Rego’s Everyday Life

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 .

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!