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.

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! :^).

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

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”.

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

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.

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.

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

Sigh.

For the curious, my proposal is finishing and enhancing the web UI for the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS for short). Which is a great system but lacks some features that as a GNOME developer have learned to love and, from my humble point of view, think that Debian would benefit from. If you have ever used Debian’s BTS after getting used to GNOME’s Bugzilla, you know what I mean.

Regarding this great news, I’m also happy and confident to say that I’ll be able to keep up with GNOME and Debian work without a hitch. Lots of engineering went through my head to ensure I’ll be able to give my best in what I’m currently doing.

Also, my dear friends Marco Villegas and Manuel Cerón (of LunarEclipse fame) got selected for Drupal and Mono respectively.
Marco will be creating the infrastructure needed for Drupal.org to go the git way and Manuel will be doing some MonoDevelop crack (actually a visual class designer).

It was a great day!

PD: Hello Planet DebianSoC! perhaps you want to read a short intro of myself in this old post.