For the 6th year in a row, Igalia has organized a hackfest focused on web engines. The 5 years before this one were actually focused on the GTK+ port of WebKit, but the number of web engines that matter to us as Free Software developers and consultancies has grown, and so has the scope of the hackfest. It was a very productive and exciting event. It has already been covered by Manuel Rego, Philippe Normand, Sebastian Dr ge and Andy Wingo! I am sure more blog posts will pop up. We had Martin Robinson telling us about the new Servo engine that Mozilla has been developing as a proof of concept for both Rust as a language for building big, complex products and for doing layout in parallel. Andy gave us a very good summary of where JS engines are in terms of performance and features. We had talks about CSS grid layouts, TyGL a GL-powered implementation of the 2D painting backend in WebKit, the new Wayland port, announced by Zan Dobersek, and a lot more. With help from my colleague ChangSeok OH, I presented a description of how a team at Collabora led by Marco Barisione made the combination of WebKitGTK+ and GNOME s web browser a pretty good experience for the Raspberry Pi. It took a not so small amount of both pragmatic limitations and hacks to get to a multi-tab browser that can play youtube videos and be quite responsive, but we were very happy with how well WebKitGTK+ worked as a base for that. One of my main goals for the hackfest was to help drive features that were lingering in the bug tracker for WebKitGTK+. I picked up a patch that had gone through a number of iterations and rewrites: the HTML5 notifications support, and with help from Carlos Garcia, managed to finish it and land it at the last day of the hackfest! It provides new signals that can be used to authorize notifications, show and close them. To make notifications work in the best case scenario, the only thing that the API user needs to do is handle the permission request, since we provide a default implementation for the show and close signals that uses libnotify if it is available when building WebKitGTK+. Originally our intention was to use GNotification for the default implementation of those signals in WebKitGTK+, but it turned out to be a pain to use for our purposes. GNotification is tied to GApplication. This allows for some interesting features, like notifications being persistent and able to reactivate the application, but those make no sense in our current use case, although that may change once service workers become a thing. It can also be a bit problematic given we are a library and thus have no GApplication of our own. That was easily overcome by using the default GApplication of the process for notifications, though. The show stopper for us using GNotification was the way GNOME Shell currently deals with notifications sent using this mechanism. It will look for a .desktop file named after the application ID used to initialize the GApplication instance and reject the notification if it cannot find that. Besides making this a pain to test our test browser would need a .desktop file to be installed, that would not work for our main API user! The application ID used for all Web instances is org.gnome.Epiphany at the moment, and that is not the same as any of the desktop files used either by the main browser or by the web apps created with it. For the future we will probably move Epiphany towards this new era, and all users of the WebKitGTK+ API as well, but the strictness of GNOME Shell would hurt the usefulness of our default implementation right now, so we decided to stick to libnotify for the time being. Other than that, I managed to review a bunch of patches during the hackfest, and took part in many interesting discussions regarding the next steps for GNOME Web and the GTK+ and Wayland ports of WebKit, such as the potential introduction of a threaded compositor, which is pretty exciting. We also tried to have Bastien Nocera as a guest participant for one of our sessions, but it turns out that requires more than a notebook on top of a bench hooked up to a TV to work well. We could think of something next time ;D. I d like to thank Igalia for organizing and sponsoring the event, Collabora for sponsoring and sending ChangSeok and myself over to Spain from far away Brazil and South Korea, and Adobe for also sponsoring the event! Hope to see you all next year!

As acting release engineer of the Gypsy project (a GPS mux, if you didn't know) I'm proud to announce the release of Gypsy 0.8. So, what's new?

• Support the Nokia N810 integrated GPS. If someone can verify that this works for the N900 too, that would be great.
• Ability to dump the parsed NMEA to the console for debugging
• Fixed over-eager old-school Garmin detection
• Support reading NMEA from named pipes and FIFOs
• Support seting the baud rate on ghetto GPS devices that don't default to a baud rate that actually works (Globalsat ND-100 and BlueNext BN-903S, I'm looking at you)
• Support NMEA < 2.3

Many thanks to Jussi Kukkonen for patch review, and Bastien Nocera for patch review and new features. The big question of course is what of the future? So far we've got some rough ideas. An overhaul of the device interaction layer is definitely required as actaully getting NMEA is becoming more complex: for integrated 3G/GPS chips you need to talk to oFono/ModemManager to get a socket, for some embedded GPS devices you need a proprietary binary that writes to a pipe, and so on. There are some new features we're considering too: server-side proximity detection and update rate limiting.

Sound Juicer "I Got Nobody On My Side And Surely That Ain't Right" 2.28.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Props to Bastien for doing most of the work here.

• Many translations
• Use gnome-session instead of gnome-power-manager to avoid the machine going to sleep (Richard Hughes)
• Fix a few crashers when extracting an unknown CD (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix CD-Text metadata gathering (BN)
• Don't truncate submission URLs (BN)
• Extract UUIDs to put in ripped files' metadata (Philipp Wolfer)
• Fix some bugs in test program (Alex Larsson)

Bastien originally called this release Not the maintainer, lalala, plug ears but we all know he is, right?

Sound Juicer "And It Ain't Even 9 In The Morning, Sorry I'm Late" 2.28.0 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Very little in the 2.27 cycle...

• Many translations
• Updated documentation
• Disable paranoia on playback (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix leaks and crashes in the metadata fetches (BN)

Did I mention that SJ could really do with a dedicated (co)maintainer?

Sound Juicer "I Should Be Crying, But I Just Can't Let It Show" 2.25.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• Port to Brasero (Luis Medinas)
• Fix Solaris builds (Brian Cameron)
• Drop libgnome (Iain Holmes, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort)
• Fix conflicting mnemonics in the message area (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix mb3 backend (Bastien Nocera)

Or, Contact Lookup Applet 0.17 is now released. Some bug fixes and features thanks to the core widget being used in Nautilus Send-To:

• Pass future maintainership to Bastien Nocera
• Don't search unopened books
• Automatically detect sources (Bastien Nocera)
• Only error out if all the addressbooks failed to open (BN)
• Show one menu item for each e-mail address, and select by default in the contact details dialogue (BN)

The tarball is here: contact-lookup-applet-0.17.tar.gz.

Sound Juicer "Old Man Take A Look At My Life" 2.25.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Everyone's favourite Frockney did a huge amount of work on this, and I'm still talking to him after he admitted that the master plan is to replace Sound Juicer with Rhythmbox in Fedora!

• Chain the metadata lookups (Bastien Nocera)
• Finish the libmusicbrainz3 metadata fetcher (BN)
• Add a GVFS metadata fetcher as fallback (BN)
• Make libcdio option, as it breaks the GPL+Exception license (BN)
• Export ASIN, Discogs, Wikipedia in the internal metadata (BN)
• Lots of other cleanups to the metadata code (BN)
• Remove copy of the id3mux plugin, assume it exists now (BN)
• Remove Encoding field from desktop file (Pacho Ramos)
• Add Audio to desktop categories (Patryk Zawadzki)
• Correctly parse CDDA URLs (Matthew Martin)
• Don't free the option context

Sound Juicer "Harder Now With Higher Speed" 2.23.0 has finally been released.. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Hot new features!

• Port to GIO (Michael Terry)
• Update URL handling for New GIO World Order (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix display problems with the cluebar (Pekka Vuorela)
• Add audio preview when overwriting (Luca Cavalli)
• Use GtkVolmeButton instead of BaconVolume (MT)
• Fix crash when no profile is selected (Matthew Martin)
• Add []
• to the special character list (MM)
• Make the year and disc entries a11y (Patrick Wade)
• Fix error handling in CD playback (Tim-Philipp M ller)
• Require intltool 0.40

I really need some heavy testing on the GIO rewrite, so please try and extract tracks to as many different targets as possible. Although I expect confirmation that using an unmounted remote location currently fails, it should be possible to use this to write to Samba, OBEX-FTP, and so on.

Sound Juicer "Nikki's Growing A Patch Out In The Backyard" 2.19.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This is the first release in the 2.19.x development series, after I failed to do anything useful in 2.17.x...

• Attempt to repair brain-dead FreeDB encoding (Ka-Hing Cheung)
• Fix memory leaks in musicbrainz object (Cristian Persch)
• Follow the preferred sound device (Bastien Nocera)
• Use xdg-user-dirs (BN)
• Use gst_element_make_from_uri instead of hardcoding cdparanoia (James Livingstone)
• Display a better message after extracting (Adam Petaccia)
• Fix detection of FreeDB albums (David Mandelberg)
• Accessibility fixes (Rich Burridge, Patrick Wade)
• Don't crash if libnautilus-burn doens't know of a device (Pascal Terjan)
• Initialise threading earlier
• Convert strerror() output to UTF-8 for display (PT)
• Remove "Application" category from desktop file
• Fix srcdir!=builddir builds (Loic Minier)
• Internal refactor of extractor and metadata objects

Weeks go by way too quickly lately, and GUADEC was suddenly here. So I finally got permission from work to attend, after managing to complete our milestone the required one week in advance. So far, my first GUADEC has been fantastic. While I've tried to come here with my most "just relax" mentality and it's working pretty well, I've also tried to be around the conference for most of the day, as meeting people is, I believe, the best way to enjoy this kind of conferences. I'm staying with Josep and Jes s in one of the bungalows at the GNOME Village, which is a very nice place, althought it's a bit too far from the GUADEC site. There's a public bus service, but some days it's quite unreliable; luckily Fabrice is staying with us at the bungalow and he has a car which we can use. An unplanned attendee was mako, who after being around the great CDG airport for the Ubuntu Conference in Paris, had a few spare days before returning to Boston and came down to Vilanova i la Geltr for the warmup weekend and half of the first core day. Of course, having him around has introduced the usual randomness to those days. Just after arriving in Vilanova, toniher drove us to the lighthouse area, where there were some big Sant Joan parties going in the middle of the beach. At 4AM, and after checking our flirting techniques are not too effective, we wandered off back to Vilanova Park, seeking some good sleep. In the meantime, Danilo Segan, from the Serbian team, apparently had a hard time finding a way to open his bungalow, and ended sleeping in ours as yet another guest. Saturday morning was spent sleeping, and while we had breakfast, I put on my Komando CT training t-shirt. When mako saw it, he said "hey I have one of those!", which made me discover how kiko traded my other Komando t-shirt with mako during the Montr al conference. WTF! We headed back to Vilanova to get lunch and my talk about the Catalan GNOME localisation project. At 16:00 it's hard to get food in some places, and when we finally managed, my talk was so close we had no time at all to prepare. Jordi Mas, Toni Hermoso and I spoke about our experience to a great audience of about 12 persons. Having decided what would each talk about two minutes before starting, I found myself with little to say at some points, but I guess the talk ended up being interesting, and we got a few interested people in assisting us with further translations. After the conference we met with Bastien and several Debian UK people in one of the bars in the beach area, where we, just after getting in, could see how Argentina scored a fantastic goal against Mexico in extra time. A few beers later, it was time to sleep, but we still had to go through the transportation odyssey. I think we managed to get a taxi one and a half hours later. Sunday has been the most intense day so far. Up at a reasonable time, mako, danilo and I planned going to spend the day at Sitges, one of the most famous towns in the Catalan coast which is just one train stop away. Mako was thrilled about the idea of visiting the Gay Capital of Southern Europe, and we set off for the train station. Visiting Sitges was not meant to be too funny for me, but mostly quite emotional. My initial plan was to go alone during the week, but I figured that mako and others would really enjoy being in such a beautiful town as this one. Sitges is where my Catalan grandmother was born, and where she lived for much of her life. Some will remember that wrote about how important she was for me when she died one year ago. I hadn't been in Sitges for years already, and I feared my emotions when I went back to her house in the middle of the town. We walked from the train station down to the Santiago Rusinyol street, while I tried to show them some of the details I always enjoy about Sitges, including the No embruteu les parets tiles which are all over the place. We arrived at my grandparent's place and we entered the house. Having danilo and mako with me probably helped to not get too many memories back, and also, seeing the house so dismantled, and empty of life made it hard to feel "at home".

Don't dirty the walls. Cleanness is a great signal of civilisation When we went down to the Platja de Sant Sebasti and I spoke to my cousin Bego on the phone I was unable to stop the tears when my grandma appeared in the conversation, though. That beach was her favourite, and I remember how she would take us to spend the day there when we were little more than babies. I took danilo and mako around the town's center and enchanting corners, and after having lunch, we headed to the beach going through the gay streets . At the beach, we had our share of sunbathing and swimming, and around 18:00 I told them we should probably head back to Vilanova, as I had to be ready to play football at 19:00. We were lucky and the train arrived as soon as we got to the station, and also when Fabrice gave us a lift to the stadium with his car. The GNOME World Cup had already started, and someone had taken the last red shirt to substitute me, so I quickly neglected my ex-team and joined the Blue Team. We found ourselves in the final after a dramatic penalty kickout, to play against the mighty Black Team led by Bastien Nocera, who had *destroyed* the White Team with 16 goals or something equally insane. It was a very even final, though, and after 40 minutes of non-stop running, our team scored the decisive goal just three minutes before the end.

Champions! The day would not end up there, as I had to meet my cousin Laia and her boyfriend Marc in Barcelona, to have dinner with them. So off I went, with a hurt calf and dressed like a tramp, to fetch yet another train. I had dinner at a nice place near the Pla a de Catalunya, and after that we were all so sleepy that we went straight to bed at my cousin's place, at 2AM or so. Then, there was the fight against the mosquitos at 4AM, and an early wake up to go back to Vilanova, in time for the grand opening of the Core GUADEC.

Contact Lookup Applet 0.14 is released, especially done for sebuild.

• Translate the .server files (Frederic Crozat)
• Don't set sensitivity ourself (Bastien Nocera)
• Correctly handle contacts with no email (Adam Petaccia)

Translators: Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Clytie Siddall (vi), Daniel Nylander (sv), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Frank Arnold (de), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), I aki Larra aga Murgoitio (eu), Jean-Michel Ardantz (fr), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Marcel Telka (sk), Maria Soler (ca), Maxim Dziumanenko (uk), Micha Kastelik (pl), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Yavor Doganov (bg), ygimantas Beru ka (lt). You can grab it from the usual place. Debian packages heading towards Sid once I update my pbuilder...

Sound Juicer "If Not Now" 2.13.2 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of changes here:

• Fix handling of multiple albums (David Mandelberg)
• Handle G_FILENAME_ENCODING (Colin Leroy)
• Add Generic Name to the desktop file (Matthias Clasen)
• Correct multiple-artist data imported from FreeDB (Bastien Nocera)
• Remove leading periods when generating filenames
• Add a Submit menu item to open the MusicBrainz web page (James Hensbridge)
• Set the MusicBrainz proxy from gnome-vfs
• Cache MusicBrainz metadata
• Add support for the MusicBrainz "sortable name" attribute (Peter Oliver)
• Make the Preferences dialog non-resizable, and fix layout
• Save the main window size (using the rocking libgconf-bridge)
• Change keybinding for Next/Previous, to avoid stomping Paste
• Remove CDIO version check
• Set default window icon
• Protect against NULL drives (Marco Barisione)
• Fix warnings with new libglade (BN)

Go testers go! NP: Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman