It means that current version of Nautilus Flickr Uploader will stop working, so I’ve added OAuth support (the code it’s in the git repo, and I’d like to make a release tomorrow).

I’ll update the package for Fedora 15 and 16 (if you’re using the repository, you don’t need to do anything at all), and any user of the previous Fedora versions will need to upgrade from source code.

The new OAuth code required changing some strings, so most of the translations are now incomplete:

• ar, de, fr, gl, gu, it, pl, pt, ru and uk need at least the new strings. It’s just a couple, so it shouldn’t take long for a native speaker.
• ca needs some love, although the important stuff is there. I translated most of the file, but I must admit my Catalan is not what it used to be :(. My partner will help me with this one, so it’ll be 100% complete this weekend.
• en and es are 100% complete!

Finally I stopped using Transifex. It doesn’t work for me anymore and I can’t make it work (is git support gone?), so I think is better to stop using it completely to avoid people sending translations for outdated files.

The bad thing of not using Transifex is that helping with the translations is not as friendly as it used to be. If you’re a git or GitHub user… you know what to do, but if you don’t know what I’m talking about but still want to help… just download the .po file you want to translate (click on the language file and then “Save As” in the raw link), fill the gaps and send it to me by mail. Thanks!

I want to release 0.11 as soon as possible, but I can push a minor release later with some extra translations.

If you want to see how the new OAuth user interface looks like, you can check this video: Nautilus Flickr Uploader and OAuth.

After installing the usual stuff (RPM Fusion it’s very important in this laptop, because I need their non-free packages so my Broadcom wireless works!), the only bit I’ve found confusing is the spell-check support. I had to install hunspell-es and hunspell-en packages (enchant is required too, but it was already installed) to have spell-checking in all the input boxes. That wasn’t obvious and Evolution’s documentation put me in the right path.

I played a bit with Gnome Tweak Tool, mainly because the default fonts are too big for my resolution (1366×768), and changed the icon theme to the Fedora one (not important, but it’ll help me to feel at home).

I made packages for Nautilus Flickr Uploader, and setted up a repository for Fedora 16.

It works as expected, because I already made some changes in previous released to be sure it’ll work fine on Gnome 3. I’m thinking about looking for a better name and performing a serious facelift, now that we’re close to 1000 registered users (according to Flick API information, Nautilus Flickr Uploader has been there for a while).

So far I have a good feeling about this release. Everything feels fast and pleasantly sleek, and the installation and migration of all my data it’s been really fast: less than two hours and I have a full functional work environment.

I’m not completely sure that I’ll fit in Gnome 3, but I’m current again! I’ll try my best to understand why things are the way they are, and contribute to the extent of my possibilities.

Congratulations to all the Fedora team for a impressive release!

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I guess I’ll be back here when I have some code to post, but in the meantime… if only Google+ had a RSS feed…

I’ll try to finish something, using a couple of hours after work every day, and more intensively on the weekend. The theme will be voted tomorrow, but anyway I’m thinking in different strategies and possible game mechanics (besides reading some pygame docs).

I’m planning writing some posts on my entry, but that will be after the contest starts 00:00 UTC 2011-09-11.

The organizers wished we had a nice hangover, but our problem wasn’t beer related, we were just sleepy.

Lorna Jane Mitchell: Careers in Open Source

We started with a nice talk by Lorna Jane Mitchell. I was interested in this talk, but as I was listening to Lorna I realized that I was been already there.

I’ve been involved in open source advocacy since 2002, and I’ve been lucky enough to focus my professional career in open source technologies and services since around 2004, and at the end I agree with Lorna in that this is not something you do to make you CV look nice but because at some point it becomes part of who you are.

It was a nice talk, but I do like slides… specially when I’m sleepy!

Alan Bell: The Ubuntu UK LoCo team 2012 plan

When I was based in Valencia I was reasonably active as Fedora ambassador, and even organized two editions of Barcamp Valencia, but since I moved to UK I’ve been quite demotivated (Gnome 3 doesn’t help, in case you’re wondering, but it’s not the main reason). I’ve attended different LUG meetings (D&C GNU/Linux User Group, Silicon Corridor Linux User Group and now the Surrey Linux User Group ), and it’s a positive experience, but it’s more a social meeting than an advocacy adventure (after all, the attendees are already Linux users).

So I was very interested in this talk, because may be it could be a good idea to get in touch with the Ubuntu community in the UK (after all I’m an Ubuntu user since Warty).

Alab Bell directed the talk/meeting, looking for different activities to promote Ubuntu in the UK. It was interesting, although I found quite surprising that he’s not a regular of LUG meetings (in fact he said he attended one meeting once). I mean, I would expect a LUG meeting a good starting point to promote Ubuntu (which is still Linux, isn’t it?).

I’ll keep an eye on the Ubuntu UK LoCo, just in case I can help.

Ken Boak: Nanode Assembly Demo

Alex was attending the assembly demo performed by the skilled Ken Boak, and I could see the finishing touches to the assembly of a Nanode board. I don’t remember what happened, but Ken was supposed to bring some Nanode DIY kits to sell, but finally he brought only a couple (that was definitely insufficient! :P).

Steve Lee: Accessibility

We already had the pleasure to meet Steve in Barcamp Oxford last year, but we had never seen his talk and it was really interesting.

The accessibility support of open source (specially Gnome) is excellent, and although I already know it from different articles and posts, I’d never seen some of the applications in action.

I knew some of these features of GTK+, but I didn’t know that using them could be that big difference for people with disabilities.

The OggCamp Raffle and Goodbyes

Finally we attended the raffle, without luck… but it was really fun (Alan Pope going up and down delivering the prizes), and it was a nice finish for two intense days in which we had the chance to meet a lot of interesting people and learn some new things.

Finally Janos, an Hungarian guy that we meet the first day, was so kind to give us a lift to Guildford so we felt like we were tele-transported home instead of suffering the annoyances of the engineering works. Thanks Janos!

The problem with this kind of event is… having to wait one year for the next edition!

As you may know, Swift is a object storage and not a file system or real-time data storage system. To explain it short: you can store, retrieve and delete objects over a RESTful HTTP API, but not all the operations that you would expect on a real file system are available.

Swift works very well as a long-term storage or when you need to store static data, and its API is compatible with Rackspace Cloud Files, so you have several applications that can communicate with it out of the box (or even with explicit support, for example with Cyberduck and OpenStack Object Storage protocol).

When we started working in a product based on Swift (to be released soon, stay tuned!), we found that the pseudo-hierarchical directories support on Swift has lots of possibilities, and… wouldn’t it be great to use any of your favourite file transfer applications directly on Swift?

Nick Craig-Wood (Memset’s Technical Director) started looking for any open source doing that, and we found the project of Chmouel Boudjnah: ftp-cloudfs. We were more interested in a SFTP interface, but Chomuel approach was very nice (MIT licensed), so we decided to put some work on his code, writing a fake file system interface layer to make some specific applications work over FTP.

After some love (other people call this QA), ftp-cloudfs has reached version 0.9, and we believe it’s in good shape to be used in a real-world™ environment.

At the same time we started to work in a SFTP implementation of the same idea, using Paramiko to deal with the protocol details, and thanks to reusing some code from ftp-cloudfs, we promptly released sftp-cloudfs as open source.

We’re planning to refactorize the code and move out the file system layer to a different project (right now sftp-cloudfs depends on ftp-cloudfs, which is not optimal), but as today I think we have reached an important milestone in both projects.

With this release we also added the packages to PyPi to make as easy as possible to start playing with the daemons, including our most crazy project to provide a full file system interface through FUSE: pycloudfuse.

So if you want to give them a go you can download the code, or try with pip:

$ pip install ftp-cloudfs

and for the SFTP code:

$ pip install sftp-cloudfs

Note: pycloudfuse mostly works, but it’s not in the same good shape than the other two projects and it needs more love (again, talking about QA here). Any help is welcome!

The venue was really nice (Farnham Maltings), and the organisation recorded 325 attendees, so I would say it was a total success.

Like any other event with several tracks, we had to choose (wisely) the talks we attended.

Simon Phipps: Freedom or Riot?

The topic was the importance of freedom in open source and why we should protect and fight for that freedom.

Phipps is a great speaker. I liked his talk, was very clear and encouraging, although I found disappointing his reasoning to explain why he’s using Apple’s hardware and software in his laptop when he’s transmitting a clear message about the importance of protecting and using open source freedom.

I think that’s OK. The message of the talk is still clear and important. We like our heroes to be perfect, but everybody has a weakness, and that’s fine (ie. I can’t avoid using Skype). But I didn’t like his reasoning to use an Apple laptop because it was in direct contradiction with the main message of his talk and because he referred to Richard Stallman’s peculiar way of browsing the web (through an email gateway) as a poor excuse.

As I said, I think it’s OK Phipps prefers Apple products because it makes life easier for him in some aspects (it might get in the way of his message, but still). What I can’t understand is why the alternative to using an Apple laptop is extreme browsing using email.

James Hugman: Technology of Dissent and Protest

This talk was about the different uses of technology that we have seen in action this years with the different riots and revolts around the world, staring with the the Arab Spring and ending with the Spanish 15M protests (he commented about the UK riots too; to state that looting it’s a different thing). Unfortunately we missed the start of the talk, but we could exchange some ideas with James later, in the corridor.

Panel discussion

This was very interesting, thanks to the four panellists: Karen Sandler (Gnome Foundation), Simon Phipps (Open Source Initiative, amongst other things), Stuart Langridge (Canonical guy, Ubuntu One), Fabian A. Scherschel (Linux Outlaws) and Dan Lynch as host (Linux Outlaws).

They talked about a lot of different topics, but I would like to emphasize on their discussion about the Linux desktop (Gnome 3 vs Unity vs KDE vs the rest, current direction, the future, etc). It’s interesting how everybody wants a Linux desktop that is reachable for everybody, no matter the technical knowledge, as if Gnome 2 was overcomplicated to use.

Anyway, I’m not a big Gnome 3/Unity fan (although I’ve been using Unity at work for some months without too many annoyances, and I can’t say the same about Gnome 3), but I got a couple of refreshing ideas from that panel discussion (mainly from Karen).

Ken Boak: The Nanode project

Ken presented his Nanode board, that aims to be one board solution to getting projects on the web, available as a DIY kit around £20.

I’m not a big DIY fan myself (I’m the software-only-please kind of guy), but Alex found it very interesting and now she wants to do some kind of hi-tech watering solution for our greenhouse. I’m scared!

On the day two of the OggCamp Ken showed how to assemble a Nanode board in less than 45 minutes. Obviously he has soldering and assembling skills I can only dream of, but it was encouraging anyway.

Live Podcast Show!

This was the recording of a mashup podcast between Linux Outlaws and the Ubuntu UK Podcast, with the participation of the audience. I must confess I don’t follow regularly neither Linux Outlaws nor the Ubuntu UK Podcast (the only one podcast I’ve followed is Shot of Jaq, and it’s probably because it was a short podcast), but I found the show very funny.

Closing the day, beer at the pub

We had never been in Farnham before, and it’s a cute small town. We tried to make the most of our visit going for a walk between the live podcast and the beer time.

Besides the talks we enjoyed the atmosphere of the event (remember, about 300 attendees!), with a geeknick (lunch on the park), we bought a couple of O’Reilly books (40% discount, yay!), and meet a bunch of friendly interesting people.

After the beers we went back to Guildford, tired but happy, resolved to come back for the second day of OggCamp.

// open firebug console to see the output
var arry = [ 42, 13, 6, 9, 12, 58, 1 ];

// by default it treats the numbers as strings
console.log(arry.sort()) // [1, 12, 13, 42, 58, 6, 9]

// providing a comparison function
console.log(arry.sort(function (a,b) {
        if (a>b) {
                return 1;
        } else {
                if (a<b) {
                        return -1;      
                } else {
                        return 0;       
                }
        }
        // or return a-b
})); // [1, 6, 9, 12, 13, 42, 58]

I don’t know if we could include this in the Javascript arrays are a non-sense box, but it’s definitely an odd behaviour.

// check the output on firebug console
var arry = [];

console.log(arry.length); // 0

arry[100] = 'one element';
console.log(arry.length); // 101

for(idx in arry) {
	console.log(arry[idx]);
}
// one element

Yes, the array has only one element and length is showing the largest integer property name in the array, plus one.

Update: look out! I’ve uploaded photos!