Category: General

Free Software

The local government in Andalucía (South of Spain, where Sevilla is) has
announced their
commitment to publish all software financed with public money under Free
Software licenses. Indeed good news, not only because of the announcement, but
because it is an official bill, not just a public declaration for the media. A good example
for other governments in the world.

GUADEC-ES

The II GUADEC-ES will take
place from May 19th to 21st, in A CoruÃ&plusmm;a, in the northwest of Spain. This is just
a week before the real GUADEC,
so anybody planning to do some travelling can have A CoruÃ&plusmm;a as one of the scales.

Unlucky weekend

I went last weekend to Formigal
for some ski action. We arrived on Saturday morning, to find the ski resort too crowded. We even
thought about not skiing at all and leaving it for the next day, but, fortunately, we decided to
try at least a little bit, since on Sunday, the resort was closed because of the wind, so
we couldn’t ski at all. We were going to come back home on Monday morning, but on Sunday evening
a big storm started, and on Monday, everything was under a huge layer of snow:

So, we did an inspection of the road before leaving, and after seeing many cars skating on
the ice and being left crossed in the road, we decided to not leave at all. So, we stayed
also Monday, trapped by the snow. Not that I don’t like to be trapped on a ski resort,
I wouldn’t mind being that way for a couple months, but of course, if I could ski, which
I couldn’t since the ski resort was again closed because of the wind. On Tuesday morning,
at last we could leave, to find out, listening to the local radio while leaving, that the
ski resort was being open as we were leaving 🙁 Also, before getting home, I realized I had lost
my cell phone 🙁

But the worst thing was the death of Mini, one of my Mum’s cats, at her 18 years of age 🙁
Here she is (on the right), along with Lulú, who also died a month ago, although much younger. Rest in
peace both of you.

GNOME-DB

Just released libgda
and libgnomedb 1.3.0, which includes, as main feature, the merge of libmergeant
code into libgnomedb, adding features like a data dictionary and
many widgets for easily modifying the data in the underlying databases.

Documentation of this new version is temporarily available here. Worth to check
is the widget
gallery. Kudos to Vivien (the person who did the merge)!

Cinema

Went yesterday to the cinema, to watch
Life is
a Miracle, by Emir
Kusturica, who is, as some people say, the best cinema director in
Europe and, maybe, in the world. Won’t comment on that, but indeed his films are
great. This one was 2 hours and 32 minutes long, and I didn’t really realize it
was that long, as good as it was. I really recommend it.

GNOME Office

Sven Herzberg (of
Criawips fame)
has started to put some effort in making the
libgnomeoffice
library, specifically on the plugin system it contains, which was intended
to be used by GNOME
Office applications, but which hasn’t been used yet (mainly because we
wanted the Gnumeric plugin system to be merged).

So, at least one point of my API
wishlists might start rolling. The idea of the plugin system in libgnomeoffice
is that there is a
plugin
loader to, of course, load the plugins, a
plugin
class to be implemented by plugins, and a set of generic interfaces that are
implemented in the plugins (like the
data
service interface).

Some work that needs to be done:

• Convert all services to interfaces, so they can be directly implemented by the
  GOfficePlugin class.
• Create new generic interfaces, and add new plugins implementing those interfaces.
  Although, as the intent is to have the plugin system generic enough to be used
  by any application, the interfaces need to be well thought and designed (the
  current ones are more a proof of concept than anything else).

So, if anyone is interested in all this work (which might one day, if successful, end up
in GTK/GLib/whatever), please contact GNOME
Office mailing list.

Photos

Just uploaded the photos I took during this past christmas.
As every year, a lot of good food and drink, but this time with snow, a lot of snow,
3 days with all plenty of snow! But the best thing was the Conan comics I bought

while in Madrid.
The 3 books contain the whole series of Conan and Belit, one of the most famous
series of Conan.

Titan

For anyone interested in watching live images from the Huygens
probe descent to Titan, you can do it at NASA TV.

GTK Enterprise/Extended/Foundation Classes

After seeing the GNOME 3.0
library wiki page, and the, possibly, plans for removing libgnome*,
and given the need there will ever be for specialized classes that don’t fit
into neither GLib nor GTK, I’ve started wondering about what I’ve called, with
little imagination, the GTK Enterprise/Extended/Foundation classes.
That is, yes, a new library, not like libgnome* where we put things that
don’t fit in other places, but as a set of high level classes for enterprise
class applications, that, making use of the platform libraries, provide an
easy way of creating professional applications. Things that could fit here are:

• An Application class, not for having an application’s main
  window, but as an easy way for applications to register services to be called
  from other applications. All enterprise/extended/foundation classes used
  by the application could be automatically registered as services via the
  Application class and thus make them available
  to external applications.
• Document management classes, to make it easier to write document-oriented
  code. This could be similar to the classes in Microsoft Office’s VBA. As mentioned,
  all classes of this kind used by the application could be registered, through
  the Application class, as services, and so we could
  write other applications that manage any document-oriented applications via
  these interfaces.
• A plugin system that makes it easy for applications to be extended by plugins.
  Also, a set of standard plugin interfaces, that can be used by any application.
• Related to this plugin system, there could be plugin interfaces for scripting,
  so that applications could support extension by scripts (like the one in
  the gnome-office
  CVS module).
• High level classes for accessing standard D-BUS services. Also, base classes
  for making the implementation of standard interfaces much easier than using
  D-BUS directly.

Not sure if this will be of interest to people, but I think having something of this
kind could help a lot in bringing new developers, since making full featured
applications, that can be easily extended and reused, would be a big win for
GTK/GNOME as a development platform.

Tragedies

Can’t believe how many deaths has caused the earthquake in South Asia, last time I heard
they were saying around 60,000 people, and that the number might still grow 🙁

GNOME-DB

Yesterday I finally released libgda
& libgnomedb 1.2, after a delay of some weeks. Unfortunately, lack of
time has prevented me from including a few patches that were waiting to be approved
in this release. These will go either to HEAD only (1.3.x development) or, if not too
huge, to the 1.2.x branch also.

Skiing

Yesterday went to Arette
(in the Atlantic Pyrenees region of France) for some skiing action, after having been waiting for
almost 8
months. I thought I had forgotten how to ski, but no, I hadn’t, so had a great
time, while using more features of my new camera. Yesterday, we recorded a few videos
of Yolanda and me skiing. They are great, only a couple of bugs:
first, neither Totem (with Xine backend) nor gstreamer does support the format recorded
by the camera (Video codec ‘motion jpeg format’), fortunately mplayer does; second, you can’t
use the optical zoom while recording video.

Finally recovered

Coming back from
vacation this time has been the hardest thing I’ve done in a long time.
Relaxing and disconnecting from daily life was so easy in Egypt that coming back to my normal
technology-driven life has been quite difficult. But now, at last, I am fully
recovered. This means that I’ll probably do, in the following days, all the things
that I should have done all this time, like releasing libgda and libgnomedb 1.2 and
GNOME
Nettool 1.0.

Three Wise Men

Thanks Fernando
for asking the Three Wise Men for a driving license for me. I was indeed going to start
going to the driving lessons, but now I’ll wait till January the 6th to see if the
Three Wise Men are really that wise and bring it for me, saving me a lot of money.
Also, since Fernando didn’t ask anything for himself, I’ll do it myself: Dear
Three Wise Men, bring Fernando a bigger house for doing parties.