Red Hat’s New Hire Orientation

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A quick post to say that two weeks ago I went to Red Hat‘s New Hire Orientation in Munich. This is an event for (guess what) new hires in order to show how the company operates, etc. with great focus on how Open things are.

Being a remote worker, it was also very nice to meet other employees, not only engineers but also sales and other roles. Jan Wildeboar gave a great presentation summarizing the Free Software history and explaining how committed to it the company is. With a bit of shame from my side, I was the only one lifting up my hand when he asked who knew the words of the Free Software song… of course later, during the awesome Bavarian dinner (with awesome Bavarian beer) we had, the sale folks forced me to sing it (luckily I could only remember the first part).
With my Red Hat fedora

The next day we all got our fedoras and I thought “so this is how they get their hats…” :)

Some people have been asking me what I am actually doing so, currently I am working in Wacom support in GNOME. You will see some of my patches on the GNOME Control Center and the Settings Daemon as well as in libwacom.

I will try to keep you posted on the big changes.

SeriesFinale for BlackBerry

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I would like to share with you this port of SeriesFinale for Blackberry.

Unlike the other versions, I was not involved in the development of this one. It was developed by Micke Prag, who also started the Meego/N9 port back in the day.
I developed the first version of SeriesFinale in 2009 for the defunct Maemo system and released also a version for the N9/Meego in 2011 (there was also a version for GNOME but I never finished it…). It is very good to see that it continues its life even if I am not involved this time.

I don’t own a BlackBerry so I am not able to try it but judging from this video, it definitely looks good so if you’re a BB user, check it out!

Judging from the success that a clone for Android and a similar online service have, it seems like I could have started a whole business out of it… :)

About the GNOME 3 Application Development book

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Yesterday I read Danielle’s review of GNOME 3 Application Development: Beginner’s Guide and I would like to write some comments about it because my name figures in there.

I was involved in the book as a technical reviewer and I reviewed a total of 5 chapters. This was the first time I did so for a printed book.
After reviewing those chapters, I asked my contact at the Packt Publishing to give me a final draft before publishing it and associating my name to it because I really wanted some of the issues I pointed out to be addressed.
After a while, to my surprise, I received an email from that contact announcing that the book had been published and thanking me for my contribution. Turns out they didn’t respect my request and included my name directly! After I asked that contact about our “arrangement”, he apologized for that and said it was his fault…

I am still waiting for my printed copy and I was hoping that some of the issues I had told them were corrected but after reading Danielle’s review it is pretty clear to me that they weren’t. That’s surprising to me because I made it clear that some issues were very important things and I assumed it’d be the editor/publisher’s work to take care of that.

Writing and producing a book is a difficult thing and in no way I intend to bash the author or the publisher (I haven’t even looked at the final version yet) with this post but I wanted to clarify how I my name is associated to it.

Hopefully next time Packt will take into consideration what their technical reviewers say and not just use their name for the book.

Working for Red Hat

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Since last week I have been working for Red Hat!

After I started looking for a new job, I had two intense months full of interviews and travelling (I traveled to different countries, including the US for the first time) where I met great people and learned a lot.
It was all very new to me because it had been a while since I had looked for a job and I had never had so many interviews.

After deciding to join Red Hat, Helena and I also started the process of moving from A Coruña to Berlin which involved packing a lot of boxes and storing them in my parents’ attic in Brotas, Portugal where they will remain for a little while. This required a few car trips (13 hours driving, each return trip) but my parents are very kind people and they love me so they helped us with all the logistics.

Leaving Coruña was something we wanted but it was still very sad. We made many good friends during these 4 years in there and saying good-bye was hard, even if in this modern world good-bye actually means “see you later”. They are very good and fantastic people and we miss them already.
It actually felt like leaving my country again because as of now, I know more of the reality (political situation, finances, etc.) in Galicia/Spain then I know of my own country.

We’re still sorting out some of the last details of setting up in Germany. Berlin is very multicultural and it’s fairly easy to get around using English but we are lucky and thankful to have our friend Chris here who is helping us a lot.
Helena is already taking German classes and I will start soon so I hope I will be able to shout “Ich bin ein Berliner” as funnily as this guy did.

Regarding Red Hat, I am part of the desktop team, composed by well known names in the community, where I will keep hacking on GNOME related stuff. It is great to be able to continue working on Free Software and for such a nice company full of great developers. Working remotely will be a new challenge but Berlin is full of lovely places like St. Gaudy Café where I can get inspiration and work quietly.
As for my other FOSS projects, I hope I can dedicate a bit of my free time to them — between German classes and my personal life affairs.

I would like to thank all the people who contacted me during these months with great projects. I wish you the best of luck.
Last but not least, I would also like to thank Mike Fabian for having recommended me inside Red Hat.

OCRFeeder 0.7.11 released

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Here is 2013′s first version of OCRFeeder, version 0.7.11.

For this version, a number of bugs were fixed, especially some that were affecting saving and loading projects.
Some small improvements were also made such as being able to load multiple images at once and being able to choose the OCR engine from the command line interface version of OCRFeeder (using the -e option).

Now for the main feature, I developed something that had been requested by a good number of users: being able to easily choose the language for the OCR engine.
When I developed OCRFeeder, I wanted to make it easy for users to use system-wide OCR engines from the layout analysis that OCRFeeder performs but I also wanted it to remain powerful and that’s why the engines are configured in a general, abstract way, as if from the command line.
Some OCR engines support setting the language in order to get a better recognition and while, users could already set the language of an engine manually using the OCR editor dialog, they wanted to have a nice drop-down list with the languages instead.
This represented a real challenge: to keep the old and flexible configuration and, at the same time, offer a high-level way of choosing the language.

OCRFeeder's new configuration
So here is how it works. There is a new special argument keyword $LANG that will be replaced by the new field “language argument” and the currently set language. Since engines support different languages (or none) and call them different names (e.g. Tesseract expects “por” for the Portuguese, others may expect “pt”) there is another new field called “languages” which should be a map between the language code in the ISO 639-1 and the name of the language of the engine expects, as shown in the screenshot.

Languages combo
To show the languages, there is a new tab in the areas’ editor called Misc (in lack of a better name for a tab that’s holding more stuff in the future) with the languages combo. This combo shows a check on the languages that the currently selected engine recognizes as seen in the screenshot.

There is also a new setting in the preferences dialog with the default language and the first time the application runs, it will assign it to the user’s locale.
One thing must be taken into account: even though Tesseract supports an extensive list of languages, the users must have those packages installed in their distros, otherwise, recognition will of course fail.

To finish, related to my recent job search, I have spent this week in San Francisco getting to know some people from an exciting start-up and despite the jet lag, I managed to finish this release so I can now say that least part of OCRfeeder was designed and developed in California :P

Source tarball
Git
Bugzilla