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Migration of this blog

2010-02-21T20:45:00.004+01:00

It is time to gain independence. I was given a Internet domain as birthday gift by my friend André s so I am going to leave this blog.

From now on you can follow my new posts and also read the old ones from my new site:

http://psanxiao.com

If you had added this blog to your rss, you will have to update your suscription to the new one.

Summary of last conferences

2009-12-20T18:12:00.005+01:00

These last months I had the opportunity of taking part in two international conferences about GIS (Geographic Information Systems) as part of my work in CartoLab. In November I was in the II SASIG in Evora (Portugal) and in December in the V Jornadas gvSIG in Valencia (Spain). It has been a great opportunity of meeting a lot of cool people who takes long time working in the GIS communities and I only knew from mailing lists. With all of them I could enjoy of great moments learning, talking and sharing experiences.

The conference, in Evora, was about GIS and Free Software. I am very glad viewing how the Free Software Philosophy is being taken, more and more, in new fields. According to what I have seen it seems that Portugal, as well as Spain, is betting hard on GIS and in many cases this bet comes from the Public Administration, but so far as well as Spain have still an unresolved matter, making public the data for the society.

CartoLab was represented with two talks, I gave the first one about NavTable, actually was the first time that NavTable was shown in public, and my workmate Gonzalo gave a great talk entitled "Development of a Free Corporative GIS in the Provincial Council of Pontevedra" that shows an example of bet for Free Software by a Public Administration.

The V Jornadas gvSIG is a conference arround gvSIG, a GIS application developed by the Valencia goberment and probably the most important Free GIS application nowadays. From CartoLab we could show many of our developments based on gvSIG since the organization gave us the opportunity of taking part with four talks:

gvSIG on EIEL of Pontevedra Province Council
Developments in gvSIG for the improvement of the management of information for ISF Honduras
NavTable, sailing along the data in gvSIG
Developments on gvSIG for the Plan of drainage infrastructures of Galicia

Besides, in this conference was presented the gvSIG Association that will take the control of the gvSIG project for now on. We could meet them and come to a series of agreements for the future. The first one was made already public: NavTable, our killer application, will be a gvSIG official project.

Good feelings about gvSIG 2.0

2009-07-04T15:17:00.003+02:00

After have been these days in Valencia, knowing the novelties about gvSIG 2.0 and have many interesting talks with project crew, I can say that I'm hopeful enough with the future of this project.
I'm not sure if these feelings are really based on something or, on the contrary, are the result of my current frame of mind, since I'm a bit disappointment after having seen last week how people, that say to know about how Free Software works, hinder the main principle: the collaboration.

According to I have being seen these days, I think gvSIG can really become in a project developed and maintained by the Free Software community. From the technical point of view, the changes that have been carrying out contribute to make easier the collaboration with the project. Some examples:

This new version includes a new geometry model, which is an evolution from the old one and based on an approximation to the standard ISO 19107. This new model is independent of the rest of gvSIG's components, removing the one that existed in the old model with draw 2D. Besides, it is more extensible since the library provide mechanisms so that we can register new geometries and their associated operations.

The new Data Access Library (DAL) is an abstraction layer that makes possible work with different
data sources in an homogeneous way, providing a standard API.

This new version of gvSIG includes also a new concept: the transformations. Basically a transformation is an algorithm that changes the way of showing data but without modify the original data source. gvSIG 2.0 includes a new wizard to apply different transformations and a API in order to have access to this wizard and create new transformations. To add a new transformation just we have to create the panels, that will be shown by the wizard in order to get the information needed about data, and the algorithm that will make the changes in the way of see the information.

Learning about gvSIG 2.0

2009-07-01T23:19:00.003+02:00

These days I'm in Valencia, learning about gvSIG 2.0 with project crew.

This new version is really a deep revision. There are many changes in the architecture, source code and technologies used by the project. One of this new technologies is Maven, that replaces Ant as method to build gvSIG.

I hardly knew Maven and it really surprises me. It's really easy to configure it. Maven is being able to search the dependencies of a project in a local or external repository an it is also really easy to add your new project to these repositories.
Besides, gvSIG people have made a great job integrating maven in gvSIG, in fact, an executable of Maven is distributed with the project so you don't need to install it. They have also created several templates in order to make new libraries or extensions in a easy way, just providing a few data Maven will create a structure for your project and even will import it into your eclipse's workspace.

Apart from learning about the technical novelties of this new version, I have known the project crew, having the opportunity of talking with them, changing opinions...
When I started to work with gvSIG, several months ago, I had the sensation that gvSIG was a cathedral project, according to definition of cathedral from the book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond, in fact I'm still thinking that. Nevertheless today I'm a bit more excited thinking that maybe in the future could become a Bazaar project, which is the essence of Free (Libre) Software.

We will see...

Tips for Ubuntu 9.04

2009-05-04T22:46:00.004+02:00

Testing the new release of Ubuntu I found some changes that don't like very much. First of them is that now the sortcut Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace is deactivated by default, the other one is that the update manager just appear when there are some new update instead of the old icon in the systray. I really hate windows that appear out of control in my desktop.

Fortunately, looking for Internet I could find a solution. In the first case it's enough to add this lines at the end of /etc/X11/xorg.cong file:


Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "False"
EndSection

To avoid that update manager appears whenever it likes just type this in a terminal:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

I have also some problem with the 3D acceleration of my card, a Intel 945GM, that was fixed downgrading the driver to the intrepid version. For that, I added these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:


deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

and doing apt-get update and sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel.

The moral of the post is that Human Beings are prisoners of our habits.

Official packages for gtranslator

2009-03-21T20:42:00.003+01:00

The last release of gtranslator (1.9.4) has been included in Debian and Ubuntu as official package.
This is still an unstable release. In the case of Debian, it has been included into Debian Experimental and in Ubuntu has been included in the next stable version, Jaunty.

I would like to say thank you to Debian and Ubuntu people that make this possible. Now, if you are fan of Debian or Ubuntu you can test the new gtranslator installing it from the repository of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

Links to official packages:

Debian
Ubuntu

GNOME Merchandise

2009-02-16T23:25:00.004+01:00

Last week was my birthday. A friend of mine, Andrés, had a brilliant idea, give me something related to GNOME. He could have thought in give me a sticker for my laptop, for instance, but I have already one. He could have thought in a T-Shirt, but I have already a couple of ones. He could have thought in a... nothing else. There were no more possibilities so finally he found this:

This is a funny bathroom rug, obviously this is not the GNOME logo but if it was, it would be really cool. I would like to have a bathroom rug with the GNOME logo, and I'm pretty sure that many people that love GNOME would like too. GNOME Marketing, it's time to create a powerful merchandise line!

gtranslator 2.0 is one step closer to be reality

2009-01-25T23:25:00.003+01:00

Yesterday gtranslator 1.9.4 has been released. This is the first Beta version of gtranslator 2.0. It includes the new features which I talked in a previous post.

I want to say thank you to all the people that have contributed with the project somehow.

You can download it from here and test it.

I would be happy if gtranslator makes your work a bit easier.

Testing Intrepid Ibex with QEMU

2008-08-28T20:12:00.004+02:00

In one of the first posts I told about testing the new version of Ubuntu. In that post I had just upgraded muy ubuntu 7.10 to ubuntu 8.04 Heard5, that was, one month before ubuntu 8.04 becomes stable. I didn't have any several problem but to be honest I had lots of lucky.

Now I am going to test the next ubuntu release, this is ubuntu 8.10 or if you prefer Intrepid Ibex.
According to the ubuntu release schedule the last version to test if the Alpha 4. Two months left for the release.

This time I am not going to trush on luck. In one of the last sessions of the Master on Free Software, Berto told us about Virtualization. Among the virtualization systems about Berto told us I liked specially QEMU, so I decided to use it in order to test ubuntu 8.10. These are the steps that I followed:

- First I downloaded the iso image of ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 from here.

- Installing QEMU:

$sudo apt-get install qemu

- Then I created a qemu file image, this will be my virtual hard disk, doing:

$qemu-img create -f qcow2 ~/intrepid.img 4G

where 4G is the size of the virtual hard disk.

- Now I could install ubuntu 8.10 in that virtual hard disk from the iso image just doing:

$qemu -hda ~/intrepid.img -cdrom intrepid-desktop-i386.iso -boot d -m 512

where 512 is the size of the RAM.

- Finally to run ubuntu 8.10 after installing it:

$qemu -hda ~/intrepid.img -m 512

Some tips:

- If you are using a 64 bits operative system you should use qemu-system-x86_64 as command instead of qemu.

- If you want the virtual system run faster you can install the qemu accelerator:

$sudo apt-get install kqemu-common

you will need to load the kernel module for the accelerator:

$sudo modprobe kqemu

then you can run qemu with the option --kernel-kqemu to use the accelerator.

Gtranslator 2.0 is comming...

2008-08-08T13:52:00.004+02:00

It has been a long time since I decided to start to collaborate with the development of gtranslator, first as my dissertation in order to get my degree as Technical Engineer in Computer Sciences and now as my practicum in the Master on Free Software working at Igalia.

Gtranslator is a PO files editor that was created by Fatih Demir and maintained until October 2007 by Ross Golder when he transfered the maintenance to Juanjo and me. Thank you guys for trusting on us. It is not very common that there are two maintainers in a gnome project but in this case I think we are a good team, Juanjo is the experience and I am the enthusiasm.

For the last months we have been working a lot with Ignacio Casal trying to migrating gtranslator to Gobject and implementing some new features:

Support for different profiles with information about the translator and language.
Translation memory.
Plugin system
Plugins for OpenTran, alternate language, integration with subersion, diff...
Catalog manager for PO Files.

All this features are working right now and we hope to make a beta release as soon as possible so that translators can check them.
Besides we are preparing a new web page with all the information about the new features, a roadmap for the future and information about how to use the program and how to collaborate with its development.

We are thinking also in changing the name for the project. So far we had created a section into gtranslator's wiki where people can write its suggestions for the new name but this decision it's not definitive because change the name for a project it is a decision more complicate than it seems to be. In fact this is worth analyzing in another post.

Master on Free Software students talking about quality and Libre Software

2008-05-29T13:15:00.006+02:00

As activity for one of the subjects in the Master on Free Software we made a paper entitled Quality and Libre Software: a theoretical and practical approach.

In that paper we tried to test the OpenBRR model. This is an attempt to meassure how much suitable a free software project is when we have a group of requirements. We chose as example in order to test the model in a real case which would be the most appropiate GNU/Linux distribution to an average user.

By means this example we could study the model and discover its strenghs and weakness. In the paper we suggest also some ideas in order to improve it.

Besides, thanks to Caixanova we could travel to Brussels in order to attend to Fosdem and present the paper into the Research Room.

Resources:

Very special thanks also to people from Libresoft and Igalia for their support and to my classmates for trusting on me as speaker. (You didn't know what were doing)

Encoding video for the NDS

2008-05-28T18:41:00.003+02:00

I have had a nds since a couple of months. Of course its best quality is the gaming but it has more possibilities. There are many homebrew or applications that you can download from internet and they let you do many things like surf the web, check your email, you can use it like video and music player even install GNU/Linux.

The video player is a great feature, for example I use a video and music player for my nds called moonshell. The problem is that application uses a specific video format (dpg) so it is necessary to encode the videos before.
Recently I found this script in python, licensed under GPL2, that let you do it easily. You need also mpeg_stat, that analyze the streaming of a mpeg file. The use is as follow:

First you need to copy mpeg_stat to your /bin directory. Then you should copy the script to the same directory where you have the video/s to encode and then you can execute doing:

$ python dpgconv.py file_name.extension

It works perfectly with avi and mpeg videos, once it has done you can copy the video in your nds and to enjoy.

The moral of the post is: Is there anything that it cannot be made with python?

Many reasons to use Libre Software

2008-04-15T15:27:00.005+02:00

These last days I had the opportunity to attend to many talks about Libre Software.

Last week, in the Master of Free Software, we had two exceptional guests: Alberto Abella and Marcelo Branco, you can see a summarize of their talks here.
Besides, these days gpul is organizing its VIII Xornadas Software Libre and yesterday I attended to one talk that my classmate Pedro did about the process of making free gisEIEL, a proyect between Deputación da Coruña and University of Coruña.

These three talks have in common one idea: the advantage of using Libre Software, but from different points of view.

In the first one, Alberto Abella tell us with statics and data how Libre Software is better than Privative.

In the second one, Marcelo Branco tell us about his experience in Libre Software and public administrations. Marcelo is pure passion talking about Libre Software but his arguments are true. Countries should not use Privative Software in their public administrations because on the one hand, they are putting economics resources out of the country and they cannot be sure about the integraty of the public data because they cannot really what the privative software do without seeing the source code.

Finally, in the gisEIEL talk, the reasons are technical. They started the project using Privative Software but they realize that was depending on the one company exclusively. They could not make their own applications to access to the database. The data was storing in binary way so they could not get them without using the privative applications... so they make up their minds to migrate the project to Libre Software because it was better from technical point of view.

Therefore we can deduce that Libre Software is not only for 'frikis'. It is a real inovation in the computer world. The world is changing. Do not stay in the dark!

Libre Software in Galicia

2008-04-03T18:47:00.004+02:00

This week has just published the new number of Codigocero, a very important galician magazine about technology. This number is special for me because there is an interview to Roberto Vieito, one of my classmates in the Master of Free Software. Roberto made a study about the situation of the Libre Software in Galicia which you can see here (in English).
You can also read the interview here (in Galician).

Well done Roberto!

Gtranslator in Wikipedia

2008-03-15T13:46:00.003+01:00

I have just added a new article for gtranslator in the Wikipedia.
Just a description for now but I'll try to do a complete article.
You can edit it and to contribute, of course ;-)

Be the wikipedia my friend!

Testing Ubuntu 8.04

2008-03-06T13:04:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my ubuntu to the new version 8.04. According to the release schedule this is the Alpha5 so all new features are included. Despite being a alpha version I didn't have any problem during the upgrade process and everything seems to work fine. Now it is time to test it.
In order to do this, a new feature seems to be very useful, the automatic bugs report. As in Gnome, now when you get a crash in an application you can send a bug report in automatic way to ubuntu.

Another interesting feature is PolicyKit. Now you can run administrative applications as normal user and click in unlock button if you need to do an action that require root privileges.

Besides, Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 include a beta of the new Gnome 2.22 and a beta of Firefox 3.0 as default browser.
You can also install Firefox 2 from Add/Remove programs and to have both versions installed. This is very useful because for example, the Add-ons that I use normally don't work in Firefox 3.0 yet.

FOSDEM 2008

2008-02-29T23:44:00.003+01:00

Last weekend I attended to my first FOSDEM. It was a really good experience. Lots of people, lots of talks, lots of new ideas... in short time.

My classmates of the Master on Free Software and me presented a paper about Quality and Libre Software. As first experience I think was great. People showed enough interested on it.

I attended to many talks about different projects (Mozilla, Gnome, OpenOffice, Embedded devices, Freedesktop...) all of them were very interesting.

I found specially interesting a talk about integrating the Web into GTK+ applications with WebKit. I didn't anything about this and really fascinated me. I'll try to learn more about WebKit and who knows, maybe it could be used in gtranslator someday.

My First Post

2008-02-28T23:48:00.001+01:00

Hello World! Here I am

This is my first blog and of course my first post.

I am a newbie in the free software world. I collaborate with Gnome project, most specifically in gtranslator.

Now, after the insistence of my friend Andrés, I think it is time to share my experiences.

Stay tuned!