Rodrigo Moya

No Software Patents

Due to the directive validating Software
Patents that will be voted this 1rst September at the European Parliament,
a lot of people from Hispalinux
have decided to protest by closing
their websites. This is for supporting the real demonstration
that will take place next Wednesday 27th August, in Brussels.

GNOME-DB

Today we have frozen both libgda and libgnomedb for the 1.0 release in a couple of
weeks. I hope the patch review thing works ok here, as it has done for Evolution.
Also, as we speak, GNOME-DB
site has been closed until the 27th, for the demonstration against
software patents.

GNOME-DB

Very nice to have Philippe using GdaXmlDatabase, since we forgot about it, and it had
a few non-working and other missing bits. Philippe has been using it and finding
the problems, and we have been fixing them, so we’ll have a fully working
GdaXmlDatabase for 1.0.

This class will be, with no doubt, one of the nice features of libgda, and which makes it
a generic data management library, not really 100% dependent on a running database server.
That is, GdaXmlDatabase can now (thanks to Philippe) be used by a lot of applications,
not related to databases at all. This class offers a way to store, query and modify an
XML file representing a database. It is used in libgda to import/export databases, but can also
be used as a data storage, like you do with Berkeley DB, for instance, but much better,
since you can have any number of fields, you can query the data via SQL, and, for using
it, you have to deal with the really nice GdaDataModel class. I am in fact going to use it in
gnome-backup,
which I hope will be a good example to convince other people to use it.

Mars

More images from Mars.

Mail bombing

It wasn’t enough with all the virus mails and bounces I’ve been getting, but also
some weed smoked by the mail server at Barrapunto
made it send me around 3500 bounce messages during the night. That has nothing to do
with the bloody virus, it seems, just low quality weed.

SCO

Not only millions of lines on the Linux source code belong to SCO (from what they say), but now, Mr Bill
Gates says it also contains a lot of code from several different companies (as
read here
(translated here)),
included Microsoft. This means that they are saying Linux developers have
been copying code (and nothing else, just copying) for 12 years.

Wow, you have to have a big face and mouth to be able to say this.

Live365

I love Live365. It’s just
the place I was looking for, with thousands of radio stations of all kinds. Also, it’s
free, with ads, but if you pay $3.65/month, you get VIP access, which means you get
no ads while listening to the radios, and you also can listen to some VIP-only
stations. Also, one of the most interesting things I saw on their website, is that
they allow you to create
new radio stations. I wonder if that could be used by some Free Software projects
to have interviews, recorded talks, etc.

And if all that was not enough, they have a label service,
which allows music bands to have their music easily distributed worlwide. I’m gonna tell my
friend Pepe about this.

Linux at prime time on Spanish TV

Yeah, free software has its moment in Spain, it seems. Today, just a few minutes ago,
on the most watched public channel, a documentary about the Campus Party 2003,
where there was a short interview to Juantomas,
Hispalinux President.

India goes to Space

It seems India is also entering
the Space race, which I guess is a good thing for all. There are people
worrying about the Indian technology: fear not, Indians already have the
Vimanas,
which are flying machines described, with great detail, in ancient Indian literature. Some
of those texts, specially one found in Tibet, seem to be being used in the
Chinese Space program (Cannot find a link for that right now, but that’s what I’ve heard
on the radio, in La Rosa de los
Vientos).

GNOME-DB 1.0

I just sent
the plans for GNOME-DB 1.0 to the list. It might seem a bit urged, but
it’s not, since we’ve been having a stable API for the last several months,
with only minimal changes and bug fixes getting in. So, by the beginning of
September, GNOME-DB 1.0 will be a reality, along with GNOME Office 1.0!!!

Gonzalo has entered now bug fixing mode, so expect the
commit list
to grow a lot in these days. One of the things he will be doing is to integrate
the blob API Juan-Mariano sent us some weeks ago, which will be one of the few
new features we will have before 1.0. Go Gonzalo Go!

Photos

More images
from Mars.

Evolution

Things on the Evolution front continue to go smoothly. First, the creation
of the Evolution
blog page, a place which will help us involving the community in
the development, and the return of
Natzilla.

Apart from that, my work on the overlayed multiple calendars per view continues,
and now, at last, I have a screenshot to show:

This shows how the calendar will look like. It just displays one calendar, since there
is no support yet for showing multiple calendars, but you get the idea. Each calendar
will have an associated color, which will be used to colorize the events. The same thing
in the week view:

Novell Ximian Services

On day 3 of the Novell-Ximian experience, things in perspective are much
better than expected on the first day. First of all, as Nat
confirms
in this mail, he and Miguel are pretty much in charge
of all the Linux desktop and Open Source strategy at Novell, which means, as
you can imagine, just only good things, given the vision and skills of both of them.
Also, all client-side development made by Novell Ximian Services will be made,
since the beginning, in the public. This is to avoid situations like the printing
support in XD2, which couldn’t be integrated into the GNOME core, since it wasn’t
known outside Ximian.

On other things, libgda
& libgnomedb 0.91 have been released.

Novell Ximian Services

It’s now official: Novell
acquires Ximian. Ximian will become Novell Ximian Services, and all its employees
will continue to work on the same projects (Evolution, Ximian Desktop, Red Carpet, Mono).

This is big news for us, Ximian employees, since it means we will have much more
resources for all the projects we are working on right now and will give us the
possibility of working on new amazing projects.

As always, a lot of different reactions:

• In Slashdot
• In Barrapunto
• IBM
  General Manager of e-business
• E-commerce
  News