Month: September 2004

Video conferencing

Had a videoconference with my friends in Chile
yesterday.
Or rather, a voiceconference, since we disabled the video on my end due to speed
problems and to the lack of need for having my ugly face showing up all time.
That was not the only technical problem, since while I could perfectly see
the people on the other end (at the University
of Talca BTW), I could not listen to them. I had that same problem when
testing the connection the other day with Alejandro, but haven’t been
able to fix it. It’s weird, because Gnome
Meeting detected correctly all audio devices, but nothing came out of my
speakers.

Anyway, it was a great experience (it was indeed the first time I did a videoconference)
albeit the technical problems. I talked for about 2 hours about Bonobo and CORBA use
in GNOME. I hope I managed to explain things correctly, but I guess including sample
source code should have helped in making it understable for anyone (unlike my
other
CORBA/Bonobo talk).

Russia

Horrible thing what happened in Russia the other day. Again, another proof that we live
in a crazy world, and that nobody, not even children, are safe from the crazyness. All
my love goes to Russia these days.

Latex

Yolanda and I bought a mattress made in latex, convinced by some friends who told us
it was great and that they were happier since they had bought it. After a few months
beta testing the mattress, I finally came today to the conclusion that it’s a piece
of shit. I haven’t slept well for all that time, with regular pain in the back in the
morning, and regular wake ups at crazy times (like this morning, at 7 AM, after having
gone to bed at 3 AM, and believe me, I am a champion when it’s about sleeping). The pity
is that we gave away the good ol’ mattress where we slept like kings, so we are going
to have to buy a new one, fortunately much more cheaper than the latex one.

So, conclusion: if you want latex in your life, make sure you use it only for document
processing, or, as Ismael pointed
out on IRC, for sex accessories.

Open Source Games

Just read OS News’ article
about not enough open source games, and, what a coincidence, yesterday Juan Nieto,
from La Rioja LUG, announced version 0.2
of his Pelota game project,
written in Python, and, of course, open source. Isn’t this original enough? I don’t think there
are Pelota games out there, not even in the proprietary market, so again, Free Software
also innovates!

Compare this screenshot with real
photos of the game.