Coder's Log

After writing the blog post about the new Geoclue convenience library , I felt that while the helper API was really simple for single-shot usage, it still wasn't as simple as it should be for most applications, that would need to monitor location updates. They'll still need to make async calls (they could do it synchronously too but that is hardly ever a good idea) to create proxy for location objects on location updates. So yesterday, I came up with even simpler API that should make interacting with Geoclue as simple as possible. I'll demonstrate through some gjs code that simply awaits for location updates forever and prints the location on console each time there is a location update: const Geoclue = imports.gi.Geoclue; const MainLoop = imports.mainloop; let onLocationUpdated = function(simple) { let location = simple.get_location (); print("Location: " + location.latitude + "," + location.longitude); }; let onSimple

Apart from many fixes, Geoclue recently gained some new features as well. Sharing location from phones If you read planet GNOME , you must have seen my GSoC student, Ankit already posting about this . Basically his work enabled Geoclue to search for, and make use of any NMEA providers on the local network. The second part of this project, involved implementation of such a service for Android devices. I'm pleased that he managed to get the project working in time and even went the extra mile to fix issues with his code, after GSoC. This is useful since GPS-based location from android is almost always going to be more accurate than WiFi-based one (assuming neighbouring WiFi networks are covered by Mozilla Location Service ). This is especially useful for desktop machines since they typically do not have even WiFi hardware on them and have until now been limited to GeoIP, which at best gives city-level accurate location. This feature was included in release 2.3.0 and

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

So its that time of the year! GUADEC is always loads of fun and meeting all those the awesome GNOME contributors in person and listening to their exciting stories and ideas gives me a renewed sense of motivation. I have two regular talks this year: Boxes: All packed & ready to go? Geo-aware OS: Are we there yet? Apart from that I also intend to present a lightning talk titled "Examples to follow". This talk will present stories of few of our awesome GNOME contributors and what we all can learn from them.

Soon after I mentioned the need for an oFono -backend in Geoclue in my blog , Sri kindly helped me get in touch with oFono developers. What started as a nice friendly discussion soon was turned into a not so nice discussion. I won't get into details and blames but here is what I found out about the project:  oFono developers claim that its is still a maintained project while rest of the world think its a dead project, even people who love the project. Last release being in 2012 and loads of missing essential features (see rest of the points below) and link to mailing-list broken (even though I pointed it out 3 weeks ago and its been broken for much longer) on the homepage all points to the fact that its essentially a dead project. No proper D-Bus introspection nor any client libraries. This already makes it extremely difficult to work with oFono but wait there is more hurdles on the way. No online cross-references documentation: The documentation link on the home-page l

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.

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

Just like every year, I'm a mentor in Google Summer of Code 2013. This year I'm mentoring two students: Mattias Bengtsson , who will be working on implmenting route search in Maps . Since the Maps project was actually started by Mattias himself before he even thought of SoC and he has been working on maps (in general) as his fulltime job for 2 years now, I feel very confident about him being able to deliver. Kalev Lember , who will be working on implementing the new date&time panel in GNOME control center. Kalev has been contributing to different GNOME projects and has been very active in Fedora packaging business. Having had the pleasure of pair programming with him last week, I feel very confident about him delivering his project as well. So I got two awesome students, what could be better? There is the coincidence that both of them are located in ̶G̶o̶t̶h̶a̶m̶ ̶C̶i̶t̶y̶ Gothenburg, the very same city where one of our designers, Andreas Nilsson lives in. Since

We just rolled out Boxes 3.7.92 and have now entered code freeze. This means that apart from translations and doc updates, Boxes is ready for the stable 3.8 release (due next Monday). So whats new you ask? Since Boxes 3.6, we have been hard at work, making Boxes an app that is so awesome that it makes you want to use virtual machines if you are not already. :) Boxes is now a lot more reliable, has improved and more impressive UI and has cool new features: Add USB redirection support in new VMs and option to add it into existing VMs. i-e You can use your USB devices (camera, flash drive etc) plugged into host from the guest operating system. Smartcard support . This means if you have an appropriate reader device, you can use that to read information from your smart cards (credit/bank cards etc) from your virtual machine boxes. Automatically download and installation of all virtio and QXL drivers, and spice-vdagent as part of Windows XP and Windows 7 express installati

I have been meaning to do this for a while and now I finally managed to do it:  Here you'll find tutorial on Boxes . I know the sound quality and volume isn't good and there is other mistakes/issues but I'm not too ashamed as this is the first time I've done this and tools that I needed/wanted were all breaking on my Fedora 18 laptop. UPDATE:  I uploaded an updated version of this tutorial with slightly improved audio. To improve it further, I'll have to re-record the audio or the whole video but right now I don't have time for that. Perhaps in a few weeks..

I was at GUADEC last week like many other cool gnomies. It was a lot of fun, just like very year but I believe this was one of the best, especially how it was organised. The feet marks on the floor were was just an awesome touch that kept on reminding us everyday that good conferences are a result of a lot of hard work. Seems its slowly becoming a tradition of mine since last year for me to stay at one of the organiser's house. :) Last time, I stayed with Lennart for the noncore days and this time I stayed all the days with Xabier and Laura. While they were very busy with their organising duties at the conf, they at the same time did an awesome job as my hosts. Xabier made sure that I don't have any problems what so ever and that I get to eat the best food in town and have a lot of fun. On top of all that, he woke-up 5:15 AM to drive me to airport. TBH I feel pretty bad now, knowing that I can't possibly return the favor. :( Thanks so much Xabier and Laura. You guys are

Some weeks back, Marc-Andre told me that it will probably be helpful for potential contributors if I could write a blog post explaining how new information could be added to libosinfo (the library Boxes relies on for information on various operating systems and their installer medias) so here I'm doing just that. Currently there are two types of information you can add, devices and operating systems. Usually, it'll be the latter that you'd want to add (e.g your favorite OS just made a new awesome release and you want libosinfo to know about it) but for the sake of completion, I'll describe both. Libosinfo keeps its information database in a bunch of XML files. Although theoretically there could be just one XML file but that would have to be really huge and therefore will be very hard to edit/maintain so we keep each OS distro and device class in its own XML file. Libosinfo recursively traverses the following locations, assuming application let libosinfo load its

If you are looking for something technical, this isn't the right entry. Today I wanted to write about one of my cats, Ostikka who left us some hours ago. I wanted to share the story with whoever is interested to know: About two years ago my wife (Ansku) and I thought that we should get ourselves cats as we both love cats. We decided that instead of getting kittens like most people, we try to get some grown-up cats looking for a home. I asked my friend , Riku Voipio (who has 2 cats himself) and he told me that one of his friends, Mikko Tuomela was looking for someone to take his cats as he had to leave to US for education and couldn't take them with him. Soon we were introduced to these two very nice cats, Ostikka and Pentu. Ostikka was 12 years old at that time and Pentu was 8. While both cats are very social, Ostikka just loves to meet new people and isn't the least bit shy. He came to our lap immediately and asked to be scratched on his belly and purred. Pentu ke

If you read any of my previous blog entries, you must be now familiar with this 'express installation' concept we have in Boxes. Its pretty neat actually, you just set a few options at the beginning and then you can leave Boxes (or your machine) and when you are back, everything is setup for you automatically in a new box. I have invested a lot of time/efforts on this already and will be spending a lot more time in future as well but I am just one man so can not possibly cover all operating systems out there. That is why I am asking for help from anyone who will be interested in adding express installation support for Ubuntu and Debian while I focus on Fedora and Windows variants. Oh and if you are interested in adding support for some other distribution/OS, that contribution will also be more than welcomed. In any case, happy hacking!