Mozilla’s schedule for FOSDEM is quite busy:

1. There is an online streaming that can be watched from here

2. Follow #mozilla tag to follow what is going on right now at Fosdem – including nice quotes, slides and some hacks like this one:

Hacking the #Fosdem‘s “O” – Hack it and tag it with #fosdem-hack and get nice #Mozilla t-shirt (draw). – See more here

3. if you are here, please stop by our booth and get some buttons and join our effort to make the web better.

I had an idea to show kind of human computer interaction during my Fosdem talk. I may not use that, because I will not have time to polish it, but it works quite well if you want to use it.

The Idea
The idea is to control slides only by moving my hand, without any devices in it.

The plan:
0. My web-cam should detect my move
1. After detection an event should be triggered
2. As a final action the slide should move to the next one

Motion detect

$ git clone https://github.com/sackmotion/motion.git
$ cd motion
$ ./configure
$ make & make install

Configure it

Motion comes with a great almost working config file, so just copy it to make it “official”:

$ cp  /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf

Open it, search for those values, edit them and read what are they for:

;on_event_start value
event_gap 60

to become:

on_event_start xdotool key Right /OR xdotool search "Mozilla Firefox" windowactivate --sync key --clearmodifiers Right/
event_gap 1

Event triggering

You may need to install xdotool using your package manager. This tool allows you to emulate keyboard action in different combinations, but I will need to emulate pressing the right arrow key.

How it works:

When web-cam detects movement an event emulating ‘right arrow’ key is pressed. Since I am using HTML5 DZslides from here, this allows me to move to next slide only with moving my hand in front of my webcam.

Run

Run it and move your hand in front of your camera. You may want to turn on the logging to see the motion detection and the event detection if it’s not working at first.

$ motion

If you have any questions, please let me know.

A friend of mine just show me a info about my efforts to establish Pirate Party in Bulgaria published on Wikileaks:

(SBU) A Bulgarian Green Party leader and two other Bulgarian
activists have started a petition to establish a Bulgarian “Pirate
Party” which advocates for free downloading of copyrighted materials
among other things. Under Bulgarian law, 5,000 signatures are
required for a political party to be formally established. Given
the fact that Bulgaria’s Green Party has generally attracted less
than one percent of the vote in national and EU elections, it is
unlikely that the fledgling Pirate Party would surpass the four
percent voting threshold needed to win a seat in Parliament.
Nonetheless, if this new party begins to win support from the
general public, IPR enforcement and legislation could face political
obstacles in Parliament in the future.

P.S Bulgarian Green Party leader == me
Source

What is RUST?

Rust is an experimental, concurrent, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Mozilla Labs. It is designed to be practical, supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles. /wikipedia/

How to install it on your Gnu/Linux box?
Pre-requirements:

• g++ 4.4 or clang++ 3.x
• python 2.6 or later
• perl 5.0 or later
• gnu make 3.81 or later
• curl

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