GUADEC Flatpak contest

I will be presenting a lightning talk during this year's GUADEC, and running a contest related to what I will be presenting.

Contest

To enter the contest, you will need to create a Flatpak for a piece of software that hasn't been flatpak'ed up to now (application, runtime or extension), hosted in a public repository.

You will have to send me an email about the location of that repository.

I will choose a winner amongst the participants, on the eve of the lightning talks, depending on, but not limited to, the difficulty of packaging, the popularity of the software packaged and its redistributability potential.

You can find plenty of examples (and a list of already packaged applications and runtimes) on this Wiki page.

Prize

A piece of hardware that you can use to replicate my presentation (or to replicate my attempts at a presentation, depending ;). You will need to be present during my presentation at GUADEC to claim your prize.

Good luck to one and all!

Blog backlog, Post 1, Emoji

Short version

dnf copr enable hadess/emoji
dnf update cairo
dnf install eosrei-emojione-fonts 

Long version

A little while ago, I was reading this article, called "Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕?", which said, and I reluctantly quote: "[...] and I don’t know what Linux does, but it’s probably black and white and who cares [...]".

Well. I care. And you probably do as well if your pizza slice above is black and white.

So I set out to check on the status of Behdad Esfahbod (or just "Behdad" as we know him)'s patches to add colour font support to cairo, which he presented at GUADEC in Strasbourg Gothenburg. It adds support for the "bitmap in font" as Android does, and as freetype supports.

It kind of worked, and Matthias Clasen reworked the patches a few times, completing the support. This is probably not the code that will be worked on and will land in cairo, but it's a good enough base for people interested in contributing to use.

After that, we needed something to display using that feature. We ended up using the same font recommended in this article, the Emoji One font.

There's still plenty to be done to support emojis, even after the cairo support is merged. We'd need a way to input emojis (maybe Lalo Martins is listening), and support in a lot of toolkits other than GNOME (Firefox only supports the SVG-in-OTF format, WebKit, Chrome, LibreOffice don't seem to know about colour fonts either).

You can find more information about design interests in GNOME around Emoji on the Wiki.

Update: Behdad's presentation was in Gothenburg, not Strasbourg. You can also see the video on YouTube.

Post-GUADEC

• If you have an orientation sensor in your laptop that works under Windows 8, this tool might be of interest to you.
• Mattias will use that code as a base to add Compass support to Geoclue (you're on the hook!)
• I've made a hack to load games metadata using Grilo and Lua plugins (everything looks like nail when you have a hammer ;)
• I've replaced a Linux phone full of binary blobs by another Linux phone full of binary blobs
• I believe David Herrmann missed out on asking for a VT, and getting something nice in return.
• Cosimo will be writing some more animations for me! (and possibly for himself)
• I now know more about core dumps and stack traces than I would want to, but far less than I probably will in the future.
• Get Andrea to approve Timm Bädert's git account so he can move Corebird to GNOME. Don't forget to try out Charles, Timm!
• My team won FreeFA, and it's not even why I'm smiling ;)
• The cathedral has two towers!

Unfortunately for GUADEC guests, Bretzel Airlines opened its new (and first) shop on Friday, the last days of the BoFs.

(Lovely city, great job from Alexandre, Nathalie, Marc and all the volunteers, I'm sure I'll find excuses to come back :)

GUADEC[1] Hardware giveaway

I'm cleaning up my hardware chest, and giving away some hardware to a good home. I intend on travelling with those that I found a new home for at GUADEC. All of them are in good working condition. If there is a charger or power supply, it will be a UK one.

Drop me a mail with your intended usage (preferably GNOME or kernel related), or need some more info about the devices.

Up for grabs

Palm Pilot Tungsten E2

The predecessor to all your new-fangled smartphones. This one could even do Bluetooth syncing using gnome-pilot, all those years ago. Might be nice as a remote control of some sort, or legacy support for Pilots.

D-Link DIR-615 Wi-Fi N router

Works with DD-WRT. Would be great to work with DD-WRT or associated on a way to configure those through a GNOME UI à-la Airport base stations.

HP iPaq 914

Euro plug. Apparently this can't run Linux... Yet!

DXR3 card

Offload your MPEG2 decoding to this PCI card.

iPod Touch 2G

Too old to run any recent iOS, but good enough to show off your web apps skills, or work on Notes sync with IMAP servers.

Broadcom Crystal HD mini-PCIE 70015 and 70012

2 video decoder cards usable with Linux. You'd need to port the GStreamer plugin to GStreamer 1.0 to get those (or one of those at least).

Plantronics and Motorola Bluetooth headsets

Not the newest devices, but they work.

Red Hat branded power adapter

USB to Nokia/Motorola with this retractable extension lead.

On their way to a good home [2]

Logitech MX 5000 pack and diNovo keyboard

Space-age mouse and keyboard set. Benjamin Tissoires will be getting the (now not so much space age as grubby and outdated) pack to hopefully implement HID++ 1.0 in the kernel.

The diNovo keyboard is a nice little Bluetooth keyboard for a media PC or the likes, even has the tiniest of trackpads.

Logitech 9000, PS3 Eye and Creative OV511-based webcams

Hans de Goede will get those to make them work out-of-the-box in Fedora, and upstream, trying to clean up some hacks he gave me for those a long time ago.

No-name USB GPS dongle and Tom-Tom Bluetooth GPS

For Zeeshan, just in case he gets bored implementing geoclue2.

Nokia N82 and Palm Centro

For Dan Williams. ModemManager's testing gear is growing.

Belkin G and Dell 1450 Wi-Fi USB dongles

Giovanni and Jasper will enjoy those Wi-Fi dongles that will create bugs in gnome-shell's network menu and the new aggregate menu.

[1]: Or near enough for some of the items :)

[2]: I made my pre-selection based on the possible uses for the hardware.

Did somebody say "FreeFA"?

Little birdy tells me that we're playing football again this year, so don't forget to sign up!

Desktop Summit all done

Like a large number of Desktop Summit attendees, I made my way back home shortly after the end of the conference. I will spare you the details of my schedule, and will share a few things of note.

Hackfests

As I attended one of those recently, I did a presentation about them for the Advisory Board on Tuesday. The things to come out of the discussions that followed is that we would want more reporting in some cases, even post-hackfest if the network access isn't good enough, or there are loose items (filing bugs, long-term goals definitions, etc.).

This help our AdBoard members, the Friends of GNOME contributors, the community, as well as the hackfest sponsors, know how the hackfest helped the project.

Seeing as we were in a shared event with KDE, I would also like to note that if you want to work on lower levels of the stack, such as hardware enablement, or features that can be shared as standards through FreeDesktop.org, talk to the board about organising a Hackfest.

Presentations

My presentation about tablets (and not sofas) went past. I'll know for next time that antihistamines don't make for a clear mind, but if you were present and I missed a particular subject you were interested in, don't hesitate to contact me.

During the conference, Nohemi fixed a number of the bugs I reported through her mentor, and my tablet can now be booted with the on-screen keyboard enabled by default.

I also prepared a presentation for the Advisory Board meeting that ties in to the above subjects, which generated a fair bit of discussion, but this will require reporting separately.

Miscellaneous

• They have high towers and holes in Berlin
• I'm a sucker for a bratwurst, and had the best kebab of my life
• Museum Island is impressive
• I was in the winning team at FreeFA, though people say we had too many Brazilian full-backs on our team.
• Kay knows how to make a rose from a napkin

See you all next time in A Coruña!

Update: No dots in "A Coruña".

Old skool GNOME

Some of us were discussing olden UIs during this year's GUADEC, including the original Totem UI. Searching through my old files, I found some interesting screenshots.

That includes an early version of Soundbox, the predecessor to Rhythmbox (it was later renamed to Rhythmbox as the name Soundbox was already used by some piece of software).

CDDB-enabled, incredible

Also of interest, abc, the audio-CD burner equivalent of sound-juicer, a bonobo-ised version of Rhythmbox, early versions of Vanity (my Cheese-before-Cheese webcam tool), and instructions on how to flash my netBook (click the link, you'll be surprised).

And a screenshot of Totem circa June 2002 (the first public release was in July 2002).

Totem with the original interface designed by task-pooper man

Bad Bastien

I forgot to mention in all my previous blog entries that my accommodation at GUADEC was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Thanks guys!

GUADEC slides

Got back from GUADEC on Saturday, and spent most of the week-end recovering. Probably a good thing, as I have loads of things on my TODO list, for either the Board, GNOME or Fedora.

Geoclue talk

As per usual when I make slides, I end up going through them quickly, but the Q&A session was long enough for me to go into more details.

Bluetooth talk

No slides, for a change. I hope the videos will be available online soon.

10th GUADEC

Made it to the venue today, and am currently enjoying my 10th GUADEC. I'm still behind jrb :)

My first GNOME Foundation board meeting

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in my first GNOME Foundation Board meeting. As you'll soon see (when the meeting minutes are published), I might have opened my mouth a bit too often as I ended up with 5 separate action items :)

With my holidays behind me, I've been able to knock a couple of those items from my list, and I'll try and use this last day to catch up on the rest of them.

I'll be flying in to GUADEC tomorrow morning, probably spending the day doing some tourism, as Sunday is our first face-to-face Board meeting of the new crew.

GUADEC digits

Have you been to 8, 9, 10 GUADECs?

Let us know! We're still looking for a GNOMie with a perfect attendance.

GCDS: Discrimination by accent

My level of Spanish being what it is, and my accent being what it is, my cab ride to Las Palmas cost me some €60 from the airport, and that's after the cabbie switched off the meter...

Apparently, the «Catalina Park» apartments booked by the nice people at the GNOME Foundation, have a namesake near Playa de Inglés.


From top to bottom: where I wanted to go, where I was, where I ended up (locations provided «by ear», do not try to replicate at home). Yippee!



FreeFA

In other news the FreeFA tournament is going to happen next Thursday, from 15:00 to 17:00. I'll put the details onto the Wiki when I can remember my password.

FreeFA '09

If you're interested in joining in for some «Futbol» at GCDS, add your name to the list on the Wiki, and bring your shoes/shinpads/other bits of kit.

We don't have a date and time settled for it yet, so make sure you check the schedule when at the conference.

As every year, if you don't bring shinpads and you break your leg in two, you'll have little sympathy.

Re: The anti-schwag movement

I'm glad people like the idea we had for GUADEC 2007, and to see it reused for other confs.

Put your hands up for the tripes!

I love this city! (Tu-de-de-de-tu-tu-tuTu-de-de-de-tu-tu-tu)

Awesome (fist pump!) picture of Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque at sunset coming soon. Tourists haven't had their breakfasts yet, so they're not in any piccies.

Attention FreeFA Players!

Tomorrow, outside the Uni main entrance, at 4 o'clock. A bus will be waiting, don't forget to bring your stuff!

PS: I bribed Dieguito, and Micke is on my team. We're gonna rock!

More than a game: GUADEC FreeFA tourney!

The FreeFA tournament will take place again this year, on Tuesday 8th July. We still have room for a couple of people. Seems like keeping it low-key wasn't enough to get it under-subscribed.

Diego will soon be taking care of setting up the teams. There might be some room left for a couple of people to join, in case we get late cancellations, so please add your name and contacts to the wiki page if you're interested.

Some work updates

Got back to work on Monday, and got a few things done.

I uploaded the videos Thos made available back in December. They're all easily findable.

In December as well, we (Red Hat) provided Matt Davey with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm. And he committed the patches to gnome-pilot SVN trunk a few days later, getting Bluetooth sync support to the Palm (with a UI, I wrote the pilot-sync code ;). Yay!

Instructions for Fedora here.

GUADEC vids

Before I'm leaving for France tomorrow, just wanted to let you know that, after Thomas uploaded the GUADEC 2007 videos to the FTP, I uploaded them to Google Video, the OGG-friendly video site using their automated upload tool. Thanks to IcedTea, I didn't have to go scouring the net for random Java bits.


Watch my fave video and follow the "same user" links on there to see the GUADEC vids.