29/October/2004

ADSL

Since yesterday, my DSL line speed has been doubled, from 512kbps to 1mbps at no cost.
Of course, while this is a good thing, in Spain we still pay much more than in other
European countries for less speed, so there is still room to improve.

27/October/2004

GNOME-DB

GNOME-DB plans for 1.3/1.4 are starting to get into shape. First of all, the libgnomedb
and libmergeant integration, which will bring, to libgnomedb, a full featured
data dictionary and all kind of associated widgets for editing data, creating tables, in
short, fully manage the database. This is indeed a big change, since we have duplicated
functionality in both libgnomedb and libmergeant, and there are some things that need
a better integration, like more reuse of the libgda classes (mainly the data models,
which allow an easy extension), but seems a good compromise for next version, specially
after having failed in 1.2 to provide all promised features for a full management of
the data from the API.

Once the integration is done, libgnomedb will have much more sense, since it wont be
anymore a crazy collection of different widgets, it will provide a rich set of
widgets to allow an easy management of databases in GNOME/GTK applications.

Eclipse

Today, there’s a total
lunar eclipse that is, fortunately, fully visible from my place (fully visible also
in many places around the world, follow the link above to see specific location information).
So, if rain permits, I’ll go out tonight to watch it.

23/October/2004

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.

21/October/2004

EPlugin Hackfest

Come to #evolution for some hacking action!

Join the EPlugin Hackfest @ #evolution on irc.gnome.org

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.

19/October/2004

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.

15/October/2004

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.

11/October/2004

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.

8/October/2004

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.