Fer's blog
fer, ferulo, that crazy man

I'm moving to London today. Yesterday we had a farewel party at home. Every time I do a party at home, I say "at 21:00", and then everyone is coming at 23:00, always. This one began a bit quiet, but finally it became more noisy, and finally it was one of the most amazing and funniest in the year.

In the morning I began to play with nautilus-cd-burner to get the media size of a blank disc, to be able to warn the user if current data doesn't fit. First, I did it in the easy way: "cdrecord -atip". Then I began to play with the dvd_plus_rw_utils, and got it via MMC commands (I think it has been the first time reading a hardware specification after I worked on the matrox stuff). Also implemented the read/write speed guessing via MMC. The patch was for n-c-b, but I also adapted it and sent to hal, proposing a new property:volume.disc.size.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
Rudyard Kipling

This poem is the fauvorite of a man who was president of Spain. A man who payed 2M$ of the spanish national budget to an American lobby to do some diplomatic stuff, including pressures to get the American Congress gold medal for him

I spent all the morning sending CVs to London recruiment agencies. I'm going to London next Saturday and I need a job there. I'm a bit worried about not getting an IT job, because then I won't have internet connection and I won't be able to make GNOME releases during August.

I watched again Tacones Lejanos ten years after the first time. Realized how much do I admire Marisa Paredes, how wonderful is Agustin Lara's Piensa en mi song performed by Luz Casal (my other version is, of course, Chavela Vargas one). Also noticed now the score by Ruychy Sakamoto, and the Tasca where Miguel Bosé does its performances in the film, Villarosa, is a pub (now normal) that I know very well.

Today is GNOME 2.7 Feature Freeze day. So I had few hours to implement some features I wanted on gconf-editor and gnome-keyring-manager. During the evening I added a new option to gconf-editor to show last modified keys:

Then I went to a birthday, and came back at 6am, but I mixed my drinks with Red Bull, that is lthe coffee for the fashion hackers. So Here is it, ACL view/edit support on gnome-keyring-manager:

Now I need some sleep and maybe we can do the xml-rpc stuff in libsoup.

Thursday night I went out with lot of friends, doing a tour for Madrid ancient bars. From 9pm till 7am. 10 cañas 10 vinos, 2 gintonics and a capininha (at my so beloved parnasillo). I can remember me playing some tango at a broken piano. We ended the night at Why Not? and drinks are now 8 EUR.

Movies: I watched Spider-Man 2 and it kinda better than the first one. Simple plot with not so plain characters, funny and spectacular. I'd hope that every commercial of action movie would be like this one. Really funny the scene of Michael Novotny actor with Spidey at the elevator. Oh, I cannot wait to watch Hellboy, an adaptation from the great Mike Mignola comic.

Sports: Paco Mancebo is the last Spanish hope for this Tour. Go, go go!

Hacking: I fixed some bugs in gconf-editor, and made it to search asyncronously. Now I only need a way to cancel the search in progress:

Also I had time to finish my muine cd burning patch. It works pretty well (only with gstreamer!) and tries to be very simple. For example it only asks you to select a recorder drive if you have more than one, only prompts you for a temporal directory if it doesn't have enough free space... (oh, I need to guess how to check if a directory is writable in C#!). Final things before sending it to muine list:

• Check that music fits in current blank disc
• A dialog saying your CD was recorded, asking for eject it (and maybe a checkbox for removing temp files)
• General dialog HIGification (and maybe adding some animated icons during recording, waiting for blank media and so)

If you want to try the patch (against current CVS), remeber to remove the CDRECORDER_DUMMY_WRITE flag

Oh, this is a pretty picture David took in Ariel Rot concert:

Yesterday I watched three films: Coen's masterpiece Blood simple, Woody Allen's bananas and current GNOME hackers Top movie: Black Cat, White Cat (gpoo and markmc already enyoied it, what are you waiting for?)

gnome-keyring: I committed ACL API to gnome-keyring, so now some gnome-lover should add ACL view/edit to gnome-keyring-manager. Caleb did a nice post about gnome-keyring

Some days ago I wanted to burn a cd for a friend with a Juan Diego Florez recital. I didn't want to do it manually, so I tried nautilus-cd-burner. As the code wasn't there, I wrote a quick hack for it. Then I asked hadess about it, and the response was that there was code for it but it was removed because nautilus is not supposed to write other things than files. The correct place was rhythmbox. But as I use muine I tried to add support to it for burning cds with current playlist. As a quick hack (another!) I tried to modify muine gst_play wrapper class, but I failed to set up correctly the filesink. Today I got the code again and decided to write my own Recorder class. Now muine can burn a cd with you current playlist:

Now I need to do some boring stuff:

• a dialog asking the user to insert a blank CD
• add #ifdefs to player.h, because I only added support for gstreamer
• rewrite the cd drive selection ui: Currently I'm using an GtkEntry for setting the drive path because I cannot use BaconCdSelection because GtkComboBox is not supported on Gtk# 1.0

I went Friday night to Plaza Mayor to listen Daniel Barenboim conducting Beethoven's 3rd Synphonie with Berlin StatKapelle. It was in memorian for 11-M victims. Really bad acustic, but exciting anyway. Then some mojitos at Taskopolis and Ohm clubbing.

Saturday another argentinian playing: Ariel Rot. Nice to hear his new songs and old ones from Tequila and Los Rodriguez (I really love "La milonga del marinero y el capitán". After it, went with friends to home to watch some films: Laberinto de pasiones, second Almodóvar film (wit Cecilia Roth, sister of Ariel) and La Virgen de los Sicarios, south-american gay hiperviolent magic realism. Previously I saw in the cinema Shrek 2, Antonio Banderas voice was really great, and listening to Tom Waits and Nick Cave's songs in such a movie was just wonderful (also a memorable version of "I need a Hero"!)

GNOME Keyring Manager: also I proposed gnome-keyring-manager for GNOME 2.8

I waked up at 16:00 (I really needed to sleep after the weekend and Opera tickets story). However it has been a really productive day. In the GNOME side I did a bunch of stuff:

* gnome-keyring: I implemented the ACL API needed by gnome-keyring-manager. I need mariano review before sending it to Alex.

* bugzilla: I fixed the bug-buddy import that was not working after the boxes update. Now I'm importing 1500 queued bugs. Thanks to jrb for fighting with the sudo magic.

* gconf-editor: Finally implemented search. I follow clarkbw UI idea. Really nice to have a widget like gedit-output-window, kudos to Paolo for it!. It's intereting to see how little time/effort took it to me. It was one of my first GNOME coding try and I remember it took me one full night and didn't work very well. Here is a screenshot:

Now it only needs some more love to select the right key in the right panel.

Really cool GUADEC in Kristiansand. Some interesting "official" talks and lot of informal ones. Beer was really expensive, but salmon and catfish was cheaper than in Spain. I took the return plane at 6:30 am that is painful.

Granada: 24 hours after GUADEC went to Granada for the weekend. We arrived just in time to go to a Festival de musica y Danza concert. I enjoied a lot Ravel's piano concert. As always, lot of fun at night. Historial drag show by Raul at Fondo Reservado:

... que parezco Shrek

- Eso es por el vestido verde!

- No bonita, eso es por las orejas y por el culo. Ademas yo ya tengo dos peliculas, y otros se pasan la vida entera comiendo pollas y no tienen ni un miserable corto porno. Lo maximo a que llegan es a grabarse 10 segundos con el movil y con eso tienen para un mes....

Teatro Real Opera seasson: When we arrived from Granada we went directly to Teatro Real queue for opera seasson tickets. We stayed there disccontinuosly from Sunday night until Tuesday morning. Kind of fun Monday madrugate, playing Trivial Pursuit, Tute, singing and eating cholocale. Finally we bought tickets for 6 people, moved from premiere to "f" turn and got better seats. This year Juan Diego Florez is going to sing Il Barbieri. Iker, Luis, Mario, Isaac and so.... expect some great opera and pub nights