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.

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 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 .

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!

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.