Recent blog entries for alvaro

I have been working in F-Spot sometime after the GUADEC in my return to Mono world after half and a year not coding in C#. The return has been very nice, I love to program in C# and F-Spot is a very nice program.

I have being working in implementing the photo duplicate detection system (duplicates video-demo), and the import from Web Gallery and Flickr web photo databases (gallery video-demo and Flickr vide-demo).Update: The video URLs have been updated to point to a site with more bandwidth.

It is cool to see in the maillist some activities and new developers coding things, in special the licenses support in F-Spot so you can specify the license you want for your photos, and I hope, use it in the export process to Flickr, Web Gallery, Original and others. The Creative Commons licenses will be the first to be supported, following Larry Lessig plans about supporting these licenses in the tools we use to create and manage contents.

In the July edition of GNOME Journal you can find a nice article about F-Spot if you want to understand the current state of the art of the project.

Time to travel to Stuttgart. We arrive this afternoon to the city, will go to the Youth Hostel and then, time to walk in the city and find nice places, take some photos and share some german beers. I will be there until Tuesday. I am sure this is going to be a very exciting GUADEC. See you there guys!

Finally I have decided to help in developing a driver for the wireless USB 54 Mbps rt2570, very similar to the ralink 2500 chipset. I have two USB networks card using this chipset: they are very cheap, around 30€. In my student days, I developed an ethernet driver so maybe, this knowledge will be useful. I am learning about USB stuff, using howto develop USB drivers for Linux, the USB Nutshell and finally, with the USB standard. I am not sure how far I will go in the project, but for now, I am trying to understand the USB traffic until we get the data sheets: USB sniff is the right tool to log the USB traffic and analyze it later (grep, cat, awk, uniq, sort ...)

A dude working with me in LambdaUX is developing in C# and Mono a program to update Debian systems. It is getting very nice. A pit I don't have yet screenshots about it.

Evolution 2.1.3 changes in the online/offline support have made that the Groupdav connector contacts doesn't work any more. I am trying to fix it before Evo 2.2, but not sure if I will find enought time.

In Planner, new hackers are coming into scene and Richard is hacking some weekends in it. My heart says me I have to help closing some bugs for 0.13 and 0.14 releases.

Hula hype is being incredible, as normal announcements that comes from Helix/Ximian/Novell guys. I have talked with Helge, an OGo developer about Hula. He has shown me a very nice webclient for his Scalable OGo product (very similar to Hula, and will be released as GPL/LGPL): SOGo web client (login:test.et.di.cete-lyon/password:test, not a production service, it could be off). Not sure if Hula developers could start the web client interface for Hula from that work. They will be released as GPL/LGPL (all the SOGo software).

Hmmm, I can't forget to talk about the II GUADEC Hispana, a warm up meeting before the GUADEC. I will blog about it next days.

In another Extremadura train trip finally I have found time to create a Evolution 2.2 plugin in order to add Planner Task files as Evolution Task Sources from the tasks GUI. You can see how Evolution and Planner are lonely until you save your Planner tasks to a file. Then, you can go to Evolution Tasks view and using the right button you can access a menu in which an entry called "Add new Planner source" is waiting for you. Select it and you can choose from the file dialog the Planner task file you want to access from Evolution. Finally, you have all your Planner tasks as Evolution tasks in the new Task source (called like the planner file). All the code is the Planner CVS just waiting for you.

I have finished the creation of my digital music library with iTunes (around 3 weeks doing it with a 10x import speed). Now I have more than 300 albumns and around 600 authors and 4.000 songs (the music we have bought last 5 years). Now it is time to migrate the database to GNOME and start testing how each music player manages such a big database. And I need to use this library as the source for all the music we play at home. Using the external entry in the hifi system I can plug the mini iPod and hear it :)

Yesterday I have received as a Christmas present a Apple mini iPod with 4 GB as a digital music player. I am right now testing it. It is a bit expensive (240€) but it is more than a music player. You can run Linux in iPods!. The iPod is marvelous when you use iTunes with it, so iTunes+iPod is a killer platform. I have started to use another time MacOS X 10.2 because it. Linux has great support for iPods since 2002 (gtkpod, GNU Pod ...).

After two days working in the weekend, I have put more than 600 songs in the music library (iTunes works 10x encoding mp3 in my powerbook) and now I am very near to have to select the music I will want in the iPod (the 4 GB limit!). It is incredible how many information the users will have to manage so we need to be very clever in ways to manage the information (thousands of songs, photos, videos ...). Beagle, gThumb, jamboree, rhythmbox ... all need to scale so well to manage this amount of information. Could muine new model support that amount of information?

My user experience is being very good with iTunes (sure I could get a similar experience with iPhoto and maybe iVideo). In GNOME currently I feel we haven't this user experience, but we are getting it. I understand now why some of my free software dudes in the university finally started to work in MacOS X and now, they can't stop using it ;-) Guys, we need to reach these user experience in GNOME. But as Richard Stallman remember us, it is not only about technology or user experience, first it is about freedom, but we will get also these ;-)

Yesterday LambdaUX and Imendio finally release the first version of the OpenGroupware.org GroupDAV Evolution connector. It has been developed in the project Noodle and we started developing it around 23 November and this was the roadmap for it. Anders from Imendio invest some intensive hacking time in the connector to finally deliver a very nice first version (for the time and limitations he has found) whith the results that you can see in this screenshots tutorial (1 MB). You can also take a look to Anders final report. Finally, the connector is a GroupDAV connector, so if your GroupWare server implements GroupDAV, it could be a cake to connect Evolution to it.

Helge Hess, from OpenGroupware.org, has helped us a lot. Now thinking about the future, Anders and me aren't sure about how many time we will have to mantain the connector and finish it, but we will try to help. For mainstream, we need to wait first to Evolution 2.2 release before we can start pushing the software in distributions.

I hope I can get some of the code developed, for example the account creation (camel provider and EPlugin), for the Evolution Planner backend. Noodle project also includes the integration with Evolution for the PDA world. The time for Planner<->OpenGroupware<->Evolution<->PDA is near today.

Today we announce finally the Noodle project in which my company LambdaUX will team up with Imendio in order to complete a functional prototype for a Evolution 2.2 <-> OpenGroupware 1.0 connector.

The global project, also with companies Yaco and Emergya, tries to close the eMobility circle working also in Evolution<->PDAs integration. The project is funded by the Junta de Andalucia government inside the Guadalinex project. You can follow the development in the noodle-devel mailing list and using the Subversion repository to take the code for the project. Time to hack!

On Friday I was in Extremadura and we planned over there a GNOME Accesibility Meeting there around January with GNOME Accesibility team. It is time to start moving it with the GNOME Hispano Association and try to push in GNOME such technologies using the resources next year are going to invest the Extremadura government. They think next year will be the Accesibility year for them.

The same Friday, the Project Morfeo (actually, only in Spanish) announces the release of the first tools from Telefonica I+D company: a CORBA 2.6 implementation and its IDL compiler (for now the Java implementation is the one released, for the C++ we have to wait a little). This ORB is being used in production environment for some years now, in very big installations. I think it is written in C++ in its born and has been one of the gold technologies in Telefonica I+D. Now it is licensed under GPL and also, you can get a license to develop close sourced applications, in a MySQL project style. I need to find sometime to play with this ORB, which I already used in the past when working in Telefonica I+D projects.

Why my diary in advogato now scores 5.1 and two days ago only 1.7? Is it a magic number?

Today is a very exciting day in free software world in Spain. The second in sells daily newspaper in Spain comes with the Guadalinex Linux distribution, a LiveCD with GNOME 2.6. Telefonica I+D, the top Teleco company in Spain, announce the Morfeo project (they choose the red pill ;-) like Neo, but the web is not working yet) in which they are going to publish with a license like MySQL some of its platform, that have matured over the last years in production environment, after 2 years thinking about it. They want to be the Free Software company. And also, tomorrow I will start to work in a cool free software project with cool people funded from the start :) And the Industry Minister in Spain talked in the SIMO, the bigger IT meeting in Spain about the importance of the Free Software. Free software is more and more a reality in Spain and the market should start growing faster next year.

We are very near to finish the GNOME Meeting in Madrid. It has been a two very nice days, with lots of talks and between 30 and 40 dudes at the same time always. Now, the Python speech is finishing and we are going to the Meeting dinner. The translation team, evolution, planner, the borning GNOME Backup, GNOME Branding, Ubuntu or LinEX has being some of the main targets. I hope we have put some seeds that will grow next months. GNOME is taking more and more community in Spain.