Silicon Island

Final call: Planet GNOME policy changes

This is a final call for our beloved bloggers, I will be performing the removal of those blogs from people who have not joined or renewed their GNOME Foundation membership.

GNOME Development Network: An attempt to improve the GNOME developer experience

I thought it'll be nice to blog about this before the Documentation Hackfest was started.

I am quite frustrated with the current situation with regards the API reference browsing experience in the GObject world, some of the problems are these:

• I can't quickly get a compact overview of all the properties, methods and signals of a given class
• On top of that, I need to open each super-class or interface page separately to know which properties are inherited from those
• I can't figure out all functions/methods use a given class as an argument or return type, or which classes use it as a property.
• People can't add comments or code samples to each struct/class/method/...
• People can't easily suggest amendments to the documentation without diving into the code and generating a patch + a bug in bugzilla.

On top of that, usability wise I'm not too happy with the current web frontend and/or devhelp. The information to figure out all these things are all in GIR files, so I gave it a thought and figured out what's needed. Turns out we are not too far.

So I've been developing GDN (GNOME Development Network) a little django app hosted in github using kamstrup's giraffe.  which takes GIR files and dumps them into static HTML code. The GIR parsing stuff is quite clever and useful, but we need a dynamic app if we want to provide some of the most interesting features, so I'm ussing giraffe's AST to dump all the cross referenced information into an SQL database.

So far I've managed to dump most info, the Django data model is pretty much done, I need to fix some bugs with regards to resolving specific types while crawling the parameters and return.

You need to install my personal giraffe's branch for now until Mikkel comes back from vacation and if you want it to work as I've been adding some missing features to the AST code.

So far I only have backend code no frontend code at all. Stay tuned for more info on this, and if anyone is willing to help make sure you send me an email to aruiz at gnome dot org

Planet GNOME: Changes in planet membership policy

Hello Planet GNOME readers and GNOME community members,

The board of directors has agreed that from now on, to be part of Planet GNOME, it is mandatory to be a member of the GNOME Foundation. In three weeks we will proceed to remove all blogs from people that are not foundation members. This policy change means a few things:

• If your blog is in Planet GNOME and you are not a member of the GNOME Foundation, you have three weeks to become a member!
• New planets additions from now on will take this policy into account.
• This doesn't mean that your blog automatically gets into Planet GNOME if you are a member, the same blog review process will be applied to requests for addition.
• There will be a slight exception with GSoC/GOPW members we will encourage them to join in the meantime, but being able to use the planet to report progress to the community is an important part of their work as interns.
• We will delete the feed syndication from the planet if your membership expires.

The rationale behind this new policy is simple, we want to increase the value of becoming a foundation member. Think of this as the blogging equivalent of rocking an @gnome.org e-mail address.

Update:  I have clarified the language behind the deletion of the feed. Someone in the comments thought I was talking about removing their blogs from blogs.gnome.org. This is not the case, if your membership expires your feed won't show up in the Planet, but that's it, if you have a blog in blogs.gnome.org none of your posts will be deleted.

Foundationally yours,
the Planet GNOME editors team. 

Trebuchet diff

It's been a few hectic weeks for me. I managed to get a flat in a really nice area of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria before I left for the Canonical Design sprint and UDS in Orlando.

I wanted to blog about my last project for Codethink which I find quite exciting. Trebuchet Diff, or tbdiff, is a pretty neat tool that Ben Brewer started, I continued and now Richard Maw is maintaining.

Tbdiff is targetted to create update images between two systems. It basically takes two directory trees and creates a binary diff for both content and the metadata. So if you remove a file, change its contents or delete it, you can record that change and apply it.

We did quite a lot of search and surprisingly we couldn't find a similar tool, the closest thing we found was dt, which just reports the differences in a fancy output format. I reckon this is a really useful tool.

Trebuchet is a subproject of the Baserock initiative inside Codethink and it aims to provide a generic framework for fault tolerant atomic/over the air updates, leveraging the BtrFS snapshot and rollback mechanism.

The times they are a-changin'

Loads of changes for me recently, both at a professional and at a personal level. Last saturday I packed my things and moved back to Gran Canaria for good. It has been four years and a half since I moved to Dublin for an adventure with extinct and moaned Sun Microsystems. And two years since I moved to Manchester to work for Codethink.

Being abroad in a foreign country has been an enlightening and rewarding experience, I have worked with great people and I am happy to be able to say that I never left any of my jobs and the places because I was fed up, quite the contrary, I am extremly proud and I feel privileged to have worked with the people I worked with and the friendships I have found in the middle. I left because it was the right time for me. However, being abroad has a huge emotional cost as well, and not always bearable.

So here I am, at the right time for another change. Two weeks ago I started a new job at Canonical as a Senior Engineer in the Product Strategy group. I am thrilled to be able to work on a project I care about, Ubuntu, which I think is key to make FOSS thrive for regular users (the so called "consumers") and not just servers and big corporations. I'm also quite excited to work alongside Ted Gould, Neil J. Patel and Álvaro López Ortega, among other great engineers.

By the way, that means that I'll be attending the next UDS in Orlando in a couple of weeks!

 

Exciting and happy times ahead for me.

Bid for FLOSS

Carlos Parra from Emergya (one of the companies helping the government of Andalusia to deploy Linux, GNOME and other free software technologies in the public institutions) has done a pretty brave proposal. Started as a joke, he said he was tempted to do the Way of St. James from Burgos (a 500km trip by foot). Some of us bet 10EUR that he couldn't make it (in fact we were all pretty certain that he is capable), and that those 10EUR would go to a FOSS non-profit of his choice.

After a few days the joke grew up as a fund raising campaing for free software called Bid for FLOSS. Here is the text of the campaing from the facebook page:

More info on apuestaporelsoftwarelibre.​com (Spanish)

You are invited to bid for FLOSS!

What is the bid?

10€:
- If I don't complete the challenge, i will donate 10€ to the FLOSS project that each person decides.
- If I successfully complete the challenge, each person has to donate 10€ to the FLOSS project that he or she decides.

What is a FLOSS project?

We understand the software projects that let you the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

What is the challenge?

I will walk on «Camino de Santigo» starting from Burgos in less than a month, there is around 500 kilometers (310 miles). No tricks, i will take just my bag and i will walk daily around 20km - 50km (around 12 miles - 31 miles). 

How to bid?

Just click on 'I'm Attending' button on the event.

How do i know that there is no trick?
I will take some FLOSS plus a little of hardware that let me keep you informed with photos, tweets and so on. I promise you that there is no trick!

If you decide to bid, you will help to a FLOSS project. By the way, it would be really nice any event promotion!

Keep you updated with twitter, tag #apuestaporelsoftwarelibre​ or http://twitter.com/c4rlos

If you want to become part, all that you have to do is join the event in Facebook, and be ready to donate the 10EUR once Carlos makes it to Santiago de Compostela. A worthwhile cause I'd say.

First steps with Wayland

I've been getting my head around wayland for the past few weeks as I am trying to understand its architecture and what can be done with it. After reading a bit about it I grabbed the source code and compile it, coming up with a moduleset and a jhbuildrc for wayland that you can find in jhbuild.

Wayland seems very interesting, specially from the perspective of having a clean codebase and architecture to work with unlike X.org. The main advantage is that the compositor acts as the display server, allowing it to be aware of the input events and avoiding round trips between processes.

The hardest thing to understand is that wayland itself is just a protocol to implement basic clients and compositors it has zero dependencies apart from FFI. It does not specify what rendering mechanism to use. Most people seem to believe that Wayland requires OpenGL/EGL and that is actually not true, that requirement is only true if you target the only wayland compositor available at the moment which is living in the wayland-demos repository.

This means that the even though  Gtk+ and Qt both have experimental wayland backends, they will not necessarily work with every single wayland compositor out there, and more backends may be needed for different compositors.

The other interesting bit about wayland is that the protocol is extensible, you may write your own protocol extension for specific use cases. Again, this means that the client side code has to be specific to the compositor. (I need to figure out if it's possible to negotiate which protocols are available in a given display server).

To start my journey I had to read a bit about EGL and GL, coming from a high level/clutter/cairo/mostly 2D wonderland it was an interesting read and I'm starting to pick the basic concepts around it.

After some concepts were able to land in my head I went ahead and wrote a simple client using cairo-gl that I am proposing for inclusion in wayland-demos. It is probably one of the simplest wayland clients available, I hope you find it useful.

I'm planning to learn a bit more about compositors in the coming weeks, will share my learnings as I move forward. Stay tuned.

P.S. I'd like to thank Kristian Høgsberg for answering all my stupid questions. I wish there were more FOSS maintainers like him :-)

The Amaroses

Where I come from, Gran Canaria, people is not well known for a sophisticated taste in music, to put it nicely. Most people stick to mainstream and whatever the disco puts out loudly. On top of that, there are only a handful of places where local bands can play live, and most coconcerts are usually played by the Ricky Martins and Alejandro Sanzs of the world. So yeah, the music scene is pretty poor in there.

For that reason, this band I was introduced to a while ago comes across as a delightful exception that flourished against all odds. The Amaroses. I saw them live last year, and it was a really good performance, energetic, right into your ears and fun!

This week my girlfriend brought their new album from Spain, and I listened to it properly. I really like the sound of it, the lyrics are just awesome, specially taking into account that the average level of English around there is pretty poor. I really recommend them if you like energetic Rock with an undertone of melodrama.

In general, I wouldn't actually write a blog post just to recommend a group I just discovered, if it wasn't that to my surprise, their album is released under a CC-BY-SA license! That totally made my day as the last thing I would expect is find a band from Gran Canaria so good and that is actually informed enough about free culture to release their work in a sensible license.

So yeah, check them out and let me know what you think!

Gtk+ FontSelection progress

I blogged before about my intention to rework the current font dialog. Máirín Duffy provided the initial designs, and I implemented a python prototype to toy with the design.

After a long while of stalled progress, I took my prototype, uploaded it to github, and started to iterate the design with the GNOME Design guys, (aday, lapo, jimmac, hbos...). After a few iterations we came up with something we all were happy with and I moved ahead to create a gtk+ branch. Here is the result so far:

Since I was using Gtk+ 2 for the original preview, I need to figure out how to get things right for 3.0 in terms of layout. However the functionality is pretty much there. I want to discuss a few API problems in the next Gtk+ meeting.

Here's a video of the current behaviour:

 

Enjoy!

GNOME 3 Launch Party in Manchester

GNOME fan or just free software enthusiast? Are you around Manchester this Saturday?

Make sure you stop by MadLab this Sunday at 14:00 for the GNOME 3 Launch Party!

Update: The party is this Sunday, not Saturday, sorry for the confusion!