Fosdem 2015

brussels

This is a good excuse as any other to retake the blog back to life.

It has been a long, long time since I was writing here last time, and I have been doing quite different things since then. As part of the Igalia browsers team, I have been working on WebKit related projects (mostly WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany), contributing on Chromium and Blink, and dealing with the coverage of Media Source Extensions specification.

Now going back to the reason for this post, it was my first year both at FOSDEM and Brussels. I had an idea about the size of the event, but it was indeed quite impressive.

This year we had four talks from igalians there, sharing the state on a few things that some our teams have been working on. In this case, we were talking about OpenGL conformance validation, on our improvements on performance and testing with Pflua, and the progress on LibreOffice for Android.

In particular the Igalia talks at FOSDEM 2015 were the following ones:

The four of them were really cool, and they had a lot of people attending to (well done mates 😀 )

Also, after digesting the FOSDEM huge schedule, my plan was to get the most out of the profiling and multimedia related tracks, and a few other talks that were calling my attention.

Saturday

On top of my colleagues presentations, and a part of the introductory talk by Karen Sandler, I could attend to Valgrind Integration in the Eclipse IDE , What is wrong with Operating SystemsTuning Valgrind for your WorkloadGStreamer in the living room and in outer spaceHow to start hacking on Valgrind by example and How to record all TV. Creating a 30 channel DVR.

There were some useful tricks at the Valgrind track and a nice overview on GStreamer portability. It was also curious finding RMS at the exhibition area. After a long conference day, it was Delirium Tremens time.

Sunday

My schedule for the Sunday was Ubuntu on phones and beyondMobile == WebKodi mediacenter (XBMC) past, present and futureIt’s not a bug, it’s an environment problemServo (the parallel web browser) and YOU! and Living on Mars: A Beginner’s Guide.

I found particularly interesting the one from Stormy Peters on how limited the understanding of the web is going to be for the next new billion users due to the devices used for it. I had also planned to attend to the one by Habib Virji (who I knew at the 2014 Web Engines Hackfest) but is talk on Web Security was full.

It was also curious the closing keynote on Mars One project. It would be fun if they manage to solve the (apparently still quite complex) open problems and this generation can witness a Mars colony.

To conclude, I think I probably rushed too much to get myself into an excessive amount of talks for 2 days, but it was great in any case to get info and fresh updates on the state of a lot of projects, meet some old friends, and breath some (literally) fresh air.

Fresh restart

After a lot of months of plenty of work, some vacations and important changes in my personal life, I’m trying to get this blog updated.

To start with the most significant change, I became a father the past year 🙂 It’s just an amazing experience every day.

Resuming what I did at work during this time, basically:

  • Coordination and development of Typo3 applications …
  • Some consultancy project and collaboration in certification process …
  • Teaching in Igalia 2009 edition of free software master
  • … and mainly  being part in the development team of a RIA oriented scheduling application, more news about to come. Stay tunned.

Testing Moonlight

We have been considering several architectural alternatives for a future project we are going to start. The idea is to develop a production management system, which has a scheduling part, to which is going to have a web interface. The debate is: plugin-oriented (free alternatives, of course) vs javascript.

We are not sure about the richness we will need to handle, and how easy would be to integrate it with

I have installed packages to run my own mono server, and develop some quick tests for moonlight http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

The tests were done with 1.0 and 2.0 versions for 32 bits. First worked fine, but some environments already demanded the latest version that shoud be downloaded from the repository

svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/moon

Although some simple C# components worked fine, and it would be interesting in the future as an alternative to Flash, its level of maturity, and the doubts on how we could connect the graphical components with a non-mono application, led us to discard Moonlight for the current project.

Besides, the possible use of direct Canvas elements in HTML 5, made us go to Javascript alternatives that seem to have other clear advantages.

So we are testing now Yahoo Library YUI (BSD Licensed) that is looking really good for our purpose of drawing and moving boxes over our ZK Direct RIA architecture.