Coder's Log

Like many others on planet.gnome, it seems I also don't feel like posting much on my blog any more since I post almost all major events of my life on social media (or SOME, as its for some reason now known as in Finland). To be honest, the thought usually doesn't even occur to me anymore. :( Well, anyway! Here is a brief of what's been up for the last many months: Got divorced. Yeah, not nice at all but life goes on! At least I got to keep my lovely cat. Its been almost an year (14 days less) that I moved to London. In a way it was good that I was in a new city at the time of divorce as its an opportunity to start a new life. I made some cool new friends, mostly the GNOME gang in here. London has its quirks but over all I'm pretty happy to be living here. One big issue is that most of my friends are in Finland so I miss them very much. Hopefully, in time I'll also make a lot more friends in London and also my friends from Finland will visit me too. The best thin

For those who haven't heard the news yet, I'll be joining Red Hat UK and terminating my Red Hat Ltd, Finland branch contract starting Nov 1 2013. Naturally, I'll be myself moving to London soon along with my wife and cat. I'm about to embark on a trip to Canada and US to attend Boston Montreal  and Google Summer of Code mentor summits and I'll return on Oct 22. Two days after that I fly to London to start the hunt for a decent apartment. Once I have an apartment, my wife and cat will come over as well. That's all folks.

The party turned out to be a lot more successful than I thought. I thought only a few people will show-up since there aren't that many gnomies around that I know of. We had lots of nice discussions on various topics especially the future of GNOME and Free SW in general. One of the participants was very interested in having some way to write UIs that work for both big screens and tiny screen of his Openmoko mobile phone, which turned out to be quite an interesting discussion. Taking the EXOPC running Fedora 16 with me was indeed a good idea since almost every participant wanted to see how it works. Although I had to keep telling/reminding everyone that on-screen-keyboard in gnome-shell is not exactly finished, I noticed that people were pretty much already able to use GNOME 3.2 with a touch-only interface. The biggest issue people encountered wasn't the OSK though but the bad touch-screen on the tablet. Some pictures from the event:

I am back. Had a very relaxing one week in the Finnish summer cottage. Lots of fishing and plenty of nice food to eat. Yes! there was Sauna almost everyday and yes! 'swimming in the lake naked' breaks were included. I had a crappy GPRS connection so I did some twitter ing for the past few days.

I am on a one week vacation starting from tomorrow afternoon. I'll be in a summer cottage in the middle of a forest and might not have any internet connection at all. I am taking my laptop with me, but I'll try to resist hacking. Lets see how successful I am. :)

Time flies and it's already been a few days that I am back from Istanbul. It was a lot of fun. Great presentations, discussions and hacks in the mornings and Shisha and beer in the evenings. Had lots of discussion with a lot of people about GUPnP, how it can be used for UPnP integration in GNOME and what features they would like to see in gupnp-media-server. My talk went pretty well and this time the demo really did work on the wireless network available at that time. :) The only issue was that it was scheduled at the same time as the Lightning talks and because of that only a few (~10) people could attend. Talking of talks, my favorite was Michael's talk about Moonlight. There were many other nice talks as well like Quim's BoF , where he nicely explained Nokia's relationship with Open Source world in general and GNOME in specific, and OH people 's talk on Clutter and the cool new features in Clutter 0.8. There was a big debate going around on git vs bazaar. Alth

I had been hearing stories of Finnish summer cottages ever since I moved to Finland but never got a chance to spend some time in one, until yesterday when we went to spend a day/night at the summer place of Suvi (a good friend of Ansku) in a forest not so far from Tampere. It was really lovely to be there. I am now really looking forward to spend the last week of July in Ansku's summer place , which I've heard is even nicer.

As the only male child in the family, it was always considered to be my responsibility to take care of my mom and (mentally disabled) sister, Erum. Implicit in this assumption is another assumption that I will marry a girl that will be a house wife and would happily take care of everything at home while I would be busy making money. I could have made piece with the former assumption but the latter would obviously involve me enslaving another person and that simply goes against my basic principles of morality. When i moved to Finland two years ago, i thought i will be able to live the rest of my life independent and free as at that time it seemed very likely that my mom and Erum will soon be moving to Canada with my sister, Uzma (Api) and her family. Unfortunately, the Canadian authorities denied them immigration an year after i moved to Finland (7 years after the application was submitted) based on the argument that they will be a burden on their social system despite Api's continu