Rego’s Everyday Life

GCDS Day 0 - Ready to learn

Tonight, we should be arriving to Las Palmas in order to attend Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS).

This will be my GUADEC, and this is the first time that GUADEC and Akademy are organized together (a great idea in my opinion).

I hope to learn a lot during this fantastic event and meet a lot of interesting people. See you in Gran Canaria

BTW, I’ll be part of a talk given in the GUADEC-ES by all the Master on Libre Software students. In this talk we’ll talk about our experience developing a GNOME application as a practice for the Development of Libre Software subject.

Python and Mono (a week between animals at MSWL)

This week we’ve taken an overview of these projects from the community and technical point of views at Master of Software Libre.

Python seems an easy programming language with a lot of available modules that you can use to fill your needs. I liked a lot the command interpreter to learn and play with the language (i.e. you can use it as calculator, that’s going to make me forget bc ;-)) moreover I also liked some other things:

• Good documentation and tutorial
• dir and help functions
• How to manage the lists
• The easy way to define functions with an arbitrary argument list (maybe because I’ve never seen how to do it before)

I don’t have a very good opinion about Mono and it’s not related with the platform that seems very good and productive, my concerns are more related with the patent issues of C# and the large shadow of Microsoft behind the project.

Actually I don’t like the Mono’s position in a race where it’s always behind .NET and Microsoft decisions specially for technologies like ASP.NET and Silverlight.
Moreover nobody knows what Microsoft is going to do in the future, maybe they could sue some Mono project because it breaks some patent just for use Mono, mainly if it’s a successful project. Then you should rewrite the program using other language to keep the project free (I don’t like it :-().

However there’re also good things, I liked a lot the Mono documentation tool (Monodoc) particulary the way to add new documentation and contribute to improve the project documentation directly from the viewer tool. IMHO, it’s a clever way to improve the documentation of the project, if you know how a class works and it’s not documented yet, you can add your comments and share them with the world from the same tool.

Finally, I’d like to thank to Dape and Álvaro del Castillo for their interesting sessions.

Next week GNOME vs KDE at MSWL, let’s see what happens.

BTW, I’ve been using Emacs since a week ago and I’m adapting to it quite well so my .emacs is growing everyday :D.

Development Subject: Desktop & Mobile

Last weekend we started the Development of Libre Software subject at MSWL where we’ll develop a GNOME (I hope that you hear more news about that during the next month).

The first class was just an introduction to the subject contents: GNOME, GTK+, GNOME Mobile and Maemo, Python, Mono, KDE, Qt, … In the second class we had a look to the common tools used in the free software world: a brief approach to the C programming language, Emacs, GDB and Valgrind.

As you can read we talked about Emacs and I’m a Vim user. I’ve already tried to start with Emacs some time ago with no success, but now I’m ready to give it another chance
In order to do that I’ve my own reference card that compares Emacs and Vim commands (this table should keep growing).

Debian packaging, kernel hacking, openSUSE and eBox platform at MSWL

After more than a month learning systems stuff at MSWL, where we talked about a lot of things (bash, network, DNS, LDAP, git, email, security, firewalling, perl, virtualization, …), last two weeks we’ve had four practical technical studies:

• Debian packaging: A very interesting class by Alberto González Iniesta. We saw the right way to create a Debian package from project sources and check its quality.
• Kernel hacking: Berto explained us a lot of things related with the kernel. We learned to create our own kernel with kernel-package and make menuconfig.
• openSUSE: A great talk by Rodrigo Moya, in which he talked about the begging of openSUSE and the openSUSE Build Service, a very interesting way to maintain the openSUSE pacakges, allowing to send patches automatically from the command line with osc (OpenSUSE commander).
• eBox: Javier Uruen showed us the eBox platform, a very easy way to manage a lot of services that you could need in a network. This platform is designed for users and not for system administrators, allowing anyone configure a network.

Now it’s time for the development subject!

Forums in TYPO3

As part of the Mancomún project we need to use a forum with the next features:

• Anonymous users
• Captcha prevention
• RSS
• BBCode

So I’ve been testing different TYPO3 extensions:

• mm_forum: The most used and with community and recent activity. Only one problem not logged users can’t write posts.
• chc_forum: Not updated since 2006. Without Captcha prevention. RSS feed is added with another extension.
• wec_discussion: An active extension, but with a forum system quite simple and without BBCode support.

All of them miss some of the required features. After some tests I decided to use chc_forum, mainly because we’ve already used it in a previous project and another extension already provides Captcha prevention, but it’s not working properly.

I’d prefer to use mm_forum but it was more difficult to add the missed feature. I’ve added a new issue and I hope that this feature will be implemented in order to improve this great extension.

Finally, the result is:

• A new TYPO3 extension chc_forum_captcha, based on chc_forum_popup source code, that adds Captcha prevention to chc_forum.
• A little patch for chc_forum_feed, because it was not detecting the website protocol (HTTP or HTTPS).

gl_pages_cat: Pages categorization in TYPO3

gl_pages_cat is a TYPO3 extension that allows to relate TYPO3 pages with categories from tt_news_cat table. In that way, you’ll only have a category tree common for the whole website, pages and news are going to share the same categories.

At the beginning this extension just provided a method that returns the news related with the categories of the current page. It was enough for me, because of I was doing news lists from Formidable.

But now, it also provides a new method that returns the categories of the current page. With this method, for example, you can assign some categories to a page and, then, configure properly tt_news plugins to show only news related with the categories of that page. You could do something like that with the next TypoScript code:

includeLibs.user_pages_cat = EXT:gl_pages_cat/class.tx_glpagescat_div.php

lib.page.category = USER
lib.page.category.preUserFunc = tx_glpagescat_div->getPageCategories

plugin.tt_news.categorySelection < lib.page.category
plugin.tt_news.categoryMode = 1

I’m very grateful to Daniel Huf for having tested my extension and having given me his feedback (this TypoScript configuration). Thanks to this, the extension has improved and, from my point of view, now it’s very useful combined with tt_news plugins.

For example, if you have a categorized TYPO3 website, once you have everything configured properly, you could change the news displayed on a page simply by changing the categories of the page.

Latest TYPO3 stuff

Lately I’ve been quite busy (I’m doing a Master on Free Software) and I didn’t have time to write any post, actually I missed the chance to do it sometimes. So, before the year ends, I should write my last post and here it goes.

This month I’ve published 2 new TYPO3 extensions:

• Pages categorization: It adds the possibility to relate pages with tt_news categories. This is very useful in some cases, because of you can have a plugin that shows news in pages with different categories, and the list of news will be different on each page. This extension also provides a function to get the news with the same categories than the current page.
• Accessible Ratings: This extension provides a plugin, which makes that Ratings extension works without JavaScript.

On the other hand, I found a page with the Formidable reference, it’s not complete but it’s updated to the last version. Furthermore, I’ve done some contributions to Formidable extension between November and December:

• Improved the datasource:DB: Now it has new properties fields, table and wheres. Whit this change is very easy to define queries from the XML.
• Added a new property meta/formwrap: It removes the HTML form tag when you use Formidable just to show information (lists, detail, …)
• New wizard icons for Formidable plugins.

All of this things come from my work in the Mancomún project, a TYPO3 project that we’re doing right now. You can check the current status of the project at SVN repository.

By the way, I’ve been testing DocBook and I like it to make slides, I should play more with it in the future.

How to write a manual for a GNOME application with DocBook

This is the title of my work for Introduction to Libre Software at Master on Free Software. You can read the article here or in only one page or in PDF format (generated with dblatex). Furthermore you can download the source file or check the SVN repository (where you can find the works of my classmates).

For your information, I paste here the abstract of my article, if you like to do any comment about the article feedback will be welcomed ;-):

This article is a guide about how to write help manuals for GNOME applications using DocBook as standard tool. This manual explains the right way to add a tutorial on a GNOME project, as well as the process to translate it. The integration process to add a new option in application menu that shows the help manual, is also explained in this article.

Writing this article I’ve had my first contact with DocBook, from my point of view I’d only use it if you want a good HTML output for your document, however if you prefer a good PDF I’d use LaTeX. For example, you can open any DocBook document directly with Yelp and you can see that the result is very good:
yelp ghelp:/path/to/myfile.xml

Moreover, I’ve used DocBook to create some slides to do a presentation of my article (source ifle) in class and I like it a lot it’s very customizable with a good XSL and CSS. For example, I found some stylesheets that generates a good HTML for presentations. When I have some free time I’m sure that I’m going to play with DocBook slides.

MyTime Demo

We’ve launched a new release of MyTime.

The main mew features are:

• Idle time is caught: In this version if you’re inactive during more than 5 minutes this inactivity time isn’t assigned to any and it’s stored as IDLE.
• GTK-Doc reference: Now source code it’s properly commented to generate the reference using GKT-Doc.

Furthermore we’ve recorded a demonstration video that you can download at MyTime homepage.

My relation with free software

Past month I’ve started the Free Software Master arranged by Caixanova, Igalia and URJC in Vigo, this’s the second edition of that master (previous was hosted at A Coruña) and this year I’m a student. I’m sure that I’m going to learn a lot of interested things about free software: philosophy, license, development, communities, …

As you can guess I’m going to use this blog to post some comments about exercises, practices, examples or whatever interesting thing related with this master (you can take this post as the first example).

In the next paragraphs I’ll try to sum up my relation with free software from my first contact to nowadays trying to answer some question of the subject Introduction to Libre Software.

Continue reading My relation with free software…