Glad to become a new GNOME foundation member

After I read this blog post, I applied for membership in the GNOME Foundation. Finally, my application was accepted last week. I think that my WebKitGtk+ contribution and GNOME Korea activities could count towards membership.

The main reason why I decided to become a GNOME foundation member is to let GNOME folks know about the GNOME Korea community(http://gnome.or.kr). The GNOME Korea community started to translate for GNOME in 1998, and is mainly working on Korean translation(http://l10n.gnome.org/teams/ko/). Changwoo Ryu has led the Korean translation team since the early stages of GNOME. As a member of the GNOME Korea community, I organize GNOME Tech Talks every month to introduce various GNOME technologies to Korean developers and am also in charge of maintaining the GNOME Korea blog (http://gnome-kr.blogspot.com/).

I'm really grateful to become a new GNOME foundation member. In particular, I’d like to thank Xan Lopez and Gustavo Noronha(kov) for helping me to become involved in WebKitGtk+ development. In the future, I will try to report on activities of the GNOME Korea community and my GNOME experiences through Planet GNOME and here.

WebKitGtk+ Hackfest 2011

(C) Mario 

Gustavo and I are attending the WebKitGtk+ hackfest 2011 which is held at the Igalia office in A Coruña, Spain like the last time. This is an annual event for WebKitGtk+ maintainers to work together at the same place.

We made a list of work items on the blackboard as usual on the first day.  You can find these topics in the wiki. My major work item is to apply Accelerated Compositing implementation of the clutter port to WebKitGtk+. If I finish it a bit earlier, I will try to hack my unresolved patches such as IME support in WebKit2Gtk+ and applying Tiled Backing Store to WebKitGtk+.

Happy Hacking!

Talking about GNOME3

I gave a talk about GNOME3 at Daum DevOn conference in Korea. Daum is a popular web portal site in Korea like Yahoo. They invited many developers & user communities to the conference, so the GNOME Korea community had a chance to introduce GNOME3 and the community to the attendees.

I was so glad to introduce GNOME3.2 and the infra technology like GTK+, Clutter, GStreamer, WebKitGtk+, Telepathy and GObject-Introspection. Here are the slides and some photos.

GNOME3 & 그놈 한국 공동체

View more presentations from Joone Hur

Desktop Summit 2011

It has been a week since I got back home from Cambridge. I had a day trip in London before leaving for Korea, which was very nice because I got the chance to look around the royal places, museums, and parks. In particular, I was so excited to find a TINTIN shop by chance. :-)

Anyway, Desktop Summit 2011 was great: there were many great talks, workshops, BoFs, and parties as usual. It was good to meet my Collabora colleagues, WebKitGtk+ maintainers(Kov, Xan, Martin, Alex, Philippe, Diego), a Korean KDE contributor(peremen), and some new people(Adrián, Debarshi,...). I even gave a talk of webkit-clutter. If I was asked to compare this summit to the last one, I can say two things: first, GNOME and KDE talks were not duplicated so I could attend a KDE talk about a WebKit Browser and there were more common sessions GNOME and KDE folks could share together. Therefore, this conference seemed more like a true Desktop Summit. The next difference was that it’s very hard to find mobile related topics in this conference. I think that It was a big loss for the community that Nokia left MeeGo. Although Intel is trying to maintain the MeeGo Project, it seems like it's not easy to delivery MeeGo to the mobile market alone.

webkit-clutter talk

Photo by Adrián

I gave a talk about webkit-clutter in place of Kov because he had personal business to attend to. This talk was a part of the WebKit talk: first, Martin explained the new features of WebKitGtk+ 1.4.0 and upcoming feature of the next version. Second, Alex introduced the current status of WebKit2Gtk+ and gave a demo of it, which showed us how to restart a flash plug-in without affecting browsing capability. That explains why we need the multiple process model in web browsing.  Finally. I introduced the webkit-clutter port: why the webkit-clutter port is needed, what we have done, and what features are coming. I will introduce more details about the WebKit talk in the next blog post.

Blending the web and the desktop

Xan showed a demo of installing and running a web application in GNOME3.  He said “80% of the time people use the web so 80% of GNOME effort should go to the web”, I agree with him, we need to focus on web integration with GNOME more. Anyway, Xan seemed like a web evangelist during his talk.

Other interesting talks

• GStreamer 1.0:  Wim introduced the main changes of GStreamer 1.0 such as managing memory, buffer metadata, and dynamic pipeline. You will be able to get more information from the GStreamer conference l in Prague, Czech Republic

• GTK 4 - the future of your favorite toolkit: Actually, nobody has started working on GTK4+, but the speakers showed a big picture of GTK+4  which will improve in areas of animations, effects, and transformations. For realizing this plan, Clutter will be used as a graphic backend, which allows GTK+ applications to use animation effects easily.
• GNOME Shell version π: Owen Talyor Introduced GNOME Shell 3.2 with some demos such as Google Account Integration, soft keyboard, and more extensions.
• GNOME a continent, starting from Asia:  There was a introduction of how the GNOME Asia summit started, what it has done and what it will do. I wish to attend the next GNOME Asia Summit held in Hong Kong.
• Towards a multitouch gnome-shell: Although it will take more time to see if X.org supports multi-touch officially, Carlos showed a demo of the multi-touch gnome shell. This seemed like the first step to touch based devices.

NateOn connection manager for Telepathy

NateOn is an instant messenger which is very popular in Korea. As you can see the above picture, it supports the Linux version, but the project has not been maintained well. The problem is that NateOn was removed from the Debian archive because it built with KDE3.(ChangWoo’s blog article) As a result, Korean users can’t download NateOn from Debian repositories. Although there was a proposal to develop a NateOn connection manager for Telepathy from the GNOME Korean community, it was just an idea. Fortunately, I met a Telepathy contributor, Debarshi who is interested in this project. I shared all the information about NateOn with him so that he was able to start developing the connection manager. When it starts to work a bit, I will be able to join the project.

Currywurst

I didn’t have a chance to go to any tourist attractions in Berlin this time, but I had Currywurst which is well-known Berlin food. It was good to have it with a beer.

Visiting the Cambridge office

After the Desktop Summit, I moved to Cambridge for visiting the company HQ office. It was very nice to meet people and work at the office. I had brought along some postcards of UNESCO World Heritage of Korea for a small gift as follows:

You can see them from the bulletin board when you visit the office.

There are many tourist attractions near the office, so I went to the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and the Fitzwilliam Museum during my stay. It was very nice, so I have shared some photos here.

On the last evening, we had a team dinner in an Indian restaurant. Although British accent was a bit unfamiliar to me, I enjoyed the talks and the Tandoori chicken. Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone in the office for helping me stay and work well. Thanks!

Finally, I'd also like to thank my employer, Collabora for sponsoring my trip to Berlin for Desktop Summit 2011. I hope to see everyone at the next Guadec in A Coruña, Spain.

WebKitGtk+ Hackfest 2010

(c) 2010 Diegoe

I attended the WebKitGtk+ Hackfest held in the Igalia Office, located in Coruña, Spain, in this month. It was a great opportunity for me to meet the WebKitGtk+maintainers directly. This hackfest was sponsored by Collabora and Igalia. The Igalia office was very nice; it can be compared to the Google office in terms of the atmosphere. There were free snacks, beverage and game consoles in the office. Moreover, we had buffet lunch everyday. I'd like to give thanks to Collabora and Igalia for sponsoring the hackfest and the GNOME foundation for sponsoring my trip to Coruña.

During the hackfest, we concentrated on hacking WebKitGtk+ to fix bugs and implement new features, only stopping to sleep and eat . Of course , we also made time for a city tour in Courña for a quater of a day.

Gtk+ and libSoup maintainers also attended the hackfest to support WebKitGtk+ maintainers, because WebKitGtk+ depends on those libraries. Moreover, embracing Gtk+3 needs Gtk+ maintainers' help to keep the pace with Gtk+3 changes. Also, an Epiphany browser maintainer also joined the hackfest to fix Epiphany bugs together with the WebKitGtk+ maintainers.

(CC) 2010 Mario

On the first day, we listed up all work items on the chalkboard (as you can see in the above picture). When we finished each item, we rewarded ourselves with Super Mario BGM. :-) You can see the performance video as follows:

Martin finished a task! YEAH! from diegoe on Vimeo.

During the hackfest, I worked on viewport meta tags support and some missing features in the DRT test  in WebKitGtk+. In addition, I improved the webkit cache model feature. In particular, I was pleased to finish the viewport meta tags patch. Actually, it might have been impossible without the maintainers' help: Kov, Martin, and Xan reviewed my patch carefully and improved it, so I'd like to thank them again. I'll explain the details of the viewport meta tags support later.

After the hackfest, I felt like I was a member of the WebKitGtk+ development team. In the future, I will try to contribute more patches to WebKitGtk+.
You can also find this blogging in Korean version. :-)

Happy New Year and Thanks again for reading!