Hack Week starting

As most people might already know, this week is Hack Week here at Novell. So, as we were told to take photos/videos of the activity during this week at our work center, and since my work center is my house, I had to call some friends to come up and help me the whole week. Said and done, they were here this morning very early, and the boys started planning what they were going to work on:

The boys planning the hack week

And right after the planning meeting, full of energy, they started hacking

The boys hacking

More details on what we are working on and more photos later.

In Your Face

I have never been a gamer, but there have been some games that, sometimes, have forced me to get back, for a little bit, to a Windows machine. Those are sport games, like EA NBA/NHL, old Dinamic’s PC Futbol, all of them, in case you haven’t guessed, with the ability to play the actual games, plus the ability of managing your team (buy/sell players, get sponsors, etc). Unfortunately there is nothing similar for Linux, and even less if you just want Free software, but this may be changing: In Your Face is a free 3d basketball game. As the author says itself, it looks a bit ugly, but the difficult thing of this kind of games is to program the logic of the game itself (in this case, moving the players around and all related stuff), and this is what Isaac (the author) is working on, so, with a bit of luck, others could step on and code the other parts (the teams database, for instance, should be very easy to do), and, in little time, we could have a very good game, which could even be the base for other similar games.

I was born yesterday

Yesterday after lunch, when coming back home from Pamplona, I was on my motorbike behind a truck, and suddenly, a car on the other direction invaded our lane, crashed against the truck, and was thrown on my way. Fortunately, I was able to avoid the crash against the car, but I got out of the road and crashed against a traffic signal. The guy in the car had fallen sleep and was a bit drunk, but was lucky enough, first, to not step down the truck (in which case he would have been smashed), and, second, to not kill anyone (in this case me, if I hadn’t avoided the car, I think I wouldn’t be here today, or at least not able to write this entry).

Fortunately, I am mostly ok, just with some bruises in my legs, and a sprain shoulder, which makes me just be able to use one arm. My bike is also mostly ok, but it lost all its engine oil because of the crash against the traffic signal, which broke the oil evacuation part, so it didn’t even start a few minutes after the accident. There were also a few other bits that got broken, but anyway, the guy on the car’s insurance would pay for everything. The police got him to do the alcohol test, and got positive, and the guy from the truck declared the same version than I, so I shouldn’t have any problem with having all paid.

I’ve been told to rest for a couple of weeks, so I might not be able to answer mail or commit patches or go to parties, etc, so just be patient if you’re waiting for something from me.

Rupert frees .NET

I have been invited to do a presentation about Mono next week for the people from NavarraDOTnet (a group of developers of .NET in Navarra). I was asked for ideas for the poster for the conference, and I suggested using Rupert. They forwarded my comments, along with a description of what Mono is (a Free version of .NET), to some Art students with no knowledge about Mono, Linux, Free Software, etc, and just using this information, they did this:

A great job indeed!

Gimmie vs Big Board

Nothing really to add to the flames, so go elsewhere if you wanted some flaming, but all this Gimmie vs Big Board thing reminded me of some similar situations, like Xgl, gnome-session-manager, Ximian Desktop, etc, etc, where software done, let’s call it “in-house”, by companies upset lots of people.

Although, AFAIK, those companies (Novell, RedHat and any others involved in past situations like these one) have nothing to demonstrate about their support of free software (lots of good free software came from them, some developers from them are very well known community members, etc), there is clearly something wrong going on, if every time those “in-house” software projects are announced people from the GNOME community get upset. Maybe it is the companies, not really paying all the attention they should to the upstream projects, or maybe it is the community, which likes seeing conspirations everywhere?

Whatever the answer is, I think we have a problem (maybe not that big, but a problem after all), so we should be doing something about it. Maybe the new release team’s plans can help in some way, like having a central place not only for keeping track of GNOME’s official modules development, but about any new development going on in the GNOME constellation? Also, maybe suggesting the companies affiliated to the GNOME Foundation to get more involved with the GNOME project?

GUADEMY

A quick summary from Guademy this past weekend:

  • It’s been great to know more KDE people in Spain, since we (GNOME Spanish crowd) did just know, very well on the other hand, Antonio Larrosa, who now will not have to stand with 10s of GNOME hackers all the time and shout GNOME!! with them 🙂 All of them were great guys, and some just came recently into the KDE project thanks to Google’s summer of code. But this does not prevent them from being very passionate guys, like Rafael Fernández, with very good ideas.
  • Ismael Olea has cut his hair!!!! It took me a few seconds to recognize him. But as always, it is a pleasure to listen to his crazy ideas, some of which, if I’ve understood them correctly (Ismael is on a higher level than us mere mortals 🙂 are quite interesting for free software.
  • We need a much better Free desktop platform!! (more on this later…)

A big special thanks go to the organizers, who have done a great job, with details that only people from Galicia can have, like having all day a table with fruits, coffee, juices, organizing a great dinner, with typical Galician food and drinks (queimada, which is now an official part of everything organized in Galicia). I hope they have time enough to rest, because it has been an exhausting work for them.

GUADEC-ES 2007

Next GUADEC-ES (Spanish GUADEC) will be held in Granada, the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited, with one of the wonders of the world, the palace of La Alhambra. And not only that, but going around Granada for tapas is one of the best (and cheapest) experience, since you just have to pay for the drinks, the food is for free (a tradition unfortunately lost in other cities of Spain).

And well, yes, there will be GNOME-related talks, if the free tapas didn’t convince you. Are you missing this?

Uses of OpenStreetMap

I recently bloged about my discovery of OpenStreetMap, but the more I look at it, the more I like it. It offers lots of possibilities.

First, you can create your own maps, like I did. It might not be a great thing for some people, but for me it’s been a wonderful finding. It is very easy to do this, as explained in this page. You just need to choose an editor (JOSM in my case), and convert the GPS tracks into streets, roads, highways, tracks, etc.

The next thing, once you have the maps you want to use, is what to do with them. An obvious choice is that, thanks to OSM, we have a (still incomplete though) free world map. But not only that, because having free maps, and mixing them with other technologies, we have lots of great uses for this.

For instance, you can create an atlas, and lots of other neat stuff.

But apart from that, and being involved in desktop development, I have started to think about ideas on how to use this technology in the desktop, so here comes my ideas.

  • An obvious choice, a map application, like Google Earth. There are sites that, I think, offer free satellite images that could be used along with the OSM maps, so seems to be a not-so-difficult task. Mixing the maps and the information in them with Wikipedia, for instance, could give us a complete atlas application.
  • Also an obvious choice, and the reason I started looking at OSM, is to be able to use those maps in external GPS units (Garmin, TomTom, Magellan, etc) or other devices (like the PSP). Garmin users are lucky, because this is already possible. For TomTom (the one I own), it doesn’t look hard to do it, once you have a correct map and you calibrate it (that is, you specify which coordinates the map shows), so as soon as I do it on mine, I’ll let people know.
  • When on systems with a GPS unit attached to them, the number of choices grow. There exists a software (GPSD), that already provides the GPS unit interface, so we’d just need to build software around it: navigation systems (gpsdrive), georeferencing weblog posts/documents/photos/etc

I’m sure there are lots of other uses we could make of the OSM technologies in the desktop, so please let me know any idea you might think about.

OpenStreetMap

While learning more about GPS on Linux, I’ve came across OpenStreetMap, a community project to create free maps for everyone to use. Since the maps is one of the biggest problems I’ve found with my TomTom (not being up-to-date, not including almost none off-road paths, being too expensive to update, etc), I’m starting to record my routes to upload them there and help thus in the creation of the free map of the world.

I haven’t really looked yet at the details on how you edit the routes, but the theory seems quite easy:

  1. You record your routes with your GPS unit in GPX format
  2. You load that GPX file into one of the OSM editors. With this, you add information to the route you just created, like identifying streets, paths, motorways, etc
  3. You upload the resulting file to OSM and that gets included in the full map

One of the nicest things, in theory still, seems to be osmarender, which is a tool to create a SVG file out of the OSM data created with the OSM editors. This means you can create a map out of a GPS track, or, that is, create your own maps!

Right now, Britain seems to have the best coverage, Spain being just partially covered. So, while the map itself is still not too useful (at least for me), it looks a very promising project, which just needs people all over the world to contribute to the map. So, if you have a GPS unit that can record routes to GPX, please start doing so whenever you can. If you are lazy enough to not want to learn all the process, just send me the GPX files or wait until I learn and I describe the process here.

More to come as I learn more about the whole process…