Rafael points to today's xkcd strip (trip?). After playing for a couple of hours last night with GHC's recent extensions to the Haskell type system, I can but wonder what the xkcd strip will be like the day Munroe comes across Haskell!

Browsing through bugzilla in search of the famous metacity Linus patches got me to this comment by Havoc:

[...] gnome is pretty much maintained for unix geeks at the moment, so there's no reason to be purist about bouncing this kind of feature. [...]

So: ¿has it gotten to that?

A few days ago, Stephen Day wrote to gnome-devel-list asking for a way to get notifications when programs get executed or when they complete their execution. As a playful experiment, I wrote a dynamic GNOME module called snitch which can be used to do exactly that.

To use it, compile it, install it and export GNOME_MODULES=snitch to your environment; a good place to export it would probably be your ~/.xinitrc script, if you have one, so that everything started by gnome-session gets it). Then you need to patch your libgnome with the patch attached to bug 410549, so that GNOME_MODULES is used in an useful way (libgnome's handling of that has never worked ;-))

After these preliminaries, apps that call gnome_program_init—and every respectable GNOME app should call it—will emit DBus signals when it is starting and when it exits (normally).

The tarball also installs a trivial python script called tipper which can be used to listen to such signals and print a log of sorts to your terminal.

All this is probably crack, so take it with a grain of salt.

By the way, can some hackergotchi factory worker turn this into something satisfying the hackergotchi regulations?

GNOME Terminal 2.17.90

A new release is available at the usual place.

Together with the new vte, your shell experience should be bit better ;-)

I'll be off-line for a few days, so I'll spend some of my last few bytes this year wishing everyone a great year and all.

A nice post by Joel Spolsky. We are not that bad, are be?

Hans has just come up with some scripts to valgrind a complete GNOME session (!!) and it appears the results are ‘interesting’. As he notes, you need fairly powerful hardware to do this and not have to tatoo yourself messages lest you forget what you are doing: valgrind eats hardware; I, for one, barely manage to valgrind one app at a time. But: people that do have the hardware could install Hans' scripts, save the output, and post them somewhere, so that enterprising leak-pluggers can take a look...

I got back last night from Talca, where this year's Chilean Encuentro Linux 2006 was held. Everything went perfectly well and Saturday, which was dedicated entirely to GNOME, came out particularily nice. There were lots of people, which is always good, and there were lots of young people, which is even better.

As everybody should know by now, GNOME is people. And it is always nice to actually meet that people. This time I got to meet Germán Poó Caamaño (gimpnet's gpoo), ninja photographer, Claudio Saavedra (gimpnet's claudio), undercover computer scientist who's been known to make posts mentioning Philip Wadler and monads, along with many others.

Special thanks go to Fernando San Martin Woerner (fsmw) and his family, who made Fernando and me feel at home at their place and to the GNOME Foundation, who payed for my trip.

At the same time, the Buenos Aires LUG conference, CaFeConf was taking place back home. I'm sure that went as well as in previous years (very well, that is ;-) )

I've posted a new version of my mono.modules moduleset that can be used to build Mono and friends using jhbuild. Since last time, the biggest change is that it now builds only mono and mcs from released tarballs (1.0.5), and the rest comes from cvs/svn. Also, it includes the two apps people asked me to include, Tomboy and Muine.

To use it, you just need to add a line reading

<include href="http://www.gnome.org/~mariano/mono.modules"/>

in your current moduleset, and set up your ~/.jhbuildrc to actually build some of the targets.

Todd points me to the abstinence entry on Jacob Berkman's blog. Cute.

Fer pointed me to this. Knuth++.

Today, from 16:00 UTC to 03:00 UTC, is a GNOME Love day, dedicated to yelp. Join us on IRC in #gnome-love.

This is a cool site.

Danilo, that is certainly great news. I chatted a little with #linux-quechua on FreeNode, and it is still a very little group of people—hopefully, this will change. One thing they mentioned is they were considering translating from Spanish into Quechua instead of (or, as well as) doing it from English, because it will be quite harder to find translators who know English and Quechua. I've googled a bit but could not find anything to help automate such triangulations of .po files. Of course, a triangulated translation might end up not being as good as a direct one, but oh well.

It appears that Microsoft will be translating Windows XP and Office to Quechua (qu or que in ISO 639), which is the language of the Incas, and which is still spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Perú.

We do not have a single qu.po file in the desktop! We should be able to do something about this... I am quite sure our amazing internationalization team would be very happy to help out a group starting a translation into Quechua. If anyone reading this is interested, you should contact the GNOME Translation project.

Sadly, I do not even know anyone who speaks Quechua, but I am sure someone does, and there must be a rather important Quechua community, for otherwise Microsoft would not mind doing a translation, so I am sure there must be people who both speak Quechua and are willing to work on translating GNOME...

The 3ra. Conferencia Abierta de GNU/Linux y Software Libre is past. It ended up being a huge thing, with over 1800 registered people and an estimated 2200 people in all. It was quite a busy event, and the people who organized the whole thing worked very hard, with great success—having been part of the organization of a large event, I know first hand how exhausting it can be. Funding was sadly an issue; in particular, Sun seems to have backed off from providing help a couple of weeks ago, to the utmost distress of the organizers: I cannot but wonder what the reasons for this was...

It is always nice to get to meet the lots of nice people one gets to meet in this events, and to meet again people one met before. In particular, the very nice group from LugFI (which has a planet now!) was there, and they are great to hang out with. There were also people from Lugro, from Lanux, from Jujuy (which is a northern province in Argentina...), and lots and lots and lots of other people—I suck at reporting, I know. It is a real pleasure to see the argentinian FOSS community in such a lively state.

Of the talks I attended, I liked best Ricardo Markiewicz, from LugFI, talking about Mono, and Enrique Chaparro, from Via Libre, talking about the evaluation of risks to be done when deploying free software. There was a talk by Marcela Tiznado about the ardous path to be trodden in order to become a Debian developer—quite amazing they actually do get to get things done!—which was very interesting too; she and her significant other, another devote debianite, turn out to be an extremely nice couple of people. Also, a fun demo/intro to the KDE desktop by Roberto Alsina—as usual when I get to see a KDE desktop, I walk out with the intense wish to know whether the guy who originally came up with the design of the the 7-bar character LCD display would have not preferred to use a 100dpi scalable proportional font had the technology available at the time allowed him to...

An interesting development is that a few LUGs around here are going to rename themselves to be Free Software User Groups, which does not have as nice an accronym, but it's much more precise in describing their nature.

I hope the other events that went on this days in the region went as nicely as this one.

Jamin, I usually point people to Norberto Bobbio's Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction (ISBN 0226062465) as an extraordinarily clear, concise and valuable discussion of what the difference is between left and right, and, most importantly, as a counter argument to the idea that the division is a thing of the past—I know that no matter how much I try I could never do better than what Bobbio does in that short essay. Sadly, Bobbio died on January this year, thereby making the ratio in the world go much much lower.

Now, the words conservative and liberal as they are understood in the US politics context are so different from anything I could attach sense to that I really can't do much with them.

As mentioned by Luis, I'll be giving a talk on the GNOME Project on Saturday during the 3ra. Conferencia Abierta de GNU/Linux y Software Libre organized by CaFeLUG, the LUG for the City of Buenos Aires.

I've just updated my jhbuild moduleset which builds Mono. The only application it includes is MonoDevelop—I'm accepting suggestions for inclusion of other mono apps, though...

To use it, you just need to add a line reading

<include href="http://www.gnome.org/~mariano/mono.modules"/>

in your current moduleset, and set up your ~/.jhbuildrc to actually build some of the targets.

Damn.