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 just flew back from Berlin where I spent the last week, mainly to participate in the GNOME Developer Experience hackfest . As you can see from blog posts from other awesome gnomies , the hackfest was a pretty big success. I focused on the use of virtual machines (as thats right up my alley) for making application development as easy as possible. I talked to Christian , who has been working on an IDE for GNOME about his idea of a simulator VM which allows the developer to quickly test their app in a pristine environment. We discussed if and how Boxes can be involved. After some discussion we decided that we probably don't want to use Boxes but rather create another binary that re-uses the existing virtualization infrastructure: libvirt, qemu, spice (and maybe libosinfo) etc. Another way to make GNOME development easy through VM would be what we already have on a very crude level: Distribution of ready-made VMs with all the development environment setup. Continuous alre

Jonas has written a very nice blog post about present and future of Maps project . I definitely recommending reading it if you are interested in this project. Since he is not on planet.gnome yet (some policy about having some posts before applying to be added), I thought I share it here.

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.

I just rolled out Boxes 3.11.92 , which is going to become 3.12 in a week. Apart from lots of fixes and minor improvements like addition of keyboard shortcuts for improved accessibility for example, there are some note worthy changes against 3.10: Dropped use of clutter and clutter-gtk: While it was a good idea to mix gtk+ and clutter at the beginning of the project to make most of the animations and transparency controls possible, Gtk+ gained new API over last few years to make most of what Boxes needed, possible. So I decided to attempt to remove clutter* from the picture and I'm glad to report that my attempt was a success. This means: Less animations: Some of the animations we had are still not possible with Gtk+ (at least not in any easy/nice way) so they had to be dropped but they are nothing really essential to how Boxes work and were only good for impressing first time users. I'm talking about box thumbnail flying around the window for transitions between d

I just rolled out Geoclue 2.1.1 ! Since my last post with Geoclue update, there has been lots of changes. You can find a list of all the changes here but here are the highlights: Modem geolocation: If you got a 3GPP modem, geoclue will now be able to use that to locate you (with neighborhood-level accuracy) using opencellid.org . Additionally if your modem has GPS capability, geoclue can use that as well and as you know GPS is the most reliable geolocation source. One issue with GPS currently is that it takes a while before it can get a lock on and reason for that is that we currently have no support for A-GPS . I'll be talking with Aleksander Morgado during the weekend about how we can add that support but if I've understood correctly, it will need more work in ModemManager than geoclue now that it has all these other sources. Geoclue locating me using 3GPP source WiFi geolocation: In my last relevant blog post, I mentioned that we'll be implementing this

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.