Category: General

16/January/2004

GNOME DB and Planner

Alvaro del Castillo has finally committed to CVS his work on replacing
direct libpq (PostgreSQL library) usage with libgda, which will make
planner able to access any RDBMS supported by libgda. All code is in
GNOME
CVS.

15/January/2004

GNOME Network

I forgot
yesterday
to mention the Personal Web Server tool (sorry
à lvaro).
It was a bit intentional, since it needs a lot of love. What I myself
want for that tool is to be a generic file sharing tool, able to
use any protocol available on the machine (HTTP, FTP, NFS, SMB, NCP),
and I would also like it to be better integrated in the desktop.

For that integration, I think the best thing would be to make it an
extension to Nautilus, so a ‘Share’ menu item shows up in the Nautilus
context menu for folders. Also, a new properties page would allow
the user to share the selected folder via any of the supported
protocols.

14/January/2004

GNOME Network

I have been thinking for some days about GNOME Network’s reorganization, based
on the comments given when it was proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.6, and
today, talking with
Germán,
we decided to go ahead and follow some of the advices given, if all contributors
agree and regardless of whether GNOME Network is accepted in 2.6 or not.

The plan will include, if accepted, the separation of the tools in their own
CVS modules, with their own releases and maintainers. This will avoid having
GNOME Network being a giant, unmaintainable module. The separation would be as
outlined below:

  • The desktop sharing would be in gnome-desktop-sharing module.
  • The network information tool would be in gnome-netinfo, where we could
    put also, if Mark agrees, the
    network
    status applet    .
  • The remote shell client could even disappear, if its functionality (connect
    to remote shells via SSH/Telnet) is moved to GNOME Terminal, as was also
    suggested. There could be a “Connect to Server” item in GNOME
    Terminal’s menu that opened a dialog similar to the current remote shell
    client’s window. This (integrating it into GNOME Terminal) avoids having
    two applications for almost the same thing (opening shells).
  • The remote desktop client might need some thoughts, to be better integrated
    into the desktop. Right now, it’s a copy of the Microsoft’s terminal services
    client. I’m not sure how that integration could be done, maybe via the
    network:// virtual module, or maybe in another way yet to discover…

In any case, I think we should also concentrate on adding networking capabilities to
existing applications, instead of writing new applications for every single
feature we want. In this way, libgnetwork is a pretty good idea, once we integrate
(I hope I had more time 🙁 the Zeroconf stuff on it, and make applications like
Galeon, Epiphany, Nautilus, etc, use it to do service discoveries.

Mars

Nice photo
from Mars, taken by
NASA‘s Spirit. Let’s hope
it finds British’s Beagle 2 pod, lost while landing into Mars last December.

10/January/2004

Mark

I was hoping we would not have to write sad blog entries anymore, at least in
a long time, but just read about Mark’s passing away 🙁 I did never meet him
in person, and just talked a few times with him on IRC, email, but still am
really sorry for his friends and family.

I hope this is the last entry of this kind I have to write ever.

GNOME-DB

Lots of patches from Jon to add missing stuff to the ODBC provider, which was
a bit abandoned. Very nice to have this set of patches coming in, to add
a new fully-supported provider.

9/January/2004

Evolution

I switched yesterday to use Evolution 1.5 full time. I had a few crashes right
after starting it, so I was starting to think on moving back to 1.4 while I
found the crashes were due to some compilation problems. So, did a fresh
build and am now happily using Evolution HEAD for mail, and so far it’s working
pretty well.

7/January/2004

SPAM

The GNOME-DB mailing list seems to be loved by spammers lately, since I have
been discarding like 30/35 messages per day in the last few days. Of course,
all of them were spam, except one.

5/January/2004

New GNOME user

My brother Jorge had recently his laptop, running WinXP, not booting
anymore. It just froze on the WinXP startup screen. I had a look, booted
from a Debian CD, and everything seemed ok, so he brought the laptop
back to the shop, where he was told that the computer had 70 virii!!!
I don’t know if that’s really true, but the fact that he had unwanted
stuff installed, and that the guy in the shop fixed it, is true.

So, as he’s seen, and used, several times my Linux laptop, he decided
he wants to put that on his laptop. He’ll be coming home one of these
days for me to install it for him, and, of course, he’ll be running
GNOME.

4/January/2004

Mars

“A traveling robotic geologist from NASA has landed on Mars and returned
stunning
images of the area around its landing site in Gusev Crater”.

No ski

I woke up this morning at 7AM to go skiing, but there were so many people
(with traffic jams in the road to Panticosa/Formigal) that we had to turn
round. It seems it’s not a good idea to go there during the Christmas
holidays. We could at least take some pictures of the surrounding mountains
and lakes:






But we took advantage of the early get up to visit Isaba, in the north of
Navarra.
It was plenty of snow, as can be seen in the road to the Belagua Peak:





Too much snow, that prevented the road to be opened, which would have allowed us
to go to La Pierre
Saint Martin, in France, for skiing a little bit. But we still had a lot
of fun with the snow:




2/January/2004

GNOME-DB

Huge patch
from Laurent to HIGify the gnome-database-properties tool, part
of libgnomedb.

Planet GNOME

Woohoo, Carlos now has
a blog! Go Carlos Go!

Holidays

Back from a very good week of vacation, in
London
for 4 days, visiting my sister and my two nieces, and 3 days in
Madrid,
visiting my mother and some friends, without switching the computer on a single
time. So, it’s been quite relaxing and funny, specially the days I spent with my two nieces,
Erika, 5 years old, and Jessica, 3:





They are so sweet and love me so much that they didn’t let me leave them to
make a short visit to Michael.
It would have been really nice to meet Michael’s wife and daughter, but my nieces didn’t
want their Tío Rodri to leave them 🙂 It was, as always, really
sad when we left my sister’s and them, since we are not going to see them again for,
at least, a couple of months 🙁 I wish they lived in Spain.