Next week our friends at Igalia will be hosting this year s Web Engines Hackfest. Collabora will be there! We are gold sponsors, and have three developers attending. It will also be an opportunity to celebrate Igalia s 15th birthday \o/. Looking forward to meet you there! =) Carlos Garcia has recently released WebKitGTK+ 2.14, the latest stable release. This is a great release that brings a lot of improvements and works much better on Wayland, which is becoming mature enough to be used by default. In particular, it fixes the clipboard, which was one of the main missing features, thanks to Carlos Garnacho! We have also been able to contribute a bit to this release =) One of the biggest changes this cycle is the threaded compositor, which was implemented by Igalia s Gwang Yoon Hwang. This work improves performance by not stalling other web engine features while compositing. Earlier this year we contributed fixes to make the threaded compositor work with the web inspector and fixed elements, helping with the goal of enabling it by default for this release. Wayland was also lacking an accelerated compositing implementation. There was a patch to add a nested Wayland compositor to the UIProcess, with the WebProcesses connecting to it as Wayland clients to share the final rendering so that it can be shown to screen. It was not ready though and there were questions as to whether that was the way to go and alternative proposals were floating around on how to best implement it. At last year s hackfest we had discussions about what the best path for that would be where collaborans Emanuele Aina and Daniel Stone (proxied by Emanuele) contributed quite a bit on figuring out how to implement it in a way that was both efficient and platform agnostic. We later picked up the old patchset, rebased on the then-current master and made it run efficiently as proof of concept for the Apertis project on an i.MX6 board. This was done using the fancy GL support that landed in GTK+ in the meantime, with some API additions and shortcuts to sidestep performance issues. The work was sponsored by Robert Bosch Car Multimedia. Igalia managed to improve and land a very well designed patch that implements the nested compositor, though it was still not as efficient as it could be, as it was using glReadPixels to get the final rendering of the page to the GTK+ widget through cairo. I have improved that code by ensuring we do not waste memory when using HiDPI. As part of our proof of concept investigation, we got this WebGL car visualizer running quite well on our sabrelite imx6 boards. Some of it went into the upstream patches or proposals mentioned below, but we have a bunch of potential improvements still in store that we hope to turn into upstreamable patches and advance during next week s hackfest. One of the improvements that already landed was an alternate code path that leverages GTK+ s recent GL super powers to render using gdk_cairo_draw_from_gl(), avoiding the expensive copying of pixels from the GPU to the CPU and making it go faster. That improvement exposed a weird bug in GTK+ that causes a black patch to appear when shrinking the window, which I have a tentative fix for. We originally proposed to add a new gdk_cairo_draw_from_egl() to use an EGLImage instead of a GL texture or renderbuffer. On our proof of concept we noticed it is even more efficient than the texturing currently used by GTK+, and could give us even better performance for WebKitGTK+. Emanuele Bassi thinks it might be better to add EGLImage as another code branch inside from_gl() though, so we will look into that. Another very interesting igalian addition to this release is support for the MemoryPressureHandler even on systems with no cgroups set up. The memory pressure handler is a WebKit feature which flushes caches and frees resources that are not being used when the operating system notifies it memory is scarce. We worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to add support for that feature to the Raspberry Pi browser and contributed it upstream back in 2014, when Collabora was trying to squeeze as much as possible from the hardware. We had to add a cgroups setup to wrap Epiphany in, back then, so that it would actually benefit from the feature. With this improvement, it will benefit even without the custom cgroups setups as well, by having the UIProcess monitor memory usage and notify each WebProcess when memory is tight. Some of these improvements were achieved by developers getting together at the Web Engines Hackfest last year and laying out the ground work or ideas that ended up in the code base. I look forward to another great few days of hackfest next week! See you there o/

1Password is a very powerful application for OSX to keep safe your passwords and identities. It works as a standalone application and as a series of plugins for several Internet browsers. It is capable of, among other things, autofill registration forms and save you a lot of time filling in the same personal information again and again. To autofill a login form, just click the 1P browser menu bar icon, choose a previously recorded identity and voila, 1Password logins in automagically with no further interaction. All the harvested information is stored in a different keychain unlocked by a master key placed in the login keychain (See Keychain access.app for more information). Macheist, in collaboration with Agile Web Solutions, is offering free licenses as a Christmas present here. You only have to create and account and click in the links below the tree to get your free license.

The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

At least 150 people were reported killed today in an air crash at Madrid. Rest in peace, all of you will be missed.

Some people are born to be a winner, you‘re one of them. Congratulations dude! ;)

It happens that when I get burnt out by Debian (I might blog about that later, but then I just might not) I am forced to face the real world just to learn that Debian was not so bad to begin with. Oh, the irony! I need to smoke more so that I spend less time involved in this crap nobody can change. It is hard enough to change Debian, I don't even want to think about the rest.

If you want to understand the world crisis you are living in...

• Watch Money as Debt, an animated documentary by Paul Grignon, that will make you want to cry (torrent here)


• Then read Why the US is collapsing by Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party.


• I can also suggest Maxed Out on Credit, an independent documentary that chronicles abusive practices in the credit card industry (torrent here)


• The end of Suburbia on peak oil and its implications on the suburban lifestyle, which I have recommended before (torrent here)


• For a nice piece of "fiction" turn to Fast Food Nation. There's shit in your meat, but that's ok as long as you cook it! (torrent here)


• If you can read Spanish, there's a great article about the housing bubble, the credit crunch and how they affect you (on top of not being able to access decent housing at prices that have anything to do with your earnings), even if you don't live in the USA or Madrid ;) The article was written by Leopoldo Abad a, although I first saw it on Nacho Giral's blog: Explicaci n a la crisis financiera que nos azota

NMs, I’ve just realized who’s gonna help you. Her name is Morgan le Fay.

Adria — You will all burn in the fires of eternal DAMnation.
Morgan le Fay — Not if I have anything to do with it!

Stargate: The Ark of Truth (1:29:18)

Although Dato has recently talked about it, it is worth to drop again a few more bits about MyEpisodes.com as a try to increase its popcon among TV shows addicts. MyEpisodes.com is an easy way to track your activity watching TV shows. Using a fancy interface it is possible, for instance, to tag episodes as acquired/watched, be aware of upcoming premieres and, taking advantage of the provided RSS channels, stay up to date of new episodes without even visiting the website. Have you ever asked yourself how many hours have you spent in front of your screen watching TV shows? MyEpisodes.com has got the answer. Cool, isn’t it? ;)

Quite often I’ll feel the urge to listen to a particular song, and you could say it’s one of my pleasures of life the ability to do so. Having a big music collection helps, but for when it doesn’t, I’m glad Nacho introduced me to goear.com.

People usually uses Google, among other things, to look for hints about how to do small tasks. Hopefully, you will find the hint you were looking for in somebody’s blog, because he or she had the same problem time ago and decided to talk about it. Last night, I was a bit bored and started writing a dumb set of files to introduce people how static and dynamic linking work, so trying to put my two cents and add a new hint to the wild wild web, I’m sharing it. The C source files are practically useless, therefore pay attention to the Makefile, the magic is in there. If you’re downloading it only to compile, execute and see what happens forget about it, the program is completely silly. Otherwise, probably the Makefile is buggy somewhere so bug reports are welcome. For teaching purposes, try, for example, breaking the ABI and see what happens. Google, index this post please! Update: This example does not cover autotools/libtool

As you might know, I’ve been sharing a dedicated server with three more guys. Since several months ago, we have been thinking about change the provider because the plans offered by JVDS were very price-outdated compared with other providers. Dreamhost didn’t fit our requirements (no root access and shared databases., WTF?!), so we had to choose between either Linode or Slicehost. After waiting for about a month in the prospective customer queue, we finally moved to Slicehost. Slicehost is a fast, made-from-geeks-to-geeks and XEN powered virtual dedicated servers provider. We’re quite happy with the change, we got a new machine with four times more memory for the same price and we also moved from Apache to Lighttpd. All the references from Slicehost we read were good and, at least by now, I second those thoughts. Skyhusker made an awesome work migrating the stuff and all the services are already moved. Of course, we’re running Etch.

Paying tribute to the girl who pointed me out to this fantastic indie band, I’d recommend listen to Move on Now, crafted by Hard-Fi. Sweet taste, deep melody. P.S.) Martin, Gazpacho sounds nice ;)

eBox has reached an important milestone recently, it has just got its first complete user-contributed module. I guess that’s quite important for a company-backed free software product, meaning that there is really a community out there, and it’s ready to contribute stuff In addition it’s always great to know that you are doing a good work (snippet from Nacho’s mini-interview to the module author):

Quite honestly it s to me the most exciting open source projects I ve come across in some time - the flexibility it provides is remarkable. The developers are great and happy to help. My first experience of coding for eBox has been thoroughly enjoyable. I m looking forward to getting on with my next module now and learning more about eBox!

It was warm tonight, so I made nachos and a big salad for dinner. I took the opportunity to capture my Nachos recipe for you to enjoy. Yes, nachos are a really easy food to make, but so many people make them so wrong, I figured I should write a recipe for people to get them right. tags: nachos recipe food

I'm sitting in our suite in the Doubletree on Times Square in New York City, catching up with some email and generally trying to pull myself together. It's been a remarkably busy week and this is the first time I've been able to sit down to blog for a while. We moved to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac last Wednesday, and most of my time last week was taken up either packing things (clothes, computers, dishes), unpacking the same things, or taking things that I didn't want to pack/unpack to various charitable organizations. Our move-in went smoothly -- the hardest part was moving our old fridge and stove to our new house, then moving the fridge and stove and deep freeze from our new house to the old apartment for Julia and Antoine to use. The new house came with a lot of new goodies, too. We bought a new couch for our new livingroom, and a new king-size bed for our new bedroom. On top of all that, I signed us up for Vid otron cable Internet instead of our old reliable Bell Canada DSL, and it's turned out to be quite fast and easy to use. So on top of the excitement of having a new place to live, there have been a lot of new toys to play with. Thankfully, our cats and our daughter have adapted quite well to their new environment. Amita June has a new bedroom, but she's been through so much travel -- hotel rooms and friends' homes -- that she's able to sleep just about anywhere. Topaz and Xe (the cats) don't usually adapt very well, but Maj kept them in the upstairs bathroom for a few days The thing that's surprised me the most about moving into the new house is how seldom we go upstairs. All our bedrooms are downstairs, as well as the new office/den, and we seem to get a lot of our needs met down there. The upstairs area is really really nice, though: lots of light and air. But the stairs are a real energy barrier. I guess my legs are going to get stronger and I'll get used to running up and down them several times a day. Probably the biggest disappointment of the move-in was that our new paint job, which had been so lovingly planned, got pretty marked-up in certain parts of the house -- specifically, the halls and stairs. We'll be doing some touch-up painting ourselves, but it is still kind of a bummer to see all these nicks and scratches on the otherwise pristine walls. tags: moving newhouse 4690ruepontiac

Train in vain We're in New York City for the awards ceremony for the Webby Awards. Wikitravel won the Webby award for best travel Web site of 2007 -- quite an honor. We came right after our move-in, so it feels a little rushed. We're just here for about 72 hours. We'd thought about going down to visit family in New Jersey, but we really need to finish getting unpacked and settled in to the new house. We're planning on coming down for a relaxed family visit in NJ later this summer, instead -- maybe combining it with a trip to the Jersey Shore. Although there are plenty of flights between Montreal and New York, and it's only about a 6- to 8-hour drive, we decided to try something different this time. We took the Adirondack (Amtrak) train, which runs down the shores of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley. My theory was that the train trip would let us stretch our legs, read, and get some work done, and that AJ could run around and enjoy herself, rather than being cooped up in a car or airplane seat. Although the train was the slowest option (it's scheduled as a 9-hour trip), it might end up being the most comfortable. I think the results were mixed. Indeed, the trip was a comfortable one, and Amita June got to run up and down the aisles and climb all over the empty seats. However, we got stopped at the US border due to an elevated terror alert, and what was supposed to be a 30-minute scheduled customs stop dragged into a two-and-a-half hour inspection. By the time we got to New York, we were more than two hours late. Among other things, this meant that I missed the opening cocktail reception for the Webbies, which was kind of a bummer. It was dumping down rain in torrents when we finally got to Penn Station, though, so I think that the rooftop reception probably wasn't all that much fun. I got soaked trying to get us a cab, but we had a decent ride to our hotel -- the functional but unexciting DoubleTree Suites on Times Square. We had a hard time finding a hotel that would be even remotely affordable, in Manhattan, and had junior suite rooms. Suites are great when you're traveling with a toddler -- it means you can put them to bed at 8PM and then go in the other room to stay up the rest of the evening. We had a decent room-service dinner -- Caesar's, nachos, 2 Heinekens -- and crashed out. This morning I woke up to a text message from my friend Ben Cerveny. He's also in New York for a few days -- he figured out that we were both going to be here using the cool Dopplr service. I rousted up Maj and Amita June -- late sleepers, lately -- and we all went down to Greenwich Village to meet Ben at The Grey Dog. The caf had decent coffee and pretty hearty breakfasts. We stayed for about 2 hours. We ambled over to the Center for Architecture to check out a few exhibits and stretch our legs. It turned out to be a great place to bring a toddler -- not too crowded, and pretty noise-tolerant. Amita burned herself out running through the exhibits. We left Ben behind and headed back to the room for naps and computer time. I was going to try to go to the Webby event for film and video tonight, but there was some complicated signup thing I was supposed to do, and I ended up failing to do it. It's probably just as well -- Maj isn't feeling great. So we're going to just get some dinner together and call it an early evening. tags: newyork wikitravel travel

Certifi.ca re-certified For the last month I've had a TODO item on my list: New SSL cert for certifi.ca. Of course, I let it slide and slide -- definitely not an urgent item, right? Well, not until the cert expired last Sunday. Oops. It took me a while to get certifi.ca a new cert -- I wanted to get it with the name of the new corporation I've started to manage my OpenID sites, called Control Yourself, Inc. or, in French, Contr lez-vous, Inc.. (I'm not even sure if contr lez-vous makes any sense, actually.) The folks at Comodo had a hard time with the Quebec corporate registration and asked for a lot of extra documentation, which dragged things out a few days. On top of that, I got distracted by the move, so I haven't had much time to think about SSL certs. But I got the cert late last week, and ended up with another problem: when I replaced the old cert and "ca-bundle" files with the new ones, Apache mysteriously failed to start up -- at all. It just kerploded with no error log information. I was unable to find any documentation on why this would be the case. I spent some extra time debugging this afternoon, and came to an embarrassing conclusion. The program I used to feed a password to Apache (using SSLPassPhraseDialog) was giving it the password for the old key. Doh! Fixing that made Apache start up just fine. I wish I had a good way to attract Google searches for this, but maybe this sentence will work: If your Apache server with mod_ssl fails mysteriously right after startup, make sure that the passphrase is generated correctly. tags: apache certifica comodo sslpassphrasedialog mod_ssl passphrase

Creative Commons shrinks a bit Kudos to Creative Commons, who have retired their controversial Developing Nations and Sampling licenses. Critics have pointed out that all CC licenses allowed a basic universal right -- verbatim, non-commercial copying -- except for the Sampling and DevNations. I think the move has helped to focus CC somewhat. Although Creative Commons started as a way to explore novel methods for letting people share certain rights to their works, this move will set a baseline for what's an acceptable CC license and what's just not enough. As Lawrence Lessig says in the announcement: There is a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially. Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least this minimal freedom at least not without substantial public discussion. It's a good idea, and I'm glad CC is taking this tack. I hope that those people who've criticized CC in the past for not having such a baseline will take the opportunity for a rapprochement. tags: cc devnations sampling creativecommons richardstallman

Funds for Standout Jobs Congrats to Montreal entrepreneurs Fred Ngo, Ben Yoskovitz, and Austin Hill. Their new high-high-end recruiting engine, Standout Jobs, just got an angel round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. Yeah, they're only Canadian dollars (see Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV), but that means a lot more today. Fred, Ben and Austin have all done a lot to advance the local technology community. I'm glad to hear that their project is taking the first steps to success. tags: standoutjobs fredngo benyoskovitz austinhill

Sadly, this is the second year I have to say good bye to Debconf, as I wrote time ago, I wasn’t able to attend Debconf in the selected dates. Yeah, I said “*was*” because some plans have changed recently, and, as you are probably thinking, it’s already too late to ask for sponsorship and start planning the trip. I hope to meet you in the next event and, meanwhile, I’ve a message for all the attendees: Fly well, fly safe, have fun and drink some beer for me!

As it’s quite predictable that we’ll have a newer version of Gnash in one or two months, I’ve created a newer experimental set of packages from the CVS, so that everything is ready when the release comes out. There is really much more to do before they’re in a decent state, mainly making them work out-of-the box for Konqueror, and decide how to handle the shared objects that are being built right now. The plugin for iceweasel works out-of-the-box for me. Do not expect a stable program for the moment anyway, it’s still under heavy development. I’ve been reported some more bugs about these packages anyway, so be careful with them. Chipi has built the packages for amd64 for me, so if you want them, they’re available online. According to one of the developers: “gnash should not have shared objects, they have been enabled again recently to allow builds on Darwin, altought I think we should disable them again”, so I think that matter about shared objects is likely to be solved soon. As it is right now, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be compliant with The Policy. As there’s no API for gnash yet, it doesn’t really make sense to create a -dev package for the moment, even though there seem to be some demand for it. Somewhere in the future we will likely have one. For those who want to experiment with later versions, I’m using SVN for handling the packaging, so it’s quite easy to create some really extreme latest version of the packages: svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-flash/packages/gnash/trunk/ latest-gnash
cd latest-gnash
fakeroot debian/rules get-orig-source
cd gnash-0.7.2+cvs*.????
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot


Dear Lazyweb, I’m sorry, I know I’m late but here it is my promised report about DudesConf. It was simply cool, even though it was my first Debian-related real [0] event everything was in a good, familiar and friendly shape. I’m really happy to had met all the Debian developers who attended, GPUL people and others, pleased to meet you guys! Talks, BOFs, meals, accommodation, everything was impressive, so my gratitude goes to everyone who helped made DudesConf possible :). If you feel curious, you should be able to watch some pictures in the gallery or read the live (I know, it’s not really live at the moment, my fault) event coverage. Of course, Ricardo, thank you for take me to A coru a, it was a pleasure for me to share some kilometers (some? all of them!) with you ;) [0] Real comes from real life, Daniel pointed me out days ago to the actual difference between real an virtual life.

13:55 -!- aba changed the topic of #debian-release to: Done. Superb guys! Thanks again to everybody who made it possible, release team, translators, bug reporters, Debian CD, ftp team, QA team,… and to everyone who is part of this wonderful project called Debian! See you next weekend at Dudesconf! By the way, the #debian-release’s topic change notice was stolen from Steve’s blog.