Work in Progress: New Canola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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!

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