Category: General

Mono

As Mikael points
out, Mono
is being used by many people initially not related with GNOME for writing all
sorts of GTK/GNOME applications. I don’t really want to start the Java vs Mono debate, which
would be useless, but given the facts, that Mono is making the development of
GNOME applications much easier than using the C API, we really should start
looking at adopting it in some official way in the GNOME
project. Of course, I’m not talking about rewriting core parts in Mono, but
about trying to push it further as an everybody-can-use-it platform for developing
GNOME applications.

I myself know personally some people that tried to no avail to write GNOME applications
in C, and are now writing very nice ones in Mono, so really this is something to
think about.

EPlugin Hackfest

Come to #evolution for some hacking action!

2nd GNOME Hackers Meeting

After the success of the first
hackers meeting we had in Pamplona, the people at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (in Móstoles, near
Madrid)
have just
announced the 2nd of these hackers meetings, to take place on November 11th and
12th. A wiki
has been set up to contain all the information about this meeting. I hope to be able to
attend, but just in case, I already registered for attending.

Photos

Still learning with my new
camera by practising. This time, the photos are from Zaragoza,
where I went on October 12th (a holiday here in Spain) for some action, since the
city was in party because of the Fiestas del Pilar.

I was testing taking photos with the manual mode, so the photos are quite far from
perfect (too much light), but I think I am starting, little by little, to use all the
advanced features of the camera. I wanted to get into the Basílica del Pilar
for some nice photos of the inside, which is just splendid, but since October 12th is a
religious day in Zaragoza, there was too many people around, so didn’t even try to get
inside.

The other photos I took, along with others I took other days, are here

For examples of how many bad photos I’ve taken while practising, see here.
Those are photos I took during a basketball game (Lagun Aro Bilbao vs Pau Orthez of France
in Tudela). As you can see, almost none of the photos are good 🙁 At that time, I didn’t
know about the settings of my camera specific to taking snapshots of sports or moving
people. Now I think I know how to do it correctly, let’s see next time.

GNOME Book

Juanan Pereira, as he promised at the GNOME
hackers meeting in Pamplona, is now in charge of the GNOME development
book we started at GNOME
Hispano. As a result of his work, version
0.0.2 is now available, which includes lots of fixes on the Docbook formatting
and build system, as well as all the many additions we have added since version 0.0.1
was released (eons ago, don’t even remember).

This is a huge step for the book, since it mainly means it’s no longer abandoned,
and that with a bit of work from a few devoted people will make it be finished
at once. But there is still a lot of work to be done. The important parts of the
book are almost finished, and we decided to remove some not even started parts for
the 1.0 version, but the book really needs a lot of reviewers for fixing the
incorrect language uses, the not working sample code, etc. So, again, if you speak
Spanish and are interested in having a GNOME programming book in this language, please
join
the discussion list, Juanan really needs all possible help. Just as another
incentive (if working for having good books of your preferred Free Software project
is not enough), I’ll mention we plan to find a publisher once the book is finished.

GNOME-DB

Alan Knowles committed today his latest fixes for building libgda on Win32
platform.

GNOME-DB

Spent many hours this weekend reviewing pending patches and preparing the 1.1.99
release of libgda
and libgnomedb. This is just the last release we do before getting 1.2 out,
so you can consider we’re frozen now. 1.2 will be released in a couple of weeks.

Talks have started about what to do for 1.3/1.4, and the most interesting thing we’ve talked
about is the merging of part of libmergeant into libgda and libgnomedb. The main feature
that will add to our libraries is a data dictionary and a pretty good form widget. Also,
libgnomedb will probably suffer from a detailed review and many of the widgets that can
be replaced by normal GTK widgets will be removed, and so allow people to use normal
GTK widgets and bound data to them. Not sure how this will be done yet, but I guess it
would make libgnomedb a much more interesting library to use.

Aymara

Aymara is the name of a language,
spoken in many places around South America and by the old Incas many centuries ago, and
the name of a culture that came from the lake Titicaca and related to the city of
Tiwanaku (in current Bolivia). There are many misteries associated with that old
culture, like how they built the city of Tiwanaku without, as the official history says,
knowing the wheel.

I recently read a book (El Origen Perdido (the lost origin), by Matilde
Asensi) about a history related to the Aymara language and its relationships with modern
computer programming languages, so, since I remembered having heard something about it,
I did a search
on Google and found what I was looking for.
Seems the Aymara language has a structure that makes it perfect for the job of converting
from one language to any other, and is indeed being used in the Atamiri project, which is a
“system made up of a set of natural language processing programs with its lexical
and grammatical database, both designed to serve as support tool for a translation center,
to assist, not substitute the professional translator“. The role of the Aymara language
is explained very well on the Atamiri pages: “Because its linguistic model is based on
the formal language representation of the ancient Andean Aymara language, this achievement
in language engineering is very peculiar. Due to its algorithmic matricial structure, an
Aymara formal representation is useful as a syntactical bridge or interlingua, making it
possible to simultaneously translate from source language into various other target languages“.

This is indeed pretty peculiar, since this means Aymara is a language that in turn can be used
to “define” other languages, and so can be used as the bridge for translation. Peculiar
indeed if you take into account that the Aymara language was first spoken many centuries ago.

Photos

Took some nice photos last Saturday while showing
Peralta to my
brother and his grilfriend. One of them ended up being a very nice one:

Weekend

Spent all weekend with my brother Jorge,
who came to visit us with his girlfriend Rosalía. On Friday, after picking them up at the
bus station, we went to Aoiz, 25 kms far from Pamplona to
see our friend Santi playing with his band in a punk concert with several bands. Was pretty good, specially
Santi’s band (called KGI) and their song “Soy navarro, qué suerte tengo”
(I’m from Navarra, how lucky I am). A pity I didn’t bring the camera to take some photos,
although I guess it was better to not bring it, just in case I
lost it
again.

On Saturday, they slept till 2 PM, so I watched the
MotoGP races, which were great for the Spaniards, with Jorge Lorenzo and Sete Gibernau
winning their races, and à lvaro Bautista, Dani Pedrosa and the amazing Rubén Xaus also in
the podium. Then, we went in the evening for some sightseeing here in Peralta, and then
for dinner to Olite to see Uxué, Ana and company.

On Sunday, my brother and Rosalía again slept till too late, so we did nothing but having
a pizza in Calahorra and then getting them to get the bus back to Madrid.

I missed though Oscar
Freire’s gold medal in yesterday’s Cycling world championship. It seems it was a great
performance, not only from Freire himself, but from the whole Spanish team.

GNOME/Evolution Data Server

With the increased usage of Evolution
Data Server in all sort of desktop applications (see the recent nautilus-sendto project
by Roberto Majadas, or the now well known clock and contact lookup applets, apart,
of course, from GNOME Meeting
and Planner), I’ve
been thinking on the idea of extending E-D-S to be a centralized data storage for more kinds
of data. First thing that came to mind was project data, idea raised when talking with
à lvaro about
his work on Planner/Evolution integration. That would, first, allow other applications to
share project data, and, second, to better integrate mail, contacts and calendar with the
projects. That is, you could associate any mail, contact or calendar event to a given project
and thus have a way to organize all data related to the project together.

But the thing that thrills me the most right now is the addition of notes to E-D-S. This would
allow Tomboy,
the sticky notes panel applet, and any other notes application to easily share their
data. This past weekend, I had a look at the previous
conversations we had in the Evolution team. The conclusion on the VNOTE RFC was that
“The vNOTE object defined by the [IRMC] specifications was created because there was no
journal entry capability in the original Versit/IMC vCalendar v1.0 specification. However, with
adoption of the [ICAL] specification support for the vNOTE in the [IRMC] specification should be
deprecated, in favor of support for the VJOURNAL calendar component in [ICAL]“. So,
using VJOURNAL would make things quite easy, since we already should support that in the
current E-D-S calendar code.

News

Good news from
Venezuela, where the government have decided to move the public administration
to Free Software.