Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)

Attending: Joerg Reisenweber (DocScrutinizer05), Ruediger Schiller (chem|st), Gido Griese (Win7Mac), Paul Healy (sixwheeledbeast), Jussi Ohenoja (juiceme).

Absent:

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Discussion on moving Hildon Foundation to a german e.V.

Topic (Discussion on moving Hildon Foundation to a german e.V.):

• Win7Mac has consulted a lawyer on the responsibilities of directors of an E.v. and the extents of liability. It seems that directors are "only liable for damage by gross negligence and intent" so there propably is no need for an extra insurance for the directors. There was some general talk over liability, and juiceme asked if there is any possibility that in EU there could be similar threat of litigation that Woody was fearing could happen to HiFo in US. General consensus seems to be that it is not likely.
• chem|st asked if Win7Mac will take care of the "Nokia" statements all over the website, and check that there are no unappropriate binaries in repositories.
• Win7Mac presented the work-on-progress for the changing of names/terms in the legal documentation on the website:
  • Contribution Guidelines
  • Terms + Conditions
  • Privacy Policy

Win7Mac told that when the documenation has been finished it will be reviewed again by a lawyer, and should be finalized by friday this week.

Action Items:

• N/A

While the Owncloud Manual suggests enabling SSL, it unfortunately does not go into detail how to get a secure setup. The core problem is that the default SSL settings of Apache are not sane as in they do not enforce strong encryption. Furthermore the used default certificate will not match your server name and produce errors in the browser.

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)

Attending: Joerg Reisenweber (DocScrutinizer05), Ruediger Schiller (chem|st), Gido Griese (Win7Mac), chainsawbike, Jussi Ohenoja (juiceme).

Absent:

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Off-site backup for Maemo
- Discussion on moving Hildon Foundation to a german e.V.

Topic (Off-site backup for Maemo):

• DocScrutinizer05 brought to attention that the Maemo off-site backup service will cease in the end of this month. This in effect means that maemo.org would exist as single instance in a single server rack with no backup whatsoever.
• There is urgent need to find a permanent solution to the backup. Requirement is about 4TB of storage and 1GBps connectivity.

Topic (Discussion on moving Hildon Foundation to a german e.V.):

• Win7Mac has drawn final version of the proposed new Maemo.org e.V. structure

Action Items:

• N/A

It was somewhere between 7th and 11th February 2004 when I got package with my first Linux/ARM device. It was Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (also named “collie”) and all started…

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)

Attending: Joerg Reisenweber (DocScrutinizer05), Ruediger Schiller (chem|st), Gido Griese (Win7Mac), chainsawbike, freemangordon, kerio, Jussi Ohenoja (juiceme).

Absent:

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Proposals for next contest
- Discussion on moving Hildon Foundation to a german e.V.

Topic (Proposals for next contest):

• No news, seems Jolla peole have been busy with FOSDEM.

Topic (Discussion on moving Hildon Foundation to a german e.V.):

• Win7Mac has drawn up nice proposals on the different possibilities to organize: first draft of various possibilities
• More refined models: KDE model and General Assembly centered model and final draft
• Discussion on whether there needs to be an annual support fee for community, pros: it would heighten the sense/value of community.
• Discussion on the actual method of the moving, do we need a general census/election for community to okay the move?

Action Items:

• N/A

Our lab - Samsung America's Advanced Software platform Lab - together with Mozilla and Microsoft have kick-started a new event/conference dedicated exclusively to web gaming. It will be on March the 13th 2014 in Issy-les-moulieneaux, France, just south of Paris.The idea here is to create a point of discussion and discovery around the challenges, opportunities and technologies available to push web gaming towards new frontiers. This is the first edition and we hope to see a lot of you there.We will have 2 speakers there: Daniel Glazman - in the opening keynote - and Swaroop Kalasapur from our platform acceleration team will talk about webCL and its direct application to gaming. Our lab will also participate to the roundtable discussion at the end of the sessionAttendance is open and free but registration is required. There are only a limited amount of seats for this first edition (~250).Check you the detail schedule here: http://www.nextgamefrontier.com/more info with those links:http://goo.gl/maps/g1iA8http://lanyrd.com/2014/ngf2014/http://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-next-game-frontier-10408182153Thanks for to Daniel and Satheesh for organizing this on our side.

The idea of Full-Stack Development is quite popular at the moment — building things that run both the browser and the server side of web development, usually utilizing similar languages and frameworks.

With Flow-Based Programming and the emerging Flowhub ecosystem, we can take this even further. Thanks to the FBP network protocol we can build and monitor graphs spanning multiple devices and flow-based environments.

Jon Nordby gave a Flow-Based Programming talk in FOSDEM Internet of Things track last weekend. His demo was running a FBP network comprising of three different environments that talk together. You can find the talk online.

Here are some screenshots of the different graphs.

MicroFlo running on an Arduino Microcontroller and monitoring a temperature sensor:

NoFlo running on Node.js and communicating with the Arduino over a serial port:

NoFlo running in browser and communicating with the Node.js process over WebSockets:

(click to see the full-size picture)

Taking this further

While this setup already works, as you can see the three graphs are still treated separately. The next obvious step will be to utilize the subgraph features of NoFlo UI and allow different nodes of a graph represent different runtime environments.

This way you could introspect the data passing through all the wires in a single UI window, and "zoom in" to see each individual part of the system.

The FBP ecosystem is growing all the time, with different runtimes popping up for different languages and use cases. While NoFlo's JavaScript focus makes it part of the Universal Runtime, there are many valid scenarios where other runtimes would be useful, especially on mobile, embedded, and desktop.

Work to be done

Interoperability between them is an area we should focus on. The network protocol needs more scrutiny to ensure all scenarios are covered, and more of the FBP/dataflow systems need to integrate it.

Some steps are already being taken in this direction. After Jon's session in FOSDEM we had a nice meetup discussing better integration between MicroFlo on microcontrollers, NoFlo on browser and server, and Lionel Landwerlin's work on porting NoFlo to the GNOME desktop.

If you're interested in collaborating, please get in touch!

Photo by Forrest Oliphant.

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)

Attending: Joerg Reisenweber (DocScrutinizer05), Ruediger Schiller (chem|st), Paul Healy (sixwheeledbeast), freemangordon, kerio, Jussi Ohenoja (juiceme).

Absent:

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Proposals for next contest
- Discussion on the mailing list
- Things to be settled with Nokia

Topic (Proposals for next contest):

• No news, Chemist has contacted Cybette but no answer yet.

Topic (Discussion on the mailing lists):

• There was discussion on the technical merits of a majordomo based list vs. current mail forwarder based list.
• It was decided that for council matters forwarder is better, and it can be implemented using masked send addresses to avoid bouncing on strictly configured servers.

Topic (Things to be settled with Nokia):

• No progress currentl.y
• Discussion on alternatives if maemo.org cannot be used.

Action Items:

• N/A

I will be doing a presentation about Tracker at FOSDEM this year.

Metadata Tracker is now being used not only on GNOME, the N900 and N9, but is also being used on the Jolla Phone. On top a software developer for several car brands, Pelagicore, claims to be using it with custom made ontologies; SerNet told us they are integrating Tracker for use as search engine backend for Apple OS X SMB clients and last year Tracker integration with Netatalk was done by NetAFP. Other hardware companies have approached the team about integrating the software with their products. In this presentation I’d like to highlight the difficulties those companies encountered and how the project deals with them, dependencies to get a minimal system up and running cleanly, recent things the upstream team is working on and I’d like to propose some future ideas.

Link on fosdem.org

I’ve been a loyal pidgin user for a long time, and for the last couple of years it’s sat somewhat uncomfortably on the Ubuntu desktop. Obviously, Empathy became the default IM client a while back, but the more troublesome part, for me, has been Unity dropping support for the well established system tray icon specification in favour of their own Application Indicators. Ignoring the relative merits of the standards, and the questionable claim that you can unilaterally deprecate a widely used standard, Ubuntu has been good at providing indicator replacements for all the tray icons I care about, with one notable exception – Pidgin. Rather than providing a pidgin icon, they instead provided integration with the central messaging indicator. While this is a fine aspiration, I find the messaging indicator a very poor replacement – it doesn’t offer reasonable behaviour for showing and hiding pidgin and has problems dismissing new message notifications.

Initially, it was possible to turn on the system tray compatibility function in Unity with a simple dconf setting, but in 13.04, this was changed so that it would only work for java, and nothing else. In turn, this led to the creation of ppas for 13.04 and 13.10 to provide patched versions of Unity with the general purpose system tray restored (a one line change, apparently). I’ve been running with that for a while, but I didn’t want to swim upstream on this issue forever, so I decided to write a pidgin plugin that provides a proper indicator, with the same menu and behaviour as the tray icon.

It turned out to be an interesting exercise – creating indicators is extremely simple – all credit where it’s due – with the main challenge being building the menu without reinventing a wheel that’s already present inside pidgin. The pidgin tray icon (docklet is the internal name) is not a plugin, although there is a partial concept of different providers. Unfortunately, the interface can’t be used to drive an indicator as it assumes it can show the menu itself, while indicators require the menu be shown by the indicator. Ultimately, I had to copy the docklet code into my plugin to make the necessary modifications.

It would be possible to modify the docklet interface in pidgin to allow for an indicator provider with minimal impact on the existing providers, but I wanted to offer a working solution without requiring a newer version of pidgin, never mind the complexities of feeding changes upstream, etc. But, there’s an aspirational project there.

So, without further ado, I’d like to offer to all the stubborn people who want pidgin to work they way it always used to in Unity.

At some point I’ll get around to producing a deb for it, but just source for now.

Enjoy!