I was taking a break from my work and after reading Planet GNOME I decided to do the File Extension test:
I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing... :-)
I know it's a trivial patch, but I'm happy it was so easy to implement :-)
I have an iPod device with HFS+ filesystem inside it. The Linux support for HFS+ is really new and it has still some issues, I know that the easier way to use my iPod under Linux is convert it into a Windows iPod (using FAT32) but, who said the life should be easy?
After the good work at Ubuntu about removable devices plug/unplug system using hal and gnome-volume-manager, I get my iPod ready to be used as a hard disk without any change from my part. The problem is that I'm not able to use it if I'm not the root user and as you could understand, it sucks. Solution? Fix the HFS+ driver :-).
Seems like the HFS+ filesystem driver has support for the uid/gid options that lets you map the default file owner and group to a concrete user. Ubuntu makes use of it with removable media to be able to write without problems to the device but the HFS+ driver is not using such information as it should.
After some discussion with Martin Pitt, the person behind the removable media support in Ubuntu, and some reading of the Apple's HFS+ specification, I did a patch (but too late to be included with the Ubuntu Warty Warthog release). If you want to follow the bugreport you can do it from Ubuntu's BTS and also in the main kernel BTS
If that's the case, I didn't know that :-)
Last month (yes, I know it was long ago to blog now about it...) my parent's bank gave us a big surprise, they said that we own 81.071.000.000,00 €, of course it was fixed in less than 1 hour :-(
Lots of things happened since last time I wrote in my blog:
Work:
Some months ago I joined a cooperative in Spain called Interactors. We are a team of professionals working mainly on Internet applications development and hosting services.
I really enjoy my work there as system administrator but on June, Canonical Software Ltd., the company behind the no-name-yet distribution, asked me to join their team to work on Rosetta, an advanced translation tool, and I accepted because all things they talked about are really interesting (sorry, I cannot give more details now, but you will see it soon :-P). The good thing about all this is that I'm working from home (like with Interactors) and I'm working for Canonical from Interactors, so I'm getting support from my partners and it's funnier.
Studies:
Although my studies didn't went as good as they should, this course has been the best one in my last 4 years in the University. I'm almost sure I will be able to finish my studies next year. I really want to be only working instead of work and study at the same time, some people does not think that way but I think is funnier the Work than the studies :-).
Free Software:
I was late (again) to include the GNOME Language and Culture applet inside GNOME 2.8 :-(. For the people that wants it, sorry, I will try to get it with GNOME 2.10.
Other thing I did not talked about here is that I'm applying to became a Debian
developer. I'm now on hold until I get some time to finish some questions from
the Tasks & Skills part but I think I will finish it soon.
As part of my Debian work, I'm maintaining three
packages:
alleyoop,
ttf-isabella and
the latest one, ttf-staypuft,
this one will take some days before it enters into unstable.
About GNOME Translation Status Pages, there seem to be almost finished, I only need to get some time to finish the needed scripts that will feed the database and small changes to the UI and we will have new pages without any regression from current ones.
I need to organise my free time better because I'm a disaster, I have lots of pending things to do and I'm really slow doing it :-(.
Long ago since last time I was out at night with friends, tonight, my old coworkers and I were
celebrating a birthday and about at 4:00 AM, when I was coming back to home, two guys berthed me.
After some talk with them, I was able to recover my wallet (without money or credit cards,
of course) and luckyly, they did not saw my Canon Digital camera in my pocket, they tried to rob
my watch but it's a present from a special friend and I was also able to maintain it. And they
just despised my cell phone because they did not like it (I really love my old Nokia 6210).
It seems like I was in time to cancel all my credit cards before they get any money from them, so
I could say that I was lucky because I only lost about 10€, but they did not believed me when I
told them that some of my credit cards don't have a secret number and they nailed me a knife
in my leg (only a small portion, but just the needed to go to the hospital and win three staples and a vaccine).
Since the recent lost of two of my friends (Ranty and ErConde) I'm too sensible and I must say that although nothing important was lost because those stupid people, they scare me a lot. Tomorrow I will go to the police and hope they will be able to catch them (but I doubt it).
I think this is not the best party end :-(.
Thanks to my friends Gonzalo, Uzi, Yoli and her boyfriend for coming to the hospital to take me to my house, and sorry for spoil your night.
Good night.
Long time ago since my last post. I hate this new entry is to blog about the terrorist act we had in Spain this morning :-(
I'm without words. I cannot believe it. This morning, several bombs exploded inside some of the Madrid local trains. We have already 173 deaths and 711 injured.
Please, stop this fucked world, I want to leave it.
The marks were published today and I passed the final exam of my university AI
subject. Why I am so happy? just because the next opportunity to pass that
exam (this year) is the last GUADEC's day
and thus I could only attend it with this subject passed in february :-).
I'm not sure if finally I could attend the GUADEC but at least, now I have a
possibility :-)
As a side note, with this subject passed I have passed all exams I did in January. I'm so happy..., I think I will be able to finish this year as I'm trying to do.
Since some weeks ago, my Powerbook's battery (two years old) does not work correctly. It should let me use my laptop between three and five hours but last week I was only able to use it one hour long.
I started to search for a solution (one solution that does not imply a new
battery) and I found several options at the
Apple's Support website.
The first article I found is about how to
calibrate the battery to get the best performance but that's only useful if your battery is new :-(.
The second article talks about a way to
reset the PMU (The Apple's Power Management Unit). I don't get why could this article help me with the battery.
After a week playing with all this options (and others I found with google), my battery state changed but instead of get fixed it only lets me use the laptop for about 15 minutes !!!
I was really disappointed because this week I was at the OSWC and I needed all battery power I could get :-(.
Now after some testings I think I have a way to recover my battery, I don't know
if I will be able to recover it as a new one, but It's better than nothing.
I was playing with the laptop and stopped the PMU daemon, that way the laptop
does not sleeps automatically when the battery thinks is close to be empty. The
funniest thing about that is that I was able to use my laptop two hours more
with the battery "empty":
flags : 00000011 charge : 0 max_charge : 432 current : -939 voltage : 14117 time rem. : 0
After that test I'm sure that my "intelligent" battery manager is completely stupid :-(
The best part is that after the test, I recharged the battery and I won more battery capacity (the max_charge entry is the important field):
flags : 00000011 charge : 1040 max_charge : 1040 current : 0 voltage : 16360 time rem. : 0
I don't know how many times this trick will work, but I will try it as much as possible :-), I think the normal number is a max_charge of 3000 or 4000 so I will try to get as close as possible to that number :-P.
Yesterday I finished my last exam (until June).
Now, it's time to sort all my ideas and restart my Free Software developments.
Gnome Language and Culture capplet
It's too late to finish the localization capplet for GNOME 2.6 so it will be delayed until GNOME 2.8, any UI review/suggestion
is welcomed.
I will start developing a library like icu from
IBM but smaller and without the things we already have inside GNOME (like Pango and libc locales). My idea is use the
iso-codes's translations as the country/language database translation
and add the missing bits so we get something that could be easily integrated inside Glib or as an add-on API following Glib's API.
GNOME Translation Status Pages
This is my first priority now, I have new features, bug fixes and changes, lot of changes to improve them, but they are not
finished and they should be ready before GNOME 2.6 release. My brain is full of possible enhancements for those pages but
I will try to add the new features gradually so we can enjoy new features now instead of waiting for all them finished...
Thus, my priority now is release a new version with the new features I was implementing until today.
SecServer a.k.a. a good authorization and priviledge scaling framework
This service is inside my head since long ago but I'm always busy to develop something so any other hacker gets interested on it and help me. But now it's different I was talking with Gustavo Noronha Silva, the gksu's maintainer and he's interested on this kind of service. Now I should prepare an API proposal and we could start working on it. If you are interested on it, please send me an email. As a side note, we want to develop it as a desktop agnostic service so it could be shared between GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and any other desktop.
We are taking the Apple solution as the base because I think it's a really good one.
GNOME bounties
Until I get a job, they are the best way to get some money and also improve GNOME ;-)
Today I saw that I'm indebted person. Orkut was giving me connection with lots of people, but now... I think they are tired and they need new people to give to new accounts so they just ask me for those people, I'm in red numbers!!!
This morning I was connected to about 40000 people, now as you can see I need to found 32569 people so I clear my debt with orkut... A good way to promote my social relations with real people :-P
As all you know, orkut is a bomb.
Since I got the first invitation I'm expending lots of spare hours (when I'm not studding) adding new friends and looking the system.
You could ask... Where is the danger?
I think it's something like a drug :-P, but that's not the worst part, the problem comes
when you are chatting with other orkut's members and they start pasting URLs about communities, other friends,
funny comments.... and you get a link like (sorry, only works if you have an orkut account):
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=1882&cmd=add...
You are fucked (If you visit it, as Andrés and I did):
Tonight I was thinking about one idea I had sometime ago. What would happen if I leave the computers work professionally?
I love the computers. I spend all day in front of my iMac with Debian GNU/Linux. I cannot say I have an active social life,
but I'm not bored after a full "computer" day. Sometimes, I miss somethings other "normal" people do like meet every day
in the street or all weekends going out to dinner and dance. Of course, I have friends and I go out to dinner, theater or
cinema but only one or two times every month.
After all this stupid thoughts, here you have my crazy rhetoric questions...
What would happen if I just look for a job out of computer programming or system administration?
What would happen if I ask for a job in a BurgerKing or a McDonalds?
We are in a bad situation here in Spain with technical jobs. If you don't live in Madrid or Barcelona you can get
easily more money working as a waiter or things like that than as a computer programmer. I'm used to see jobs that ask you
more than 3 or 5 years of experience as programmer, with all programming languages you could imagine and when you look at
the salary you can see: between 6000€ and 12000€ yearly (of course they always give you 6000€ when you start the job and
"in the future" they will review your salary)
Sometimes you are a lucky man and you see a job with a salary of 12000€ or 15000€ but then your life is your job, because
you start working more than eight hours every day, just because you have an "high" salary.
The best thing about all this is that if you accept those "wonderful" jobs you will get a job for six months, a year or
perhaps, if you are a lucky man two years, but then they kick you out and get someone new so they cat pay less money for
a new worker.
After all this I only see three solutions:
- Move to Madrid or Barcelona trying to improve the situation (it's better there but it's not ideal, I did it already three years ago, but I don't like Madrid as a city to live).
- Look for a job out of Spain (I had already an option some months ago, but due some personal problems I lost my opportunity).
- Create your own company.
The last option is the one I'm working on since long ago but it's not an easy task.
I think that all I can do is try all options until I get the "joker" option, :-) to win as much money as possible so I have
my life solved and I could do anything I want with my life, for example create software, create Free Software.
It's time to sleep, I think I said already enough stupidities and tomorrow I should restart my university studies.
Good Night
After a week finishing a Java application for one of my university subjets, today is the "the day", when my teacher will look at it, but I will not be there just because Java is doing funny things like mixing the windows contents when I'm doing some animations. I suppose it could be due doublebuffered Components and some bugs inside my code but it's too late to fix it, thus last week was lost. Better luck in June...
This is the "best" exams start you can get, I did not go to the first exam (yesterday) just because I was finishing the Java Application and now, the application is not ready :-(.
This is my last year in the university (I hope it), but I think I must begin to study sooner or next year I will be here again.
I cannot believe it, I'm online again!!!.
Time to refresh GNOME Translation Status Pages, Stratagus CVS mirror and get the info needed to finish my homework.
Where was the problem? My phone cable was cut!!!
When you need something urgently, you will not have it available.
My ADSL connection died yesterday with my phone line, I don't know why.
I only know that I need it to finish my university homework today and I'm not
able to do it :-(
My phone company told me that it will be fixed in about 24 hours, that was about 13 hours ago, I hope they said me the truth...
Today I was with all my family in my parents' house, and my sister showed us a photo with the best Christmas present that she and his husband got this year:
I would like to know what my niece will say about this when she begins to speak... :-P
Ok, the first localization capplet release is done.
Please, test it, break it, send comments... anything.
Hope it's accepted soon inside gnome-control-center.
It adds a new dependency, icu,
from IBM. I'm getting from there all languages/countries translations. They have
already such database with translations, so if you detect any error or a missing
translation, please, fill a bug against
icu.
You can see their database information and fill bug reports
here.
Missing features:
- Nautilus, gnome-panel and gnome-session patches so they know about the new preferences (this one is the most important one).
- Keyboard layout move from the Keyboard capplet to this new capplet.
The capplet seems to be finished now, with some changes suggested since
the initial screenshots. We have now Up/Down buttons to sort the language list.
Tomorrow I will prepare a patch against gnome-control-center.
Now it's time to add the needed lines to nautilus and gnome-panel so
we can enjoy this new feature and also, I will start the keyboard layout move to this new capplet. I hope Jody loves my proposal and accept my changes :-P.
Good night
The GNOME International capplet has been renamed
After an hour or so of comments and suggestions from Kenneth we changed some
strings and the name to improve the new capplet.
The original screenshots are updated with the new strings and here you have
another screenshot to try to show the behavior of the capplet (sorry Sergey,
I don't know how could I do an animated GIF, I tried it but I did not found
the GIMP option).
Here you can see that new languages selected from the "Available languages dialog" are added at the end of the old list:
The GNOME International capplet is almost finished
Here you have two basic screenshots:
Hi people,
What's the best thing to do with a new year?
Start a new life, a better one. And also start a website and a blog :-P.
This old 2003 year was not a good year for me:
- The relationship with my girlfriend ended this summer.
- My grandmothers died (yes, both), one on September and the other one the day before Christmas.
- And Chema Celorio also died. He was someone special for me, he motivated me to improve my GNOME work. I really love the (small) work we did together with glade-3 and gnome-print. I had the hope that someday he could be my boss. That's impossible now, but I will never forget him. I think he did me a better programmer.
As you can suppose, I was unable to concentrate on my work with all those things.
Luckyly, I had also good news, my niece Lucia born in November:
Now it's time to look at the future, we are starting a new year and I want to start a new life, but now it's time to sleep.
The new website and the blog took me too much time tonight. Tomorrow will be a better day :-)
