¡Vamos al sur!

October 20th, 2009 by diegoe

This past weekend I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy the mother of all bacteria, I have a pharyngitis since last Thursday. Turns out the bastard is resistant to amoxiciline so just yesterday I got switched to something different to try to kill it. It seems I’m better now but I’m still ‘infected’.

Bad timing. I’ll be travelling in a few hours to Valparaíso, Chile for the 10th Encuentro Linux and Día GNOME 2009. I’ll be giving a small talk/workshop about some cool stuff you can do with WebKitGTK+. I gotta say I’ve stolen content from Xan López, Gustavo Noronha and Christian Dywan’s talk at Gran Canaria, don’t blame me, it was a nice talk.

voy voy

I’m focusing in examples so I hope the code I’m producing will prove helpful as a base for more talks, I’ll try to translate it to English and upload it somewhere visible :) . Many thanks to Encuentro Linux organizers for sponsoring my ticket and accommodation.

On Saturday, I’ll be speaking jointly with Pedro Villavicencio about the GNOME Community and how cool it is and why you should join. It will have interesting info, comments and, of course, photos ;-) .

This year I’m glad that two new peruvian GNOME contributors are travelling with me to meet with the GNOME Chile people and enjoy their first GNOME-related conference. Sergio Infante, triager and GNOME Hispano IRC talks organizer, together with Juan Rojas, patch maker and tester, will be talking about the good and bad of involving with GNOME: what can we do better, what are we not doing, etc. Their talk is really promising for me, since they have a much better point of view than any of us, since they are new contributors. They are travelling thanks to the GNOME Foundation financial support of DíaGNOME.

So, if you are in Chile be there. And whether you are there or not, wish me better health! :^).

Debian free chocolate bonanza

July 26th, 2009 by diegoe

If you are in Cáceres for Debconf and happen to fix a bug (any) in Debian, look around for me and I’ll give you a quite incredibly most awesome too damn good peruvian chocolate. It’s amazing, you have no excuse to not fix some extra bugs.
Extra surprise even more omg awesomeness bonus for the most evil bugs and release-critical ones.

FreeFA tournament

July 8th, 2009 by diegoe

freefa in 2008

Remember, tomorrow (Thursday 9th July 2009), 15:00 to 17:00 ¹, is FreeFA.

Join in at around 14:40-45, join us in front of the main University Building. We’ll get to the pitch by foot.

Summing up:

  • Bring your football kit (trainers, or moulded shoes, shinpads)
  • Bring T-Shirts of different colours (at least a clear and dark one)
  • Show up at 14:40

The teams haven’t been set up yet, as we don’t know whether we’ll have smaller goals available (it’s currently setup as a full-fledged 11-a-side pitch).

If you show up late, you won’t be able to play…

¹: Might last a bit longer

Gran canaria tidbytes (ala vuntz)

July 5th, 2009 by diegoe
  • Had an insane long walk trying to find a cuban restaurant, we finally discovered it was 1 block away from Catalina Park. Not really good in the end.
  • Met a lot of nice GNOME Hispano people already and gave and received lots of hugs, GUADEC is always full of hugs. It’s the hug conference.
  • The Sponsored by GNOME Foundation badges are awesome, great idea by Germán and incredible artwork by Vinicius (that awesome brazilian guy that gave the green colored UI suggestions talk). If you want one, ask Germán or me.
  • Seif Lotfy showed me some cool Zeitgeist ENGINE (I’m still trying to pronounce it correctly) stuff, really nice since it’s not really an UI but more like a new concept regarding how we can gather data about how people use their desktop, his talk is today in the afternoon, be there!
  • Had fun seeing Vincent and Lucas being gringos in the stores by the beach, sort of feels like being at home. Lucas doesn’t really understand Spanish but he believes he does.
  • Will be hanging around the conference today, eating icecream.

FreeFA cup 2009

June 29th, 2009 by diegoe

Every year brave players from the 5 continents gather together to define who’s the best in the deadliest sport there is: soccer.

FreeFA 2008

photo © by Alia and Zaheer Abbas - http://www.flickr.com/photos/aandza/2653266909/

While in its already various years of existence the FreeFA cup haven’t yet taken any victim, we still like to think it’s quite dangerous and brave to play.

If you would like to become part of history books and be admired for generations yet to come, sign up now in the GCDS wiki (registration required on the main page).

Pack up your shinpads and football shoes, plus one or two colours of shirts you can sweat confidently.

Teams and time will be sorted while on the island.

We need lots more of this

June 25th, 2009 by diegoe

Fully quoting Lluis Sanchez:

How to build MonoDevelop with Visual Studio in five easy steps:

  • Install GTK# (get installer here)
  • Install the Mono Libraries (get installer here)
  • Get MonoDevelop from SVN
  • Open main/Main.sln in Visual Studio
  • Press F5

And for everyone completely clueless about the important fact in Lluis’ post: No, I haven’t just said “we need more Mono!! yeah!!!1 OMG PONNIES!!!111eleven”.

Dear Bastien, I’ll be waiting for you to organize FreeFA

May 28th, 2009 by diegoe

My dear French Colleague Bastien (FCB? Wait, what? Is he hiding something?), I’m glad to accept a bet that I have (and had even before the game) already won.

Anyone interested in FreeFA (our annual soccer match) keep an eye on Bastien’s blog, he will be organizing it :-)

Python common mistakes

May 23rd, 2009 by diegoe

When starting with Python or just when you haven’t read PEP 8 you usually fall into some frequent mistakes. Mostly because you take your experience in other languages to Python and your mind gets confused with the new conventions (or something like that).

Some of these errors and their explanation:

  • if a == None:
    Really common. None is a singleton, so you can (well, actually, have) to compare to it like ‘if a is None‘ or ‘if a is not None‘.
  • if (condition):
    This is not really pythonic, if doesn’t take () around the condition in python, () purpose is grouping, you can use them in an if but only to clarify a really complex condition or similar stuff. Please don’t clutter code with unneeded characters.
  • if len(list):
    This is a misunderstanding of Python way of things, any empty sequence (string, list, tuple) is False. So if you want to make sure a list is empty, just check if it’s False. Same for tuples, and in some ocassions for strings.
  • if type(obj) is type(1):
    This is killing kittens, there’s a builtin function for this purpose, it’s called -surprise- isinstance(object, type). For example isinstance(123, int)

Read more about this and other conventions in PEP 8.

Still locked out of Google

May 11th, 2009 by diegoe

Google continues to lock me out of my account apparently just for fun. NOT A SINGLE ANSWER I have got from their bazillion of forms.

I’m obviously pissed off by this, so far the best I have got have been automated replies from forms spitting standard answers to me, answers also in the GMail web help. Yes, that kind of answer “please check that the router is ON”.

Google: you are making me unhappy, I have been happy to recommend you to friends, but doesn’t seem like I will keep doing it after this.

I have bazillions of stuff rotting in queue because of this.

Locked out of Google world

May 5th, 2009 by diegoe

So, seems like Google locked me out of my account today. Apparently for my own protection. Perhaps they are right and they are preventing me from being harmed.

In case you sent me a million dollar offer or something really important, this is why I haven’t replied.

Sigh.