2 años en 250 palabras.

Casi dos años desde mi última entrada! Hasta el agregador mas paciente de RSS habrá marcado este blog como inactivo (y con razón).

No es que no hayan pasado cosas. Tendría que haberlas comentado en su momento, pero como no lo hice, aquí va un resumen basado en lo primero que me viene a la cabeza y orden pseudo cronológico.

1. Mi afición al cine creció y se multiplicó. Además de ver películas empecé a leer libros sobre cine y a jugar con una camara y un programa de edición. Nada memorable que pueda enseñar, pero creo que es un nivel más de cinefília. No falté a las Berlinales del 2012 y 2013 (2012 fue especialmente buena). Netflix llegó a Finlandia y fuí refinando el home cinema. Mis buenos propósitos de bloguear sobre películas se quedaron en nada.

2. Meego se acabó. Meses de oscuridad. Yo me quedé en Nokia en el único departamento que parecía hacer algo interesante (CTO) y no me arrepiento en absoluto. Veáse punto 4.

3. Ahora soy un hombre casado. Desde hace poco Reetta tiene su propio blog, donde habla de lo que anuncio en el punto 4.

4. Nos mudamos a California. Transfer interno de Nokia a la oficina de Sunnyvale en el Silicon Valley. Llegamos hace una semana y todavía estamos en el alojamiento temporal. Intentaremos vivir en San Francisco y yo usaré el tren para venir a trabajar.

También hubo libros, viajes, amigos, momentos buenos y malos… y más que vendra. Con un poco de suerte hablaré más de ello por aquí.

Meego Tampere summit

Tomorrow I go to the Meego Summit FI in Tampere. I will talk there about Tracker, as usual, but this time sharing happily the stage with Adrien Bustany.

The plan is to talk about what Tracker does NOW in a very pragmatical way, explain the limits we have hit, and give a hint on the more or less experimental ideas we have for the future. Less philosophy, less history and much more pragmatic information, compared with my previous talks. Believe or not, I won’t mention “RDF” or “ontology” at all.

Tracker is nowadays ready to use, and Meego (even if it is only for 1.2) will be the first environment where all its potential can be shown with real information. Combine this with QML and pyside (python bindings) and everything is in place to write very easily surprising applications.

A la Berlinale 2010

Otro año más a la Berlinale. Mañana vuelo a Berlin, y durante una semana solo me preocuparé de: amigos, cerveza, kebaps, comida vietnamita, vino a precios razonables, un concierto de Paco de Lucia (Miércoles), otro de Victor Luque (Sábado) y librerias (nuevo y segunda mano) a cascoporro.

Cine? Ah! si! alguna pelicula también caerá.

Zeitgeist hackfest

Zeitgeist is an “event logger”. It registers the activity of the user on the desktop, what documents uses, when, while talking with who, combined with what… and then different UIs can consume this data to show a Journal of activity, a better relevance in the searches, related documents to the one you are working on and [write your own cool idea here].

Tracker and Zeitgeist are complementary projects: Tracker knows the documents, Zeitgeist knows the activities. We (tracker developers) have been talking with Zeitgeist developers before and have a common understanding about the big picture. Now is time to start fixing details, and I’ll be next week in the Zeitgeist hackfest to work on that.

By the way, with some patience and fixing few details, Zeitgeist and Tracker 0.7 can be installed in maemo5. Catching few events here and there, zeitgeist can grab some basic informacion, and somebody could write a Journal home-screen applet, like the call log, but about all kind of activities/documents… Quite an interesting project.

Encuentro Linux 2009 – GNOME Day

Back in Helsinki after attending last week, sponsored by GNOME Foundation, to the Encuentro Linux 2009 in Valparaiso, Chile. My original plan was to talk about Tracker in the dedicated GNOME Day; but from the very first day it was clear that the people was very curious about maemo5 and specially the n900, so i decided to talk more about this. I recognize that makes me feel very proud to show an N900 and hear a WOW and see amazed faces.

So, the first talk (in an informal event between organizers and speakers) was about the N900 and some Q&A about it and maemo5. The people were mainly linux enthusiast, so lots of good questions about how to develop on it and the technology involved.

The first of the official talks (during the GNOME day) was about maemo5, what is it, relation with the desktop and how to contribute. I explained also one of the coolest things in maemo (IMHO): all the extras-devel/extras-testing/extras process. Your pet-application (or not so pet when you spend hours and hours on it) can easily reach a lot of users in few clicks. Well, few clicks on your side, and few more on the community side.

The second and last talk was about Tracker. The usual introduction to the basic concepts, and a couple of demos. I was happy to show that using tracker you can get “The last blog post of the user who sent me this song”. Sounds like a lab example, but it mixes RSS, contacts, files and activity, and you can easily see a plugin in totem using this.

About the event itself, the audience was more on the university side of life and people using free software in their companies/work; so a lot of curiosity for new projects and general conversation about open source. There were some people looking for a place to contribute in GNOME; I gave them few hints how to do it via tracker (e.g. writing plugins to Eye of GNOME), so let see if we get fresh blood in the community.

Finally, i want to say thanks to the organizers there, from Encuentro Linux and GNOME Day. They made everything easy, treated me really great, showed me a little bit of Chile and made me feel really warmly welcome. Thanks, guys!

Encuentro Linux 2009 – Chile

Otra vez al aeropuerto. Voy a Chile al Encuentro Linux en Valparaiso/Viña del mar, donde daré dos presentaciones. Una general sobre tracker para todos los publicos:que es, para que sirve, que se puede y que no hacer con el, y como creemos que encaja en GNOME; y otra técnica explicando como implementamos esas ideas, explicando las palabras malditas (ontologias, RDF, Sparql….).

Para que las 20 horas de viaje cundan, estaré tambien unos dias de turisteo por alli. A ver que tal es el otro extremo del mundo.

Maemo summit 2009 & Tracker

Tomorrow in the afternoon i flight to Amsterdam for the Maemo Summit 2009. On saturday i’ll talk about Tracker in a shared session with Iridian.  I’ll give big overview about the recently released 0.7 and its role in Harmattan, and he will present our brand new library to use Tracker in QT-based programs: libqttracker.

We have only 25 minutes and too much to explain. If you are curious about Tracker, what can it does (and what not), how to use it in your application, or how you application can get advantage of it, you have 3 regular contributors (Iridian,  Philip , and me) in the conference; feel free to come and talk with us. We are always happy to explain to the world what this triplets, ontologies, RDF mess is all about.

Back from GCDS

Back in Helsinki, after a week in Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. This year it was great, and i enjoyed it a lot probably because i am more involved in the community.

It was a pretty active week, starting with my talk on Sunday in the cross-desktop track (slides). I explained there what did we do in tracker 0.6 , and what do we plan for tracker 0.7. This can be interesting for maemo-fans, as far as tracker 0.6.9x is the version available in Fremantle, and 0.7 is in the roadmap for Harmattan.

During the week, i was talking with some of the Zeitgeist project people. In few words, Zeitgeist will monitor and store the activity of the user, analyze it and extract relations between documents, applications, tags, etc. (E.G. “every time i edit doc1, i read webpage2”). Tracker has already the information about documents and applications, so instead of building their own database, they can set the “relations” directly into it. Zeitgeist is one of the hype projects now in GNOME and i am very happy to see Tracker participating in such an ambitious idea. [Note for hackers: if the things work fine, be ready to write a maemo UI for it!]

Taking advantage of the Akademy-GUADEC co-location, we (tracker team) also had an informal meeting with Sebastian Trueg, from the Nepomuk-KDE project. We are sharing ontologies and we agreed on how to distribute them and organize the documentation. The idea is to have a shared-desktop-ontologies package for all desktops and platforms with the nepomuk core ontologies, allowing applications to install extensions.

And finally after some parties and more talk with developers, i had another presentation in the Spanish GUADEC, explaining again tracker (slides in spanish), but this time showing the tools, code and examples.

I expect to see some results (i.e. more information into tracker from different apps) sooner than later. Stay tuned!

Vacaciones (o algo así)

Al final no se como me arreglo que “los dias para descansar” acaban siendo mas estresantes que los de oficina.

Mañana vuelo a Madrid, estare por alli una semana y luego el sabado salto a canarias al desktop summit. Allí doy dos charlas, una el domingo en el track de cross-desktop (sobre tracker en ingles), y otra el jueves en el track de GNOME hispano (sobre… !sorpresa! tracker en español).

Berlinale 2009

Para no perder la costumbre vuelvo a darme un paseo por Berlin y el festival de cine; a ver buenas películas (espero), encontrar mejores amigos (lo se) y beber cerveza alemana (inevitable).

Una semanita de vacaciones que me sabe a gloria.