JCCad
Deckard, a long-time GNOME
Hispano member, just uploaded to GNOME
CVS his CAD project, called JCCad. It’s still
a work in progress (and hence its addition to GNOME CVS, so that it gets more
visibility) but looks promising for filling up the gap in the CAD area.
Screenshots here.
Extremadura
Extremadura’s commitment to Free Software and new technologies is getting more
and more consequences, like INDRA
‘s announcement
of the creation of a software factory in Badajoz (INDRA is one of the biggest
outsourcing companies in Spain). This will create many employment vacancies for the people
in Extremadura, who won’t have, if companies continue creating branches there, to migrate
to Madrid or Barcelona.
GUADEC-ES
I’m now back from Almendralejo where the GUADEC-ES
has been held this last weekend. The short summary is: “wow, amazing”, for
more details, read on.
There were much more assistants to the conference than what was initially expected,
and talks were about many topics, mainly around hacking and deployment of GNOME
over Extremadura and other places. That deployment in Extremadura is simply
amazing, making Extremadura the promised land for us, GNOME people. First of all,
everyone is using GNOME, includings kids, teachers, polititians.
Secondly, it
was amazing to see polititians (Almendralejo’s Mayor, for instance) talk about
Free Software and GNOME without mistakes, proving that they knew what they were
talking about. One of the first talks was about that deployment, which is getting
new technologies and Internet access to all schools in Extremadura, including the
ones in small villages. Extremadura is clearly taking the lead in GNOME and Linux
deployment, so we should really take advantage of that. We’ve got around
200,000 beta testers there, so some way for getting feedback from all those
people (to be many more as the deployment continues) might be needed. Of course, we don’t want
all of them filing bugs and asking questions on IRC, but you get the idea. I
mentioned this in my talk, but didn’t get any answer, idea, or suggestion from the
crowd, but I’ll continue trying.
As always, lying around with the GNOME
Hispano people has been the funniest thing of the trip to Almendralejo.
Jokes and hacking is what is around all the time, so you end up finding yourself
at 3 AM, a bit drunk, and running to the bed for waking up in the morning at 8 AM.
Luckily I’m a bit more responsible than some of the other people (I won’t mention
names, but you know who you are 🙂 that were getting to bed with the first sun rays.
I was exhausted sleeping 4/5 hours per day, so imagine sleeping 2/3.
Of course, the faces and voices in the morning were the proof to know who had gone
to sleep early and who didn’t.
It was also pretty funny how the (our own local) flamebait about the Mono/Java debate
turned into a lot of jokes that made us laugh like crazy. We didn’t come to any conclusion,
like the people at Planet GNOME, but we laughed a lot at least.
Mérida
Since the conference finished on Sunday at 16:00, Yolanda and I decided to stay
Sunday’s night at Mérida (Emerita Augusta, home of Russel Crowe
in Gladiator), since we were pretty tired (due to Almendralejo’s life at night) and
had 700 kms to drive home, and given the
latest
tragedies, we didn’t want to take the risk of an accident. So, we did a bit
of sightseeing to find an amazing city, plenty of roman vestiges.
Royal Wedding
And, forgot to say, thanks to the GUADEC-ES in Almendralejo, we missed the bloody
royal wedding!
GUADEC-ES
Heading in a few hours to Almendralejo, Extremadura (a.k.a. GNOME-land), for the
GUADEC-ES. Most of
the Spanish GNOMErs are attending, so it’s gonna be a lot of fun. There are
going to be normal talks, tutorials and involvement sessions, that is, sessions
where we’ll try to get people to start hacking on GNOME projects. Not sure yet
how all that is organized, so we’ll see how it comes out, but at least it looks
promising.
Software patents
The European
Council approved software patents in Europe, which is very bad news,
although still waiting what the real consequences of this are. It seems the voting
still needs to come through the European parlament, so there is still a chance for
us.
The only vote against the directive came from Spain, which is coherent with what the
party currently in the government has been doing (LinEx
in Extremadura for instance). It is the first time in my life I feel proud
of polititians, even if the vote against the directive won’t be of much use.
Innovation in other OS’es
Seems our competition is willing for us to win the race. After Longhorn being delayed until
2006, now Apple says it will slow
pace of Mac OS X tweaks. It’s clear, they want us to be better than them.
Software patents
There are today, as we speak, many demonstrations
against software patents in Spain (and I guess other countries in Europe), an
issue that, unfortunately, is still unresolved here in Europe. I really appreciate
the efforts from the people at Proinnova
(and other similar European groups fighting against software patents) for all the
work they are doing to defend us from this threat.
Also worthy to note is that given that elections for the European Parlament are taking
place in June in all the EU countries, people going to vote should check the different
parties’ positions related to software patents. So far, and thanks to some people from
Hispalinux, it’s been confirmed
that Izquierda
Unida is against software patents. I’ll post more information on other parties as
soon as I get it, so that nobody can blame me for asking the vote for a single party.
Vote to whomever you want, but check they are going to fight against software patents first.
New mailman version
I’m so glad mail.gnome.org now has a new version of Mailman that I needed to say
thanks publicly to whomever did the upgrade. I’ve switched from having to deal
with 60/70 (mostly) spam messages per mailing list I manage, to only having like
3 or 4 per list, thanks to the filters you can set up, and thus discard all messages
coming from given addresses. My life as a mailing list admin is now much better
than before.
Bad News (again 🙁
I just got the bad news about Manuel
(aka as Ranty) and Andrés’s death, two people from the Free Software Community in
Spain, on a car crash while coming back from a conference in Valencia. I knew personally
Ranty (Debian developer and kernel hacker), and even was with him just a few weeks ago in
Salamanca. Rest in peace both of you.
Mono
Very happy to see beta
1 of Mono 1.0 released. Kudos to the Mono team.