Back from aLANtejo 2005

Yesterday I came back from aLANtejo, one of the main technology related conferences in Portugal, organized yearly by the Núcleo de Estudantes de Engenharia em Informática (Computer Science Students Association) of University of Évora.

I was there representing the Gnome project (my travel expenses where partially funded by the Gnome Foundation), in order to participate in a round table with the a priori polemic title “Gnome vs. KDE”.

Finally, I was also invited by the organization to give a 90 minutes talk introducing the Gnome project, including some technical tutorial, due to the massive presence of Computer Science students and in general people with computer science background among the public. So I presented the project history, goals, and its underlying technologies (30 minutes); I gave a short tutorial of Glade/GTK/C and Gnome programming (40 minutes); and finally talked a bit about Love and how to collaborate becoming a member of the Gnome project (20 minutes). It was a great experience, with a lot of people in the audience, and I had afterwards a lot of feedback from all kind of people interested in the project, from students to members of some local and international companies that were also attending and wanted to know more about collaboration opportunities.

After my talk, we started the round table. From the KDE side the person representing the project was Joseff Spilner, from Germany. The round table was moderated by a teacher from the University of Évora, that was giving turns to both of us and asking some generic but very interesting questions about similarities and differences among the projects approaches to develop a free(dom) desktop. I had prepared some slides the day before trying to be a bit polemic (in a constructive way), and they were used by all of us in order to improvise a script for the discussion. There were also a lot of questions and comments from the public, some of them more critical with KDE and others with Gnome. I tried to summarize what I think are the main advantages of Gnome: big industry support (we talked quite a lot here about licensing, a quite big difference also that has to be taken into account), very clean user interface, releases every 6 months, ambitious subprojects and platforms/technologies (Mono was a very interesting topic, as always, and quite polemic indeed), integration of other big actors like OO.org or Mozilla, and so on.

It was always nice to attend to the rest of the talks. In general the level of the conference was very good, and I had the opportunity to met for the first time some very interesting people, like Joseff Spilner itself, or Alex Beregszaszi, maintainer of the mplayer project, or Xavier de Blas, who closed the aLANtejo with his very funny but also educative Linux Show.

As a curiosity, I talked all the time in Galician Portuguese, and everything went very softly. It was my first experience in a Portuguese speaking conference, so I asked in the beginning of my talk if everyone was understanding me correctly, and the unanimous answer from the audience was saying that without any problem. In this corner of the world where I happen live there are a lot of linguistic conflicts and polemics, some of them discussing if we speak Portuguese or something “similar but different”, but that is itself subject for a big blog entry, and I will leave this for other day. The fact is that I could communicate without any problem in Évora in my mother tongue, and that is something always great 🙂

Finally, I would like to thank Bruno Teixeira (who contacted me and organized all my travel and stay) and all the organization of the conference for the great work they have done. See you next year!

Erlang/OTP – the community

If you got interested in Erlang after my previous blog entry on the topic, you probably want to know more about the community created around the language since it became Open Source in 1998. Well, here goes a list of interesting events, webpages and mailing lists related to the Erlang community:

  • Open Source Erlang webpage, all kind of information and documentation related to the language and the platform can be found here.
  • Erlang User Conference, yearly conference, hosted by Ericsson in Stockholm, where the last projects related to Erlang from a professional point of view are presented.
  • Erlang Workshop, yearly conference, co-located with the PLI’s and the ICFP conferences, where the last projects related to Erlang from a research point of view are presented.
  • erlang-questions mailing list, the main Erlang discussion list. There is more information about other mailing lists here.
  • Planet Erlang, aggregates the
    weblog entries of the Erlang users and developers.
  • Erlang Foundation, is one of the fresh new ideas for expanding Erlang outside of the current community, but it is still under discussion. A proposal was presented in the Erlang User Conference 2004.

aLANtejo 2005, 20-22 October, Évora, Portugal

aLANtejo 2005 is a technological event directed to students, graduated and curious about information technologies and computer science, as well all people that like conviviality and diversion of a Lan-Party. The organization has the main objective to promote the conviviality, the exchange of knowledge and experiences between the participants.

I will be participating in a round table about “Gnome vs. KDE” during the third day of the event. The idea is to give a short talk on the Gnome project and then, after a similar talk by the KDE developer, discuss a bit the state, the similarities, and the differences between both projects with the people attending.

It is going to be really nice to be there. Will blog more about this during the next couple of weeks.

Erlang/OTP – the language

Erlang is a programming language designed in the late 80s at the Ericsson CSLab, a research laboratory that was in operation from March 1, 1984, to June 30, 2002, at Ericsson, Älvsjö, 10 minutes by commuter train from the center of Stockholm.

The language was designed for programming telecom systems, where handling concurrency, being fault tolerant, and having easy to maintain systems which are working 24×7 are some of the most important issues. After analyzing some of the available programming languages and technologies, the research group in charge of selecting the best language for Ericsson’s telecom systems, decided to implement a new one from scratch. About a decade later, after being used by Ericsson internally for several projects, in December 1998 the language was released as Open Source.

Erlang has several key features and advantages over other options:

  • It is declarative, with a high abstraction level. In fact it has a lot in common with functional languages like Haskell or ML. This means less code, and easiest to maintain programs. There are some articles claiming that Erlang programs have four to ten times less code than C or Java programs.
  • The language is process oriented (as opposed to object oriented), and handles massive concurrency and message passing. Concurrency and distribution are inside the language, not an addition as in Java or C.
  • Hot code loading. Systems can easily be upgraded without stopping.
  • Powerful fault tolerance mechanisms based in organizing the program in supervision trees.
  • Transparent and very natural distribution. A program designed for working in a machine can be distributed among several ones almost without changing the source code.
  • Independence from hardware and operating system.
  • Open Telecom Platform (OTP): a set of applications, libraries, design patterns (Erlang behaviours), and programming rules and all kind of things for making life easier for people programming in Erlang

As a summary: Erlang is a very interesting language, and an option you should have a look into if you have plans for implementing a telecom system or a control system, where the advantages of the technology are more powerful. I am not saying that Erlang cannot be used for other kind of projects (there are some examples of using it for banking or business management applications), but in this area is almost unbeatable.

I will talk more about this language from now on, in the Erlang section of the weblog.

How to become a hacker

Liked a lot Nat Friedman’s answer to the question “How can I become a hacker?” that he and Miguel de Icaza get all the time during his talks and travels: just get the code, open it, improve something and send the patch to the mailing list.

In the answer, I just miss the social part of being a hacker, including the Hacker Ethic and the Hacker Culture. I don’t see a hacker as someone that changes code, but as someone seing changing code as a way of changing the world.

I guess this is another distinction between Free Software and Open Source supporters.

Free Sound and Free Pics

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

Stock.XCHNG is a Free pictures collection, where the users can browse, share pictures establishing the sharing conditions, and chatting with other members of the community.

Freedom gets more and more out of the software ghetto.