Trolltech Developers Day

On my last entry I talked about the trip to San Francisco. Besides the GSoC mentor submit, we also joined the Trolltech developers days. The slides and examples of the Trolltech event are available online. It is worth to take a look at them although slides are not as nice as having some trolls explaining them in live.

We really learned a lot of such event: Andreas Aardal Hansen, a very smart hacker, gave us a nice lesson on how we could exploit the Graphics View framework to turn CLAM into a cooler environment. The framework has been massively adopted in just one year since it was published, and the reason is that it is just impressive how easy you can do complex and cute things on a snap. The reason why we didn't used it is because we did the full rewrite of the NetworkEditor just before Qt 4.2 which included such framework. Another rewrite at that time would have been too hard.

We also could have a little talk with Thierry Bastian who is responsible of turning KDE's Phonon multimedia interface into a regular cross platform module in Qt. Unfortunately we were still travelling the first day and we missed his talk on Phonon.

Another nice session I assisted was the one presented by Girish Ramakrishnan on Qt style sheet support. Just by taking a look at the latest demos you can realize that Qt application can be very cool and even use such style sheets to let designers enhancing the look and feel of your applications without even programming.

While I was on the style sheet presentation Pau was on the Model View talk. I thought that it was about the old Smalltalk MVC model we failed to generalize in CLAM so many times and in so many flawors. So I thought it was a mistake on the troll's side to generalized it so much, but I just took a look at the presentation, and maybe is worth a try. It seems that they did a smart twist to the pattern to make it worth to work with.

I also nagged Jason Barron, at the support team, with some bugs we found on latest Qt version and some question on how to implement some things for CLAM. I still have to get in contact with him again to get some solution for some problems.

As I said we learned a lot, and we are eager to apply such knowledge to CLAM. A month later we have just applied such knowledge to fix some QtOpenGL bugs but we are planning at some time to port the NetworkCanvas to QGraphicsView.

GSoC 2007 mentor submit

A couple of weeks ago, Pau and me were at San Francisco for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Submit. At the submit we joined some interesting sessions on how to improve the next GSoC, but also we met a lot of other hackers of free software projects all around the world: Mixxx, Inkscape, KDE, Amarok, Pidgin, Scumvm, Haiku, Crystal Space, Ogre, Moin Moin, Drupal, VideoLan, XMMS2, audacious... Well, as you can see in this picture we were pretty much people:



I knew about most of all other projects, but, sadly, nearly no one knew about CLAM. :-( The good news is that most of them get pretty interested as they saw CLAM capabilities on audio processing and application prototyping. We need independently packaged end user tools!!

I also was glad to confirm the collaboration between projects that one could figure out being competitors:

• People working on desktops (KDE, Gnome...) are in fact in a very close collaboration.
• Wiki implementations (Moin Moin, Wikimedia...) meet there
• Also several 3D engines (Crystal Space, Ogre...) met there
• Comunity portals such as Drupal, Joomla, Plone...

They all share common challenges and solutions and they used the submit to join efforts.

Related to common issues and efforts, we took a very productive meeting on multiplatform development where some multiplatform projects, including us, shared experiences. We explained how we faced such problem at CLAM: the use of portable 3rd party libraries, crosscompiling from Linux to other platforms, and the use of testfarm to rapidly detect multiplatform issues. Some projects, such VideoLan had automated third party compilation scripts a step we have not automated at all. We realized that a lot of people was also solving such problems and we compromised to share experiences and results. For example, we talked about having a single repository of precompiled binaries of third party libraries. We also realized about our not-so-open-source mind we most of us realized that we were not reporting back patches we did to external libraries. We compromised to send them to upstream or making them available in a common place for the other project using them.

Californimedia

After the PLoP we took a jet to Santa Barbara for the ACM-Multimedia conference. What a weather change!! We left Portland raining and Santa Barbara weather seems like the one at Barcelona in July!

It has been a pity because while preparing the CLAM demo we missed most of the talks. Yesterday we received the prize to the best opensource multimedia project for CLAM and today we did the demo having some unrelevant logistic problems. The audience got the rapid prototyping idea very well, as we intended.

I saw few paper presentations. The one left i felt interesting for us was about extracting brush patterns to identify painting style/author. We assisted but, sadly, we were solving some problems with our demo and we couldn't pay the attention the topic required to understand it properly. :-(

Most of the presentations were about video. Nearly none about audio but ours and Peter and Markus' poster. We meet those nice guys at the ISMIR last year. They have done a very nice and impressive work on navigating music collections. Tomorrow the Audio workshop starts, so we'll get our audio meat. ;-)

Being about multimedia you can feel the shadow of two of the most successful phenomena in internet this year: Google Maps and YouTube. A lot of papers were about integrating geographical information with media and social networks.

Xavi, which is very busy with the conference arrangements took us yesterday to the UCSB (the university were he works in). He showed us the Allosphere project which is an impressive multimedia installation that puts you into a interactive 3D world.

Unplop

I was amazed with the insight we got on our own pattern at the PLoP writer's workshow. You can learn a lot by having seven experts on patterns talking behind you about your paper without you being able to talk, just listening.

It was a pity that we had relation mostly with the people on our workshop, but, anyway, people in our workshop was very interesting to know. No doubt about Ralph, but also Jason, Amr, Hishem, Dirk, Paddy, Leon... all of them gave us very valuable feedback.

A part from Jason's paper, the one about stand-up meetings i already commented, the other i liked the more was the one about Functional testing. Regardless pattern like formatting flaws it contained a lot of insight on functional testing that will help Pau and me to better communicate the functional tests principles to our Software Engineering students.

Back to the games, a funny one we played was the one of segregating people by things we thought make each one weird. Just 5 of about 40 keept on one side on the statement 'I don't use windows'. Of those 5, 3 were Mac'ers. Having that much veterans computer scientists, was very interesting the segregation on statements about knowing weird programming languages and having using old technologies.

We really enjoied our first PLoP. I hope we could be back some year.

Plopping, first day

PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) conference is really a weird one. We were already shocked by the paper 'admission' and paper review process and, the conference itself has started in the same weird/unusual way.

It's nice to see a core of veteran people to meet each other so touched. It's a family that joins once a year since 1994 and most of them are old workmates of the old smaltalker times. All the organization was all but formal what i really like. They also made us to play some games in order to break communication walls. Also the main purpose of the conference itself it is a major novelty for us. It is not about presenting your work and know what others are doing but about helping authors to improve our work by discussing the papers we submitted.

We have meet some big names on the Software Engineering field. We sitted just beside Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki among other things. We also meet Ralph Johnson, one of the GoF, which is the moderator of our discussion group.

About the discussion itself, we discussed two interesting papers. One about the Value Object pattern, that highlighted some insightfull consequences i even never had thought about. The other was really interesting and funny to read because it explained some patterns to have a successfull 'standup meeting' and some 'bad smells' to dectect when things are not working properly. It was very funny because it highlighted meeting situations we all have experienced and the solutions he proposed were very clever and pleasant to read.