuntu and Xfce. I talked it through with Stephan and after I got back, I resigned from my position as the Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison.

At the moment

  • I've started to implement the so-called thumbnail management D-Bus specification. My implementation is called Tumbler and it will hopefully start serving thumbnails for other apps soon. I'm planning to use it in Thunar, Stephan has expressed interest in using it in Ristretto and when discussing the specification and the existing hildon-thumbnail implementation, Philip van Hoof told me that Hildon/Nokia might be interested in dropping hildon-thumbnail in favor of Tumbler if it's flexible enough. I'm working on it as much as I can and I'm hoping to do a release within the next few weeks.
  • I'm still working on the Transifex installation for Xfce. It's already running but I still need to import all the projects, releases and of course create accounts for maintainers automatically.
  • The migration of Xfce to Git is still work in progress. Brian has most of the repository issues sorted out and is now waiting for me to finish the commit mail script. I have two or three possible implementations lying around but I need to have a look at that again.
  • Jim needs the documentation repository next week, so I'm about to set it up.
  • Our Buildbot server has arrived in Sweden. Today I set up the firewall. Samual is taking care of setting up the Buildbot host VM and other things. We're considering to move a lot of the services not related to development (like the Xfce websites) into separate VMs on that server too, in order to make the current server a development-only machine.

Besides that I'm trying to catch up with the work and personal stuff that piled up while I was away last week. And I really should go and sleep.

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