Claudio Saavedra

claudio@codemonkey.cl

Fri 2009/Jul/03

• As all the other cool kids in town, I'm flying to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, to attend the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. In practical terms, this means GUADEC, GUADEC Hispana, Akademy, and, eventually, other conferences/activities that might be arranged during the big event.

  Partly because of laziness, partly because of having really busy weeks lately (both work and life-wise), I won't be presenting anything during GUADEC Hispana, although I would have liked to. However, Berto and I will be giving a talk on the new Hildon toolkit for Maemo 5, during the Mobile Day. Besides introducing the new widgets and UI style for Fremantle, we will also talk about the difficulties we have been facing during this major revamp of the toolkit, which will hopefully serve to clarify some of the doubts spread around lately.

Wed 2009/Jul/01

• Joaquim, one of our new superheroes at Igalia, has been porting the Eye of GNOME to Maemo 5 using the Fremantle Beta SDK and the widgets in the new Hildon toolkit.

  Joaquim's work is a live example of the look 'n feel of Fremantle-style applications. I'd recommend to anyone writing or porting applications for Fremantle to have a look at his screencast and, of course, the application.

Wed 2009/May/13

• Now I start to wonder whether we should have a Canarias City Run during GUADEC (cf. [1], [2], [3], [4]).

  Jokes aside, during conferences and travels it's always easy to break the training routine (unless you are really into it), so having an excuse to actually run, let's say, 10k would probably be a good idea.

Tue 2009/May/12

• I just noticed that the examples and documentation packages for libhildon are not present in the Maemo 5 SDK Beta. If you want to have a look at the API using Devhelp or want to toy with the examples, I'd recommend you to either 1) get the source package and build it (good) or 2) clone the git repository and build it from there (better).

  At some point in the very near future, I'd like to start publishing updated tarballs regularly in the garage page, but at the moment a few (probably quite trivial) issues prevent us from doing it. If I find a bit of time this week, I might fix them. If you want to help, just clone the repo, run make distcheck and see for yourself. The mailing list is waiting for your patches.

Sun 2009/May/10

• Yesterday was the 1/2 Marathon: Helsinki City Run. I took part in it and learned the hard way what it means to run more than 20k (is there an easy way?).

  Originally, I had been running since January in the cold Helsinki, around Töölönlahti, sometimes with around -10⁰C, with icy and slippery roads, starting from around 5k to 15k in my best moment. Motivated by Dirk-Jan and Ann-Christin, I had the idea to run the Helsinki City Run but due to external factors I wasn't sure if I would even be in Helsinki for this date and didn't sign up.

  A bit demotivated when the deadline passed, and affected by a flu during the last two weeks, I had stopped my running routine, waiting to feel better. In the meantime, Iván recommended me a book by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about running. In this book, Murakami writes about his experience as a long-distance runner, his motivations to run, and how running helped him to become the writer he is. Certainly an interesting read for any runner (and probably even for non runners), that somehow managed to rise my motivation to run. But still, running the City Run wouldn't be possible.

  But thanks to one of these great coincidences, things turned out in a favorable direction. On Friday afternoon I got a call from Ann-Christin, telling me that she was picking up the runner's pack from the Olympic Stadium and had found out that, since Marius wouldn't run, it was possible for me to take his place. After thinking for 3 seconds about how lazy I had been in the last weeks and doubting, I went crazy and told her to sign me up. Went home, had spaghetti for dinner, and started drinking water as crazy. I would finally run the HCR.

  Saturday turned up to be a cold, rainy, and windy day. Nervous about the race I didn't manage to sleep well enough but as time of the race approached, I started to feel full of energy. Drank lots of water and ate mostly cereals and bread up to two hours before the race, and got to the stadium. I was certainly excited about all this!

  The competition had about 11.000 participants. The Olympic stadium, although windy and cold, was looking beautiful. Runners of all ages, colors, and shapes were warming up all around the place. Adrenalin could just go higher as the start approached. And once we started running I couldn't feel happier. Of course, I had no idea how painful this would turn to be.

  The first 10k were absolutely fine. The circuit went along my beloved Töölönlahti, and it felt like home while I tried to make my way between all the people. Between 10k and 12k I was still feeling things to go well, but entering the 13k was the beginning of the real race. Starting from there, it only got more and more difficult. With each kilometer pain in my legs increased and feet friction started to bug me. Hydration and breathing were however fine, so I knew that it would only be a matter of pushing enough and I would make it. But, of course, this belief decreased as the distance completed increased.

  After 17k, pain was starting to get really annoying. Being the first time I ran more than 15k this was completely new and it was hard to know whether I would get all the cramps at some point or whether I could even walk to the finish line. Of course, I didn't want to retire nor walk the last kilometers, so I just kept pushing, and pushing.

  When we finally reached the 20k mark, just around the Olympic Stadium, I knew I would make it, even when my legs were almost not responding. The last few hundred meters before entering the stadium are basically a small uphill. Were these actually more than 100mt? I don't even know, but these certainly felt like a few km. People were just walking at that point, but I wouldn't give in. I had managed to run all the way there, no way I would walk this bloody hill.

  Entering the stadium was probably one of the most exciting moments. For whatever reason, entering the running track brought all the energy back and I ran through the finish line with a smile on my face. An official time of 2:25:00 for the 21,097 m that I thought it would be impossible to achieve. I got the medal, some bananas, and water. Found a warm spot where to cover me with my towel, pullover, and jacket, and met Luc, Dirk-Jan, Ann-Christin and the other runners. Champagne to celebrate, and then the real pain started.

  Looking back at yesterday's experience and how good I have felt since, I have to say that running is now definitively something I'll be doing more seriously. I know very well that 2:25:00 is not a time to feel proud of, but given the circumstances, I am more than happy with it. I'll probably start running shorter distances, since I would like to start swimming as well, but running a half marathon under 2 hours is going to be the goal for the next season. Let's see how it goes.

  

Wed 2009/Apr/29

• I finally took the three seconds I needed to copy my blogging script to my home laptop, which means that I should be writting a bit more frequently from now on.

• Yesterday, the Maemo 5 SDK Beta was released. From the Application Framework team perspective, I can say that it's been a lot of hard work to get it to the state in which is now, but there's still plenty of work to do.

  But there are more good news, yes sir. In a joined effort of Nokia and Igalia, we've finally convinced the right people to move libhildon, the GTK+ widgets library for Maemo, to a public repository. Not only that, we also have a garage project page with a mailing list where we expect to discuss with application developers from the community about the status of the library and get feedback, patches, and interesting discussion.

  So, if you are a Maemo developer and want to join the fun, be at the bleeding edge before Maemo 5 is released, feel free to clone the git repository, join our mailing list, report bugs, and in the end, help us make libhildon 2.2 the best release ever.

Wed 2009/Mar/18

• Last night was Jethro Tull's 40th anniversary concert in Helsinki. Marius, Eugene, and I attended and were delighted with the performance. 40 years is a log time and these guys are still rocking!

  

• A few weeks ago, Vicente Amigo, a flamenco guitarist from Córdoba played in Espoo. Maria and I attended and the performance was impeccable. He even had an amazing bailaor dancing for some of the songs. Awesome.

• On a different note, since my university decided to outsource the email service to Windows Live@Edu (a service provided by Microsoft) and I am not willing to activate it, I am not getting any emails to my account in @alumnos.utalca.cl. Please remove this from your address book.

Tue 2009/Feb/24

• On my trip to Chile, last November, I bought a small bunch of books from the Latin American authors I've been interested to read for a while but never managed. During the idle time in A Coruña (which was much more than what I would normally like), the vacations in Germany, and now in the Helsinki winter, I managed to read them almost all.

  One of the most interesting ones was El Roto, by Joaquín Edwards Bello. This novel from the beginning of the XX century describes in a very direct way the Chilean society and the enormous social differences (something that unfortunately is still a problem), while criticizing the role the Catholic Church had on this. It is not a big surprise that this book was censured on its first publications, in times when the Church had a huge influence in the Chilean society.

  Also read Llamadas Telefónicas, by Roberto Bolaño. The short stories are quite interesting to read, nothing really brilliant, but somehow the writing style of Bolaño caught me. Most of the main characters in these stories share an inability to remember somewhat important details on what they are telling, so phrases like "she told me her last words, or maybe not really her last words but something important, the point is that I don't remember anymore" are quite common. I wonder if that's a reflection of Bolaño's personality.

  Anyway, I also read a couple of compilations by Cortázar (Bestiario and Todos los fuegos el fuego), and I'm currently reading a compilation of poems by Nicanor Parra and Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo. It had been a while since I last felt so passionate about reading, so that partly explains why I've been a bit away from computers in my free time.

Thu 2009/Feb/12

• On Monday, I came back from Brussels after FOSDEM '09. This was the first time I attended this event and I am certainly impressed by the huge amount of people who gathers during these two days. Not only I met many old GNOME friends, but I also got to know many fellow hackers that I had worked with but never meet before. Pretty cool.

  I attended the talks in the GNOME, Crossdesktop, Mozilla, and Embedded developer rooms. It was a good opportunity to know a bit more about many different projects that I unfortunately haven't managed yet to try on my own but interest me in different ways (like nevimer, rygel, and all the stuff around geoclue and geolocation). I think now I have more reasons to play with them, when I finally get a bit of extra energy.

  One special thing of this FOSDEM was that, finally, Lucas, Felix, and I were in the same event, meaning that the whole current Eye of GNOME team got to finally meet. It was the first time that Felix attended an event involving GNOME people, so Lucas and I were introducing him to some of the guys. Jokes here and there, we could realize how well defined the roles in our team are: Felix does all the hardcore work, I do the releases, and Lucas gets the all the credits as the maintainer (partly a joke, partly true, since lately Felix has been really rocking on making eog pretty rock solid. Dude, you rock!). We discussed some of the things we would like to do in the near future. Somehow I feel an extra motivation after this meeting, so I will be trying to summarize these points and what we agreed and mail them to the eog mailing list. If you are interested, please join (and poke me with a stick if I take too long to write this mail down).

  Other cool thing that happened was to meet Jorge Bustos, a Chilean friend from my times in the Universidad de Talca, who is currently working in Madrid with the people from Libresoft. We randomly met in one of the corridors and the expression of surprise of both of us was just amazing. There are not that many Chileans abroad working in FLOSS related projects, and when it's about a friend, this is a one in a million coincidence (although I have to say that I also met another Chilean, who works for Nokia/Trolltech, and also Duncan Mac-Vicar from the Kopete/Yast fame was around).

  In general, a nice experience. I only wish the schedule wasn't so packed and Belgian beer wasn't that good, but that's just complaining for free.

Sat 2009/Jan/17

• Thanks to the kind support of Igalia, I'm going to FOSDEM this year. I've never been in Belgium, so this will be an interesting trip. Of course, many friends will be there, so it's gonna be a good opportunity to catch up with all of them.

  

Sat 2009/Jan/10

• Felix did the final work to remove the Eye of GNOME dependency on libgnome. Great work, dude!

Sun 2009/Jan/04

• Vacations ended up being really cool, in spite of having lost the initial connections and having had to spend the night in a scary terminal of Berlin-Tegel. That night ended up being really funny, as I met some backpackers in a similar situation and realized that getting stuck on a terminal is a fundamental part of life. I decided that, later at some point, I will take a few months to backpack the world that I still don't know. Then, I'm sure I will find my Tegel experience just irrelevant.

  I spent Christmas in Zuschendorf, at Marie's parents. This was the most German Christmas I've experienced ever, with pyramids, Räuchermänner, Klösse, beer, and so on. I even tried ice skating and proved to be completely useless for it. I should definitively try again here.

  

  Later, Prague. Francisco, Edgardo and I went for a few days to the Czech capital. I enjoyed once again the delicious Czech food and beer. We took a few walks through the typical places, and made lots of pictures. Weather was nice: although it was always under 0 degrees, we didn't see a cloud during the three days. Not bad.

  

  For new year, we traveled to Berlin –the good thing of Dresden is that you can reach many interesting cities in less than two hours– and met other Chilean DAAD scholars. We made it through the crowd in the Strasse des 17. Juni until the Brandenburger Tor, and enjoyed the fireworks and party afterward. It was really cold (probably around -5 or -7 degrees), but Glühwein, continuous movement, and dancing stopped us from freezing.

  

  Then I spent the days after walking around Berlin-Mitte and Berlin-Kreuzberg. There is quite a lot to see, and I definitively will need to visit the city again, as time and energy weren't enough to go all the places I wanted to see. At last, I was so exhausted because of this trip, that I ended up sleeping more than 12 hours a day during the last three days. Crazy.

• So, I'm back in the North pole after my nearly two months world tour. During the last two months I visited Santiago de Chile, Talca, Curicó, Lima, A Coruña, Dresden, Zuschendorf, Prague, and Berlin. Fortunately, the last few days have been quiet enough for me to recover energies and I am already missing work. Let's get it on!

Tue 2008/Dec/23

• So, I'm stuck in the Berlin-Tegel airport. The plain Madrid-Berlin was also delayed for about an hour or so --no further explanations, of course. I arrived at 23:30 in Tegel, no restaurants nor cafeterias open, so no much to do.

  Fortunately, there is free internet in a waiting room, packed with other people who probably lost connections as well and a homeless guy that gets kicked out every half hour by the security people. I just need to wait until 4am, when some restaurants will open to feed the helpless.

  That's what I call vacations' day one.

Mon 2008/Dec/22

• Of course, vacations couldn't start smoothly. My Iberia flight A Coruña-Madrid got delayed and I lost my connection to Berlin. I will consequently loose my train to Dresden. Of course, they don't offer you anything else than exactly what the law enforces, so I will be in my own in Berlin-Tegel.

  Luckily, I found a bus from Berlin-Tegel to Dresden that leaves early tomorrow morning, so I will be only about. 9 hours late in Dresden and this will cost me only 23 &eur; extra.

  Now, if I could only find how to print the bus e-ticket..

Sun 2008/Dec/21

• After an interesting year, it is time for a break. I'll spend the next two weeks in vacations, away from computers, offline, etc. Where? Well, the vacations plan is still work in progress, but for sure, I'll spend Christmas in the most beautiful place in the earth..

  

  Yes, sir. I'm going back to Dresden. I'll be visiting Marie and other friends there. It is likely that I'll be visiting Berlin and Prague later as well, but the plans are not complete. We'll see.

  I am so excited about this trip. Dresden means so much to me that I just can't wait to be there. Berlin, on the other hand, is a city where I've been twice for the day, but never had enough time to visit all the interesting places, nor to see its Nachtleben. And Prague? Well, Prague is one of those pearls you can't never get enough of them.

  It's gonna be really cool..

Thu 2008/Dec/18

• Regarding the suspension of the Galicia-Chile match, scheduled for this 27th in A Coruña. This is how SIFUP published it:

  (La suspención) dice relación con la no autorización de los futbolistas convocados, por parte de sus clubes, para participar en dicho encuentro que debía efectuarse en la fecha anteriormente señalada en dependencias del Estadio Riazor de La Coruña.

  This is how La Tercera understood it:

  (...) en el comunicado (de sifup) se aclara que los clubes gallegos se negaron a facilitar a sus jugadores, hecho que no había ocurrido en anteriores ocasiones. En ese sentido, los clubes más destacados de esa región son Celta de Vigo, La Coruña y Pontevedra,entre otros [sic].

  This is how what Carlos Soto, president of Sifup, actually wrote to the Xunta de Galicia:

  No tenemos los diez jugadores de la lista del último partido ante Argentina que Galicia exigía por contrato. No podemos cumplir esa condición. Hay dos o tres lesionados, otros de vacaciones, y la gran mayoría sus clubes no nos los facilitan porque no es una fecha FIFA.

  Once again, La Tercera publishing crap.

Mon 2008/Dec/15

• Galician food is awesome, but the truth needs to be said:

  
  Cartoon by Gogue.

  Too many potatoes for my taste. It's not strange that one of the first galician sentences I learned is "Estou ata o carallo das patacas!".

Mon 2008/Dec/08

• This is the first public holiday I have in four months (the last one was 15th august, but doesn't really count, as I was preparing my trip to Helsinki). Somehow I managed to skip all public holidays in Chile (six, but three during weekends), in Galicia (three, but two during weekends) and in Finland (seems like all were during weekends this year).

  So, this is my first day off in like 4 or 5 months, that I am not sick in bed, preparing a trip, on a plain, jetlagged, or similar. It feels nice!

  It is worth noting that Chile had way too many public holidays for any given reason during this period. Not only that, but one was approved in record time by the congress just a few weeks before the date, which is of course a mixture of populism and laziness. Interesting.

  Anyway, back to get personal stuff done now.

Fri 2008/Dec/05

• Last Sunday, besides visiting Lima, was my last day in Chile. I made the final move to A Coruña that day. Without fancy goodbye parties, without tears, no one saying goodbye in the airport, just me and my luggage. Exactly as I wanted it to be. Looking forward, no sadness.

  I think my family was more than ready to let me go – I left my hometown when I was about to become 18; I traveled overseas for one year when I was just 22, and I hadn't spend much time in Chile in 2008 anyway. This only completes what I started 7 years ago.

  Friday was my graduation ceremony, in Curicó. My whole family went to receive my diploma with me, and we got a nice surprise. Someone in the Computer Engineering School thought I deserved an award, and it seems everyone in the Escuela agreed. I am grateful for that. My family and I had dinner in the Pizzería Real, and said goodbye as any other day. It was a really beautiful day.

  I arrived in A Coruña this monday. Calvaris was waiting for me in the airport and took me directly to the office to work. No break for me, no sir (ok, this is not completely true, I only went to A Grela to greet the guys and check my email, no real work done).

  Today I finished all the immigration paperwork, which was a pain in the ass. Had to wait on a line for two hours to get a numbered ticket, and then wait for another hour for this number to be reached, and then finally deliver all my papers. I think people were making the line since 6am or 7am. This is a clear example of why Spain is not Europe.

  Anyway, the painful part is past. Now it is time to enjoy work, Galician food, Igalia, and A Coruña. It is a really exciting moment in my life.

Wed 2008/Dec/03

• On Sunday, I had a connection in Lima with a long wait, so Diego and two of his friends picked me up on the airport and took me to the city. Basically, the excuse was to see the city but I have to confess that at the end, I was mostly interested on the peruvian food, like ceviche. Of course, neither the food nor the city dissapointed me at all. Thanks Diego, Juanpe, and Pedro!

  

  

  

Wed 2008/Nov/26

• One of the things I'm doing to eat and drink healthier for the last few months is to have lunch with a glass of water instead of a soft drink or juice -- something extremely rare in Chile, but that fits pretty well with A Coruña and Helsinki lunch habits. This is so rare in Chile, that every time I order a glass of water instead of a soft drink, waiters have looked weird to me, but always brought it. Until today.

  I went to Nuria with a friend for lunch. While she ordered a soft drink, I ordered a glass of water. The waiter was really rude and said to himself "hm, veo que me saqué el premiado" (an interjection meaning I was his big-prize-customer of the day). Although rude, I didn't really give importance to this, until he served only the coke Gabriela had ordered, and then our meals. No water for me.

  I inquired him about my glass of water. He looked around very annoyed and told me he would bring it soon, something that after a few minutes, he finally did. When we were ready with our meals I ordered an espresso and another glass of water, just to test him. Of course, he only brought the coffee I had ordered. Once again, no water for me.

  I think there is a general misconception that ordering a glass of water in a restaurant means you are a cheap customer. Truth is, I wouldn't have cared if he had charged for it or not -- I just want to drink water with my lunch. So, instead of complaining with the manager or filing a complain, when we payed for our lunch I left about 20% tip (something really rare here), and told him when leaving: "I am so sorry to have ordered water, I didn't know you can't charge for it". If that makes him understand that drinking a glass of water with your lunch doesn't mean you are a cheap customer, then I would feel relieved, but the truth is that I doubt it will make a difference. Still, I felt fine when we left the restaurant and much better than how I would have felt if I had complained.

  I don't think I'll lunch in Nuria again, though.

Wed 2008/Nov/19

• I've spent the last 10 days in Santiago de Chile, taking care of the last steps of a not-so-painful visa process. It's been pretty exhausting, as I am still working remotely, I've had to walk a lot, to make lines half of the day, paying for lots of documents (some of which I didn't even need in the first place), and also have met some of my friends and my family (including a weekend trip to Talca, to visit my mom). Summarizing, a pretty intense time.

  Fortunately, today I got a positive response from the Spanish Consulate, stating that my visa request was approved and that now I only need to confirm the date of my flight. This means that I won't be so busy nor expectant during the next days. That's such a relief.

  Somehow, I don't feel anything special from the fact that I am moving out of Chile, this time indefinitely. I guess that the months in Helsinki took care of preparing me for what's next. Fortunately, I have the feeling that it's the same for my family, which is a big relief.

  I expect to be in A Coruña by the first week of December. What then? I'm not sure yet, but I don't think I will keep my ass quiet in the same place for too long, anytime soon.

• Today I learned that it would be a good idea to keep a recent backup of my version of Federico's activity-log.el.

Wed 2008/Nov/05

• So, it took more than originally planned, but the timing is almost perfect: my Spanish work permit was granted, so I'm traveling to Chile this month to do the final paperwork and get the stamp in my passport.

  One thing that's curious is that when I tell people about it, they congratulate me. It feels weird to be congratulated because of receiving something that I consider almost a right (the right to have permission to legally work in something that you love), but the way bureaucracy and immigration policies go, it seems that getting a work permit for a European country it is a motive of joy. Weird.

• On Sunday I reached a milestone I had set for myself: I ran over 10.5 kms in about 50 min. It was damn cold in Helsinki, so I just started and decided not to stop until I had run more than 10 kms, and it just happened. When I could measure the time it took me it felt amazing. I thought I was running at a much slower peace, so getting to know it was only 50 min. felt really cool.

  I've been also trying to run in one of those running machines, but it's not working pretty well for me. Not only I feel dizzy, but also my back starts hurting and the impact on the surface makes my legs hurt. I am not really liking it, so I've been only doing between 2 km and 4 km. Anyway, it's better than not running at all.

  Also, I started playing table tennis again. It's been years since I played regularly (during high school I was really freak about it), and it's slowly coming again. I got myself a nice racket, but I still haven't beat Marius, though :-)

Fri 2008/Oct/24

• I spent the weekend and the first days of this week in Galicia. The weekend was the Igalia Summit Autumn 08, so I took a few planes on Friday and arrived right on time for some football. We spent the whole weekend in a nice place east from Santiago de Compostela, going insane playing a geocaching competition, and in general, having fun and getting to know ourselves and Igalia a bit better.

  

  Then, I spent a few days working onsite in the A Grela offices, in A Coruña. The environment is as cool as I remember it, and it really feels great to have the guys around. Surprisingly, they managed to make me completely forget about my camera, which I didn't use during the six days I spent with them. Unbelievable! No pics of Santiago nor A Coruña.

  I came back to Helsinki yesterday, and slept so much that only the second morning coffee cup was able to get my brain working again. I would love to do that again.

Mon 2008/Oct/13

• This is one of the things that makes you smile about the beautiful community we build everyday. Pierre-Luc Beaudoin is working in a really cool clutter powered widget for the visualization of maps: libchamplain. Not only that, but he also went on and created a kicking ass plugin, for the Eye of GNOME, that displays geotagged photos in a map in the eog window. A screenshot is worth more than 1000 words:

  

  We merged his patch in the eog-plugins SVN module, for you to enjoy at home! Yay! Just go grab the eog-plugins module, and the latest release of libchamplain.

  Distros out there, what are you waiting to package libchamplain and libchamplain-gtk? huh?

• So, Zeeshan actually likes Molly Malone's. He only disagreed about Meritähti being a good bar..

• Thanks tigert for the kicking ass hackergotchi!

Sun 2008/Oct/12

• A weekend on the drop of deprecated libraries: just while Francisco and I were cooking patches to remove the dependencies on libgnomeui and libgnomeprint in gyrus, Felix published patches in bugzilla to remove dependencies on libglade and libgnome-desktop in Eye of GNOME. Great!

• Although Zeeshan may disagree, I still think that Molly Malone's rules enough to have spent both Friday and Saturday evening there. So, Zeeshan, still waiting for your suggestions.

• Today I was able to do about 8 kms around Töölönlahti, even when I had started feeling some pain in my left knee the previous times I had run here. Now I didn't feel any pain while running, but now at home it feels a bit uncomfortable. Anyway, that is better than not being able to run back home, like last week.

  Hopefully the weather will be still runner-friendly during the next weeks.

Sun 2008/Oct/05

• Given that I am a DAAD alumn, I have the blessing of being able to order at most €200 in Computer Science books. So, today I sent my order for this year. As I'm likely to spend some time working on software design and user interfaces, my selection focuses a bit on design patterns, OO programming, plus some classics that I think could be interesting to read:

  • Gamma, Erich / Helm, Richard / Johnson, Ralph / Vlissides, John: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. ISBN: 0201633612
  • Brooks, Jr. Frederick P.: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. ISBN: 0201835959.
  • Tidwell, Jenifer: Designing Interfaces. ISBN: 0596008031.
  • Weisfeld, Matt: The Object-Oriented Thought Process. ISBN: 0672330164
  • Bentley, Jon: Programming Pearls. ISBN: 0201657880
  • Knuth, Donald E.: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (CSLI Lecture Notes No. 136). ISBN: 1575863278.
  • Abelson, Harold / Sussman, Gerald Jay / Sussman, Julie: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. ISBN: 0262510871.

  Obviously, the list exceeds the €200 limit, but this makes sense, as most probably not all the titles will be available at the time the order is processed. And the list above is in priority order, so, let's see what I get for Christmas.

  So, now is the time when you email me and tell me "you chose the wrong book on $TOPIC.."

Sun 2008/Sep/28

• Given that past week was the Helsinki International Film Festival, the other day, Iván and I went to the Bio Rex in Lasipalatsi, to watch Cidade dos Homens. As the name suggests, it is closely related to the brilliant Cidade de Deus –gangs and Mafias at the favela style– but doesn't try to be a second part nor a continuation. Its plot is more easy to follow, the story is pretty interesting, and the music is quite cool.

• I've been watching the old HBO series Oz. I'm about to finish watching the 6th and last season (when everybody leaves home so early, you don't have much options), and I still think it's brilliant, same way as I did when I seldomly watched some episodes during '97-'02.

• My favorite bars in Helsinki: Molly Malone's (live music every night!) and Meritähti (cool food, served by his Hungarian owner, and they have Unicum!). I still have a few that I'm interested on, but that I haven't been there yet.

• And now, for no reason, a gratuitous picture of Kimmo and Marius à la Men in Black (I regret I didn't have my real camera with me):

  

Wed 2008/Sep/24

• So, there you have it. A new version of GNOME has been released. Go celebrate with your local gnomies!

• With it, you will find the latest version of the Eye of GNOME. Although I should have summarized this before and not at the last minute, here you have a list with the most interesting changes:

  • This release is finally using gio/gvfs. The patch to implement this was originally written by Cosimo Cecci during the 2.21 cycle, but unfortunately, a bit late to go in. As we are conservative and respect schedules (something that may piss off some people), we only committed it after the 2.22 release. Thanks to Cosimo!
  • We also included now a small set of plugins. These plugins implement some of the most-wanted features for the hardcore users. Of course, there are still many things that could be implemented, but now you can help us...! These plugins are simple enough for any developer to get inspiration from them and create new plugins, with a little help from...
  • ...the new shinny Eye of GNOME Reference Manual! No more excuses about the eog code being poorly documented. Although there is still room for improvement, we spent a lot of time reviewing the eog code in order to document all the public API. We know that some parts of it are not as extensible as we would like, but we will be working on improving it.
  • Tons of bugs fixed, performance improvements, extended metadata support (including PNG metadata), UI improvements.

  What are our plans for 2.26? Well, a list of the things that I would love to get done in this cycle (if my frequent relocation doesn't get in the way):

  • Store locally remote images in order to set them as wallpapers (so that I can get lots of ice cream from Luis during GUADEC).
  • Improve extensibility of the eog API. In some places, the API is too ad-hoc and makes hard to extend it, through plugins. We've learnt that from feedback from nice guys writing plugins, that hang from time to time in #eog. With their help, we will improve the situation during this cycle.
  • Finish the clutter powered widget. I really need to get into this.
  • Eye of GNOME in maemo? I want to play with it and see how would it perform.
  • Obviously, bug fixing, some new plugins, some UI improvements, etc, all based on your feedback.

  We'll see how much of that we'll get done. At least, it feels good to look back to the roadmap for 2.23 and see that we accomplished most of what we wanted to do. Kudos to Lucas and Felix!

Sat 2008/Sep/20

• Being subscribed since a few months to svn-commits-list@gnome.org, it is more evident to me now that this is the time of the cycle when several dozens of unsung heroes do an incredibly tremendous job to get GNOME completely translated to many languages. There are hundreds of translations updates made each day to all of the GNOME modules, that make me feel a lousy contributor compared to the huge work they do.

  If you are a translator, thank you. I appreciate and respect your work enormously. Keep on making GNOME rock in your language, kudos to you all!

Wed 2008/Sep/17

• For work reasons, I've been for about a month living in Helsinki, Finland. It's been a pretty interesting experience so far, in spite of weather, beer prices, lunch break time, and food. I've meet a lot of old pals here and also made some new friends, so I've had no much time to be bored.

• During the weekend I went with Simo and Ghis to Tallinn, in Estonia. Tallinn is a very nice city, not so far from Helsinki, where food and beer prices are much better. A must if you are in Scandinavia.

  We had lunch in a nice restaurant named Vanaema Juures, that's located in a sort of basement in the center. I certainly recommend it, as the prices are quite good for what you get, and it's not that touristic nor expensive as the famous Olde Hansa. Other nice place for drinks and food is the Scotland Yard bar.

  And of course, lots of pictures. I've not uploaded many to flickr yet, because of the crappiness of my internet access, but will do progressively (see the photo set). A favorite one:

  

Sat 2008/Aug/30

• I forgot to turn off the coffemaker yesterday. I just discovered that all the water boiled and all the concentrated coffee stayed on the base of the pot. Eek!

• I'm developing a new addiction. Besides my well documented lemon pie dependency, I'm discovering I love cinnamon rolls. Now if I only learn to cook them..

Wed 2008/Aug/20

• I'm having an ugly flu that has kept me since Monday in bed, and not feeling really well. Hopefully I'll feel better soon, as I have tons of interesting stuff ahead to do (and I'm too young to die, of course).

Sat 2008/Aug/16

• My sister Catalina sent me an SMS yesterday evening to tell me that she just had one of her friends installing Debian on her computer, removing Windows XP on the go. And no, she is not a geek.

  Considering that my dad is an Ubuntu user, this makes for three GNU/Linux users in the family.

Thu 2008/Aug/14

• Anyone out there with a few spare minutes willing to give my hackergotchi a revamp? I particularly like this picture by Germán and think it could result to be really nice and definitively funnier than the current one. I'd really appreciate it!

Tue 2008/Aug/05

• After some people insisted on it, I reordered and rebased the work in progress code to get some clutter action in the image viewing widget in EOG. Not that it's all ready, but hopefully this will motivate others to contribute and will motivate me to dedicate a few hours/week to get it in a sane state.

  So, the story is as follows: bug #532183 has a patch to add an EogView interface (or abstract class) that widgets like EogScrollView must implement (or derive from). First step is to finish it and get it into trunk.

  Then, bug #546504 has the initial code for an EogClutterView class that implements EogView. Currently, there's only nice transitions between images, there's no zoom, no scrolling, etc, but it's good enough for an evening of pictures, wine, cheese, and good company.

  So, be nice with it, give comments, and even better, contribute to it. A hardware accelerated GNOME image viewer depends on you!

Thu 2008/Jul/31

• Just wondering how came that nobody told me about that beautiful CTRL-x o mode in GDB!

• Thank you Cody Russell for having fixed bug #56070!

Mon 2008/Jul/28

• Today's 20 minutes python hack. I have always loved to organize my pictures in directories with the structure yyyy-mm-dd-some_caption. Today, I got Antía's pictures for past GUADEC and was definitively not interested in sorting them by hand so, 20 minutes of python, and:

  claudio@dijkstra:/media/seagate/fotos$ picsdir.py Antia/ . guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-11-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-14-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-10-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-13-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-08-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-07-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-27-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-15-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-17-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-09-guadec_antia
  creating dir ./2008-07-12-guadec_antia
  claudio@dijkstra:/media/seagate/fotos$

  Get the small script, if you think it's useful for you. Probably, not. It's not the most beautiful code on earth, but the whole idea was to spend less time coding than in sorting (wasn't that the original goal of computer programming, after all?).

  Thanks to pyexiv2 for doing all the real work.

Thu 2008/Jul/24

• On how we blew up the place during the GUADEC cocktails party, I can only say...

  
  Original picture by Mario Gonzalez

  From left to right, Edward Hervey, John Palmieri, Lucas Rocha, me. Kudos for the others as well!

Sun 2008/Jul/20

• I uploaded some of the pictures I made in Istanbul during GUADEC. See the flickr set for some of them. This one, taken near the New Mosque, is one of my favorites:

  

Tue 2008/Jul/15

• Let's try to summarize activity for the past two weeks.

  Monday 30th: Picked up from the A Coruña airport by Juanjo and Calvaris. Went to the A Grela offices, met the Igalia crew again. Had lunch with some of the guys. Some work done. During the evening, took a walk with Eva through Ciudad Vieja, the beaches, and the Calle Real. Andres joined for some tapas.

  Tuesday 1st: Picked up from the hotel by Juanjo. Went to the Uni da Coruña, visited the CITIC offices. Met there Mario, Jota, and Montse. Back to A Grela, conference meeting with Alex. More work done. Lunch with the guys, during the afternoon more work and meetings. Went to Mario's parents house for a churrascada. Met there Edu, Chema, and other Igalians.

  Wednesday 2nd: Picked up from the hotel by Juanjo, gone to A Grela. Some work, planning, organizing the travel to Fuenlabrada with Berto, Mario, Victor, and Felipe. During the evening, made some pictures on the beaches, the Calle de hercules. Met Calvaris and Laura at the Praza do Maria Pita, went for some Turkish advices to the local Kebab restaurant. The good Turkish there told us a lot about Istanbul and places to visit. Nice Dürüm, by the way.

  Thursday 3rd: Picked up very early by Mario, checked out, taxi to the airport and off to Madrid. Flew alone but waited in Barajas for Mario, Berto, Felipe and Victor. Took the metro to Nuevos Ministerios, there Cercanias to Atocha, and then to Fuenlabrada Central. Arrived at the GUADEC-es venue right in time to attend Germán's talk on GNOME and Innovation. Great stuff; I'd really love the GNOME people to listen Germán's views on innovation. Met Garnacho, KaL, and all the old spanish friends. During the evening, guided visit through Madrid downtown. Later, dinner with all the people. Met the good Jorge González and the Majadas siblings. At Midnight, traveling voodoo in order to make it to Fuenlabrada. Two hours later, at the hotel.

  Friday 4th: More GUADEC-es. Finished my talk on eog plugins. Emotive recognition to the translation work by Javi Serrador, nice to see him fine and to see his mother proud. Later, met Loreto at Atocha. Happy to see Luca again, he is growing up fast! The Igalians joined Germán, Domingo, and Garnacho for some tapas at Madrid's downtown. Back at the hotel right in time to pick the last cercanias train to Fuenlabrada.

  Saturday 5th: Left pretty early in the morning direction Barajas with Victor. Terminal 2 is a mess, had to do voodoo in order to check in in time. Good flight to Vienna, bought a book in german in the Schwechat airport. Flight to Istanbul, overflew Budapest, a bit of nostalgia to see the Danube and some of the islands again. Met Philip Van Hoof and some Nokians (Karl, Ivan, Rodrigo, and others) in Atatürk airport. Taxi with Mario and Philip to the hotel in Sirkeci. A small walk through Sultanahmet area, dinner, and pictures. Istanbul is awesome! Met some gnomies at the bar besides the hotel, chat with Hub, Bastien, Hughsie, and others. It already feels like GUADEC!

  Sunday 6th: Left the hotel early in the morning with Mario, some tourism at the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, and Sarayburnu. Had lunch, then visited the Basilica Cisterna. Met Philip and walked through Sirkeci, Eminönü, to Kabataş. Back to the hotel really tired. Dinner with Alex and Dape, who arrived during the afternoon. Had fun listening a fellow hacker chatting with a gorgeous ukranian girl about free software, linux, filesystems (!), network protocols (!!), reiser fs (!!!), and the Hans Reiser's story. Juanjo, Antía, Sergio, and the other igalians arrived later.

  Monday 7th: GUADEC starts, nice to see everyone again. The Bahçeşehir Üniverstesi is a bit apart from Sirkeci, tram + 20 minutes walk do fine. Lunch at the uni cafeteria, sadly, no Turkish coffee but nescafe crap. Had some meetings. During the evening, dinner somewhere near the hotel.

  Tuesday 8th: More warm up talks. The schedule is a bit messy and I couldn't attend some talks, but things are fine. Lunch at a restaurant recommended by Germán. Cheap but nice food. No Turkish coffee. During the evening, welcome party in the Taksim area. Nice to talk with André, Jens, Ádam, and others again. Back to the hotel in a race-taxi at god-knows-which-speed. Arrived safe, fortunately.

  Wednesday 9th: Core days start. After so many days sleeping so few, it gets hard to stay awake. Nice talks, better networking. Excellent keynote by Leisa Reichelt. During the afternoon, set up the equipment for the Drooling Macaques Band at the roof of the University building. Practiced some songs with Garnacho, Lucas, Chris Lord, Edward Hervey, John Palmieri, and others. Awesome jam with Volkan, one of the finest drummers in Turkey. During the party, played with the guys some nice rock tunes and blew up the place. People seemed to like my guitar skills more than what I would have expected. Back to the hotel, dinner with Lucas, Germán, Pedro, and the Igalians.

  Thursday 10th: I finally didn't bring my laptop to the University anymore. Pretty unreliable internet access and not many places to plug the laptop, so I better use the n810 for basic stuff. Really good keynote by Kris on GTK+, (un)surprising proposal by the GNOME release team about GNOME 3.0. More talks. Lunch with Pedro near the Uni, good talk about GNOME Chile and some upcoming events. Federico told me where to find Turkish coffee! Awesome keynote on WebKit by Alp Toker. Love to see what they've been doing. Had dinner with Antía on our way to Kabataş, to the party by Collabora in the Lüfer boat through the Bosphorus. Totally scared about the icecream deathmatch -- I would've feel totally crappy if something would've been wrong (as I'm guilty for having recorded the previous edition), but everything went well.

  Friday 11st: Last core day, some good talks. Loved the lightning talks and totally regretted not to have prepared one. Enjoyed the foundation's AGM, and later the interesting keynote by Federico. Foundation announced next GUADEC to be held in Canary Islands --sad that it won't be in A Coruña, but at the same time, confident that Alberto and the canarians will do a good job. Closing party in the Ghetto in Taksim was a blast. When kicked out from it, found another place with many others. Party until pretty late.

  Saturday 12nd: Afterhours day. Decided to visit the Grand Bazaar and Spice Bazzar; and skip the morning talks. Went with Germán and Ivan. Bought much more than what I thought I would, including turkish coffee, Çay (turkish tea), some souvenirs for friends and family. Dinner near the Spice Bazaar, back to the hotel, and then to the University. Good talk by Alberto on GTK+ marketing, good points on what GTK+ people is doing wrong to advertise GTK+, but ironically, no GTK+ hackers around. Not their fault, nor Alberto's fault: this talk was too good to be an after hours one. Later, went to Üsküdar with Alberto, some Igalians, and Germán. Saw a nice turkish musician play live at a cafe while drinking some apple tea. Back to the hotel, enjoyed the last waterpipe and beers, slept one hour.

  Sunday 13rd: Wake up at 4am, picked up by a taxi, and off to the Airport with Juanjo, Alex, and Germán. Flew to Munich, but didn't have enough time to have a walk in the city. Breakfast, slept in the airport, flight to Madrid. Met Germán at the Oso y Madroño. Had some food in the Cafe Comercial. Went to the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, but too late to get in. Off to the airport right in time to take the plane back to Chile. Had an good flight, and for the first time, I could sleep during most of the flight. You can imagine why, don't you?

Mon 2008/Jul/14

• Yesterday, I woke up in Istanbul, Turkey; had breakfast in Munich, Germany; and had dinner in a nice bar in Madrid, Spain.

  Today, I write this at my desktop in Santiago de Chile. The interesting bits from the two weeks on the road, pictures, and more, in the near future.

Fri 2008/Jul/11

• Dear Rob Bradford: If you can't accept promptly people's requests to be part of the GUADEC 2008 Flickr group, then pretty please, make it a public and non moderated group. We all really want to upload pictures and watch those from others. Thanks.

Thu 2008/Jul/10

• I definitively haven't had the energy to write anything during the last week and a half. The days in A Coruña, Madrid, and now Istanbul has been one of the most wonderful experiences ever. And there's still a lot of things to do during the next days.

  A Coruña is a pretty nice city. The first day there, Eva took me to the Ciudad Vieja and gave me a pretty interesting lesson on Galician history. We ended the evening de marcha, having some tapas with Andrés.

  The next days were composed of work, meetings, barbecues, and pictures. That, until Mario, Berto, Víctor, Felipe and I flew to Madrid for GUADEC Hispana '08. The conference was pretty cool, as usual (thanks to KaL and the others for the fine work they did).

  

  Now I'm in Istanbul, Turkey, attending GUADEC. But this is material for other day, as I'm deadly tired right now.

Tue 2008/Jul/01

• This is how A Coruña welcomes its visitors:

  

Sat 2008/Jun/28

• It's that time of the year again. Tomorrow, I'll leave for a pretty tight but extremely exciting trip in Europe, from one corner in the west, to the other in the east of the continent. Really tight, but I'm sure it's gonna be a hell of fun.

  First stop is A Coruña, where I'll meet the Igalia crew for a few days, in order to get to know them a bit more personally, learn a bit more about the company and my future home, and of course, a little bit of work.

  Next stop is Madrid, where I'll attend the fifth GUADEC Hispana. This year's conference will take place in the Fuenlabrada campus of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and it really promises interesting days. I'll give a small talk on how to extend the Eye of GNOME Image Viewer, so if you are interested on having fun with images, metadata, and that sort of stuff, you're more than welcome.

  You probably imagine my final destination: Istanbul, in Turkey, where most of the GNOME people will gather for GUADEC, the GNOME Conference. I'm really excited, because I always wanted to visit Istanbul, and mixing together a bunch of good friends, the project I love, and one of the most beautiful cities in the world, can't possibly be bad at all.

  It's gonna be like nine flights in less than 15 days. Not bad, uh?

Fri 2008/Jun/20

• Since a few months, my dad has been using Ubuntu in his new desktop computer. And he is a happy user.

  He had been using Windows 98 in his old computer for quite a long time, so it wasn't a difficult task to convince him that Ubuntu wouldn't be difficult to learn for what he was used to do: write documents, prepare spreadsheets, play Tetris and Freecell, and listen music. So, when we got his new computer ready, I downloaded and installed Hardy Heron on it.

  The experience has been really pleasant. Now he fully understands what GNOME is, and what do I do with my free time. He also jokes a lot every time something doesn't work immediately for him and tells me he is going to call Pedro to complain. I laugh everytime at that.

  He now listens to his music with Rhythmbox. He was used to the good old Winamp, but once he understood the library organization of music in Rhythmbox, he told me that this is far superior. I've also helped him to set up a Last.fm account, and now he scrobbles his listening habits. Also, he listens to the Last.fm streams with the Last.fm client. Last but no least, he is an avid Gnometris player.

  During the first weeks, I had to help him installing the software updates. I insisted to him that it was important to run them regularly, so that his system becomes more and more stable. Yesterday I realized he hadn't asked me for assistance in a long time, and asked him about it. It was really pleasant to hear him tell me that he's been doing all the software updates without needing my help at all.

  When I think of all this, I realize how far we've come. People may think that GNU/Linux is only for geeks, but seeing my dad, enjoying using his computer without worrying about viruses, without being afraid of messing with the system, and actually being able to do his daily routine at the computer, makes me feel proud. We all should feel proud.

  So, what's your story? Does any of your non-computer-literate relatives/friends/significant other uses GNOME or other Free Software environment? I would love to read others' experiences.

Wed 2008/Jun/18

• A few weeks ago I was invited to give a talk about the GNOME Desktop at the Primera Jornada Linux in the Instituto DuocUC, Plaza Oeste. Sometimes I feel that it may become boring for people to attend this kind of talks, but in this talk, when I asked the crowded audience to raise their hands if they had ever used GNU/Linux or GNOME, only a very few did it. That means that there's still a huge amount of people who doesn't know about what we do and who could be potential users – enough motivation to give advocacy talks again and again.

  

• I'm loving my work. Still need to organize better my time – working at home can prove to be really challenging if you don't set your work hours responsably – but I'm improving.

Wed 2008/Jun/04

• Can you trust the tracking systems of your local postal service?

  

  I don't get how could it be possible that the documents left Curicó one hour after they arrived in Santiago.

  And we pay for this kind of service. Oh, dear...

Fri 2008/May/30

• This morning I found a small bug in GCC, but the GCC hackers are always one step beyond us: they had already fixed it in 4.3.0.

Sun 2008/May/25

• Exciting times ahead! Tomorrow will be my first day working at Igalia, one of the coolest Free Software companies in the world, where I'll be joining some very good friends in the Innovation team and will work in projects involving GNOME, GTK+, and maemo. Isn't it awesome?

  During the first months, I'll be working at home in Santiago, but once the paperwork and visa are ready, I'll move to A Coruña, in Galicia. I'm very excited because I'm sure I'll face many new challenges, but at the same time, pretty confident that I'll be doing really cool stuff together with incredible people.

  

Mon 2008/May/19

• About accommodation during GUADEC

  If you plan to attend GUADEC, this is surely of your interest. The accommodations page in the GUADEC 2008 website has been updated. The organizers recommend a series of hotels, so you are encouraged to check out which one fits better your interests for the days at Istanbul.

  Also, we've set up an accommodation collaboration wiki for people to find mates to share rooms. If you plan to attend and have already someone to share the room with, add yourself anyway, in order to give others an overview of the attendants preferences.

Sat 2008/May/10

• For some reason, Facebook's presence bar makes epiphany really slow during scrolling. If you, like me, don't use the presence bar, add this to your personalized style sheet:

  @-moz-document domain(www.facebook.com) {
  	body #presence { display: none; }
  }

  This will hide the presence bar and bring smoothness back.

Mon 2008/May/05

• So, two afternoons hacking and the clutter frontend for EOG is a bit more fancy. Click on the image for a screencast:

  

  I wonder if it's a good idea to make this a windowed mode. I've need to bend a bit the EOG API and do a few strange things to make the clutter canvas replace the EogScrollView and I don't like it too much, so I'll probably make it only a fullscreen mode.

  I haven't published the code yet because there are a few glitches I would like to iron out first. Also, I'm not sure whether this should go with the yet unreleased eog-plugins module or as a module by its own. I should talk with Lucas about it.

Mon 2008/Apr/28

• Last night, after having recovered enough sleep after FLISOL, I started working on a clutter frontend for EOG. The progress after a couple of hours learning about clutter and hacking (click on the image for a screencast):

  

  Not sure where I want to get from here, but I have some ideas. Making the thumbnails view a widget on top of the clutter canvas, accelerated zoom and image rotation, and stuff like that, are what come to my mind right now. Let's see if I get something.

Wed 2008/Apr/23

• My dad was discharged yesterday and is now at home. Besides the additions to his daily dose of pills and the increased frequency of his clinic visits, everything is back to normal.

• On Saturday, FLISOL, the Latin American Free Software Installation Festival, will be held at different locations in our continent. My alma mater is organizing the Maule edition and I've been invited to give a user oriented talk about the GNOME Desktop, so I'll be traveling to Talca.

  I'll also give a hand to the people willing to install Debian GNU/Linux on their computers and to the brave ones trying to build GNOME from sources. I encourage you to attend and have a nice time learning how to use your computer without proprietary tools and why this matters.

  

Sun 2008/Apr/20

• Some Chileans are getting it wrong, again. And the worst is that these Chileans, to some extent, claim to carry the free software advocates and promoters flag.

  During the last weeks, I received SPAM from two different entities that promote, in different ways, free software in my country: Corporación Linux and GNUCHILE. I was very surprised when I received the emails from them, which showed that they don't understand how much the FLOSS communities and developers all over the globe reject and disapprove the usage of massive unsolicited email.

  The first SPAM came from Corporación Linux, a Chilean company that gives support on Linux and other free software technologies. I don't know much about this company, but I'm first of all surprised of their usage of both the name Linux and the Tux Penguin. After some research, I found out that you actually need permission from the Linux Mark Institute to do this, so I notified the Institute about this possible trademark abuse (note the emphasis on "possible" –I'm not really aware of the permissions they may have to use the Linux logo and name, and that's why I notified LMI in the first place).

  The second SPAM came from GNUCHILE, a Chilean foundation devoted to the spread of the GNU operating system and Free Software in general. The contents of the SPAM seem noble: it's only an invitation for people to attend the FLISOL in Santiago, next week. Still, it's discouraging to see them using SPAM for this: the end doesn't justify the means.

  I'm concerned, because this is the kind of issues that may give the wrong impression about the people behind FLOSS. I'm sure that most of the real Chilean contributors, advocates, and developers of FLOSS are against SPAM, as a matter of principles. Therefore, seeing these people using it makes me feel like we are moving backwards.

Mon 2008/Apr/14

• Dad was moved out of the Acute Care Unit last Friday, but has not been discharged yet. In the general sense, he is pretty fine now. Some tests still need to be done and he should stay in complete rest, so he won't be discharged before Friday.

• I've been pretty lazy during the last weeks, and specially now because of my dad's situation. I haven't feel in the mood to do much in any front. I suppose it's natural after many months of stressful work. I think that plugging me off of computers and taking a few days away would be optimal, but I don't think I can afford it in the short term.

  To compensate, I started reading an Erich Kästner's book I bought in Dresden and never finished. It's great to realize that I still can read German fluently, even when Kästner is not Goethe and therefore his writing is reachable.

  I also started watching Numb3rs, even when desrt warned me that it's yet another series and there's nothing special about it. Now I agree with him, but I have to say that I like the way they show math as a useful resource everywhere. A few years ago there was a CSI hype in Chile, and a lot of high school graduates started studying forensic sciences as a consequence. I really wish there would be a similar Numb3rs hype and more people started studying maths or computer science but, of course, that's just a dream.

Thu 2008/Apr/10

• Yesterday, I had to take my dad to the ER of Hospital Salvador, where he was diagnosed with a cardiac arrhythmia. The doctors decided that he should stay in the hospital while they find a suitable treatment and his heart rate stabilizes.

  I visited him today and he's in a very good mood, although his heart still beats at a irregular rate. They'll be running more tests on him, and he'll probably be moved out of the acute care unit in the next days, so I'm pretty calm at the moment.

  The situation overall has been a little stressful, though, as it's the first time I have to assist him in a medical situation. Even when he's 65, he has always been very independent and responsible of his health, so all this came to me as a huge surprise.

Tue 2008/Apr/01

• So, I couldn't stand it anymore and tracked down the missing space after the password prompt. It seems to be a localization issue in PAM. I fixed it (together with other similar issues in the translation) and sent an updated translation to the Debian bug report.

  I hope that this will hit unstable soon.

Thu 2008/Mar/27

• I finally graduated as a Computer Engineer. A huge thank you to my family and all the people who supported me during all this time and, specially, during the time I worked in my final project and dissertation.

  

  I'll be publishing my work and releasing the code pretty soon.

Tue 2008/Mar/25

• I love beamer, but there is this small issue that makes it impossible to use properly in a non english nor german presentation: The example, theorem, definition, and similar environments are hardcoded to english. If you need to do a talk in German, beamer author was kind enough to provide with Beispiel, Lemma, Definition, and others. But if you need to do a talk in any other language, then you are on your own.

  If anyone knows how to cope with this and be able to redefine the titles for these environments, I'd really appreciate it.

  Update: an inspection of beamer templates has lead me to realize that beamer uses a strange way of translating. You need a package called translator that is in beamer CVS, but it's not totally documented, nor packaged in a useful form.

  Update 2: To get your beamer talk properly translated to Spanish, do the following:

  1. Download the files translator.sty and translator-language-mappings.tex. Install them in the proper way for your distribution (instructions for Debian here). You can optionally download the documentation and place it in the proper place, of course.
  2. Get my dictionary of mathematical terms from here. If you need to translate other stuff, get the original ones from beamer's CVS.
  3. Put the dictionary files together with the files downloaded in (1).
  4. Use spanish as a parameter for the document class definition. Beamer will take care of passing that parameter to the translator package.
  5. Compile. Enjoy.

  Now you should be able to defend your dissertation with a properly localized talk. Good luck with that!

Sun 2008/Mar/23

• Following up my entry on GBookmarkFile and the desktop, I wrote today a small program to clean up a given bookmarks file. Given a XBEL file, it'll remove all the entries for nonexistent files.

  I used it to clean up my own ~/.recently-used.xbel, which shrank from 5.3MB to 1.8MB. Notice that this will remove all entries for files that cannot access, including the entries for items in removable media that is not plugged in. I think that this could be improved by using g_file_query_info, but it's Sunday and I want to go out and take a walk. :-)

  Get it from here. Patches and comments are, of course, welcome. Use it under your own risk!

Sat 2008/Mar/22

• One thing, that EOG users have been complaining lately about, is the large time spent during image switching. Thanks to sysprof, I had discovered a while ago that a considerable part of that time is spent in saving the GBookmarkFile used by GtkRecentManager to ~/.recently-used.xbel.

  The first thing I did, to alleviate users, was to delay the saving operation of the GBookmarkFile to a low priority idle call. This way, when a user switches between images, she first notices the image change before the bookmarks file is updated, which gives a good responsiveness impression.

  Problem is, that when a user wants to switch between images really quickly, she is going to notice the slowdown anyway. So, either a complete change in the way we handle recently used files is needed, or real optimizations should be done.

  Felix and I found some things that could be optimized during the creation of a GBookmarkFile file. We filed bugs about it (#518160, #523877), and Emmanuele has been very helpful on this, so there'll be some improvements in the saving time. Good.

  However, I still have the feeling that letting ~\.recently-used.xbel grow without control is very, very wrong. In my laptop, this file is about 5MB, which accounts for ca. 9000 files(!). Also, loading it completely every time an application gets the default GtkRecentManager and saving it each time a user selects a different file, is also very suboptimal. We really need to do something about this.

Thu 2008/Mar/13

• Dissertation delivered. Now to prepare for the defense.

Wed 2008/Mar/12

• It's both fun and a bit of pathetic that now that our timezone for the rest of the month is not CLST (Chilean daylight saving time) but CLBT (Chilean Bachelet time), I receive lots of mails from the future.

  If you live in Chile, do me a favor: set your timezone to BRT (brazilian time) for the rest of the month. Thanks.

• Hughsie: maybe you are failing to pass the Turing test? :-)

• And the community made it in time again...

  

  Enjoy it!

Tue 2008/Mar/11

• Yesterday, we released the Eye of GNOME 2.22.0. This is a major release to be included in GNOME 2.22, to be released tomorrow.

  This is mostly a polishing release after the big rewrite we did for 2.20. There are tons of bugs fixed, many memory and performance improvements, and also a small bunch of features came in.

  I want to thank to everyone who contributed during the last 6 months with patches, testing, suggestions, translations, documentation, and the like. Special kudos, as usual, to my good friends Felix and Lucas.

• Yesterday, a new t-shirt arrived from France. Thanks to Vincent (nowadays most known as Mr Ice-cream) for sending me one of those nice FOSDEM GNOME t-shirts (it arrived the right day!)

• My dissertation is almost ready to be handed out. I need to polish a bit the results chapter, and will be delivering really, really soon.

• Thanks to everyone who one way or another greeted me yesterday!

• Now that I'm working on getting a highly polished document for my thesis, I thought I better share some of the non-trivial stuff I've been using to make it look pretty.

  • For documents in Spanish, hyphenation can be problematic. Some words may not be correctly hyphenated, so you need to add them to the preamble under \hyphenation. Every LaTeX user knows that.

    The problem is that if you need to add to that list any word in Spanish that has an acute or any accentuation mark, it may cause problems during compilation. To avoid that, use the fontenc package and specify the T1 encoding.

  • You may want to use pdftex to get a PDF summary. If the title of your document, or your name has also accentuation marks, you need to set unicode=true in the options for the package, and add your accentuation marks in the old TeX way: \'a, \'e, and so on. Otherwise, you'll be yet another one to fill the internet with documents with PleaseinsertPrerenderUnicode{x}intopreamble messages.

  • The default font size for tables, figures, and other bodies' captions is the same than the size for the document text. This may cause confusion for some of your readers, so it's better to use a smaller font for the captions. To get this, I added the following to the preamble:

    % Different font in captions
    \newcommand{\captionfonts}{\small}
    
    \makeatletter  % Allow the use of @ in command names
    \long\def\@makecaption#1#2{%
      \vskip\abovecaptionskip
      \sbox\@tempboxa{{\captionfonts #1: #2}}%
      \ifdim \wd\@tempboxa >\hsize
        {\captionfonts #1: #2\par}
      \else
        \hbox to\hsize{\hfil\box\@tempboxa\hfil}%
      \fi
      \vskip\belowcaptionskip}
    \makeatother   % Cancel the effect of \makeatletter

  • I needed to add enumerated examples, for clarity. This is not hard to do, but here's how I did it anyway. You can use for this the asmthm package, and create a new theorems class. The following in the preamble of your document

    \newtheoremstyle{example}
    {\topsep}
    {\topsep}%
    {}%         Body font
    {}%         Indent amount (empty = no indent, \parindent = para indent)
    {\bfseries}% Thm head font
    {.}%        Punctuation after thm head
    { }%     Space after thm head (\newline = linebreak)
    {\thmname{#1}\thmnumber{ #2}\thmnote{ (#3)}}%         Thm head spec
    
    \theoremstyle{example}
    \newtheorem{example}{Ejemplo}[chapter]
    

    will allow you to do something like

    \begin{example}[gramática para un lenguaje]
    Considérese el lenguaje de todas las palabras compuestas únicamente
    por pares de paréntesis balanceados, descrito recursivamente como: ...
    \end{example}

    to get something like

    Ejemplo 2.1 (gramática para un lenguaje). Considérese el lenguaje de todas las palabras compuestas únicamente por pares de paréntesis balanceados, descrito recursivamente como: ...

  I collected the ideas for these tricks and some code snippets from the web. I don't recall exactly where from, so no links this time.

Fri 2008/Mar/07

• Dear Spanish translator of Debian's su(1) command:

  Could you please bring me back the space after the colon on the Password prompt? In Spanish, a space after comma, colon, semicolon and so on, are mandatory. kthxbye.

  Update: Filed in Debian's BTS.

Mon 2008/Feb/25

• I got a nice suprise today in the mail: Lucas sent me a lovely Eye of GNOME T-Shirt!

  

  This is one of those small acts of kindness that make me love the free software community. Thank you a lot, dude!

Fri 2008/Feb/22

• I noticed this a bit late, but I still think it is worth writing about it. Huge congratulations to Jorge González and all of GNOME's Spanish translation team, as they have reached 100% of translation of the platform documentation. As far as I remember, this is the first team ever that reaches this awesome milestone, and I have to say that it is really hard work to get it here. So, keep on rocking guys!

Thu 2008/Feb/21

• Today's lunar eclipse, as seen from my neighborhood:

  

Sat 2008/Feb/16

• I found this and think it's extremely useful: Common Errors in English is a list with common mistakes that people make when writing in English. I always had doubts on whether to use "more importantly/more important", "compare to/with", "if/whether", "that/which", and the like, so it's great to have a place with some guidelines and historical background on where to use them and why. Recommended even for native English speakers.

Fri 2008/Feb/15

• Last month, I went to Valparaíso. I stayed for a few days, and took the chance to visit a bit more of the lovely puerto. This time, I took walks on the Cerro Alegre, Cerro Concepción, Cerro Bellavista, Plaza Sotomayor, and other interesting places.

  I almost visited La Sebastiana, one of Pablo Neruda's houses. I declined visiting it, for the same reasons I got really upset when I visited Isla Negra while I was still in high school. Prices for students are reasonable, but only valid during weekdays. So, if you are a student from a different city who can only travel to Valparaíso during the weekend, you have to pay a normal fare, which is pretty unfair. I had forgotten about that (high school was like 7 years ago), but had the same feeling this time. So I rather not visit it.

  Valparaíso is really colorful. With a sucky camera like mine it's hard to depict the beauty, but either way, I made a few pictures.

  

  

  

  With Betti and Marie we went to Viña for the day. That city was really crowded and there was way too many people around. I wonder why people is so obsessed with making vacations in Viña, when it clearly sucks to share every m2 with three or four people. I'm glad the girls lived in Valparaíso, and not there.

  

  Bettina already flew back to Dresden. Marie will leave next Tuesday. I'm thrilled to think that it's unlikely that we will meet again, once she's gone.

Fri 2008/Feb/08

• I couldn't help it. I had to hack a bit today.

  A report coming from Launchpad showed that EOG needs a lot of memory to load big bitonic TIFF images. These images shouldn't really use so much memory, as, in the best case, only 1 bit is needed to store each pixel. An image of 15000x5000 pixels then would only need about 9 MB in memory, but due to some limitations in libtiff and GdkPixbuf, we require 4 bytes per pixel, meaning that instead we need about 286 MB. Certainly a waste, but not much that we can do at the application level.

  Something surprised me, though. Loading a 5 MB TIFF image in EOG for the first time almost killed my poor laptop. But, loading it a second time, showed that even when ridiculous amounts of memory were required, the responsiveness was better and load time was much less. So, I decided to investigate what was going on there.

  I used valgrind's massif to check what was going on. Opening the evil TIFF image from a newly created directory, produced this output:

      MB
  552.7^                             ,.. .. .., . .. .. .,.#...                 
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                          @  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                ,    @....@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             .   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |                @    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             :   
       |            .. ,@    @::::@  @:: :: ::@ : :: :: :@:#:::             : ..
     0 +----------------------------------------------------------------------->Gi
       0                                                                   12.07

  The first band, at around 280 MB, represents the memory used when the image is first loaded. The second one appears when EOG loads the thumbnail for the image. As you can see, it's the double than the first one!

  Problem here is that the thumbnailing code in eog-thumbnail.c comes from eel. The API for this is something like

  GdkPixbuf *eog_thumbnail_load (GnomeVFSURI *uri, GError *error);

  which means, that EOG passes a URI to the loader, which, in case the thumbnail doesn't exist under ~/.thumbnails, needs to load the image from the given URI and create the thumbnail. Something here is wrong, isn't it?

  Well, that API makes sense in nautilus (I suppose that this eel code is from nautilus, not sure, though), because nautilus never has an instance of the image already loaded in memory. EOG, on the other hand, sometimes may have the image already in memory, so in these cases, it's not necessary for GnomeThumbnail to load the image again in order to thumbnail it.

  So, I decided to change the API a bit, and instead have a

  GdkPixbuf *eog_thumbnail_load (EogImage *image, GError *error);

  that will work as follow: first, try to load the thumbnail from ~/.thumbnail. If it doesn't exist or it isn't valid, check if the EogImage instance has already the pixbuf loaded. If it does, scale it, tell GnomeThumbnail to save the scaled version as the thumbnail, and use it as such in the application. If it doesn't, tell GnomeThumbnail to create the thumbnail from the URI, the usual way.

  The same test case after this patch reduces the memory usage to the half during thumbnailing. Massif's output:

      MB
  286.8^            #                                                           
       |           @# : ...   ....... .,.. .  .@  :....,.. ..,.., .,....,.....  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       |           @# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::  
       | ,. . ., .,@# : :::   ::::::: :@:: :  :@  :::::@:: ::@::@ :@::::@:::::.:
     0 +----------------------------------------------------------------------->Gi
       0                                                                   16.63

  I know what you are thinking. Using 280 MB for a bitonic image still sucks, but I don't think we can do much more at the application level. The good thing is that this beast gave me some hints on what to do to make EOG a bit faster.

  Still a lot of other places in EOG where to look for improvements and optimizations, but I should go back to finishing my dissertation before February ends first.

  (yes, I wrote all this here only as a way to procrastinate even more)

Thu 2008/Feb/07

• Our newspapers suck. La Tercera says that Paris Hilton was awarded by the Harvard University with the "Woman of the Year" award, but they are too lazy to research that, actually, she was awarded by a satirical magazine by Harvard students, called the Harvard Lampoon.

  I bet that everyone reading this understands the difference. If you don't, go grab your MW and search for lampoon.

Wed 2008/Jan/30

• Now that I'm living in Santiago again, I'm enjoying again the beauty of the cultural life here. This is one of the things I was missing the most while I lived in Curicó, where there are really few cultural activities and the quality of them is not really the best.

  Jazz: Mauri, Moisés and I attended one of the days of the the Semana Jazz in Las Condes, where Cristián Cuturrufo played some classics. As a little surprise to the audience, Alvaro Henriquez joined and sang a tune.

  Also attended two of the three days of the Festival de Jazz Providencia '08. I'm not really happy with the level of the guest artists, but at least Ravi Coltrane was pretty cool. Not that he is as virtuous as his father, but at least he plays well, and the musicians who played with him, specially the pianist, were really talented. Unfortunately, I missed the presentation by Dave Holland the last day, but I heard very good comments, and I have no doubts it must have been pretty good.

  Theatre: I saw two Chilean plays during the Santiago a Mil Festival: Fin del Eclipse, a nice play about theater inside theater, and H.P. (Hans Pozo), a play about one of the most thrilling murders of the last times in Chile.

  Music: Last week, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Chile performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony in D minor, Op. 125, "coral". We got tickets for the last row of the most apart section of the Teatro de la Universidad de Chile, but nevertheless, we enjoyed the symphony a lot. I had never attended a performance of the 9th and I can say that it's really an experience.

  And the best of all is that ticket prices here are very cheap and even some of them completely free! All the tickets I bought costed less than 5 €, which is a really good price for the quality of the events. It's so nice to be here!

Fri 2008/Jan/25

• Today, I'm leaving to Valparaíso to spend the next days with Marie. I'll take the laptop with me to be able to proof read some chapters of my dissertation but won't use Internet at all and I won't even read my e-mail. Wohoo!

Fri 2008/Jan/18

• Confirmed: Dream Theater will play in Santiago, on March 1st!

  An awesome new, and this time I won't miss it.

Sat 2008/Jan/12

• On thursday, Marie, Betti, and Linda came to Santiago. I played the tourist guide for the n-th time, and took them to Cerro San Cristobal, had a nice evening (despite the jotes), and made a few pictures, as usual.

  From the top of the hill:

  

  The typical reflection of the Torre Entel.

  

Fri 2008/Jan/11

• Today I reached what I think it is the last milestone in the development of my dissertation's project. This means that now I'll devote most of my time redacting the core chapters, and only a few hours/week coding what's left. Eitherway, I need to write some fancy tests to demonstrate what I achieved and draw the results of the work, but I feel that I got to the point where I can feel safe and sure that this will have a nice ending.

Go backward in time to January 2008.