Launching Kdenlive Tutorials

Many years ago I started writing a number of tutorials about Kdenlive, describing how to achieve visual effects similar to what you can get from commercial software (like the Adobe suite). But I didn't have time to translate my writings in English and format them with HTML. That was, until the last couple of weeks.
Now, I'm ready to release the website kdenlivetutorials.com.

Women in the IT industry (interview from Akademy)

There's a clear gender gap in computer science, beginning with education: women in schools and colleges tend to approach computer studies less frequently than men. And we should also consider the usual obstacles for occupation every woman encounters in her work life in every field. So, it's not surprising that the majority of computer science workers are men.
And, at the same time, the Free Open Source Software world is made of many kinds of communities. Some are quite closed and unfriendly for new developers, expecially if they are women. Others, instead, commit to welcome everyone, without discrimination based on gender, nationality, or any other parameter.
At Akademy 2019 in Milan, as editor for GNU/Linux Magazine Italy, I've had the opportunity to discuss this issue with Lydia Pintscher, president of KDE e.V., and Lays Rodrigues, developer for KDE software.

PySide2 on Raspberry Pi 3b+ with Raspbian Buster

PySide2, or Qt for Python, is becoming more usable: since it has landed on PyPi, it is easy to install on almost every PC. Unfortunately, this does not apply to the RaspberryPis. Actually, there are only wheels for 64 bit x86 (and 32bit on Windows), not ARM. And there's a reason for this: the actual Raspbian Stretch has way too old packages for PySide2 to work. To get PySide2 on a RaspberryPi, you'll need Rasbpian Buster, which has not been released (even though there are repositoryes for an upgrade). Then, you can use the packages already compiled for Debian armhf (which are not in the Raspbian repository, at this moment). This is not straightforward, expecially for beginners. So I made an image, ready to be written on a (at least 16GB) microSD card. This image has Raspbian Buster with the main Qt5 and PySide2 modules. I've also switched the desktop environment from LxDE to LxQt.
You can find the image here:
https://www.codice-sorgente.it/raspbian-buster-pyside2-lxqt/#English
In that page you'll find also links to the Debian Qt5 and PySide2 packages for armhf, if you want to install them on another distro. This image works on a RaspberryPi 3B+, because that's the one I have, but should work also at least on version 3 and 2.

Kartesio 1.0: free best fitting for science labs is now stable

I'm finally able to release the first stable version of Kartesio, Kartesio 1.0. There are lots of new features, and I feel the program is now ready for everyday use.

Kartesio is a program I wrote in 2011 for calculating best fit curves from a set of points. Kartesio uses QCustomPlot widget to plot data, and Maxima to solve expressions. The icons used in Kartesio have been designed by KDE Oxygen team. Kartesio also uses ZorbaNeuralNetwork to recognize the best fit curve. ZorbaNeuralNetwork is a library for easy neural networks construction I started writing in 2006, and supports training with both Widrow-Hoff algoritm and genetic algorithm.

Microsoft's going to release source code of Windows Phone

As you all may know, Windows 8 Phone (codename Apollo) has not been the great "Android replacer" that Microsoft hoped. Developers do not like this OS, and neither users: too much complex, too slow. Given that it's not worth spending resources on Windows Phone 8, Redmond decided that the support for this system will end on July 2014.

So, trying to go for broke, Microsoft decided to publicly release the source code. The day of the public release is not yet decided: the code needs to be cleaned and organized first, so it will happen probably after July. Redmond hopes to attract, in particular, people who are disappointed by the NSA scandals.

Microsoft declared that all the source code of Windows Phone will be released, including the NT kernel.

SteamOs: the good, the bad, or the ugly?

You may have heard that Valve, one of the major videogames companies, is going to release its own operating system: SteamOs. It is based on Debian: basically, it's just a Debian GNU/Linux distro with GNOME, that comes with Steam preinstalled and ready for use. If you want to try it, I have prepared a VDI image for Virtualbox (you will need to create a Debian VM, with 3D enabled):
www.zorbaproject.org/steamos/Steamos-vdi.zip

Kartesio: best fit curves with experimental points

I finally had the time to build a simple website for Kartesio. This is a program I wrote about two years ago for my phisycal chemistry laboratory: I needed to calculate best fit curves for some experimental points I got from the refractometer and the regression algorithms available in the common office suites were not so good. But I also wanted something really simple: why sould I use "R" if I just want to best fit some points? So I decided to create a program which does this operation and only this one, but does it well. Kartesio is able to best fit curves using a regression algorithm or a neural network.