GNOME events

This is being a very GNOME year for me. After some time of the events I’ve attended to an GNOME Hispano meeting, an GNOME Marketing Hackfest, the GUADEC Hispana, the GUADEC and the next week I’m going to attend the GNOME Accesibility Hackfest.

I’ve been a bit lazy with the blog but I’ve been spending my time helping the awesome GNOME a11y team with is making big progress and a huge effort to keep the project alive and healthy.

I’m looking forward to meet all the enthusiastic a11y developer than are going to come to Seville the next week 🙂

Well, and of course, to Joanmarie that comes before and is being so patient (sometimes :-P) with me  😉

Great GNOME Hackers meeting

As I told the last time, this weekend was the GNOME Hispano meeting at Seville and was one of the best I remember.

I didn’t expect to have so many people here. The meeting was mostly improvised and with just few weeks of preparation, but we had hackers from many different places of Spain. I think the session with more people had over 30 attenders.

The people didn’t fit on the room so they were looking through the windows. It was cool 🙂

People didn't fit inside the room
People didn't fit inside the room

We even had Rodrigo Moya teaching us about CouchDB and DesktopCouch from another region of Spain using an open tool for video/audio meetings. Rodrigo was great 🙂

There was more good sessions, but for me was especially interesting the explanation about how the new XInput2 and GTK+ works with multi-touch interfaces made by Carlos Garnacho. Another session especially instructive for me was the one about GObject Instrospection and Gjs by Lorenzo Gil (lgs).

I knew about GObject Instrospection, but I didn’t know it was so easy to add to the current libraries and all the adventages we all have with that. Really good stuff….

But we also have a meeting about how some companies from here (Emergya, Yaco, Onirica and Warp by now) are going to approach some projects about to improve the a11y on GNOME. The projects were asked by the Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society and we all want to be coordinated with upstream maintainers and GNOME goals, so it could be really useful.

This sesion was interesting and we are now in the same page to talk this week with the GNOME Foundation people at the Zaragoza Marketing Hackfest. I think these projects and the collaboration is being proposed is going to be really good for everybody: GNOME, our client and first of all, the users.

Let’s see 😉

GNOME Hispano’s meeting at Seville

This weekend (May 1th and 2th) at the Yaco’s offices at Seville (Spain) will hold the  next GNOME Hispano meeting.

Here will be a bunch of Spanish hackers talking about GNOME technologies and having fun.

The program is ready so we will talking about:

But we will be also talking about a11y on GNOME and how to coordinate the efforts we (Yaco and Emergya) are doing with some projects that are being paid by the Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society with the GNOME a11y developers.

Here’ll be also Dani García (danigm) a friend who was working with us at Emergya and now is working with our friends of Yaco, to show us his project TBO, a GTK+ app for designing and creating comic strips from GNOME. The idea is that he could present the project and the rest of hackers make sugestions so the project will be fully GNOME friendly.

This could be a good help for those who want to start their own project for GNOME and don’t know exactly how do it right.

Well, I hope to see a lot of good hackers and friends there.

See you on friday night for the warm up 😉

GNOME Hispano meeting and CISL09

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 😉

CISL09 and GNOME Hispano

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 😉

Great GNOME weekend in Madrid

Although I’m from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (the place where the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is going to be), now I’m living in Seville (also in Spain). Actually the past 10th of January I made my third year here 🙂

I was in Las Palmas for Xtmas and there I was with Alberto (good friend and GNOME hacker), who is living now in Dublin. He told me he was going to make a stop in Madrid, just before to come to Ireland to see some common friends and ask me to go as well.

I couldn’t resist. I was almost one year wanting to come back Madrid and see my friends there. I like so much visit Madrid. I think I couldn’t live there a long period, but I like to go there some times.

Well, this past weekend (the one when people gone crazy because snow in Madrid, which didn’t happen sine long time ago) I went to Madrid and I met there with a good group of good friends and historical Free Software people from of the Spanish community.

People as Alberto Ruíz (a.k.a. arc), Jesús Climent (a.k.a. data), Roberto Majadas (a.k.a. telemaco), Carlos Garnacho (a.k.a. garnacho), Zazu Vega and María Majadas.

Free Software / Open Source friends
Free Software / Open Source friends

That was a very good weekend. Lots of fun and even some geeks conversations about GNOME, GTK, Vala, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, DVCS and much more 🙂

Thanks guys! 🙂

My first GNOME post

Hi!

This is my first entry on this blog and the first entry on any blog from some time.

But I’m very exciting because this is my first post on my new GNOME blog and I just got it as well as my @gnome.org.

For me this is very important thing, because I’m GNOME user from 2000 or so but I got into the Hispanic GNOME community almost from the same time. Gnome-Hispano was my first step into the FLOSS world and GNOME was the project in which I was born as a wannabe_free_software_developer.

I still remember when I meet with telemaco, alo, acs, rodrigo, garnacho and some others gnome devs. They become soon very good friends and gave me the tails to follow for growing as a developer.

At least, at the beginning, I was more into the philosophic part of the FLOSS thing and GNOME community inspired me.

I’m still proud of my first live distro (based on Debian and some script from Knoppix) Gnome-live. This distro was a just 180 Mb live CD with a full functional GNOME Spanish desktop. We (Gnome-Hispano) used it to show the (at least, the Hispanic one) world how powerful but still easy was Linux.
I’m talking about a distro from 2001…

I remember lot of friends and friends of other people who tried it and tested the beauty and easiness of a clean and fancy desktop. That gave me great moments 🙂

OK, GNOME wasn’t on that time so nice, easy, powerful, eye-candy and so on as nowadays is. And even now is not that good. But for the concept people had on that time of Linux world, was fair enough, I think.

Although I was more into the distro world, I liked to program or translate for GNOME. But not much as I had wished. So now I’ll try to fix this. I really like to collaborate more in GNOME.

Anyways, I got some things in mind and I hope to have time (the work and some minimal social life don’t give me so much spare time) for approach them.
We’ll see…

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.