Fábio Nogueira: FLISOL 2010 – Salvador / BA

Sábado, 24 de Abril de 2010. Tá em Salvador nesse dia e quer conhecer mais sobre o Software Livre? Pronto.. fechou! Basta ir para o FLISOL 2010…

Mas o que é esse tal de FLISOL?

FLISOL é o Festival Latinoamericano de Instalação de Software Livre, ou seja, o maior evento sobre Software Livre da América Latina.

O que rola no evento?

Além do Install Fest (Instalação em massa de distribuições Linux e softwares de código aberto), rolam palestras, oficinas, encontros de usuários e muita troca de informações e conhecimento.

Além de Salvador, quais são as cidades participantes?

Na Bahia, o evento acontecerá também nas cidades de Sobradinho e Vitória da Conquista (ainda não confirmada totalmente!). Para saber se na sua cidade também irá acontecer o FLISOL 2010, basta visitar o site do evento: http://flisol.net/FLISOL2010/Brasil

Onde consigo maiores informações sobre o evento de Salvador?

http://softwarelivre.org/flisol-ssa – Informações sobre o local, programação, etc… Se desejar baixar o nosso material gráfico, basta clicar aqui!

Pronto! Só falta a sua participação… Te vejo lá!

Djavan Fagundes: Voltando a ativa

Olás! Felizmente, tenho me recuperado rápido, já tirei o gesso e agora passo por algumas sessões de fisioterapia, para melhorar os movimentos da minha mão direita. Agradeço todos os desejos de melhoras! Abaixo uma foto da cicatriz da cirurgia.

Vai dois parafusos ai?

Durante o tempo de molho, aproveitei para colocar a leitura dos feeds em dia, ainda não completei a tarefa, mas estou quase. Além dos feeds tenho lido incessantemente o livro “XMPP: The Definitive Guide: Building Real-Time Applications with Jabber Technologies“, muito interessante! Recomendo muito a leitura! Explica mais que detalhadamente os fundamentos do protocolo, além de mostrar exemplos de implementação. Assim que estiver re-estabelecido por completo penso em implementar algo usando XMPP.

Bem, até a próxima!

Gustavo Noronha (kov): WebKit2 and WebKitGTK+

So you’ve seen people talking about WebKit2, perhaps have seen someone claiming it “drops support for Linux“, and you’ve been wondering what the hell that means for WebKitGTK+. Well, welcome to the preemptive Q&A section with WebKitGTK+ maintainers =D. Let’s first explore some history so we can better understand what exactly is going on.

What exactly is WebKit2?

Currently, when we say “WebKit” we really mean one of the ports that are built on top of WebCore using the WebKit layer. WebCore is the part that does all of the hard Web-related work, WebKit an API layer that exposes WebCore functionality in a coherent way, so that the platform-specific ports can expose a public API layer for their applications to use, which is usually also called “WebKit”. This WebKit layer was designed by Apple to build the Mac, and Windows ports it maintains, and was later released as Free Software so that other ports, such as the GTK+, Qt, EFL ports could be built on top of it, instead of having to do all the heavy lifting from WebCore directly.

WebKit2 is nothing more than the second version of that interface, with a whole lot of changes on what you can expect from it, and on how it interacts with WebCore, and the platform-specific API and UI. First of all, the first WebKit was not API stable, and that interface was usually not made public by the various ports - they only exposed their platform-specific APIs. WebKit2 is being designed to provide a stable, cross-platform, C-based, non-blocking public API. This is huge. It will allow cross-platform code to be written without having to consider language, and port differences for basic functionality.

The second big change is the API will be made fully non-blocking. Currently most things you do are asynchronous already, but some of them may be completed in a synchronous ways (like, loading a string into WebKit instead of an URI). This is important for responsiveness, and is also a very important need for what comes next: process splitting.

WebKit2 will bring into WebKit proper the concept of splitting the UI process from the Web process, similar to what Chromium has. It also much more awesome than what Chrome has for a large number of reasons, including, but not limited to:

1. It’s being contributed directly to the WebKit project, in a cross-platform way that lets ports such as WebKitGTK+ take advantage of it, instead of being shipped directly into Safari, like Google does with Chrome;
2. The process separation goes bellow the API layer, meaning that all complexity involved in managing the process separation is handled by the library, and hopefully none of it leaks to the application using it; that means that applications like Devhelp and Yelp will be able to take advantage of this without having to make their lives more complicated;

What WebKit2 is not?

WebKit2 is NOT a rewrite of the whole WebKit stack. Webcore will continue mostly unchanged, and all ports currently building on top of it will keep working. It is also not a fork - the code lives in the same tree as the current version of WebKit, which will allow us to progressively move towards using this new, improved layer. WebKit2 is not Apple-only, and it is not dropping Linux support. Initial builds of the code that is being landed will likely show up building on Linux in the near future (specially because us porters are already eager to play with it).

What happens to WebKitGTK+?

In the near future, nothing special. We will continue working towards making it feature-complete, more stable, faster, and rocking on it as always. We will, though, start working out how we can best take advantage of WebKit2 in order to provide an even more awesome library for the G world. What this means is you can expect us to have a library that will provide a nice GTK+ widget, just like we have today, with a GObject-based API, like we have today, but that is built on top of this new WebKit2 infrastructure, taking advantage of the process-splitting, and the bigger focus on not blocking the UI thread. This should give us a platform that is more stable, and faster and more responsive than what we already have today.

The API is bound to change, of course, but the WebKit2 version of WebKitGTK+ will be a separate, parallel-installable library, and we will keep supporting the WebKit1 version while we work on making the new one at least as good as the current one. This is long term we’re talking here. We’ll likely see WebKitGTK+ 1.4, and 1.6 come to life before we are satisfied enough with WebKitGTK+2.

We hope this clears some of the doubts up, and lightens your hearts!

The WebKitGTK+ maintainers.

Lucas Rocha: My favourite “So What”

Miles Davis: Genius

Even if you’re not into jazz, you’ve probably listened to or heard of this song. So What is a Miles Davis composition that was first recorded as part of his world famous 1959 album Kind of Blue – probably the best-selling jazz record of all time. Miles plays with his famous first great sextet: Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly (piano), Jimmy Cobb (drums), Paul Chambers (bass), and John Coltrane and “Cannonball” Adderley (Sax). With this amazing ensemble, the original So What version is, with no doubt, a masterpiece. Especial mention to the soft and enigmatic piano and bass intro written by Gil Evans. It bothers me a bit that Miles, Coltrane and Cannonball are a bit inconsistent among themselves in this version. Miles sounds much more in the proper mood for the tune: less notes but the right ones. Coltrane, on the other hand, is doing something else. He’s just doing his own thing – which is awesome but not really matching Miles’ purpose for the album. Cannonball is somewhere in the middle. All in all, So What became a standard and has been recorded by several artists and with different arrangements and styles – including different versions by Miles himself.

Among all versions of So What that I had the chance to listen to, my favourite one is the one recorded by Miles with a band very similar to his second great quintet in an album called Live At The 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival. Let me share why.

First of all, the personnel is amazing: Herbie Hancock (Piano), George Coleman (Sax), Tony Williams (Drums), and Ron Carter (Bass). Definitely one of my favourite Miles band. This album was recorded in 1963, a transition period for Miles between the first and second great quintet (the only difference from the second quintet is Coleman in place of Wayne Shorter). The sound of the band is tight and furious. Their connection is amazing, it’s like they can predict what the others are about to play. It’s one of the last Miles acoustic bands. The second Miles quintet – which is well represented here – was focused mostly on standards and bebop tunes. They kept reinventing old tunes. It was a very inventive, creative, and genius group.

Secondly, this So What version uses a really fast tempo. That was another important characteristic of Miles’ bands of that period: they loved to accelerate the tunes. Quoting Miles own words in his autobiography:

What was funny was this: the tunes that we used to record live that we played every night were just getting faster and faster., and after a while the speed really limited what we could do with them because they definitely couldn’t get no faster than what they were.

The third reason I love this version is the performance of the rhythm section (piano, bass, drums). When they start to play, you really wonder if they are going to keep up the pace. Doing that famous bass riff in that speed in an acoustic bass is quite challenging. But Carter does it sharply. The Williams’ drum beat is fucking awesome. The complex bebopian beat and the random snare and bass drums bombing really gets you. Last but not least, Hancock’s use of silence and space combined with unexpected harmony hints glues everything together.

The last aspect is the solos by Miles, Coleman, and Hancock. Miles solo is the first. The use of space is precise (and groovy). His solo if full high pitched arpeggios. He sounds acid, aggressive, hot. It’s the evil face of Miles. When Coleman starts his solo you can hear him coming from the back of the stage getting closer to the mic, bringing an informal atmosphere. His solo follows a smoother approach. He does some really neat riffs, playing same notes with different rhythms and articulations (intuitively followed by the rhythm section). Hancock’s solo is classic Herbie. Extremely melodic. You feel like he’s composing a tune on demand. Everything fits together like it was planned. Nothing feels out of place.

Samuel Chell wrote a review of Live At The 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival for All About Jazz. A good read if you want to know more about the album.