Every year the GNOME Foundation gathers its membership on its Annual General Meeting (AGM) where the different teams of the project share their progress and plans. Also, the new Board of Directors —the guys running the Foundation— is welcomed and the old one is thanked for their hard work.

If you care about GNOME you are welcome at the meeting, no matter if you are not a Foundation member.

The Annual General Meeting is today at 4PM in the Fritz-Reuter-Saal, get there through the main entrance and straight ahead upstairs to the 3rd floor.

But it’s most important role has been that of hosting lots of GNOME activity. The 3rd ever GUADEC was held here, those cool Emergya guys who are working on a11y live here, and the even more awesome Sugus ETSII group —helping with the conference setup and beer availability— who helped organize the GNOME 3 launch party in Sevilla.

GUADEC Hispana group picture by Ana Rey (from GUADEC_ES8 set)

Not as huge as GUADEC, but certainly as much fun as it, GUADEC Hispana lets the Spanish speaking community get closer together, get bugs fixed and —only as a side effect— get a bit drunk.

A big thank to Ana, Juanje, Víctor, the Sugus team and all the local people that contributed. Also, of course, thanks to our GNOME loving (and loved) companies: Emergya, Igalia and OpenShine. And don’t forget Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática who hosted the event.

Beer time now. See ya at Berlin.

I’ll be there since Friday 5th night until Saturday 13th.

I’m stoping at Sevilla for VIII GUADEC-ES, the Kung Fu Edition.

I’m leaving in a few hours, so see you there!

PS: I already packed the ceremonial vuvuzela, I hope we make a tradition of it

A couple of things here:

• Minimize and Maximize are still available and functional in the right-click menu and as shortcuts. Like always.
  
• When using GNOME Shell there’s only a Close button on the window, GNOME3′s default.

In one sentence: GNOME3 changed the default layout of window controls. Default being the important word:

• Can I revert this?
  Yes, if you really want to. You only need to change a key in the configuration system. Just as you have always been able to change GNOME2′s window-controls configuration.

Please give GNOME Shell a try, don’t be afraid of changes. If it’s a bad decision, we’ll notice in time and fix it. It’s not the end of the world. Not yet

Inspired by André’s recent post I recalled that many people have gave me bad feedback about jhbuild. So I thought I might share some ideas and tips, here we go:

• Don’t use the jhbuild shipped by your distribution, use git master
• Only build what you need, buildone is your friend
• Prefer distro packages when possible, ALWAYS

• I want to test the latest awesome version of RupertBrowser!
  jhbuild buildone rupert-browser

• But… I want to have RupertBrowser from master and it requires a LibBrowser that is not in my distro!
  jhbuild buildone libbrowser rupert-browser

• Awesome! But it seems RupertBrowser devs have a cool branch I’d like to automatically build, I bet you can’t do that!
  Edit your jhbuildrc:
  branches['rupert-browser'] = (None, ‘new-cool-branch’)

• No wait, but that branch requires me to use the –enable-coolness switch for configure… how do I do that?
  jhbuildrc again:
  module_autogenargs['rupert-browser'] = ‘–enable-coolness’

• This all looks nice, would you please show me a somewhat basic jhbuildrc file anyway?
  Sure, but don’t ask me to explain it all, use your bright mind or read jhbuild’s documentation, or config.py script (from jhbuild’s repo in git.gnome.org). Here it is:

# if you are a committer to git.gnome.org, this is your line
# ignore it if you are not a committer
repos['git.gnome.org'] = ‘ssh://someone@git.gnome.org/git/’

# see jhbuild’s repository for the classic modules or use a path to a custom one
moduleset = ‘gnome-2-32′

# don’t hit the internet for modules, just use what came with jhbuild
use_local_modulesets = True

# only build modules when there are new commits since the last time
build_policy = ‘updated’

# simultaneous build anyone?
makeargs = ‘-j4′

### Branches
branches['gtk+'] = (None, ‘awesome-new-stuff’)

### Checkout and install prefix
checkoutroot = ‘/home/user/gnome/’
prefix = ‘/home/user/gnome/build’

### Custom configuration
autogenargs = ‘–disable-static –disable-gtk-doc ‘
module_autogenargs['epiphany'] = autogenargs + ‘–something-magic’

### Extra env, you can set anything for the shell env here
os.environ['CFLAGS'] = ‘-g -O2′

Last week we held GUADEC-ES in A Coruña, Galicia. It seems I got my virus there, but I’m not blaming anyone. I presented two talks which I think had a positive response from the laughing audience . It’s on my attic.

Anyway, so GUADEC core is starting tomorrow and people is already looking for vuntz to blame him of various stuff like network connectivity, weather, etc. Lennart is leading the efforts to chase him down and let the wrath of the masses unleash on him, ping him if interested.

I’m looking forward to sit down with Allan, Reinout, Xan and Gustavo to re-think the Epiphany UI/UX. Now that everyone is breaking everything, well, why not us? The meeting will be scheduled on-the-fly, keep an eye .

Colombia is a really nice place, although a little rainy it is a comfortable weather to walk around and enjoy the city. Bogotá’s altitude is not relevant unless you are carrying your a laptop in a backpack around… oh, wait.

My first talk, about WebKitGTK+ and GNOME, was this afternoon with really good results. People had fun and felt confident to ask questions and approach me later for some extra chatting and photos. It was the one opening the Free Software track.

Tomorrow I open the day again with a talk titled “How to live creating Free Software without starving”, it’s a somewhat personal tale of how I have survived my life as a hippie hacker. Lots of lolcats and fun, guaranteed.

On Friday, Germán will present a talk titled “Who writes GNOME?”, I’m eager to see the results of his investigation. He’s also presenting it at GUADEC Hispana.

Sadly, light is really bad on the campus floor so it’s hard to take any picture. Germán has a few mugshots though. Maybe he publishes them later.

I’m happy about it, really really happy. I love this job, totally, completely!. I’ve had the chance to learn a lot. Here I’d like to share some things I have learned so far, I look forward to post again with more ideas, but meanwhile here you have two.

Different timezones are hard

The time when I find most of the Igalia crew online is between 2am and 12pm. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t find them past 12pm, but it’s already 7pm or 8pm in Europe then. I”m on UTC-5 and Spain is on UTC+1 or (now) UTC+2.

You probably agree that asking anyone to wake up at 7am in summer is unrealistic. Luckily, Igalia doesn’t make me pass a turing test everyday at a fixed time. This rocks.

Valparaíso, Chile

I love it when people understand that a happy hacker working at midnight is better than an unhappy hacker working on a set in stone schedule. Kudos to Igalia for that.

Your code should explain and defend itself

My written expression teacher says “Your text should be good enough to explain and defend itself”. This applies to code too. I confirmed this at the expense of Xan‘s patience.

It’s a common situation: when the maintainer reviews your patch you are not around to explain it, or present the rationale you put into the change. The solution? well, simple, your patch and commit log should explain by themselves.

I saw, after realising how much ping-pong Xan and I had to play to get a patch in, that my patches lacked a harder review by myself before being posted. You have to be your first reviewer.

Be a severe judge of your patch, ask yourself if you would accept such a patch, if you would like a commit message like that, if that variable name is really good, if someone could quickly grasp what’s it all about, etc. Get into the flippy flops of the maintainer, don’t assume everything is obvious to everyone.

Now, I like some of The Killers’ songs (this one will give you the context), so I just couldn’t help myself from doing this:

Update March 1st, 16 UTC: Alejandro Valdés, Fabián Arias, Carlos Ríos Vera and Germán Póo-Caamaño have been in contact with others in Chile.

Probably by now some of you know or are worried about the situation in Chile. I’m not chilean nor in Chile but I’ve been following closely due to the considerable number of good friends I have there, most of them related to GNOME.

From The Big Picture (AP Photo/Roberto Candia)

Juan Carlos Inostroza (blog down) suggested I publish the list of GNOME/Free Software people in Chile that has reported since the earthquake and are fine, here it goes:

Known, found and good:

• Andrea Orellana Palma
• Álvaro Olivares
• Alejandro Valdés (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via Felipe Besoaín)
• Adrien Bustany (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via pvanhoof)
• Cristian Barahona G.
• Carlos Ríos Vera (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via his sister on fb)
• Fernando Ruiz Altamirano
• Joo Anfossi Mardones
• Jorge Bustos
• Juan Carlos Inostroza
• Fabio Durán
• Fabián Arias (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via Andrea Orellana)
• Felipe Andres Besoaín Pino
• Fernando San Martín Woerner
• Germán Póo-Caamaño (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via Pablo Estefó)
• Mario Gonzáles
• Miguel Angel Ruiz Manzano
• Pablo Estefó
• Pedro Villavicencio Garrido
• Ricardo Fuentes
• Reynaldo Verdejo (updated 20100301 @24 UTC, via Claudio Saavedra, Juan Carlos Inostroza)
• Sven von Brand
• Sebastián Lara

Not know, nor found, we presume good but without cellphones:

• None

If you have been in contact with any of them, leave a comment, send a DM in twitter (@diegoe) and etc. List is not complete, I probably forgot someone, please remind me. Will update if I get news from anyone.