Yeah, Dirk Nowitzki did it, and scored the winning basket in the semifinal against Spain. And today, in the game for the bronze medal, France just ran over Spain, in a very bad game of the Spanish players.
On the final, happy for Eugenia to see Greece win the gold medal, with an incredible performance by the Greek team, and specially by Theodoros Papaloukas.
I like a lot watching sports, but I’m not too passionate, except when it comes to the Spanish national basketball team. And today it was one of those days it’s nice to remember. 101-85 against Croatia in the quarter final of the Eurobasket 2005 that is taking place in Serbia & Montenegro, in a great game, with an overtime forced by Fran Vázquez in the last seconds, when all seemed lost for Spain.
All seemed to indicate Spain was going to take the same route as the other 3 first round groups’ leaders, all of them eliminated in the quarter finals in very ugly games (it is indeed curious that the 2 best teams, from what we’ve seen in the quarter finals have been Spain and Croatia, since the other 3 games were, well, “of low quality”), and the game started the same way, with Spain scoring only 11 points in the first quarter. But fortunately, the Spanish players reacted and won one of the best games I’ve seen in years.
Only bad thing was when the Croatians lost their nerves in the last minute of the overtime, following a foul on Gordan Giricek, when the crowd (Serbian) started to shout “Serbia, Serbia” (I guess there are still a lot of wounds to be closed between Serbians, Croatians and Bosnians), and the Croatian players and coach started to insult the referees. Bad end for a great game.
And tomorrow, semifinals against Germany. Let’s hope Dirk Nowitzki doesn’t break our hopes 🙂
Came back yesterday from Zaragoza, where we had the III hackers meeting. It wasn’t as productive as I expected though 🙁 I thought we could have had people working more intensively in fixing bugs, but only 2 bugs were solved, and very simple ones.
So, it’s clear that we’re doing something wrong. For the people already involved in GNOME (garnacho, kal, telemaco, tapia, juanan, dexem, etc), these meetings are productive, since we dedicate some time to hack on our already ongoing projects, we share ideas, and we have fun together at nights. But for new people, I think we really need some way of having them start working on bugs immediately, so that we can have this sort of weekends be real hacking days, and have them as GNOME contributors right after the weekend.
We talked about this during the weekend, and some possible solutions raised, like re-starting the IRC talks, so that we teach people how to hack before we get together on the weekend. Any other ideas for making these weekends more productive?
Apart from that, as always when meeting with the GNOME Hispano people, it was really fun, lots of laughs, good music (we went to a R&R bar in central Zaragoza on Saturday night), good food and, unfortunately, little sleep.
Also, one of the hopefully productive parts was about the book, since we talked about getting all people more committed to completing it, which is not much work, since we already have around 400 pages!. Hopefully people will respond to the challenge, so that the book is ready before GUADEC 2006 in Barcelona.
As part of the III GNOME Hackers meeting next weekend in Zaragoza, we are going to introduce new people to the misteries of bug fixing in GNOME. For that, we have decided to try to fix GNOME 2.12 bugs. Unfortunately, it seems people don’t mark anymore their bugs as easy-fix when they’re easy to fix. This makes it hard for us to find easy bugs to work on at the beginning, so that new people can start fixing bugs immediately while we show the basic process.
So, could maintainers please mark easy fixes with the apropriate bugzilla keyword? Thus, hopefully, those bugs will be fixed by Sunday.
Today I completed my patch for the message of the day feature in gnome-session, based on comments added to the wiki.
So now, if libnotify is available, it will use that for displaying the message of the day. Apart from that, it monitors the /etc/motd file, displaying again its contents whenever it changes.
As soon as gnome-session is branched, I’ll submit the patch. For the time being, it’s here (added files here and here).
Next weekend, the III GNOME Hackers Meeting in Spain will take place in Zaragoza. Over 30 people have signed up, and a few workshops are already scheduled. Matters range from working in our book, to core desktop bug hunting, GNOME Backup, GNOME System Tools and Mono programming.
A couple of week-ends ago, I went to Olite (very close to my place) for the annual Medieval party, where all the village (which indeed looks medieval all year, with a very beatiful castle from the good times of the Kingdom of Navarra) gets dressed in medieval suits, with a fairy of artisan products, parades, etc.
I had been there for a few years now, but I never got my camera with me. This year I did take it, so took a lot of photos.
As part of the medieval party, there is a photographic contest, so I’ll be presenting a few photos for that contest, to win, if my photos get chosen as winner, a free dinner in one of the good restaurants in Olite. So far, this is the photo I like the most. Other friends will be taking other photos and presenting those under their names, so we’ll have a lot of chances to win the dinner 🙂 I know it’s cheating, but the dinner is worth the trick.
Some stuff I’ve been working on recently:
Also, very happy to see cairo 1.0 out. Now, I hope, we will start using it to make the desktop a pleasure to look at.
One of the things I miss the most in GNOME is having access to many operations I still do on the command line. So, since I am not sure how all this should be implemented, I am looking for ideas for how to have access to those operations in an easy/GNOME-ish way from the GUI.
Not that I will implement all that myself, but it’s been long waiting in my notes folder, so I think I’d start sharing it for having more opinions. So, I’ve created a page on the GNOME wiki to start putting in clean all my ideas and so that other people can add their own. So please, if you have good ideas on this, please add them to that page.
The other day someone mentioned the need for taking more advantage of the UNIX features in the desktop. Specifically, message of the day, talk/wall/finger were mentioned, in a need to take advantage of the multi user features we have. So, since I agree with what was said, I went through the addition of showing the message of the day (/etc/motd) at the beginning of the GNOME session.
Since it adds new strings and features, this can’t be added for 2.12, so I’m posting it here to get some comments (like if all distros use /etc/motd) and hopefully post it for inclusion after 2.12 is branched. The patch is here.
