Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Everything ready for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest

Friday, December 11th, 2009

During the past weeks, Xan and myself have been busy putting together everything for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, which will take place next week at Igalia’s offices in the beautiful city of Corunna.

The original idea for this event arose a few months ago. We have a team of Igalians working full-time, together with other members of the community, in completing and improving GNOME’s WebKit port, and we thought that it would be a good idea to propose ourselves to host a hackfest, which should turn out to be very productive for the project. After talking to the Foundation and all the core developers, we got such a positive feedback, that we decided to push it forward.

So we will have here all the most active WebKitGTK+ hackers, working together, in the same place, during 1 week (15th-21st of December), to make one of the (imho) most important components of our platform rock even more.

The hackfest is sponsored by Collabora and Igalia, and has the support of the GNOME Foundation, which covers about half of the total cost. Igalia will also take care of food&drinks for all the days, and will organize a nice dinner before the end of the event, so that people don’t leave the place without enjoying the famous local food. Of course, any last minute extra sponsor would be very welcome. So if your company cares about WebKit in GNOME, it is the right time to join and contribute.

Stay tunned, I will try to blog and tweet about the event as much as possible.

SCIGen: the art of generating research articles

Sunday, August 7th, 2005

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather
than coherence.”

Pretty impressive what they manage to do. One of the goals is to be able to find out conferences where they have very low submission standards. They even have some examples of articles submitted.

Let SCIGen improve your CV!

Women, Computer Science and Free Software

Sunday, April 10th, 2005

I’ve been quite interested lately in the topic, and decided to post here a collection of related documents and links:

Audioscrobbler and MusicBrainz

Saturday, March 26th, 2005

I’ve been playing during the last week with these two very cool projects.

Audioscrobbler keeps a database with the music profiles of the registered users, based in the messages sent by plugins of the media players (there are plugins for a long list of players) when the users plays a song. Based on this, Audioscrobbler creates statistics, generates recommendations, and creates a network of people where the connections depend on the musical taste.

MusicBrainz is a music metadatabase with information about the names of the artists, the names of their albums and the concrete list of tracks included in each of the albums. But the very interesting concept is that the keys in the database are based on the physical characteristics of the audio CD, or the MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files. Any music player, using the provided API, can obtain metainformation on a concrete song, and use it for tagging. And it works!

Martin Fowler on agile methods

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

This article written by Martin Fowler, published two years ago, is a must read for those interested in the motivations of adaptive, people-oriented, agile methods for software development.

How It Works…The Computer

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

Time (especially in a technology world) flies, and 1971 is the prehistory of computers.

The oldest known color photograph: 1872

Saturday, March 19th, 2005

Oldest color picture

Taken almost 50 years before the used method was perfected for commercial use. More info here.

The Six Laws of the New Software

Sunday, March 6th, 2005

Dror Eyal defines six interesting laws to have in mind when creating new software. Summarizing, they are the following ones:

  • Single idea (create software that fulfills a specific need, be able to explain what software does in a single sentence)
  • Collaborate (don’t create software that do everything, interoperate with other software complementing yours)
  • Disappear (reduce and simplify the user interface)
  • Simplify (reduce the learning curve of the technology)
  • Release (publish prototypes, think in iterative releases and let the user base grow)
  • Comply (follow standards)