Stuff to look forward to at FOSDEM 2010: The GNOME room and for the first time ever: the Mono room. And seeing everybody again, off-course. Can't wait!

Stuff to look forward to at FOSDEM 2010: The GNOME room and for the first time ever: the Mono room. And seeing everybody again, off-course. Can't wait!
I am happy to announce that the schedule for the Mono developer room at FOSDEM 2010 has been finalized. We have a lot of great talks lined up for you to enjoy:
| 09:00 - 09:15 | Opening (Ruben Vermeersch, Stéphane Delcroix) |
| 09:15 - 10:00 | MonoDevelop (Lluis Sanchez Gual) |
| 10:00 - 11:00 | The Ruby and .NET love child (Ivan Porto Carrero) |
| 11:00 - 12:00 | Mono Edge (Miguel de Icaza) |
Lunch Break | |
| 12:45 - 13:15 | The evolution of MonoTorrent (Alan McGovern) |
| 13:15 - 13:45 | Image processing with Mono.Simd (Stéphane Delcroix) |
| 13:45 - 14:15 | ParallelFx, bringing Mono applications in the multicore era (Jérémie Laval) |
Coffee Break | |
| 14:30 - 15:30 | Building The Virtual Babel: Mono In Second Life (Jim Purbrick) |
| 15:30 - 16:00 | Moonlight and you (Andreia Gaita) |
| 16:00 - 16:30 | OSCTool - learning C# and Mono by doing (Jo Shields) |
| 16:30 - 16:45 | Smuxi - IRC in a modern environment (Mirco Bauer) |
| 16:45 - 17:00 | Closing (Ruben Vermeersch, Stéphane Delcroix) |
Are you a developer hacking on or using Mono? Coming to FOSDEM 2010? Be sure to submit your talk for the developer room and do it quickly: the deadline is nearing!
More info.
I am very pleased to announce that in 2010, for the first time ever, we will have a Mono developer room at FOSDEM. This room is organized by Stephane and me, with the kind input of Andreia and many others.
As of now, you can submit your talk proposals! We want to make this a fun room and we want to accomodate all kinds of talks. For that reason, one thing we're experimenting with is having dynamic timeslots. Only want 15 minutes? That's okay! Need an hour? We'll see if we can squeeze it in! The most important factor is that it's interesting and fun.
So send in your proposals, be it large earth-shaking projects, or little hackery experiments that make you giggle with hacker joy, we want to hear it. We have the complete Sunday to schedule. Still have questions? Email me: ruben @ savanne be.
The submission form is here, go fill it in now! (Send in your proposals before December 20)
We hope to see you all in Brussels in 2010!
I recently read the book Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development by Keith Pope. Having done quite a lot of PHP work and having used Zend Framework, this book caught my attention. In general, I don't really like IT books that cover a technology, most of them tend to be a refactored version of the reference manual.

Together with Mike Gemünde (tigger), I am happy to announce that we are working on adding image support to Taglib#, which is the metadata library used by Banshee and currently only supports audio and video files. So why is this important? Because we will be able to vastly improve the metadata handling inside F-Spot. Furthermore, should Banshee ever decide to add photo support. it'll be ready for them to use.
The aim is to have a usable, complete and solid metadata library. This includes extensive unit testing (to the extreme). If we will handle your files, we want to guarantee that it will be done correctly.
All of this can be found on Gitorious. The code is in the photo-support branch of the mainline repository, master is a copy of the SVN repository for upstream Taglib#. Currently we support JPEG and TIFF, with Exif and XMP (see the wiki for more details). We plan to expand this to every other format out there. More instructions on how to get the code and test it can be found here.
So what's the plan here? First, we will improve the git version as is. When it is ready, we will then start embedding it into the F-Spot tree (while keeping the main repository synced in gitorious), to let it mature. Over time, we'll be working with upstream to have it merged back. I have already talked with Gabriel Burt about this, so this "fork" won't stay around forever.
We are looking for people that want to help us out. By testing it (to make sure we handle your files correctly) and off-course by hacking on it. Much to my surprise, I noticed that writing a metadata library isn't all that hard, so you don't have to be a superhero hacker to be able to do something useful.
Want to help out? Hop onto IRC and join #f-spot (on irc.gnome.org), come and talk to me (rubenv) or Mike (tigger).
Yesterday a friend of mine pointed out that I have six computers which I all use regularly: a laptop for work, a laptop at home (for photography and hacking), a netbook, a backup/file server at home, a webserver and a smartphone.
Is this too much, do I need to go into rehab? Or is the average much higher? How much computers does the average IT-er have (and why do you have them)?
Discuss in the comments!
Three weeks since the end of GSOC 2009 and I still haven't managed to blog about it. Shame on me! This summer I worked on RAW handling and processing for F-Spot. In the long term, F-Spot should become a capable image processing tool, like e.g. Adobe Lightroom. The purpose of this GSOC was to get a step closer towards that goal.
There are three big issues that need to be solved to get there:
original --> editA --> editB --> editCoriginal + adjustment settings --> result
As Stephane mentioned in his blog, F-Spot 0.6.0 is out.
Some of the highlights of this release (in no particular order):
A little while back, Mike Gemünde (tigger) wrote one of the nice features that will be present in the upcoming F-Spot release (really soon!): the folder bar. What is this? It's a new sidebar page that shows the folders in which your photos are located and allows you to browse them by folder.
