Older blog entries for lucasr (starting at number 236)

Joining Mozilla

I’m really excited to announce that I’m joining the Mozilla folks to work on Firefox Mobile! There are several reasons why I’m excited about it, here are a few of them.

Big Challenges. All major mobile platforms have their own built-in web browser. Being a third-party browser in the mobile space means that you have to offer an extremely compelling product in order to convince users to switch. And I do believe Mozilla can make it happen. Allowing users to seamlessly go from desktop to mobile without interruption is a major step on the right direction. I’m sure more compelling features will come out.

Space for innovation. The web browsing experience on mobile devices carries much less legacy than on desktop. This means there are less barriers and constraints for innovation and a lot of space for experimentation. For instance, tablets bring a whole world of possibilities in terms of new features and interaction models for larger touchscreens.

Global, public benefit, open source. It feels good to work for a public benefit organization that is fully committed to improving the web. Mozilla is also a huge open source community. I’m sure it will be a great opportunity to meet new people and make new friends. As a long-time open source contributor, I’m eager to learn more about the Mozilla community and hopefully be able to contribute in a meaningful way.

My first day at Mozilla will only be in July as I want to take a well-deserved break between jobs to clear my head a bit before starting. It will be a good to spend more time with my girls, travel a bit, and maybe work on some of my pet projects.

Exciting times ahead!

Syndicated 2011-06-14 11:36:31 from lucasr.at.mundo

Leaving litl

After three years at litl, it’s time for me to move on. Writing a blog post to announce that you’re leaving is always a bit tricky. In this case, it’s because the experience at litl was so rich in so many ways that to it’s hard to know where start from.

Back in the beginning of 2008, I had already decided to leave the Maemo team at Nokia and started looking for my next gig. I heard about litl for the first time from OpenedHand’s Matthew. He said Havoc was working on something pretty cool there. I had started conversations with a couple of prospective employers but I thought it would be cool to talk to Havoc and get to know a bit more about the company’s plans anyway. I honestly thought it was very unlikely that litl would be my next thing mostly because I was under the impression that they were only hiring in the US.

Fast forward several weeks, I accepted an offer and started working at litl—a few months in Helsinki waiting for my UK work permit then finally in London. And I was not alone, the whole Maemo UI framework and toolkit teams—Tommi, Xan, Johan and I—got hired at the same time! Interestingly, this was not a collective move in any way. We only found out about each other’s interest in litl once we started having our first interviews. It was funny to see the rumors that were founding a Maemo-focused company of some sort.

The first two years at litl were quite intense! Each of us would be working on something totally different each week or month—cache management, webcam, photo app, contacts app, sync protocol, web browser, core UI, plugin framework, etc. All this while we were still trying to finalize the design and interaction model for the product. We finally released the litl webbook, our cloud-based computer, in November 2009. This is, by the way, long before Google actually released Chrome OS.

litl’s team is just awesome, full of extremely talented and generous people—quite a few of them are well-known for their contributions to GNOME and other F/OSS projects. Throughout those years, the team gradually grew on all fronts with people coming from Amazon, Novell, Red Hat, OLPC, US startups, and many others.

I’d like to make a special mention of a few people with whom a worked more closely since I joined. First of all, it was a great pleasure to work with Johan B. and Tommi for almost 5 years, both at Nokia and litl. I learnt a lot with them. Secondly, working with Havoc was an awesome experience. He has this huge talent for solving complex problems besides being simply a nice guy. Last but not least, I loved working with Marco. He is, with no doubt, one of the most passionate developers I’ve ever met.

A lot has changed in the company since the release of webbook. litl is now starting to explore new areas and markets. I feel that I have now ended an important career cycle and it’s time to move on to something new. All in all, I can only thank everyone at litl for the great time I had!

What I’ll be doing next? I guess that’s a topic for my next post :-)

Syndicated 2011-06-13 15:50:26 from lucasr.at.mundo

My Favourite “Tutu”

Dreyfus Night in Paris

The magic of jazz comes mainly from the fact that it’s fundamentally built around improvisation. Reinventing the same tunes over and over again is a core part of the culture among the jazz musicians. This is maybe why I find it so cool to track all the ways by which certain tunes have been performed at different gigs in various moments of jazz’s history. I talked about my favourite performance of the classic So What in a previous post. Now I’d like to talk a bit about my favourite Tutu.

Tutu was composed by the genius Marcus Miller in 1986. It was originally recorded as part of a Miles Davis’ album with same name that was all composed, arranged, and co-produced by Miller. What I find special about Tutu (the tune) is that it shares a lot of the qualities of So What by working as a sort of minimalist platform for great improvisation. The core foundation of Tutu comes from the 3-note bass line with a chord progression that provides the perfect ground for intense solos. My favourite performance of Tutu is in an album called Dreyfus Night in Paris recorded in 1994, three years after Miles’ death.

So, what makes this specific performance so cool? The personnel is fantastic: Marcus Miller (bass), Michel Petrucciani (piano), Kenny Garrett (sax), Bireli Lagrene (guitar), and Lenny White (drums). White and Garret have played with Miles and other giants, Lagrene has a very interesting work with Pastorius, and Petrucciani is just legendary. If you haven’t heard of some of those guys, you should definitely go look for them. You won’t be disappointed!

The solos are fantastic! All of them start setting a quiet atmosphere, with sparse notes and rhythm then go into more complex rhythmic and melodic explorations until reaching a climax with high-pitched notes full of energy. Garret’s dissonant arpeggios are overwhelmingly cool. Lagrene brings in a highly melodic solo full of tempo-bending riffs. Petrucciani has such a Hancockian precision in his solo that it almost feels like he’s composing a new tune while improving. Finally, Miller turns his bass into a percussion instrument while still playing the bass line.

So, in summary, Tutu in Dreyfus Night in Paris is 16 minutes of pure energy with remarkable solos. Other people have positively reviewed this album before—good reads if you want to know a bit more about the album.

Syndicated 2011-06-05 22:38:31 from lucasr.at.mundo

The Board 0.1.3

The Board 0.1.3

Time for a new development snapshot release of The Board! I’ve just uploaded the 0.1.3 tarball. Get it while it’s hot! So, what are user-visible changes?

The main feature of this release is the webcam support in photo elements with Cheese. It’s fun, it’s magic! A couple of useful key shortcuts were added: Ctrl+N to add a new page and Delete key to remove selected elements. An important crasher fix—caused by an update in gobject-introspection—is also included.

I should be updating The Board’s PPA with the new release in the next days. Other distros should have updated packages soon. The sad news is that the webcam support will not be available on Natty as it doesn’t ship Cheese 3.0. Everything else should work fine.

What’s next? I will be working on the implementation of a storage layer based on Tracker and a few important UI improvements. On other news, I’ll be giving a talk about The Board in the next Desktop Summit. Yay!

Syndicated 2011-04-28 21:10:58 from lucasr.at.mundo

Moving to Fedora

After many years using Ubuntu as my primary distro, I’m now moving to Fedora. I’ve installed F15 Beta on my personal laptop during this long weekend and spent a few hours getting my development environment back together. I have a few reasons for moving to Fedora.

Ubuntu and GNOME 3. Ubuntu now has an uncertain user story for GNOME 3. They will provide a PPA for Natty with GNOME 3 but it pretty much comflicts with the official packages. Not ideal as I just want GNOME 3 out of the box.

GNOME 3 full time. So far, I’ve tried GNOME 3 on the live images and while doing GNOME releases but never used it for longer than a few days. I wanted to start using it full time as soon as possible and Fedora provides exactly that.

Red Hat and upstream. I have always had great respect for the big contributions that the Red Hat guys give to GNOME and other upstream projects. I want to support them in a more concrete way.

Out of comfort zone. I’ve recently decided to do a few things to get me out of my comfort zone. Changing distros is one of them. It’s not a big deal really—at least for me anyway—but it’s a step on a not-so-comfortable direction. I’ll surely learn a few things on the way.

Except for the apparently broken Eclipse in F15—couldn’t get the Android ADT plugin to install—and a few glitches and rough edges here and there, the experience has been quite good so far.

Syndicated 2011-04-25 11:27:50 from lucasr.at.mundo

Leaving the Release Team

Photo by Frédéric Péters

It’s been some time that I’ve kept my work on the GNOME release team to a minimum by just doing a few development releases. After some consideration, I decided that it’s a good time to leave. The awesome Colin Walters will replace me.

This is the team that set the general plan for the GNOME 3 release and I feel very proud of having been part of it. I especially remember a couple of very long conversations with my evil twin about GNOME 3 and the team discussions during our meetings at GUADEC and FOSDEM…

Leaving the release team means that I now have no official roles in GNOME anymore. I’ve left a few other positions recently—among others that I haven’t really announced. This is actually an explicit decision of mine to gradually free some of my (rare) spare time for other personal projects. You probably know one of them. But there’s probably more coming, stay tuned!

Syndicated 2011-04-17 23:22:53 from lucasr.at.mundo

GNOME 3

What a day! This is one of those rare special moments. Hard to describe. Tricky to write about. It’s when the result of the hard work of the community is finally made available to everyone! 9 years since our 2.0 release and nearly 3 years of gestation. GNOME 3 is finally here!

GNOME 3 is a new baseline for innovation for the years to come. A new user experience, a clean platform, a gorgeous website, and more. This release brings a strong refreshing feeling to the community and this is simply awesome.

Celebrate my friends! Wherever you are! GNOME 3 is an amazing achievement and we should all be very proud of it!

Syndicated 2011-04-06 21:46:23 from lucasr.at.mundo

Cheese in The Board

Cheese in The Board

I spent a few spare hours during this week to finally implement webcam support on The Board‘s photo elements. I still need to polish the design a bit but it’s pretty nice already! Click the image above to see a video demonstrating how it works.

As you can see, I haven’t shown my face on the demo video. This is because I recorded it too late today and I would definitely have to shave—yes, I’m looking like an ogre at the moment. So, I preferred to introduce the feature using one of my daughter’s favourite toys, my pet mug, and my charming hands instead.

This feature was very simple to implement thanks to Cheese‘s library (libcheese) which recently received a lot of love from Luciana. Thanks to her and the Cheese team I was able to use Cheese’s functionalities in The Board with little hassle. The photos are saved on the location than the photos taken with the Cheese app. When you don’t explicitly write a caption before taking the photo, The Board gracefully defaults to a date and time caption—see third photo on the video.

This work is not in git master just yet because I need to get a few fixes in Cheese first. So, I’ve pushed the code to a remote branch for now. This feature should be available to testers soon—in the next development release. Stay tuned!

Syndicated 2011-04-04 00:07:42 from lucasr.at.mundo

The Board in the Summer

As you probably know by now, GNOME has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google’s Summer of Code 2011. Student applications period started yesterday! If you’re a student excited about GNOME, have a look at our wiki page for more information and project ideas! Application period ends on April 8.

This year I decided to mentor one project related to The Board. The idea is to implement a Tracker storage for the app. Using Tracker will allow us to implement smart searches in the app itself and expose The Board’s data to other desktop components.

So, if you’re a student looking for an interesting project to hack on as part of the Summer of Code this year, this is an exciting opportunity to work on a cool app using bleeding edge GNOME technologies (Clutter, GTK+ 3, Gjs, Tracker, etc).

Syndicated 2011-03-29 16:59:24 from lucasr.at.mundo

The Board 0.1.2

It turns out that The Board‘s distro packages were a great success! The PPA package alone has been downloaded more then 330 times in just a week. Not bad for package only available for an unreleased version of Ubuntu. And I’m not even counting the implicit testers using the GNOME 3 live image. I’ve got some useful feedback from early testers and I expect get even more from now on.

I was planning to finish some new major features before releasing 0.1.2, but a serious crash has been reported and I felt I had to respond to it quickly to avoid losing early testers. So, I give you The Board 0.1.2!

Besides the crash fix, this release contains a few nice improvements and bug fixes such as the addition of keyboard shortcuts for aligning and distributing elements on the page, more subtle window dimming when an element is activated, and proper saving when multiple elements are dragged. Major features such as Cheese integration are probably coming as part of the next release.

I’ve already pushed the updates to The Board’s PPA. If you already have it in your sources list, you should get it soon. I expect openSUSE and Fedora packages to be updated soon. If you haven’t tried The Board yet, what are you waiting for? Follow the instructions from my last blog post and start testing a few minutes!

Syndicated 2011-03-28 22:40:04 from lucasr.at.mundo