Diego, el gnomo

WebKitGTK+ hackfest, day 2

December 7th, 2010 by diegoe

Another day of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest, and a couple more stuff done.

I finished my work to separate the profile migration code into a different binary, saving epiphany from a linking to NSS. Then Martin explained to Xan and myself how the points, pixels, logical sizes, etc mess works. Our conclusion was that 12 is the answer, points are responsible for lots of problems in society and that Epiphany is getting a new fonts UI.
Dan and Benjamin have been working on stress testing gio-tls with the gvfs ftp backend, or so I’ve heard. Also, Dan seems to be preparing libsoup so we can add custom protocols to browsers, that means “about:whatever” can be back.
Xan finished his oprofile support on JSC and started to work on a plugins API. The goal is to have an about:plugins page where you can disable individual plugins.
Martin has been trying to ease the life of everyone by enabling precompiled headers.
Alex and Philippe worked on updating our test runner script to be much faster and more precise, giving our more information about failing tests.
Philippe advanced his custom widget to draw “progress ranges” for buffered parts of videos, like youtube does.
Mario is still working on a really evil accessibility bug, he’s almost done I’ve heard.
Gustavo fixed a complex bug where stuff that shouldn’t disappear was going away on page loads.
Joone kept working on viewport support and the cache model
Xan and Gustavo lost in Super Smash Bros against me, a lot of times.
I lost to Gustavo and Xan in Street Fighter II, a lot of times.
Gustavo likes the word “Cave”.

We also discussed a concept for GNOME 3 t-shirts, but we are keeping that one secret.

Finally, after seeing the presentation of Chrome OS and its sandboxes concept, we decided to implement it on Epiphany, so, here it is:

Tags: epiphany, GNOME, hackfest, igalia, SANDBOXES, webkitgtk
Posted in GNOME | 2 Comments »

WebKitGTK+ hackfest, day 1

December 6th, 2010 by diegoe

Today we started the serious hacking. A lot of interesting topics are being covered:

Philippe is working on fullscreen support for HTML5 elements with some help from Benjamin.
Xan is working on easing performance analysis of JavaScriptCore.
Martin has been playing with WebGL and some early work to improve the build.
Alex fixed a leak when using CSS shadows and then spent the afternoon on a really complex graphics problem with a “blackboard moment” with Professor Otte.
Joone was working with Gustavo to get the viewport element going.
I got rid of gconf on epiphany-extensions, resurrected smart-bookmarks-on-context-menu extension, fixed a crasher on Epiphany, worked on avoiding Epiphany linking to libnss.

But the current lead of the scoreboard is Dan, who completed the first task of the week:

WebKitGTK+ hackfest: first task done. from diegoe on Vimeo.

There’s a strong feeling of “productiveness” and a lot of energy going on. We’ll see lots of progress this week!

Tags: coruña, GNOME, hackfest, webkitgtk
Posted in GNOME | 5 Comments »

WebKitGTK+ hackfest, day 0

December 5th, 2010 by diegoe

Today is the bootstrap day for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest.

Everyone is arriving today and luckily it seems no flights were delayed or cancel because of the spanish controllers strike. No flights except mine , as I already reported.

Before leaving Lima, I was talking with my fellow Igalian Martin Robinson about how cool the SquirrelFish pet is compared to less badass pets are (cough, Konky).

So, in perfect hackfest mood, I came up with this:

You can join our hackfest mood theming your wanda applet too!. Just download the image and set it on the wanda preferences. It’s 4 frames, and I suggest you to use 1 second per frame.

Update: I found a couple of bugs in the previous png, here are two new ones hopefully fixing issues (choose depending of the height of your panel):

22px24px

The wanda SquirrelFish™ theme and the current WebKitGTK+ hackfest are kindly sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, Igalia and Collabora

Tags: coruña, GNOME, hackfest, igalia, webkitgtk
Posted in GNOME | 2 Comments »

In Galicia

December 5th, 2010 by diegoe

Like a good guest of María Pita‘s town, I made it to Galicia kicking ass and crashing skulls in my way here.

Iberia sent us on a bus from Madrid, we arrived in more or less 6 hours. I’m now at the hotel.

Tags: coruña, galicia, hackfest, igalia, webkitgtk
Posted in GNOME | Comments Off

How to use jhbuild, the easy way

September 22nd, 2010 by diegoe

Inspired by André’s recent post I recalled that many people have gave me bad feedback about jhbuild. So I thought I might share some ideas and tips, here we go:

Don’t use the jhbuild shipped by your distribution, use git master
Only build what you need, buildone is your friend
Prefer distro packages when possible, ALWAYS

I want to test the latest awesome version of RupertBrowser!
jhbuild buildone rupert-browser

But… I want to have RupertBrowser from master and it requires a LibBrowser that is not in my distro!
jhbuild buildone libbrowser rupert-browser

Awesome! But it seems RupertBrowser devs have a cool branch I’d like to automatically build, I bet you can’t do that!
Edit your jhbuildrc:
branches['rupert-browser'] = (None, ‘new-cool-branch’)

No wait, but that branch requires me to use the –enable-coolness switch for configure… how do I do that?
jhbuildrc again:
module_autogenargs['rupert-browser'] = ‘–enable-coolness’

This all looks nice, would you please show me a somewhat basic jhbuildrc file anyway?
Sure, but don’t ask me to explain it all, use your bright mind or read jhbuild’s documentation, or config.py script (from jhbuild’s repo in git.gnome.org). Here it is:

# if you are a committer to git.gnome.org, this is your line
# ignore it if you are not a committer
repos['git.gnome.org'] = ‘ssh://someone@git.gnome.org/git/’

# see jhbuild’s repository for the classic modules or use a path to a custom one
moduleset = ‘gnome-2-32′

# don’t hit the internet for modules, just use what came with jhbuild
use_local_modulesets = True

# only build modules when there are new commits since the last time
build_policy = ‘updated’

# simultaneous build anyone?
makeargs = ‘-j4′

### Branches
branches['gtk+'] = (None, ‘awesome-new-stuff’)

### Checkout and install prefix
checkoutroot = ‘/home/user/gnome/’
prefix = ‘/home/user/gnome/build’

### Custom configuration
autogenargs = ‘–disable-static –disable-gtk-doc ‘
module_autogenargs['epiphany'] = autogenargs + ‘–something-magic’

### Extra env, you can set anything for the shell env here
os.environ['CFLAGS'] = ‘-g -O2′

Posted in GNOME, planetgnome, tips | 1 Comment »

Today I’m presenting some stuff about Epiphany (today @15:45), while the summary can confuse and overwhelm you, it’s actually a simple talk. It’s after Gustavo and Xan’s talk about WebKitGTK+ (“My platform is bigger than yours”, today @14:45) in the Paris room. Check the program anyway.

While you wait for it, you might want to drop by the info desk and buy a nice GNOME Free Agent t-shirt. Good stuff. You should buy one, now.

Please remember that we have a closing session in the Paris room later today around 17:00. We’ll be giving away free ponnies and -only to the first ten- rainbows. Also, you’ll have the chance to see the funny release-team banner. I heard it’s part of Lennart’s revenge.

Tags: denhaag, guadec, guadec2010
Posted in events, GNOME, guadec | Comments Off

I’m at GUADEC

July 27th, 2010 by diegoe

So I’m sick. Luckily nothing too bad, just a sore throat with an infection warning.

Last week we held GUADEC-ES in A Coruña, Galicia. It seems I got my virus there, but I’m not blaming anyone. I presented two talks which I think had a positive response from the laughing audience . It’s on my attic.

Anyway, so GUADEC core is starting tomorrow and people is already looking for vuntz to blame him of various stuff like network connectivity, weather, etc. Lennart is leading the efforts to chase him down and let the wrath of the masses unleash on him, ping him if interested.

I’m looking forward to sit down with Allan, Reinout, Xan and Gustavo to re-think the Epiphany UI/UX. Now that everyone is breaking everything, well, why not us? The meeting will be scheduled on-the-fly, keep an eye .

Tags: 2010, den haag, guadec, rain, weather-fail
Posted in GNOME, guadec, planetgnome | 1 Comment »

A Coruña

July 22nd, 2010 by diegoe

I love this place.

Tags: coruña, guadec, guadec-es, igalia
Posted in General | 1 Comment »

At Campus Party, spreading the word

June 29th, 2010 by diegoe

I left good old Lima yesterday to attend Campus Party Colombia 2010. I’m here with Germán to present a few talks on Free Software and GNOME. Big thanks go to Manuel Cerón for being the immolated soul behind the Free Software track.

Colombia is a really nice place, although a little rainy it is a comfortable weather to walk around and enjoy the city. Bogotá’s altitude is not relevant unless you are carrying your a laptop in a backpack around… oh, wait.

My first talk, about WebKitGTK+ and GNOME, was this afternoon with really good results. People had fun and felt confident to ask questions and approach me later for some extra chatting and photos. It was the one opening the Free Software track.

Tomorrow I open the day again with a talk titled “How to live creating Free Software without starving”, it’s a somewhat personal tale of how I have survived my life as a hippie hacker. Lots of lolcats and fun, guaranteed.

On Friday, Germán will present a talk titled “Who writes GNOME?”, I’m eager to see the results of his investigation. He’s also presenting it at GUADEC Hispana.

Sadly, light is really bad on the campus floor so it’s hard to take any picture. Germán has a few mugshots though. Maybe he publishes them later.

Tags: bogota, campusparty, colombia, talks, webkit
Posted in GNOME, planetgnome | Comments Off

Summer lessons

April 27th, 2010 by diegoe

Over the last few months I’ve been working for Igalia, as an intern, fixing regressions in Epiphany, which extends to WebKitGTK+ sometimes. Surely a dream job: working on my favourite projects, on a great company, surrounded by great teammates and friends.

I’m happy about it, really really happy. I love this job, totally, completely!. I’ve had the chance to learn a lot. Here I’d like to share some things I have learned so far, I look forward to post again with more ideas, but meanwhile here you have two.

Different timezones are hard

The time when I find most of the Igalia crew online is between 2am and 12pm. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t find them past 12pm, but it’s already 7pm or 8pm in Europe then. I”m on UTC-5 and Spain is on UTC+1 or (now) UTC+2.

You probably agree that asking anyone to wake up at 7am in summer is unrealistic. Luckily, Igalia doesn’t make me pass a turing test everyday at a fixed time. This rocks.

Valparaíso, Chile

I love it when people understand that a happy hacker working at midnight is better than an unhappy hacker working on a set in stone schedule. Kudos to Igalia for that.

Your code should explain and defend itself

My written expression teacher says “Your text should be good enough to explain and defend itself”. This applies to code too. I confirmed this at the expense of Xan‘s patience.

It’s a common situation: when the maintainer reviews your patch you are not around to explain it, or present the rationale you put into the change. The solution? well, simple, your patch and commit log should explain by themselves.

I saw, after realising how much ping-pong Xan and I had to play to get a patch in, that my patches lacked a harder review by myself before being posted. You have to be your first reviewer.

Be a severe judge of your patch, ask yourself if you would accept such a patch, if you would like a commit message like that, if that variable name is really good, if someone could quickly grasp what’s it all about, etc. Get into the flippy flops of the maintainer, don’t assume everything is obvious to everyone.

Tags: epiphany, hacking, igalia, tips, work
Posted in GNOME, planetdebian, planetgnome | 5 Comments »