stick's corner

I just returned from LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin and it was a blast!

Our car crew (Michal, Luboš, Martin and me) got up very early and we were on our way from the Prague office shortly after seven. Fortunately it took us only 40 minutes to realize that our GPS was set to ignore highways, so we could make it to Berlin before noon.

At the time we arrived our booth was already full of other SUSE colleagues and of course visitors. Besides 13 official talks we also held four hack sessions every day (making it 29 sessions in total, absolutely crazy! – the complete list is in the wiki). The booth was rather small (when compared to 3 times larger and almost always empty Ubuntu one, hope that organizers noticed that) but it was fun as always and the atmosphere was great!

Nearly all SUSE folks were also interviewed by RadioTux, thanks Gnokii for driving that.

LinuxTag was not always about hacking and computers. Our booth was often visited by clown who created a very nice geekos from balloons (thanks Eva!):

And our sessions included craft workshops led by Henne and Annika:

On Wednesday some of us were invited to Qt dinner (thanks Alex and Jos!) and on Thursday we all went to LinuxNacht. It is a great informal event where you can chat with all speakers and project contributors over beer and good food.

I visited a couple of very interesting and inspiring talks:

• What Is Special About the QML Declarative Language? by Matthias Ettrich
• Real-time Communications with PHP by Scott Mattocks (can be applied to any platform, not just PHP)
• MeeGo – Linux for Mobile Devices by Dirk Hohndel
• The Move Towards Open Source and Open Clouds by Larry Augustin
• Google and Open Source by Chris DiBona
• Beyond init: Systemd by Lennart Poettering
• Kernel Mode Setting – a Change in Paradigms for the Graphics Driver Stack by Egbert Eich
• On Being Free by Jos Poortvliet

Last but not least, Google had a stand where you could fill in the general and software engineering quiz. Michal and I were supposedly the only people who had the latter one correct so we were two of the four that won Nexus One phones, thanks Google!

I’m already looking forward for next year edition of LinuxTag. It is a event you can’t miss and a great opportunity to meet FOSS infected people!

(Photos taken by Adrian Schroeter, Michal Hrušecký and Sirko Kemter)

I was playing with the idea to write an application inspired by xkcd comics 715 since it was released, but today I finally found time to whip it up! The whole source code is a single webpage (HTML+Javascript/jQuery) around 100 lines long. It basically forms the query by replacing hash sign “#” with the particular number from loop and then asks Google via its Search API. Resulting data are shown via Google Visualization API. It doesn’t have much eye-candy yet, but it works and that’s what counts. I put the presets Randall came up with and also added some of my own. I will now describe the first three in detail:

The first one was "xkcd #", which easily showed that the most popular issues were: 10, 12, 244, 385, 427, 449, 452, 505, 701, 705 and 714.

I continued with "# czechoslovakia", which of course spotted the most important years of the 20th century for this country (1918, 1938, 1945, 1948, 1968, 1989 and 1993).

The last one, "favorite number is #", shows the distribution of favorite numbers. Three, seven, eight and thirteen were expected, but I was surprised to see peak also at 42. I guess you know why.

Bear in mind that there are still some outstanding issues and also if you have any ideas for interesting presets to add, I’d be more than happy to include them!

Ah, I almost forgot the link, so here it is: http://gk2.sk/xkcd715.html. Enjoy!

Thanks to unceasing endeavors of David Buck and Raymond Wooninck we now have Chromium built fully from the source code! It is available from our Contrib repository (package chromium). I recommend using this one instead of various other RPMs that repack Google Chrome/Chromium binaries or are kept in users home repositories. Big thanks also goes to Tom ‘spot’ Callaway for much of the original patchwork, Justin Haygood for helping with the icu patch and Malcolm Lewis.

Thanks to hard work of Jeff, Narendra, Vidar and me, we managed to create today a 2.1 release of SVG-edit. Interesting changes include:

• tooltips for all UI elements
• editing of fill, stroke and group opacity
• selecting and moving elements
• saving SVG file
• adding end editing of text elements
• context panel for tools
• change rectangle radius
• controlling of the editor with keyboard shortcuts

You can try the 2.1 branch here:

Unfortunately the editor still has some problems when embedded into Google Wave, but now that Vidar received his invitation, I hope we’ll be able to fix it sooner. We are also already cooking new features for 2.2 so stay tuned!

Last week I announced cooperation with Narendra Sisodiya on a SVG-edit project. The inscrutable ways of twitter allowed Jeff Schiller, a co-chair of the W3C SVG Interest Group, to spot our efforts and later he contributed with various patches and implemented some new features like selecting and moving objects.

I was very surprised when I found out that Vidar Hokstad took trunk of SVG-edit (only two days after my blogpost!) and created a proof-of-concept gadget for Google Wave, the exactly same thing I would try to accomplish once the editor was more mature . I asked Vidar if he’s not interested in moving his source into our SVN, he agreed and is adjusting the gadget to work with the latest version of the editor right now.

I’m very happy that both guys jumped on our development train and the project gained momentum and visibility. We’ve also decided to change the license from GPLv2 to Apache License 2.0 to allow even broader adoption. A discussion group and an IRC channel #svg-edit on irc.freenode.net have been created for the ones who are interested in this project as well.

PS: The gadget is probably not yet usable inside Google Wave, but we are working on it and we’ll keep you posted about our progress … The work would go definitively faster if we all had Wave Sandbox access (people at Google: hint, hint ) and didn’t have to try everything only in Vidar’s Gadget API emulator.

I’m happy to announce that this year I’ll be mentoring GSoC project which will attempt to create an alternative source backend using git. Student implementing the idea is Peter Libič. I have created an openSUSE wiki page with the copy of the proposal and some useful links. Some of my colleagues (like Andreas Gruenbacher and Brandon Philips) are also interested in topic and already provided a valuable feedback. If you’d like to get involved, feel free to contact me, edit the project wiki page or join us on IRC channel #obs-git@irc.freenode.net.

Folks at Google announced the list of accepted organizations for Google Summer of Code 2009 tonight. I am very happy that openSUSE was included again. Of course, we don’t want to disappoint them, so keep your great ideas coming!

Day 2 – 2008/10/26

• The second day started with breakfast and was followed by the bus journey to Googleplex.
• There we had on opening talk about the first day, what went good, what went bad and we would like to change. We had a lots of comments about Summer of Code organization, mainly about picking right students for project.
• After that I headed to conference room where I prepared for my openSUSE Build Service presentation. Unfortunately I found out that Apple keeps changing its connectors nearly every year, so I was left without any option to connect my MacBook to the projector and I had to borrow Lance’s computer. At least I could easily prove that Build Service and its OSC command line client (which I freshly checkouted from SVN) could be easily used from any machine
• Went to cafeteria for lunch, where I met Malex. Learned from him that I had missed key signing party the day before, so at least we signed our keys.
• Rushed to “DVCS Boxing Match” as I was really looking forward to it. It was presented by Shawn O. Pearce (Git) and Dirkjan Ochtman (Mercurial). Result: both are pretty mature, but have some features missing, so the audience is a bit different.
• Pretty in-depth session about Android internals by Romain Guy.
• Went outside to take a group photo near the Android statue:

• Closing talk with Leslie and Chris. Mainly about Summer of Code application called Melange, the Spice of Creation.

(Photos taken by Pınar Yanardağ and Austin Ziegler)

Day 1 – 2008/10/25

• woke up and headed to the hotel parlour for breakfast
• met Werner and talked a little bit about Java and Java packaging in openSUSE
• back in the hotel room shown BuildService to David like I promised; he was interested in packaging, because he wanted to build Tux4Kids packages for OLPC
• we all took a shuttle to Googleplex

• all herded into the largest of the conference rooms called Tunis
• summit’s opening talk held by Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona, the open source manager at Google
• learned some details about this year’s Summer of Code, e.g. that the youngest mentor Dmitri Gaskin was only 13 years old! he was unable to attend the Google Highly Open Participation Contest so he decided to do mentoring for Drupal
• we were presented with giant grid where rows represented times and columns conference rooms
• asked to write the name of the session in the correct cell, if we wanted to host it (learned that this type of conference has its own name and it’s called unconference)
• decided to give a short presentation of openSUSE Build Service on Sunday
• to my surprise, after a few minutes the board was actually full and it seemed that we’ll have a very interesting program ahead of us
• met Zonker, the other openSUSE Mentor and Community Manager, told him I’m having a session on Sunday
• found out that we’ll be attending completely different sessions

• first session – ‘Monetizing Open Source without Being Evil’ by Mixxx guys
• pretty good, learned a couple of real-life examples:
  • Firefox – has Google search on home page and in navigation toolbar (paid by Google)
  • Rhytmbox and Amarok – last.fm / Jamendo / Magnatune integration (increases program value and is paid by the studios/companies)
  • Ardour – optional donation 10$/month – has around 120 subscribers (1200$ a month)

• short session about developing for iPhone by Matt from Adium; more particularly about how GPL and other open source licenses clash with iPhone SDK NDA

• veeeeery long queue for lunch; agreed with Assaf Raman from Ogre3D that Americans love queues
• everybody is throwing Google colorful frisbees and balls
• lunch is actually tasty, but I miss warm food, every choice is a cold dish

• going to session called ‘Human Supercomputer Workshop’ held by James from Audacity
  • have no idea what this could be, but sounds like fun
  • 9 people divided into groups of 3; each group has worker, facilitator and observer
  • worker says how he/she would solve the problem and also refines the problem itself
  • facilitator can interrupt worker to prevent preconceptions of the speaker
  • observer notices when the interactions were most effective and is allowed to give feedback only at the end of the session
  • session lasts for around 15 minutes and after that the groups are dissolved and the new ones are created, ideally so that none of the members of the new group is in group with the person he has met before
  • after 3 or 4 sessions, one large group is created and everybody gives feedback
  • totally fascinated how this “architecture” could solve problems in a very short time
  • interesting thing is that human supercomputer is working better when it is “under-clocked”, i.e. when speakers speak more slowly, as compared to CPUs which work better if they are over-clocked

• rushed to ‘Dynamic Languages’ initiated by Giovanni Corriga from Squeak project
  
  • seems not to be a one-man show, rather a large debate
  • it would be interesting if there was a way how to translate programs in various dynamic languages to some common intermediate language
  • unfortunately .NET’s CIL is suited for statically typed procedural languages
  • maybe even design a processor that could run this CIL
  • Update (2008/11/05): learned from Anders Hejlsberg’s PDC2008 talk on C# 4.0 that Microsoft is actually planning to implement something like dynamic languages runtime

• Android lecture by Chris DiBona, Shawn O. Pearce and Brian Swetland
  • learned about architecture of Android, where the code is and how can we contribute
  • lot of this could be found on Android website

• concluding remarks held again by Leslie and Chris

• traveled back to hotel
• lots of chatting in the hotel parlour and around the pool
  • chat with Brian Swetland about Linux kernel changes in Android
  • learned a lot about NTP protocol and its pitfalls from Harlan Stenn
  • talked with VLC guys about Dominique Leuenberger‘s great packaging work using Build Service (he uses it also to create VLC upstream packages)
• dropped into bed, again very tired, but with a very good feeling after the great day

(Photos taken by me, Pınar Yanardağ and Chris DiBona)

Day 0 – 2008/10/24

In my previous blogpost I described the project I mentored during this year’s Google Summer of Code event. At the end of October I was invited into Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California for Mentors Summit. Here you can find my remarks, not dissimilar to twitter tweets or identi.ca tics.

• arrived at the Wild Palms Hotel at around 3pm and took a short nap
• Google planned a dinner for us at Amarin Thai restaurant, left the hotel around quarter to six
• used VTA public bus transport to get there; turned out to be pretty adventurous: one had to request the stop and the stops were not announced; fortunately had a map software in my cellphone so I was able to track my position by looking out of the window and advancing cursor in my mobile map
• arrived to the restaurant; not so many people yet, soon started to change …

• met Leslie Hawthorn (the official geek herder ) for the first time
• sat at the table with Earl Miles and his wife from Drupal, David Wollner from BZFlag and Joel Sherrill from RTEMS project
• talking about our projects; served with various Thai dishes, some of them were very exotic
• after an hour or so we headed to the Tied House

• some snacks and free beer at the Tied House, heeey!
• American beer is not what I’m used to, too thick for me
• went to two tall guys: Matt Handley from Adium and Werner Guttmann mentoring Castor
• when talking about Czech Republic, Ondrej Certik from Python Software Foundation appeared too
• heard two people talking about openSUSE Build Service, interested who could it be …
• mystery solved: Oleksandr Moskalenko from the Scribus team and Lance Albertson from Oregon State University – Scribus is one of the first larger projects that started to build their own packages using Build Service, Lance was mentoring a project which aimed to create packages for various distributions using Gentoo ebuilds
• noted that the dependencies of the packages are the a big problem, Lance had to admit that I’m right; they actually use database of packages and their dependencies for each distribution, must be huge and hard to maintain!
• there are two Gentoo mentors here! Donnie Berkholz and Alec Warner
• short talk with Johannes Schmid from GNOME about Mono
• approached by Stefan Reinauer from coreboot; learned that he used to work for SUSE once, in the Arch team; he decided to start his own business with LinuxBIOS (or coreboot, like it is called nowadays)
• short talk with guys from OSSIM project (Pablo Rincón Crespo and Juan Manuel Lorenzo)
• headed back to the hotel with Brooks Davis from FreeBSD and his wife

• finally found out who my roommate is! it’s David Bruce from Tux4Kids project
• we talked a little bit about his work, promised to show him openSUSE Build Service the other day
• I fell into bed exhausted, but really looking forward for the actual summit and its sessions

Days 1 and 2 will appear tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. I promise to post some photos too