I’ve got two questions about the new baby made by Nokia with the collaboration of some FOSS companies:

1. Does it make calls? It seems that not.
2. If the multimedia part has been done with Fluendo and the GStreamer, why the hell it does not play Ogg files?

Looking for a job

I’m finishing my working contract with the Audiovisual Institute in June, so I need a new job by September.

Just in the case that somebody could be looking for a computer scientist in Barcelona, interested and devoted fan of Free Soft, (s)he could drop me some lines…
[more info about my interests in my webpage]

Thanks!

Linux 2.6

Now using the latest version of the kernel, 2.6.5, and found it really nice.
The USB devices work OK, and the CD burner is correctly handled.

I like it a lot…

JHBuild

I’m now installing the JHBuild version of GNOME. This means, as you know, that I’d use the CVS version of this superb Desktop Environment. I hope that this step’ll help me to starting contribute with it.

I owe so much code to the community that I could never restore…

GNOME Evangelism

Yesterday I changed my brother’s PC (which was running GNOME 1.4) for my old one (which is running GNOME 2.4). He liked it very much, and he’s now enjoying it a lot.

Just with Sound-Juicer, CD-Player, Rhythmbox, Totem and OpenOffice, he’s the happiest one in the world…

Nice to see it…

Article

I’m still thinking about my planned article.

No so tech incompatible

I improved my abilities lacked in my last blog-post:

The mobile phone was OK, so it’s working nice now.

I tried my XFree4.2-working config in a brand new installed Debian GNU/Linux in a brand new 120GB HDD, and didn’t work properly. It seems that the X are working but they aren’t displaying properly… I’ll keep googling!

Tech incompatible

I’m starting to think that I’m totally incompatible with technology (bad thing…):

XFree 4.3

Recently, I apt-get upgraded my system (Debian Sid), which made me to upgrade my XFree version to 4.3. Everywhere I read that no changes where needed: the confile was the same. Maybe it’s true, but I didn’t managed to put it working again :_(

Solution: I installed Debian Sarge…

Proposal: make a decent XFree’s autoconfigurator…

Mobile phone

Yesterday night I left my mobile phone plugged to the electric network to refill my battery. When I woke up this morning, I could not make it turn on again. Tried a workmate’s battery and it worked. I’m unsure if the battery didn’t refilled or if this stormy night broke it or if the stormy night broke the transformer or…

Solution: Identify and isolate the problem [work in progress...]

User actions in a Mediateca

Thinking in Mediateca as the whole of multimedia files the user has, I tried to classify all the actions that the user may want to do with his/her files. Here you have my sorting, done in two different ways.

Sorted by the element pipe

• Incoming elements
  • Creating a brand new one
  • Digitalizing some input
  • Downloading from internet
  • Provided by a hotplugged portable device: [ handling hotplugged devices - project Utopia ]
    • CD?
    • MP3 player
    • Videocamera
    • Photocamera
• Manipulating elements
  • Viewing, listening or both
  • Navigating over all of them
  • Searching for any element (conventional search or Storage-like search)
  • Organizing your mediateca (mainly editing metainformation: tags and RDF info)
  • Transforming and editing
• Outgoing elements
  • Burning a CD/DVD (data, music or movie)
  • Printing (if possible) in paper
  • Broadcast (if possible) over the internet
  • Send to somebody
  • Transfer to a site

Sorted by the element used

• Application options
  • New from:
    • Scratch [ New... ]
    • Analogycal source [ Digitalize... ]
    • Digital source [ Extract... / Rip... ]
    • Net [ Download... ] / Handle galeon/epiphany download
  • Playlist / Smart playlist / Inet radio / Stream sources:
    • [ New... ]
    • [ Save... ]
    • [ Load... ]
    • [ Delete... ]
• File options
  • Out
    • View
    • Add to a CD/DVD (data, music or movie). Burn it easily.
    • Print file / Screenshot a movie
    • Send / Broadcast / Transfer
  • Manipulate / transform / edit [ Open with... ]
  • Edit properties / rename

Planning for an article

I read Nat Friedman’s blog entry on January 28th. His thoughts there make me think about a new GUI/Desktop philosophy: ‘Unixing the Desktop’, mainly distinguished by splitting up applications, generating message ports and connecting their inputs/outputs, and -in other side but extremely attached to this- generating, indexing, retrieving and encapsultaing lot of information about what user has (files) and does (applications behaviour).

Linux kernel 2.6

I’m planning to go back to 2.4 kernel, since I’m not used to about the managing of devices of 2.6. Im specially frustrated about (my lack of knowledge of) USB handling and CD burn. I also got the sensation that the apps in charge of doing this aren’t ported yet. Any pointer would be interesting.

New PC at home

Monday I bought a brand new Asus Pundit Barebone, and hadn’t got time to build it up and test it.
This morning I did it with a classmate -which is really pro in building PCs- and tested the software behaviour (I reused my 60GB HDD):

• M$ Windows XP: Didn’t work. It even could not start up. My mate (a Windows user) told me that it was mandatory to reinstall it. Sucks. Really sucks.

• Debian GNU/Linux: It started up. I had to configure the network (load b44 module and restart the network subsystem), the soundcard (load i810_audio and restart sound system -alsamixer doesn’t work, don’t know why since GNOME volume control does) and X (used a config file from GNOPPIX). All works perfectly. I love it.

TODO Plan

Remove M$Windows XP from my PC. It sucks.

Linux 2.6.0

Finally got it working! Steve Kemp gave me the solution to my problem:

image=/vmlinuz
      label=Linux
      read-only
      initrd=/initrd.img
      append=”root=/dev/hda2″

After putting this in Lilo, loading mousedev and psmouse modules made the /dev/psaux mouse (and the X) work:

> uname -r
2.6.0-1-686