Category Archives: guadec

Going to GUADEC without leaving town

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That’s right, this year GUADEC is taking place in the city I moved to more than 3 years ago in order to become an Igalian: A Coruña. It’s fun to see this event happening just 20 minutes walking from my place when in the previous editions I had to catch several planes in order to attend it :)

Going to GUADEC

In this year’s GUADEC, I am presenting two projects I have created:

  • OCRFeeder, the most complete OCR Free Software solution;
  • Skeltrack, the first Free Software library to perform human skeleton tracking from depth buffers such as the ones given by the Kinect.

If this sounds interesting, be sure to attend the talks or have a chat about the projects when you see me.

Since I feel pretty much like a local, I can tell you that you must not leave the town without trying “pulpo á feira” (octopus + olive oil + paprika) or, in case you’re not into cephalopods, just go to some traditional Galician bar, have a beer and enjoy the folk music of Celtic origins.

Call for GUADEC BoF and Lightning Talks open until June 18h

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The public Call for Participation for Lightning Talks, BoF and Hackfest has been officially opened for the 2012 GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC) conference.

You can read the call for participations at Lightning Talks and BoFs CFP and submit your proposal at the submission system.

GUADEC 2012 will be hosted in A Coruña, Spain, from July 26 – August 1st. BoF, Hackfests and other events will be scheduled between July 30th and August 1st.

This call for Participation for GUADEC 2012 will follow these dates:

June 18: Deadline for submission of Lightning Talks and BoF proposals.
June 26: Notification to Lightning Talks contributors.
July 26 – 29: GUADEC 2012 in A Coruña, Spain
July 30 – August 1: hackfests and meetings

The rest of the activities BoFs, Hackfest, etc. will be accepted with a FIFO approach whenever there are available slots and rooms in the conference program.

We would like to remind you that registration for GUADEC is already open and you can reserve your accomodation with the registration system until July 1st.

Follow GUADEC’s developments:
identi.ca/GUADEC and twitter.com/GUADEC.

For general questions please contact the GUADEC team.

Igalia’s booth at the Desktop Summit 2011

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You might have heard/seen that there are quite a few Igalians in this year’s Desktop Summit.
What you might have not noticed is that we also have a booth in here. The booth is only set during breaks since we all are attending or giving talks and the reason you might wanna pass by is to try some of the cool things we work on in Igalia or to get some free FOSS stickers (WebKit, Epiphany, MeeGo, Grilo, Orca, …).

You can see some of the stickers in this crappy photo:

Igalia's booth at Desktop Summit 2011

OCRFeeder 0.7.6 and DesktopSummit 2011

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Just in time for the Desktop Summit 2011, I’ve released the 0.7.6 version of OCRFeeder.

The new interesting stuff in this version is that OCRFeeder can now export to PDF. When exporting the pages to PDF, users will have two choices: “a PDF from scratch” or “a searchable PDF”. The PDF from scratch means that the text part of what will be exported will be written in the PDF using ReportLab whereas the searchable PDF means that the PDF will present the whole original picture but with invisible text overlaid in order to make it searchable.
The PDF exportation still needs some polishing but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible for the people who need it.
Check out these examples:

OCRFeeder
(page loaded in OCRFeeder and recognized automatically)

OCRFeeder's exported PDF from scratch
(exported PDF from scratch)

OCRFeeder's exported searchable PDF
(exported searchable PDF with selected text)

This version also fixes issues when recognizing grayscale pictures as well as the mouse cursor that was being changed when it was over a page’s right margin.

I’ve also added separators to divide the Document’s submenus so they are grouped correctly and I’ve made ODT the first choice in the list of exportation formats, which had been mistakenly changed.

As usual, the incredible team of translators is doing a great job and apart from the updated translations, OCRFeeder now comes in Catalan (with the Valencian option as well) and in Greek.

DesktopSummit

No, once again, OCRFeeder’s talk wasn’t approved by the Desktop Summit’s organization. If you think that I’ve presented it some well known conferences (LinuxTag, GUADEC ES and twice in FOSDEM), it makes me a bit sad that I couldn’t yet present this unique project in the conference of the desktop it targets, but let’s hope it makes it next year.

Still, Igalia is sponsoring me again to attend the DesktopSummit, so, if you’re interested in OCRFeeder or other projects I’m involved, let me know!

See you in Berlin!

GUADEC and InterRail

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I’ve spent last week in Den Haag, attending GUADEC 2010, with many other fellow Igalians.

Although last year I also attended GUADEC, this year was like a first time to me as last year’s GUADEC was co-located with aKademy forming Gran Canaria Desktop summit and it felt different.

What do I think of this year’s? Javascript, web, introspection and shell, that’s what I think.
This is GNOME’s new route, making desktop development more webbish and it is seems like a smart one too. Now, I don’t really fall for Javascript, I think it’s ugly and not really the best choice (imho) for large projects but anyway that’s the beauty of GObject Introspection, in the future it should be easy to use whatever language one prefers.

As for the talks, I really enjoyed Luis Villa’s keynote. Xan and Fernando did a great job getting the tragedy that some times the Foundation’s mailing list is and turning it into a comedy.
Iago gave a good talk about Grilo and Juan complemented it in a lightning talk about the plugins we did using Rygel-grilo.

This year I gave again a lightening talk, this time about the Predictor Input Method which you might one day use in a mobile device or on the desktop itself if you need assisted typing. There must be a GUADEC’s rule saying that the laptop where people present the lightening talks must be a crappy netbook that takes 2 seconds before it changes a slide…

For an overall feeling of GUADEC, you can check out Victor’s post covering GUADEC, I agree totally with him.

I could also meet and chat with nice people like Eitan Isaacson, Patricia and others.

So let’s see how the projects presented in GUADEC evolve and wait GUADEC 2011 in Berlin.

And what this week? This week I’m on vacation doing an InterRail across a bunch of European countries together with my girlfriend. I visited Paris already, where I found out my french is good enough for basic stuff. Today we’re in Brussels, it’s my third time here but the first one as a turist. I’m sure the beers will taste as marvellous as always.

I’m also doing a new thing: travelling without my laptop, the N900 seems to be a perfect replacement, I (still?) love this gadget and it surelly spares some space in my backpack.

See you in some European city, I’m likely to be wearing a GNOME/Linux/Metal t-shirt… what else is new…?