Month: June 2004

2004, a Europe odissey

After all my odissey through Europe (Peralta/Barcelona/Amsterdam/Oslo and, finally,
Kristiansand), I’m now in Norway for the GUADEC. I expended yesterday a few hours, while
waiting for Jakub
and Radek, I had some
sightseeing in Oslo. All photos here.

Boat trip in Kristiansand

We were invited this afternoon to a boat trip around the Kristiansand coast. It was
really funny to see a boat plenty of hackers:

And of course, Rupert and Toronbolo:

Microsoft

Seems Microsoft is going to sue Sergio Amadeu, the person responsible of
the deployment of Free Software in Brazil, to try to intimidate the
Brazilian government after their decision to deploy Free Software all
over the country. The Brazilian people have set up an online
petition to try to fight against it (in Portuguese, sorry). Microsoft
says the Brazilian government’s decision is wrong for the country which is
“getting thus the wrong direction“.

GVADEC

I’ve now my tickets to Norway confirmed. It’s gonna be a lot of fun, since
I’ve got to go, first, to Barcelona to take the plane, then to Amsterdam,
then to Oslo, and then, by train I guess, to Kristiansand. I’m gonna feel
like Willie Fog, with so many scales.

I’ve been looking for information on Norway in the last few days, and have found a few interesting
things:

• SUPER-I,
  a super hero from the region of Kirkenes (in Norwegian Lapland) whose duty is
  to assist poor tourists in buying tickets and finding the nice tourist places.

  
  

• Of course, Norway is the land of the trolls,
  as well as the land of the vikings, who
  ravaged the coasts of northwest Europe from the 8th to the 11th century. Don’t worry, since
  it seems norwegians now are much more peaceful and nice.
• Lots of links about Kristiansand.
• Nearly 70%
  of Norway is uninhabitable and covered by mountains, glaciers, moors, and rivers.
• Norway is being investigated
  by the CIA!

Estudiantes

Estudiantes lost
today the ACB (Spanish
basketball league) final. The dream lasted till the last minute (they needed to play
till the 5th game in a series to the best-of-5), but anyway, all the people that
support Estudiantes (one of the historic basketball teams in Spain) we really enjoyed
the final. Now the prize is, apart from being 2nd for the first time in history,
playing the Euroleague
next year.

GNOME Nettool

After some delay due to a few last-minute commits and a disagreement over it,
GNOME
Nettool 0.99.1 is finally available.

GNOME Nettool

Carlos García has just committed his changes to GNOME Nettool
that allows the devices information tab to display information on IPv6 addresses,
not only IPv4.

The interesting bit of this patch (apart from, of course, the IPv6 support) is the
way the GUI adapts itself to the system having 1 or more addresses per network
interface. Thus, if there’s only one, it just displays a label with that address;
if there’s more than one, it displays a tree view with all the addresses, as shown
in the screenshot above.

Wikipedia

As Mark points out,
Wikipedia is great. Not
only, as Mark said, does it have a huge amount of documents with a good quality, but
it also has that same amount/quality for many languages other than English.
I talked some time ago with some friends about doing a GNOME frontend to it (a
gnome-pedia application), although I don’t know if they
offer a XML-RPC (or similar) interface. Does anyone know?

Prize

For the first time in my live, I’ve won a prize!! Well, not me, Yolanda, my girlfriend,
but I’ll take advantage of it. It is a travel, by plane, to Málaga
(in the south of Spain) and a night in a hotel there, all completely free. Woohoo! Now,
I need to buy lottery tickets, it’s my day of luck!

Sun

A couple of good news from Sun. First, still not confirmed though, the possibility
of open sourcing Java. Second, the opening of a
Linux Technology Center in Pamplona (close to where
I live), where
they’ll be promoting Linux-based projects and technologies all around
Navarra
(Navarra is the region where Pamplona is).