Joining Canonical

I'm happy and proud to announce that March 1st marks an important day in my life & career as I've joined  Canonical team to work on Unity project and surrounding applications. My main focus will be on Qt-based Unity 2D, meaning C++, Qt & QML as the primary technologies. Cool stuff. With recent announcements of Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu on Android, and upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 (LTS) it's really great time to join and it all looks very exciting! I'm very happy to work on opensource technologies and in fast-moving and growing project - something I've always dreamed about. It's almost too good to be true!

Goodbye Ireland!

Early in the January 2011 me and my family moved to Dublin and I took position as a Senior Software Engineer with AOL. This was a big decision for my family for lots of reasons, and not an easy one to undertake as you can imagine. Anyway, everything that has a beginning, has an end, and this time the end was not so distant... In late 2011 we decided to return to Poland for personal and family reasons. So, after 13 months I'm back at home in Poland.

The decision of returning was almost equally difficult to that of leaving one year ago, and my last days in Ireland will be the most memorable ones - last night & last few pints with friends from AOL, lots of good words I heard from co-workers, last walk in the city centre etc. It's these moments you actually realise you're loosing something and leaving it behind...
Anyway, it's time to move on. Let me try to summarize the last 13 months:


Good things:

• working for AOL was good.
• made a lot of friends at AOL - brilliant people and smart engineers. I'm going to miss you guys!
• learned a lot of new technologies such as Erlang and got familiar with cool stuff such as ZeroMq, Thrift, Goole Protocol Buffers (protobuf), NodeJs and others.
• worked on the backend of one of the biggest Ad-solutions (ADTECH) & learned how advertisement business on the internet works. This was completly new stuff for me.
• Been to PyCon 2011 and listened some amazing talks and lectures from bright people such as Raymond Hettinger or Paul Barry.
• Been to one of Google Techology Group monthly talks at Google HQ in Dublin.
• Had two wonderful weeks of sunny holidays on Tenerfie / Canary Islands (you wouldn't think I was going to say 'in Ireland', would you? ;)) in the summer.
• lived in a quiet and green area of Dublin, in Ashtown (north city), close to Phoenix Park, around 6 kms from cirty centre. Nice area.
• Been to a few cost towns - Malahide, Howth, Dalkey to name a few. Very nice places with beautiful views.
• improved my English - I think my understanding of English has improved, although some Irish people still give me trouble if they're mumbling ;).

Bad things:

• I'm on the lookout for new job again.
• Feeling a bit lost and confused. May take a few weeks to adjust to new (old) reality again ;)

That's it, not so many bad things to talk about. Attached are a few photos taken during my last walk in the city centre. Cheers!

QComicBook - new web hosting, new domain

After two years with rootnode.net and numerous issues with their hosting I finally made the effort of switching web hosting of QComicBook and my home site. QComicbook web site is now hosted on www.a2hosting.com - by the way if you decide to buy hosting there, please consider using this referrer link which will give me a credit for a2hosting services & renewal of QComicBook hosting.
Other then that, QComicBook web site is now available at much more friendly URL: www.qcomicbook.org. The old URL (qcomicbook.linux-projects.net) is still valid, but I may remove it by the end of 2012, so if you maintain QComicBook packages or link to source tarballs for any other reason, I suggest you update your links with next QComicBook release.
Finally, please be warned that there may be some disruptions to the qcomicbook.linux-projects.net website (and possibly qcomicbook.org) in the next few days due to DNS and configuration changes.

Erlang quick reference card

For the last couple of months I've been learning Erlang and doing some Erlang programming for a new project at work. I couldn't find any good quick reference card for Erlang (aka cheatsheet), so decided to create something on my own. You can download it from my github repository.

As I'm a newbie to Erlang and still learning, I'm sure it has some gaps and possibly errors, so any suggestions and corrections are welcome. Also, the document was created with OpenOffice Writer (plus it's available in PDF format for your convienience), which results in not-so-good look & formatting -  my goal was to have something quickly, rather than spending weeks on creating formatting rules in a more suitable tool. My ultimate goal however is to migrate this cheatsheet to TeX (LaTeX) format or similar and find existing macros/rules suitable for quick reference card formating to give it more polished and professional look.  If you know any such solutions, please comment.

I'm going to PyCon Ireland 2011!

I seldomly do Python programming, but when I do, I absolutely enjoy and love it. So I couldn't miss the opportunity to attend Python Conference in Dublin. PyCon Ireland is organised by Python enthusiasts from Ireland, and will be held here for the 2nd time. The schedule looks pretty interesting, it looks like Oct 8-9 will be very fruitful 2 days!

Installing latest Flash Player 11rc on Debian Squeeze

Here is a little HOWTO about clean installation of  the latest release candidate of Adobe Flash Player 11 on Debian Squeeze. It should also work on Ubuntu and other derivatives of Debian.

The method proposed here uses Debian's Alternatives System which makes it possible to install latest Flash Player in a dedicated directory and  switch between it or the default version installed from Debian repository (v10) if needed.

1. Install flashplugin-nonfree (standard Debian repository) or flashplayer-mozilla (debian-miultimedia repository). This will install Flash Player 10.
2. Download latest Flash Player for Linux from Adobe.
3. Unpack it to /opt/flashplayer-11rc1 (or any other directory of your choice).
4. Add entry for Flash Player 11 in the Alternatives System:
   sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so flash-mozilla.so /opt/flashplayer-11rc1/libflashplayer.so 0
5. Switch between installed Flash Player versions (will launch interactive menu):
   sudo update-alternatives --config flash-mozilla.so

Please note that  Flash Player tarball contains a few other files that you may find interesting - such as flash-player-properties configuration tool. They won't be automatically picked by the above procedure, as update-alternatives for flash-mozilla.so maintains plugin symlink only. See man page for update-alternatives for more information.

Stack smashing protector accepted in Arch Linux!

If you visit my blog you may recall I blogged about feature request for enabling stack-smashing protection in Arch Linux. I had created feature request in Arch Linux bug tracker in March 2010. As you can see this initiated some discussions and finally, after almost 1,5 year they decided to go for it! The default compilation flags have been changed to use stack protector and main toolchain packages were recompiled; other packages will follow with new releases. For now the change is in [testing] repo and should become available in [core] in a few weeks.

So, rejoice Arch users! Unfortunately me personally will not benefit from it since I stopped using Arch some time ago - GNOME 3.0 release (which ruined my desktop experience) and power-off issues caused by updates made me look for a more reliable system (which is Debian Squeeze at the moment). I must admit however that I miss Arch a lot, and the acceptance of stack protector reminds me of it...

BTW, Debian still doesn't take advantage of GCC's stack protector, which is a pitty. Fortunately, Debian security team is aware of this and they plan to enable hardening features in Debian Wheezy.