Fer's blog
fer, ferulo, that crazy man

Mono Summit in Madrid is approaching. Let me share with you some small and random tips&tricks about Madrid social-cultural life:
Art. If you are interested in art and paintings, you probably want to visit the 3 main musseums in the city:

• Museo del Prado: Classical art, one of the most relevant Pinacothecas in the world. Could be a little bit crowled because the renovation and the nice exhibition about Velazquez
• Museo Reina Sofia: Modern art, stuff like Picasso, Miro, Dali, Gris, etc... Also a very interesting building
• Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza: small but perfect collection

Monuments. Madrid doesn't have many relevant monuments like other cities in Spain (Toledo, Salamanca, Granada), but if you like them, you can visit Palacio Real, hang aroung Plaza Mayor, Puerta del Sol, etc...
Food. Spanish food is famous over the world, and of course in Madrid you can find almost every kind of nice food. You'd probably enjoy eating "tapas", the location of the summit is a nice area for "tapas", but also the very-close area "La Latina". If you are looking for a very nice restaurant, I'd suggest you Casa Lucio for tipical spanish food (you'd need a reservation) and Kabuki for the best (about 60 EUR pp.) Sushi in town.
Going out. Welcome to Madrid, the city that never sleeps. If you want to enjoy Madrid night life just go the area that better matchs your musical tates: Malasaña if you like rock and underground music, Huertas for more commercial and posh pubs, La Latina if you are looking for a relaxed ambient and Chueca if you want to try out the gay night life.
Music. There is no opera performances at Teatro Real during the summit, that is a pity, and National Auditorium is closed until February, so not good chances for a nice classical music evening. About rock, the more relevant concert is the Boss on 25th but there are no more tickets availabe. You can check for more rock concerts. For jazz lovers there are hundred of concerts during the summit, in small venues/pubs, I'd suggest you Chano Dominguez at Clamores and Chucho Valdes in the same venue.
Shopping. For luxury brands you should check Barrio de Salamanca area around Calle Serrano. If you want more trendy clothes hang around Fuencarral street and Chueca. If you need want to buy some music or computer supplies the best option is fnac in Calle Preciados.
Sports. Real Madrid doesn't play home during the summit, so your only option to watch spanish football (or soccer) is to visit Vicente Calderon stadium to watch Ateletico de Madrid in action.
If you have any question, specific interest about something in Madrid, drop me an email, fherrera at onirica dot com.

I'm back in Madrid. Last 30th October I spent my last minutes in Helsinki, in the same hotel everything started. After more than one year and a half I left nokia and Finland. Reasons are mostly personal and related to quality of life, but some kind of violence and a company driven by panic modes didn't help. I left there very good friends and awesome people, special kudos to the three letters gang: xan, tko, and mdk.

Now I'm living in the very heart of Madrid, enjoying great food, nice weather and plenty of cultural and social life. Yesterday I started a new job at Novell working in the moonlight team. I'm really excited about this great team and new technology. In an image:

This week I went insane while debugging some obscure crash in ARM + glib + logging + threads. Finding this kind of stuff on glibc scares me:

/* Atomic compare and exchange.  These sequences are not actually atomic;
   there is a race if *MEM != OLDVAL and we are preempted between the two
   swaps.  However, they are very close to atomic, and are the best that a
   pre-ARMv6 implementation can do without operating system support.
   LinuxThreads has been using these sequences for many years.  */

at least, it's documented :)
On the other hand I got enough energy for some very low-level hacking and finally got DWARF2 symbols dumping for breakpad/bug-buddy minidumps! The bad news are that it's a _ugly_ hack on top of valgrind code, trying to de-valgrinize (and bastardazing it while doing it). However it works, and should be enough for our target in GNOME for having rich backtraces coming from people without debugging symbols and enriching them in the debug server. Also the socorro server is prepared for deployment with our (GNOME) custom modifications and nice and beautiful features:

Did I hear eye-candy? transparency? No, this is just about reading the _real_ code crashing :)
Here are the bits:

git-clone http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/dumper.git
git-clone http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/socorro.git
git-clone http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/bug-buddy.git

Currently, if you want to test it you'd need to point bug-buddy to my home server or if you are brave enough, run your own socorro collector. Ah, I also started using git :)
Finally the last open issue to get all of this working are the package collectors: a simple piece of code that has to:

• Download all packages from a distro
• Check for updates and download them
• Extract binaries from those packages onto a temporal directories
• Feed those packagers to our symbolsuplier

And that's all. I'll probably start working on a RPM based one this week, but of course all your help is highly appreciated

Just reading planet and mailing lists these days...:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter directory refspec
git clone --no-hardlinks /tmp/gtk2-perl Gtk2-SourceView.git
git tag -f -d ${TAG}
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter Gtk2-SourceView HEAD
git reset --hard
git gc --aggressive
git prune
git-svn clone svn+ssh://username@svn.gnome.org/svn/modulename/trunk modulename
git-svn rebase
git checkout -b mybranch
git merge --squash mybranch
git-svn dcommit

Liz: clone!
Annie: filter
June: squash
Hunyak: hard tag
Velma: checkout
Mona: rebase

He had it coming
He had it coming
He only had himself to blame
If you'd have been there
If you'd have seen it
I betcha you would have done the same!

When I was child I read a lot of comics books, tons of them. I started doing my first budget managment figuring out how many monthly series I was able to afford. At that time I was mostly a Marvel fanboy, following all those series about mutants, avengers, etc... One of my favourite one was Fantastic Four. I read and re-read those comics by John Byrne and Walt Simonson. My favourite between the Four was Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic. I love his scientific approach to live and when fighting against super-villains. At that time I could never even dream about Mr. Fantastic using one of projects I have been working on as one of his gadgets/inventions:

- "Come on!, Fer! this is a product placement issue."
- "Yeah, and superheroes don't exist."

Half an hour of hacking with arc. Nice clutter API, nice opt presentation toy, nice poppler-glib API and all's done. Click on the image to view the viedeo :)

When these people get lunch toghether:

Things like this happens:

Epiphany with webkit-gtk. I love GUADEC

Aunque tu me has dejado en el abandono,
aunque tu has muerto todas mis ilusiones
en vez de maldecirte con justo encono
en mis sueños te colmo,
en mis sueños te colmo
de bendiciones.

Sufro la inmensa pena de tu extravio
siento el dolor profundo de tu partida
y lloro sin que sepas que el llanto mío
tiene lagrimas negras,
tiene lagrimas negras,
como mi vida.

Tu me quieres dejar,
yo no quiero sufrir,
contigo me voy mi santa
aunque me cueste morir.

It has been 9 months since I moved to Helsinki (con mi pequenia maleta de carton): like a pregnancy. Just listen to Tom Waits Helsinki mood song from One from heart's SoundTrack (am I the only one that hates the new imdb.com interface?). Complain about food, complain about people not saying hello in the lift, complain about how hard is to go out when it's -27 Celsius degrees outside, complain about taxes. Then listen to Dalida's cover of Besame mucho, and then to Extremoduro's Jesucristo Garcia.

At OSSO/nokia/maemo we are doing lot of cool stuff. Finally we are moving the platform to gtk 2.10. Also our Sardine development distribution is getting more and more love (from OSSO people and from the community). Finally, in the Desktop team we are prototyping new ideas/ui/features. Click on the image to watch this video I took last Friday during our Friday Coffee demos:

I have lot of new heroes.Xan is like a detective, like Sherlock Holmes. Last week he used a new fancy tool (xtrace) to figure out why the Xserver was taking more time to render glyphs coming from pangocairo than from pangoxft. Then, this morning, Behdad, one of the most popular GNOME heroes just fixed the thing. This heroes list also includes, of course, Mr. Carl Worth (conducting the whole cairo as a perfect symphonic orchestra), Daniel Amelang (improving performance for non-FPU hw) and Pachi (Improving tessalator). Click on the image below to read Xan's blog:

Please, stop requesting jdub to add Xan's blog to Planet GNOME. We all know that he still needs a cool hackergotchi. Ah, tigert promised one as cool as the Alex Graveley one

Today I implemented a great idea from Federico: Helper to collect more info in bug-buddy. Just add

X-GNOME-Bugzilla-ExtraInfoScript=myscript

to you .desktop file or a

bugzilla:extra_info_script

entry in your .server file. When you application crahses bug-buddy will include the output of that script into the bug report. Some nice information that some applications would like to know:

• Totem: output of a typefind gst pipeline over the current playing media file
• gnome-volume-control: list of alsa devices
• Add your most wanted info here!

We are already telling the user that the data he is submiting could include some personal information and we are requesting him to review it, however we should never collect sensitive information as emails contents, contact lists, etc..

After coming back to Chile I went for a weekend to Berlin. My friend Luis is living there and also Mario did a little trip from Köln to Berlin. The funny thing is that it was supposed to be a surprise for Luis, but they parents were visiting him _the same_ weekend. So finally we managed to get dinner and stuff all togheter. The surprise for me was that Diamanda Galas was singing (she tours rarely) that Saturday on a church at Berlin!. We mamaged to get ticket, and I enjoyed it very very much. Quite impressive to see/listen to her live.

I am really proud of my friend Luis Carlos: he is hacking a wireless driver for the linux kernel for OLPC.I still remember when we went to Seville Guadec and our hacking action at Eurielec

During this week I had a severe sleep disorder, ending with this Friday not being able to sleep until 8 or 9am and then waking up at 17pm without hearing the alarm clock. Really bad :(

Finally I went to Tallinn on Saturday/Sunday. I really love that city. Nice coffeshops, nice shopping, nice restaurants and good Sushi!

No, the ending was the song of the week: Coin, Operated boy by Dresden dolls.

We are having nice talks and hacking sessions here in Talca. I did yesterday my presentation about GNOME past, present future. This evening g mariano is talking more about GNOME projects.On Saturday, during the GNOME day I'll talk about maemo. Nice people, nice place and nice food.

Xan has been measuring gtk+ performance on ARM using some different gtk+ flavours:

• maemo-gtk (2.6)
• stock gtk+ 2.10 + stock cairo
• gtk+ 2.10 patched to use XFT for text rendering
• gtk+ 2.10 + cairo patched to use the magic number tecnique for the fixed_from_double

Interesting results. Read it: Gtk+ Performance Measurement (I)

Today I was preparing some slides for my upcoming talks at 7th Encuentro Linux 2006 in Chile. I had planned to use some music in sync with some slides. However embbeding music in OpenOffice Impress is not easy. Also I'd prefer to use a PDF with evince in presentation mode. Solution? Using evince for display slides and totem for playing the music, both syncronized using a dogtail script. Here are the fundamentals:
Guess what page evince is displaying from:

If the page has changed, check in an array if the new slide has music. If no music associated, press pause button on totem. If music associated, search totem playlist for the song and press play button. That's all: 30 lines of python where you can embbed your music array:

#!/usr/bin/python


import gtk
from dogtail.tree import root

music = {}
music['3'] = '03. Nina Simone - Pirate Jenny'
music['5'] = '04-raimon - diguem no.mp3'

current = '0'

def check_music():
        global music, page, play, totem, current

        if current == page.text:
                return True
        else:
                current = page.text


        if music.has_key(page.text):
                entry = totem.child(roleName='table cell', name=music[page.text])
                entry.doAction('activate')
                if play.name == 'gtk-media-play':
                        play.click()
        else:
                if play.name == 'gtk-media-pause':
                        play.click()

        return True


evince = root.application('evince')
toolbar = evince.child(roleName='tool bar')
page = toolbar.child(roleName='text')

totem = root.application('totem')
play = totem.child(name='gtk-media-play')

tag = gtk.timeout_add (500, check_music)

gtk.main()

Next improvement would be adding a gui for creating playlists, associating PDF presentation and slides, lauching evince and launching totem with the created playlist

Last Thursday I was watching a really bad spanish movie on my computer when it just died. No power up, so I though that it was a problem with the power suply or the motherboard. It was a really old computer: 1998. I upgraded it twice, with a new hd and later, two years ago with an old motherboard/micro that my friend Luis Mago gave me. So it was a good time to buy a new desktop computer. On Friday I went to verkkokauppa, a computer store very close to Nokia NCR in Helsinki, with moi. So on Saturday morning I set up my new computer, with a very big surprise: my old hard disk was also dead. Only a little bit of noise on power on, and nothing, no more. Everything lost: my music, my documents, my writtings, my pictures... 8 years of stuff. It is a big coincidence, because some days ago Jesus warned me about hard disk failures, so I bought a dvd writer for doing backups. But I got this lumbago pain so I delayed the dvdrw instalation a few days...and then it died! :(

The instalation of the new machine was funny, I got a asus motherboard with the JMB363 SATA chipset. None of my on-cd distros (thanks Novell for the SuSE boxes) recognized this chipset, and the DVD drive was not functional. I googled a bit, and I needed some brand-new kernel to make it work with the all-generic-ide param. No luck. I tried Fedora Core 6test2 with a pretty kernel panic. I need to hack a little bit to get a Fedora rawhide 2.6.17-1.2586 kernel booting on my machine and inside a bootable CD. After that I tried to do a network installation. FTP failed a lot, so I finally got the minimal installation with HTTP.

Now it's time to try to recover all my data from the dead hd. So, lazy web:
Do you have any experience with data recovering companies?
It's a 120 GiB HD with 7 ext3 partitions. Something giving me the full data on DVDs and not very expensive would be great. If you can recommend me any company it would be great.Thanks!

Yesterday I assembled my new IKEA desk. It's nice to have my computer again on a desk :). In Madrid I used to connect my computer audio output to my Hi-Fi system to be able to listen to my mp3/ogg/flac music on the living room with a long RCA audio wire. However that is not anymore possible in my new apartment. I though about some other solution to play my music. First I considered buying an Apple Airport Express: 130$. Then I realized that I already have a gadget with wireless and audio output: my Nokia 770 so let's code it!.

• First I need a music server: after some web crawling tangerine was the perfect piece of software, quick, easy and just works.
• Then I needed some DAAP client code for the 770: python-daap looked great, so I could write a quick 770 python player.
• I did some local testing on my computer and I had to hack python-daap to connect/disconnect after each request, because downloading more than one song was failing: ugly hack for python daap
• Finally a quick and dirty test player in python for the 770, based on the Muine idea: Add -- Play/Enqueue

So after ~200 lines of python I got it:

My Hi-Fi system with the 770 connected wih a jack2RCA wire


Main play window


Add Song window

Here are the files:

• pythondaap_1.0-1_armel.deb
• n770.py

Currently DAAP server address is harcoded and stop button is not working, so there is lot of stuff to do:

• add some Avahi python code to search for music servers
• Make stop works
• download next song 10 secs before playing it to avoid delays
• Support for remote playlists (in client and tangerine)
• Create real .deb packages with .desktop files so you don't need to run it in a console with

  run-standalone.sh python2.4 ./n770.py

• ...

Really nice GUADEC week here in Vilanova. Interesting talks and meetings. Of course, lot of party and hacking. Yesterday, with the help of Lorenzo Gil I added support to pygtk to report a bug with bug-buddy when an exception happens. Today Arturo, Antonio and me hacked a little application using the hdaps driver for IBM sensor to do funy things with compiz: gtollina.c: (click on it to watch the video)

Notice that this is version 0.1 (Codenamed "Lorenzo nos va a hacer un Gazpacho en la GUADEC")

Last Wednesday I arrived to Helsinki. I have joined nokia for working in the maemo team:

Simplified Bug Buddy usgin XML-RPC

Finally with the great help of Brent Smith and Olav Vitters we have a flamant bug-buddy 2.15.0 out of the door. It now makes really easy for the user to submit a bug (crash) report and no long need a sendmail installation working.

Recently I have been traveling a lot. I use to sleep during train/plane/bus travels, but it is not always possible. Also recently I began to watch some TV shows that some friends of mine recommended to me:

• Alias, by my friend Javi, AKA "Mini Kaster"
• Desperate Housewives, by my frien Migue, AKA "qu3s0s"
• Lost, by my friend Andreu, AKA "Aldeart"

So in my travels, when not sleeping it great to watch some of these tv show on my Nokia 770. I was using some scripts based on mplayer or ffmpeg to transcode them to a suitable format for the nokia, but as I wanted to use GStreamer I hacked some bits:

It is an small gst-python application, but if you want to use it, you need some more bits:

• As nokia770 currently only supports avi, 3gp, mpeg and rm cointainers, you would need the upcoming port of avimuxer to gstreamer-0.10. The patch is for bug #332031, however you current n770 player only wants to demux avis containig "DIVX" fourcc on the avi header. When using mencoder, ffmpeg or transcode there are some hacks to force this fourcc (-ffourcc DIVX for mencoder, -vtag DIVX for ffmpeg or using avifix -F DIVX for transcode). So I added this hack too to this upcoming avimuxer. here is the combined patch against gst-plugins HEAD
• Also there is a bug on gstreamer videoscale that doesn't allow you to specify only one of height/witdh and get the other one generated to maintaing pixel-aspect-ratio: bug #338991. However I need to hack again the patch to get it working and also for maintainig both height and witdh being multiple of 16. Of course these size adjustements could be calculated on the transcoder application, but I wanted to use only a simple decodebin without worrying at all of the input file. So here is the combined patch against gst-plugins-base HEAD

Finally here is the python script:gnome-nokia770-encode.py. The UI is HORRIBLE, I just cooked it in some minutes, and the idea is that someone wanting to play with pygtk improve it. Here are some ideas:

• Make a decent visual design
• Use gnome-python thumbnail factory to get the thumbnail of the video
• Add support for command-line options so it could be also a non-interactive script
• ...

Send patches!!!.
Many thanks to Thomas, Tim-Philipp Mueller and the other guys on #gstreamer for helping with my dumb questions about gst :)

Update:I forgot to mention that also another patch is needed for making the transcode. It fixes a videorate bug which creates an infinite loop when changing fps: bug #339013

In 1997 Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena started the GNOME project. We got GNOME 1.0, then we got an usable and accesible Desktop with GNOME 2.0. Recently we got a GNOME 2.14, a desktop that my mum can use. Now, with the release of MonoDevelop 0.10 we finally got Rapid Application Development in GNOME:

• Open MonoDevelop
• Create a new project
• Add some widgets to MainWindow
• Add Handlers for events

and you got it, just in 3 minutes:

Xara LX source code has been released under the GPL!. They claim great perfomance of their drawing engine: 2x compared to Microsoft GDI+ and 4x with cairo 1.0. They have release nice docs too. Altough the graphic engine (CDraw) source code has not yet been released "Xara intends to release these under the same license as the remainder of the Xara LX program". So great news.

Woops, I didn't forget it....Here we are again! New GNOME, new party! Tomorrow GNOME 2.14 will be launched with lot of new features and improvements, so kudos to all developers and people that made this possible!. Now to celebreate it let's party tomorrow or during the weekend. To organize or join a local Release party visit the Gnome214Party wiki page.

A long time ago, my friend Ismael asked me for pubs and clubs for going out at night during a Hipalinux congress, so I updated a guide I wrote several years ago for my friends in Madrid. Ismael published this guide as Madrid de Noche. As google love open source freaks this guide became popular in google, and as my email address was on top of it I got lot of emails for people interested on Madrid night life: people just visiting Madrid, people making company parties, DJs from Argentina looking for a new job in Madrid, etc... I have touhght several times to make a cool portal/personal web page about this stuff but I have been really busy last years. Maybe now it's time to do it. In the meantime I got an email from a pub I used to go often asking me to update the guide Ismael published to link to their web site. So here is it:

Phobia
Also I'm back from my long trip to Buenos Aires, Uruguay and Lisbon.

Thanks to the great Olav we have XML-RPC on GNOME bugzilla (testing version). So I finally committed to an experimental branch the new bug-buddy "less is more":

• No more application/product/component selection
• No more long descriptions
• No more mostfreq stuff
• No more gdb pages
• No more save report
• No more sendmail at all

Just catch the crash, get the info and send it. The remaining issues are:

• Should we ask the user what was he doing during the crash? (Windows and other reporting tools are not doing it)
• Should we ask email address to the user?

Click on the image below to see a gif-screencast of it in action:

Ross: Maybe you want:

gst-launch-0.10 v4lsrc ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=352,height=288 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! tee ! xvimagesink tee0. ! theoraenc quality=8 ! oggmux ! filesink location=test.ogg

magic GStreamer pipeline to view and record webcam feeds. I'm playing a bit with GStreamer to make a stupid webcam application for taking funny pictures with deformation effects (like those you can see in a "House of Mirrors" or apple's isight):

Currently I have only the main skeleton for multiplexing video and appliying custom filters to it. I have ported lens effect from effectv to gst and parametrized it little bit. Lot of fun to hack on optical and math stuff.

Two weeks ago, kernel developer Arjan van de Ven posted on lkm a hypothetical doomsday scenario:Linux in a binary world. He talks about propietary drivers and about ABI/API compatiblity for kernel drivers. But what about the present and open source users?. Now, my story:
I have a friend whose brother forced him to use only Free Software at home (Linux, and some BSD flavours), that I think that it's good. He is a non-tech user, and he wants just to use his webcam with his friends over MSN. So with some help from other people he was able to install aMSN from the CVS. But his webcam still didn't work. After some more help, and poking with lsusb, finally he got the USB Vendor and product ID of his webcam, and google for it. It was a Logitech Messenger one, that his distro didn't support. So more google until Logitech Quickcam QC-USB driver for Linux was found. There you can see more than 14 diffrents projects with drivers for wild webcams listed by USB Vendor/ID. Get the right one after browsing a little bit, download the driver, configure it, install it, insert it, change /dev/video1 perms, and get it working on aMSN. Of course my friend needed help from a "very advanced user".
So the people in the kernel land is arguing against API/ABI compatibility to avoid vendors making closed source drivers... but they are hurting a lot to users and developers of Free Drivers (update your driver code with each kernel version, update your driver with every kernel update...). That ideal world of all drivers included on the kernel sources is not real: it isn't for those webcams and it isn't for my rt2* wireless card. The only fix then I can see for this hardware problem is in the (cross)distro side:

• Create a Linux Drivers portal for all of these non-in-kernel drivers
• Set up an sandboxed infrastructure to compile each registerd driver against each registered kernel and package it
• Modify hotplug and hadware detection tools from distros to be smart enough to ask the package manager (apt, yum, ...) for hardware support: "I got this hw id... which package is providing a driver for it?
• Make every package manager smart enough to query this Linux Drivers repository to get the drivers and Warn the user that he is going to use a non-standard driver, non-supported or commercial one

Plug and play?

‘Mi bella Princesa, your funny little dwarf will never dance again. It is a pity, for he is so ugly that he might have made the King smile.’

‘But why will he not dance again?’ asked the Infanta, laughing.

‘Because his heart is broken,’ answered the Chamberlain.

And the Infanta frowned, and her dainty rose-leaf lips curled in pretty disdain. ‘For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts,’ she cried, and she ran out into the garden.

Oscar Wilde, The birthday of the infanta
Source: Gutenberg Project, A House of Pomegranates, by Oscar Wilde

I'm excited about fon: a nationwide semi-public WiFi network. The model is simple but brilliant:Everyone "subscribed" to fon (foneros) has an AP running an special software sharing its DSL connection. If you are sharing your connection for free you are a Linus and you can use any fon connection for free. If you want to get money for sharing your connection you are a Gates. Who is going to pay to Gates?aliens: non fon-people (usually tourists) that want a WiFi connection is a pre-paid way. The man behind this idea (and the company making this possible) is Martin Varsavsky, founder of two of the most important and innovative companies in Spain in the last years: Jazztel and ya.com. They are building this (AP and network infrastructure) upon Free Software (do you remember that Linksys WRT54G with Linux? :) ). I'm going to be a Linus in fon, but what will be my main usage of fon network? My new nokia 770!!!. As I have connection at home (like every user in fon) I'll be very insterested on connecting "outside": a bar, waiting the bus, just checking cinema timetables in the street, etc... Conclusion:

• Killer service for the nokia 770: fon
• Killer gadget for fon: nokia 770

Another interesting point about fon is the way they are doing marketing: blogs.

In the other hand, I'm sick again. I always get sick on holydays (all saints this time). last year I went with some friends to Granada for some sky action and spend those 5 days of hollydays on bed. This time I've missed an opera I was very interested: Janacek's Z Mrtveho Domu at Teatro Real

Lot of users are doing a forced migration to Linux / Free Software. That is because that is the preinstaled OS on their computers at school/work . That's ok, but why a home user, non-techie would say I am going to install this free software instead of my propietary OS?. The new software should make then happier than the current one to migrate.

An example of migration because more features is hotmail --> gmail migration. People just got more features from the google mail than from hotmail, and some of them went for the new one. But this hasn't been a massive migration

Also a migration because of less features or you-have-to-pay now to get usual features can happen. For example gaydar is popular gay contact web service. But recently they are charging money for putting on-line nude pictures, so people started to move from it to another services offering the same features for free.

Now take a free (as beer) application as an example: IM. Most users around the world are using MSN, Yahoo or AOL. The users don't care about "systems" behind the application. They don't mind about MSNP9, jabber, nexus or whatever. If they are going to consider a moving, they would ask these questions:

• Can I talk with all my current friends
• Would I be able to do every thing I'm used to do?
• Would I get any new benefit from this migration?

So what's the right approach for a new application? First, answer a big yes to the two first questions, then try to offer something better for the 3rd. So the way for Gaim or google talk to get users should be:

• for the first time show an assistant importing previous user account/network
• Show his contacts as before, with all previous features, ofering full compatibility
• Offer the user the posibility of create a new more-featured account
• Invite users from the old accounts to get this new fancy client with more features

I was talking with my friend SemiElf and he didn't know what enteletar means, so I redirected him to La hora chanante dictionary, but it was missing there. Then we tried to search it in google... with zero results!. That's the first time I've search in google for a word that I heard every day and is not indexed by google... so I'm just blogging about it to get it :)

I'm in Castellon, at iParty 7.Tomorrow (well, in some hours) I'll give a talk about past, present and future of GNOME. I was trying to build X11R7 modular tree on my laptop to demo some cool X effects with the new EXA acceleration, but it's failing somewhere with the font stuff.

Finally I can tell you: I'm arranging the glorious Ariel Rot's Milonga del marinero y el capitan, that it's the best pirate song ever. I'm doing this arrangement with new lyrics and music (solo voice plus piano in a caribbean jazz flavour) for a good friend, just for our private use. These are the original lyrics:

El marinero y el capitan se reunieron en un bar
y encargaron otra botella de ron
ese seria el puerto final, y lo fue tanto de verdad
que bajo el mar ahora descansan juntos los 2.

Fue por una rubia loca, que bailaba sola hasta el amanecer
y se movia, pero, tan bien, que fue mirarla y fue perder
todo por ese cuerpo y esa promesa.

Ya no era joven pero era audaz
y bailaba siempre al compas
no le importaba que se la echaran a suerte
llego la noche, llego el champan, llego la hora de la verdad
y esa apuesta, al final la gano la muerte

Fue por una rubia loca ...

Cuando el barco llega a la ciudad las mujeres salen y los hombres solos
bajan a los bares, y esa noche todo vale !!
y sientes tu corazon latir al ritmo de esta milonga que es la milonga
del Marinero y del Capitan

Fue por una rubia loca, que bailaba sola hasta el amanecer ...

Well, I wish I was in New Orleans
I can see it in my dreams
arm-in-arm down Burgundy
a bottle and my friends and me
hoist up a few tall cool ones
play some pool and listen to that
tenor saxophone calling me home
and I can hear the band begin
"When the Saints Go Marching In"
by the whiskers on my chin
New Orleans, I'll be there

I'll drink you under the table
be red nose go for walks
the old haunts what I wants
is red beans and rice
and wear the dress I like so well
and meet me at the old saloon
make sure there's a Dixie moon
New Orleans, I'll be there

and deal the cards roll the dice
if it ain't that ole Chuck E. Weiss
and Clayborn Avenue me and you
Sam Jones and all
and I wish I was in New Orleans
I can see it in my dreams
arm-in-arm down Burgundy
a bottle and my friends and me
New Orleans, I'll be there

Tom Waits

Here we are again! New GNOME, new party! This time we're going to have a _big_ one in Madrid, at wh2001 HackLab. For this party or any other visit the Gnome212Party wiki page.

After two months of too much work(TM) (things like writing more than 4K LOC in a weekend), I got some spare time to hack on GNOME again. Today I updated my cvs copy of most of my gnome.org stuff. When updating Beagle I noticed the addition of libbeagle. So I thought that it was good stuff(TM) and tried to port my old and ugly patch for searching files with locate inside GtkFileChooser to use Beagle instead of locate. So now it rocks, because I can search for the word Onirica and I can get all files related to it (OOo files containing that text, pictures with that title...):

Of course, this is not a good way to do the thing, just a local and custom patch. The real way will be using Federico's GtkFileChooser Extension Interface when it get implemented. If you want to try the GtkFileChooser Beagle search hook patch you'd need gtk+ from gnome-28 branch and beagle from HEAD.
PS: Don't try it with gedit, because the patch is ugly and just copies and old version of gedit_output_window.c code into gtk+, so you will get conflicts between different versions of the same functions.
PS2: Oh, I forget to metion that the only thing I hate of GtkFileChooser is that if you have a ssh:// uri bookmarked or in recent-files, every chooser dialog will try to connect to the remote host just for getting info about its parent (opening an ssh conection, asking for access to the gnome-keyring, etc...

Reading alex post about Debugging without symbols I remebered some debugging magic I did some time ago: I had to debug a core file generated by a dynamically loaded module on a Solaris without debugging info, having only a non stripped module on another machine. Lot of magic with nm and add-symbol-file. Thinking about what we can do for GNOME...

• Users running jhbuild or garnome are ok, because they have debug symbols and provide useful backtraces
• Users with a vendor instalation are not ok, because they don't have debug symbols, and asking them to download a bunch of MiBs is not acceptable

So this is my propossed solution for these backtraces without debug info:

• Add to bug-buddy a new field with the md5sum of the crashing binary (and libs?)
• Set up a big machine with jailed enviroments (one per distribution or one per distro-gnome-bins-and-libs pair)
• Sent the backtrace to that machine
• Run on it gdb against the matching env (chrooting to it)

...and we will have a beatiful stact trace. Some more open questions:

• Should bug-buddy directly sent the bactrace to the "debug server",get the answer and send final report to bugs@gnome.org? Or should the magic procmail at bugs@gnome.org get this info from the server
• Can we get this "big" machine? Maybe Intel? sri?
• Do we have volunterrs for se5tting the machine up (installing all jailed distros) and maintaing (installing new distros)

Work
I'm working a lot, too much maybe. I got sick three times in three weeks, last one I went to ER and the doctor told me I needed to take a rest/hollydays, but the project I'm managing is in a critical phase and I cannot take it :(
I don't have time for the things I used to do and my friends are complaining, telling me to leave my current job. I neither had time to make enough GNOME work, and my only visible work on 2.12 will be nautilus evince thumbnails and gnome-keyring-manager

Music
Lately I'm listening to more jazz music and some flamenco. Recently discovered Bambino:

Also I have been fascinated with a single 800's song: Groenlandia by the Zombies, a band led by Bernardo Bonezzi that now is a succesfull film music composer:

Movies
Also not enough time for watching movies: in the last months only Batman Begins, Episode III, Sostiene Pereira and Roman Hollydays

Travel
Without hollydays it's dificult to travel, but I mamaged to do some weekends-trips:

• Menorca: I went to this beautiful Belear island to visit my big friend Toni
• Malaga/Granada: Visiting friends there: Alberto, Diego, Fran and Fred
• Lanzarote: "my island", visiting family

Night Life
Hotel California closed, what a pity!. It was a warm pub where listening cool rock music and playing chess.

Have you ever submitted a bug? Then you should take a look at this YourOwnBugs wiki page.