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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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!

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!

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

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

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.

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.