From the get go and what changed

Hi all,

it has been a long time since my last post. A lot had happened and my interests shifted quite a bit as well. Firstly, I am not contributing with free software actively, like in the good and fun days tinkering with Amarok about a year and a half ago. The point is, desktop development, in general, does not makes me tick anymore. Especially when that involves front-end development. KDE is a great community and the knowledge I had acquired by contributing, for two years, certainly surpasses ordinary desktop development assumptions. It certainly entails good software development practices, agile methodologies, build systems, tests, revision control, community building, software licensing and the like.

[GSoC] Transcending the sharing of thoughts in Amarok

Hi folks. For the general happiness, herein I announce that my GSoC project achieved what I'd proposed three months ago. Although this post is inspired in this project, it doesn't focus on its results. Today's topic is about sharing.

As usual in free software communities, Amarok has always been open to new ideas. Their flow from the most unexpected places and some of them often becomes real. Our software development and design is sustained by collaboration, but are ideas and processes the only things that could benefit from it?

[GSoC] Amarok gets more social

Hi everyone. To those who didn't remember, my project objective is to integrate Tomahawk social features with Amarok. By social features, I mean that Amarok would be able to share user’s music files with online friends, thereby allowing them to listen to one another’s tracks.

Actually, Amarok is already capable to listen to other peers' tracks, but keep in mind that it still has performance issues. From now on, I intend to improve its performance while I provide support for tomahawk playlists.

LaKademy's Logbook: Day 3 and 4

Everyone here have been working very hard these days. And the difficulties and doubts that appeared gave me the opportunity to learn a lot with the KDE overlords we have here. Yesterday morning we stopped the coding/translation activities a bit to plan what we'll do this year to promote KDE in Latin America.

KDE Promo BOF

LaKademy's Logbook: Day 1 and 2

The flight from Recife to Porto Alegre wasn't really comfortable. The airplane had to stop over in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. And since I leaved Recife at 00:37 it was hard to sleep with these stopovers and people getting in and out the airplane.

Although the majority of the participants didn't take long to appear on day 26, some of us had had problems with delayed flights due to the bad weather in Porto Alegre. Fortunately, I didn't had such problems, since I arrived in Porto Alegre in the beginning of the morning.

Let's rock this GSoC

Hi everyone. After one successful GSoC a year ago, I'm going to work with Amarok again in one more GSoC. My proposal objectives are harder than last year's, though I'm also more experienced with Amarok and its associated technologies.

To LaKademy and beyond

Last month I received an invitation, from a Brazilian KDE fellow, named Filipe Saraiva. For my surprise, I was one of the suggested newcomers for the first LaKademy ever. As I said in one of my previous posts, to be more involved with the community is a must-do for this year, so this invitation came at the right time.

I already had confirmed my participation and I'm really eager to meet, in person, some of those that contribute with KDE in so many different ways.

How I started to contribute...

Hi everyone. The ideal of sharing propagated by RMS and his fellows has fascinated me for more time than I could remember. I've been always concerned about both the technical and the philosophical side. Therefore, It's resoanable to suppose that I'm also a kind of intellectual property geek.

Moreover, I felt that I could do something different from the boring tasks that my university imposes to me. The knowledge itself is good and I'm very grateful for a lot of things that I've learned in the university. But there is too much effort to make we professional problem solvers, whereas nobody really cares about how to encourage us to search for problems ourselves. Long things made short, what the point to be the best problem solver if you can't even recognise one by yourself.

[GSoC] Mission Accomplished

Hi folks. Sorry for too many weeks without any post about the project. During this period, I have been changing and arguing things related to the service source code and to the user design. Also, there was a lot of optimizations and bug fixes. Nevertheless, to the joy of all, I'm here to announce that gpodder.net features are now successfully integrated with Amarok.

[GSoC] Podcast Subscribtion Synchronisation - Reloaded

Hi folks. First and foremost, I want to apologize for the absence of posts for two weeks now, since I was a little occupied at the end of my university semester (lots of projects and tests) in a way that was difficult to update this blog about the project. Besides that, I have two good news to compensate the delay.

The first one is that the subscription synchronisation is finished. In my last post, I had explained some of the behaviour and features of the subscription synchronisation, so I will continue with the explanation, giving focus to the gpodder service configuration dialog.

[GSoC] Podcast Subscription Synchronisation

It’s been two weeks since my last update about progress on gpodder integration with Amarok, so here we go.

Amarok is now fully capable to receive podcasts from gpodder.net and to synchronize them with your own local podcasts, and the other way around. Every podcast, from gpodder.net, will be synchronized with it respective, from local podcasts, using the playlist synchronisation implemented in the first part of this project.

[GSoC] There is no vain attempt in free software community

This week, I had been trying to set-up a mygpo server in my notebook, as said in my last post. It was a difficult task, principally when I am no expert at neither python nor django, so I had unfortunately failed.

In despite of this, I want to express all my thankfulness for the help provided by the mygpo team, specially for Stefankoegl and HorusHorrendus. The best of this failure is to know that my work has awared them of the problems that makes mygpo difficult to install and set-up :). This is a clear example that there is no vain attempt in free software community, since all work can be recombined by someone and applied in different contexts (+1 for collaborative intelligence).

By the way, It is good to be part of a project that involves more than one community, to be constantly trying to to keep the dialog between them, leaving and retrieving feedback. To integrate everyone's ideas in a solid feature it is, definitely, a very enjoying activity ^^.

So, remember to keep in touch with this blog. Next week, I will be back to update you with fresh news.

All hail the collaborative intelligence supremacy!!! \o/

[GSoC] Now it's gpodder integration time!!!

Hello, fellow reader. Up until now, I had fixed the playlist synchronization in Amarok, hence everything is on schedule and the first part of this project is "apparently" finished. 

[GSoC] Playlist Synchronisation for Amarok

Hi fellows. Last week, I and my mentor discussed a lot about playlist synchronization, mainly because I was getting the wrong idea about the correct implementation.

In the second half of the week, we had achieved a consensus about how we can keep playlist synchronisation flexible to future changes and simple for almost all kinds of playlist.

At this moment, I had fixed the synchronisation between two different kinds of playlist (if you dont understand this, just ignore ^^) and this commit was already uploaded to my scratch repository (it has no utility for a normal user now indeed).

Basically, Amarok playlist synchronisation is not a noticeable feature for common users, at least for my project, but it is neccesary to our planned implementation of gpodder integration as an Amarok service. 

So, remember to keep in touch with this blog if my project interest you. Next week, I will be back to update you with fresh news.

All hail the KDE!!! \o/

My KDE Google Summer of Code Project

Hi everyone. I'm here to talk a little bit about my Google Summer of Code(GSoC) Project - yes, my project was approved and I'm very happy. YAY ^^.

Basically, the project goal is to integrate gpodder.net web service with Amarok podcasting functionalities. Now, lets answer some questions...

What is gpodder.net?

The podcast web service gpodder.net is a free, online and open source application that can be used for podcast searching, subscription and status synchronization.

What are the benefits of this integration?

The integration will make possible things as such as:

1. Synchronization of subscribed podcasts between any device that supports Amarok or other application compatible with gpodder.net (like GPodder).
2. There will be, also, status synchronization too. So you can start listening one podcast in your notebook, stop to get the school bus, and continue at the same point you stopped in any other device that supports gpodder.net web services. 

Its only this? 

Off course not, there will be another feature, the long-waited playlist synchronization, that was not working for a long time. Just prepare your pendrive, MP3 player, flashcard or any storage device to the music guys UU. 

Final remarks...


Despite all the greatness of this project, I must say that behind every programmer there is a better one XD. And this man, geeks and freaks, this man is Bart Cerneels, the main developer of Amarok podcasting functionalities and my mentor until August. 

So, that's all for this post. All hail the KDE!!!

P.S.: Just don't forget to keep in touch with this blog. Stay alert, the next steps will be reported here and I sincerely hope to receive feedback from interested people. Please, let me know your opinion!!!