Category: tech

In less than one hour, on 10:00 am CEST, Aviary.pl will ignite the very first MDC sprint.

We hope it’ll be a great experience for us all! 🙂

7 years ago Janusz Vax Radkiewicz, Bartek Terk Raciborski and Michał Mis/io Zajączkowski have created a project named Alladyn. Alladyn was at the time most sophisticated and powerful JavaScript library ever. The name came from DynDuo, very popular library, and the chain was DynDuo->DynTrio->DynAll->Alladyn.

In 2 kb of source code, Alladyn offered more than any other library, cross-browsing, key-frame based animations, public API, and others.

We’ve released 7 official versions and one special, with more open license (Alladyn 1.7lite) that was bundled into Pajączek NxG Pro.

In 2002 the work has begun on Alladyn 2 codename Dynamite. We spent many night sessions at Vax’s flat, mine flat and several Wroclaw’s pubs on this, but around 2003 the idea faded out because of lack of time.

So using the recent buzz around Alladyn licensing, to clear the story we’ve gathered again, discussed the goals and issues and following our believe in openness and freedom we’ve opened Alladyn.

Ladies and gentleman. May I present you Alladyn project on Google Code on tri-license MPL/GPL/LGPL. Feel free to scan the sources, there are several interesting things like Alladyn 0.5, 0.91, and various planned builds of Alladyn 2.0. The most stable of them is currently in trunk/lib/Alladyn.js.

It supports real time animation, multiple animator objects that can have different animation paths which can run with different speeds etc. and support for vGIN’s – Alladyn plugin system.

Alladyn keeps the model of animation based on keyframes, but with several animators you can do real magic, like setting one animator to move layer1 100px left in 10 seconds while another animator runs at the same time and moves the same layer 200px down. With real time synchronization (that is able to count and skip frames), it’s really powerful.

What next? We have to update Alladyn to support XHTML, test if it can work well with SVG. Remove the obsolate NS4,IE5 compatibility code, and play with CSS3 to get as much as possible.

I’m extremely happy about it, also because my plan to include Alladyn into Daniel Glazman‘s Composer++ to do some pretty nice animations 🙂 If you want to help, step in, email us or what, and we’ll get Alladyn 2 into shape.

Alladyn was always driven by the idea of perfect, clean code that is smaller than its documentation. Do you know any other examples of this approach? 🙂

P.S. Terk’s blog post

Hi folks!

I’m in Cracow for a few hours, sitting in Novotel conference room with people from Novell, Novell Poland, KDE Pl and Aviary.pl of course 🙂

We’re discussing various topics related to OpenSUSE and SLED/SLES localization and community coverage. We’re also shaping up our plans for something big… really big for the whole polish localization community… We hope you’ll like it (tips at wiki.aviary.pl).

Later this afternoon, we’re going to work for a few hours on the World Domination Plan. (After borking Mozilla, we’re going to aquire Novell).

We hope to streamline our work and make it easier for volunteers to step in and help us with the minimum possible learning curve. Staszek (after very shameful episode in France) is back in town, and we’re speeding up. :>

Welcome to the new diary of mine!

After 1,5 year from a first post about the idea of splitting my diary into halfs, it finally happens.

From today, I’ll have two separate blogs, one for private, one for professional. You’re just viewing the latter one. I hope you find it stylish.

why:

• People tend to confuse my personal blog posts with my professional posts. I don’t want anyone reading my position on politic issues connect it with Flock, Mozilla or any other technology I’m related to.
• It’s easier to split it into two separated blogs than to maintain categories. See, those are two really very different worlds. The reader’s profile of both is very different.
• I like the idea of keeping my techie issues in one place, not separated by pictures from my holidays.
• As long as I was a volunteer or a dev, there was no risk for the brand’s perception. Now, the situation changes (more hints soon), and I don’t want to get more frustrated every time a journalist misuses my words.

I’ve just finished installing ies4linux 2.5.beta6 package. Love it!

Just take a look at those masterpieces: first, second, third.

Totally inspired by Apple’s Think Different, inspiring, smart and powerful. Hey, world! Linux is can be professionally advertised, beat this 🙂

p.s. If you missed Novell’s covers of Apple’s adds – first, second.

As some of you know, I’m playing a guitar, and recently a feadog. This of course means that one of the things I’m gathering are chords, tabulatures and tunes.

For last few years I missed a songbook of my own that would cover everything I like to play, something that I could just take with me on a tent camp. Of course I have many songbooks but none of them is enough so I usually have to take all of them while I use only four or five chords from the whole book :/ Another problem is with my own chords.

I started trying to create my own songbook while ago, using either Koffice or OpenOffice. The issue is – I’m a nerd. I don’t want to simply write a text and put capital letter D, A and G somewhere around. I want a markup. I want symantic. I want to be able to extract any piece of data later. I want to be able to change the translation of the song while keeping chords in place. I want to be able to put tunes or tabulatures anywhere around without a problem and connect them with words of the song.

There is ChordML,  MusicXML, MML, but none of them serves what I need. (with ChordML being pretty near I think).

So, I’m going to try to figure out if ChordML could be modified to suite my needs or not. In either case I’d like to spend some time on this project and have some nice XML files with my songs soon, with XSL sheets to export it to ODF or XHTML.

How nerdy it is? 🙂

By the way, I almost forgot to blog about KDE4 progress!

So, according to the new roadmap, KDE4.0 Subsystem Freeze already happened and it means, that from now on, the major focus of kde community should start shifting from kdelibs to kdebase/kdenetwork/kdemultimedia etc.

In the last months, there was an enormous amount of changes in kdelibs. Every single day, when I did svn up on kdelibs, it exceeded my terminal backlog!!! But the results on the front-end were minimal. If anyone tested kde trunk, you could see a few changes here and there, minor updates to a few UI’s and a few major things like dolphin, oxygen icons, okular or amarok 2. But you couldn’t see the result of plasma, phonon, decibel, solid, strigi, nepomuk or sonnet because it happened on the kdelibs level.

People expect changes to happen vertically – when the project changes sound lib, we should see fancy new sound utils at the very same time. But such approach would be very bad for devs. It would require them to split their work focus and it would mean that they’d have to rework the front-end after each major change in kdelibs. It’s much more efficient to rework low-level libs and then rework front-end basing on the new libs. Easy?

So please, do not yell on KDE4 if you’re not into kdelibs, front-end work will start very soon 🙂

btw. same happens in Mozilla world. Launch Firefox trunk – it looks exactly like Fx 2. Front-end changes will start appearing once back-end will cool down/freeze.