Fer's blog

I’m doing some job interviews these days (exactly one per day), about 1-2 hours each one, and I’m enjoying them. I’m feeling like a handsome boy with 7 possible girlfriends 🙂

I am suitable for very technical jobs as well as consultory and commercial ones (the fact of having founded and directed a small company several years ago help to this) so in these interviews we talk about lot of different stuff.

Some things I’m learning for an interview:

• Don’t pronounce the work hacker at all. Human resources people don’t read ESR and it scares them
• Using the name miguel is always good 🙂

Here we are again. We are going to relase GNOME 2.8 in a week, so let’s party!. Please join one GNOME 2.8 party or organize it yourself.

Enjoy

Some time ago I read that hackers should try not to use the terminal for a time and doing every task via graphical applications. I’ve realized that I’m really used to do this when opening a file:

• click on the open dialog
• Go to a terminal and type locate -i mycoolfile
• copy that text
• go back to the file selector dialog
• press Control+L
• paste the full location

So if I want to use only UI apps, I need this patch for adding search to GtkFileChooser (it is against gtk-2-4 brach because I’m very lazy). It uses the gedit output window again, and I’m finding it very useful. Maybe the UI part is not good, but what do you think about the whole stuff?

Now olympic games are over. This is the official classification

And this is the way I think it should be, based on points: 3 points per gold, 2 per silver, and 1 per bronze:

End of summer in Madrid, I love it.

Clubbing: some pub crawling on Tuesday night… Sangr

After one month, I’m back from London. I really enjoied this one-full-month vacation, because I didn’t worked there at all. Basically I were going out and clubbing every night. Lot of wonderful bars and clubs. Also lot of quiet museum stuff and theatre.

But one of the best things in London summer are BBC promps: Jassons with the Bayeriche Rundfunks Orchestra playing Dvorak Strauss, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky music. Gidon Kremer, Maxim Vengerov and Joshua Bell three of the top world violinist in 5 days!. Anne Sofie von Otter, Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony, Gergiev conducting Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Alfred Brendel last concert…

One litte storie example of my relation with Britishs: when I were in the Royal Albert Hall for a prom concert, I asked someone in the staff for the right queue:

• Me: “Is this que Arena queue”
• Staff: Do you mean Arena? (Pronounced slowly as )
• Me: Oh, yes I’m very sorry but I am used to pronounce ancient greek and latin words in original pronounciation

The worst in London is coffee. They don’t know how to make coffee and all coffee shops are starbucks, costa and nero. Starbucks is the 5 adventages coffee:

• They don’t serve you, it’s self service
• They put the coffee in bad paper glasses
• The coffee itself is awful
• They don’t allow you smoking
• It’s stupidly expensive

Lot of book reading action: Pantaleon y las visitadoras by Mario Vargas Llosa (really, really great and funny), A man in full, Tom Wolfe (his second book after The bonfire of the vanities), Herodoto History. I also read a book that everyone is reading now (included those people not used to read) and everyone is saying that it’s exiting: The Da Vinci Code. But IMHO It’s boring, badly writen, with stupid and plain characters, predictable, incongrouent….

In the GNOME side, we are now in Beta 2, so I urgently relased gconf-editor and bug-buddy with two bugs fixed and lot of translation updates.

I’m moving to London today. Yesterday we had a farewel party at home. Every time I do a party at home, I say “at 21:00”, and then everyone is coming at 23:00, always. This one began a bit quiet, but finally it became more noisy, and finally it was one of the most amazing and funniest in the year.

In the morning I began to play with nautilus-cd-burner to get the media size of a blank disc, to be able to warn the user if current data doesn’t fit. First, I did it in the easy way: “cdrecord -atip”. Then I began to play with the dvd_plus_rw_utils, and got it via MMC commands (I think it has been the first time reading a hardware specification after I worked on the matrox stuff). Also implemented the read/write speed guessing via MMC. The patch was for n-c-b, but I also adapted it and sent to hal, proposing a new property:volume.disc.size.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!
Rudyard Kipling

This poem is the fauvorite of a man who was president of Spain. A man who payed 2M$ of the spanish national budget to an American lobby to do some diplomatic stuff, including pressures to get the American Congress gold medal for him