Coder's Log

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...

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...