Mono at FOSDEM 2012: Schedule announced!

Posted on Wednesday January 18, 2012 by Ruben

The schedule for the Mono devroom at FOSDEM 2012 has been finalized:

  • (11:00 – 11:45) Enough Debian packaging knowledge to hurt yourselves slightly less than you do already (Jo Shields)
  • (12:00 – 13:00) Mono – State of the Union (Miguel De Icaza)
  • (13:00 – 14:00) *** Lunch break ***
  • (14:00 – 14:30) Gluon (Federico Di Gregorio)
  • (14:40 – 15:25) Banshee: Past, Present, Future and the Crazy stuff (Bertrand Lorentz & Olivier Dufour)
  • (15:40 – 16:25) IronPython: Bringing the dynamic world to the CLR (Carlos Alberto Cortez Guevara)
  • (16:40 – 17:30) MonoGame (Dominique Louis, Dean Ellis & Kenneth Pouncy)
  • (17:45 – 18:15) XWT (Lluis Sanchez)
  • (18:30 – 19:00) MonoMac (Miguel De Icaza)

Full details (with talk abstracts) should be available on the FOSDEM website. As always, if you want to see a talk, show up early, once the room is full, you’re out of luck!

Date to put in your agenda: Feb 4, 2012.

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Mono @ FOSDEM 2012: we still need talks!

Posted on Thursday December 22, 2011 by Ruben

Mono hackers of the world, if you are planning on attending FOSDEM 2012, be aware that there is still a call for presentations up for the Mono Devroom. Go submit your talks now, you have until the end of the year to do so.

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On F-Spot maintainership

Posted on Thursday December 22, 2011 by Ruben

From the category of news I’ve been planning to send out for months, yet never got round to doing:

With life work getting in the way, it’s been impossible for me to further maintain F-Spot. Fortunately, Stephen Shaw has offered to pick up the task. Expect new stuff soon.

Alternatively, check out Shotwell, which has been making excellent progress lately.

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As seen in an Amsterdam bar

Posted on Monday December 12, 2011 by Ruben

Linux-powered cigarette machine. Looks like they nailed it in terms of user experience.

Also on Twitter

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As seen in a Berlin hotel

Posted on Friday November 25, 2011 by Ruben

As seen in a Berlin hotel:

Arrow towards door: fails, arrow pointing away from door: door opens (click for full size)

Whoever made these things needs to re-read his usability 101 book.

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Mono Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012: CFP

Posted on Thursday November 24, 2011 by Ruben

Great news! There will be a third edition of the Mono devroom @ FOSDEM. The event will take place on Feb 4 and Feb 5. We have the devroom the entire afternoon, for 6 hours (from 13:00 till 19:00). As I am not planning to fill up all that stage time on my own, we need your talks and presentations to make this day extra interesting.

Talks on any topic are fine, as long as it’s related to Mono and open-source. These do not need to be life-changing project announcements either: deeply technical things or pet projects that will make us all giggle with hacker joy are just as desired.

Please send your talk proposals using this form: http://bit.ly/vK2WC6

You have until Dec 31 to send in talks. A final schedule will be made available on Jan 10.

Not that we get more talks than we can schedule each year, so we’ll unfortunately have to make a selection.

If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me.

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Quarter of a century

Posted on Monday September 26, 2011 by Ruben

As of today I’ve passed the mark of 25 years of existence. And what a ride it has been:

  • Started out as one cell, then gained about 1m78 in height.
  • Went from illiterate and unknowing to a university degree and a slightly better insight in the way of the world.
  • Started a PhD, abandoned it and started a company (going strong! [1]).
  • Saw parts of the earth and while doing so found out that I have much more to explore.
  • Found a bunch of friends and the most wonderful girl on earth.
  • Met a huge amount of interesting and inspiring people along the way.

I cannot wait to see what the next quarter of a century will bring!
To anyone I’ve encountered: thanks, it’s been a pleasure.

[1] And growing, more on that soon!

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Surviving on OS X when you’re used to the terminal

Posted on Sunday September 18, 2011 by Ruben

If you’ve spent some portion of your life with Linux on your computer, you’ve undoubtably discovered the usefulness of the Linux command line. Sometimes it’s just quicker to get something done by pulling up a terminal and entering a one-liner.

The GNOME file manager makes it trivial to open a terminal at your current location, if you have the nautilus-open-terminal package installed:

Going the other way around, from terminal to GUI is also easy:

  • Open current folder in file manager: nautilus .
  • Open any file with default application: gnome-open myfile.xyz

If you’ve grown into this habit, you’ll feel lost whenever you need to use a Mac. No such option in the file manager and no gnome-open command (obviously).

Don’t worry though, it’s all possible. Here’s how.

Opening a terminal at the current folder
Opening a terminal at the current folder requires you to make a small change to the preferences. Open the keyboard preferences, go to services (on the keyboard preferences page) and enable the two services shown below:

Once you’ve done that, you can simply right-click any folder and find the option under the services menu:

Opening any file from the file manager
Need to open an image from the command-line? Or a PDF? Or any other document. Simply use open: open myfile.xyz

To open a finder window and show the file in the file manager, use the -R (reveal) flag: open -R .

At least now you can switch back and forth between command-line and GUI quickly. Try Homebrew if you need to install your favorite missing tools.

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Zipper, an insanely simple zipfile creator for node.js.

Posted on Friday September 16, 2011 by Ruben

Earlier this week I needed a way to create zip files with node.js. I was shocked to find out that no such thing exists (prove me wrong interwebs!). Some hacks later, zipper was born:

Zipper, an insanely simple zipfile creator for node.js.

a zipper

a zipper by sogni_hal, on Flickr

Zipper has an API that consists of one method:

addFile(name, path, callback)

This method simply adds a file to your chosen zipfile, using an asynchronous operation. Full example:

zipper = require('zipper').Zipper;
var zipfile = new zipper('/path/to/my/zipfile.zip');
zipfile.addFile('myfile.txt', '/path/to/myfile.txt', function (err) {
    if (err) throw err;
    // Do stuff
});

Zipper is available on Github: https://github.com/rubenv/zipper
Or through npm: npm install zipper

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Student session tomorrow

Posted on Friday August 5, 2011 by Ruben

As a reminder, the GNOME and KDE Interns Showcase at the Desktop Summit is on tomorrow at 17:15, which is in 24 hours from now (at the time of publishing). It’ll take place in the Audimax room.

The main goal of this session is to give our Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women students a forum to show what they’ve been working on in the past few months. Your feedback and support will be very much appreciated by them.

Be there or miss out on the future!

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