Older blog entries for alvaro (starting at number 44)

Last week we have painted all the house with nice colors in each root: blue, green, brown and vainille. I like more the house now. Also, we have finally bought the flat panel TV after more than a year waiting for the right moment: Sony KE-32TS2E won the prize (32'' Plasma): colors are wonderful, the image is very clean and it is perfect for the hole we have for it.

I received also from Amazon my last books: The Practice of Programming, Inferno Programming with Limbo, Interaction Design, User Interface Design for Programmers. Also, I am waiting for Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms.

Next week will be crazy, with the SIMO event in Madrid and the GNOME Meeting in Madrid with a shared Evolution hackfest with the Brazil meeting on Friday. I am sure you are near to Madrid dor Brazil. Are you going to loose the two parties? ;-)

Really busy weeks. Last Friday the distro LinEx Empresa, heavily based in LinEx 2004 and the Componentized model from Progeny, was announced (GNOME 2.6). The main focus of the distro are the little companies which are most of the industry in Extremadura, and also in Spain I think. The distro includes Evolution 2.0 and a version of Planner with the import contact plugin to take the resources from Evolution. Also, we have included Mono 1.0, Monodevelop and in the repositories, Mono programs like Muine, Tomboy and others.

The GNOME Meeting in Madrid is getting better and better, we have about 16 differents events about GNOME , Freedesktop, i18n, C# ... and around 60 subscribers to the Meeting, and we have to announce it in the university yet!

Next days I plan to finish my Debian duties and start hacking in Planner and Evolution another time, but my focus next months I think will be to move more and more to Mono GNOME world.

Planner

We are planning to publish Planner 0.13 next weeks so I am trying to test more the database backend. I have sent a guide to test it to our developers and also, do some little change in the logic that creates the databases for the user.

Planner evolution backend

After a week not working on it, I have check that all the targets for alfa8 have been reached so it is time to create a new working Plan and test more the backend. I hop next week I will do it.

Home systems

I have changed my ADSL router for a SMC Barricade 7804 with wireless support in it (I have before a ADSL router and a wireless AP plug in it). I am very happy with it because it is the same I have at work so I know it features. And also, I am sure now that my ISP have given my a fix IP so I can start to put some services in the line. Playing with Plone (it really rocks for intranet sites), I am not sure if I will finally use it for my publishing environment at home. As you can imagine, I am thinking algo about integrating Plone Calendar with Evolution ;-)

Planner evolution backend

Great news this morning about the backend. I have created the build system inside Planner CVS module and now all the backend code lives in our CVS. As a good team, Micke has helped me in some dynamic loading issues and Richard has helped in coordinating the commit to the CVS. So now the code is in CVS waiting for you to test it! You only need evolution data server from CVS until next release. Be careful, the backend isn't complete and has some problems that will be solved.

Planner evolution backend

Yesterday Chris Toshok commit the e-d-s modules change that let evolution data server load dynamically the backends it works with. This morning I have converted the Planner backend so now, it works without the need to touch anything in e-d-s code. Great! With this change, development will be easier because I don't need anymore to relink all the e-d-s binaries to test the Planner backend.

This morning also, I have tested the Planner postgres backend from evolution, and it works as expected. The main problem is the URI Planner needs to load projects from the database: sql://acs@localhost#db=plannerdb&id=2. I think we are going to need some kind of integration here, maybe using the gnome-db data sources tool in Planner and Evolution in order to configure the database access.

Evolution Planner backend

Step by step the backend is near to be in a first release state. Today, it can load several Planner files and show them as different lists of tasks in Evolution and now, you can also add new Planner sources from Evolution GUI. In the screenshot you can see four Planner projects showing in Evolution.

I need to check now the really enterprise integration: using Planner Postgres database backend from Evolution. It is transparent for Evolution that project is in a file or in a database (libplanner does it), and with database, you have a multiuser backend, but we need to test scenarios and solve some concurrent access issues before thinking about sharing projects between manager using the database backend.

Development environment

Three days ago I decide to update my Evolution CVS and have some problems with dependencies. I am thinking about if I will follow CVS Evolution or better, I will stop in Evolution release as soon as it has the plugin support for loading third party backends. It is fun to follow evolution day by day, as it is with GNOME and jhbuild, but you need a stable environment to develop and not loose time in solving environment issues.

Planner backend for Evo: alpha 0.7 released!

Weekend is marvellous to advance in projects and I finally found time to complete the alpha 0.7 Work plan (details) for the Planner Evolution backend. For now, I think all data than can be shared between Evo and Planner is shared. I have test all the fields from Evolution task and from Planner task and it seems to interop correctly. I have updated the Testing results for this alpha release and create the Work plan for next release. Working with Planner and Evolution libraries is great, things work as expected and you can concentrate yourself in doing the valued added work, make the integration as soft as complete as possible.

Next to alpha 0.8 release I will publish the first beta of the backend. I will start to push the backend in developers so they test it because I am sure some bugs are waiting to bite us. So the target for 0.8 is to simplify the compile and install process so other developers can play with the beast.

Talking with Rodrigo he has very ambitious goals: create a new backend system to manage Projects data in e-d-s. We need to create a new IDL (like calendar and contacts backends), implement it and start coding the library. Then, we need to add some support in Evo GUI to manage the data for this new backend. After the first release of the actual Planner backend, I think we will try to follow this way.

Talking with jpr, he said me the best thing to integrate the new Planner backend in the e-d-s daemon (service) will be to use the new plugin architecture. I am afraid it isn't included in e-d-s 1.0 and I have to wait some months before I can start to have real users :(

Tapia is working in a C#/Mono catalog application (sorry, it is in spanish) and he will need some support to take the user data from e-d-s. It will be great to start playing with the C# bindings for e-d-s.

Planner backend for Evolution

This morning I have created the work plan for the alpha7 release of the Planner backend for Evolution. I have found very valuable the Tesing plan because it is the guide in order to complete the work.

In next days I will be working in how data from Evolution tasks is saved to Planner. To be a good backend, every data in Evolution task have to be saved in someway to Planner. For that, you need to translate the concepts from Evolution to Planner and also, that Planner let you save all the data. Mikael works in custom properties for Planner objects is enabling that all all the data from Evolution could be saved.

The hard thing I think is to define a clear mapping for dates, because Planner manage dates in a more advanced way than evolution to schedule the projects, so I think that Planner will be the director here.

Hmmm, three days getting some sleeping time ... I think I am going to stop a little next days.

I am right now in very busy dates. Next year I will start teaching Inferno and Lingo in my University group, GSyC, in a cource with lots of students. I don't have any experience with this Operating System nor with the Lingo language. But I am progress well and Inferno has lots of concepts that I already studied in Java and .NET so no big deal, just some new concepts and lots of new details. You have to see the Inferno "Desktop". Ok, it is mainly for embedded systems so it is a very basic desktop.

This morning finally I catch the sencond problem in the Planner e-d-s backend and I think I have now a clear path to complete most of the features of the backend, but I need to review all the code because I started it using another backend, I use code from other backends so, I am not 100% sure that all the code is doing what I want. When I reach 0.1, I will upload it to the CVS and stop using snapshots.

Ismael want that I see some performance problems he has in Planner. He is very happy with Planner but he'll love Planner if we can solve some issues. I will try to find sometime to understand the problems. He can't give me the real Planner project because the Plan Project is confidential so I will change a little Planner save function so the task names aren't saved. I hope it will be enought.

Thank Jeff for adding the blog to Planet GNOME. I am very happy with it and also, with this rodrigo photo.

GNOME Hispano Association

Finally yesterday we signed the regulations of the GNOME Hispano Association so we hope that before the end of the year we have the Association legally created in Spain. Then, we only need to start doing things ;-)

XML-RPC in GNOME

In the trip to home from Pamplona we talked about GNOME System Tools and in some moment, we talk about communications between the frontend (GNOME client) and the backend (Perl backends). Currently the communications is very basic, using a pipe and sending XML data only in one way. garnacho is thinking for the future, not before GNOME 2.10, using XML-RPC. It seems there are interest in adding to libsoup, now in the GNOME platform as a Evolution dep, XML-RPC support.

Planner and Bugzilla

It will be great because in Planner, we try in the past to integrate Bugzilla and Planner but it was impossible because in Bugzilla, only a XML interface to take the data from a bug number was the only interface we had. New bugzilla versions seems to offer a XML-RPC interface, I need to talk wih fer about it, so the Planner integration could be done.

It seems Jeff is now using the same laptop as mine: Dell Latitude X300. Jeff, a great buy. I am in love with it.