The Grupo de Programadores y Usuarios de Linux, based in the University of A Coruña, is organizing, from 23rd to 25th March 2007, the first joint GNOME/KDE meeting: GUADEMY, intended to bring together developers and users of both desktops and try to come with more and more collaboration ideas.
It is initially oriented to Spanish users and developers, but everyone is welcome.
The Control Center patch party went great, with over 50 unreviewed patches reviewed and, some of them applied. The result of that crazy party (it lasted all the weekend) comes to you in the form of the 2.17.5 release of the GNOME control center, the best release ever.
Most notorious thing is the new categories in the control center shell:
With searching integrated:
And lots of new small features, like new MIME type for theme packages, sound capplet improvements, etc. See the NEWS file for more information.
After all the hard work we’ve spent on the new control-center shell, there are though still lots of unreviewed patches in Bugzilla. And since feature freeze is approaching, we have decided to do a Control Center patch party tomorrow (Saturday 6th January) at 5PM UTC on the #control-center channel at irc.gnome.org.
Most important patches to discuss are the ones related with the shell categories (we need a gnome-menus maintainer to settle this down) and THE BUG, but there are lots more. So if you are interested in cleaning up all the rough edges, please join us.
I guess lots of people have the same problem I had, which is that, due to the extensive use of computers, I had always pain in my hands. Not enough to think that I had RSI, but I had been feeling that for so long, that I guess I would get RSI sooner or later. So, since Davyd just mentioned it on IRC, here’s a tip on how us (hackers) can prevent any injury. I was advised to use the Chinese health balls while watching TV or just sitting on the couch, to massage the muscles in the hands, and after almost 2 months using them, I have to say I don’t feel pain anymore, and when I’ve felt some (just in the first few days), using the balls for a little bit calmed it down.
So, if you use computers too many hours and feel some pain in your hands, I advise you to try, it has worked for me.
I’ve recently acquired a TomTom Rider GPS device for my motorbike. While being based on Linux (that’s one of the reasons I chose the TomTom instead of others), all procedures to update it are described in the documentation as being done from Windows. And, while talking with other friends about it, they all update it via Windows (poor guys 🙂 ), so I feel a bit alone in the GPS on Linux field. I have been getting lots of docs about some tweaking by hand on the SD card, as well as some app development things, but I still feel there are lots of things my fellow Windows users do that I’m not able to do (like using GPS software on their desktops to create tracks to be uploaded to the TomTom). So, dear lazyweb, any pointers on GPS software on Linux?
The new control center shell (from Novell’s SLAB) is now on for GNOME 2.17.
As you can see in the dialog, it looks a bit ugly, not only because of the missing icons (my setup’s fault), but because there is only one category (“Preferences”). So, next step, categorize the capplets.
BTW, I couldn’t get CVSROOT/modules from GNOME CVS, so until I fix it, you’ll have to download by hand slab/libslab and put that libslab directory into gnome-control-center source tree.
With all the talk about the GNOME desktop integration lib, one of the things I had wrote down is the inclusion of notifications (proposed for Freedesktop.org) in GTK. This is something lots of desktop applications might take advantage of.
So, what do people think about it? There’s even a bug about it.
That famous book (“From lost to the river”, a literal translation of the Spanish saying “de perdidos al río”), introduced a new mechanism for learning to speak English, by just translating literally from Spanish. Lots of people seem to have taken the lesson and start using it (only to speak, the method doesn’t provide you with the means for making English speakers understand :-), as I listened on the radio the other day, from a restaurant, in Galicia I think it was, where they have an international menu with the following items:
Sorry to non-Spanish speakers, who won’t get the joke, but for Spanish speakers, I laughed so much with this that I thought I’d better share it.
I have been doing a bad job on getting people interested in Atomato, mainly because of my lack of time for working on it. But now this is going to end, with the creation, yesterday, of the Atomato mailing list. If interested in the project, please subscribe, and if you sent me some mail in the last months about it, it would be great if you could resend it to the list once subscribed (if not, I’ll forward those mails to the list myself in a few days, once all interested people are subscribed).
Update: the web interface seems to not work at all, not even the admin interface, so the only way to subscribe to the list is to send a mail with the subject ‘subscribe’ to this address.
One of the late nights at last GUADEC, talking with Quim about mountains and nice landscapes, he talked about Montserrat and the feelings he had there. It is, from what I’ve heard, what some people call places of power (lugares de poder in Spanish, which I translated to English from), which are places that, for some reason, make you have feelings impossible to have in other normal places. Some people would call it God, others energy, and others, simply, Nature, but the truth is that they usually are spectacular places.
Another coincident characteristic of these places (at least the ones in Western Europe) is that, in some of them, there is (or was) a megalithic monument (maybe because the Neolithic people catched the magic of the places and decided to build their monuments there, who knows). And that’s the case for Artajona, in the middle of the way from my place to Pamplona. Most people would visit Artajona to see the medieval remains of the town, very spectacular:
But the real beauty is 4 kms away from the town, where there are 2 dolmens:
They are not very spectacular, but what is indeed awesome are the views you can see from the hills where the dolmens are:
I didn’t feel any mystic energy or magic 🙂 but I was really impressed by the place, quite beautiful and, being alone there, quite relaxing.
More photos here.