Fer's blog

I’m back in Madrid. Last 30th October I spent my last minutes in Helsinki, in the same hotel everything started. After more than one year and a half I left nokia and Finland. Reasons are mostly personal and related to quality of life, but some kind of violence and a company driven by panic modes didn’t help. I left there very good friends and awesome people, special kudos to the three letters gang: xan, tko, and mdk.

Now I’m living in the very heart of Madrid, enjoying great food, nice weather and plenty of cultural and social life. Yesterday I started a new job at Novell working in the moonlight team. I’m really excited about this great team and new technology. In an image:

This week I went insane while debugging some obscure crash in ARM + glib + logging + threads. Finding this kind of stuff on glibc scares me:

/* Atomic compare and exchange.  These sequences are not actually atomic;
   there is a race if *MEM != OLDVAL and we are preempted between the two
   swaps.  However, they are very close to atomic, and are the best that a
   pre-ARMv6 implementation can do without operating system support.
   LinuxThreads has been using these sequences for many years.  */

at least, it’s documented 🙂
On the other hand I got enough energy for some very low-level hacking and finally got DWARF2 symbols dumping for breakpad/bug-buddy minidumps! The bad news are that it’s a _ugly_ hack on top of valgrind code, trying to de-valgrinize (and bastardazing it while doing it). However it works, and should be enough for our target in GNOME for having rich backtraces coming from people without debugging symbols and enriching them in the debug server. Also the socorro server is prepared for deployment with our (GNOME) custom modifications and nice and beautiful features:

Did I hear eye-candy? transparency? No, this is just about reading the _real_ code crashing 🙂
Here are the bits:

git-clone http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/dumper.git
git-clone http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/socorro.git
git-clone http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/bug-buddy.git

Currently, if you want to test it you’d need to point bug-buddy to my home server or if you are brave enough, run your own socorro collector. Ah, I also started using git 🙂
Finally the last open issue to get all of this working are the package collectors: a simple piece of code that has to:

• Download all packages from a distro
• Check for updates and download them
• Extract binaries from those packages onto a temporal directories
• Feed those packagers to our symbolsuplier

And that’s all. I’ll probably start working on a RPM based one this week, but of course all your help is highly appreciated

Just reading planet and mailing lists these days…:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter directory refspec
git clone --no-hardlinks /tmp/gtk2-perl Gtk2-SourceView.git
git tag -f -d ${TAG}
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter Gtk2-SourceView HEAD
git reset --hard
git gc --aggressive
git prune
git-svn clone svn+ssh://username@svn.gnome.org/svn/modulename/trunk modulename
git-svn rebase
git checkout -b mybranch
git merge --squash mybranch
git-svn dcommit

Liz: clone!
Annie: filter
June: squash
Hunyak: hard tag
Velma: checkout
Mona: rebase

He had it coming
He had it coming
He only had himself to blame
If you’d have been there
If you’d have seen it
I betcha you would have done the same!

When I was child I read a lot of comics books, tons of them. I started doing my first budget managment figuring out how many monthly series I was able to afford. At that time I was mostly a Marvel fanboy, following all those series about mutants, avengers, etc… One of my favourite one was Fantastic Four. I read and re-read those comics by John Byrne and Walt Simonson. My favourite between the Four was Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic. I love his scientific approach to live and when fighting against super-villains. At that time I could never even dream about Mr. Fantastic using one of projects I have been working on as one of his gadgets/inventions:

– “Come on!, Fer! this is a product placement issue.”
– “Yeah, and superheroes don’t exist.”

Half an hour of hacking with arc. Nice clutter API, nice opt presentation toy, nice poppler-glib API and all’s done. Click on the image to view the viedeo 🙂

When these people get lunch toghether:

Things like this happens:

Epiphany with webkit-gtk. I love GUADEC

Aunque tu me has dejado en el abandono,
aunque tu has muerto todas mis ilusiones
en vez de maldecirte con justo encono
en mis sueños te colmo,
en mis sueños te colmo
de bendiciones.

Tu me quieres dejar,
yo no quiero sufrir,
contigo me voy mi santa
aunque me cueste morir.

It has been 9 months since I moved to Helsinki (con mi pequenia maleta de carton): like a pregnancy. Just listen to Tom Waits Helsinki mood song from One from heart‘s SoundTrack (am I the only one that hates the new imdb.com interface?). Complain about food, complain about people not saying hello in the lift, complain about how hard is to go out when it’s -27 Celsius degrees outside, complain about taxes. Then listen to Dalida’s cover of Besame mucho, and then to Extremoduro’s Jesucristo Garcia.

At OSSO/nokia/maemo we are doing lot of cool stuff. Finally we are moving the platform to gtk 2.10. Also our Sardine development distribution is getting more and more love (from OSSO people and from the community). Finally, in the Desktop team we are prototyping new ideas/ui/features. Click on the image to watch this video I took last Friday during our Friday Coffee demos:

I have lot of new heroes.Xan is like a detective, like Sherlock Holmes. Last week he used a new fancy tool (xtrace) to figure out why the Xserver was taking more time to render glyphs coming from pangocairo than from pangoxft. Then, this morning, Behdad, one of the most popular GNOME heroes just fixed the thing. This heroes list also includes, of course, Mr. Carl Worth (conducting the whole cairo as a perfect symphonic orchestra), Daniel Amelang (improving performance for non-FPU hw) and Pachi (Improving tessalator). Click on the image below to read Xan’s blog:

Please, stop requesting jdub to add Xan’s blog to Planet GNOME. We all know that he still needs a cool hackergotchi. Ah, tigert promised one as cool as the Alex Graveley one

Today I implemented a great idea from Federico: Helper to collect more info in bug-buddy. Just add

X-GNOME-Bugzilla-ExtraInfoScript=myscript

to you .desktop file or a

bugzilla:extra_info_script

entry in your .server file. When you application crahses bug-buddy will include the output of that script into the bug report. Some nice information that some applications would like to know:

• Totem: output of a typefind gst pipeline over the current playing media file
• gnome-volume-control: list of alsa devices
• Add your most wanted info here!

We are already telling the user that the data he is submiting could include some personal information and we are requesting him to review it, however we should never collect sensitive information as emails contents, contact lists, etc..