I’m going to FOSDEM 2010

February 3rd, 2010 by juanje

Well, last year was my first time in Brussels and FOSDEM. It was great, but I guess this time, as Barney would say: it’s going to be legen…. wait for it…. dary!!! :-P

This time a lot of friends are going and I hope to meet new not-yet-friends up there.

I’m going with my good friend from Emergya and also great Guadalinex developer, Roberto. Here we are at some spanish FLOSS congress….

Juanje and Rober at the Hispalinux congress

Juanje and Rober at the Hispalinux congress

We are the two guys in the middle… If you are at the FOSDEM we look (kind of) like in the photo.

BTW, If you see the girls you can also tell us :-P

See you there ;-)

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

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Posted in distros, emergya, events, gnome, guadalinex, personal | 4 Comments »

Drupalcamp: Call for sponsors

January 14th, 2010 by juanje

Back in time I was working in a small company (actually it was a cooperative) called Interactor. When I was there, I was working in different stuff like the Guadalinex v3, but also some web projects. Then was when I first saw the Drupal’s code.

I knew php, but I didn’t like so much. But Drupal’s code was different to other big (or not so big) project in php, it was well organized and very clear.

One of my partners at Interactors and still friend poked me the other day to tell me about this Drupalcamp thing. He (Javier Carranza) is owner of a small but very productive company called Alquimia which is specialized on Drupal and he is also helping with the organization of the conferences.

DrupalCamp Spain 2010

DrupalCamp Spain 2010

I got really impressed when I saw how well organized they have it and I’ll definitely go there :-)

There are more than 450 pre-registered. They are developers, designers and companies which work with Drupal or are interested on it.

Now they are looking for sponsors (sorry, the link is in Spanish, here is a automatic translation) so If you like to be one of them, or you know someone who could do it, just tell them.

Thanks :-)

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Posted in events | 1 Comment »

lastest Freemind for Ubuntu

January 5th, 2010 by juanje

I discovered Freemind few years ago, which is a very nice and useful tool. It is a mind maping application.

I use it for brainstormings (mostly with myself…), for taking notes on meetings, for creating the initial tasks tree of a project, for preparing a talk or even the structure of a document. It’s a great tool.

I’m not very fan of Java and probably this is the only Java application I use and I’m happy with ;-)

But my problem with Freemind is that to find the last binary version for Linux is very painful… Even more if you try to find for your version of Ubuntu (in my case). There is a very old version for Ubuntu on the download section of the site, but too old. I always have to googling a lot before to find someone’s repository with almost last version on debian package format.

The official current version on Ubuntu is 0.7.1-6ubuntu4, but the current last version from the project itself is 0.9.0-RC6, which comes with a lot of interesting features. As you can see the gap is huge…

But Debian has now the last version packaged for sid :-)

Before I discovered this, I found the PPA (Personal Package Archive) of Savvas Radevic with the version 0.9.0-rc4, almost the last one. I saw the sources and I realized that it was just a rebuild of the Debian version, so I looked for the last Debian version and I rebuild it.

So, if you like the last version of this nice application and you are using Debian, you could use the Sid package and if you are using Ubuntu Karmic, Ubuntu Jaunty (or Guadalinex v6) you could add my PPA and install from there.

If you don’t know, from Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) on you can add easily a PPA doing this:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:juanje/freemind

Then you can install the Freemind’s packages normally. I think I’ll keep this PPA updated until there be a final stable version (0.9.0) in Ubuntu.
I hope you enjoy as much as me this software ;-)

UPDATES:

  • I made also the backport for Ubuntu Jaunty and is already at the PPA. I had to make also a backport for one dependency (simplyhtml), which is at the PPA as well.
  • ScottK commented that the last version is already in Lucid. It seems to be uploaded to the repositories on 3th January.

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Posted in distros | 14 Comments »

WiiCan: Easy Wii remote control on Linux

December 29th, 2009 by juanje

Félix Ontañón, a very good friend and hacker from my company, has just released a new versión of a systray application which help to configure and manage the Wii remote control on Linux. The application is called WiiCan and is hosted on Launchpad.

The project has been programed in Python and it uses D-Bus to connect with hal (by now) and bluez for tracking the available bluetooth devices and wiimote connection status.

I’ll copy here from the project’s site the features:

Discover if it’s an available bluetooth device for connect wiimote
Display a list of available keyboard-mouse-wiimote mappings
User-defined mappings creation assistant
Mappings manager:

  • New/Edit/Delete
  • Up/Down order
  • Visible/Invisible

Notify the state of wiimote usaging:

  • Bluetooth available/unavailable
  • Discovering wiimote
  • Wiimote disconnected

And here some screenshots:

WiiCan systray

Connected with a Wiimote

Connected with a Wiimote

Mapping options

Mapping options

I haven’t tryied the application because I haven’t got any wiimote, but some friends have already tested and they’ve told me that it work great, and they are very happy with the tool. So I’d like to invite you to test it and share here your experience.

And also I’d like to invite you to colaborate with the project, reporting bugs, patches and translations.

I hope you enjoy it ;-)

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Posted in distros, emergya, gnome | 18 Comments »

Is GNOME 3.0 for users or developers?

December 10th, 2009 by juanje

This question is walking around in my head for some time now…

I’m the first thinking that the old traditional desktop is that, old. And we need something new.

I like things I see about GNOME Shell and so on, but I’m a geek!

I mean, I do use virtual desktops or spaces, but I like to mess with my system and I always have running my Guake terminal.

I remember when Compiz came up, everyone was so excited with the things it could do. It was so cool, so fancy and that was going to be the right tool to attract normal users to our desktop, because it was a lot of better than Vista…

That was cool, but I don’t really see much people using those effects nowadays… Ok, transparency and smoothness on windows stuff, is used, but no much more.

So now people who are thinking on the next release of their distros for non-very-tech-users (like Guadalinex), are a bit afraid to be forced to use a very new concept, which is cool when you are geek or somebody teach you about it.

To upgrade a few thousand of users to a very new desktop concept is a quite hard challenge… Even having a helpdesk services, online documentation and forums.

I just hope those new concepts be really easy to catch or somebody make any kind of “first use lesson” for them.

Actually, for regular end users I think I prefer something like Litl OS or Chrome OS. That is a change of concept, but into something they already know: the web. And also the mediacenter and web interfaces.

Well, it’s just a personal thought…

Anyways, we’ll see next year… I wish the best for my favourite desktop and their hackers, so let’s have a bit of faith ;-)

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Posted in distros, gnome, guadalinex | 8 Comments »

GNOME Hispano meeting and CISL09

December 7th, 2009 by juanje

I’ve been in Caceres (Extremadura) the last three days attending the “Conferencia Internacional de Software Libre” (International Free Software Conference), one of the biggest FLOSS events in Spain.

It was a very intense days and I met a lot of friends and new interesting people.

But also was held there the GNOME Hispano meeting with people like Carlos Garcia Campos (aka Kal), Álvaro del Castillo (aka acs), José Ángel Díaz, and others gnomers.

The beginning was actually quite moving for some of us, because José made a retrospective of GNOME’s history and how GNOME Hispano was born. For those who were that night, when GNOME Hispano started this made them draw a smile in their (our) faces :-)

I couldn’t attend all the sessions, because I had to attend also to the other conference, but they told me they were interesting. There was stuff like “GNOME Fails“, “Introduction to the Desktop course“, “The migration of GNOME Hispano’s services to OpenSolaris” and the other two sessions where I was: “Software development using git” and “GNOME and the distributions” (which, actually was mine :-P )

My talk was about how what developers make can be affected by changes on the distribution or by third party people who need to integrate their software with the desktop and more software. We were also talking about the very end users and how is more important to them some small and silly bugs than the next big and fancy feature.

We’ve learned from the experience of thousand of users in Extremadura (GNU/LinEx) and Andalusia (Guadalinex) that the very end users (people from little villages, childrens, old people, and so) don’t care so much about the new fancy stuff but they really do care about crash when they try to perform an email search on Evolution or some dialog is untranslated.

Some of those errors come from the distributions but others are responsibility of the upstream developers. I know it is much funnier to be working in a fancy feature or dealing with a very tricky bug, than take care of a hundred of silly bugs, but it’s probably that a lot of people won’t see the super-feature, just because one those silly bugs… I can tell you…

Anyways, the talk was interesting, the people was participating and we all learnt some lessons, I think. I’d like to write some conclusions to see what do you think as well…

I’ll probably do ;-)

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Posted in distros, emergya, events, gnome, guadalinex | 5 Comments »

CISL09 and GNOME Hispano

November 30th, 2009 by juanje

I’m packaging my stuff to leave to Extremadura. There, in Caceres, takes place the Free Software World Conference this week, one of the biggest FLOSS’ event in Spain.

I’m very excited because it’s my first event in my new position at Emergya and because there you can always find interesting people and interesting projects.

Good place for networking ;-)

I have also to give a talk about GNOME and the Linux distributions there, as part of the GNOME Hispano meeting. It will be about the problems I’ve found several times trying to integrate GNOME with other software into some distributions.

I’ve been working on distributions based on Debian and Ubuntu for almost 8 years and there are some issues that are still there.

Actually, it’s much easier than before to integrate the desktop, but there are always some things hardcoded or not very well documented that make us made some tricky hacks.

Well, these are, mostly, experiences from the past, because now it’s much more better, but I hope this help to be more aware of those things for future changes.

I’ll tell you more after the event and I hope to see any of you there ;-)

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Posted in distros, emergya, gnome, guadalinex | 1 Comment »

Back to the community

November 27th, 2009 by juanje

It’s been awhile since my last post. I’ve been busy with my personal life and some changes on my professional life…

Actually, I left my last company (Emergya) because I was needing a change and I had the possibility of start to work on Guadalinex (Ubuntu based distribution from Andalusia, Spain) full time. Guadalinex is a very important project for the Spanish FLOSS community and It’s very important for me as well.

There were some problems to start at my new position and I’ve been something like two month off, waiting for my job.

Meanwhile I’ve been a bit disconnected of the GNOME, Ubuntu, Debian and floss world in general, and I’ve been more focused on recovering and improving my health. I came back to doing climbing, running, Ninjutsu, some parkour, I’ve been eating more vegetables and fruits, I’ve been visiting my physiotherapist… You know, trying to fix a bit my sedentary life.

But there were more problems with my new position which made me worry about my future and my economy… :-/

Then my previous company offered me another position, this time it was a very good job, the one I was looking for last time I was working there. And because of several reasons (which weren’t easy decisions at all) I took that job :-)

So, I’m about to start a new stage of my personal and professional life and that is very linked to the FLOSS world :-)

They call the position Community Manager, but it’s not “online community manager“. It is not about create online community around our products and so, it is about build (or to get stronger) free software community inside the company and putting the means for our developers to be able of sharing knowledge with people from other communities (GNOME, Ubuntu, Debian, Drupal, gvSIG, Redmine, Rails…).

We’ve been very focused on looking for good clients, growing up as a small-medium company and we have a bunch a good developers with very good skills and know how, but not all of them come from the free software world and they need to know how to share all that knowledge and how interact with  the community. The rest, just need tools and opportunities for working as they want, in a open way.

Connect our GIS people with open GIS projects, our Drupal hackers with the Drupal developers, our distro experts with Ubuntu, Debian and GNOME people and so on, plus a few more things is going to be my life in, at least, one year from now.

I’m very excited about this and I think is going to be great for all of us and, I hope, for the communities we’ll try to help. We’ve been receiving so much from them and it is time to give a bit back to them.

Well, this is all by now, but I’ll come back here to tell you all our progress and to share knowledge and experiences.

Thank you folks for read this boring long post and:

Happy Hacking! ;-)

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Posted in emergya, guadalinex, personal | 13 Comments »

Python helps you with your running sessions

August 12th, 2009 by juanje

Time back I was trying parkour, but I got some old injures that didn’t let me practice it properly. Also there was too much sedentary life… I needed to start from the beginning. I needed to create a good baseline for my training.

I also started of doing some rock climbing again. Sport that I really love :-)

I was gaining some strength and I could doing again some pull ups and some boulders. But I found, as I did before with the parkour that I needed some stamina.

I also realized that parkour is a way to run, so I should be able to run. And I wasn’t…

So I’ve decided to start to run. I used to do it time ago when I got into the university. And I liked to be a bit methodical, so I could see the progress and train better. So I decided to buy a good pair of running shoes, a pulsometer and chrono. Then I realized that things have changed since I was at the university and there are a lot of stuff and software to help you with your training.

But the most of the applications I found weren’t open source and neither for Linux. Very fancy stuff like Ipod+Nike , but nothing for Linux. Nothing until I found Pytrainer !!! :-)

Pytrainers years stats

Pytrainer's years stats

This is a Python + Gtk+ application oriented to track your sessions and show you your progress. It’s for running, bike and mountain bike, but I think you can add other sports alike those ones.

It has also plugins for that fancy Ipod+Nike system and others. It seems to me a really cool stuff. I have to test it more, but I hope someone with more running training skills than me, test it and give me (and to the developers ;-) ) some feedback.

Well, let’s run! :-P

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Posted in climb, gnome, parkour, personal | 8 Comments »

i18n bugs are important too

July 27th, 2009 by juanje

I’m Spanish speaker and my English level (as the most of Spaniards) was very bad before I went to Ireland few months for learning English. I was kind of lucky because I could have some extra English lessons at the school and they taught me some technical English at the university, although I couldn’t understand well complicated and technical papers.

I think that this is the typical profile of a computer science student in Spain. Of course, there are a lot of exceptions, but I guess you got the idea.

Well, but the Guadalinex/GNU/LinEx/Molinux/Lliurex/Ubuntu’s users haven’t that profile at all. They usually don’t know any English at all. Most of them (we are talking of thousands of users) are children at schools, people who hadn’t got any contact with computers before using those distributions and people who know the typical few words in English to ask for directions on London or to ask for a pint in an Irish pub…

The most of our problems are about things we (developers) think are very intuitive but they don’t understand well. Even when they are explained in their own mother tongue…

Now let’s say that this people having a problem with their computers, with some desktop application. The most of the warnings and error messages are scary for them. Sometimes they say something useful, but the most of the time people with almost no computer skills or experience get scared and they stop doing what they were doing and think that the “machine” is broken… or whatever….

And now let’s see the same scenario, but with the warning and errors messages in a language they don’t understand… But this is not much better to have an option at the UI you don’t understand. They don’t use it, because they don’t know what is that about and to avoid breaking something…

If they don’t understand options or features, it’s like don’t having them, but also it gives to the user some feeling of “I can break something“.

Ok, this is not always like that. This is the worst scenario. But, trust me, this happen to the most of our users. I also could bet that this happen to non-English speaker users from any country.

All this introduction and explanation is to say: Please developers and triagers, don’t put internationalization (i18n) or localization (l10n) bugs as “Importance: low“.

We are pushing really hard to get the free desktops to the end users, to the schools, to the (non-technical) professionals and we need to have software well translated for that. But the i18n and l10n bugs are worst of having some strings untranslated.
Strings untranslated in one language are bad, but it’s easy to find people for translating those strings than find someone to understand the app’s code, the gettext and i18n stuff and then fix the code.

I think the developers need to be aware of the importance of fixing those bugs and what amount of users won’t use their cool features if they can’t be translated.

I don’t say those bugs are the most important ones, but sure they are not “Importance: low“…

I’ve seen to change this priority level in Ubuntu and GNOME, but I’m sure this is happening in more projects.

I would like to say one more thing, this time, just for Ubuntu. By now, there is no official tag on Launchpad for i18n or l10n bugs. I would like to ask you that if you report, triage, or find one of those kind of bugs and they have not this king of tags, to add it.

  • i18n: For those bugs about something broken in the application that makes the translations not being working, or strings not included at the translations templates (not marked for translations).
  • l10n: This is a localisation issue. Including errors in localisations, typos, etc. Adding locations and weather stations is one example. Correcting date and time formats is another.

In those cases, will be desirable you follow the Ubuntu Translations guidelines:

All translations (internationalization or localization) issues should be filled against the Ubuntu Translations (ubuntu-translations) project. From there the bugs will be triaged and assigned to the right persons and package.

You can also tag the bug with “l10n” or “i18n”.

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of problems that should be filled against an Ubuntu Translations Project (ubuntu-translations):

  • if a string from the application is not available for translation in Launchpad Translations
  • if an application from Ubuntu main repository is not available for translation in Launchpad Translations
  • if a translation made in Launchpad Translations is not updated in the Ubuntu Language Packs
  • a source package has the wrong (or inconsistent) translation domain
  • you find a duplicate template
  • a template/translation is no longer used in Ubuntu and should be deleted from Ubuntu Launchpad Translations
  • errors in spellcheckers or language support

You can find these guidelines and much more useful info at the Ubuntu Translations’ wiki.

Well, I hope this makes sense to someone and more developers get aware of the importance of i18n/l10n bugs.

See you soon and happy hacking! ;-)

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Posted in distros, gnome, guadalinex | 6 Comments »

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