Afiestas Blog

As everybody should know by now, tsdgeos is moving to another city (Dublin) and of course is getting a new job. Is because of this job that Albert is not able to continue with his collaboration with anything that have to be with games. Life sometimes has this unintended consequences :/

So well, as you know, I created a patch some month/weeks ago which adds a small feature to KTuberling (will be available in kde 4.5). Since I like the code, and I’m a “friend? :p” of tsdgeos I proposed myself to Albert to continue with KTuberling at least until he can go back to his *games* duties :p

So, this is my roadmap for KTuberling in KDE SC (KSC?, I don’t like the new branding sorry ._.) 4.5:

1. Support to switch between playgrounds using easier way
2. Possibility to export the playground in some simple web 2.0 service
3. Add Get Hot New Stuff  (in discussion)

If you have any ideas please, drop a bug to bugs.kde.org so we can evaluate it.

Cya!

At home!

After my “small” holidays in Paris, I’m back home. Despite my intentions of finishing some ktuberling/kamoso/kbluetooth work on this holidays

as you may have noticed I didn’t, sorry for that I only had time to keep myself up to date with kde planet/mailist/commits, leaving only the last 3 days of kde activities as homework to when I’ll come back.

So now, I’ve read everything I had to, as well as answering dozens of emails and I’m ready to hack on KDE again and to finish my kde homework’s.

The first thing I’m going to do is to prepare the release of kbluetooth 0.4, as well as to write the property announcement of the project, which will be splited in 3/4 post.

Then some more work on Kamoso will follow (add webcam basic controls), and finally I have to finish the ktuberling patch.

That’s all at the moment!.

Picture from Effiel top // Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

See you soon Paris

As maybe you have noticed I’m kinda offline these days, this is because I’m in Paris in some sort of holidays. While I’m here my internet/code hours will be reduced to the mornings, from 10:00 to 14:00 (local hour), I’m using the rest of the day for walking trough those beautiful streets.

Well, this is it at the moment,  tomorrow I’ll announce something in this blog, something that lot of people has been waiting for :p

Effiel picture against the sun // Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Click on the picture to download it in his original size, if somebody wants the raw just ask for it.

Hi again!

Seems that was yesterday when I wrote my last post, but the truth is that almost 1 month has passed sorry for that Despite not being posting with regularity I have been working hard on KDE, mainly focused on Kamoso/KBluetooth and researching something that might become my third KDE contribution/project.

Well, the next week I’ll take a break of all my duties (work/kde/free software) and I’ll travel to Paris at my brother’s home, I hope that will be there where I’ll find more time to post on the blog.

Focusing on the Title’s topic, today I have been working on a small contribution I have been promising to Albert Astals (aacid) for something like… 2 years? If I remember correctly was in Akademy-es 2007 when I said to him that I would implement it. The feature is really small but it has allowed me to investigate deeper the model/view framework which I have to say is really hot!

Well that’s all at the moment! screencast and bye!




Download the video here

**The design is not final and is not committed yet.

Hi everybody!

Two days ago at morning, I was very bored I don’t remember exactly why, so I decided to hack a bit on Kopete, which is imho the KDE application which needs more love. I was wondering what I can add to it and after a few ideas I decided to implement the idea apol gave to me some days ago, be able to take pictures from the webcam, and set it as an avatar.

Well, this is the result after 1 hour of work (It was only 1h mainly because of kdevelop, it rocks!):

You can download the video from here

The first patch to implement it is waiting for review at: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/1532/ Once it has been accepted I’ll submit the big one. I’m open for more ideas like that,I’ve no time to implement big features in software that I’m not completely involved with, but I can do things like this.

I hope you like it and please, drop a comment or send me an email if you have more small ideas!

Hi everyone!
After a few days of “non-computer” I’m back with the batteries charged at 100% and with a small list of things to be done in the next days. This is the list:

Reach kamoso 1.0 version (I hope in 1week max):
Kamoso is the codename for a project I’m doing with Aleix pol (apol) and in theory with ereslibre (he’s kinda offline), is a Photobooth/Cheese clone, written in Qt/C++. The project is developed on gitorious and within a few days we hope reach the first stable version, which mainly will have this features:

1. Take picutres.
2. Choose which webcam to use.
3. Record video.
4. Record video with voice.
5. Some web 2.0 exports (facebook, youtube etc).
6. Maybe some effects too.

Finally we’re going to use libvlc for the video work, yes! vlc has an exported library which provide a quite straight forward api to deal with video stuff.
Currently we’re working on cleaning the plugin structure and to port our current video code to libVlc. If anybody wants join us more developers are welcomed, so just drop an email to alex (at) eyeos (d0t) org or to aleixpol (at)kde (d0t) org or maybe even better, just clone the repository on gitorious !

Research kbluetooth4 (in 1 or 2 days)
I’m not only talking about a code research here, the main point is to know why kbluetooth4 is not part of kde trunk (or at least part of extragear), and try to fix this situation, with this I mean write wherever kbluetooth4 needs to become an application ready to be part of those “sections”.
In the meanwhile I contact with the maintainers, I’ll try to add some configuration menus to be able to specify where the received files are saved.

Phonon Audio/Video input
This is in my list, the most low priority point, and it is the most low priority point because it makes me feel small ._. I’ll try to push some effort here, and with that aim other ppl to write input stuff in other backends, but from my most humble opinion, phonon needs more developers, and needs Krezt back :p. By the way, my TODO for phonon input is:

1. Learn how gstreamer works (api level).
2. Fill the current interface for avdevice (list devices etc, all using gstreamer).
3. Start to expand the gstreamer backend to be able to output input content.

I’ve chosen gstreamer because it already have input support, but maybe I’ll switch to the VLC, since I’ll use libvlc in kamoso.

Well, this is more or less all! I’ll try to keep the blog up to date with the progresses I made in those points.

The last, but not less important, this is the drink I’m taking to celebrate my “come back” !

Duff beer

In case you have lost it, now you’ve the chance of view it in video! the kde-commtis channel full of people waiting to know who will win the 1M commit!
Finally as you maybe already know, ervin with an akonadi commit won the one million (thanks you?) commit.

Kde 1 million commits:

You can download the video from here

My name is Alejandro Fiestas, and I have a problem… I’m a addicted to the free software. People could ask, why? what the software libre give to you? I’m not sure but I’ve some theories
The software libre gives to me the motivation I need to jump of the bed each morning thinking: come on Alex! you’ve code to write! or come on Alex, you’ve a community to help, to talk with, to work with! And is precisely the community my favorite point, is the power of the people, individual people which do things and  help others without expect anything material on exchange. Also, maybe the last thing, but less important is to be able to trouble big companies which do not respect any kind of freedom, not even in they own market using monopolistic strategies that makes almost impossible create your own company if you’re not a millionaire.

Two long years have passed since Akademy-es Zaragoza, which was my first attended KDE event and something like 3 years since I left everything to start, what at this moment is my most important contribution to the free software ecosystem, eyeOS.

The eyeOS project, and the company behind  it, are like children for me, they’re something stuck inside me and it won’t never change. Despite it, a chain of incident put me in the situation of think about stop my collaboration with the eyeOS project, at least for a while, but this is something I haven’t decided yet.
My biggest challenge inside the project was (is?) build a community around it, and right now,  this objective have a low priority inside eyeOS, so I’m not sure if I want spend my time there. Technically, not even eyeOS 2.0 bring to me enough motivation.

So, in this situation, I need a source of motivation, a source I have found it in KDE. This project is amazing, the people inside are just fantastic (at the moment everybody inside the project has been cool with me helping me a lot, until the point that, Aleix Pol is reviewing this entry and is because of him that this entry won’t have 900 errors/sentence.
And  now, I’m trying to become one of them.

My road to become a KDE developer will be written in this blog along as other free software related stuff, and I hope, this can be useful for other people for not to have fear of anything related with floss, KDE is a project made of people, and almost in all cases, the people that works in a free software project, are good people

That’s all, the next entry will be something more technical, will be one of my first steps in my kde path!