A few weeks back I had the opportunity to attend the MonkeySpace conference.

For all of you that missed it, I highly recommend planning on attending it next year.  If you did miss it, this year is not completely lost as the awesome folks over at Monkey Square are planning on making the videos of the sessions available at some future date.

I had a great time meeting some awesome people and attending some great sessions.  There are several really exciting technologies out there that are worth following discussed at the conference.

Here is a bit of a recap of some of the sessions that I attended.

First, The top secret keynote that Miguel De Icaza delivered.  The major topic was the release of Mono 3.0 and the future of the ecosystem.  Some of the really cool features of Mono 3.0 is full c# 5.0, System.Net.Http, TPL DataFlow, Code Contracts, entity framework, razor, asp.net mvc 4, F# 3.0, and 64bit support on OS X.  The 3.0 release is very exciting not to mention lots of ‘lameness’ will be going away with the new async stuff.  There are also improvements to sgen the new garbage collection system in Mono that should help improve performance.  Mono is seeing a lot of success in the gaming side of the market as well.  Some other areas that will receive focus are code analysis, bug finding, and profiling tools.  In the next year Xamarin expects to deliver new MonoTouch and Mono for Android versions based on 3.0.  Very exciting stuff!!!

Second, ServiceStack.  This was a very full session and I was lucky to find a spot to stand in at the back of the room.  Sadly this meant that I missed parts of this presentation, but definitely plan to look more seriously into it once I get the chance as a replacement for wcf.  Hopefully the video comes out sooner than later for this one!

Third, GitHub.  Phil Haack did a great job presenting on GitHub and the awesomeness that it is.  I had seen some of it before, but really like seeing the command line style interface that is built into the web interface in action.  He also did a demo of the API that is available and there were some really cool things in there.  I’m very interested in the possibility to integrate pull requests into some Continuous Integration system.  It would be cool to know right away if the pull request would break the build or not.

Fourth, Vernacular.  Aaron Bockover, now a Xamarin employee, was great enough to post his slides here.  If you are working on a project that is targeting multiple platforms and need it to support multiple locales then this is definitely a project you need to check out.  Very promising!

Fifth, Mobile Development with C#(book).  Greg Shackles is definitely someone to follow and watch in this market segment.  He has been doing some great work including writing a book about it.  If you are considering writing a mobile app that is targeting multiple platforms I definitely recommend picking up this book.

Sixth, Effective MonoDevelop.  Michael Hutchinson is an awesome developer that has contributed a great deal to the MonoDevelop project.  His blog has some great tips that makes using MonoDevelop even better.  It is definitely worth the read.

 

Apart from all of the sessions there was plenty of time to hang out with some rockstars in the Mono community.  It is always great to chat with them in person and get feedback on questions and problems.  I am definitely looking forward to next year’s conference!  Keep up the great work!

 

Introduction

A few days after  the openSUSE conference is over, it is the right moment to write my report.

For me it was the first openSUSE Conference which i attended to. It was the first time that i was surrounded by hundred of Geekos during 4 days and interacted with people from the openSUSE Community , SUSE  other distribution and other FOSS projects as well. People from openSUSE , Gentoo , Ubuntu , Fedora have been there to collaborate, make a presentation , discuss about FOSS and at the end of the day have a beer (pivo, in Czech). So what did i do during the oSC2012?

What did i do

First of all , at Day Zero, the whole Greek community went to the Venue so as to help with the setup up and explore the Venue as well. It is a truth that i I was amazed by the infrastructure, the coordination and the high level of education provided by the University. I had the opportunity to get into a laboratory and  saw that the students do make their own experiments there. At the end of the day we drunk a couple of beers and personally  discussed with the Spanish spoken guys. We had fun by expressing our ideas and interact with people who live far away from European continental .

Actually the first day i  helped at the registration desk  by giving swag ,all the necessary staff and piece of information to the recently (or not) registered attendees. By the second day and until the end of the conference i worked at the Social Media team with Kostas Koudaras and Jos Poortvliet. Our goal was to spread to the social media (twitter,google+,facebook) the presentations,talks,workshops and what was going on during the conference. In that way people who attended to the conference were up-to-date for what is going on and people who didn’t attend had  also the opportunity to enjoy the conference by watching the live streaming. Finally i did translate some of the tweets in Spanish , so the Spanish spoken people be up-to-date as well.

Presentations-Attendance

Apart from what did i do , i attended to some presentations. So here i list the presentations:

1) Agustin Benito Bethencourt: SME as target for GNU/Linux distributions

2) Jos Poortvliet: openSUSE Around the World

3) Lightning talks

4) Prof. Joe Doupnik: A complete server to assist charities

5) openSUSE Project meeting

6) Izabel Valverde: The openSUSE Travel Support Program

7) Kostas Koudaras: Ambassadors 2.0

8) Michal Hrušecký: Whats new in openSUSE Connect

9) Kostas Koudaras: oSC13 The Spirit and the City

I admit that i would like to attend the following presentations but finally it wasn’t possible :

1) Henne Vogelsang: Building RPMs for starters…

2) Stephan Kulow: Packaging of perl/python/ruby/java

My presentation

Apart from attending at some presentations i did make my own. Actually my presentation was related to my failure  in GSOC 2012 with openSUSE Project. I explained to the crowd [ok i admit i was a bit nervous , it was my first presentation in an international conference] who am i , which are my plans and encouraged people to participate at the next Google Summer of Code with openSUSE Project. Finally i mentioned that what a failure does mean and what doesn’t mean in that case. My presentation  is available here.

Interaction-Feedback

In my opinion it’s very important to interact with people during a conference. Apart from the presentations you gain experience, you discuss with other people about an idea that you have in common. So my interaction was :

a) Met people from Latin America (Sebastian, Axel) and discuss with them about the community there.

b) Met Baltasar Ortega who owns the kdeblog.com and become collaborator of the blog. Now my spanish posts  appear also at kdeblog.com

c) Discussed with my mentor of GSOC 2012 about my next steps at the project

d) Discuss about participation of openSUSE Project @ LinuxCon with Jos Poortvliet and met Ralf Flaxa as well

d) My openSUSE Member application was accepted. Also i became member of openSUSE Member Officials Team

e) Met Ramon Roca and discuss with him about his project

f) Joined the conference by another point of view : as a volunteer who worked on a group.

g) Beers,beers,beers

Conclusion

According to some people, FOSS conferences are dominated by corporate representatives promoting their products.I disagree with that  because in my point of view FOSS conference are dominated by participants , volunteers , FOSS communities and FOSS companies. The main point is the interaction between all of these parts .

See you at the next openSUSE Conference!

As some of you might have noticed I’ve created a repo on GitHub for F-Spot under the mono umbrella – F-Spot on GitHub!

I have left the repository on git.gnome.org/f-spot and will try to sync up changes in master regularly. I’d like to thank the awesome GNOME project for hosting F-Spot and want to be clear that I have absolutely no plans of dropping GNOME support in F-Spot nor diminish F-Spot’s GNOME integration in the future. On the contrary, as the .NET bindings for the GNOME  3  platform are improving I expect to be working on further GNOME integration for F-Spot.

The goal in moving F-Spot over to GitHub is purely for the benefit of its development technically as well as to breath new life into the project through the wider GitHub community and feature set.  Github provides several really cool features, one of the features that I’m looking forward to taking advantages of is the pull request system.

Currently, contributors will typically clone a repository, create a patch that fixes some bug, file that bug in Bugzilla and attach the patch, which then sit and wait in the hope that the developers will notice the bug and accept the patch.  What seems to happen with projects, particularly F-Spot, is those bugs will sit there and bit rot.  Either someone will come alone, see the bug and possibly rebase the patch against git master or it’ll be forgotten until it’s no longer valid.  The pull request interface isn’t some silver bullet, but I see it making the process much simpler and much more discoverable for both patch contributors and maintainers alike.

With the GitHub system, it’s really simpler for any user to come along and fork F-Spot.  Once forked they can fix a bug and do a pull request.  At this point there is a nice list of pull requests or shame list (a list of all the patches I haven’t addressed yet!).  There are some other features such as issue tracking and a built-in wiki that comes with GitHub which I’m not sure if it will get used, but time will tell.

Another goal I have for the project is to port it over to OS X and Windows.  GitHub has a nice client for both platforms as well as conveying the idea that F-Spot is intended to be cross-platform application with GNOME support more clearly than being on GNOME’s git does.

I hope everyone will appreciate this new workflow and will enjoy the improvements that are to come in F-Spot.  I’m excited to continue development on F-Spot and look forward to the future of such an awesome photo management.

Finally got around to find time to write a bit about my attendance of the openSUSE Conference 2012 in Prague.

Overall I found it a quite successful event even when I could think of a few improvements for next time.  I’ve attended quite some talks during the days and also helped recording some of them. But to me the most important thing was to meet and talk to people. Since openSUSE 11.4 is going to go Evergreen very soon there were quite some discussions including two related BOFs and a maintenance hands-on with Marcus from the SUSE Maintenance team as we are planning to use OBS’ maintenance features for the upcoming 11.4.

What I missed was a bit more space to meet and hack a bit. Both venues were a bit short on seats outside of the talks or BOF rooms. But congratulations for a pretty stable wifi network during the conference. I missed it at the hotel though

Apart from that I’ve met some new (to me) people and missed some other community members including some from the board which is a bit unfortunate for the main community event but still there were many good conversations.

Special thanks to Petr from SUSE showing us the city and helping me to find my hotel when I arrived (and everything else) and also the openSUSE travel support program which was sponsoring my travel to the conference.

I’m looking forward to next year’s conference and hope I can attend there as well again.

Although the release of openSUSE 12.3 is yet to come, the people of the openSUSE community contributing to KDE are already at work to bring the best possible KDE experience for the new release.

One of the changes that started off already is the development of a new Plasma theme and color scheme. Based on the original Produkt theme, it has been adapted to be better integrated with openSUSE’s customary green:

[caption id=“attachment_1003” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot4.png) Widget view[/caption]

[]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot1.png)

Aside from general changes, theming has also been extended to the new logout dialog from the next release of the KDE Workspace (4.10) which will be in openSUSE, and to the logout screen:

[caption id=“attachment_1002” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot3.png) Lock dialog[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_1001” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot2.png) Logout dialog[/caption]

Last but not least, the theme extends to the alt-F2 launcher (KRunner) and to the system tray (shown is the new QML system tray from Plasma Workspace 4.10):

[caption id=“attachment_1006” align=“aligncenter” width=“175”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot7.png) System tray[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_1005” align=“aligncenter” width=“253”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot6.png) KRunner view[/caption]

Don’t forget that everything is a work in progress.

This theme is the result of the hard work of the following people:

• shumski

• Raymond “tittiatcoke” Wooninck

• Alin M Elena

Thanks also go to Melissa Adkins for reviewing the theme from a graphics design point of view.

After my post yesterday on getting openSUSE on the new ARM Chromebook, a lot of interest was generated with discussions on various forms of media – heck I even got Slashdotted (thanks :-) ). I read some but not all of them and even the comments. One thing popped out to me, and I feel I need to clarify some things. Whilst I do indeed work for ARM, my device was a private purchase and not provided to me by my employer.

I was lucky enough to get into work today to have a lovely package waiting for me, a shiny new ARM powered Chromebook! o/ I ordered it specifically to have a good mobile ARM development platform. So after having used the bundled ChromeOS for the first half of the day I decided it was time to get this machine’s Geeko on. Thankfully one of the Google employed developers , Olof Johansson, was kind enough to post his steps to get Linux on the machine.

I spent the last weekend in Prague at the openSUSE conference 2012. It was a great opportunity to visit the wonderful city of Prague and meet old friends from the openSUSE community and get a bit more involved into openSUSE again.

I gave a talk about ownCloud on Saturday where I tried to show some technical details. That could have gone even deeper was the feedback some people gave me so I promise to show more of for example app development next time. Apart from that (and apart from the fact that laptops, projectors and Linux still do not play well) the talk went ok and was well received.

The conference is a joint conference of actually four conferences: The openSUSE Conference, the Czech Linux Days, the Gentoo Summit and the SUSE Labs Conference. Over the weekend it was hosted at the Czech technical university of prague and that was a great venue. Very inspiring that over the whole foyer of the building intersting art sculptures were shown. Unusual for a technical faculty but a great thing. The building is modern and large enough for all the talks and workshops but as a result of that it was sometimes a bit difficult to keep the overview where happens what. Especially because the start- and end times of the talks were not kept in sync over the tracks.

I found it is a different atmosphere on the event compared to the openSUSE conferences of the last years which might have been more focussed around the openSUSE project. This one felt more like an general FOSS event. That is not bad, just different, and since change is obvious and good I look forward to seeing how this influences the openSUSE project in the near future.

I like to thank all involved on the organizing teams for their successful hard work, have a lot of fun for the next two days, I had a lot during the last two days :)