Older blog entries for alvaro (starting at number 48)

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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.

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.

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.