Month: January 2004

Mars

From NASA’s
bulletin: “Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove down a
reinforced fabric ramp at the front of its lander platform and onto the soil
of Mars’ Meridiani Planum this morning“.

“Pelota” Game

I went this afternoon to a Pelota
game (this is the most popular sport in the Basque country, of course, after football),
and I had some good photos:

New car

I finally got my new
car on Thursday. In the morning, I had this:

Since then, I am a happy owner of this:

Mars

Opportunity, the 2nd of the rovers recently sent to Mars by NASA, has landed
safely on Mars: “NASA’s Opportunity rover returned the first
pictures of its landing site early today, revealing a surreal, dark
landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars“.

The photo is here.

GNOME-DB

Just completed another CVS merging, by putting the never released
GDA
Evolution provider into libgnomedb.
This provider, for those who don’t know, offers a data source that allows access
to Evolution’s contacts, calendar and tasks. It still uses the old Evolution API,
but will be converting to the new one soon.

GNOME Network

Finally started the splitting of GNOME Network, with a CVS module for
each tool. I’ve started with GNOME
Netinfo, the network information tool. Ã lvaro PeÃ&plusmm;a is starting
to work in the second iteration of the file sharing tool, now better integrated
into the desktop itself. It won’t be a separated tool, but a set of Nautilus
extensions to allow sharing files via many protocols. So far, only HTTP via Apache
(using the ~/public_html), but will be extended to
work with other web servers (like Cherokee)
and other network services, like NFS, SMB, NCP, FTP, etc. A screenshot of what
à lvaro has done so far is here;
the source code itself is in GNOME
CVS.

Heavy Metal

Just finished watching “Heavy Metal, F.A.K.K. 2”, the second part
of “Heavy Metal”, a very good comic-like cartoon movie, for adults. As the
first part, good music and fantastic fightings and animations. I had been
for years willing to watch again the first part, so it’s been great to watch
the second one, and even better to see that its end leaves everything open
for a third part.

More planets discovered

Jesús Climent has set up Planeta
Hispalinux, a new planet inhabited by the people from
Hispalinux, the
Spanish main LUG.

GNOME DB and Planner

Alvaro del Castillo has finally committed to CVS his work on replacing
direct libpq (PostgreSQL library) usage with libgda, which will make
planner able to access any RDBMS supported by libgda. All code is in
GNOME
CVS.

GNOME Network

I forgot
yesterday
to mention the Personal Web Server tool (sorry
à lvaro).
It was a bit intentional, since it needs a lot of love. What I myself
want for that tool is to be a generic file sharing tool, able to
use any protocol available on the machine (HTTP, FTP, NFS, SMB, NCP),
and I would also like it to be better integrated in the desktop.

For that integration, I think the best thing would be to make it an
extension to Nautilus, so a ‘Share’ menu item shows up in the Nautilus
context menu for folders. Also, a new properties page would allow
the user to share the selected folder via any of the supported
protocols.

GNOME Network

I have been thinking for some days about GNOME Network’s reorganization, based
on the comments given when it was proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.6, and
today, talking with
Germán,
we decided to go ahead and follow some of the advices given, if all contributors
agree and regardless of whether GNOME Network is accepted in 2.6 or not.

The plan will include, if accepted, the separation of the tools in their own
CVS modules, with their own releases and maintainers. This will avoid having
GNOME Network being a giant, unmaintainable module. The separation would be as
outlined below:

• The desktop sharing would be in gnome-desktop-sharing module.
• The network information tool would be in gnome-netinfo, where we could
  put also, if Mark agrees, the
  network
  status applet.
• The remote shell client could even disappear, if its functionality (connect
  to remote shells via SSH/Telnet) is moved to GNOME Terminal, as was also
  suggested. There could be a “Connect to Server” item in GNOME
  Terminal’s menu that opened a dialog similar to the current remote shell
  client’s window. This (integrating it into GNOME Terminal) avoids having
  two applications for almost the same thing (opening shells).
• The remote desktop client might need some thoughts, to be better integrated
  into the desktop. Right now, it’s a copy of the Microsoft’s terminal services
  client. I’m not sure how that integration could be done, maybe via the
  network:// virtual module, or maybe in another way yet to discover…

In any case, I think we should also concentrate on adding networking capabilities to
existing applications, instead of writing new applications for every single
feature we want. In this way, libgnetwork is a pretty good idea, once we integrate
(I hope I had more time the Zeroconf stuff on it, and make applications like
Galeon, Epiphany, Nautilus, etc, use it to do service discoveries.

Mars

Nice photo
from Mars, taken by
NASA‘s Spirit. Let’s hope
it finds British’s Beagle 2 pod, lost while landing into Mars last December.

Mark

I was hoping we would not have to write sad blog entries anymore, at least in
a long time, but just read about Mark’s passing away I did never meet him
in person, and just talked a few times with him on IRC, email, but still am
really sorry for his friends and family.

I hope this is the last entry of this kind I have to write ever.

GNOME-DB

Lots of patches from Jon to add missing stuff to the ODBC provider, which was
a bit abandoned. Very nice to have this set of patches coming in, to add
a new fully-supported provider.

Evolution

I switched yesterday to use Evolution 1.5 full time. I had a few crashes right
after starting it, so I was starting to think on moving back to 1.4 while I
found the crashes were due to some compilation problems. So, did a fresh
build and am now happily using Evolution HEAD for mail, and so far it’s working
pretty well.

SPAM

The GNOME-DB mailing list seems to be loved by spammers lately, since I have
been discarding like 30/35 messages per day in the last few days. Of course,
all of them were spam, except one.