Rodrigo Moya

Fast User Switching applet

I went yesterday to Zaragoza
to give a couple of talks. In the morning, at the Youth Institute, I had to give a
tutorial on GTK/GNOME programming. Since the people attending already knew a bit about
GTK, I decided to implement the Fast User Switching applet in the talk.
So, we just had time to implement the applet itself, and the ‘New login’ menu item,
but I think it can perfectly be the base for more improvements. As a result of
the talk, a couple of guys were interested in carrying on the development of the
applet, so I assigned them to research on how to communicate with GDM to get
the list of open local sessions and show them up on the menu, so that users
can select them. To actually change the virtual terminal, I guess chvt is the
command to use, or is there a better way?

Compile farm at home

I recently found out about distcc,
a distributed C/C++ compiler. The installation is very easy, you just have to:

        export CC=distcc
	export DISTCC_HOSTS={list of hosts with distcc installed}
      

and then, whenever you run make with more than one concurrent job (make
-j n) or many compilations at the same time, your compilation will be
distributed among all hosts specified
in the DISTCC_HOSTS environment variable. Latest version
even includes a GNOME UI for monitoring the compilations:

So far, it seems to work ok, except when running make -j 8 on
the Evolution sources. In that case, it seems to hang for me.

libgnetwork

James Cape is kicking ass on his work on libgnetwork. He just finished SSL support,
and has started working on the Unix and UDP sockets support. Go James Go!

Prestige

Just watched on TV a documentary about the
Prestige catastrophe
that happened one year ago. It’s really sad to see the volunteers talking about
how the local government in Galicia and the Spanish government left them on their
own cleaning up hundreds of beaches infected by the fuel. Also, even sader were
the people from those governments saying all the time that everything was ok, that
the situation was under control, etc. But the fact is that there are still (this
summer, a year later, some beaches in the north of Spain still got more fuel).

But this is not all, since the volunteers seemed to be misinformed by those
governments about the situation of the different black tides. Luckily, the
Hydrographic Institute of Portugal had that same information and gave it away to
anyone wanting it.

Viva Chile!

Back from Chile yesterday, where I had a really great time. The people
there are just fabulous, they are very kind and they treated us, speakers,
as kings.

Actually getting to Talca, where the conferences were taking place, was the only bad
thing, since it took like 26 hours from my mother’s in Madrid to the hotel in Talca.
Although I expended like 3 hours running with the baggage, drinking beer and eating
in Santiago, with Alejandro, his wife and Ednilson. In the arrival to Santiago, you
can see the Andes mountain range, which is awesome:

Then, in Talca, met a lot of very nice people, from the organizers (Jorge, Alejandro)
to the attendees, where there were really young people, fresh blood for GNOME
(since I think Federico and I convinced them to hack on GNOME :-). Also met again
my friend Germán,
who seems to be the reference in Chile for Free Software.

First day of the congress was about political talks, with the people from the Chilean
customs, people from La Junta de Extremadura (making the number of Spanish people in
the congress to 3), and, in the afternoon, Federico’s talk about GNOME (with a very nice
tribute
to Chema (we knew the tragic news that same day in the morning, and it was
a bit of a shock)). After Federico’s talk, I gave mine about Mono,
and it seems it interested many people, so there will hopefully be more developers
coming from Chile.

The second day, Federico and I had a room for the whole day, so we talked about various things.
I opened the day talking
about GNOME-DB and I succeeded in making the people from
Galilea (a local Real Estate
Company that is developing a GPL ERP for themselves) interested in it. Then Federico talked
about the GNOME Canvas (please Federico post the slides :-), with very nice sample code. After
lunch, I talked about CORBA
in GNOME. It was maybe a bit too advanced for the people there, since the questions
I asked to give away t-shirts (Federico had brought Ximian t-shirts which we were giving away
to people answering the questions we asked at the end of the talks) were answered
not as quick as in the other talks. Then Federico replaced
his Drag&Drop; talk with an interactive session, where people asked questions about
anything related with helping GNOME. So, he talked about translations, documentation, GTK,
etc, making the talk the best in the congress (in my opinion).

Last day, before getting the bus to Santiago airport, Fernando (from Galilea) drove us to
San Javier, a village near Talca where there are plenty of vineyards. He brought us
(Federico, Oralia, Tim Ney and myself) to Balduzzi vineyards, where we bought some wine
to bring it home.

So, a really nice trip, and in fact, the most productive congress besides GUADEC that I’ve
ever attended. I just look forward to attend next year.

All photos here.

Chema

Ugh, just knew the bad news about Chema.
Really, really sad.

Chile

Packing now to go tomorrow to Madrid, and then, on Friday, flying to
Chile, for the National
Congress of Free Software. I’ll meet in Santiago airport with
Germán
and Federico.
Then, travel, by train hopefully, to Talca, where the congress is taking
place.

Novell/Ximian/SuSe

Novell just announced it acquired
SuSe.

MotoGP in Valencia

I’ve been last weekend in Valencia, for the
2003
MotoGP Grand Prix. We had VIP tickets, so we had the chance to get
into the pit lane, where the boxes of each team are, like Aoki’s:

Or the mytical Derbi’s (the Red Bullets):

The circuit (in Cheste) is really nice, since you see all parts of the track from almost everywhere:

We slept in Valencia in Carlos’
house. It was nice to see him again, although the visit was quite quick, since
we arrived in Valencia at 6PM on Saturday and we had to leave to Cheste at 7AM on
Sunday.

GNOME Network

Oops, I forgot to blog this: gnome-network now has a
desktop
sharing tool thanks to Rob Clews. It uses VNC as the protocol for sharing the desktop,
and has a nice system tray icon, from where you can see a list of connected clients,
disconnect them, etc. This will be available in the next gnome-network release.

Mushrooms

I went last Saturday to Ulzama, to the north of Pamplona, with some friends
to pick up mushrooms (as food, not as drug :-). We picked up a lot of them:

They were really delicious (we ate some of them on Sunday), and picking them
involved meeting new friends:

The weird thing is that the most beautiful mushrooms are the ones that cannot
be eaten, whereas the ugly ones can. Of course, we didn’t pick any of them,
since one of the guys with us knew a lot about mushrooms and told us not to.
If he had not been with us, I’m sure we would have taken them 🙂

GNOME Network

GNOME Network 1.99.2 has
been released. This was a quick release to propose it for inclusion
in GNOME 2.6 Desktop Release. It has been suggested to separate things in
small modules, which doesn’t look bad to me. Although I need to come up
with a good setup that allows us to manage all in one shot (one CVS
meta-module, I suppose, like what gnome-utils is, IIRC).