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):
