Blog

I’ve been thinking for some time already of moving my six years old blog to a more personal domain, and turns out I did it last week moved by the fact that I already had to mess with web development, hostings and domains for a while again, in order to assist my brother-in-law with the set up of a new local business. So, I finally went after some (quick) thinking for this mariospr.org domain which I think it kinda makes sense considering I’m using mariospr in many places out there already. ...

It seems this year GUADEC is going to be pretty close to my place and so I will surely attend, but this time I won’t go by plane but by bike, which since some months ago has become my main vehicle for moving around the beautiful city where I live in: A Coruña. Also, besides hanging around the venue and trying to help as much as possible as the local I am, I’ll be talking about WebKitGTK+ in the afternoon on Thursday 26th, so feel free to come round the room if you feel curious about the current status of the whole thing and the current plans for the short and medium term, which are mostly focused around WebKit2 and the roadmap we’re already following. ...

Some time ago I wrote a (very!) small android application to scratch an itch I had: being able to easily check the status of WebKit buildbots right from my phone, which turned out to be quite useful in some scenarios. And no, I’m not the kind of guy that does the “Land Patch / Goes Home” thing, but sometimes you see yourself in the situation of having to leave your workplace before than expected and after having committed certain kind of patches a while ago. And in such a situation WebKit Watcher has proved to be a helpful tool many times, at least to me. ...

As you might already know Flickr has added support for OAuth a while ago, which is meant to be the obvious replacement to the old Flickr auth API that has been available since a long long time ago, which has been used by many applications our there, like frogr. But the important point here for apps using the old auth method is that it won’t be longer available after July 31st, which means they should get updated if they want to keep working as so far. ...

So it seems I’m going to FOSDEM this year (yay!), together with a bunch of other Igalians who will be attending as well, coming from different places from across the globe (well, mainly from Europe this time). I know some people will probably disagree with me on this, but for me FOSDEM is one of the greatest events of this kind, and so I’m quite happy to go there this time, specially after not being able to attend last year due to some unexpected (and unavoidable) personal matters. ...

As Piñeiro already mentioned in some posts, last week a bunch of hackers attended the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest 2012 here at the Igalia offices, in the lovely city of Coruña. As the guy working on accessibility support for WebKitGTK+, I attended the hackfest to join some other great people representing different projects, such as Mozilla, Orca, AT-SPI, ATK, GTK+ and Qt. So, apart from helping with some “local” organizational details of the hackfest and taking some pictures, I spent some time hacking in WebKitGTK+’s accessibility code and participating in some discussions. ...

Some posts have been already published about this during the last days, but just in case you missed them I will mention it here again: Last week, a bunch of hackers gathered together in the Igalia office in Coruña for the third edition of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest , and a lot of work has been done, as Juanjo has already summarized in his “WebKitGTK+ hackfest wrap up” post. ...

Last May, I wrote about some initial tests I did back then with AtkSocket and AtkPlug, just to learn a bit about that API that allows connecting accessibility trees in different processes, thanks to the magic of the ATK bridge. I did that in order to prepare for the work that would probably be needed when adding accessibility support in WebKit2GTK+, so browsers using the new version of this web engine could be at least as much accessible as those using the single-process WebKitGTK+ library. Looking back, I think that the effort has definitely payed off… ...

Shit happens in many ways, and sometimes that means you release an application with some bugs you just can’t stand and need to roll out a bugfixing release as soon as possible. Does this sound familiar to you? :) So that’s why this new release of frogr, just one week after the 0.6 version had been published, has arrived, taking care exclusively of fixing the following problems, as stated in the NEWS file: ...

After some changes here and there frogr 0.6 is finally out. Besides the usual bugfixing work, the main new features on this release are: Integration with the GNOME general proxy settings (optional). Open pictures in the default image viewer from the details dialog and the main view. Allow users to specify the license to be set for the pictures. A new User Manual, under "Help > Contents". Some UI improvements. As usual, you can get frogr through different ways: you can grab the source code from its git repository or via the xz and bzip2 tarballs, specific packages for Fedora or for Ubuntu (ranging from Karmic to Oneiric) and even a version for MacOSX, if you dare to use it. By the way, at the moment frogr is already being packaged in some distros (see this) and others might follow, so perhaps it could be that you already were able to install it by just using your favorite package manager with the standard repos. Otherwise, it might be just a matter of time, I guess… ...

Now announcing that the new release of frogr is finally out. This time, I’m afraid you won’t find huge changes in the application, but a bunch of small improvements instead, in the way of subtle -yet handy- new features, bug fixes and new and uptaded translations mainly. Still, I can mention some of the new small features that I specially like, since I use it a lot: Uploading pictures stored in remote machines via well-known protocols like smb, ssh, ftp... well anything supported by GVFS, basically. Sort pictures in the interface by title and date taken (and keep the pictures sorted as you add more pictures!). Allow disabling tags autocompletion (seems to slow frogr down when you have thousands of tags). Tooltips with basic info about the pictures in the icon view (title, size, date taken). Show the total amount of data to be uploaded in the status bar. Allow filling the details for pictures right from the photoset details, when creating a new one. Correct picture orientation in the icon view, if needed (rotation). Support both for Gtk+2 and Gtk+3 (now this is the default toolkit for building). Support for generating MacOSX packages, thanks to the GTK-OSX project. As usual, several other bug fixes, improvements and nitpicky stuff. As usual, you can get it through different ways: Source code: clone from the git repository at gnome.org. Tarballs: both in xz and bzip2 formats. Pre-compiled packages for Fedora: at my personal public folder in gnome.org. For the specific case of Ubuntu you can use this PPA at LaunchPad. MacOSX packages (Intel) in the GNOME FTP server (experimental, yet ready for everyday use) [Update 31/05/2011]: If you have already installed frogr 0.5 for Ubuntu from my PPA or from the pre-compiled packages, please do upgrade to the latest version of the Ubuntu packages as soon as possible, as available in my PPA. If you already have the PPA configured in your system, you can upgrade just frogr by simply doing this: sudo apt-get update && sudo install frogr There was a problem with the generation of the previous version of the packages for Ubuntu (files being installed under /tmp/frogr, instead of /usr/share) and all of them are broken and need to be updated. Sorry for the hassle. If you want to contribute, remember you can do it by proposing ideas, translating, coding, discussing or filing and/or fixing bugs. ...

Today, while at the ATK/AT-SPI hackfest, I received a mail in my INBOX from a well known guy from the GNOME community stating just the following: Don't know if you read Hackers news, but this one is pretty nice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532790 -- Regards So I followed the link and I found a nice thread titled "Love in GIT" where people were commenting about something which remind me of one of the last commits I did in frogr, which became my favourite one so far in the project, by the way. But the big surprise for me came when I realized that the thread was actually about the commit I innocently made last week, when I realized that the so-much-important THANKS file was outdated since almost one year ago, right when I got married, so I decided to update it. Then I understood that there was actually a good reason for the thread to remind me of that change… Yes, I know, sometimes I’m “a little bit too slow” :-) ...

Last week some of the members of the Igalia WebKit team, attended to the second edition of the WebKit Contributors Meeting in Cupertino, California, in order to gather round with other WebKit contributors to discuss and work around our favorite web engine, away from IRC and with a more personal and “human” touch. As for me, it was the first time I attended this unconference and I have to say it was a great experience overall, even if accessibility (the field I usually work on through the GTK port of WebKit) was not precisely a hot topic there. But in the other hand, I managed to put some faces to people I just knew from IRC, attended to several interesting discussions and sessions, did some actual work (tm) and met Chris Fleizach, the guy from Apple involved in accessibility for the Mac port, who attended the meeting on Tuesday morning and discussed with me some interesting topics, mainly about the implementation of the accessibility support in the Mac port of WebKit2. ...

Gracias a la gente del GPUL, que me hicieron un hueco en la apretada (e interesante!) agenda de las “Xornadas Libres” de este año, hoy por la tarde he dado una charla en la Facultad de Informática de A Coruña acerca de git, uno de los sistemas de control de versiones más populares y más usados hoy en día. Personalmente, tengo que reconocer que me cuesta ocultar mi pasión por esta herramienta, la cual tengo la suerte de poder disfrutar usando a diario, pero espero que esa pasión no haya empañado la charla y que los asistentes, que aguantaron estoicamente el chaparrón de información hiper-concentrada que solté durante poco más de una hora, hayan extraído algo útil y positivo de la misma :-) ...

As I said some days ago, in theory I should be releasing Frogr 0.4 this weekend while at FOSDEM, after a 2-week period of feature and string freeze to work on stabilization and bugfixing tasks only. Well, bad news (mainly for myself) is that I did not make it to FOSDEM at the end, due to unavoidable personal matters, but good news is that I’m finally making the release anyway today :-) ...

Too many things have happened to me during the last weeks (some good and some bad, as usual), but I still have found some time to continue improving frogr towards the 0.4 release, which I hope it’s gonna be, at least thinking of my very particular use cases, a very complete and functional release. Still, the UI won’t be great (I’d really need help with this), I know that… but I said “complete and functional”, right? I do not remember having mentioned “beautiful”, “eye candy”, or the like… that’s a matter, though, I’ll probably consider for following releases, but not for now. ...

Quick after-Christmas post to tell the world, now that is not a secret anymore [*], that Isa, Sergio and me are currently expecting a new member to “arrive” in the family by next summer, still no idea whether it would be a boy or a girl, but whatever it will be, we’re already happier than ever, suspiciously in a similar situation than almost two years ago, when I told the world about the arrival of Sergio, our first son. ...

After more than one year without writing almost anything related to my other pet project “frogr”, I finally found some time, motivation and energy to put all the loose parts I already had more or less in place together and evolve them towards what finally made a new release of this -yet another- GNOME flickr uploader. That way, I finally released frogr 0.3 two days ago (see the announcement here), featuring the following changes: ...

After the daily reports written by Diego in his blog, few more things can be told about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest hosted at the Igalia offices last week, but I’d like to comment anyway some impressions from my personal point of view, if you don’t mind reading them. First of all, this was the second time I attended to this hackfest (I “kind of” attended last year hackfest as well) but now things were pretty different for me, basically because one year ago I was not part of the Igalia WebKit team yet, hence my contributions in the hackfest were pretty small (see my post back then for more details). However, this time I attended full-time to the event and I must say I’m really proud of the work I’ve been doing right there, which I hope will eventually lead to the resolution of this WebKit metabug, which was about fixing bugs blocking ORCA support from WebKitGTK based applications. ...

This is a short post just to let the world know about my last pet-project, which I managed to name, after several hours struggling, WebKit Watcher. WebKit Watchers is a really simple and minimalistic application that allows you to easily monitorize the status of the WebKit buildbots as you would do it through build.webkit.org, but from your Android powered device. It currently works as follows: ...