FOSDEM 2010: GNOME Developer Room

Who What Where When Why

The FOSDEM GNOME Developer Room is a casual get together for GNOME lovers in Europe to meet with their favourite hackers and discuss all things GNOMEy. Please let us know you're coming by adding your name to Brussels2010/Attendees. Check the FOSDEM website for more information about the main conference.

• When: February 6-7, 2008

• Where: H.1308

• Capacity: 150 seats

We will also have a GNOME booth: Brussels2010/Stand.

What can you expect to have as material

• Overhead projector (a.k.a. "beamer")
• Wireless connection
• ... need anything else ? Try asking.

(but as with any conference you make things vastly easier for yourself and organisers by having a hardcopy and providing organisers with copies of your notes wherever possible or appropriate)

Schedule

We'll be working on a call for presentation and then a schedule. Please contact ChristopheFergeau if you want to present something in the devroom!

On Saturday, we'll have the room from 13.00 to 19.00 for GNOME specific talks. On Sunday, we'll be in room H.1308 from 9.00 to 17.00 for crossdesktop talks (GNOME+KDE+XFCE)

Saturday, February 6

Reminder: on Sunday, we'll share the devroom with KDE people for talks of interest to both groups

Sunday, February 7

Presenters & their presentation

Name

Talk title

Abstract

Short Bio

Nick Papoylias

Gnome Developing Tools: High-Level Debugging and the Misha Research I.D.E.

Misha is a debug-oriented research I.D.E. developed at the Technical University of Crete and published under the GPLv3 license that introduces among other things: syntax-aware navigation, data-displaying and editing, reverse execution, debugging scripting and inter-language evaluation through the integration of its source-level debugger (gdb) with a full-fledged source parser, data visualisation tools and other free software technologies.

Misha, apart from introducing new debugging facilities (that we would also like to see and implement for Anjuta), is a great example of how new innovative widgets and programming interfaces can be implemented on top of the gtk+/pygtk libraries and the gnome platform.

Nick Papoylias holds a diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering, from the Technical University of Crete (Chania, Greece) where he developed Misha Research I.D.E. and is currently a post-graduate student at the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete (Heraklion, Greece). His interests include Programming Languages Tools and Environments, Human-Computer Interaction, Cryptography and Quantum Computing (among other things). Nick is a member of the Free Software Foundation and his favorite moto is "Free Software, needs Free Societies".

Project Site Video Presentation

Philippe Normand

Multimedia in WebKitGTK+ past/present/future

This talk would give an outline of the status of multimedia support in WebKitGTK+ thanks to GStreamer. How it was done until recently, what we improved and what we plan to work on during 2010.

Philippe Normand has worked at ENST-Bretagne (France) on home-care and domotic technologies for elderly people. He too worked on the Elisa/Moovida media-center project at Fluendo. He is also a contributor to Free Software projects, mostly in the Python language community. At Igalia he currently works on improving the HTML5 audio/video support in WebKitGTK+ with the GStreamer multimedia framework. Philippe has a Master degree in Computer Sciences.

Steve Frécinaux

Add plugins to your GNOME apps

This talk will focus on libpeas, a lib-ification of the gedit plugin's engine intended to allow adding support for plugins written in various languages (currently C, python, javascript) into gobject-based apps in a very simple and quick fashion.

Steve Frécinaux is a free software enthusiast and contributor for quite a while, and has been a long-time developer of the gedit fame, involved mostly in extensibility. He is also an occasional contributor to the GNOME project as a whole and is a quite vocal IRC user ;-). In real life, Steve is currently employed as a software engineer in BeIP, a Belgian startup contributing to free software its own way by selling open source telephony servers based on asterisk.

Richard Hughes

GNOME Color Manager: exploring the user experience and integration points for a 100% color managed desktop

GNOME Color Manager is a new project intending to make color management in the GNOME desktop "just work". In this presentation I will quickly introduce why color management is required, and also the problems introducing a color management workflow. We will compare and contrast the frameworks commonly used in OSX and Windows 7. By discussing the integration points, we will be talking to application developers and platform maintainers in order to shape the future development of GNOME Color Manager. We will also spend some time exploring the intricacies of a color management framework best suitable for GNOME, and how GNOME Color Manager can start to provide this functionality. There will be time left for questions and discussion. It is expected the audience will be moderately technically skilled, and possess a basic understanding of color management.

Richard Hughes

PackageKit one year on: what's changed, and where are we heading

PackageKit is now an established project with a team of developers, and stable front-ends to KDE and GNOME. In this presentation I'll explain what progress we've made in the last year, and what direction the projects are heading. This talk will focus on how application authors can leverage PackageKit, and what PackageKit is now allowing applications to do. We will talk about unresolved issues such as application installation, config file handling (during the transaction) and dealing with complex package management tasks in an abstract daemon.

There will be time left for questions and discussion. It is expected the audience will be technically skilled, and possess a comprehensive understanding of package management.

Tobias Mueller

GNOME Bugsquad

This Bugsquad session will be about statistics and people. While I'll show, in what shape our bug database is, I'll also explain, how to use the current infrastructure appropriately in order to manage our bugs. That includes, how to use the bugtracker, the mailinglist and our IRC channel to successfully manage bugs. We'll have a Q&A session afterwards, where we explicitly want to introduce new triagers which will be part of the new bugsquad

Tobias Mueller is a lead member of the GNOME Bugsquad for the last years and thus responsible for managing the bug database as well as the team around it. He is involved in deciding on effective policies for the bug database, actually dealing with the bugs in the database and recruiting new members who will help triaging. Besides beings a Free Software and GNOME lover, Tobias is involved in the German security research community around the Chaos Computer Club.

Joaquim Rocha

OCRFeeder

OCRFeeder is a document layout analysis and optical character recognition system that I wrote for my Master's Thesis project.

Like it says on its website, given the images it will automatically outline its contents, distinguish between what's graphics and text and perform OCR over the latter. It generates multiple formats being its main one ODT.

I think this is currently the most complete and user friendly OCR application for GNU/Linux out there and, of course, I wrote it to be used mainly with GNOME, featuring a GUI written in PyGTK and respecting, as far as I could, the GNOME User Interface Guidelines.

I would like to present how the application works on the inside, for example the page segmentation algorithm I created for it, etc.

About myself, I have been involved in Open Source projects related to mobile devices like BluePad (http://bluepad.sf.net), the port of EOG for Maemo (http://www.joaquimrocha.com/2009/07/01/eye-of-gnome-for-maemo/) and also SeriesFinale, a TV shows' tracker application for Maemo 5 (http://gitorious.org/seriesfinale); I have also been involved in OCR having implemented a plugin for DSpace (http://softwarelivre.sapo.pt/ocrd) that indexes images based on its recognized words.

Mixing pleasure with work, I am part of Igalia's mobile and desktop team (http://www.igalia.com).

Lionel Dricot & Bertrand Rousseau

Getting Things GNOME!

Getting Things GNOME! is a python todo-list manager inspired by the Getting Things Done method. GTG was first introduced during FOSDEM 2009. This talk will be a brief retrospective of one year of development and what we have learned from them. We will also cover the basis of GTG structure, have a brief look at the future and, if everybody is still not asleep, explain the first steps to contribute to GTG because, in GTG, fixing a bug is often easier than writing the bug report.

Lionel Dricot & Bertrand Rousseau are two geeks and engineers from Belgium. They share the same passion for usability and for Ju-Jutsu. They talk all the time about usability success or failure of everyday objects or about software architecture, inserting Monty Pythons quotes in nearly every sentence. Normal people often say that having both in the same room is a nightmare.

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

GUPnP & Rygel: Liberating Digital Living

GUPnP is an object-oriented C library to ease the task for writing UPnP/DLNA applications. Rygel is a collection of DLNA services built on top of GUPnP in Vala language. I will start the presentation with an introduction of both projects and how they are designed from ground-up for both desktop and mobile environments. After that I will introduce the existing and planed features. I will then introduce the plugin API of Rygel with the help of a Sample plugin, followed by a demo and Q&A session in the end.

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) is a Lead Developer at Nokia Maemo Devices in Helsinki, Finland and a GNOME developer. He started as a GStreamer plugin and application developer and got his first share of fame in the GNOME community for his video-whale project. For the past two year, he had been obsessed with UPnP/DLNA and in turn the GUPnP and Rygel projects. Thanks to Nokia, he now work full-time on Rygel and GUPnP.

Koen Martens

GUADEC 2010

This year, GUADEC will take place in The Hague, The Netherlands on July 24th-30th. In this small presentation I will introduce the venue, and ask for help organising this edition of GUADEC.

Patrick Ohly

From the SyncML Protocol to Free and Open Implementations

Data synchronization is still mostly a missing piece in the free desktop puzzle: solutions that are reliable and ready for the mythical Average User just aren't available. This talk presents the SyncML protocol, introduces the Synthesis SyncML engine (developed since 2000, open sourced 2009) and outlines how SyncEvolution is used as the synchronization solution in Moblin, GNOME and other Linux desktop systems. This is intended to be a technical talk with time for discussion. For a more end-user oriented project presentation, attend the Lightning Talk on Saturday, 18h00.

Patrick Ohly is a software engineer at Intel GmbH, Bruehl. In the past he has worked on performance analysis software for HPC clusters ("Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector") and cluster technology in general (PTP and hardware time stamping, included in Linux since 2.6.30). Since January 2009 he works for Intel's Open Source Technology on data synchronization and more specifically SyncEvolution, his spare time project since 2005.

In parallel to his work on commercial, closed source software Patrick has often contributed to free and open source software (including Evolution, mkisofs, doxygen, Roundup, gpsbabel, fcron, UAE) before he started is own SyncEvolution project. Patrick started his love/hate relationship with computers in his teens on the Commodore 64 and (more seriously) the Amiga, for which he wrote both public domain programs (DiskProtection) and shareware (MakeCD). Later he studied Computer Science in Karlsruhe and Edinburgh before working for Nero, Pallas and then Intel.

Philip Van Hoof, Rob Taylor, Roberto Guido

The Semantic Desktop, SPARQL and You!

You've probably heard about the Semantic Web and the Semantic Desktop. But what lies behind the buzzwords? Let's look together at at effective examples, running code and actual applications. Be inspired, tame the sparql beast and join the future of desktop computing!

We will demonstrate:

• "Daily Catchup", which uses Tracker to mash together feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Flickr

• Solang, a photo browser built on SPARQL

• FSter, a FUSE file system to browse files by their metadata information

• Gnome Activity Journal: see what you did when.

Presenters:

• Philip is a freelance software developer who has worked alongside Codethink Ltd on various projects. Philip began the Tinymail project. Following this, Philip went on to do consultancy work as a Linux software developer. To date, he has implemented and worked on larger projects for Nokia, Maia Scientific, Lannoo, Boehringer Ingelheim, Newtec Cy., Alstom and Alcatel-Lucent. - http://codeminded.be/

• Rob Taylor: Managing Director, Codethink Ltd - Rob has been developing software since he was just nine years old. His personal focus has always been on working with powerful middleware and frameworks with the aim of providing a far more compelling user experience. Having been educated in Mathematics and Computer Science at Cambridge University, Rob began working on embedded Linux systems back in 1999. In January of 2007 Rob founded Codethink Ltd, an Open Source consulting company that aims to Provide Genius wherever it's needed. He continues to attract like-minded individuals with a variety of specialist skills to the company with the aim of driving forward Open Source technologies and providing expert consultancy to businesses around the world.

• Roberto Guido: Working at Itsme, Roberto is a long time software developer and free-software addicted user. He offers to the Itsme team his experience in low- and high-level Unix development, his familiarity in embedded systems and security management, and a critic point of view about OpenSource technologies eligible to be integrated into the architecture….

Patrick Welche, Bengt Farre

Open Accessibility Everywhere: Software projects from AEGIS

AEGIS is a European Commission funded project to embed accessibility into mainstream software. Open source desktops have a head start with regard to accessibility, and we demonstrate some of the projects we are working on:

• A web-cam based gesture switch - smile to click a button

• A "concept coding" plugin for openoffice for symbol based communication

• Dasher - that familiar from the GNOME desktop

• Nomon - a way of selecting an x,y screen coordinate with a single switch

Patrick Welche is a researcher in the Inference Group of the University of Cambridge, and maintains dasher, an information efficient text-entry program.

Bengt Farre is a senior software architect and developer specializing in technical applications on open source platforms. Designer of concept coding framework, a semantic net connecting lexicons.

Frank Scholz

Coherence - The Digital Livingroom and beyond (sharing our media with UPnP/DLNA)

After quite some time, where our digital media was limited to dedicated devices - e.g. mp3 players - or spend an isolated life on the PCs of their owners, more and more consumer device appear on the market allowing to easily share these media files in an household (and beyond).

The protocols behind UPnP A/V and DLNA are nowadays implemented in nearly every connected Consumer Electronics device. Being it some first simple clients years ago, continuing with consoles like the PS3 and the XBox 360, media clients like the PopcornHour,... and now they can be found in amplifiers, TVs and even mobile phones from various vendors.

Using these UPnP A/V and DLNA on our computers and enabling our favourite applications to enter that world, creates a unique landscape where suddenly bridges appear between formerly isolated digital islands.

Coherence is a framework written in Python, that greatly simlifies the entry into the UPnP world. It provides numerous UPnP devices, that can instantly used to serve media-files, act as a gateway to online resources, or to expose the media-db of some application. Others enable controllable media playback for instance via GStreamer.

For applications it supplies interfaces via DBus, Rest/JSON or XML-RPC to interact with UPnP devices - e.g. browse the content of some MediaServer.

The goals of our session:

• (short) introduction to UPnP A/V
• Coherence architecture and extensibility
• demonstrating the integration and (DBus) interaction of Coherence with other applications:
  1. Amarok and kio/FileManager (KDE) - work in progress, reporting from the two sprints in 2009
  2. Rhythmbox, Totem, Nautilus, EoG and Banshee (Gnome)
  3. DVB-Daemon, Ampache, Gallery2, YaML,...

  4. YouTube, Flickr, Picassa, RadioTime,...

• provide some insight into Mirabeau, our vision of 'Personal Media Networks' (there will be a dedicated talk about this in XMPP dev room)

Frank Scholz is the founder and lead-developer of Coherence and lives in Germany. When his family grants him the time, he works on perfecting his Linux home-server integration with home-automation and home-entertainment systems.