Celebrations with the GPL

This post is to celebrate a few things despite the events that are clouding our feelings. 😠

Another thing to not celebrate is the slaughtering by Sourceforge of my developer web site, which they are calling "sunsetting", by October. I've already migrated it. 

On the other, brighter hand, I'm celebrating this week La Mercè, which is the local festivity of Barcelona.

 Castellers of Barcelona

 
Another event to celebrate is the first 2 million downloads of VMPK for Linux, Windows and Mac. The Sourceforge statistics do not include the installs thru Flatpak, but you may realize that more than 75% of the Sourceforge downloads are the Windows packages. The 2 mil download happened some past day of this year 2025. I've promised a celebration, and now, I have released the Android port of VMPK under the GPLv3 license in GitHub.

You may download it from GitHub (source code and APK), or you may get it from the IzzyOnDroid repository which is available in the F-Droid app, but also on Neo-Store, Droid-ify,  and the unofficial IzzyOnDroid app.

If you already have the F-Droid app, you only need to add the IzzyOnDroid repository in Settings>Repositories and install it today, or you may prefer to use the official F-Droid repo.

I would like to add to the celebration a video live streaming concerto, but I am too lazy and odd playing for that. Better use this wonderful rendering of the Tchaikovsky Violin concerto by TwoSet Violin, with Brett Yang playing the soloist and Eddy Chen the rest of the orchestra. Enjoy!

Summer releases 2023

Barcelona Trees v0.0.5 has been released. This is the third Beta release of this program, that was already mentioned here some time ago. The new features are:

• Database updated using the 2023_2T datasets from Open Data BCN
• Added Dutch translation by @Vistaus: Thanks!
• Window Client Side Decorations on all platforms (except Android)
• Build system migrated to CMake
• Git Submodules for android_openssl and libq7zip
• Migrated to Qt 6.5.2

The last one is interesting, because the Location Maps were removed from Qt 6.0, but they came again in 6.5 so the migration was possible. Another interesting point is the new Dutch translation contributed by Heimen Stoffels. The Window CSD feature is based on the work of Johan Helsing, and it is available for Windows and Linux. It has the advantage of saving some screen space for the application window, providing a similar experience for all operating systems, and also similar to the Android interface…

But of course, the most important feature is the Database update from the Open Data BCN datasets. This time the number of catalogued trees is 232,260 and the number of species is 487. Impressive numbers! but you may think how accurate is this database. Well, I am somewhat disappointed in my personal experience. I’ve been testing the new version for some time, and discovered that a Ginkgo biloba supposedly at Taulat with Selva de Mar doesn’t exist anymore. Not even a stump!

And when checking two Metrosideros excelsa, on the Mar Bella promenade, I’ve found them dry dead. So sad! 😧

There are three more Metrosideros not far away that look healthy. Live long and prosper, dear Pohutukawas!🖖

Spring is coming

I've just released Barcelona Trees, Beta2 v0.0.4, which is just another extremely niche application, totally unrelated to MIDI, but also based on the Qt frameworks like my other free software projects.

The motivation of this program is to help Barcelona visitors or dwellers, answering questions such as:

• What trees are nearby? (from manual or GPS location)
• What trees are on a given street or garden?
• Where can I find specimens of a certain genus/species?
• For each specimen, obtain more information about its species from existing data on Wikipedia and public images.

This may be useful in many ways, from Botany students to simply curious people. Barcelona has plenty of trees: almost 230k at this moment. And the Open Data BCN service periodically publishes several datasets cataloging the Geo-located specimens in public spaces that are used by this application.

As an example, there are more than 3k Bitter Orange trees like the above (the Courtyard of the orange trees is not in a public place, it is inside an official building) used as ornamental. They are not edible in raw, but can be used for cooking. On the other hand, there are a few (dozens) other Citrus gender specimens that are truly edible, and you may find using the program. Enjoy!

Farewell

This release using Qt 5.15 may be the last one for this application. It won't be a Qt6 migration, because the Qt Location Maps have been removed in Qt6, but this may change in the future...

Another functionality lost in Qt6 is the QTextCodec class, removed from QtCore and moved to the Core5Compat module that has been already mentioned here, and provides conversion from many text encodings to Unicode. This issue has impacted applications reading MIDI files, and the Drumstick::File library. Well, I've tested two possible replacements...

• Integrating libICU for Unicode conversion and charset detection with Qt apps (POC)
• Integrating iconv() for Unicode conversion with Qt apps (POC)

iconv() is a POSIX API, and it is included in the C library of many Unix systems, like the GNU libc. This may be detected by cmake, and in this case no additional library needs to be linked to the application program, but the external libiconv is also supported when needed.

Character set detection was never provided by Qt. The iconv() POC uses the latest uchardet library (0.0.7 at the time of writing this), which only supports pkg-config. A newer version will include also support for find_package() and imported targets. On the other hand, libICU provides charset detection in addition to Unicode conversion.

Akademy-es 2011

I've been attending the Akademy-es 2011 at Barcelona last week-end, instead of protesting and making the Spanish Revolution 2.0. It was a pleasure to meet Antonio Larrosa face to face again, after 5 years. We met the first time at Akademy-es 2006, also in Barcelona, where the idea for KMid2 was born. Hugs, Antonio!

My presentation was rejected. I've offered the same paper ("MIDI en Linux") used at the IX Jornadas de Software Libre. As an alternative, they proposed a lightning talk about KMid, but I wasn't interested in this format. My project is not KMid, but KMid is a piece of my project: providing Linux and KDE the MIDI tools that are needed, and this includes KMid, KMetronome, KMidimon, Drumstick, and some more programs.

About the conferences. Some talks were recycled, year after year, like the Valgrind talk by Albert that anyway deserves to be repeated even more times because it is a key tool to enhance the code quality of our projects. Other topics were brand new and interesting, for instance the half-rolling release and bundle system of the Chakra distribution, presented by Manuel Tortosa.

After the meetings, supper and drinks. This is the so called "social program". Everything is social, of course, when a couple of geeks meets to do things together. Saturday supper, I was shocked by a question of one of the attendees. He said to me something like this: Who wants MIDI at 2011, anyway? The answer for this question was in my paper, but he didn't bothered to read it. To summarize: MIDI is not an alternative to MP3, like drawing is not an alternative to photography. Who thinks that every program related to drawing should be banned from KDE? After all, it is a technology invented in the paleolithic era.

Mordor attacks

How to explain yesterday's events to all the inhabitants of Middle-earth?

The Squad of Orcs, here called "Orcos de Esquadra", attacked a large meeting of Hobbits at Shire's Square, when they were pacifically claiming real Democracy.

There have been 121 injured, including 37 orcs.

There was a repulsive Nazgul commanding the Orcs, Felip Puig.

Orcs and his commander defend the interests of the Black Tower, where evil dwells.