In which I meet QA testers, bang my head against the GNOME OS initial setup process, and travel overland from Scotland to Spain in 48 hours. Linux QA meetup Several companies and communities work on QA testing for Linux distros, and we mostly don’t talk to each other. GUADEC 2023 … | Continue reading
GNOME 46 just released, and with it comes TinySPARQL 3.7 (aka Tracker SPARQL) and Tracker Miners 3.7. Here’s what I’ve been involved with this month in those projects. Google Summer of Code It wasn’t my intention to prepare another internship before the last one was even finished … | Continue reading
Looking back at this month its been very busy indeed. In fact, so busy that I’m going to split this status update into two parts. Possibly this is the month where I worked the whole time yet did almost no actual software development. I guess it’s part of getting old that you spen … | Continue reading
Some months you work very hard and there is little to show for any of it… so far this is one of those very draining months. I’m looking forward to spring, and spending less time online and at work. Rather than ranting I want to share a couple of things from elsewhere in the soft … | Continue reading
Happy new year everyone! For better or worse we’re now well into the 2020s. Here are some things I’ve been doing recently. A post on the GNOME openQA tests: Looking back to 2023 and forwards to 2024. I won’t repeat the post here, go read it and see what I hope to see in 2024 w … | Continue reading
A new discovery of mine for 2023 was the #CrossBorderRail movement. It’s mainly a project of Jon Worth who is investigating all current and former border crossings in the EU by train and bike. His motivation, aside from the fact that I guess he likes to explore, is to highlight o … | Continue reading
The Outreachy intership for end-to-end testing of GNOME OS started this month, and we are already in week 3 of the internship. Our two interns Dorothy and Tanjuate are working hard on the first phase which is testing accessibility-related features. Here’s what we’ve achieved so f … | Continue reading
I just published version 10.0 of the open source playlist generation toolkit, Calliope. This fixes a couple of long standing issues I wanted to tackle. SQLite Concurrency The first of these only manifest itself as intermittent Gitlab CI failures when you submitted pull requests … | Continue reading
In Santiago we are just coming out of 33 consecutive days of rain. The all-time record here is 41 consecutive days, but in some less rainy parts of Galicia there have been actual records broken this autumn. It feels like I have been unnaturally busy but at least with some interes … | Continue reading
This month I had the pleasure to visit Manchester and Wales for a couple of weeks. I caught the last of the summer before the crazy climate-crisis storms of October began and everywhere started flooding. I also just came back from A Coruña where I attended the excellently organi … | Continue reading
Musically this has been a fun month. One of my favourite things about living in Galicia is that ska-punk never went out of fashion here and you can legitimately go to a festival by the sea and watch Ska-P. Unexpectedly brilliant and chaotic live show. I saw an interview recently … | Continue reading
It’s two years since I started looking into end-to-end testing of GNOME using openQA. While developing the end-to-end tests I find myself running tests locally on my machine a lot, and the experience was fiddly, so I wrote a simple helper tool named ssam_openqa to automate my wor … | Continue reading
Hello!As often, these are some thoughts without any grand announcements to accompany them. It’s just passed 5 years since I arrived in Santiago de Compostela, without much of a plan, and here I am. Summer a bit milder than last year which is great as I have got really back into … | Continue reading
I was lucky enough to attend the 2023 edition of GUADEC in Riga, Latvia. In a way GUADEC is more fun each year because each time I know more people, have more things to talk about, and also it’s 4 years since my last in-person GNOME event so this one was particularly special. … | Continue reading
You know the feeling of actually coding something, a new library which doesn’t exist yet but you know exactly how it should look and you just need to chip away at the problem space until its final form appears ?I was really lacking any creative flow recently and decided to flesh … | Continue reading
This blog is about what’s on my mind, and recently I’ve been thinking about aeroplane flights, and limiting how many I take every year. I’m not trying to make anyone feel impressed or ashamed here, or create rules that I insist everyone needs to live by. And I am no expert in cl … | Continue reading
I did some research into open source text to speech solutions recently. As part of that I spent a while trying out Coqui TTS and, while I was trying to get it to sound nice, I learned a few things about voice synthesis. Coqui TTS provides some speech models which are pre-trained … | Continue reading
Reading a computer screen wears out your delicate eye-balls. I would like the computer to read some web-pages aloud for me so I can use my ears instead.Here’s what I found out recently about the available text-to-speech technology we have on desktop Linux today. (This is not a co … | Continue reading
I am volunteering a lot of time to work on testing at the moment. When you start out as a developer this seems like the most boring kind of open source contribution that you can do. Once you become responsible for maintaining existing codebases though it becomes very interesting … | Continue reading
It’s been a long month, thankfully with a nice holiday in the middle. I am divided between lots of things at work which is not helpful for being able to focus on any interesting thing. The development of large language models is everywhere at the moment, I shared some thoughts o … | Continue reading
Hello from my parents place, sitting on the border of Wales & England, listening to this excellent Victor Rice album, thinking of this time last year when I actually got to watch him play at Freedom Sounds Festival, which was one of my first adventures of the post-lockdown 2020s. … | Continue reading
This month I attended FOSDEM for the first time since 2017. In addition to eating 4 delicious waffles, I had the honour of presenting two talks, the first in the Testing & Automation devroom on Setting up OpenQA testing for GNOME. GNOME’s initial OpenQA testing is mostly impleme … | Continue reading
I wrote a small program in Rust called cba_blooper. Its purpose is to download files from this funky looper pedal called the Blooper. It’s the first time I finished a program in Rust. I find Rust programming a nice experience, after a couple of years of intermittent struggle to … | Continue reading
The tech world is busy building “AI apps” with wild claims of solving all problems. Meanwhile it’s still basically an unsolved problem to get images and text to line up nicely when making presentation slides. I’m giving a couple of talks at FOSDEM in February so i’ve been prepar … | Continue reading
The last update of 2022, and the 14th since I started writing these. Before we begin it’s vital to check my list of top albums from 2022, which I’m sharing to Mastodon: #5 – Fred Thomas – Another Song About Riding The Bus #4 – Klawo – Klawo #3 – The Slackers – Don’t Let The … | Continue reading
Audio Developer Conference I was at ADC 2022 last week – thanks to Codethink as always for covering the cost and allowing me 2 days time off to attend. It was my first time attending in person, and besides the amazing talks (which will appear online here around the end of this m … | Continue reading
The most important news this week is that my musical collaborator Vladimir Chicken just released a new song about Manchester’s most famous elephant. Released with a weird B-side about a “Baboon on the Moon”, I am not sure what he was thinking with that one. I posted on discou … | Continue reading
Last week I attended OSSEU 2022 in Dublin, gave a talk about BuildStream 2.0 and the REAPI, and saw some new and old faces. Good times apart from the common cold I picked up on the way — I was glad that the event mandated face-masks for everyone so I could cover my own face witho … | Continue reading
Building Wheels For the first time this year I got to spend a little paid time on open source work, in this case putting some icing on the delicious and nourishing cake that we call BuildStream 2. If you’ve tried the 1.9x pre-releases you’ll have seen it depends on a set of C+ … | Continue reading
Summer is here! All my creative energy has gone into wrapping up a difficult project at Codethink, and the rest of the time I’ve been enjoying sunshine and festivals. I was able to dedicate some time to learning the basics of async Rust but I don’t have much to share from the la … | Continue reading
I am currently in the UK – visiting folk, working, and enjoying the nice weather. So my successful travel plans continue for the moment… (corporate mismanagement has led to various transport crises in the UK so we’ll see if I can leave as successfully as I arrived). I started th … | Continue reading
I had some ambitious travel plans last month – ambitious by 2020’s standards, anyway – and somehow they came off without any major issues or contagions. In Cologne I was amazed to go to Freedom Sounds festival and witness the return of the Singers ATX alongside host of other ska … | Continue reading
I recently acquired a monome grid, a set of futuristic flashing buttons which can be used for controlling software, making music, and/or playing the popular 90’s game Lights Out. There’s no sound from the device itself, all it outputs is a USB serial connection. Software instr … | Continue reading
Engineers at Codethink get some time and money each year to attend conferences, and part of the deal is we have to write a report afterwards. Having written the report I thought… this could be a bit more widely shared! So, excuse the slightly formal tone of this report, but here … | Continue reading
As i mentioned last month, I bought one of these Norns audio-computers and a grey grid device to go with it. So now I have this lap-size electronic music apparatus. Its very fun to develop for – the truth is I’ve never got on well with the “standard” tools of Max/MSP and Pure Da … | Continue reading
This month has had a big focus on music! I just released a 4 track EP called Rust In Peace, which you can listen to on various popular music platforms and (better still) download it from Bandcamp. The COVID19 pandemic is not over (I can name 5 folk who have been COVID+ just this … | Continue reading
January 2022 was the sunniest January i’ve ever experienced. So I spent its precious weekends mostly climbing around in the outside world, and the weekdays preparing for the enourmous Python … | Continue reading
Happy 2022 everyone! Hope it was a safe one. I managed to travel a bit and visit my family while somehow dodging Omicron each step of the way. I guess you cant ask for much more than that. I am kee… | Continue reading
Its a time to be thankful for what you can do, rather than be pissed off about things that you can’t do because we’re in the 3rd year of a global pandemic. I made it home to Shropshire,… | Continue reading
This is part 5 of a series. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here and part 4 is here. The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines … | Continue reading
This is part 3 of a series. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here. Come back next week for my thoughts on the next 10 years of Tracker. This post took a lot of research. I wanted to properly answer the qu… | Continue reading