Summary of 2016

So, 2016 has been a great year to me. Interesting in many aspects, but most has turned out to be for the better. I’ve gotten to know a bunch of awesome new people, I spoken about open source, Qt and Linux in Europe and USA, I’ve helped hosting an open source conference in Gothenburg, I’ve learned so much more professionally and as a person, and I’ve really enjoyed myself the whole time.

2016 was the year that…

  • … myself and Jürgen where Qt Champions for our work with the qmlbook. It feels really great getting recognition for this work. I really want to take QML Book further – during 2016 both myself and Jürgen have been too busy to do a good job improving and extending the text.
  • … I had to opportunity to visit the Americas (Oregon and California) for the first time in my life. Felt really nice having been on another continent. Now it is only Africa and Australia left on the list :-)

  • … I picked up running and has run every week throughout the year, averaging almost 10km per week. This is the first year since we built out house and had kids (so 11 or 12 years) that I’ve maintained a training regime over a full year.
  • … foss-gbg went from a small user group of 15-30 people meeting every month to something much larger. On May 26 the first foss-north took place. This is something some friends of mine and myself have discussed for years and when we finally dared to try it was a great success. We filled the venue with 110 guests and ten speakers and had a great day in the sunshine. In the events after foss-north, the local group, foss-gbg has attracted 40-60 people per meeting, so double the crowd.

  • … Pelagicore, the start-up I joined in 2010 when we were only 6 employees, was acquired by Luxoft. We had grown to 50+ employees in the mean time and put Qt, Linux and open source on the automotive map. It has been a great journey and I feel that we being a part of something bigger lets us reach even further, so I’m really excited about this.

2017 will be the year that…

  • … I make more time for writing – on qmlbook, this blog and more.
  • … I improve my running and increase my average distance per run as well as distance per week.
  • … foss-north will take place again. This time with double the audience and dual tracks for parts of the day. I will share more information as it develops. This time, the date to aim for is April 26. In the mean time, foss-gbg will have fewer, but larger, meetings.
  • … Qt, Linux and open source becomes the natural choice in automotive. I will do my best to help this turn out true!

Even as 2016 has been really good, I hope that 2017 will be even greater. I’m really looking forward to learning!

foss-north follow-up

The time to summarize the foss-north event has come. I’d like to start by thanking everyone – speakers, sponsors and visitors – you all made it a great event!

After the event I sent out a questionnaire which made for some interesting reading. About 30% of the visitors have replied to the questions, so I feel that the input is fairly representative.

First of all, everyone who joined the event seems happy with it. Almost everyone are likely or very likely to come next year and the same goes for recommending a friend. This sounds like a great starting point for the 2017 event.

foss-north-will-you-come

When it comes to the scheduling, the results are a bit ambiguous. It seems that everyone wants more contents, but it is harder to tell if two days or two tracks is the way to go. I am also a bit torn on this subject. Two days mean that some people might not be able to make it due to it taking too much time, but two tracks means that everyone, even those who have the time, will miss half the contents.

foss-north-how-many-days

All this data and much more will be incorporated into an event summary report that will be made available soon. We are also looking into the details of setting up next year’s event, so stay tuned for a date and venue.

foss-north – Schedule available

Just a short update on foss-north – the schedule is up. We have a whole list of speakers that I’m super excited about and tickets are selling well. I still don’t know what to expect, but more than 1/3 of the tickets are gone and the sales numbers are actually even better for the full priced tickets than the early birds.

Speakers will cover everything from design, methodology, licensing, embedded tech, networking, IoT, start-ups, innovation – a broad spectrum demonstrating the versatility of free and open source.

To sum things up – it looks like we might actually pull this off and I still can treat my family with a vacation instead of paying for unused catering ;-)

foss-gbg goes foss-north

As some of you might know, I run a group that meet and learn new stuff about foss every month – foss-gbg. Today it’s official that this summer foss-gbg goes foss-north and it is going to be awesome. So I welcome you all to the wonderful city of Gothenburg to a day filled with talks on a wide variety of topics around free and open source technology. It is going to be awesome!

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Vacation 2015

IMG_20150703_172538So, vacation has finally arrived in 2015. To the despair of some, and joy of others, the Swedish standard vacation is 3-5 weeks over the summer. I’ll be having five weeks of this year.

So, what do you do with five weeks? Generally, I start out ambitious and end up in reality after 3-4 weeks and then scramble to get something done. Here is my list for the summer 2015:

  • Hang out with the kids and wife and do fun stuff.
  • Do some work around the house (a shed for our bikes and some general painting are on the wish list).
  • Get the calendar for foss-gbg into place. It does look as if we will have an awesome autumn.
  • Work on a whole bunch of little Yocto projects that I’ve been planning for a while (meta-kf5 being one of the high priority ones, playing with various targets such as the Raspberry Pi 2, Beagle Bone Black and more another).
  • Getting my 3D printer back into shape and do something fun with it (if it rains a lot)

That summarizes my ambition pretty much – but first things first – lets spend a few days hanging out with the kids before they grow tired of me and think that I’m old and boring :-)

Ardour 4 on Debian Jessie

The Ardour project just announced version four of the digital audio workstation. Debian carries version 3, so I decided to build version 4 myself. Here is a summary from what I learned.

First of all, the Ardour people have written a building page and a list of dependencies. The do carry a set of patches towards some of the packages. These seems to be more or less small fixes, apart from the libsndfile that has a bug fix for handling BWF files.

In addition to the patches libs, the requirements list a whole range of gtk and corresponding -mm packages as well as boost, and varous codecs and such. I decided not to care too much about versions for these packages. Instead, I just took whatever I could find in Debian. The packages installed are:

  • libsndfile1-dev
  • libgnomecanvas2-dev
  • libsigc++-2.0-dev
  • libcairo2-dev
  • liblrdf0-dev
  • libfreetype6-dev
  • libboost1.55-all-dev
  • libfftw3-dev
  • libglibmm-2.4-dev
  • libcairomm-1.0-dev
  • libpangomm-1.4-dev
  • libatkmm-1.6-dev
  • libart2.0-cil-dev
  • libgnomecanvasmm-2.6-dev
  • liblo-dev
  • libraptor2-dev
  • librasqal3-dev
  • libogg-dev
  • libflac-dev
  • libvorbis-dev
  • libsamplerate0-dev
  • libaudio-dev
  • liblv2dynparam1-dev
  • libserd-dev
  • libsord-dev
  • libsratom-dev
  • liblilv-dev
  • libsuil-dev
  • librubberband-dev
  • vamp-plugin-sdk
  • libaubio-dev
  • libjack-dev
  • liblilv-dev

Then it is just a matter of configuring using waf.

./waf configure --with-backend=alsa --prefix=/wherever/you/want/it
make
./waf install

My plan is to use ALSA (i.e. not JACK) and installing libjack-dev meant that Skype got kicked out, so the system needed some love to restore the order.

apt-get autoremove
apt-get remove libjack-dev
apt-get remove libjack0
dpkg --install skype-debian_4.3.0.37-1_i386.deb
apt-get install -f

Despite this little hack, Ardour seems to work nicely and record and play back. I still need to test out some more features to see if everything is in place, but it looks hopeful.

Update! As pointed out in the comments, Debian not only carries a really old version but also version 3.

Saving code

As you probably know by now, Gitorious is shutting down. A lot of history sits on that site, and much of the code is no longer maintained. Browsing around, I ran into the maemo-tools that has not been touched since 2013. There are still some useful stuff there, so I decided to save it. All tool repositories has been cloned to the maemo-tools-old organization on github.

As I’m only a happy user, I would love to invite the original maintainers, or other interested developers to come work on it, so if you want an invite to the organization so that you can maintain the code, just drop me a mail at e8johan, gmail, com.

foss-gbg on 3D printers

On Monday, 30/3, the foss-gbg group will meet and hack on 3D printers. Invitation in Swedish – tickets are free.

Välkomna på foss-gbg hackafton!

Vi träffas klockan 17:00 den 30/3 och lär oss om 3D-skrivare.

Vi får besök av Göran Frykberg som kör en 3dhub i Mölndal. Han kommer att snacka om printerteknologier och material. Han kommer även att visa lite bruksprodukter och visa varför 3D-skrivare är här för att stanna.

Vid åttasnåret drar vi vidare och umgås över en öl.

Pelagicore står för lokaler och bjuder på lättare tilltugg under tillställningen.

Gratis biljetter hittar ni på eventbrite . Antalet platser är begränsade, så först till kvarn gäller!

Välkomna!

Göran Frykberg, Johan Thelin och Mikael Söderberg