Fer's blog

Xara LX source code has been released under the GPL!. They claim great perfomance of their drawing engine: 2x compared to Microsoft GDI+ and 4x with cairo 1.0. They have release nice docs too. Altough the graphic engine (CDraw) source code has not yet been released “Xara intends to release these under the same license as the remainder of the Xara LX program”. So great news.

Woops, I didn’t forget it….Here we are again! New GNOME, new party! Tomorrow GNOME 2.14 will be launched with lot of new features and improvements, so kudos to all developers and people that made this possible!. Now to celebreate it let’s party tomorrow or during the weekend. To organize or join a local Release party visit the Gnome214Party wiki page.

A long time ago, my friend Ismael asked me for pubs and clubs for going out at night during a Hipalinux congress, so I updated a guide I wrote several years ago for my friends in Madrid. Ismael published this guide as Madrid de Noche. As google love open source freaks this guide became popular in google, and as my email address was on top of it I got lot of emails for people interested on Madrid night life: people just visiting Madrid, people making company parties, DJs from Argentina looking for a new job in Madrid, etc… I have touhght several times to make a cool portal/personal web page about this stuff but I have been really busy last years. Maybe now it’s time to do it. In the meantime I got an email from a pub I used to go often asking me to update the guide Ismael published to link to their web site. So here is it:
Phobia
Also I’m back from my long trip to Buenos Aires, Uruguay and Lisbon.

Thanks to the great Olav we have XML-RPC on GNOME bugzilla (testing version). So I finally committed to an experimental branch the new bug-buddy “less is more”:

• No more application/product/component selection
• No more long descriptions
• No more mostfreq stuff
• No more gdb pages
• No more save report
• No more sendmail at all

Just catch the crash, get the info and send it. The remaining issues are:

• Should we ask the user what was he doing during the crash? (Windows and other reporting tools are not doing it)
• Should we ask email address to the user?

Click on the image below to see a gif-screencast of it in action:

Ross: Maybe you want:

gst-launch-0.10 v4lsrc ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=352,height=288 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! tee ! xvimagesink tee0. ! theoraenc quality=8 ! oggmux ! filesink location=test.ogg

magic GStreamer pipeline to view and record webcam feeds. I’m playing a bit with GStreamer to make a stupid webcam application for taking funny pictures with deformation effects (like those you can see in a “House of Mirrors” or apple’s isight):

Currently I have only the main skeleton for multiplexing video and appliying custom filters to it. I have ported lens effect from effectv to gst and parametrized it little bit. Lot of fun to hack on optical and math stuff.

Two weeks ago, kernel developer Arjan van de Ven posted on lkm a hypothetical doomsday scenario:Linux in a binary world. He talks about propietary drivers and about ABI/API compatiblity for kernel drivers. But what about the present and open source users?. Now, my story:
I have a friend whose brother forced him to use only Free Software at home (Linux, and some BSD flavours), that I think that it’s good. He is a non-tech user, and he wants just to use his webcam with his friends over MSN. So with some help from other people he was able to install aMSN from the CVS. But his webcam still didn’t work. After some more help, and poking with lsusb, finally he got the USB Vendor and product ID of his webcam, and google for it. It was a Logitech Messenger one, that his distro didn’t support. So more google until Logitech Quickcam QC-USB driver for Linux was found. There you can see more than 14 diffrents projects with drivers for wild webcams listed by USB Vendor/ID. Get the right one after browsing a little bit, download the driver, configure it, install it, insert it, change /dev/video1 perms, and get it working on aMSN. Of course my friend needed help from a “very advanced user”.
So the people in the kernel land is arguing against API/ABI compatibility to avoid vendors making closed source drivers… but they are hurting a lot to users and developers of Free Drivers (update your driver code with each kernel version, update your driver with every kernel update…). That ideal world of all drivers included on the kernel sources is not real: it isn’t for those webcams and it isn’t for my rt2* wireless card. The only fix then I can see for this hardware problem is in the (cross)distro side:

• Create a Linux Drivers portal for all of these non-in-kernel drivers
• Set up an sandboxed infrastructure to compile each registerd driver against each registered kernel and package it
• Modify hotplug and hadware detection tools from distros to be smart enough to ask the package manager (apt, yum, …) for hardware support: “I got this hw id… which package is providing a driver for it?
• Make every package manager smart enough to query this Linux Drivers repository to get the drivers and Warn the user that he is going to use a non-standard driver, non-supported or commercial one

Plug and play?

‘Mi bella Princesa, your funny little dwarf will never dance again. It is a pity, for he is so ugly that he might have made the King smile.’

‘But why will he not dance again?’ asked the Infanta, laughing.

‘Because his heart is broken,’ answered the Chamberlain.

And the Infanta frowned, and her dainty rose-leaf lips curled in pretty disdain. ‘For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts,’ she cried, and she ran out into the garden.

Oscar Wilde, The birthday of the infanta
Source: Gutenberg Project, A House of Pomegranates, by Oscar Wilde

I’m excited about fon: a nationwide semi-public WiFi network. The model is simple but brilliant:Everyone “subscribed” to fon (foneros) has an AP running an special software sharing its DSL connection. If you are sharing your connection for free you are a Linus and you can use any fon connection for free. If you want to get money for sharing your connection you are a Gates. Who is going to pay to Gates?aliens: non fon-people (usually tourists) that want a WiFi connection is a pre-paid way. The man behind this idea (and the company making this possible) is Martin Varsavsky, founder of two of the most important and innovative companies in Spain in the last years: Jazztel and ya.com. They are building this (AP and network infrastructure) upon Free Software (do you remember that Linksys WRT54G with Linux? 🙂 ). I’m going to be a Linus in fon, but what will be my main usage of fon network? My new nokia 770!!!. As I have connection at home (like every user in fon) I’ll be very insterested on connecting “outside”: a bar, waiting the bus, just checking cinema timetables in the street, etc… Conclusion:

• Killer service for the nokia 770: fon
• Killer gadget for fon: nokia 770

Another interesting point about fon is the way they are doing marketing: blogs.

In the other hand, I’m sick again. I always get sick on holydays (all saints this time). last year I went with some friends to Granada for some sky action and spend those 5 days of hollydays on bed. This time I’ve missed an opera I was very interested: Janacek’s Z Mrtveho Domu at Teatro Real

Lot of users are doing a forced migration to Linux / Free Software. That is because that is the preinstaled OS on their computers at school/work . That’s ok, but why a home user, non-techie would say I am going to install this free software instead of my propietary OS?. The new software should make then happier than the current one to migrate.

An example of migration because more features is hotmail –> gmail migration. People just got more features from the google mail than from hotmail, and some of them went for the new one. But this hasn’t been a massive migration

Also a migration because of less features or you-have-to-pay now to get usual features can happen. For example gaydar is popular gay contact web service. But recently they are charging money for putting on-line nude pictures, so people started to move from it to another services offering the same features for free.

Now take a free (as beer) application as an example: IM. Most users around the world are using MSN, Yahoo or AOL. The users don’t care about “systems” behind the application. They don’t mind about MSNP9, jabber, nexus or whatever. If they are going to consider a moving, they would ask these questions:

• Can I talk with all my current friends
• Would I be able to do every thing I’m used to do?
• Would I get any new benefit from this migration?

So what’s the right approach for a new application? First, answer a big yes to the two first questions, then try to offer something better for the 3rd. So the way for Gaim or google talk to get users should be:

• for the first time show an assistant importing previous user account/network
• Show his contacts as before, with all previous features, ofering full compatibility
• Offer the user the posibility of create a new more-featured account
• Invite users from the old accounts to get this new fancy client with more features