Rego’s Everyday Life

MSWL ends: Master Thesis & reStructuredText

The second edition of Master on Free Software finished. After this great and long year, I think that worth the effort of sharing work and study. I’ve learnt lot of things and improved my knowledge in several topics related with free software.

Last Friday, students did a presentation of our Master Thesis: In my case it’s called Communication between desktop and web applications, and it’s mainly centered in the GNOME platform and the library RTM-GLib (that was developed as part of the Master Practicum).

Finally, I wrote the thesis using reStructuredText and it really rocks . It’s just simple and very comfortable. Moreover, sources are also readable.

RTM-GLib 0.1.0

First of all, I’ve created the project homepage at http://live.gnome.org/RTMGlib, where you can find examples and download the last versions.

Today, I’ve announced the first public release of RTM-GLib, both in GNOME announcements mailing list and Remember The Milk API Google group. And I’m doing the same here

Some crazy ideas for the future work, now that the library is usable:

• Provide some methods through Mojito (via D-Bus) to get, for example, the list of tasks for today.
• Develop a Tracker data miner in order to store the information about the tasks from Remember The Milk on Tracker infrastructure.
• In some way EDS (evolution-data-server) could use this library to keep synchronized the information about tasks between Remember The Milk and the desktop.

Now is time to check the feasibility of these things and think about how to implement them.

RTM-Glib released

Lately, I’ve been working on the last part of the Master on Free Software, the Master’s Thesis.

First of all, I’ve started a small library called RTM-Glib, that is just a wrapper around the API of Rememeber The Milk. It’s written in C and using GNOME technologies. It pretends to be similar to other libraries like Twitter-GLib or Flickcurl, but for a different web service.

In order to develop this library I’ve used librest, a great library which makes very easy the access to RESTful-like services.

For the moment RTM-Glib is just in an early stage, just some basic functions with tasks and lists are implemented. But the library should evolve in the future implementing more methods of the Remember The Milk API.

Among other tasks (like improve the library), during the this month I should take a look at Mojito, trying to provide a new service supported using RTM-Glib.

Finally, I’ve just created a repository for the project in Gitorious, the URL is: http://gitorious.org/rtm-glib. You can download the source code, check the example and test it. As usual, any comment and suggestion are welcomed

Reviewing gedit project

As work for the last Master on Free Software subject (Dynamics of Libre Software Communities), I’ve redacted a brief article that tries to analyze the gedit project.

This article is just a collection of charts about gedit project activity. The information was extracted with different tools that helps to analyze data sources of a project (lines of code, repository, mailing list, …).

For example, one of these graphics shows the number of commits by the main contributors per year:

This work just joint some information gathered from different sources, any comment, correction, idea and/or suggestion are welcomed.

BTW, all the needed steps to generate the different charts with the R project are explained in the article. Maybe this examples could be useful for other cases.

CASify Redmine

Redmine is a project management web application. It’s written in Ruby using the Rails framework.

There is a CAS client available written in Ruby: RubyCAS-Client.

So, I’ve made some modifications on Redmine code in order to use the CAS service to authenticate Redmine users. Moreover, user information is updated from a LDAP every time the user login in the Redmine website (using Net::LDAP). And the fields to modify this data will be disabled on My account page.

Summarizing, I’ve uploaded a patch which provides this specific behaviour (this patch is done against the revision 2824 of Redmine). I know that it’s hardcoded, but it could be a base for further steps and I hope that it could be useful for someone else (or even for me in the future ). In the next paragraphs I’ll go into more technical details.

Continue reading CASify Redmine…

GCDS Day 6 – Last day

I spent the whole day attended to the GUADEC-ES talks. And I liked specially two of them:

• GTK+ 3.0, paso a paso where Carlos Garnacho showed us some interesting things that will be the future of GTK+
• Tracker. ¿Qué he hecho yo para indexar esto? interesting talk about the new Tracker 0.7 by Iván Frade.

Moreover, we present our talk about Tarefas at GUADEC-ES, it seems that people like the idea and how it was developed as part of the Master on Free Software. BTW, you can get the slides (in Spanish).

Finally, Berto and me went for a walk around the old city, this part is really nice.

Summarizing, it was a great week in Gran Canaria, where I could meet a lot of great hackers. A lot of interesting stuff: Mojito, Tracker, Zeitgeist, Midgard2, CouchDB, GNOME Shell, … I should take a look at some of them in the future, I hope to find some time

GCDS Day 5 – Mobile Day & GUADEC-ES

I started the day at GUADEC-ES with a great talk Enanos con Gorrito – GNOME para novatos by Federico Mena.

Then I moved to the GUADEC Mobile Day in order to attend the following talks:

• Designing Moblin-Netbook. A free desktop on a 7-10″ Screen
• MAFW: the Media Application Framework for Maemo

Afer that, I moved again to GUADEC-ES where Víctor explained how to generate .vapi files in his talk Un vistazo a Vala.

And I finished the conferences day in the next talks:

• Couch DB: Cross Desktop Data and Demos
• Pitivi Video Editor

Finally, I went to the GNOME Hispano dinner and also attended to the party sponsored by Collabora.

GCDS Day 4 – Talks, beach and dinner

I attended some talks during the day, during the morning Clutter was a main character. The Midgard2 project seems interesting, a content repository with just a library, it should be reviewed with CouchDB if you need something like a content repository for your project.

After the conference some of us went to the beach and other hackers join us there. BTW, my second swim in Gran Canaria

Finally, some igalians and Federico Mena went to dinner to the city centre. I had the chance to ask him about Zeitgeist internals, how they detect the events and so on. It was a nice night with a great guy.

GCDS Day 3 – GNOME party

Today I attended the next talks:

• WebKitGTK+
• I can has aliens too? Client side windows in Gtk+
• Modest: Creating a modern mobile email client with gnome technologies
• GNOME 3.0 – A Live Circus^WStatus Update
• Vala: Compiler for the GObject type system
• GSettings: Next Gen of Config Management
• GNOME 1,2,3

Quite interesting talks today, and a very funny talk (GNOME 1,2,3) by Fer and Xan. Furthermore, it’s good to see how Igalians have started to appear as speakers

Today is the GNOME party sponsored by Igalia, now it’s time to go there!

BTW, master students (Manuel, Javi and me) have started to prepare our talk for the GUADEC-ES. Moreover Sergio has found some time, after the Modest talk, to help us with the Maemo port. Thank you very much!

GCDS Day 2 – GUADEC starts

During the morning I attended the following talks of the Cross-desktop track:

• Desktop search: Extracting semantic meta data
• Tracker: Metadata central storage for the Desktop
• Animated UI technologies in maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• WebKit combined GTK+/Qt talk
• Profiling and Optimizing D-Bus APIs

I liked the Desktop search and Tracker talks, that allowed me to understand better the problems and ideas of these projects. From the D-Bus talk I should extract a basic concept:

D-Bus API shouldn’t be just a mapping of your library

You should use some time to think the proper D-Bus methods that you need. Another interesting thing was Bustle, a kind of D-Bus monitor that seems very interesting.

At the afternoon the GUADEC starts, and I’ve attended:

• Introduction to the GNOME Shell
• GNOME Zeitgeist
• Sipping Mojitos and thinking RESTful thoughts
• State of Clutter

It was interesting see the current status of GNOME Shell. The GNOME Zeitgeist talk reminded me some ideas of MyTime. Finally, I had the chance to talk a bit with Rob Bradford about Mojito project, a very interesting way to access social networks from the desktop.

BTW, Nokia’s party is waiting, see you there tonight