Sunday, August 22, 2010

emit remmus

This was a really cool summer. Actually, a really cool winter, since I live in the southern hemisphere (Brazil, for those whom don't know already). I believe that the most cool thing on this GSoC for me was finally get involved in the community, know the people behind and contribute with the KDE project after about 5 years using it. I'm really glad to see lines of code written by me in the tree and looking forward to do more cool stuff from now on.

As a not so much experienced Qt/KDE developer, I had some problems on the way. However, I think I can say that the basis for a consistent UPnP support on KDE is ready. Obviously, there is more things to do and refine, and I'm happy with that, because it means that I'll keep working with Kevin and the others 'metalworkers' :-D.

Today we have a nearly full media server support on Solid and the KIO slave developed by Nikhil with the Amarok people will help to get UPnP media servers available for browsing on Dolphin, for instance. As you can see, they are already appearing in the kfileplaces KPart (and in the device notifier as well). This is the actual user-visible part:

We have some IGD support, too. Given an UPnP router available, it's possible to add/remove port redirects (and other vendor-optional operations, like toggle the internet access in the router):

Solid::Device dev(deviceUdi);
Solid::InternetGateway *igd = dev.as();
igd->addPortMapping("192.168.0.1", 80, "TCP", 80, "192.168.0.136");

The API needs a little bit of refinements, but I think we are on the right way. My plan is to add more operations in the API soon and integrate the IGDs within the network manager.

So, what about the plans for the future? Well, along with the IGD integration, a debug app using BRisa framework and a plasmoid showing the UPnP neighborhood are intended, too. In the future, my desire is to implement other UPnP devices, like printers and media renderers. The HUPnP library (used in the project) need some adjustments, too. So, work is not lacking here :-). I'll keep you posted about how things are going here in the blog.

Finally, I want to thank Kevin Ottens, my mentor, for the support and patience in the past 3 months. I'd like to thank Bart Cerneels, Nikhil Marathe and Tuomo Penttinen, too, for the help, feedback, and hints. Honorable mention to Lydia Pintscher and Leo Franchi, the SoC managers. Thank you all, guys, you rock!

Oh, almost forgot. There will be the Solid sprint soon, in Madrid. Don't know if I will can attend in person, but I'll participate somehow. Looking forward to meet the Solid people personally and put some faces in the (nick)names. :-)

Cheers.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Moving out

Hello, all. This will be a quick (and late) post.

Oh, hell, I'm moving out the apartment. And it sucks. Really sucks. This week I've been pretty busy taking care of the process and stuff. My masters advisor also had an epiphany and asked me the first two chapters of the thesis. The work didn't flow much well this week. :-(

On Sunday I intend to keep you up about the integration of the Solid UPnP backend with Dolphin and Plasma Device Notifier. The pencils down date is approaching... May god (or anything similar) have mercy on my soul. :-p

See ya.