Hoy salió una nueva emisión del podcast de JBoss donde varios core developers e invitados discuten y comentan sobre las novedades de la comunidad. Una buena manera de enterarnos que es lo que está pasando, que es lo que se viene y en que andan algunos developers como Michael Neale, Emannuel Bernard, Max Rydahl Andersen y otros.

UPDATE: Van a poder escuchar a Neale intentando pronunciar mi apellido y explicar mi trabajo en el Google Summer of Code!

http://asylum.jboss.org/

Si, finalmente se terminaron los plazos, se commitearon las modificaciones, se enviaron las evaluaciones y se terminó la codificación de los últimos días en contra del reloj… todo esto hace más de un mes atrás. Esta es una simple actualización, sin video, imagen o diagrama de clases, para tan solo comunicar que mi propossal para JBoss Drools fue terminada y aceptada así que es de esperar errores en el hudson, comportamiento erróneo en el IDE y demás luminarias

Sin dudarlo es una buena experiencia para adentrarse en el mundo del open source, porque seguro que lo posterior que vas a hacer es buscarte tasks en el JIRA (aunque ahora no te paguen, claro)

Last time I presented the work Adam Kidder did on Nepomuk virtual folders in the GSoC. Today the story continues with the work by Alessandro Sivieri, my second GSoC student.

Whenever we handle files on the computer we need to bother with folder structures and file names. We need to come up with good naming schemes which allow us to find our files. We need to decide several times a day in which folder a file should go – should it go into folder A or B or should I create a subfolder? In the end there is always a little bit of chaos, even with the most structured minds. Alessandro tried a different approach in his project: save and load documents based on meta data and annotations rather than file and folder names.

This is not an easy task but I dare say that he succeeded. Alessandro created two new dialogs for saving and loading documents (we do not talk about files anymore – way too technical). The saving dialog allows to create arbitrary annotations for the document using the Nepomuk annotation plugin system which also brings in Scribo text analysis features. The loading dialog on the other hand uses a fancy filter system to narrow down the list of documents to open.

Saving Documents

We start by looking at the document saving dialog. Our example is KWord from which we want to save a fancy little text document. (No, it is not a test document, I really wrote this, this is real data, I assure you! … Yeah, OK, I admit it, just random words…) Hitting the save button opens up the new smart save dialog as can be seen in the screenshot below.

Smart Saving of a KWord document

The first thing we notice is that there is no filename and no folder selection. Name and folder are selected by Nepomuk. However, we get to give the document a name (it makes things much easier for us later on) and a description (in a future version applications will be able to prefill these fields with some meaningful defaults). But the interesting part is the meta data. The dialog suggests certain possible annotations which we can approve). Below the recently used annotations we have the possiblity to add any annotation we want through the existing Nepomuk annotation system. Last but not least we can give the document a type. This type does not identify the document on a mime-type level but much more real-life oriented. The idea is that users either define their own types based on pimo:Document or use ontologies that provide them. Typical examples include invoices or letters or project descriptions. This way documents are saved on a much higher abstraction level than with the classical file chooser: instead of a text file we save an invoice.

Once we specified the meta data we want to apply to the new document and hit the save button the smart save dialog generates a folder and file name and saves the document. We do not need to care about the location.

(Hint: there are certainly situations in which we want to use the classic file chooser. That is why the smart save dialog allows to switch over to the old ways by the simple click of a button.)

Loading Documents

But if documents are saved in some random folder which we do not know, how do we find them again? Well, that is the real beauty of the new approach. The idea is that you tell the open dialog what you want to open by specifying some details that you remember.

Let us have a look at the smart open dialog as it opens from within Okular.

We see two main views: on the left hand side we see a list of filters and on the right hand side we see a long list of files/documents. This might look overwhelming in the beginning but wait until we specify the first detail about the document we want to open: we tell the dialog that the document has mime type image/png (Yes, in the future this will look less technical) and the file view changes only showing png images.

These are still way too many to search for the one we need, so we give more detail. We remember that we accessed the document sometime this week:

Again the list of files is changed and now after only choosing two filters we are down to seven documents to choose from. Although this would be enough we do one better just to show that the filter system obviously also includes manual annotations such as tags:

And after activating the tag filter we are down to a single document. Nice, isn’t it?

A Few Technical Details

There are a few technical aspects worth mentioning about Alessandro’s work.

First of all: he makes direct use of Adam’s work on the virtual folders. The file list on the right is a simple KDirModel listing a nepomuksearch:/?sparql=… query. I find this very nice as my two students shared knowledge and discussed their work to find good solutions to their problems.

The second thing I find important is the creation of the filter list. The list of filters is created dynamically based on the existing annotations of the files in the current selection. In essence the idea is to only show filters that would actually change the list of available files (as you can see in the last screenshot this does not work 100% yet but we are close).

The GUI is obviously a prototype and we hope that you will give feedback and ideas to improve its usability. As Adam, Alessandro will continue working on KDE and Nepomuk and the smart file dialog will evolve until KDE 4.4.

Try It

To test the smart file dialog you need three things:

1. My kdelibs patch which makes the KFileDialog pluggable. This is actually a very simple one as the file dialog already loads the backend from a separate lib. While you are on it, please review the patch so it can get into KDE 4.4.
2. The Nepomuk-KDE playground module which also contains the smart save dialog. I recommend installing the whole module as the smart save dialog makes use of pretty much every Nepomuk lib available.
3. Tell KFileDialog to load the smartfilemodule instead of the default by adding “file module=smartfilemodule” into the “KFileDialog Settings” group of kdeglobals.

Obviously nepomuk needs to be enabled for it to work. Have fun.

This year’s Google Summer of Code has ended. And it was a great success!

This year I had the pleasure to mentor two outstanding students: Adam Kidder and Alessandro Sivieri. Working with them was fun and rewarding. Both quickly understood what Nepomuk was all about and provided high quality work. I am very happy about that. Even more so since both of them plan to continue working on KDE and Nepomuk. Thus, I can only repeat myself: a great success.

Enough of the euphoria. Let us dive into the good stuff and start with Adam’s project:

Improved Virtual Folders

We have had the virtual folder KIO slave in KDE for quite some time now. But it was one big hack I threw together and always had its hickups, not to mention the lack of features. Adam took the project of improving the situation by making it more stable, introducing new features such as negated terms and relative dates, and providing a GUI for query creation. I can assure you that this was no easy task. Diving into the messy code I produced both for the Nepomuk query service and the search KIO slave Adam needed nerves of steel. But he proved himself by understanding and sorting out the mess and introducing a bunch of nice features.

Relative Dates

One of the nicest thing Adam implemented is the support for relative date in queries. By relative dates I mean for example yesterday as you can see in the following screenshot:

Virtual Folder using a relative date

Another possible relative date is “a week ago” which can of course also be combined with other query terms:

Apart from relative dates Adam implemented

Negated Query Terms

Using a minus sign as the negation prefix we can exclude certain query terms:

Querying for one tag

Excluding another tag

Very useful and mandatory for any search engine.

One thing I personally find very important is the possibility to use

Sparql Queries in the KIO slave

This allows to use the KIO slave to list arbitrary query results (as long as its only resources) and list them in Dolphin or even use a KDirModel to list resources in any application.

Listing Nepomuk Tasks via the Search KIO slave

Now let us have a look at the

GUI

Due to the complexity of Adam’s project’s code he did not get as far with the GUI as he would have liked. But as mentioned already he will continue to work on it and integrate it into Dolphin nicely. Anyway, so far we have a small query creator which allows to save queries that are then displayed in the nepomuksearch:/ main folder.

Editing a query in the simple query editor

Try it

If you want to test Adam’s new features before they are merged into trunk you need to install his work branch which replaces a few files installed by kdebase-runtime. The query editor is still part of the Nepomuk playground module. It is not enabled in the build system of the whole module, it needs to be built independantly.

That’s it for now. Next up: Alessandro’s smart file dialog.

Yes, sometimes it is. And sometimes it is a good thing that David Faure does not answer your pings because it makes you write test cases. And sometimes these test cases actually reveale the bug you have been hunting for months. And sometimes searching for the bug makes you refactor and simplify code in the process. This is exactly what happend with the annoying “reload bug” of the Nepomuk query KIO slave. It was responsible for results sometimes not showing up before hitting F5 a few times. Well, that is history. The present brings a better design using a QWaitCondition instead of a local event loop (which was ugly anyway and I have no idea what made me using it in the first place) which as a side effect also fixes the bug and simlifies the code. (And I mean “simplify”, not “making it simple”. The code is still far from simple.)

That’s already it. Just wanted to share that. More search goodies when I blog about Adam’s GSoC work.

It’s been quite a while, truth be told, quite some time without posting updates to this blog.
My GSoC project have been going through a mix being busy, many events happening, trying to find love for new things but I am sure my project is still interesting .
Today I want just to mention the status of my GSoC project ; it’s in the mid-term evaluation and we expect Google paying for all ‘well-going’ projects .

I have a detailed wiki page about my project : OpenMRS Sync, Create a new Sync Node .Everyone is welcome to leave useful comments on this project. The source code is available under the terms of OpenMRS Public Licence and can be browsed from OpenMRS website as well as they can be ‘checked-out’(downloaded) via subversion with the command

svn checkout http://svn.openmrs.org/openmrs/branches/data-synchronization-admin-ui


Other things actually are happening in my coding environment:I have been undergoing series of switching Operating Systems between Windows, Linux and Solaris and I have some insight about what does things in the best way; I have been trying to find love for Groovy/Grails at the same time I am trying the Qt toolkit .Groovy seems to be a powerfull Jav-based agile framework, easy to configure and deploy. Touching it is like drinking milk from your grandma, and when you get satisfied you feel and find that you have more energy . Qt is a cross-platform desktop GUI framework using C++and acquired by Nokia last year, Qt is the parent of KDE Desktop environment for Linux.Trying Qt is like eating bread from your granddad tagged with honey inside; you get stronger and healthier. The reality behind things like these(trying new things) should be :”Always, there is a place where you want to go, there is a person who you want to be with, there is something you always want to see happenning, there a level you always wish to be on, the is a goal you always want to achieve ! The list doesn’t end and when you feel you don’t have neither one of these desire, you don’t enjoy your life .” .

I the past 40 days, I have seen many other things happening around us and among them as I am writing: ATRACO club from Rwanda won the East-African soccer cup(CECAFA), Rwanda has named other new born gorillas (Kwitizina<www.kwitizina.org>: this is really a new brand for the Gorilla tourism in Rwanda, and it demonstrates the efforts deployed in both tourism promotion and conservation ) , Rwanda has celebrated 15 years after National Liberation and the end of Tutsis Jenocide <www.rwanda15.org>. An other event was the departurte of MJJ , the King of Pop, to the land of peace, and I can’t say anything more personal than “In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.“.

This is not the end, please stay turned to my blog and I love to hear your comments .

svn checkout http://svn.openmrs.org/openmrs/branches/data-synchronization-admin-ui

Gracias a todo el tiempo libre que tengo por mi nuevo y excelente trabajo full time 24×7, estos son todos los avances que pude realizar en el proyecto:

- Variable Binding: completamente funcional, puede haber unos detalles mínimos para corregir y algun comportamiento inesperado.

- Variable rename: implementado totalmente en forma de unit testing, solamente falta la integración con el IDE que no va a ser tan desacoplada como son los requerimientos del proyecto.

- Fix Imports: indagar un poco más en la forma de detectar correctamente las classes pertenecientes a un Eclipse Project. No es demasiado complejo, estoy seguro que actualmente están utilizando esa funcionalidad internamente en el plugin.

no es mucho, asi que acá hay un video de consuelo

Dentro de dos semanas tengo la evaluación intermedia, la meta es completar al menos esas dos funcionalidades pendientes. Veremos que pasa!

Recently I came across some sites that are useful for those that are interested in participating in coding competition and participation programs, Google Summer of Code and the Imagine Cup (sponsored by Microsoft).

What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Google also developed a Wiki for the prospective to provide helpful advice about the program, the content on the Wiki is created by the mentors and students that participated in the program, as well as Google’s program administrators.

/*break*/

“I wish there had been an Imagine Cup when I was growing up. It gets people involved in seeing that software is changing the world.”

–Bill Gates
Chairman, Microsoft Corp.

What is the Imagine Cup?

…The Imagine Cup encourages young people to apply their imagination, their passion and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world – today. Now in its seventh year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a truly global competition focused on finding solutions to real world issues.
Open to students around the world, the Imagine Cup is a serious challenge that draws serious talent, and the competition is intense. The contest spans a year, beginning with local, regional and online contests whose winners go on to attend the global finals held in a different location every year.  The intensity of the work brings students together, and motivates the competitors to give it their all. The bonds formed here often last well beyond the competition itself.

In this program students around the world compete with their “inspiration”. Contestants get sent to different countries every year (only if they’re a finalist), this year the competition is in Egypt. It’s just like an Olympics for student programmers.

Students can enter in a number of fields including Software Development, Game Development, Robotics, Photography, and a few more multimedia related competitions (check out the site). After browsing through this site and looking at some of the user’s creations, it inspires me to get all creative inside. If you’re just starting out programming and looking for some practice or ideas I would probably recommend this site. People post ideas in the forums a lot (I’m not a regular viewer of the forums). Here’s a sample of what some US competitors came up with (Link).

Last week was really busy forme, I was packaging everything for traveling back to Kigali . At least now, I get time to write a couple of blog posts . I am seating in WA Dulles airport,  waiting for the plane that take me to Brussels; I am waiting  almost for the whole day and I can now summarize what I’ve done on OpenMRS during last week .

My GSoC project is again about Sync: “Data synchronization is a new OpenMRS feature allowing synchronization of data amongst a set of loosely networked servers. Such ability to exchange data is essential for operation of EMR system in rural areas where connectivity amongst sites maybe unreliable yet the need for timely centralized collection and analysis of data from remote sites exists.”

The synchronization feature was designed in a parent-child hierarchical model, to allow data to flow from from remote sites to more central parent and vice versa . A parent OpenMRS server can have many child servers and child can have only one parent . At synchronization, a child server send new change-sets to its model (SYNC REQUEST) and receives all new change-sets from the server (SYNC RESPONSE) . This can be done either via the web or with a disk drive (file) that can be carried over the parent while the child is off-line and  the parent will also issue an off-line sync response to carry back to the child . The sync via file doesn’t mean that you have to move physically to the place where the the parent server is installed ; OpenMRS is a web app and any where you can access the parent app you can sync your off-line child !

There are two additional changes on the OpenMRS data model that synchronization does :

1) synchronization_* tables are added to the data model for storing sync settings & configuration and they also store the temporary sync import/export records .

2) GUID indexes : to ensure data exchange between different OpenMRS systems, the ID fields are not enough to identify a record because there are from different MySql installations, so the GUID index columns are added to all data that can be sync-ed .

My actual project’s main aim is to provide an automated way of creating a new sync node(i.e.child) and provide the appropriate user interface . This was done in manual process and required much administrative knowledge. When creating a new sync node(i.e.child) you had to:

• register newly created child with parent
• back up parent server DB and move the backup to the new child server
• restore parent’s DB
• assign new server sync ID
• change any server identifying information from parent to child (i.e. form entry server URL)
• test sync connection between parent and child and finally establish periodic sync schedule

In order to achieve these project I have to start from the actual sync code . As last year I was commiting to the synchronization-admin-ui branch, I think I am going to commit to it even for this project . So I started by resolving few issues in the actual code and I merged the synchronization_bidirectional branch to the sync-admin-ui branch so that all sync changes after last GSoC be available to the sync-admin-ui . This was not a simple task because the sync_bidirectional branch also merges from trunk .

I just used Subclipse merge feature and I let both the old and new versions of code be there then I removed the old revisions where it was necessary and, sometimes I had to use a piece of regex in order to be fast .

For example, Subclipse should form somewhere two blocks of code with different versions and limit them with

<<<<<<< .working
//Code
=======
// Code
>>>>>>> .merge-right.r7385

Then in that case I used the following regex and replaced it with an empty space in order to keep the merger-right version of the code

(<<<<<<< \.working([\x00-\xFE]*?)=======)|(>>>>>>> \.merge-right\.r7385)

This is how I merged and it’s working perfectly .

My next step now is to find out a way of cloning the MySql database from the parent DB and apply it to the new child instllation automatically . If you have more ideas about how to achieve this, please leave your comments .

This was really amazing, I spent the last two months doing an internship with RealNetworks, Inc.

I was assigned to a challenging software engineering project and everything went well . My supervisor was always complaining because the internship was so short, and 6 months should be the best . Anyway my project was so successful and it attracted a lot of people in  my team .

Apart of the work, I get to know a lot of people and Seattle especially . This was my first trip to the US , the country where everything is possible !

Sometimes I got to hang out with friends and got to watch movies in the theaters around . Well, this was a very adductive fun and it’s the reason why the title of this post is called so . For my colleagues who like coding, I have a fun of code that always came out after watching one of the SciFi series . Guess which :

try{
energize();
}catch(UnknownUniverseException ex){
ex.printStarTrek();
}
Isn’t that fun ? The really came out once I wanted to write ex.printStackTrace and I wrote ex.printStarTrek instead .

Here is alist of the movies I enjoyed while in Seattle :

1- Fringe : a kind of new X-Files ; you know what ,  I already saw someone in Olivia’s face here in Seattle and I am applying for a Computational Bio-Chemical Engineering internship position with Massive Dinamic , WHAT CAN’T WE DO ?  (  — This is a joke )

2-Star Trek : This was awesome and I enjoyed it even before I knew it was so famous (at the time when they released the new season).

3-Angels & Demons : Oh my goodness , what a Camerlengo ? I was happy to see the movie starting in the LHC near Switzerland but I didn’t imagine it’s gonna be a Da Vinci Code of some sort . Anyway I am not a part of Illuminati ! And at the end of the movie the guy(Camarlengo) got into trouble , and I remembered my old high school latin text about Catilina: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

and

4- Drag me to Hell was the Killer ! Don’t even dream of the story because it can be so harmful .
That was my fun time, tell me what you think about these movies .

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine send me a JavaScript code that I called “Balancez-Balancez” ;  it’s really fun to play with it . Just with your browser go to any website (e.g. www.baidu.com ), then  after the page is loaded copy the following code and paste it into the address bar of your browser :
javascript:R=0;x1=0.1;y1=0.05;x2=0.25;y2=0.24;x3=1.6;y3=0.24;x4=300;y4=200;x5=300;y5=200;DI=document.links;DIL=DI.length;A=function(){for(i=0;i-DIL;i++){DI[i].style.position='absolute';DI[i].style.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5;DI[i].style.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++;};setInterval('A()',5);void(0);

What happens: all the links in the website become a beautiful CHINESE DRAGON DANCING !

The principle of this code is collecting some HTML elements(i.e. links) and animate them continuously (changing their style positions) along an elliptical line .

It was really pretty looking and it conducted me to dig deeply and find out how to go beyond  this practice of JavaScript in the address bar for just manipulating the HTML page : I thought about AJAX .

In fact if the page has an AJAX port, meaning the back end can handle some XMLHttpRequest, you can  build an out-of-page JavaScript code that runs into the address bar of the page and calls some functions in the back-end of your application .

Example: Use DWR

Consider you have exported a DWR function that gets the app logs from the server . You can just omit to put the JavaScript imports in your page header and load them dynamically with a JavaScript in the address bar ; you can also override the Ajax Callback function, you can override the callback handler and so on . Here is the example :


javascript:
script=document.createElement('script');
script.type='text/javascript';
script.src='/js/page.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
css=document.createElement('link');css.type='text/css';
css.rel='stylesheet';
css.href='/css/page.css';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(css);
scriptA=document.createElement('script');
scriptA.type='text/javascript';
scriptA.src='/dwr/util.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(scriptA);
scriptB=document.createElement('script');
scriptB.type='text/javascript';
scriptB.src='/dwr/engine.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(scriptB);
dwr={};
dwr.engine={};
DWREngine=dwr.engine;
DWRLogsService={};
DWRLogsService._path='/dwr';
DWRLogsService.giveMeTheLogs=function(callback){
dwr.engine._execute(DWRLogsService._path,'DWRLogsService','giveMeTheLogs',callback);
};
if(DWRLogsService==null)alert('DWRLogsService=null');
void(0);
logsHandler=function(logsList){
newTable='<table cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="100%" border="0">';
for(i=0;i<logsList.length;i++){
newTable+='<tr><td>'+logsList[i]+'</td></tr>';
}
newTable+='</table>';
document.getElementById('logsDiv').InnerHtml=newTable;
};
displayLogs=function(){
DWRLogsService.giveMeTheLogs(logsHandler);
};
setInterval('displayLogs();',1000);
void(0);

Since this technique is not very fair, there are three main points you have to consider when making building the Javascript code for the address bar:

1)Avoid new line (‘\n’ or ‘\r’) or space into your code : we are in the browser address bar !

2)Don’t use the name  ‘var’ for declaring your local or global variables ; this should cause a new space into your code.

4)Call void(0) at the end of your code .

I hope this can help anyone who want to try and please leave your feedback and lets share the experience .

I may not seem to be the biggest fan of Microsoft at KIST , but I do believe that Microsoft is a very innovative company in the software industry. Last weekend I was at the main Microsoft campus in Redmond , Seattle . They really have a kind of fresh environment you should dream to working in;  gardens,  flowers , trees it’s all welcoming. Although it’s a hard time for many companies including Microsoft , due to economic crisis ,  I am feeling late to embrace the .NET and C# world . I will enjoy to start reading my C# book left in Dusaidi Hostel . I hope there are much similarities between Java an C# .

This is my picture inside the Redmond campus, I was near the building No. 7  and  if you don’t know where the building No. 7 is in that campus, you never been there !

Antoine @ Microsoft near the building # 7

It seems to be true that “dev people”, spending most of their time on coding, debugging, …, do not have a lot of time for “blogging” but when you work on open-source projects, it should be almost a requirement to write blogs and let the world know what you are working on .

So here I get time to talk about few points and the main issue I am asking myself is about Open-Source and Africa . Few days ago I was accepted to work with OpenMRS , an open source project which is deployed in Africa to fight against HIV/AIDS mainly . This my second time to work on the project through the Google Summer of Code ™ program . So, I started counting how many African students were involved in the Google Summer of Code(tm) since its birth Date in 2005 and I don’t find 20 yet in “Africa” (I mean the sub-saharan/black one).

I don’t know what people in “The West” think of “Africa”, but I am sure some think it’s place for wars, diseases and still counting bad things; and they don’t expect much stuff like technology in Africa . It’s also sad to see people in Africa not benefiting from the open-technology which is all around . Internet itself is not perfectly open but it’ an open world of all kind of information .

Last year I got an opportunity to attend the Intego Awards which is the Rwandan Annual Award for the best companies in the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) business there . There is a man who said that Africa was sleep when The West was revolutionizing the machinery and mechanization industry and that Africa should not be sleep again with this new revolution in ICT . This is really a great thinking but there still much a lot to change for achieving this kind of dream .It’s true that people can benefit from much information available on the internet now for free and especially when they use well that information .The only problem is when people try to exaggerate using that information, I am afraid that Internet couldn’t replace the typical classic learning methodologies; a very sad example I knew is about a college teacher who was trying to “google” the title of the subject he was assigned to and the first PDF to come in the google results would be his textbook . It sounds really funny for these students to learn by this kind of FIFO methodology .But behind this information accessible on the Internet, there are really much more things that people can benefit from : That is FLOSS . I am not sure you can be heard when you tell that kind of teacher : “Hello teacher, I am writing open-source code, can we spread it and benefit from it ?” – ” That’s not my business ? ” should be the most probable answer.This really sucks .

I always believe that open-source can save Africa in the sectors like education or health care but a lot of new understanding should be adopted . When I asked someone why people don’t care about open-source , he said “it’s because we don’t even feel the proprietary guy’s pressure, here you can download anything you are able to access, no body will come from The West to say that the video , PDF book or cracked software I downloaded from rapidshare is illegal “;  “An other thing is that we download this digital stuff because we can’t download food or beer”, he added .This not the definitive answer but I should keep you updated when I get new reasons .

Anyway I should keep to interest my classmates about open-source , I want them to migrate from IE to FireFox, from Windows Media Player to VLC, from XP to Ubuntu, from the proprietary chains to THE WORLD OF OPENNESS AND FREEDOM !

If you feel like there is a concern in this post, please leave me a comment .

Antoine

Today’s interesting thing I found : Bridge2Rwanda

Hace unos pocos días fuí seleccionado para participar en el Google Summer of Code 2009, más precisamente con el proyecto Refactoring Rules de JBoss Drools.

El objetivo de este proyecto es realizar la integración de refactorización de reglas en los IDEs, tanto en el IDE para Eclipse como en Guvnor. Este módulo tiene que ser reutilizable para ambas partes, y tener un nivel de abstracción que permita realizar la refactorización en todos los tipos de formatos de reglas conocidos, no solamente DRL sino que también en DSL, BRL, TableDecision (aunque en este momento no se implemente), RuleFlow, etc.

En la application presentada se propusieron varias features, que en teoría todas son implementables pero todavia no hay nada concreto.

• Asignación de variable
• Renombrar variable
• Cambio de parámetros para aumentar la performance
• Detección de producto cruzado
• Sugerencia de join/linking variable
• Organizar imports

Se habrán dado cuenta que algunas features van más allá de lo que denominamos refactorización, pero son un buen agregado que pueden proporcionarles nuevas funcionalidades a los IDE’s, y seguramente se agregarán o modificarán algunos requerimientos según los pedidos de mi mentor asignado aparte de algunas ideas que puedan surguir cuando empieze el coding madness.

Toda esta locura empieza el 23 de mayo, cuando es la fecha fijada para el inicio formal de GSoC, sin embargo en estas semanas restantes son los momentos para empezar a coordinar con los mentores y completar wikis como Refactoring Rules , que como verán todavía no tiene ningún contenido de implementación más allá de los requerimientos y donde podrán seguir los avances que vayan sucediendo.

Supongo que si hay alguna novedad útil para comentar sobre los progresos lo haré en otro post, por ahora no hay mucho más que contar… eso si, el 26 de agosto les comento como terminó todo esto.

Post original de lucazamador.wordpress.com