Farewell, Spain. Hello, São Paulo.

Sad, sad. My passport won't be ready until the Solid Sprint date, so I'm not coming anymore :-(. Now my plan is to participate remotely somehow (afiestas said they will try to stream the sprint, let's hope so). I know it's not the same, but I can buy some beer and do some hacking from here, I guess ;-).

Anyway, you can bet I'll have this god damned document soon, so Desktop Summit, here I go (first I need a job or something, but there is time until August :-)!

BUT, everything isn't lost yet. Last week I got an invitation to the Google Developer Day, at São Paulo. I got some help to the flight tickets, too (sometimes I wish Brazil couldn't be such a big country!). Quite good for a consolation prize, right?

So, this week we'll have the the workshop of masters and PHDs thesis at my university. I believe next weekend I get back to the work on the UPnP backend, finally.

Oh, and the Software Freedom Day here yesterday was really awesome! Congratulations to all involved!

Well, that's all for now.

Hail.

Solid Sprint at Madrid

Hey,

Seems like all the budget submitted to KDE e.V. for the Solid Sprint was approved (yay!). Looking forward to meet some of the metalworkers in person, but there is the possibility of I'm not attend because I've never traveled outside Brazil and guess what? I don't have passport (damn it!). I've asked at the local federal police office to emit it, but these things often take a while here, and I'm afraid that it will not be ready until the likely day for me to travel, September 29th. Let's pray. I'll try to push the guys to hurry up.

See ya.

Pong

Hey, all.

If you're wondering about the Solid UPnP backend state after the end of GSoC, here I am to satisfy your anxiety. :-p

Well, there is not so much to update, sadly. I've fixed some bugs on IGD and updated the code to be compliant with the most recent version of HUPnP (thanks, Nikhil).

The reason for the little flow of work has name, but no title: masters thesis. I have a workshop coming and really have to rush with this stuff. But I'll do my best to keep all the things running fine in parallel. :-)

That's it for now.

Cheers.

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.

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.

(GSoC) And god said: "Let there be an Internet Gateway"

Hi, all.

Last week I said to you that HUPnP did not recognize UPnP internet gateway devices in the network. Now I think I can say it used to not recognize. :-)

Seems like Tuomo's patch fixed the problem and now the Solid UPnP backend is able to "see" my wireless router and finally invoke the UPnP actions available on it (like to do some port redirect and toggle the internet access, for instance). I have made some tests and seems like the action invocations are working well from the HControlPoint instance in the UPnPDeviceManager. Now it's time to refine the API and add more operations, probably.

However, "the world is cruel". This week Nikhil and Bart pointed to me and Kevin some problems with the media server stuff. Besides some mistakes on the HUPnP use from my part, seems like there is something wrong with the creation of the UPnPDeviceManager. According to him, due to the use of a QThreadStorage on the backends manager, a new HControlPoint is created for every thread using Solid, causing some inconsistent results. The expected behavior is only one control point across Solid stack (frontend -> iface -> backend). I'm working on the backend part, but the Solid thread-affinity stuff I prefer to let the more experts metalworkers to decide what's better.

Another thing Nikhil opened my eyes is about that I'm not running KDE trunk (I'm using that script development strategy from Techbase). I know, it's a blasphemy and I will build and use the SVN trunk ASAP. My unit tests are not enough and I need to do real system tests.

Well, I really hope this week to get the backend working fine to go into the little desktop integrations and the debugging app using an UPnP framework developed by some fellows here in the lab, called BRisa. I have to run a little bit with the schedule.

See ya.

No, I'm not dead ;-)

It's been a while, right? Sorry for that. I'll try to post here once per week from now on, I swear.

Well, since my last post some things happened. Let's see... I've got a motorcycle. And I've got a motorcycle accident. My left arm is not so good but I will survive :-). I've began to write my master thesis, too. But I'm not here to talk about me, but about my GSoC project.

The midterm is gone now and Kevin granted me a "passed" status :-D. This is a motivation, indeed. About the work: I've implemented the media server (Solid::Backends::UPnP::UPnPMediaServer) and internet gateway (Solid::Backends::UPnP::InternetGateway) classes. The media server implements the Solid::DeviceInterface::StorageAccess interface, with the idea of treat UPnP media servers as remote folders or something like that. Actually, you can think in a media server as a remote pendrive, with some media there. The internet gateway (could be a router, an ADSL modem, etc.) implements an interface made by me to these kind of devices, so it can and will be improved with the time, since the actual API is pretty bounded with the UPnP forum specifications, and it is exactly what we can avoid in Solid (flexibility is the law).

I've made some unit tests with the media server and seems like the things are fine. Actually, Nikhil's work in Amarok will tell what we could improve on that part. Using the HUPnP library, the backend is able to detect UPnP devices available on the network, as you can see here.

The IGD tests are kind of stuck, because HUPnP has some problems in detecting UPnP internet gateway devices. I've been trying to test with two wireless routers, but without success so far. I'm in touch with Tuomo (library's author and maintainer) and in this afternoon we spent a good time debugging HUPnP and talking about heavy metal :-p. Looks like he figured out what is going on and will patch the library ASAP.

The next steps now is keep working in the IGD issue and in parallel work at the device notifier integration (at least with media servers). I'm having some difficulties in understanding the device notifier code, but nothing that we can't ask, right? :-)

Well, that's it for now. Next Sunday I'm back here. With a good arm. I guess...

Cheers.