Summer
It’s been too hot lately over here, so I’ve been too lazy to do anything apart
from real work, but today it’s less hot and energy is coming back to me. Let’s hope
temperatures continue going down in the next few days… John Fleck, what’s the
forecast? 🙂
First of all, my congratulations to Lance Armstrong for winning his 6th Tour de France. I didn’t want
him to win, because it would mean beating our great Miguel Induráin, but now that he’s
won, we Spaniards must accept the truth: Lance is the best in history, and Miguel
is second. Not that this is bad, since we all enjoyed Miguel’s winnings (as Americans
do with Lance) while it lasted. What I didn’t like about this Tour was the Spanish
riders’ performance. Only Paco Mancebo and Carlos Sastre were seen with the best in
the important stages, and Roberto Heras, Iban Mayo, Haymar Zubeldia, Aitor González,
Óscar Sevilla, all failed, either by abandoning or by losing a lot of time in
every important stage. It was a bit hard to see all of them fail, since we were
used in the last years to see the Spanish riders always in front, with the permission
of Lance, of course. Anyway, let’s hope they are all ok for La Vuelta.
GNOME
On the GNOME front, many things that I haven’t blogged about:
-
Eventuality:
I’ve been for some time now thinking about a scripting framework for the GNOME desktop
to adopt. I didn’t go past the thinking process, but I was always thinking on GNOME
terms, until I found about Eventuality, a FreeDesktop.org
initiative for creating a “DBUS based framework for creating and flexible
scheduling of arbitrary “actions” performed by conforming applications“.
That is, looks like a replacement forcron, but it’s much more.
Those actions it talks about are actions installed by specific applications, so, for
instance, Evolution could install aSendMailaction. Those
actions, initially thought for being ran on scheduled times, could also be used
for scripting on the user side. There needs to be just a nice way for users to
run/write their scripts. We could even avoid having the user to write a single line
of code by doing something similar to Apple’s
Automator, where you have an application that queries the system for
installed actions and their arguments, and builds a GUI to query the user for the
arguments’ values. -
GNOME Pedia: I asked
some weeks ago about how to access the Wikipedia from a GNOME
application. I got several answers, even from some of the Wikipedia developers telling
me that there is no such XML-RPC interface yet, but that one could be built if there
was some interest. I also got mails from some people interested in helping in writing
such GNOME Pedia application, so I started the other day writing the skeleton for the
application (in C#) and have now a main window for it!!! I plan to continue working
on it as time permits without moving it to a public CVS until it does something else
than displaying a window, but if someone is interested in starting helping right now,
please drop me a line and I’ll upload the sources to GNOME CVS.