Category: Technology

GUADEMY

A quick summary from Guademy this past weekend:

  • It’s been great to know more KDE people in Spain, since we (GNOME Spanish crowd) did just know, very well on the other hand, Antonio Larrosa, who now will not have to stand with 10s of GNOME hackers all the time and shout GNOME!! with them 🙂 All of them were great guys, and some just came recently into the KDE project thanks to Google’s summer of code. But this does not prevent them from being very passionate guys, like Rafael Fernández, with very good ideas.
  • Ismael Olea has cut his hair!!!! It took me a few seconds to recognize him. But as always, it is a pleasure to listen to his crazy ideas, some of which, if I’ve understood them correctly (Ismael is on a higher level than us mere mortals 🙂 are quite interesting for free software.
  • We need a much better Free desktop platform!! (more on this later…)

A big special thanks go to the organizers, who have done a great job, with details that only people from Galicia can have, like having all day a table with fruits, coffee, juices, organizing a great dinner, with typical Galician food and drinks (queimada, which is now an official part of everything organized in Galicia). I hope they have time enough to rest, because it has been an exhausting work for them.

OpenStreetMap

While learning more about GPS on Linux, I’ve came across OpenStreetMap, a community project to create free maps for everyone to use. Since the maps is one of the biggest problems I’ve found with my TomTom (not being up-to-date, not including almost none off-road paths, being too expensive to update, etc), I’m starting to record my routes to upload them there and help thus in the creation of the free map of the world.

I haven’t really looked yet at the details on how you edit the routes, but the theory seems quite easy:

  1. You record your routes with your GPS unit in GPX format
  2. You load that GPX file into one of the OSM editors. With this, you add information to the route you just created, like identifying streets, paths, motorways, etc
  3. You upload the resulting file to OSM and that gets included in the full map

One of the nicest things, in theory still, seems to be osmarender, which is a tool to create a SVG file out of the OSM data created with the OSM editors. This means you can create a map out of a GPS track, or, that is, create your own maps!

Right now, Britain seems to have the best coverage, Spain being just partially covered. So, while the map itself is still not too useful (at least for me), it looks a very promising project, which just needs people all over the world to contribute to the map. So, if you have a GPS unit that can record routes to GPX, please start doing so whenever you can. If you are lazy enough to not want to learn all the process, just send me the GPX files or wait until I learn and I describe the process here.

More to come as I learn more about the whole process…

GPS on Linux

I’ve recently acquired a TomTom Rider GPS device for my motorbike. While being based on Linux (that’s one of the reasons I chose the TomTom instead of others), all procedures to update it are described in the documentation as being done from Windows. And, while talking with other friends about it, they all update it via Windows (poor guys 🙂 ), so I feel a bit alone in the GPS on Linux field. I have been getting lots of docs about some tweaking by hand on the SD card, as well as some app development things, but I still feel there are lots of things my fellow Windows users do that I’m not able to do (like using GPS software on their desktops to create tracks to be uploaded to the TomTom). So, dear lazyweb, any pointers on GPS software on Linux?

Atomato mailing list

I have been doing a bad job on getting people interested in Atomato, mainly because of my lack of time for working on it. But now this is going to end, with the creation, yesterday, of the Atomato mailing list. If interested in the project, please subscribe, and if you sent me some mail in the last months about it, it would be great if you could resend it to the list once subscribed (if not, I’ll forward those mails to the list myself in a few days, once all interested people are subscribed).

Update: the web interface seems to not work at all, not even the admin interface, so the only way to subscribe to the list is to send a mail with the subject ‘subscribe’ to this address.

Talking with Microsoft

Last week I went to Tudela for a talk as part of the Semana del Software Libre organized by Fundación Dédalo. There were a few talks the previous days, which I missed them all, but on Thursday evening, it was the last debate, with 2 guys from the Microsoft camp (José Parada, Microsoft employee, and Chema Alonso, from Informatica64 and who works closely with Microsoft Spain) and 2 guys from the Free Software camp (Sergio Montoro from Knowgate, and myself). Each speaker had 20 minutes for their presentation and then 1.5 hours of debate.

José Parada talked about the new? concern about security in Microsoft, and all the things they’ve been doing for making their systems more secure. He mentioned User Account Protection and the automatic tools they use for finding exploits (not like in Free Software, where they use nothing).
Then Sergio Montoro talked about the businesses that can be made with Free Software, and then I talked about what FS represents for all users, developers, companies, public administrations (based on a presentation by the great Jesús Barahona). I tried to focus the debate on the real differences between propietary and free software, that is, the social, technological and business advantages. But then, Chema Alonso used the number of vulnerabilities argument to demonstrate that Free Software is more insecure than propietary software 🙁 Not sure if he succeeded in convincing the few people that attended the debate, since his talk was really funny and might have catched better the attention of the attendees than Sergio’s or mine. But, as I told him after the debate, it is a bit unfortunate to see the same argument over and over.

It was a pity I hadn’t prepared the “Microsoft is insecure” part of my talk, since that would have served as a good counter-argument. I didn’t think that was the argument to defend (attacking your enemy might be seen from the outside as a lack of arguments on your part) though.

I also was given a Microsoft t-shirt, which I was planning to wear in all FS-related events, but unfortunately I left it in Tudela 🙂 I’ve been also invited by Chema to visit the Microsoft offices in Madrid, on a guided tour. It might be an interesting thing, given that Chema was asking if Microsoft could create its own Linux distro (he seemed to not get the point, since he had doubts about it), so maybe I could spy a bit about their MS Linux plans 🙂

All in all, a good debate, and a pity I had to run back home after the talk, so missed the pintxos (tapas) in Tudela.

Extending the Nautilus scripts support

We all know now about Nautilus Actions, and I think people agreed, while discussing its inclusion in 2.14, on having this much better integrated into Nautilus itself. And, you know, I am in a quest to provide UNIX power to all kinds of users 🙂 So, I’ve been wondering for a few days about some ideas, which can be summarised in a mix of nautilus-actions, Automator and, of course, Nautilus.

What I’m thinking is about the Scripts menu in Nautilus context menu to provide better tools to write scripts. One, the simplest, is to create scripts directly (by allowing the user to enter a command or a full script in any language), and allowing the user the kind of tweaks nautilus-actions offers, like specifiying for which files/protocols to show the script in the menu. The other is to provide a mechanism for writing scripts like what Automator does.

In Automator, there are ‘actions’, which are just calls to AppleScript/Automator modules (and which could be calls to D-BUS services and normal commands in our case), and then there are ‘workflows’, which are combinations of actions in a specific order and with specific input parameters/sources. In our case, a XML file describing all the actions and their relationships, and an accompanying command-line tool to run those files through, could be enough for users to write scripts without even knowing a thing about programming. Experienced users could also define more actions, by just specifying commands to be run. And applications could provide even more actions, via D-BUS.

As you can see, my ideas are not still very clear, so would appreciate any opinion on how this could be done, or if it should be done at all.