New beginning
I guess it is time to announce that since yesterday I am working at Collabora, a UK-based company very well known for its work in several free software projects, like Telepathy, Farstream, GStreamer and others.
Haven’t had much time really to transition (and relax) from Canonical to Collabora, apart from last week, which I spent skiing, but hey, new year, new life, as we say in Spain, so the sooner you start with your new life, the better.
Leaving Canonical
Today marks the beginning of my last week at Canonical, where I’ve been working for the last 2.5 years. Because of the conflicts between the direction the company is driving to and my personal interests (GNOME), I have decided it is time for me to move on.
Since I am a positive person, I would just remember the good things of these 2.5 years, which have been, mainly, the nice people I’ve been working with, with a special mention to the Ubuntu Desktop team, composed of very great people. Also, some good projects I’ve worked on, like the Ubuntu One music store or the work at the Desktop team.
I can’t say yet publically where I’ll be working next, but I’ll continue being around GNOME.
Fix PDFs hack
I recently bought a new ebook reader (Wolder miBuk ALFA 7.0 Color) because my previous one was very bad at reading comics. It looked really great in the shop, but as soon as I copied my entired e-book collection to a memory card and inserted it on the reader, I found its 1st problem: it doesn’t have the option to display the books collection by file name, but it gets the PDF metadata and uses that. So, since lots of my books didn’t have correct metadata, it was very hard to find books in the library view.
But thanks to the help of Carlos García Campos (famous Evince/poppler hacker), I cooked up a patch for Poppler to add API to be able to set the metadata, and, right after that, wrote a very simple GTK program to allow me to “fix” my ebook collection.
The Poppler patch is still not ready to be pushed upstream (my fault, lack of time in the last couple of weeks, but will fix it soon), but posting this now just in case it is useful for someone.
Unofficial GNOME3 on Ubuntu PPA
A friend of mine was having problems with the GNOME3 packages in Ubuntu, and after some questioning, he told me he was using a PPA from this Launchpad team:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntugnome
The GNOME3 PPA for that team seems to be just a copy of the official GNOME3 PPA, but just in case, this is a public announcement to let people know that they shouldn’t use that PPA (unless they really want to, of course), but use the official one instead, which is at:
https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/gnome3
That is, the official team is the gnome3-team, so please make sure to check your sources.list if you really want to use the official one.
Internet hoaxes
As the number of my computer-illiterate friends that get an email address grows and grows, the number of mails containing hoaxes that I receive from them increases every day (things like “please forward this mail or the child would die”, “this music group helps financing a terrorist group”, “Mars will be as big in the sky as the moon”, etc). So, yesterday I got one about a restaurant charging 250€ instead of 2.50€ for the recipe of some cookies, giving the name of a real restaurant in Spain. Yolanda did a quick search for that restaurant and found a forum where people were complaining about that, and where one (clever) person pointed everyone to a page explaining the same hoax (word by word) for some restaurant in the US.
So yeah, a typical Internet hoax, you would say, but if I’m blogging about it is because I wondered yesterday what the purpose of these hoaxes is. Is it really just making fun of people? sociological studies? or using this for a revenge against a restaurant/shop/etc? There are clear cases, where you are asked to keep all people in the CC when answering, which seem, to me, related to getting email addresses for spammers, but all these hoaxes where people are just asked to forward the mail to their friends, what’s the purpose of them?
Please ask quick, as I couldn’t sleep last night because of this existential doubt 
Another thing for further study would be how is it that so many people believe those hoaxes, but I’ll leave that for another time…
GNOME3 on Ubuntu
I already blogged about this some time ago but since some people keep asking, I’d thought about giving it more publicity.
So, in case you don’t know, next Ubuntu version won’t ship GNOME 3, but we have been working in the last few months on providing GNOME 3 packages for anyone interested in running GNOME 3 on Ubuntu. The packages are in the GNOME 3 PPA, and although it still doesn’t include everything GNOME 3ish, it includes the stuff that has changed the most, like the new control center, gnome-shell and other core desktop things and some applications. Thanks to Allan Day, here are some instructions on how to use a PPA.
It still misses lots of apps and some core desktop things, like gnome-session, but should be ready for daily usage (using it myself on my systems).
You can report any problem you find on the PPA via the GNOME 3 team mailing list or directly to me, as you like.
“GNOME 3″ on Ubuntu
With the great work from Robert Ancell and Sebastien Bacher, who worked on packaging the new GLib/GTK3 stack, and with the recent packaging of a few GNOME 3 applications (eog, Nautilus, the new control center, …), you can start testing what will be GNOME 3 on Ubuntu (Natty) by using this PPA.
Please note that this is a work very much in progress, which means that, apart from the usual problems of running unstable software, it’s got the unstability of new packages added, so please USE WITH CARE. I would suggest to use a virtual machine for testing this, but please test it and report any problems you might find. It seems to be running ok for me (on a virtual machine), but please don’t risk your every day desktop
Ubuntu One SyncDaemon API
Ubuntu One’s SyncDaemon (the process that takes care of synchronizing your files between the cloud and the desktop) has a DBus interface for applications to control and get notifications from it about what it is doing. This interface was being used in the Nautilus plugin and other desktop tools contained in ubuntuone-client itself. Even though powerful and straightforward, we haven’t seen many applications using it, since usually 3rd party applications don’t want to be dealing with the low level DBus API themselves.
But this is now history, since I introduce you to libsyncdaemon, a GObject wrapper on top of the DBus API which makes it very easy to communicate with SyncDaemon, as well as improving a lot the performance compared to accessing the DBus API directly (thanks to its use of caches, to avoid DBus calls repeating when no needed) and containing high level functions that would allow applications to, for instance, publish a file on Ubuntu One with just one call:
SyncdaemonDaemon *daemon = syncdaemon_daemon_new ();
syncdaemon_daemon_publish_file (daemon, "/home/user/myphoto.jpg");
But before you run to another place after seeing this C code, note that it includes bindings for many languages (Python, JavaScript, etc) for free, thanks to gobject-introspection. So, the same code in Python, for instance, would be:
daemon = Syncdaemon.Daemon ()
daemon.publish_file ("/home/user/myphoto.jpg")
So now, the next step is to start adding support for sharing/publishing files in Ubuntu One to many desktop applications, like, for instance (ideas stolen from Stuart Langridge):
This, along with the already existing desktop APIs (desktopcouch, couchdb-glib, libubuntuone), makes integration of 3rd party applications into Ubuntu One a very easy thing.
Facebook account disabled
Last night, I was writing a message to a friend’s wall on Facebook, about telescopes, and when submitting the message, I got a message saying that the content of my message had been reported to be abusive by some Facebook users ?? After that, I couldn’t log in back again, it just said my account was disabled.
So, if you rely on Facebook for contacting me, please don’t, send me mail, which is still enabled, and even allows all sorts of abusive content (you can write me about telescopes if you want, no ultra-paranoid filters there ).
I already wrote to the Facebook staff about the issue, but I’m not sure what they will decide.
Google Wave invitations
I’ve got several Google Wave invitations to hand out, so if you want one, send me an email (you should know my email address if you’re my friend 
).
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
