/usr/blog/sobral

Qt LGPL!

2009-01-14T03:13:00.000-08:00

so the big news of today is that Qt has now a third license model: LGPL!

that's great news for a wider Qt adoption, specially on emebedded platforms, like symbian and maemo.

see these links for more info:
- Announcement
- Ars Technica
- Dot KDE
- FAQ
- Slashdot

new participant @ bossa09

2009-01-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

I just found here in Oslo, at Qt Software, the newest participant of bossa 09!

tux is not dead! he is still recovering from a broken window :P

programming arena @ fisl 2008

2008-12-18T05:37:00.000-08:00

for those who don't know, fisl stands for "international forum of free software", it's the biggest open source event in brazil bringing together all segments interested in OSS: students, academy and companies.

in fisl 2008, which happened in april, we, at INdT, had the opportunity to organize the programming contest that happens during the event, called the programming arena.

it was a great event and the students really did their best to solve the proposed set of problems and win the prize of 1 N95 + 1 N810 for each member of the winning team.

the competition was divided in 2 days: the first phase was to solve a problem set programming in python for series 60 and the second phase was to develop an odf reader for maemo.

below is a video produced by casa de cinema de porto alegre, which shows a bit of how exciting this whole competition was for all the participants.

QEdje on Akademy

2008-08-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

For the lasts 3 months we have been working hard on the QEdje project, a bridge of the Edje declarative language (from the EFL - Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) to the Qt world. In the next week we are going to travel to Belgium, where we will have the opportunity to present, on Tuesday 12/08, this work at Akademy!

Edje has been used on Canola, Carman and various other applications with great success, simplifying the work of designers and developers. So we are really excited about the opportunities of using Edje together with Qt!

below is the abstract of our presentation:

Edje is a declarative language that simplifies the development of complex interfaces separating the UI design from the application logic, by providing animations, layouts and simple scripts in a very small memory footprint.

The main purpose of the QEdje project is to build a bridge among components that proved to have great value for open source developers: Edje and Qt. This will extend the Qt toolkit with the flexibility of a declarative language, such as Edje, and also enable Qt widgets to be embedded into Edje UI design.

This presentation will show more about the QEdje project, current status, future plans and also present some canvas benchmark's and improvement possibilities, taking Evas (which is recognized as a very fast and optimized canvas) as a reference point.

In Scrum we trust

2008-05-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

we had a Scrum training in the last 2 days with Boris Gloger. It was clarifying to have this training as most of the participants were already using Scrum actively in their projects. Now we know what we did wrong and what could be improved.

the points that catched most of my attention was the rule of working on one backlog item at a time (of course you need to be reasonable here, as there might be situations where it is necessary or better to parallelize, but as a general statement you should avoid that).

another point that confused me was the sizing of the backlog, we previously sized the items in days, but we got convinced that sizing should not be dependent on time as you want to estimate how big your item is and not how fast you can solve it.

one interesting practice to sizing is the poker play: where you use cards with the values of an almost fibonacci sequence to "size" your backlog items among your team.

a very important point is to define beforehand the acceptance criteria with the Product Owner and also check what went well and what could be improved by the end of each sprint.

according to the curse, for having scrum running efectively you need to have:

Timebox
Self organization
Full principled
Potential shippable code

and for documentation, it is basically the product backlog (PB) & the sprint backlog. \o/

as an interesting side note, the word backlog refers to the containers that are transported by ship and this backlog is also ordered by importance: the most important containers are placed in the bottom in case there is any storm.

the things we are going to improve in our team for the next sprint: do the daily scrum meetings DAILY, time boxed and on time, work on the same backlog item until it is really done before moving to the next one and doing the sprint planing 1, . planning 2, review & retrospective in order to improve after each sprint. In order words, just apply Scrum more strictly :)

the main benefit of the training was to understand the principles of the Scrum methodology. With that in mind you should be able to adapt it to your day to day work, without loosing the agile principles.

Canola beta9

2008-05-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

the new beta 9 of canola is out! in this release the main new additions are the UPnP plugin and the "On the Move" playlist.

I find these two new features extremely useful: now you are able to create and edit a dynamic playlist on the go and access your media from your local network seamlessly.

besides that, there is also the new canola-tuning plugin, which enables you to get the cover arts and video thumbnail from inside canola´s settings (no need to run the canola-tuning app anymore).

one really old bug that was finally solved is the PNG thumbail generation! this was a long time on my todo list, but with low priority. the fix included a patch for epsilon, the EFL thumbnail library, and I took the opportunity to send some patches for epsilon upstream.

hope you enjoy, there is more to come ...
br

Arena in FISL 9!

2008-04-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

this year was the first time I went to fisl (Forum Internacional de Software Livre) to participate in the organization of the Arena Contest, that was promoted by INdT together with Forum Nokia, the Gobolinux community and the fisl organizing committee.

the arena itself was a closed glass room (like an aquarium) in the middle of the event area. it seemed like a "big brother" show, everybody stopped and starred through the windows to see what was going on inside :)
while coding the participants were given "red bull" and pizza to keep their energy high and it worked since none of them left before the last minute!

the first phase "qualifying" of this competition was a series of tasks of python for series 60. these tasks were hidden in the calendar of the N95, like a "treasure hunt". 8 teams of 4 people participated and the teams that earned the most points by solving the tasks advanced to final round: the "insanifying".

in the final round was proposed a real project of developing an ODF viewer for the Maemo platform. from the 5 teams that participated in the final round (1 resigned), 4 functional applications were coded in 24 hours, great job from the participants!

we hope they continue to develop the applications (as they promised) and start a joint project at garage.

more photos from the Arena can be found here.

all this Arena event was filmed by a great professional team of film producers from Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre. they will produce a video that will show off better what we are trying to describe here.

besides the great experience of organizing the Arena, it was also great to meet the guys from trolltech and kde and see the challenges of the UI design in Andreas talk! in INdT, we are doing a lot of work in common with these guys and we talked about the opportunities of working together.

summarizing, as artur said, it was an amazing event for INdT!

Canola 2.0 Photos Screens

2007-11-21T06:30:00.000-08:00

the feature that most catched my eyes when I saw the first canola 2.0 presentation from the design team, was the pictures screens!

lucky me that had the opportunity to take part in the challenge of transforming a beautiful and smooth flash animation into a real usable application on the maemo platform :) I worked on the three photo screens that are previewed below:

these screens push the hardware (memory and processing) capabilities of the maemo devices to its limits, but that is a good thing!

wait for some videos of these photos in action (these screenshots are from my desktop)

br

Fullwork at Canola 2.0 pre-release

2007-11-17T10:26:00.000-08:00

we are now working at full speed in order to release canola 2.0. a lot of new features are being implemented, and unfortunately we are not having much free time to report back to the maemo community our work in progress.

I have been working since the beginning of the project with the download manager, the new canola media player, code-named "atabake" and more recently with the UI of the photos screens.

next week we will start posting some screenshots of the features of canola 2.0: podcasts, media player and photos browsing have been through a major "ramp up"

and despite the new look and feel and the features added, canola 2.0 keeps the original spirit: a simple, yet powerful and sexy portable media aggregator.

hope you enjoy the outcome of this project!

Web Trend Map

2007-08-20T18:45:00.000-07:00

the folks at iA, Information Architects, in Japan created this very interesting map of what's going on in the web. the tubes are based on Tokyo's subway lines, that represent categories of the current web buzz.

in the major stop places there are weather forecasts (msn and yahoo are under heavy storm) with a number that is the Web classification (0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 2.5): Facebook is rated as 2.5, whilst useit.com (from Jakob Nielsen usability guru) is still in the web 0.5

you are placed in the center of the picture, right in the comfort of the Emperor's palace :)

Brazil, Winner of the Imagine Cup 2007!

2007-08-14T21:04:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to yet another great participation of brazil in the imagine cup 2007! The Team formed (from left to right) by Carlos Rodrigues, Ivan Cordeiro, Andre Furtad o (from UFPE) and Eduardo Sonnino (from USP) got the first place in the Embedded Development Category!!!

a great achievement for these guys, establishing brazil as first class competitor after successful participations in the last 3 editions of this competition. another brazilian team (Papa) also conquered the third place in short film design!

excellent work, let's hope that these great results will inspire even more young talents here in brazil to participate in the imagine cup 2008, that will be hosted in paris.

afterall, brazil has much more talent than just soccer and samba!

Work in Progress: New Canola

2007-07-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

hi,

after a long time without updates on this blog, I will give an overview on my current tasks involving the new ramp-up of Canola.

there is a lot of work going on around Canola, as you can see in various posts from Marcelo, Barbieri and Kenneth! That´s an exciting time for good changes and new features :)
Besides the adoption of evas and edje as the UI toolkit, Canola is being rewritten in python and being reviewed from an architectural and functional point of view.

in the first semester I have worked on a cache and download manager for providing easy access to offline content, such as podcast and images, etc. Now I am working together with Artur (MoRpHeUz) on a media-engine for Canola. The main purpose of this media-engine is to provide simple access to multiple backends, such as MPlayer, GStreamer, the current Osso media server and others.

we all know that the default media-player has a lot of restrictions to supported formats, that´s why we believe that multiple media-backends is the way to go for applications that want to maximize the features for the end user. The new media engine will be able to select the best backend automatically for each mime-type, combining MPlayer, for open formats, with GStreamer (we are still waiting for playbin2 to come out) or the current media-engine for proprietary formats and DRM protected content.

in addition to support a wide range of media formats, this new engine will also manage sessions, allowing applications to save/restore state, such as remembering the last url played along with the position. Moreover, the session architecture will end with today´s mess of various applications using and confusing the osso-media-server.

what all applications want is a simple and reliable method of managing the playback of their media and that is what we will do!

BR

Bossa Conference

2007-03-04T15:54:00.000-08:00

I am very excited for the next weeks! The reason why is that the first edition of the Bossa Conference will be held in Recife from the 12th to the 14th of March. Actually the event will take place in Porto de Galinhas, a wonderful beach in the southern coast of Pernambuco. Here is the conference site and the agenda.

Many experts of the Linux Community will be present focusing on Embedded Software in three main categories: Connectivity, Multimedia and Platform.

Besides the invited speakers, the whole INdT from Recife will also take place in this event, gathering and disseminating information about its projects and the maemo community in general.

It will be an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and to build new ideas!

Canola 1.0 Beta 2

2007-03-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

So finally the second release of Canola is out! There are several new features in this release, including a version for the N800. Here is a cool video of thoughtfix using Canola in his car:

Now I am working on the next Canola release that will focus on architectural refactoring and creating new plugins for expanding Canola horizons. In this context, I am currently working on a plugin for Mythtv for accessing live tv and recorded content from your N800, based on the gmyth frontend library.

So what are you waiting for, go grab your N770 or N800 and give Canola a try here!

Podcast for Remote Education

2006-12-04T18:58:00.000-08:00

for those who might be interested in taking courses in berkeley: webcast.berkeley.edu

the lessons of several courses are available in audio and video formats for streaming and downloading. it is very interesting!!!

who said distance learning is going to happen in the future may be missing the present.

some days off

2006-02-05T19:19:00.001-08:00

after the accelerator workshop finished, we (andre, gustavo, fernando, me) joint guilherme (he is currently living in Levillenoveau, Belgium, doing his MBA) and took 10 days off traveling from London to Paris and Barcelona.

It was really cool to travel with these mates around europe! the weather was cold and we had just 1 day of snow, but besides that we have nothing to complain about...this trip was just awesome :)

I put some pictures of this trip in my just created flickr (www.flickr.com) page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leosobral/. It seems to be a cool image tagging software, check it out!

cheers

PS: just a nerd comment...
now I really miss some software that would agregate all the experiences I would like to share about my trip, it would be a joint of blog, image sharing and social software (to meet and keep in touch with new friends around the globe). that´s why I think that the idea we are working on since the imagine cup would really enhance your travel experience! let´s wait for the travelreach...I will tell more details about our project later on.

Workshop Finished

2006-02-05T14:17:00.000-08:00

Now the workshop promoted by British Telecom in UK is already over and I am back to Recife.
It was an awesome time to work, travel and have fun with some great new friends!

During the 2 weeks of work in the workshop we had the opportunity to extend our imagine cup projects with the excellent support of British Telecom and Microsoft, thanks to all the folks that organized this event.

In the last day there was a presentation of all teams and in the end the teams could vote among themselves to select the best projects. All the projects were really incredible and I am proud that the brazinglish (the brazilian and the english teams merged during the workshop) was the winner together with Serbia (cheers to Kosta and Milos!)

I would really like to see all the ideas that came up during this workshop turning into reality!

meanwhile, keep walking.

UK Experiences

2006-01-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

hi guys,
look below what we have done so far, beside working :)

here is our daily traditional english breakfast. a bit too heavy for me...

I standing in the entry of the tunel! we went to the biggest kart in the UK, this was just the best kart ever!!! I won't tell more, because otherwise you will envy me forever :P

some relax time playing xbox 360, it's really cool! we have just been playing gotham race (very good) and perfect dark (this game is crap)

BT Workshop

2006-01-11T01:33:00.000-08:00

We were invited by BT (British Telecom) to present and extend the project developed for the Imagine Cup 2005 in a workshop organized along with Microsoft.

It's currently winter here in Reading, a city 40 minutos from London. Unfortunately, despite the cold weather we are not going to see any snow.

Since the arrival, we have had some trainings from BT on their technologies and infra-structure and now we are working on extending the project.

here are some pictures of us in the front of the hotel and beside the Tamisa River in London!!!

So far it's been lots of fun!
Tonight we are heading to London to go to a Kart with all the people that are participating in this event. I hope that my racing in Brazil with my friends in INdT will show valuable today :P

now let's go work.

Symbian Training

2005-12-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

this last week I had my first contact with the Symbian OS, the most used operating system for 3G mobile phones. I was in Campina Grande for a basics course of Symbian.

at first it seems very confusing and difficult to develop applications for the Symbian OS, the learning curve is high, but for those who have a solid c++ background it is easier to understand the variations of different patterns that are embedded in this operating system focusing on a restricted memory and processing platforms.

the main differences to normal c++ programming are handling exceptions with trap/leave (you have tu use a cleanup stack) and descpritors, the mechanism for using strings, (this is what I found most complicated at first glance, you have too much options to do basically simple operations: handle strings).

but even the descriptors have good points:
- you can treat text and binaries in the same structure (no needs for strxxx and memxxx functions);
- the descriptors have the maximum size and length inside the structure, so strings are not terminated with '\0' anymore. this is more secure as it prevents buffer overflows.

besides that, the application framework is based on the MVC (model-viewer-controller) architecture and for this reason it creates 5 .cpp files for a simple hello world example :P

my personal comment is that developing for the Symbian OS is not that much difficult or different from standard c++ after a little of sought, but it is not simple either for application developers that are beginning and don't have much experience with c/c++. Even though if you are interested in developing applications for mobile, it is worth to take an in-depth look in Symbian, which is the market leader in a robust embedded environment for diverse applications where people are not used to crashes and blue screens.

below are some very good references for symbian, including a whole blog only for descriptors:
www.symbian.com
my-symbian.com
www.descriptors.blogspot.com
www.newlc.com

Aniversário Daniel Coelho

2005-11-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

Oi, aqui vão algumas fotos da festa de Daniel Coelho no último sábado.

aqui a foto do aniverariante, não sei se eu já tinha bebido demais...
mas não consegui enquadrar a família reunida (daniel é o q aparece pela metade na esquerda)

fazia tempo q o pessoal não se reunia, mas parecia q era uma festa do colégio cbv e q nada tinha mudado e acho q não mudou mesmo.

DVB-H in Brazil

2005-11-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

Since November 1st 2005 the INdT´s
DVB-H Lab is operational transmitting live tv over the air!!!
This is the first transmission of this new mobile digital TV standard in latin america.
It is really cool to see the mobile TV in action in what is going to be the future "cell phone" devices, if we can still call these gadgets a cell-phone...
look at this just released multimedia phone from Nokia, the N92 is the first phone to have an integrated DVB-H receiver for the mobile tv + wi-fi + bluetooth + IR + USB2.0 + memory slot for 2GB + 2MPixel Camera.

these 2 pictures are from this new device, in the left one is watching the Brazilian soccer team playing (no, unfortunately this is not in my hands :) and the other picture (right) is the same phone unfolded.

the future is near

Hall is back!

2005-10-06T17:32:00.000-07:00

Hall is the short for Hallyson. He just arrived yesterday from a 1,5 week trip to Finland, where he had the opportunity to participate in a DVB-H course by Nokia.

He brought us some nice toys direct from Finland!

Alex happy with the new 7710

The phone in the picture, that Alex is holding, is the Nokia 7710. Now we have 2 of them (the picture was taken by the other 7710)! This phone has a dvb-h receiver on the backcover and is a full featured mobile tv.

soon we will be deploying our mobile tv lab and the 7710 will receive the content live, I can't wait anymore. This will be the first mobile tv lab in Brazil and probably in South America, there are few pilots and test beds of this new technology around the world.

Now we are very excited to start playing with our new toys in action!

Kart

2005-10-06T17:21:00.000-07:00

here is one late post about our last Kart race! It was really amazing, in the begining I was a little afraid, but that feeling changed fast and suddenly I was trying to do my best, but it was a little bit late :) I finished in the 6th place out of 8. Luckunko was the big winner!

now we are organizing the INdT World Kart Championship, with 12 races and a big prize (we just don´t know what)

INdT pilots (from left to right): Alexsandro, Master Luckunko, Leo, Andre, Coxinha, Cidorvan, Edu e Osvaldo

INdT

2005-09-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

INdT is the Nokia Institute of Technology a non profit research organization sponsored by Nokia. This is the place were I am currently working and I am very proud and happy of being part of this team!

We are the Open Source Mobile Technology Center, located in Recife, northeast of Brazil, and I am part of the Digital TV Group.

Beside that I am finishing my Masters Degree in Computer Science in the Center of Informatics (CIn) of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). My research is about Middleware for Mobile TV and Pervasive Systems.

Until I finish my thesis I will not have much social life and will have to spent my weekends in front of my computer...hopefully it will not last forever :)

Imagine Cup 2005

2005-09-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

I have created a blog specially for my last trip! It was my first time in Japan, 1 month ago, where I participated in a programming contest, the Imagine Cup World Finals 2005. The brazilian team, which I was part of, in the Software Design Category conquered the 4th place! An amazing experience, for meeting so many different people in a completely different culture.

If you are curious, take a look in the link below...
www.thespoke.net/MyBlog/sobral/MyBlog.aspx

Hello World!

2005-09-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

Hi,

so finally I have a blog, and what?!?!
my little sister, 9 years old, would know better about
what to write here now

anyway I will give it a try!
let's talk about bits, notes and fun :)

just passing by to welcome everybody!

hope you enjoy, cheers