Aitor Rodríguez Alsina

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Google have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 4,500 students and more than more than 4,000 mentors & co-mentors from over 85 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Here you have the current timeline for this year:
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In the Workshop on the New Challenges for 2011 organized by CEPHIS (09/12/2010) I had the oportunity to talk about our work on web-based user interfaces for Ambient Intelligence. Here are the notes:

The SVG Open Conference is a great opportunity to learn the latest developments with the Scalable Vector Graphics format, including the W3C’s ones. In 2010 the event was held in Paris, France, and we saw interesting works on accessibility, interactivity on digital TV and mobile, business cases and authoring tools among others. The conference will be of interest to developers, designers, artists and content creators. These were my favorite papers last year:

• SVG for IPTV
• Accelerating SVG Tiny with multimedia processors
• From SVG to Canvas and back

The Call for Papers for this year has not been published yet but recently it was announced that the conference will be held at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT campus, from 17 to 20 October 2011.

This announcement (and the website when ready) can be found here.

Taking the example ‘Multimedia and object graphic synchronization using SMIL features’ of the paper ‘Lights, Camera, Action’ (svgopen 2009) as start point, I’ve implemented the subtitle reading and synchronization with a defined HTML5 video. The URL of the SRT subtitle file for each language is defined independently from the video source, so new languages can be added in a easy way. In fact, with a database linking and a few server programming, the available languages could be set dynamically (depending on the user’s uploaded subtitle files, for instance).

Moreover, in order to demonstrate the flexibility and dynamism that this subtitle solution offers, I’ve implemented a Subtitle Playground Bar using SVG+SMIL+HTML5+JavaScript+CSS:

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These are some of the examples of the usage of SVG on the Web. As I’m working on Interactive TV, I’ve focused my search on video issues and content synchronization:

Image and video managing

This example from Vladimir Vukicevic shows how to move, resize and rotate different pictures on the screen using SVG and mouse events. It demonstrates that SVG can be used for the types of things that Silverlight is being used. The example can be seen here:

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Take the case that we have hired one hosting service and we want to use more than one domain for whatever reason. Many of these hostings provide only a single domain assignment, pointing to the website space that we’ve hired. Other hostings, however, offer the possibility to assign more than one domain, but sometimes they don’t provide the capability of hide the destination address in the URL redirection, which can be useful to keep the original domain name in the address bar of the browser.

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We have created a blog with WordPress and we also have several static pages that we want to be available in several languages, such as this humble homepage. We may even want to control the translation of our posts and facilitate multilingual discussions.

qTranlate is a WordPress complement to have a multilingual site. With this plugin we can manage the translation of all our content, the language change and update of .mo files for the static text in different languages. In this comparison we can see facing the main plugins that allow us to do this.

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The SVG format (Scalable Vector Graphics) is emerging as a technology to take into account in future developments and even more after Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 will support SVG natively. This means that the vast majority of browsers will allow the presentation of vector graphics without additional plugins and with a non-proprietary technology. It can be embedded on HTML5 and cit an be animated with SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) within the same page.

Last October, I took the W3C’s course “Introduction to SVG“, about SVG and SMIL. It is a 4-week course where you can learn basic principles of these languages in a guided way and with weekly exercises. There aren’t exams, but the deliveries must be submitted in order to get the certificate. The first couple of weeks can be really easy for a web programmer while others are more interesting. In the end, it is more profitable the course participation in forums and the support of the teachers, the generation of ideas and the amount of examples that you can see.

On January 10 a new edition of this course and registration is open, if anyone is interested. Further information on Training Direct from W3C.

With the change of year many of us have in mind a list of goals or wishes for 2011 and even further we would like to meet somehow (remembering to watch what you wish). The issue is whether this “somehow” we expect to occur by chance, divine imposition, destination, or have a plan to achieve it. In any case it’s okay to think to begin to increase the chances of fulfilling that wish.

A freelance, for example, depends largely on his planification, what wishes can be for this year 2011? We may call them “goals”? This post suggest 4 simple steps that should help a freelance to achieve their objectives, as summarized in planning, planning, planning and implementation. These steps can easily be applied to achieve any other goal or desire you have in your life and especially in the professional field (even the not freelances).