A Bunch of Updates

Warning! Long long post ahead!

Well, I was supposed to post news here more often, but it's been quite impossible to do it due to the day to day work. Bullet point to the rescue!!!

• Google Summer of Code
  
  Thanks to Valério who arranged everything, Maemo has got 10 slots in this year edition of Google Summer of Code. We received very good proposals for projects, but I never expected as much interest in Canola as we got in the end: 5 out of 10 projects are related to Canola. We'll surely have great results by the end of the program in August.


• Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend
  
  The hackfest was really great. The idea of gathering together the main Firefox add-ons developers to get them ported to Fennec and the developers of Fremantle Stars at first seemed a bit weird in my point of view, but in the end it proved its worth. My travel was ok, but I felt really confused because of the jetlag. I only managed to get used to the timezone in Lisbon, during my trip back to Brazil.
  
  The IT University is a wonderful place, and the architecture of the building is just stunning.
  
  
  
  
  
  The opening party on Friday was a great opportunity to meet the already known and new faces. I could take part on some good discussions about Free Software, mobile devices, traveling, and many other things I can't remeber by now.
  
  
  
  
  
  In the way back to the hotel we realized how fun can it be to get a train in Copenhagen after having drunk some beers.
  
  
  
  It felt like we were traveling through time. Niels could express it better :D.
  
  
  
  Saturday morning after a quick kick-off by Quim and William, we had a track with presentations related to Mozilla. Time for the Maemo guys, myself included, to start working on their projects. I managed to get together with 3 of the 5 students that are participating in this year edition of Google Summer of Code: Andrey Popelo (Remember the Milk plugin), Andrei Mirestean (Picasa plugin), Lauri Võsandi (Bittorrent plugin).
  
  In the afternoon it was time of the Maemo track. We had very interesting talks: The first one about the new version of the platform and device. Quim showed us a development prototype unit and it seems really promising. Can't wait to see the final product. After that, quick presentations about the Fremantle Stars and a presentation about Canola, where I made the announcement about the exception in the GPLv3 that we adopted targeting new opportunities of adoption of our software.
  
  
  
  During my presentation I also demoed the new version of Canola, yet to be released, and the students working on the GSoC projects introduced themselves and their projects to the attendees. In the end of the talk, I presented some rough plans of the points we expect to work on for the near future.
  
  After my talk, we had the last two presentations about the awesome Mer project. :)
  
  On Sunday we were able to hack almost all day long. It was quite productive and I could help the students a bit and fix some nasty bugs in Canola and plugins. I also kicked off the work of porting the EFL packages to Fremantle, thanks to Jeremiah's valuable tips.
  
  
  
  
  
  It was a great event, thanks to everyone who worked to make it happen and also to Nokia/Mozilla for sponsoring my travel and accommodation. I really hope to be able to attend the Maemo Summit later this year in Amsterdam. :)



• FISL
  
  That's what has keeping me busy lately. There are about 15 people from INdT going to Porto Alegre to attend the tenth edition of the Fórum Internacional de Software Livre (FISL). I'll give a talk about Canola and how it can be extended to bring new experiences to the users. Some guys from Qt Software are coming to FISL as well, and we're helping them to arrange everything with their booth.
  
  We are also organizing a challenge where the winner will receive a N810 Internet Tablet, Nokia Bluetooth Speakers and one week stay in Recife for a training on the latest Qt technologies which we're helping to develop.
  
  


• Canola
  
  After the Mozilla/Maemo hackfest I started to work on the new release of Canola and consequently, EFL. At the moment we already have the core packages uploaded and working. Unfortunately I wasn't able to start working on the Python packages yet. Hope to start them on next week after we finish the arrangements for FISL. More to come soon. ;)