Coder's Log

So the Location hackfest 2014 took place at the awesome Mozilla offices in London during last weekend. Even though some of the important participants didn't manage to be physically present, enough people did: John Layt (KDE) Hanno Schlichting (Mozilla) Mattias Bengtsson (GNOME) Jonas Danielsson (GNOME) and some participated remotely: Bastien Nocera (GNOME) Garvan Keeley (Mozilla) Unfortunately Aaron McCarthy of Jolla couldn't attend remotely either as he lives in a very incompatible timezone (AU) but we had a lot of productive discussion with him through email that still continues. Some very fruitful discussions we had: Why Mozilla doesn't make wifi data it gathers for its location service , available for everyone to download? Hanno explained in great detail how making this data available would seriously compromise privacy and even safety of people. One good example given was someone getting out of an abusive relationship and not wanting to be traceable by the...

I'm organising a hackfest in London from May 23 to 25 2014. The plan is to improve our location-related components and to get them useful to other OSs: KDE , Jolla and hopefully also Ubuntu phone . If you are (or want to) doing anything related to location and want to attend, please do add yourself to wikipage as soon as possible so I can notify our hosts if we'd need a bigger room. Oh and if you need a place to stay, do contact me! I'm thankful to awesome Mozilla folks for hosting this event and providing an awesome open geolocation service to everyone.

Wow! Its been months since I last blogged. I have a good excuse and a bad one. The good one is that I've been extremely busy with trying to get some of things ready for GNOME 3.10. The bad one is that w/ me sharing all important events on all 3 major social networks, I don't feel too motivated to put all those into blog posts (yes, I'm very lazy). As you probably already know, I've been working on Maps, geolocation and geocoding apart from Boxes in 3.9 development cycle. Although there is still a lot of work to do in all these, I'm really happy with what we achieved in a short amount of time: Maps : There was  desire and design page for a map application for GNOME but I didn't see any implementation. I looked around and found out that  Mattias Bengtsson had already a repository so I helped him start the project. Currently it only allows you to some basic things you expect from a map application, like searching for places and finding your location but f...

I have a talk where I'll attempt to brain-wash educate the masses about the awesomeness of Vala language. If you are even slightly interested, please do attend. I also have arranged a BoF together with KDE's Friedrich Kossebau to discuss about the possibility of SSDP (discovery protocol used by UPnP) as a system service. See you in Berlin soon!