I recently added initial support for real time collaboration in fontforge. This was followed by the wonderful fortune of presenting the work at the Libre Graphics Meeting last week. Having collab in fontforge allows you to create and edit glyphs and have other fontforge instances in the collab session see your changes in (near) real time. There is also support for python scripting, so you can have one fontforge instance be a headless scripted one which continually creates new ttf files as you edit a font. Using collab with scripts like this allows for possibilities which didn't exist. For example, the ttf generation can take time, and doing it each time an edit is made in the fontforge process that is editing a glyph would be too slow. Even saving the font to SFD/UFO each edit so you can fork() and create the ttf would be too slow. The Collab support is needed to allow the user experience of editing glyphs not to bog down.
I'm now working out what I'll be hacking on next. If you are looking for a C/C++ programmer with a Bachelors, Masters, and PhD on computer science to do some hacking feel free to contact me. I own the gmail and sf.net email addresses associated with this blog.
I've hacked on Abiword, Calligra, some fringe EFL stuff, fontforge (as one already knows from the top of this post), and many other contributions here and there. My main for fun project is libferris, a metadata handling virtual filesystem with index and search capabilities.
Planet maemo
There will be a Board meeting at 14:00 UTC on Friday, April 19. The meeting will be a public conference (video/audio/chat) held on www.concert-oh.com (registration required).
I've been working full time on my Android workstation for over a month now, and it is time to write an update about it. How has it worked out?
There have been some unfortunate rumors and efforts going on with respect to the Hildon Foundation Council. This post will hopefully clarify the current official status of Hildon Foundation Council and Maemo Community Council.
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Hildon Foundation Council calls elections for Council and Board
The current council's term is coming to an end, which makes it time for another round of elections to be called. In addition to the council election, the council is looking to call elections for the Hildon Foundation Board given that the current board is occupied only by appointed directors. Council chair Alexander Kozhevnikov announced the election timeline and rational last week: "As many of you are aware, the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors has come to be filled with all unelected Directors."
"There has been some significant desire to have a reelection take place once the infrastructure migration issues were settled."
"[...]"
"It is the position of this Council, that this Council was always intended to count as the Hildon Foundation Council. And thus we have the authority to trigger both elections simultaneously."
"Furthermore, even besides this point, a careful consideration of the Bylaws and the timings of the resignations and appointments of Directors from the Board, indicates that an election should have already been triggered by the Bylaws themselves."
"[...]"
"Thus, we hereby announce the elections for both the Hildon Foundation Board and the Council."
Nominations for the board and council are open, so if you have an interest in running for one of these positions, or know someone you'd like to see run, send an email to the community mailing list at maemo-community@maemo.org.
Read more (talk.maemo.org)Read more (maemo.org)
In this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Hildon Foundation Council calls elections for Council and Board
- Applications
- Dark theme for stock Twitter client with additional features
- Development
- SDK for Sailfish OS now available for Windows and Mac alongside Linux
iPad is three years old now, and many tech blogs are writing stories to reflect what has changed. More than 100 million of them have been sold, alongside other popular tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7. But originally the reception was quite sceptical.
I’ve bought a Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook, model NP530U3C-A08IT to be exact, and Italian version. Its a 13″ laptop, 1,5kg with a 128Gb SSD disk. I received with it another 120 Gb SSD disk, which I have used to install Debian Wheezy, keeping the original disk with a never booted Windows 8 apart. It is [...]
Hi Everyone,
It’s been a while since my last update (over a month!) so it’s a good time to talk about what’s been going on.
Firstly, GVFS 1.16 is out – so that’s the first stable release with the MTP backend in it. w00t!
Before you wonder, it doesn’t include my work to support the Android Direct I/O extensions (that allow normal read/write access to files on the device). I’ve now got those to a point where I’m ready to get them in, but I’m waiting on a review in bugzilla. Since my last update, all the libmtp changes have been merged and released in version 1.1.16.
The second big thing I’ve done is completely change how mtp URIs work. In previous posts, I’ve talked about how I was putting entity IDs as path elements to save having to maintain an ID->filename mapping, and then relying on the gvfs display and copy name properties to make the files appear to have normal names when looked at. I ultimately decided to abandon this approach for a couple of reasons. The main one is that with Direct I/O support, every application that can operate on files can be used with an MTP device, and most of those apps don’t know anything about gvfs and can’t use the special properties. The second reason is that there are edge cases where it’s impossible to tell if you’re looking at a filename that’s all numbers or an entity ID. So, I’ve added a mapping system and URIs now use filenames.
Finally, I’ve fixed a bug in gvfs that only got triggered when unmounting an mtp device in Ubuntu 13.04 betas. The code in question hasn’t changed in gvfs for a long time, but the bug didn’t appear anywhere else. Still, there is a real code problem in there, so I’ve got a fix out for it.
I’ve updated my with builds that contain all these pending patches (although the raring gvfs got updated while mine was building so it’s now considered out-of-date) and the new libmtp, so please try the new stuff out.
For the curious, here are the GNOME bugzilla entries tracking these changes:
- Add support for Android direct I/O extensions
- Implement filename cache to enable name based URIs
- gvfsmonitor.c: backend_died needs to take a ref while unsubscribing subscribers
Enjoy!
As mentioned before, we are creating an Open Source department that will focus on key open source technologies. The Open Source department is in Silicon Valley - as part of my Advanced Software Platform organization in Samsung Research America.But there is also an office in London, UK - as part of Samsung European Research Institute (with a smaller satellite office in Helsinki, Finland). So if you are also living in those countries and want to be in contact with those guys, you can also send us your CV and we will channel them to the relevant offices.We are hiring sw developers on the following: Linux Kernel, Webkit, jQuery, Android, Hadoop, Tizen, EFL, FFMpeg, Gstreamer, LLVM, Cassandra, Cloudstack, HBase, U-boot, WEbinos, Openstack, Chromium OS, Lighttpd, Linaro, Cairo, Node.js, Wayland, and Xen. This is not an exhaustive list, this list will grow and we are potentially interested in any open source project that might move the needle - so there is no harm in contacting us anyway - if only to chat.We will support the option to work remotely depending on your personal situation and we are also trying to build some core team here in Silicon Valley.So if you are currently involved in any of these projects/technologies (or similar/related projects) as a contributor, committer, reviewer, maintainer, etc., and enjoy collaborating with the global community of open source developers, you can contact us by going through the site or sending me your CV directly.That is the gist of it – if you want more details (about the content of the job, the requirements, etc…), go to http://careers.us.samsung.com/, enter as location San Jose and as keyword: open source.Thanks
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Proposed referendum to tidy up Community Council election process before change in scope
When the Hildon Foundation was formed the by-laws provided for a Hildon Foundation Council to replace the Maemo Community Council, as an interface with Nokia is no longer needed. The stated intention of the primary author of the by-laws, Craig Woodward, was that the Maemo Community Council would transition directly into the Hildon Foundation Council and that these were not two separate councils, but a change primarily in name. There has been some disagreement on this point from certain community members, who hold the opinion that the Maemo Community Council has no authority over the Hildon Foundation since it is not the Hildon Foundation Council.