Category Archives: Planet

Elements to be displayed on the Planet Igalia

by lorenzo tilve

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 Systems, Tuning Valgrind for your Workload, GStreamer in the living room and in outer space, How 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 beyond, Mobile == Web, Kodi mediacenter (XBMC) past, present and future, It’s not a bug, it’s an environment problem, Servo (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.

by lorenzo tilve

Published LibrePlan Audiovisual website

After several months working on the application, it’s now available the website of the project LibrePlan Audiovisual www.libreplan.com/audiovisual

It’s a section inside the main LibrePlan website, which has been the starting point for this adaptation oriented to solve problems identified on the companies of the audiovisual sector in Galicia. More specifically on the area of budget ellaboration and monitoring of audiovisual projects.

It was neccessary to have a tool to allow the standarization of budget creation on a collaborative way, and to ease controlling of costs and time deviations over the initial budget, produced during the ellaboration of adiovisual products, solving the problems due to be using other non specific tools.

The project has been developed by Igalia and Wireless Galicia with the collaboration of the Galician Audiovisual Cluster (CLAG), and financed with public fundings.

Among his main features we can remark the next ones:

  • Budget templates system

Create new projects from configurable template trees with the budget structure and predefined data.

  • Budget execution forecast

Visualize and modify the distribution along time of the cost of the budget items, and compare the real costs to do the neccesary adjustments.

  • Advanced assignment of forecasts and cost details

Distribute in a fine grained detail level the expenses forecast, use the cost sheets to track the produced expenses during the project and integrate the costs system with other tools to import expenses through Web Services.

  • Filming productivities perspective

Measure the productivities on the ellaboration of the multimedia product being developed, according to different unit types (scenes, minutes or script pages). Define an initial filming plan, specifying the estimated productivities, compare them with the real measurements and adapt the forecasts.

 

  • Planning, expenses and payments plan reports

Generate printable reports either on PDF or HTML showing information on the project execution.

More detailed information on the application features, and the documentation can be accesed at http://www.libreplan.com/audiovisual/main-features/

As the LibrePlan project, on which this solution is developed, LibrePlan Audiovisual is Open Source with AGPL license, and cam be downloaded and used freely.

In the same way, all the services offered on LibrePlan website related to its  cloud plans, training, customization or support, are also availables for LibrePlan Audiovisual.

Thanks to all of us who made possible the existence of this tool, and I hope it can be useful to all organizations or companies interested on improving the planning, monitoring and control of their budgets.

 

by lorenzo tilve

Back from JSCONF.eu 2009

After a some of rest (we slept just too little during the conferences) and catching up with the mail, I was willing to devote some time to write about my notes and feelings these days in Berlin.

Just to sum up, the whole thing was just awesome! We knew a lot of great people there and learned so many things.  We are surprised with the maturity and possibilities around JavaScript community, and how they will have even more presence in the short term.

The speakers were all important people from the variety of JS related feet, just missed some speech about Gnome Shell. In some months time all GNOME 3 users around the world will be running JavaScript in their desktops. That’s millions of people! We talked a lot about this with many people and everybody was really interested about it. In fact, a BoF about was almost proposed. In future JSConf editions we should try to get something presented on Gjs.

I have plenty of annotations, tools to test and things to take a look at, but for the record, some interesting quotes 🙂

Saturday

We already knew some people from the welcome party the day before (Sergi and Irakli from Tom Tom, Tobie Langel and Peter Svensson who were talking on Sunday) and after the ‘expect bacon’ breakfast the conference started. Briefing:

And later on the Nokia party was also really good. The snacks were great, all the food we had at Berlin, in fact. We also had a little bit of time to go for a walk and see the Brandenburg Gate spectacularly lit for the 20th anniversary of the Fall of The Wall.

Sunday

  • Amy Hoy Hard Refresh – Not Just Another LightboxVery innovative ideas about concepts on web design and user interaction (Motion, Interaction, Graphics and Differentiation). I promised her that I would be sending her a copy of the t-shirt I have in mind with the great quote I borrowed from her blog “If you polish shit, all you get is shit that’s shiny“.
  • Ryan Dahl Node.js, Evented I/O for V8 Javascript We were really interested in this speech as it was giving hints on threading and handling of high concurrence environments, that apply to DBUS problematic in GNOME
  • Steve Souders Performance Really interesting his analysis on the emotional reaction that makes the user feel slowness, and the tools he introduced browserscope.org, webpagetest.org, spriteme and pagespeed. Progressive rendering and enhancement are needed, deliver HTML first and defer JS loading and decoration.
  • Tobie Langel Unittesting JavaScript with Evidence He explained his motivations to create a new unit testing suit, based on the necessity of making it framework agnostic
  • Faruk Ateş JavaScript in the age of HTML 5 and CSS 3 A great presentation on how to manage advanced CSS3 features from an agent independant point of view. It started in a shocking way: ‘All the webs don’t need to look the same in different browsers. Equal vs. similar‘. The idea is that some visual enhancements can be managed from each separate feature, and not in terms of user agent, and it will be the responsibility of the developer to implement the rest or not. It can be experienced what he ment in his site, accesing it with webkit based browsers, Gecko or others, and check the CSS transparencies, rounded corners and animated transitions. I had also an interesting discussion with him to ask for his opinion on the improvements planned for the webkit hackfest and he would be glad offering his point of view in the priorities from a designer point of view.
  • Jörn Zaefferer Developing web applications with jQuery UI Gave a quick overview on creating a shop from the scratch with jQuery. An interesting question was asket regarding to interaction in newer smartphones, to which the roadmap will have to manage interaction with multitouch events
  • Nicole Sullivan A little off topic: on OOCSS Useful set of hints and techniques to keep CSS under control and make the architecture of the presentation styles more coherent. I do agree with her ‘code is fragile’ quote, and that’s even more explicit in CSS, but it’s still difficult to avoid.
  • Fabian Jakobs Autopsy of a Widget An step-by-step implementation of a spinner component
  • John Resig Understanding JavaScript Testing Some more comparison on testing suites. As Tobie already covered that, he also included a part of profiling. It was funny to find out that IE benchmarking works better emulated, as getTime() function gives more accurate results than 0 and 16 ;p

Then another informal party in the Lounge of the Ïma Design Village, where all the conferences were done, a really cool place by the way.

This is as summarized as I could, an overview of what I saw at Berlin. For any other information I could have ask me, or see the rest of stuff is in their web, slideshare, Flickr, Twitter and so on ;p

by lorenzo tilve

Going to JSConf.eu 2009

After some doubts about if we were going to be able to register, we finally could sign up for JSConf.eu 2009, so two people from Igalia are going be in Berlin the 7th and 8th of November.

lg_logoJavascript is one of the transversal technologies in Igalia and this is the reason why there will be people in the conferences that has been working both on Desktop Mobile and Web Application Development groups.

Some of us already have quite a lot of experience with Server-Side communications with JS, and we are willing to go deeper in its usage to more advanced RIA oriented features within the scope of our ZK scheduling application.

We hope to get a lot of interesting ideas and boost our knowledge in the different frameworks that are going to be explored, have an insight in future opportunities, and of course, know people and have fun!

PD.  Then we take Berlin!

by lorenzo tilve

Online Desktop. State of the art

Some times it is necessary to take a breath.

The concept 2.0 is expanding too fast and some times it is mandatory to stop from your tasks to have an overall perception of how technologies are evolving. Perhaps the forest sometimes doesn’t allow you to see the trees. Let’s have a look on how to face an approach to the integration of these applications on the desktop.
Borrowing some ideas from Chema proposal:

  • Get a definition: What is online desktop for us?
  • Which is the relationship with Online Desktop?
  • Crazy ideas: What do you think that could your desktop do to improve your Internet experience?
  • Study the state of art of the project. What is mugshot?

Starting from the last point, we have started testing Mugshot Stacker in an Ubuntu 7.04.

# alien mugshot-1.1.45-1.fc8.i386.rpm

Warning: Skipping conversion of scripts in package mugshot: postinst postrm preinst prerm
Warning: Use the –scripts parameter to include the scripts.
mugshot_1.1.45-2_i386.deb generated

# dpkg -i mugshot_1.1.45-2_i386.deb

# mugshot
mugshot: error while loading shared libraries: libcurl.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So it is necessary to install libcurl4, and i will have to upgrade my distribution. Keep going…

[…]

Finally, it wasn’t neccesary. Reviewing the ubuntu backports and debian repositories mentioned in the mugshot wiki , I reached this repository where I could download and install the Debian package to start playing whith the Mugshot stacker widget.

Mugshot