Rodrigo Moya

Summer

It’s been too hot lately over here, so I’ve been too lazy to do anything apart
from real work, but today it’s less hot and energy is coming back to me. Let’s hope
temperatures continue going down in the next few days… John Fleck, what’s the
forecast? 🙂

First of all, my congratulations to Lance Armstrong for winning his 6th Tour de France. I didn’t want
him to win, because it would mean beating our great Miguel Induráin, but now that he’s
won, we Spaniards must accept the truth: Lance is the best in history, and Miguel
is second. Not that this is bad, since we all enjoyed Miguel’s winnings (as Americans
do with Lance) while it lasted. What I didn’t like about this Tour was the Spanish
riders’ performance. Only Paco Mancebo and Carlos Sastre were seen with the best in
the important stages, and Roberto Heras, Iban Mayo, Haymar Zubeldia, Aitor González,
Óscar Sevilla, all failed, either by abandoning or by losing a lot of time in
every important stage. It was a bit hard to see all of them fail, since we were
used in the last years to see the Spanish riders always in front, with the permission
of Lance, of course. Anyway, let’s hope they are all ok for La Vuelta.

GNOME

On the GNOME front, many things that I haven’t blogged about:

• Eventuality:
  I’ve been for some time now thinking about a scripting framework for the GNOME desktop
  to adopt. I didn’t go past the thinking process, but I was always thinking on GNOME
  terms, until I found about Eventuality, a FreeDesktop.org
  initiative for creating a “DBUS based framework for creating and flexible
  scheduling of arbitrary “actions” performed by conforming applications“.
  That is, looks like a replacement for cron, but it’s much more.
  Those actions it talks about are actions installed by specific applications, so, for
  instance, Evolution could install a SendMail action. Those
  actions, initially thought for being ran on scheduled times, could also be used
  for scripting on the user side. There needs to be just a nice way for users to
  run/write their scripts. We could even avoid having the user to write a single line
  of code by doing something similar to Apple’s
  Automator, where you have an application that queries the system for
  installed actions and their arguments, and builds a GUI to query the user for the
  arguments’ values.
• GNOME Pedia: I asked
  some weeks ago about how to access the Wikipedia from a GNOME
  application. I got several answers, even from some of the Wikipedia developers telling
  me that there is no such XML-RPC interface yet, but that one could be built if there
  was some interest. I also got mails from some people interested in helping in writing
  such GNOME Pedia application, so I started the other day writing the skeleton for the
  application (in C#) and have now a main window for it!!! I plan to continue working
  on it as time permits without moving it to a public CVS until it does something else
  than displaying a window, but if someone is interested in starting helping right now,
  please drop me a line and I’ll upload the sources to GNOME CVS.

GNOME Book

Eons ago, we started, at GNOME
Hispano, a book
about GNOME programming, in Spanish. We took some articles
we had already written about many different topics, and started with some translations
of the GTK+ tutorial. The result was a huge
book (more than 200 pages in the PDF version last time I generated it)
that looks really promising. But the fact is that it needs a lot of cleaning here and
there, to correct the language, the grammar, the code samples, and, more important,
to finish the unfinished sections. For this second task, of course we need people
that know, apart from Spanish, the GNOME APIs good enough to write about them, although
we could complete them by making translations of already existing documentation in
English. For the first task though, anyone speaking Spanish can help. This is specially
interesting for people looking forward to learn GNOME programming, since they can
study/fix the book as they learn.

So, for people interested in helping, please subscribe to the mailing
list we’ve created for coordination.

Clock applet and E-D-S

Davyd,
for getting the colors assigned to each calendar for your clock applet hack, just use:

      gboolean e_source_get_color (ESource *source, guint32 *color_return);
      

So, you just need to get the ESource for each calendar, and then
get the color assigned to it via this function.

New planet

New planet available: Planeta
GNOME Hispano, for the Spanish speaking gnomies.

Le Tour

The real Tour starts
today, with the mytical Aspin and Tourmalet:

I should go, one of these years, to see one of the stages in the Pyrenees
live, since it’s pretty close (3/4 hours to the Tourmalet by car, for instance) to where I live. Hopefully
next year, since tomorrow’s stage, also in the Pyrenees, goes further to the east, thus
further away from me.

More GNOME Deployments

The University of Zaragoza
and the government in Aragón (a region in the north-east of Spain, between Navarra
and CataluÃ&plusmm;a) have announced
the plan for the one of the biggest Free Software deployments. What they’ve done
(the students and staff of the University of Zaragoza) is a live CD with their own
Linux distribution, which
contains lots of software for office, network, multimedia, etc, and which is based on
Debian and GNOME. The initial plan is to distribute
50,000 CDs to the students in the University of Zaragoza, which will make an average
of 1 Linux CD per student.

San Fermín

I’ve been this past weekend partying in Pamplona
for San Fermín. On
Saturday, thanks to Nicolás, we went to the Telefónica building to see the running of the
bulls. It was superb, a really privileged place.

As it always happens on weekends, there are lots of people, and this made it really difficult
to see the bulls when they were coming up the street towards our position.

Fortunately, the organizers always choose the less violent bulls for the weekends, since
the runnings become much more dangerous with so much people. Not only there are the bulls
(Spanish bulls, which are very brave and violent, and which in fact are trained all their
live to be so), but running besides so much people makes it very easy to fall down
and be trampled by 100s of people as scared as you are for not being taken by one
of the bulls, which of course only think about getting safe. So, on the weekend, just
a few injured people.

Today though, 8 people were injured by the bulls’ horns. On Friday morning, also, a guy
was taken by 3 different bulls in 20 seconds, one right after the other. This makes
me think, as every year, that people should be aware of the danger there is when running
with the bulls. First of all, you need to know what is dangerous and what can be done;
for instance, a lot of people touch the bulls on the back, and this is one of the most
dangerous things that can be done, since the bull can turn back, and instead of going
as quick as possible to the arena, it would stay running over people in the street. Second,
even if you know what to do, a simple error, like not realizing where one of the bulls is
coming from, or a simple slip, can make you suffer an ugly accident. Third, drinking a lot
usually makes you lose a bit of
control, so going drunk to the runnings is like calling for disaster. Also,
there are people that have seen a bull only in films, and think it’s
a manageable animal. Really, believe me, a Spanish bull weights 500/600 kilograms, and is
one of the most brave animals, specially when something afraids it (like 100s of people
running besides it), is quick, even though it looks as if it were a slow animal, and has
2 big horns!

Also as always, lots of people sleeping in the city’s streets (there are over 1 million people
now in Pamplona, where there are usually around 200,000 inhabitants, so there is no
place for everyone coming).

Glsof

glsof
is a GNOME front end to the lsof command, which shows files
opened by each process running on the system. Someone sometime ago mentioned having this
functionality in the GNOME System Monitor application already available in GNOME.
It could work by showing the list of opened files when asking for more details on
a specific process.

San Fermín

Headed yesterday evening to Pamplona for San Fermín, with Cristina, Ana, Isaac and
Yolanda. As every year, every corner of the city was full of people, some of which
on difficult ethilic states. We headed to the Plaza de los Fueros for the free
live concert. It was about hip hop, with two groups: Niumara, which was composed
by a guy playing bongos and 6/7 girls dancing; and La Mala Rodriguez, a gipsy
from Madrid
who seems to mix his nice gipsy voice with hip hop sounds. Was not that bad,
but really, I would have preferred something a few less repetitive. Anyway, it’s always
good to hear new music.

After the concert, we walked over Pamplona, finding again people all over, bars full,
music everywhere, and, after 24 hours of party, lots of rubbish. We ended up in the
Gaztetxe for a few more beers and a bit of better music.

Le Tour

Lance Armstrong seems to be flying towards his 6th Tour de France. This would mean
beating the great Miguel Indurain, born in Pamplona,
who, like Lance as of today, won 5 consecutive Tours (from 1991 to 1995).
So I still hope someone can beat him, although that looks really difficult, given the
differences he set up yesterday in the team time trial, and that Lance is the best.
A pity Joseba Beloki is not running this Tour, not sure what his performance would have
been, but last year, until his injury, he was one of the best contenders for Lance.

Gora San Fermín

San Fermín has just
started with the traditional fireworks.

204 hours of party all over Pamplona
ahead.

GVADEC

Finally got yesterday home, back from Kristiansand, so before I forget, here is
a report of the 3 days of GUADEC. All photos are here.

As always, it’s been a lot of fun; hanging around with people is what is GUADEC about,
at least for me. Very nice to meet the Indian gang from Novell (with, BTW, very nice looking
t-shirts that they were giving away in their talk about the
GNOME
Bangalore group), the people from GNOME
Germany, with whom I had a lot of laughs, the Latin mafia (with some additions, like
Fernando from Chile, Paco from Extremadura and Paulinho from Brazil), and, of course,
to see again (after almost 2
years) the Evolution team (or part of at least).

Special thanks go to the streaming guys, who had all working pretty well so that people could
follow the talks from Internet

New software

I’ve known about a couple of new pieces of software during GUADEC. The first one is
Beagle (I already
knew about it, but didn’t know it was already working so well), which is an indexer to search
the user’s data, with a very nice integration into Nautilus. The other one is
MapEditor, which is a
very nice map application. The most interesting thing is that the maps are being generated
by Amaury, the author, by using a computer with a GPS drive in his car.

Another interesting piece of software, which I knew about while I was in Extremadura for
the GUADEC-ES,
and which was presented by Jose, from Extremadura, in his talk,
is Squeak, a programming
system, based on Smalltalk, which allows teachers and students to do their own applets,
which makes it a perfect tool for teaching purposes, and so is being used for that in
Extremadura.

GTK+ team meeting

I attended the GTK+ team meeting, where some sort of roadmap for the next two versions was
decided. I completely forgot to raise one thing I wanted to, which was to put the tree models
into GLib, so that other non-GUI libraries/applications can use them (and not have to create
their own data models, as we do in libgda).
I’ll probably look into it as soon as time permits.

GNOME System Tools

Carlos Garnacho’s talk on GNOME System Tools had quite a lot of attendees, which I hope means
there will be more and more interest in bringing these tools into the official GNOME distribution.
One question that was raised though was, what about Yast, SuSE’s setup tools. And yeah, what
about it?

Dr Edgar Villanueva’s keynote

I was asked to help on the simultaneous translation of Dr Edgar Villanueva’s talk, so, with the
help of German,
Fernando and Daniel, I think we managed to do it fairly well. Dr Villanueva’s talk, in
Spanish, was perfectly articulated, with a very clear explanation, so it was easy to
translate. I hope we managed, with our 2nd division English, to transmit Dr Villanueva’s
message, which clearly exposed his commitment to continue fighting for having laws that
help the Peru in the introduction of Free Software, very needed indeed in this kind of countries
to manage to close the digital gap there is (getting even further with the adoption of
Free Software in European countries and the even more monopolization in under-developed countries)
between them and the so called first world. I have also to agree with
Thomas
about Bruce Perens question to Dr Villanueva. The question indeed was not that bad IMO,
but it was indeed too long. I hope anyway something comes out of the talk, focused on
trying to help Peru and other countries in getting digital knowledge via the use of
Free Software.

Ximian Parties

The Ximian (or Novell) party was this year in the University’s pub, where there was a concert.
We thought, as was announced, it was going to be a R&R; concert, but it wasn’t. But anyway,
it sounded pretty good.

There was, on Wednesday night, an alternative Ximian party. It all started in the afternoon, when
I won the Pisco bottle at Fernando’s talk (it was the prize for answering the questions he
asked after the talk). After dinner, we went to the student flats, and started by having just a
bit of the bottle Fernando had left, but then more and more people started coming, so we opened
the other bottle, and all ended pretty crazy, with Roozbeh bringing two other bottles (gin and
something else I don’t remember) and lots of people around.

With a bit too much of alcohol in the body, we started playing a football game (soccer for the
Americans). It was a Latin countries with Iran’s Roozbeh against Americans, with two infiltrated
players, one from Germany and the other from Australia. I don’t remember who won (or if we were
even having a result), but it was a real football game, with even injuries (Fernando will be out
for the next 3 games). That was too much for me, so I went to bed to try to sleep a few hours
and get ready for the second part of the Europe odissey to go back home.

Joe Shaw’s fan club

It was the first time I saw Joe after he
had won the Emp** *f the Y**r (sorry, promised Joe to not say it anymore) award, so I
congratuled him. He was really upset, and told me he’s fed up of being called that thing,
so I now declare started the campaign against calling Joe E**Y**r anymore. Be nice, call
him something else 🙂