Coder's Log

After I started working for Collabora in April, I've finally been able to put some time on maintenance and development of Geoclue again. While I've fixed quite a few issues on the backlog, there has been some significant changes as of late, that I felt deserves some highlighting. Hence this blog post. Leaving security to where it belongs   Since people's location is a very sensitive piece of information, security of this information had been the core part of Geoclue2 design. The idea was (and still is) to only allow apps access to user's location with their explicit permission (that they could easily revoke later). When Geoclue2 was designed and then developed, we didn't have Flatpak . Surely, people were talking about the need for something like Flatpak but even with those ideas, it wasn't clear how location access will be handled. Hence we decided for geoclue to handle this itself, through an external app authorizing agent and implemented such an agent

Earlier this month, a few of us from Collabora, Olivier Crête, Nicolas Dufresne, George Kiagiadakis and I attended the GStreamer Spring Hackfest in Lund, Sweden. Hosted by  Axis Communications (who uses GStreamer in their surveillance cameras for many years now), it was a great opportunity for the GStreamer community to touch base and work on open bugs and pet projects. While I've been involved in the GStreamer project in the past, it was my first GStreamer hackfest. While a lot was achieved during the event, the most exciting outcomes were no doubt the closing of more than 350 bugs, and the agreement on a transition plan to move to GitLab. Overall, the hackfest was very productive, with each member of our team managing to progress in their list of tasks while all taking part in bug triaging & cleaning in preparation of moving GStreamer's issue tracking to GitLab. George spent time working on improving the new library API that is needed to introduce

Last Thursday was my last day at Kinvolk . While Kinvolk is a great company run by very nice and talented folks and I really hoped to work there for a very long time, unfortunately it turned out to be not the best fit for me. While I am sad to leave, I am also very excited to join Collabora in their multimedia team. Today is my first day there. Since Collabora does not exist in Germany, I will be working for them as a consultant and had to register my own one-man company. Yes, I will be staying in Berlin and work from home. I have known Collabora from its very early days, when it was just a few developers with a vision and passion for Open Source. I also worked very closely with Collabora over the years during the good old Nokia Maemo/Meego times. I always had great appreciation for their work and commitment to Open Source, which is a huge challenge for a consulting company. While I do not yet know which specific projects I will be involved in at Collabora, I'm most likely

As most folks who know me already know, I've been in love with Rust language for a few years now and in the last year I've been actively coding in Rust. I wanted to document my journey to how I came to love this programming language, in hope that it will help people to see the value Rust brings to the world of software but if not, it would be nice to have my reason documented for my own sake. When I started my professional career as a programmer 16 years ago, I knew some C, C++, Java and a bit of x86 assembly but it didn't take long before I completely forgot most of what I knew of C++ and Java, and completely focused on C. There were a few difference reasons that contributed to that: Working with very limited embedded systems (I'm talking 8051 ) at that time, I quickly became obsessed with performance and C was my best bet if I didn't want to write all my code in assembly. Shortly before I graduated, I got involved in GStreamer project and beca

I have been meaning to document my experience of moving to Berlin, mainly to help people who are considering to move or are about to move. However I'm lazy and unless I'm paid to do so, I just won't get around to doing that so instead of ending up posting nothing, I'll just quickly list all the advice I have here: Don't actually order any services through check24 website. Only use them to compare prices etc. Avoid Vodafone for broadband connection. Follow this thread for why. Consider using an online bank, like N26. For your Anmeldung, go to Bürgeramt in Neukölln or Kreuzberg (unless you speak German). book appointment around noon or be prepared to wait a month. Make sure you have local friends who speak German and are willing to help you out. Many locals will tell you that you don't need German in Berlin but that is simply not true. Either consider hiring an estate agent or make sure your temporary residence allows you to register on their address

Well, no, not really but maybe I'll be able to claim that at some point because I'm moving to Berlin to join Kinvolk. I'm told that I'm changing countries and companies too often but that's not true. I was at Red Hat for 5 years and at Nokia before that for 5 years as well. The decision to move out of Finland was not exactly mine. Regarding Pelagicore I'm not as much leaving Pelagicore as I'm leaving the automotive industry, more specifically the software side of it. While the automotive industry is changing and mostly for the good, I realized that it still is not a place for me. Things typically move very slowly in this industry and I realized that I don't have the required patience for it. Also, C++/Qt are big here and while an year ago I thought it's just another language and Open Source UI framework, I no longer think so. Since you can find a lot of rants from very experienced C++ developers on why C++ is a horrible language, I won't rant

For gps-share to be useful to people, it needs to be tested against various GPS dongles. If you have a GPS dongle, I'd appreciate it if you could test gps-share. If you don't use the hardware, please consider donating it to me and that way I'll ensure that it keeps working with gps-share. Thanks!