Yerga

#2 in the ‘photos I’ve been taking recently’ series, this time about Yerga, a few kms away from my house, in La Rioja (yeah, where they do the famous wine). It is a place with some peaks and, fortunately, some paths to get around them. I went, a few weekends ago, with Guelphon, a guy from Calahorra, and his Yamaha XT.

It was a very nice place, with some nice tracks for the motorbikes, but the last part of the route we did was a bit hard, going downhill on tracks plenty of stones, very slippery sand and huge holes, very bad place indeed for the tyres my motorbike has. For some of the way down, I was skating more than riding 🙂

Here are some views from the path that took us down the hill. You can see other tracks in one of the photos, that go up to the Peña Isasa (that’s the name of the peak). Unfortunately, those paths are closed during the summer, because of fire danger in the area, so we’ll have to wait till the Autumn to get around them. In the second photo you can see the last part of the downhill track, although you can’t appreciate the difficulty in the photos.


I almost falled down on my bike a couple of times, but fortunately, I managed to control it and not bite the dust. My friend Guelphon also had some problems, but managed to get to the valley safe and alive.

GNOME-DB

Since I retired from the development of GNOME-DB (mostly because I haven’t used a database for years) and left Vivien the liberty to do what he wanted, the project has been improving over time, and with the latest 2.0 beta release the libraries are in a very good shape. Lots of missing features have been added, API has been greatly improved, which makes it suitable for all kinds of application developers. So expect some more DB-love (GNOME Office, Glom, etc) in your GNOME desktops in the upcoming release cycles.

Supermotard at Cascante

I’ve been recently taking lots of pictures that I haven’t blogged about, so here is the first post about them.

To start with, last Sunday I went to Cascante, 50 kms from my place, to watch the Basque-Navarre Supermotard championship.

I didn’t take many photos, because I met there with a few friends, and we left early to drive some kms around in our bikes.

World champions!

Even without superstar Pau Gasol (injured at the semifinal), Spain won yesterday the FIBA World Cup, for the first time in history. This outperforms the silver medal won in Los Angeles’84, the most outstanding success of Spanish basketball until yesterday (and which I also witnessed, 22 years ago).

The real final was the semifinal against Argentina (75-74), and the final was much easier than expected (70-47), with Greece totally unable to score against the splendid Spanish defense. The game was a bit boring in terms of emotion, since Spain was so superior since the beginning, but this allowed us, Spaniards, to enjoy the victory many minutes before the end of the game.

One of the good things also has been that, for the first time in history, a Spanish TV has been broadcasting all games (not only Spain’s games, as in previous years, but *all* games), which is something already done in more “boring” sports (like football 🙂 Let’s hope the TVs take notes so that we can watch more Spanish league games in the upcoming season (last seasons it’s been only 1 game per week, 2 if you leave in some regions).

Another thing to note about this championship is the bronze medal for USA, another disappointment for NBA basketball. Even though they have the best players, they keep forgetting that basketball is a team game, and that now the difference between FIBA and NBA players is not as big as many years ago (when USA brought university teams and won almost always the gold medal, or when the splendid Dream Team in Barcelona’92). This makes it impossible for them to beat real teams (like Greece, Spain or Argentina) without doing team play. So let’s hope this makes a good lesson for them, so that we can see the best NBA-based team in Beijing’08, which is what we all want, even though that would mean no gold medal for Spain or any other country.

(not yet another) survey

Some people I know very well from the Spanish free software community,
and which are now involved in university, have asked me to forward the
below announcement, to ask people to participate on a survey. It’s not
yet another survey, it is one in a series of projects from that university to study how free software works, which I think is interesting for GNOME. They have already done some GNOME studies, for
instance:

http://libresoft.urjc.es/Papers/index_html

http://libresoft.dat.escet.urjc.es/cvsanal/gnome2-cvs/

Find below the official announcement, I’d be grateful if you could do
the survey.


Dear FLOSS developer,

MERIT at the University of Maastricht along with the University Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) are studying how developers contribute code to Free /Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. This is an extension of our previous research projects such as flossproject.org, flosspols.org, flossworld.org, and libresoft.urjc.es.

In this study, we are looking for survey respondents like you, who contribute to at least one of a small number of projects that we have selected for the study.

Therefore, we would like to ask you to participate in a small survey and to fill in our questionnaire, which you will find online at

http://libresoft.urjc.es:9999/Survey/

To fill in the survey takes not more than 10 minutes of your time.

Of course, all personal information will be kept strictly confidential, no personal information will be revealed to third parties, and the information obtained will be properly aggregated and anonymized so that no data about named individuals will be published. We also would like to point out that this study has only academic and no commercial purpose, and the resulting analysis will be freely available.

Rishab Ghosh ,MERIT (Board member, Open Source Initiative)
rishab@dxm.org

Ruediger Glott, MERIT
Ruediger.Glott@INFONOMICS.unimaas.nl

Gregorio Robles, URJC
grex@gsyc.escet.urjc.es

Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, URJC
jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es

Mundobasket 2006

It was mostly clear, before the start of the 2006 FIBA World Championship, that Argentina, USA and Spain were superior to the other teams. And so far, that’s what has happened, maybe with the inclusion of Greece. Although happy for the Spain’s way to semifinals, I must confess it hasn’t been as funny as other championships, since Spain has been so superior to the teams they’ve played against that games were without emotion. Fortunately Spain is the real dream team in this championship :-), so there were lots of spectacular plays.

Next Friday, the moment of truth will come, Spain-Argentina. A pity, since a final between Spain and Argentina is what I would have liked. After that, either USA or Greece in the final.

Keyboard control center applet

We have been discussing about the best way to reduce the overcrowded preferences menu, that is, the number of control center applets. The ideal solution, which we are discussing on the Control Center mailing list, is to have a new control center shell. More news on that soon.

The other things we discussed was about merging some of the applets, since some seem redundant. A good example is the keyboard capplets, which are 3!:

  • Keyboard applet, to set basic settings like layout and cursor blinking, and not so basic things, like the typing break.
  • Keyboard shortcuts.
  • Accessibility keyboard settings.

So this looked like the best candidate for the first merge, so after some discussion, two of them have been merged in the mockups below:


The a11y bits were not merged, mainly because the a11y guys seem to think it is better to keep it separated. And merging it with the already crowded keyboard preferences dialog seems a bad idea, given the a11y capplet has its own tabs, which would be inside the keyboard prefs capplet tab.

Any comments, suggestions, etc, please send it to the Control Center mailing list.

GNOME hackers meeting in Zaragoza

It is now official: there will be a GNOME hackers meeting in Zaragoza, Spain, September 30th and October 1st. As with previous meetings, the intention is to get more hackers for GNOME and, for the people already involved in GNOME, to meet together and do some collaborative hacking sessions, like the crazy one at Vilanova Park. Thanks go to our friends at Hispalinux, who will be letting us use their venue in Zaragoza for the meeting, and to Dani Baeyens, the man behind the idea.

More info on the wiki.

openSUSE build service

While in Boston, I learnt more in detail about openSuSE’s build service. It allows people to build packages for any software they feel like, and is not reduced to support SuSE OS only, but other distributions (like Ubuntu and Fedora right now) also.

So, for testing my brand new account, I added a new package to my Home project, nautilus-actions. It was an easy task because I had the SPEC file already done, and had only to modify a couple of lines to adapt it to latest nautilus-actions release. I didn’t even have to build the packages myself, just adding the needed files to the repository (much like how CVS works) and triggering the builds on the server 2/3 times until it built correctly. Right now, I’ve got packages only for SuSE distributions, but I’ll add shortly Ubuntu and Fedora targets to the repository.

The Linux Desktop

Being last week in Boston, for a Novell desktop team meeting, I met some people from SuSE, including Duncan MacVicar from Chile (hard to know he is from Chile with that name :-). Very nice guy, and while being KDE people, with lots of ideas and plans that mostly matched mine. Mainly, Duncan and I agreed in that KDE and GNOME should be seen as different frontends to the Linux Desktop, and this Linux Desktop should be a complete set of specifications, interfaces and shared storage data for both frontends. We talked about some things that could be shared, like addressbook and calendar data (and concurrent access to it) and Will Stephenson, another of the SuSE guys I met last week, told us about his plans to add an evolution-data-server backend for KDE, for live data sharing.

Things like Freedesktop.org should have more influence on both GNOME and KDE, so we should try to push for more specifications there. Once we have a shared infrastructure, 3rd party developers would choose one or the other based on the same reasons people choose Visual Studio/Java/Borland/.NET/etc to develop Windows applications now, and users would choose one or the other for whatever reason they feel like.