Older blog entries for rodrigo (starting at number 39)

GCDS expectations

With just a few hours before I leave to Gran Canaria, here’s a list of things I personally would like to get from the conference:

• I’ve been to all GUADEC’s except for 2 (Stuttgart and Istanbul), and every time I’ve missed one GUADEC, I was doubly excited to go to the next one, so this year, having missed last year’s, this is the case again.
• Since for the first time we are having a joint KDE/GNOME, I am expecting to have a big push on collaboration and cooperation between the 2 projects. I am not sure what would come out of this, but we should all really be looking for this, since it would just help both projects a lot. So, keep the rivalry only for the sport activities, please (maybe a KDE vs GNOME football game? )
• As I’ve already blogged about recently, we (at Canonical) are trying to push CouchDB use to the desktop. I’ve got all the code I’ve been working on ready to be shown (karmic packages here, but broken for jaunty right now, sorry), so if someone wants to see it in action (a technology preview, of course, not everything is done yet), just find me around and I’ll do a personal demo (a better demo if you buy me a beer ). Other Canonical staff will be around also showing these (and other) technologies, so if interested, just ask.
• GNOME 3.0 plans and technologies like mutter, gnome-shell.
• I only played the FreeFA tournament in Vilanova (yeah, was part of the cool champion team), so looking forward to revalidate the title
• Mojo Picón, a spicy hot sauce typical from the Canary Islands. Make sure you try the Papas Arrugadas with that sauce.
• Have a lot of fun!

Only bad thing is that I’m going to miss the first few days of San Fermín festival in Pamplona, but well, since I’ll be back home on the 10th, I’ll have the chance to enjoy the last few days of it. As I said other times, please use other dates than July 6th to 14th next year!

See you all in Gran Canaria!

Syndicated 2009-07-02 14:53:04 from Rodrigo Moya

Mapping Gran Canaria (call for help)

For all of you attending Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week and with fancy gadgets like Nokia’s N800/N810, cell phones with GPS, etc, please take the opportunity for helping out the OpenStreetMap project.

How? Very easy, just make sure you set up your gadget to save tracks and have it recording your itineraries whenever you move around the city/island (no need to record your walks around the conference center ). With so many people with gadgets around the city for the week, I think we can improve the current situation (not bad, but lots of room for improvement if you compare it with the Google Maps version).

To save the tracks correctly, make sure to search for your device at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/, and follow the instructions on how to set it up for good recording of tracks. The most important thing is to setup a good interval (I use every 10 meters or every second, whatever comes first). If you use a very long interval of saving track points, the tracklog would be mostly useless. Also, if you want to do more than just saving tracks, have a look at the map making techniques page. But please, just saving the tracks is enough for helping, so there’s no excuse if you have a gadget with GPS.

And then, when you have the tracks, just send them to me, if you don’t want to bother anymore, or, if you want to bother more, join the project and help editing the map.

Syndicated 2009-06-29 11:51:27 from Rodrigo Moya

CouchDB contacts in Evolution

Continuing with my CouchDB on the desktop series, here’s the 1st screenshot:

It’s Evolution addressbook components showing contacts from a CouchDB database. As stated in previous posts, all contacts in that database would be automatically replicated to a remote CouchDB instance, so, for instance, you could just see and edit/delete/whatever them from a web interface, and the changes would show up in Evolution.

Code is in GNOME git, under couchdb-glib and evolution-couchdb modules.

Syndicated 2009-06-19 16:27:01 from Rodrigo Moya

couchdb-glib 0.1

As the first step on CouchDB desktop integration, here’s version 0.1 of couchdb-glib, a GLib-based API to talk to CouchDB.

This initial version only allows reading and does all operations synchronously (not a problem in most cases, since the communication is done to the local CouchDB instance, which is quite quick, at least from what my tests show so far). Next releases will have all the missing functionality.

And, well, no screenshots to show, so here’s some example code for you to enjoy.

Source code is in GNOME GIT, under couchdb-glib module.

Syndicated 2009-06-11 10:35:00 from Rodrigo Moya

Desktop data/settings replication

In the last UDS, there were some talks about UbuntuOne, the technologies it uses, and how it could be well integrated into the Desktop. Also, there were discussions about how it could be integrated painlessly into upstream projects. So, here’s an idea on how this could be done.

First, it must be said that the easiest (and quickest) way of achieving UbuntuOne integration in Ubuntu would be to just patch/extend applications so that they supported accessing the UbuntuOne server, and have Ubuntu packages use that as default for users with UbuntuOne accounts. That would make most Ubuntu users happy, but it would not benefit at all users of other distributions, and worst, the upstream projects.

Now, if we look at the technologies being used in UbuntuOne, there is one awesome thing, called CouchDB, a project supported by the Apache Foundation, which provides databases (of JSON documents) that can be replicated (and 2-way synchonized) to other hosts. So, what if we had Linux Desktop applications use this for storage of files and settings?

Well, what would happen is that we’d gain data / settings replication and synchronization for free. And also, if we could come up with standard formats / locations for common information (accounts, notes, mails, calendars, etc, etc), we’d also gain a shared storage for all applications to use, solving the problem of incompatible formats / locations used by similar free software applications.

And other advantages:

• CouchDB knows already how to deal with conflicts, as this is included in the automatic replication / syncing features it provides.
• While normal documents in CouchDB are JSON, you can attach any kind of file to any JSON document (even to empty JSON documents), so any kind of files can be stored. Also, it allows users to create as many databases as needed, so storage for different needs can be easily separated.
• CouchDB provides a sort of revision history, so it could be used for nice stuff like Zeitgeist.
• This, not being an Ubuntu-only solution, could benefit every Linux Desktop user.
• UbuntuOne would be a service built on top of this that users can subscribe to. But others could just setup a CouchDB server on their home / company network and use that by just pointing their local CouchDB to their remote CouchDB replication server.

To continue my investigations/playing on this, I’m going to try writing a gvfs backend to manage files in the CouchDB instances. Once that’s done, applications could start just writing their files to couchdb://… URIs instead of file://… ones and enter the replication/synchronization world with just a single change. Next, a GConf/d-conf backend could be added for replicating/sync’ing settings, and so on.

Syndicated 2009-06-02 22:44:54 from Rodrigo Moya

Back home

After two weeks out of home (1 week for Canonical all hands at a nice hotel and conference center in Terrassa, and another for UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit, for those who don’t know) in Barcelona), I’m finally back home and have rested enough to write a small post.

First of all, the good things: met again with some GNOME old friends, like Christian, Cody, Pedro, Seb, Ryan, James, Jorge, … (sorry if I miss someone), and met lots of new interesting people, both from Canonical and the Ubuntu community. Learnt lots of new things (which I’ll try to blog about soon), hacked on cool stuff (more news soon), had a lot of fun hanging around with people, got a bit tipsy some nights, and, in summary, had a great time, even though I slept very few every night And well, visiting Catalonia in general and Barcelona (my father’s born place) in particular is always a pleasure for me.

But there’s always a dark side, or maybe I’m getting too old, but I really don’t understand why in the free software community we compete so much, and please don’t take this as an Ubuntu-only case, I’m blogging right after UDS just by coincidence, this is something that applies to all the communities I’ve seen so far in the free software world. That is, it is nice to have competition (”2 desktops make for a better Linux desktop“, “choice is good“, etc), but hearing all the time comments in community/project A about how community/project B sucks so much (and viceversa) made me think, while coming back home on the train last night, about how we could be doing if we cooperated rather than compete. That is, having 16 audio libraries in Ubuntu, is it really needed? Or having people from different projects work on the same stuff over and over without even talking to each other about how to share some work? Is it that hard to understand for us, that we like telling others from outside our world how nice it is that you can share and work together with others, that we should really apply those principles in how we do the stuff ourselves? How is it that, in these events, you hear more comments against “rival” free software projects than against “evil” companies, like in the good old days of trolling?

As I said, maybe I’m really getting too old for this, but it really reminded me the situation in Catalonia in the final years of the Spanish civil war, where anarchists and socialists fought against each other for a few months instead of fighting together against the fascists. Fortunately here nobody is dying, so I guess I can cope with being in the middle of some fightings (I have friends at Novell/Canonical/RedHat/* and GNOME/KDE, etc), but just try to imagine how well we could do if we all cooperated a bit more. What a wonderful audio library we could have if the people working on those 16 implementations available in Ubuntu worked together!!! *

So yeah, that’s all the bad stuff I had to share. From now on, will only blog about the nice things that came out from this All Hands/UDS 2 week marathon.

* audio libs developers: please don’t get upset, I’m not criticizing you, just using you as an example of what happens in a lot of projects

Syndicated 2009-05-30 19:21:58 from Rodrigo Moya

New job

Being quite busy last week with my new job, I totally forgot to blog about it, so, in case someone is interested, I started last Monday working at Canonical. Not sure yet what parts of my work are public, so I’ll just point you to the job offer for now

Syndicated 2009-05-04 11:37:25 from Rodrigo Moya

+10 years in GNOME

While cleaning up my very old mail, I came across some of the 1st mails I sent related to GNOME, and, a bit late though, I wish to celebrate my 10th anniversary as a GNOME user and developer. I started as a user in 1998, and after some hacking training (on my free time, since my job at that time was nothing related to free software), I came to announce version 0.1 of gnome-sql, which was later on integrated with the already existing GNOME-DB project.

In all these years, I’ve worked on several projects (GNOME-DB, Evolution, Control Center, openSUSE GNOME packaging and integration mainly), and, most important, I’ve met a lot of great people, and, fortunately, the future looks even more exciting (more news on this soon), so looking forward to my 20th anniversary

Syndicated 2009-04-23 11:47:46 from Rodrigo Moya

Unemployed

In the 8 years I’ve been at Novell/Ximian, several layoffs have happened (not in the Ximian times, AFAIR), and until now, I was never affected (directly, of course, since losing very good work colleagues affects), so it was just a matter of time that it would affect me. So, yes, from Feb 17th, I am officially unemployed, for the 1st time in, like 15 years or so. And, for the 1st time in my life, I have been fired from a company.

Fortunately, I am a positive person, and since I had been thinking for a while to move somewhere else, this gives me the opportunity to stop thinking and start acting. More on these plans as soon as they materialize, as for the time being, I’m going to relax for a couple of weeks, doing nothing but have fun.

Of course, as I am unemployed, I’m open to hear any offers, so feel free to send any, if you want me. Apart from computing, I am very good at riding motorcycles, skiing, having fun and making maps, just good at cooking and canoeing, and wanting to learn on martial arts and lots of other stuff, so, if you have something fitting any of these categories, feel free to offer me a job

Syndicated 2009-02-12 16:49:06 from Rodrigo Moya

GNOME Packaging Day

In the last few openSUSE-GNOME team meetings, it was decided to do regular packaging days whenever GNOME point versions are released, with the goal of providing bleeding edge updates as quickly as possible. So, next week is that time: along with the GNOME 2.25.90 release on Feb 4th, Thursday Feb 5th we’ll be helding a packaging day to get the latest unstable GNOME release packaged into our GNOME:Factory project (to be used for openSUSE 11.2 but also available for 11.1). It is a great opportunity to find out how to contribute to the packaging of GNOME for openSUSE.

The packaging day will last the whole day long, so just come around #opensuse-gnome IRC channel on FreeNode at any time you want and ask how to help.

Syndicated 2009-01-26 12:17:48 from Rodrigo Moya