Posts

This is the eighth entry in A Field Guide to GTK Widgets, a series about which widget to reach for, when, and what bites you when you do. The previous post taught the store to report its own changes. This one puts a table and a grid on top of it. The complete, runnable code lives in the companion repo. Where we left off Every view in this series so far has been a ListView: one row per item, one widget per row. The model stack under it grew from a store and a selection to four layers, and the last post made the store report when an item changed so the sort model above it could keep up. ...

This is the seventh entry in A Field Guide to GTK Widgets, a series about which widget to reach for, when, and what bites you when you do. It picks up where the filter and sort post left off and replaces the workaround that one ended on. The complete, runnable code lives in the companion repo. Where we left off The last post built a task list four models deep: a GListStore at the bottom, then a FilterListModel, a SortListModel and a MultiSelection. It searched, hid done tasks and sorted three ways, and two parts of it were workarounds. ...

This is the sixth entry in A Field Guide to GTK Widgets, a series about which widget to reach for, when, and what bites you when you do. The previous post put selection in the model. This one adds search and sort underneath it. The complete, runnable code lives in the companion repo. Where we left off Last time the stack was two layers deep: a GListStore with a MultiSelection on top. I closed with a warning to look positions up through the model that handed them to you, because the store would stop agreeing with the view once a filter or sort model joined in, and this post adds both of them. ...

This is the fifth entry in A Field Guide to GTK Widgets — a series about which widget to reach for, when, and what bites you when you do. The previous post got rows behaving correctly under recycling. This one is about which of them is selected. The complete, runnable code lives in the companion repo. Where we left off Two posts ago I wrapped the list store in a NoSelection and moved on, with a note that GtkListView won’t accept a bare GListModel and that NoSelection is how you say “no selection, and I mean it.” True enough as far as it went, but it was a placeholder. Time to take the wrapper seriously. ...

This is the fourth entry in A Field Guide to GTK Widgets — a series about which widget to reach for, when, and what bites you when you do. The previous post got a list on screen with a factory it deliberately didn’t explain. This one explains it. The complete, runnable code lives in the companion repo. Where we left off The list-mindset post got a GtkListView on screen with just enough factory code to prove the model-driven approach worked, and it said so directly: setup builds a row’s widgets once, bind fills them in, and GTK recycles rows as you scroll — the same widgets get re-bound to different items instead of new rows being built for each one. That recycling is the entire reason GtkListView scrolls well through ten thousand rows without breaking a sweat, and it’s also the thing that breaks people’s mental model the first time they hit it, because nothing in the API shouts about it. You write bind once, it looks like a constructor, and it isn’t one. ...

A phone call with a mate turned into a wager: could AI actually build a real application from scratch? Five months, 898 commits and 40,000 lines of Rust later, here’s the verdict — and the app. It started with a phone call Like most of my questionable decisions, this one started on the phone with a mate, talking about technology the way we always do. The conversation drifted, as every technical conversation eventually does now, into AI. And we ended up circling the same question everyone circles: is this stuff actually capable of building real software, or is it just very confident autocomplete? ...

This is Part 6 of a series taking a GNOME app from an empty directory to GNOME Circle. Part 5 wired the sidebar to a real Feed GObject and a feed-selected signal — selecting a row updates the content pane and prints a line to the terminal. This is the post where that line stops being a placeholder and becomes a real network fetch. The click that still does nothing real Select This Week in GNOME, then select Hacker News. The placeholder swaps in the new name and URL — everything the app knows about that feed, and none of what’s actually in it. Every Feed in the sidebar has a uri pointing at a real RSS or Atom document on the actual internet, and nothing in the codebase has ever asked one of them what’s there. ...

This is the third entry in A Field Guide to GTK Widgets — a series about which widget to reach for, when, and what bites you when you do. We’re jumping straight to lists, ahead of layout and navigation, because it’s the material the reference documents worst. Each post stands on its own, and the complete, runnable code for this one lives in the companion repo. The list you’d build without thinking Say you’re showing a handful of tasks. The obvious way to do it doesn’t require reading any documentation at all: ...

I carry two YubiKeys. One lives on my keyring, one lives in a drawer, and both are enrolled everywhere that matters. A hardware token with no backup is a single point of failure you have chosen on purpose. For months I had a small irritation I never bothered to chase. Some days git push asked for my PIN, I typed it, and it worked. Other days it asked for my PIN, failed, and then asked again, and the second one worked. Same command, same repo, same laptop. The variable turned out to be which of the two keys happened to be in the USB port. ...

Every platform modernisation programme has the same first act, and it is never the interesting one. Before anyone gets to write a line of dbt, somebody has to work out what the current thing actually does. In the SAP BusinessObjects Data Services case — BODS, if you’ve had the pleasure — that means inheriting a few hundred dataflows whose authors left the organisation years ago. The logic lives in exported XML. The business rationale lived in the heads of people who are now at other companies. Nobody can tell you which flows are duplicates, which ones nothing reads any more, or what any given one is for. There is a spreadsheet somewhere claiming to be an inventory. It is wrong in ways nobody can enumerate. ...