Rodrigo Moya

GNOME-DB

Huge patch
from Laurent to HIGify the gnome-database-properties tool, part
of libgnomedb.

Planet GNOME

Woohoo, Carlos now has
a blog! Go Carlos Go!

Holidays

Back from a very good week of vacation, in
London
for 4 days, visiting my sister and my two nieces, and 3 days in
Madrid,
visiting my mother and some friends, without switching the computer on a single
time. So, it’s been quite relaxing and funny, specially the days I spent with my two nieces,
Erika, 5 years old, and Jessica, 3:

They are so sweet and love me so much that they didn’t let me leave them to
make a short visit to Michael.
It would have been really nice to meet Michael’s wife and daughter, but my nieces didn’t
want their Tío Rodri to leave them 🙂 It was, as always, really
sad when we left my sister’s and them, since we are not going to see them again for,
at least, a couple of months 🙁 I wish they lived in Spain.

Mars

The Beagle 2 spacecraft, from the European Space Agency, is expected
to arrive to Mars this Christmas day, when it will enter the
Mars atmosphere at 20,000 kms/hour. Let’s hope it doesn’t crash.

Ettore

After some very sad days, when I could not think about anything related
to Ettore that didn’t made me sader, I remembered yesterday, thanks to Yolanda,
some nice things about him, that I’d think about sharing. Firstly, his responsibility in one of
the happiest days in my life: I was working in a software company whose
name I prefer to forget and was thinking about leaving that job, but I had
no other job in perspective. And, one day I got a mail from Ettore,
asking whether I wanted to work at Ximian or not. “Of course
I want, when do I start?“, did I answer. It was like a gift
coming from heaven, since Ximian was the place I really wanted to work at.

Then I had some laughs remembering about his stay in Madrid, after
Sevilla’s GUADEC. He and Anna were stolen in the underground, by a
professional pickpocket (professional because they didn’t even realize
the wallet was being stolen), and were also ran over by a motorbike (small,
fortunately). I was really upset of hearing them telling
me that, since Madrid is my city, and I felt a bit bad about them being
robbed and ran over there, but Ettore just started laughing and making fun of the
situation. We then went, accompanied
by Duncan and a couple of other Spanish people, to the old part of Madrid,
in the center of the city, where there are, literally, thousands of
“tapas” bars. We did a gastronomic tour, from bar to bar,
eating, drinking and having a lot of fun. No-one remembered anything
about the stolen wallet 🙂

So I guess that’s how I’ll prefer to think about Ettore from now on, even
if it’s so difficult to realize he’s really gone.

Accessibility in KDE

I just read in Slashdot
that “KDE gained accessibility support through the ATK interface from
Sun with Qt – so KDE 3.2 will be ‘accessibility ready’ for the end user once coming
out in January“. Very nice news, for KDE, for gaining that
accessibility support, and for GNOME, for having its technologies being used
in other places. Also, I guess this will shut up all those people that didn’t
want to use GLib in FreeDesktop.org‘s
projects, since now I guess all KDE applications will be using, indirectly, GLib.

Miguel pointed out
the announcement is somewhat misleading, since the only support that has been added
is the use of ATK in the QT toolkit. That is, they are like GNOME was at
2.0 times, that is, still missing support in *all* applications, as well as
KDE-specific applications like Gnopernicus, GOK, etc.

Wind

I took this photo last week, but haven’t felt good enough to even get it out
of the camera:

It shows a windmill broken by the wind. It clearly demonstrates, apart from that
I leave in a windy place, that I need a zoom for my camera.

Novell

Novell has just announced
version 1.0 of Nterprise Linux Services. This “provides
integrated file, print, messaging, directory and management services on Linux,
wrapped in support, training and consulting services“.

Ettore

We had not even recovered yet at Ximian about Chema’s death, and now Ettore 🙁
I personally have worked with him for almost 3 years, and it’s been
a pleasure to do so always. I met him in person several times, and it was
always fun to be with him. It has been also great to share with him and the
rest of the Evolution developers these 3 years of hacking one of the best
Free Software pieces, all of it perfectly managed by our dear Ettore.

We’ll miss you a lot Ettore.

Patches

I’m not having too much time lately to hack on anything, apart from
Evolution, of course, but I’ve been getting many patches and applying
them to CVS. Many of them for gnome-network (thanks Emil and Carlos!),
to fix some issues in the gnome-remote-shell tool,
and some for gnome-db. For the latter, the most interesting ones
were about fixing some problems in the libgda header files that
were making pyGTK‘s
h2def.py script complain. This means that, at last,
somebody is working on Python bindings. This, with the
GNOME
Platform Bindings release set will be a great help in gnome-db
libraries adoption, since, for 2.6, we’ll have Ruby, C# and, hopefully, Python
and C++ bindings for, at least libgda.

GNOME-DB

I’ve started changing the UI of the gnome-database-properties tool
(part of libgnomedb, which allows users to configure their data
sources) so that it now displays the tables data directly when
opening the properties page for a data source:

This window is directly available from Gnumeric, Abiword, Mergeant, and, as soon as
we finish the updatable models thing, users will be able to easily modify the
data in the underlying database from this window.

Novell

Novell rocks so much!

Neck

My neck is much better today, woohoo! Tomorrow, if I’m still ok, I’ll go to
sign up on the swimming pool near my house, to swim for 1 hour or so every
day, so that neither my neck nor my back nor anything hurts me anymore. Thanks
to all people who sent greetings, and more thanks to the people sending
suggestions on what to do.

Neck

My neck is being hurting me for a week now, and yesterday I had to stay for
hours lying in the bed, with a terrible pain in it. So I went to the doctor
and now I have a necklace to use when I’m in front of the computer.

Releases

Just finished doing the 1.99.3 release of GNOME
Network, to follow the GNOME 2.5.0 release, whose star feature is the
addition of the desktop sharing tool, written by Rob Clews. Before that, last night,
I managed to release the first libgda/libgnomedb releases for the 1.1.x
unstable series, which contain the beginning of the updatable models
support, which will make using databases (or any other data source a provider
is written for) with these libraries a child’s play. I just wish we settle
down the few misunderstandings there already seem to be, and have both Paisa
and Laurent continue their work on that as quickly as they had been doing
before.