The Gluon Project

Hi,

Unfortunately, I have been busy recently with a couple of serious real life issues. Yeah, our life is not always an easy-peasy cakewalk; we sometimes think it is getting very grim. I was traveling back to Hungary about three weeks ago when I got the news my dear father had deceased after a stroke. It was two years ago, when I last saw him, but I still clearly recall his activities. What a great person, he will be extremely missed.

It was not an easy situation, Christmas and New Year's Eve for us, especially for my mother who has spent 46 years with my father in this material life. I have tried to take care of my mother mentally and financially as much as possible. As for me, it was much simpler to accept the fact than I thought even though I loved him a lot. I prayed a lot for his soul during this period, especially during the funeral to reach the most appropriate position ever. I have a good poem for the situation that I would like to share (probably a good candidate for my pall when I reach my "end"):

For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.

- Bhaktivedanta VedaBase: Bhagavad-gita As It Is 2.20

Unfortunately it took an effect on my leisure time FOSS contribution and I had to withdraw my mentorship help of the Google Code-In session. Thanks to Lydia for helping me with that. I also had to withdraw my help from the KDE and Qt5 contributions that I previously discussed with David Faure. I am really sorry for those, again.

The good news is that, I am now entirely back to Helsinki and can concentrate on amending the time spilling regarding these activities. I have also been organizing a Qt MeetUp [1] in Helsinki next week. It is also a sort of KDE 4.8. release party. Hope to see some of you there.

I would like to wish a happy new year for you with a lot of FOSS acitivities. :)

[1] http://www.meetup.com/QtEverywhere/Helsinki-FI/533242/?a=bn5_l1#946032

Hey hey :)

As you may have already known: I have taken a subtle hint at the end of my previous blog post about the "KDE Mobile on Harmattan sprint". I would now like to show what has been happening. I will be much shorter this time than usual. =)


KDE Mobile on Harmattan sprint

The KDE Harmattan sprint has really been an amazing event for me in my life. Very impressive to see people caring about KDE on handset platforms, like this shiny N9 and Harmattan. You can read our wikipage about the issues we realized in advance and discussed thoroughly at the sprint:
http://community.kde.org/KDE_Mobile/Harmattan


Social event with the KDE e.V. 2011 sprint participants

You can find a more detailed story about the sprint on the following page:
http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/kde-harmattan-sprint-makes-advances-mobile-space


Gluon Player for Harmattan

I have also worked on Gluon a bit at the sprint, and also later as a post-sprint
activity in my leisure time. I am really thankful for the help and feedback I
was able to get from the people about the sprint, but as well as about the
Harmattan Gluon Player. Here you can find some screenshots of the current state:

 Game List Page


Game Details Page

Note, there are no proper margins yet on the pages. That is because, for the time being, I decided not to hack around. The relevant qt component version will be having the facility "UiConstants.DefaultMargin". This is not available yet on the PR 1.1 firmwares, but will probably come along with the PR 1.2 update. Disclaimer: we do not really have mature games yet for N9, thus this follow up is only about the Gluon Player application, not the games themselves.

Space Invaders MenuSpace Invaders Game




Future plans:

I would really like to say again. please stay tunned. The story is definitely not over! Having had the KDE Harmattan sprint in this success: I started to deal with creating an Android target in scratchbox. since Qt on Android has been coming along very nicely, I would also like to start the researches about the KDE Android development. I will be trying to organize a KDE Android sprint as soon as the technology of ours make it possible. Thank you for reading, really! ;)

Hey there again :-)

Luckily enough, I have been busy recently with a couple of conferences and meetups, like Gluon sprint, Qt Developer Days, Fruct10 conference and Qt MeetUp in Helsinki. I have a lot to report about since all of them were new and amazing experiences in my life that I could never really forget. Cozy environment, friendly people, interesting technical discussions and the like :)


Gluon Sprint

The event took place in Munich at the Nokia premises, the weekend before the Qt Developer Days. It was very fruitful from the technical point of view, so as it a very good occasion for having fun face to face with other Gluon volunteers.

You can read more about the Gluon sprint on the following page
http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/07/gluon-sprint-fall-2011



Group photo

Qt Developer Days

I am not sure where to start since there were so much happenings :) First of all, we had a company booth there with my current employer, called Symbio. This is a subcontractor company located in many countries all over the world. We had a lot of preparation for the event beforehand, like designing our own T-Shirts and providing demos for the volunteers, bringing rollups and variety of marketing materials.

A lot of interesting discussions from many points of view. I was able to get to know new people in the Qt world, which was already pretty awesome. Moreover, it was also a good occasion to meet old friends and buddies.

I was also able participate to the Qt Contributor Day to talk about and listen to Android and Qt, KDE and Qt discussions along with other interesting talks, such as inqlude.

As for me, it has been pretty impressive to see the stage of the Qt development opportunities on Android. I have seen some demos invoking OpenGL in the background, and .. let me just say a really loud "awesome"! ;)

I must admit: we were very lucky because we got an N9 for free without any loan contracts. Hence, pretty much for personal usage as well. I am really grateful for getting this amazing phone. Big kudos to Quim Gil and Nokia!

You can find the available videos about the event below:
Qt Developer Days 2011 Munich Highlights: http://youtu.be/FQMtg7pL82A
Qt Developer Days 2011 Munich Demos: http://youtu.be/39M5AKuyQOs



Symbio T-Shirt logo

Fruct10 conference presentation

The event took place in Tampere, Finland. I participated in the event on the ninth and tenth of November 2011. The program consisted of lectures provided by invited industrial and academic experts, community  presentations selected from the open call and demos on MeeGo and other Mobile Linux systems given by the regional groups, invited FRUCT teams and selected from the open call. I am really thankful for the organizers and decision makers for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite ongoing leisure projects: Gluon (Gaming Freedom). All my respect goes to the organizers, too. I am really happy about their support for such brilliant events as this. You can find the detailed program for the event at the following link:
http://www.fruct.org/conference10

I could present our vision, current project state and future plans. Thanks for the participants and the questions. I was really impressed with the feedback. Thank for you guys again for making it a success together. :)

I am also really grateful about Knut Yrwin's constructive feedback. I learned a lot from him, like I should look over the audience more, I should take a bit more breath during the talk for audience to let them think a bit more. Of course, I should also decrease my arm work during my presentations to not get the attention of the audience for my arms. :) Sounds funny, but I knew that from Knut Yrwin: these points make a whole lot of quality change into your talk. You just need to practice it in advance, if you are not mature yet with these practicalities.


Talk about Gaming Freedom (Gluon)

Fruct10 conference social event

We had a social event on Thursday evening 19:00-22:00 where various people were able to present their projects. I had taken the opportunity and then was presenting Gluon. It has really been a good occasion because I was even able to get a large TV for presenting the example games we have in Gluon, namely: Invaders and Apocalypse.

You can find the slides here for the demo session about Gluon:
http://posters.fruct.org/index.php?title=Gaming_Freedom

The presentation for the demo session had a bit interesting style. It had the Pecha Kucha Presentation Format. If you know nothing about this format, then in a nutshell:
"Pecha Kucha is a presentation technique where a speaker shows a definite number of slides (usually 20 or 15), each for 20 seconds. The slides are changed automatically during the talk."

I must admit I stopped this demo session relatively early and used the time for getting to know new people around.

Gluon demo on the TV

KDE Mobile talk at the local Qt MeetUp in Helsinki

As some of you may already know: we had MeeGo MeetUps in the past in Helsinki. It is a great opportunity for gathering local people with the same interests. As the MeeGo's state is clear, we are now heading to have a Qt MeetUp in Helsinki regularly not depending on MeeGo, Maemo or what matters big companies dictate. We had already one in the past in a pub close to Nokia, but it has been more like an adhoc meeting without too much organization. As for a start, it has already been excellent!

This time, we had a well-organized event with our sponsor. There were interesting technical talks, including me about KDE Mobile, but also about Software Abstraction and so on. Nevertheless, we had free drinks, chips, snack and everything. :) You can find the page of the meetup here:
http://www.meetup.com/QtEverywhere/Helsinki-FI/289971/

I was impressed with how the audience reacted to my KDE Mobile presentation. There were many interesting questions and a lot of feedback. I invoked the same slides as previously at the Mobile Linux Summit in Oulu:
http://fruct.org/sites/default/files/kde-mobile-laszlo-papp.pdf


Talking about KDE Mobile

As usual: I am really sorry for the long blog entries. I should blog more frequently with smaller entries. I will shortly come back about the "KDE Mobile on Harmattan sprint" results and feelings. Please do keep tunned! ;)