GUADEC has been going on for a few days already, but it is far from over. This is a short post to make some noise about some upcoming BoFs & hackfests that might not receive as much publicity as the rest of the stuff, being outside of the “talks” track.

GNOME as an OS

As announced in our “A bright future for GNOME” talk Juanjo and myself will chair a BoF to talk about the future of GNOME. If you want to get things done and want our project to keep kicking ass for another 15 years (at least!) please come and talk with us next Monday 30th from 10AM, Room 2.1a. We intend to make this BoF productive, constructive and as little bikeshed-y as possible, your cooperation will be welcome!

Epiphany & WebKit hackfest

The might Epiphany and WebKit GNOME hackers will meet again in Room 2.1a on Tuesday 31st to hack, hack and hack. I have already committed to move the all-new Overview forward with Claudio, review the amazing new documentation submitted by Pierre-Yives Luiten, work with William on Data Sync or keep going on recently started secret projects. Some people have already approached me asking for various Ephy-related things (bug triaging, random bugs they want to see fixed), be there if you want to help!

Third day of GUADEC already. And in Coruña!

This is a very special city for me.

I came here in 1996 to study Computer Science. Here I discovered UNIX for the first time, and spent hours learning how to use it. It’s funny to see now those old UNIX servers being displayed in a small museum in the auditorium where the main track takes place.

It was also here where I learnt about free software, installed my first Debian system, helped creating the local LUG and met the awesome people that founded Igalia with me. Then we went international, but our headquarters and many of our people are still here so I guess we can still call this home.

So, needless to say, we are very happy to have GUADEC here this time.

I hope you all are enjoying the conference as much as we are. I’m quite satisfied with how it’s been going so far, the local team has done a good job organising everything and taking care of lots of details to make the life of all attendees easier. I especially want to stress all the effort put into the network infrastructure, one of the best that I remember in a GUADEC conference.

At Igalia we’ve been very busy lately. We’re putting lots of effort in making WebKit better, but our work is not limited to that. Our talks this year show some of the things we’ve been doing:

• A bright future for GNOME.
• WebKitGTK+: current status and roadmap.
• Web to the core.
• OCRFeeder – OCR made easy on GNOME.
• Grilo: present and future.
• GNOME 3 accessibility: State of the Union.
• Skeltrack: A Free Software library for skeleton tracking.
• Sketching interactions.
• Sandbox all the pipelines!.
• Web application stores in GNOME.

We are also coordinating 4 BOFs (a11y, GNOME OS, WebKit and Grilo) and hosted a UX hackfest in our offices before the conference.

And we have a booth next to the info desk where you can get some merchandising and see our interactivity demos.

In case you missed the conference this year, all talks are being recorded and the videos are expected to be published really soon (before the end of the conference).

So enjoy the remaining days of GUADEC, and enjoy Coruña!

And of course if you’re staying after the conference and want to know more about the city or about Galicia, don’t hesitate to ask me or anyone from the local team, we’ll be glad to help you.

Jolla clarifies position on "developer mode" after misinterpretation of interview comments

A mistranslation of a Finnish interview of Jolla's CEO Jussi Hurmola resulted in a great deal of FUD last week, when comments about Jolla's market positioning were taken to mean that Jolla devices would be locked down, with customers unable to flash the device or replace the kernel. Most of the furor stemmed from a SlashGear report on the IBTimes article that extrapolated from the translated comments a bit farther than was likely justified, claiming that Jolla planned "to lock down its MeeGo phone." The original IBTimes article has since been updated with clarifications from a Jolla spokesperson: "There were a couple of quotes from Jussi Hurmola about the product. I think they were translated from Finnish to English and misunderstood, or then the developer edition was left out. [...] We are however planning on creating a development version of the phone for open source community, those interested in Linux and open systems and for partners. [...] Jolla is going to release a developer edition of the device which gives full access to linux hackers and technology enthusiasts. Jolla will fully support the communities and be part of them, and wants them to be part of creating and developing our device. [...]"

Council logs for meeting on July 13th, 2012

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

Attending: Woody14619, Estel_, SD69, Ivgalvez, ZogG, rzr, NielDK, StsKeeps

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):

• Review and progress with bylaws
• Infrastructure discussion
• AI review, other topics.

Pre meeting (old business):

• Thanks to SD69 and Ivan for the followups to X-Fade and Qgil.
• We should request e-mails to Council go to the group ML (council@maemo.org)

Topic 1 (Review and progress with bylaws)

• The review on the mailing list is going well.
• Items from the mailing list should be folded and and presented as a blog post, to start the discussion on TMO.
• SD69 takes the item to retouch with suggestions and post as a blog item.
• ZogG notes a topic change and announcement on IRC may be in order.
• There is a concern for how final approval of new group should occur.
• General agreement is toward approval of bylaws in concurrent with electing first board, depending on the the variety or nature of branches (if any) after discussion.
• Thoughts on using the Wiki to house working copy of bylaws in discussed.
• Estel takes the item to put bylaws on wiki and monitor edits.
• Tabled until more input is forthcoming from further review (on TMO?)

Topic 2 (Infrastructure discussion)

• A request has been made to X-Fade about which services can be admined by Council or a subcommittee setup for maintenance.  The end goal being to lighten the load on X-Fade and allow faster access for the community when problems arise.

Topic 3 (Misc items)

• Zogg proposes using a more robust logging bot in #maemo-meeting, for topics, etc.

Post meeting discussions:

• A general discussion about OBS, QTCreator and Jolla. (separate topics)
• Estel announces (via link post) his resignation from Council

Action Items:
SD69 to retouch bylaws and post as a blog entry for review by full community
Estel (now Woody14619?) will post bylaws to wiki for markup and review edits
Woody14619 to follow up with IRC topic links and announcements once blog/wiki are up

Wow, something I think I would not see, but GUADEC is happening less than 3km from home in less than a week!

I have collaborated in organizing the Lightning Talks and BoFs/Hackfests and of course, I’ll help wherever I can. Poor Zeenix will be at my place so he will need to wake up early to come with me and my wife Laura to the faculty.

I also want to thank Igalia for sponsoring me with time to help organizing and attending the event and I might be also helping the Advisory Board meeting that will happen at Igalia headquarters on the 25th.

Back again with a new release, the 0.0.3, of Applications Fullscreener and Automatic Skype Launcher.

Just download and install them in your N8x0 for making it become a good 24/7 Skype phone. For more information about the goals and features of this project you can check the previous post Extending the life of your N8x0: Automatic Skype Launcher.

I took the chance to update also the artwork used in these two applications. First thing, I created a Tango-ized version of the Skype logo.

Then, I used the previous magnificent art works from Andreas Nilsson and Jakub Steiner to create the new icons, and these are the result:

Anyway, going to the actual changes.

The most important change for Applications Fullscreener is:

• There was a second bash helper to launch a certain application and send the fullscreen key event some time afterwards. It was not fully featured but now it is.

You can, also, check the complete ChangeLog for Applications Fullscreener.

The most important changes for Automatic Skype Launcher are:

• The Automatic Skype Launcher service was not stopping when uninstalled. Now this is corrected.
• The init service was not starting correctly in some scenarios due to some uninitialized variables. This has been corrected.
• In the previous version, I added an alarm triggered by the alarmd daemon to restart Skype (and the service). This was not working always. Now, killing Skype is forced.

You can, also, check the complete ChangeLog for Automatic Skype Launcher.

That’s it. Comments and patches are welcomed!

Draft bylaws for non-profit entity to take over Maemo infrastructure

In a proposal on the Maemo Community mailing list, RM Bauer details a draft bylaw to change the maemo.org infrastructure that is currently provided by Nokia to a non-profit entity possibly to be named the Hildon Foundation. "In order to continue the community at www.maemo.org in the future, it will be necessary to migrate much of the infrastructure and associated elements to a new site and to establish a separate entity for that purpose. See generally http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=84933. The attached bylaws are proposed for discussion. Please note that this is primarily a legal document and this is not the appropriate place to discuss many of the issues associated with the actual migration of the community." Time will tell how the idea is received and how the obstacles will be navigated.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Draft bylaws for non-profit entity to take over Maemo infrastructure
2. Applications
   • Open source video editor for Harmattan from Collabora
   • Unlocking landscape use of Harmattan built-in apps
   • Enable traffic updates in N9 Drive app
   • New version of Shutdown compatible with N9 PR1.3 now available
3. Development
   • Harmattan repository for open-mode/Inception-requiring packages
4. Community
   • How should the community around Jolla look?
5. Devices
   • Nokia officially announces PR1.3 for N9
6. In the Wild
   • Interview with Jussi Hurmola, CEO of Jolla