Most of you might have heard about the sudden “death” of the airline Spanair. I had never known of an airline stopping its planes on the same day it announces it’s rupture.
Several colleagues of mine in Igalia were affected by the events and guess with whom some of us (mostly Igalians based at Coruña) were flying to Brussels? That’s right…
Fortunately yesterday we bought new flights and decided to try to get the reimbursement for the cancelled ones later.

This means that thanks to Igalia:

I had two presentations in each of the last two editions of FOSDEM but I didn’t really have something new to show in this year’s so I’m attending only as a participant which doesn’t make it less exciting for me.

I have already some arrangements planned, as in having a beer with some folks, and you’re invited too if you wanna talk about Igalia or the projects I’m involved in.

See you in Brussels.

This is a long pending post. It should have been written about 3 months ago but only now we found the time to do it.

Some of us in Igalia have been interested in Augmented Reality (AR) and Computer Vision (CV) for a while and we wanted to do something within these fields for the company’s 10th anniversary party which took place in last November.
Since our time was limited (due to our work in a client’s project) we came up with a simple AR installation to show at the party — a fish pond, or aquarium.

So a week before the party Edu and I bought a Kinect device and implemented this fish pond using OpenFrameworks, an Open Source framework for writing interactive applications using C++.
As you might notice from the pictures, we are more programming artists than graphical artists so the fish may look a bit funky but they’re drawn in only 10 lines of code using graphics functions (and I kinda like their looks). Due to limitations of the place where we installed the application, we had to place the projector in a lower angle instead of above the “action area” and this of course resulted in bigger shadows but people could still play with it without many issues.

The fish’s behavior was implemented using Reynolds’s algorithms and the idea is that when a person “touches” the pond, the fish will go there as if there was food being dropped. When the person stops touching the pond, the fish will hang for a little while and then will disperse randomly to other points of the pond.

As you see, the idea is pretty simple but it was a nice entertainment for kids and grown ups around the party.

We will likely be doing more AR and CV for the coming months so stay tuned!

Today is the last day of 2011 and it is once again when people look back in time and realize what they have done throughout the year and if they stuck to their promises. I don’t give that much importance to events like new year’s eve or even my birthday but I decided to write a blog post and to think about what happened on 2011.

December is also the month I’ve joined Igalia, I have been in the company for 3 year and the changes seem to have been quite some.
I feel 2011 was not a very productive year from the point of view of side projects. I have been working on the toolkit that powers the MeeGo Harmattan (Nokia N9) for a year and a half and that, together with other tasks in Igalia and in my personal life didn’t leave me much time for creating new projects. Still, I released 5 new versions of OCRFeeder; 4 versions of SeriesFinale and ported it for the Nokia N9. Also I have given once again presentations in some nice events like FOSDEM and LinuxTag.

On the personal side of things the big event this year was my wedding with Helena. After that we had a nice time travelling in Turkey after having cancelled the plans to visit Japan due to the earthquake.
We also spent 10 days in Berlin, we are still in love with the city and we wish one day we’ll experience living in there (could it be 2012?).
After 3 years living in Spain, I feel comfortable here, I recognize its virtues and flaws but I want to know more cultures, more languages and thus more ways of seeing life. As for Portugal, it is part of what defines me but Helena and I are not planning on living in there for the foreseeable future, especially these times when the government(s) is(are) making things difficult for everybody.
Related to this and the economic crisis that is going on, this year I joined a demo and a strike for the first time and I keep hoping that things get better for everyone.
I also realized I am now used to donate to some institutions throughout the year and it is something that makes me feel good.

As book counting is something often present in this kind of year’s review, in 2011 I read 10 books and a short story. The most important ones, in case you’re interested are: The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins), Through the Language Glass (Guy Deutscher) and Citações e Pensamentos de Agostinho da Silva (“Quotes and Thoughts of Agostinho da Silva” by the philosopher).

The future

People often say “next year is gonna be a year of change” but things do change and some situations that happened this year have made me think about my life so I really feel there are going to be changes in 2012. Hopefully they will be good ones.

I wish you all a happy 2012.

If you’re one of the people waiting for RPM packages of OCRFeeder for Fedora, rejoice!
Juan, my friend and coworker at Igalia, has cooked an RPM spec and created an OCRFeeder repository for Fedora 15 and 16.

To add this repository to Fedora 16 simply download this file and move it to /etc/yum.repo.list/.
Alternatively you can download the RPMs directly from:
OCRFeeder RPM for Fedora 15
OCRFeeder RPM for Fedora 16

Important: These Fedora packages haven’t been thoroughly tested and there might be tiny issues currently (like the icons not being installed in the right place) and I’m no longer using Fedora myself (I’ve switched to Debian) so please report any issues you might find.

It is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity and we should be proud of it:

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