Coder's Log

So yesterday, I rolled out the first release of gps-share. gps-share is a utility to share your GPS device on local network. It has two goals: Share your GPS device on the local network so that all machines in your home or office can make use of it. Enable support for standalone (i-e not part of a cellular modem) GPS devices in Geoclue. Since Geoclue has been able to make use of network NMEA sources since 2015, gps-share works out of the box with Geoclue. The latter means that it is a replacement for GPSD and Gypsy . While "why not GPSD?" has already been documented , Gypsy has been unmaintained for many years now. I did not feel like reviving a dead project and I really wanted to code in Rust language so I decided to create gps-share. Dependencies While cargo manages the Rust crates gps-share depend on, you'll also need the following on your host: libdbus libudev libcap xz-libs Supported devices gps-share currently only supports GPS devices tha

In the light of my latest fascination with Rust programming language, I've started to make small presentation about Rust at my office , since I'm not the only one at our company who is interested in Rust. My first presentation in Feb was about a very general introduction to the language but at that time I had not yet really used the language for anything real myself so I was a complete novice myself and didn't have a very good idea of how memory management really works. While working on my gps-share project in my limited spare time, I came across quite a few issues related to memory management but I overcame all of them with help from kind folks at #rust-beginners IRC channel and the small but awesome Rust-GNOME community. Having learnt some essentials of memory management, I thought I share my knowledge/experience with folks at the office. The talk was not well-attended due to conflicts with other meetings at office but the few folks who attended were very interested an

While I'm known as a Vala fanboy in GNOME, I've tried to stress time and again that I see Vala as more a practical solution than an ideal one. "Safe programming" has always been something that intrigued me, having dealt with numerous crashes and other hard-to-debug runtime issues in the past. So when I first heard of Rust some years back, it got me super excited but it was not exactly stable  and there was no integration with GNOME libraries or D-Bus and hence it was not at all a viable option for developing desktop code. Lately (in past 2 years) things have significantly changed. Not only we have Rust 1.0 but we also have crates that provide integration with GNOME libraries and D-Bus . On top of that, some of us took steps to start converting some C code into Rust and many of us started seriously talking with Rust hackers to make Rust a first class programming language for GNOME. To make things really go foward, we decided to arrange a hackfest , which took place

Are you a student? Passionate about Open Source? Want your code to run on next generation of automobiles? You're in luck! Genivi Development Platform will be participating in Google Summer of Code this summer and you are welcome to participate. We have collected a bunch of ideas for what would be a good 3 month project for a student but you're more than welcome to suggest your own project. The ideas page , also has instructions on how to get started with GDP. We look forward to your participation!

Quite a few major life events happened/happening this summer so I thought I blog about them and some of the experiences I had. New job & new city/country Yes, I found it hard to believe too that I'll ever be leaving Red Hat and the best manager I ever had (no offence to others but competing with Matthias is just impossible) but I'll be moving to Gothenburg to join Pelagicore folks as a Software Architect in just 2 weeks. I have always found Swedish language to be a very cute language so looking forward to my attempt of learning Swedish. If only I had learnt Swedish rather than Finnish when I was in Finland. BTW, I'm selling all my furniture so if you're in London and need some furniture, get in touch! Fresh helicopter pilot So after two years of hard work and getting myself sinking in bank loans, I finally did it! Last week, I passed the skills test for Private Pilot License (Helicopters) and currently awaiting anxiously for my license to come through (it

Last week I travelled to Brussels to attend and present at FOSDEM . Since I was going there anyway, I decided to also join 2.5 days of GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest . Travelling to Brussels is usually pretty easy and fast, thanks to Eurostar but I turned it into a bit of nightmare this time. I had completely forgotten how London public transport is a total disasters in peak hours and hence ended-up arriving too late at the station. Not a big deal, they put me on the next train for free. I decided to go through security already and that's when I realized that I have forgotten my laptop at home. :( Fortunately my nephew (who is also my flatmate) was still at home and was going to travel to city centre anyway so I asked him to bring it with him. After two hours of anxiously waiting, he managed to arrive just in time for train staff to let in the very last late arriving passenger. Phew! While I didn't have a particular agenda for the hackfest, I had a discussion with Ale

What makes for a good maintainer? Although I do not know of a definite answer to this important but vague and controversial  question, maintaining various free software projects over the last many years, I've been learning some lessons on how to strive to be a good maintainer; some self-taught through experience, some from my colleagues (especially our awesome GNOME designers) and some from my GSoC students. I wanted to share these lessons with everyone so I arranged a small BoF at GUADEC and thought it would be nice to share it on planet GNOME as well. Some points only apply to UIs here, some only to libraries (or D-Bus service or anything with a public API really) and some to any kind of project. Here goes: Only accept use cases There are no valid feature requests without a proper use case behind them. What's a proper use case you ask? In my opinion, it's based on what the user needs, rather than what they desire or think they need. "I want a button X tha