19/May/2004

Software patents

The European
Council approved software patents in Europe, which is very bad news,
although still waiting what the real consequences of this are. It seems the voting
still needs to come through the European parlament, so there is still a chance for
us.

The only vote against the directive came from Spain, which is coherent with what the
party currently in the government has been doing (LinEx
in Extremadura for instance). It is the first time in my life I feel proud
of polititians, even if the vote against the directive won’t be of much use.

Innovation in other OS’es

Seems our competition is willing for us to win the race. After Longhorn being delayed until
2006, now Apple says it will slow
pace of Mac OS X tweaks. It’s clear, they want us to be better than them.

13/May/2004

Software patents

There are today, as we speak, many demonstrations
against software patents in Spain (and I guess other countries in Europe), an
issue that, unfortunately, is still unresolved here in Europe. I really appreciate
the efforts from the people at Proinnova
(and other similar European groups fighting against software patents) for all the
work they are doing to defend us from this threat.

Also worthy to note is that given that elections for the European Parlament are taking
place in June in all the EU countries, people going to vote should check the different
parties’ positions related to software patents. So far, and thanks to some people from
Hispalinux, it’s been confirmed
that Izquierda
Unida is against software patents. I’ll post more information on other parties as
soon as I get it, so that nobody can blame me for asking the vote for a single party.
Vote to whomever you want, but check they are going to fight against software patents first.

12/May/2004

New mailman version

I’m so glad mail.gnome.org now has a new version of Mailman that I needed to say
thanks publicly to whomever did the upgrade. I’ve switched from having to deal
with 60/70 (mostly) spam messages per mailing list I manage, to only having like
3 or 4 per list, thanks to the filters you can set up, and thus discard all messages
coming from given addresses. My life as a mailing list admin is now much better
than before.

29/April/2004

GNOME Love

I imported yesterday gjobs
into GNOME CVS. This is just a skeleton of a simple and HIG-compliant frontend to
the crontab command, that is, a tool to manage scheduled
jobs.

This is intended to be a skeleton for gnome-love people to pick up the development. I hope
this succeeds, as it is happening with the GNOME
Keyring Manager project. As a start point, I added a list of things
that need to be done, which I’ll reproduce here so that everybody can see
how easy it is to do this tool:

  • Implement reading from the user’s crontab (that can be done by parsing
    the output of ‘crontab -l’, which AFAIK should be standard over all
    supported platforms). This is to be done in src/crontab.[ch].
  • Display the list of scheduled jobs retrieved from crontab in the list
    view in the main window. Some thoughts should be put on how to display
    the ‘When’ information. crontab stores day of week, day of month, month,
    hour and minute. Not sure if we should display all that or just a
    human-readable string (“first sundays on all months”, etc).
  • Implement writing the user’s crontab. This can be done again via the
    crontab command, which accepts gets its standard input as the contents
    of the crontab file.
  • Implement the ‘add’ and ‘properties’ buttons. These should open the same
    dialog, to allow adding new entries or edit existing entries in the
    crontab file.
  • Implement the ‘remove’ button. This should just remove the entry from the
    crontab.

22/April/2004

Photos

Got the memory card on my camera full, so I had to upload the photos I took while
having Arturo visiting here, which are now
available: some from the visit we did to the Moncayo
Peak, others from Pamplona.
Also had some photos from the last time I went to ski this year (the season is now
finished here 🙁 ), to Arette,
in France, pretty close to where I live.

Desktop integration

Very nice to see Damien
working on Evolution Data Server and GNOMEMeeting integration. It
is a very nice step into the whole desktop integration.

19/April/2004

GNOME Development Platform

All the comments from the Mono/Java discussion recently have made a lot of people
be paranoid about the future of GNOME (I’m not naming those people, sorry :-).
I’ve heard in the last few weeks a lot of complaints, not about the decision,
which hasnt been made yet and wont for a while I guess, but about the conversation
taking place. And one of those complaints I’ve heard is that “GNOME
does not need a new development platform“.

I am myself not sure what is the best way yet, but of course I am not blind enough
to not see that we really need a better development platform, maybe not for the
most experienced hackers, but for new developers. People missing this fundamental
point are missing the whole point of the conversation, and probably have never dealt
with libtool, autoconf, automake, etc. Be it Java, Mono, C/Python,
a custom thing or the the
new D programming language, it’s clear we need a better development
platform to attract new developers. If someone still doesnt believe so, please come
see me, I’ve got a few bugs to fix that involve using our hyper-advanced-dont-need-changes
super platform.

GNOME-DB

Spent some time this weekend going over some patches and bug reports for libgda
and libgnomedb, and ended up doing the 1.0.4
release, which should have been out much sooner (it’s been 3 months since
1.0.3).

Also, on the reporting front, seems some stuff might come out from the merging of Papyrus and the libgda report
API/engine. I hope at last this is, once for all, the definitive step to have the reporting
stuff working in libgda/libgnomedb.

11/April/2004

Weekend

Just left Arturo at the
bus station, to get back to Madrid. It’s been a very nice weekend, doing tourism over
to Pamplona, Tarazona and the Moncayo Peak.

Longhorn delay

It seems
that Microsoft’s Longhorn is delaying again, and, what is most important, some of the
announced features might be clipped to not delay its release anymore. This gives GNOME,
I guess, a lot of advantage over Microsoft.

In that article above, it says: “We are going to focus on doing fewer things,
and doing them well“. Are they copying us? Maybe we’ll see Windows versions
every 6 months?