Month: March 2006

III GUADEC-ES CFP

As you all should know, GUADEC-ES this year is going to be part of the warm-up weekend in GUADEC, next June in Vilanova i la Geltrú. As part of it, we are doing a Call For Papers, as previous years for GUADEC-ES. So if you want to give a talk, please send your papers.

Famous "friends"

Just watched (by coincidence, of course) a guy called Colate on a gossip-like TV program, a guy that is famous because of having romances with other famous people which, in turn, are famous for having romances with other famous people, and so on. Nothing strange, lots of this kind of people here in Spain, except that that guy went to the same school as I did! So, when I saw him, I couldn’t stand it, and just had a terrible laugh, specially since he’s being called on TV and other media with the same alias we used to call him when we were children (his name is Nicolás, Colate is just his little boy’s alias). And the laugh became unstandable when he said he wanted to work on TV, on gossip-like programs, I guess.

Not sure if, given I went to the same school, I might suffer from the same stupidity. At least I don’t show up on TV with my little boy’s alias, and no romances with famous people. At least not yet :)

GNOME meeting in Madrid

Thanks to the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, we are having another GNOME meeting on the 20th/21st of April, in Móstoles, near Madrid. This is in the spirit of the previous hackers meetings from our friends from Chile and the ones already done in Spain. But, due to the biggest audience there is in Madrid (compared to Pamplona or Zaragoza, where some previous meetings were held), it will probably include more than just developers. So, we are talking about having different sets of tracks, one for experienced hackers, with informal speed talks and tutorials, one for new developers, and one for users.

In any case, the meeting will be what the attendees want, so please if you plan to attend, help us designing the talks/tutorials/presentations.

ETA cease-fire?

I just read this, a communication from the terrorist group ETA, saying they’ll start a cease-fire on March 24th. Wow! while of course we can’t believe 100% what a terrorist group says (they’ve declared cease-fires other times before, but then continued killing), this seems to be what we all were expecting in the last few months. Not sure how it will end up, but I think there is lots of hope now to see the terrorist violence end up with this, replaced with political debate.

Of course, the political debate, as everything related to politics here in Spain, will be too violent also, but at least only via words, not killings, kidnappings, bombs or blackmailing. So, yeah, seems good news are on the horizon for Spain and, specially, the Basque country.

Motos

After many years without having my own motorbike, I’m now decided to buy one, and looking into the offer for 125 c.c., which, due to some changes in the Spanish legislation (which allows people with car driving license to drive

  • Derbi GPR 125 Nude: this is a “streetfighter”, which is a competition bike with some changes to make the driving more comfortable.
  • Derbi Senda R 125:
  • Honda XR 125L:

    • I am looking for Trail bikes, so that I can use it both on the road and on paths, but the Derbi GPR 125 Nude catched my eye. It’s indeed quite beautiful, and the reviews I’ve read talk quite well about it. The problem with it is that you can only use it on the roads.

    I’ve seen also a few others, although right now they’re low on the list:

    Anyone can give any advise?

    Improving startup time

    Like Federico says, improving startup time is like peeling potatoes, there is not a single point of failure, just an addition of small/big slow places.

    So, one of the things not yet committed is the use of a single GConfClient for the whole life of the gnome-session process (instead of calling gconf_client_get_default/g_object_unref everytime it’s used). The patch represents a small gain, but still a gain, which adds to the improvement. It’s got some test from Novell people, but it would be good if people could test it and confirm it’s ok, so that it can be put into 2.14.1.

    Photos

    I’ve been so busy that I totally forgot about the photos I took the last two weekends. The first one, we went to Panticosa, a ski resort in the Pyrenees, with such a bad luck that the first day it was raining, and that made us being so wet after 2/3 hours that we had to leave. The 2nd day it was worst, the resort was closed due to very high winds :( But anyway, I took some nice photos:


    The next weekend, we woke up at 7 AM on Sunday to go again for some skiing action, and while leaving my place, we saw the village had suffered from floods during the night.

    In case things got worse (which was expected), we just turned back and missed another day of skiing :( Next weekend we’ll do another try, maybe one of the last, since temperatures are starting to go up, and skiing in melting snow is not a very good experience. So I guess we have just 2/3 weeks left for this season :(

    Alo’s children grow quick

    I was reading my newsfeeds in liferea and started seeing a lot of entries from alo, quite surprised of how many entries in a row he had posted and how much his English had improved. I even noticed some change in his personality in all these posts. But suddenly I got to this one, and at that moment I even fall of the chair! Alo with 2 children, and I didn’t know!

    So, yeah, planet.gnome.org needs a fix, Alo denied the news, he has no children yet and his English is good, but not so much.