Planet Igalia

As planned, I attended today to my first day at FOSDEM ‘09, and I have to say my impressions are even better than what I would expected: lots of talks, lots of volunteers, lots of resources to get into (I’d like to congratulate the organization for all the amazing work they have done), and lots of hackers all over the place. In fact, it was sometimes very hard to manage to select and attend to some talks (at least for me, perhaps because I’m a “newbie” here as this is my first year here), since parallelization is very high (and needed, if you think on more than 260 talks taking place in just two days) and timetables are sometimes too tight if you want to move around between different rooms. ...

As some of my mates here in Igalia, I’m arriving tomorrow at Brussels, in order to attend to FOSDEM ‘09. This is my first visit both to Brussels and FOSDEM and I’m very excited and looking forward to arriving there and meeting all the people attending and giving talks in this great event, which I’m sure I’m goint to love. So now it’s time to get everything ready in my backpack and going to bed soon, since my plane leaves Coruña early in the morning and I’ll need to rest properly to reach Brussels in my best shape. And let’s hope I don’t find any problems in Madrid, where news said they’re in “orange alert” because of the snow (I wouldn’t like to miss my connection or, even worse, to miss Friday in Brussels and therefore the FOSDEM Beer Event ;-)). ...

Just in case you wonder why my personal webpage (formerly at http://people.igalia.com/msanchez) is no longer available, here you are some brief explanations: I don't see the point of having a so simple webpage when the same thing could be easily got by setting up a Wordpress page. I don't like having two different places to make all the stuff I want available for everybody: a blog for posts, and the personal web for the remaining stuff. Two different places also mean, by the way, two different "things" to maintain and keep up-to-date. I'm not a graphical designer and, no matter what I do, a webpage made and designed by me (I'm talking about the CSS on here, mainly) never will look as good as many Wordpress themes out there, like this one I'm currently using, for instance. So, I just decided today to remove my personal webpage from the internet and set up a redirection to this blog (I don't like broken links either). But first, instead of just throwing away all the stuff I had in my old web, I've merged and moved them into the (already existing) About me and the (newly created) Stuff pages in this blog, respectively, whose hyperlinks you can find in the sidebar. I hope this change made sense for you too :-)

As Juan, I’m one of the proud owners of a Linksys NSLU2 (aka Slug) perfectly (and continuously) running the Debian/NSLU2 distribution for more than 6 months, currently featuring the following configuration (both sw and hw), after some slightly changes: Attached 500Gb 2,5" HD (powered through its USB2.0 connector). MediaTomb uPnP media server, to keep a nice "media center" running always available. Samba filesharing server (to easily share files with any device connected to the LAN) rtorrent bitTorrent client, to use the Slug as a dedicated machine always up and ready to download whatever you want. The 'screen' command line utility (useful to easily keep the rtorrent app always running and "detachable" ;-)). OpenSSH server (ssh port forwarded in the router to access the Slug from the Internet), to easily manage my Slug from anywhere in the world. With the exception of the HD (which used to be a 3,5" 120Gb HD since June to December, when I replaced with the 500Gb one), the rest of the configuration was amazingly working with no problems at all for more than 6 months, as I previously stated. This, along with the fact that this device is quite small, noise-and-heat-free (no fans) and only needs 8W (it's the 266Mhz, 'underclocked' version) to work, makes it one of my favourite devices I ever had :-). But all this was kind of “incomplete” stuff until I got a PS3, as a present from my girlfriend during last Christmas holidays, which gave it a new dimension to the Slug, since the PS3 bundles a nice uPnP client for pictures, audio and video which works perfectly with the MediaTomb server installed in this cute device. ...

As you might know, two weeks ago I told in this blog that “big news were about to come”… and the time to say what it was about has come, so get ready… steady… go! I’m going to become a father I doubt I could express my feelings right now well enough in a blog, so I won’t write a long post about this topic. Just keep in mind that I’m happy as I never was before, and I’m glad to be now ready to tell the world about it :-) ...

…in some weeks time. And it has nothing to do with cats, just in case you wondered: Mincha: one of my cutest cats Just stay tuned!

As you can check out in the vagalume-devel@garage.maemo.org mailing list archives: https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/vagalume-devel/2008-June/000151.html …today I’ve finished the implementation of a new patch for Vagalume which will enable D-Bus support in the desktop version of this nice player, since so far D-Bus interaction was only allowed in the maemo platform (due to using functions from libosso for RPC methods, instead of dbus-glib). So, this is how the vagalumectl script (formerly known as vagalume-dbus) would work from now on in a “regular” GNU/Linux machine: ...

I know three posts talking about the summit could be too much… but I couldn’t stand without continuing Javi’s last post showing to the world the two fierce teams which fought in the Arbo War. So, here you are them: The Arbo War: red team The Arbo War: green team They seem quite fierce, don't they?

During this last weekend most of the igalians (me included) had a nice experience in a rural house of Pontevedra due to the Igalia Summit, June 2008 edition. There we were able to enjoy of the nature, perform a great Paintball match… and do several other kind of activities that always help to have some rest of daily work while keeping in touch with some mates that we sometimes don’t see very often (since we igalians usually work in our three different offices). ...

As you might know, some time ago I developed a plugin for the maemo version of Vagalume which would allow the user to manage the most basic features from a tiny icon in the status bar. After that, I thought it could be a good idea to implement a freedesktop tray icon as well, so you would be able to hide/show Vagalume with a tray icon in the notification area, in the same way you could do it with some other programs such as pidgin, xchat or rhythmbox, for instance. Moreover, some people told me that it would be very nice to have a tray icon in the desktop version of vagalume, so everything seemed to say that I was not mad after all and that it could be a good idea… ...

Today, I’m going to give a talk about Vagalume in the "VIII Jornadas de Software Libre de GPUL 2008", since Berto finally won’t be able to be there, as it was initially planned, so I’ll be charged with the responsibility of telling the people how cool Vagalume, Maemo and GNOME are in only 30 minutes… quite a big challenge for me, since I seldom can speak in a concise, short and effective way without going on and on. ...

As my mate Berto has already commented on his blog, we’re back from California after attending to the Mobile Rules! ‘08 awards ceremony, and I’d like to say that we had a great time there, even though we didn’t win the prize… but being a finalist was already a very nice kind of price, don’t you think? Moreover, maybe we didn’t get the acknowledgement of being the “Mobile Ruler ‘08” under the Multimedia category, but we met a lot of people indeed, and we enjoyed a lot of the event, which was nicely arranged to allow all the participants to meet each other and to have a good dinner at the San Jose City Hall Rotunda (look at the picture to see me in front of the beautiful San Jose City Hall). ...

Yesterday I’ve got my new Thinkpad T61 laptop and I had to spend some time installing a GNU/Linux distribution on it, so doing all those related tasks that are a must: partitioning, installing linux, installing emacs… and besides to all those tasks a very important one: encrypting some disk partitions. To do that, I just followed the instructions that Berto had posted some months ago in his blog, either for encrypting full regular partitions with LUKS as for encrypting temporary filesystems, say, /tmp and swap partitions. ...

Today, while doing the houseworks, I plugged the N800 to the AUX input of my mini hi-fi system (see the photo), in order to listen my online radios with Vagalume while I was doing several tasks all around my flat. Then, after finishing those tasks, I sat in front of my laptop and I began to do some tipical tasks: read mail, surf the internet, talk with some friends through IM… while Vagalume kept playing music through my hi-fi system in the living room. And then, while I was thinking how nice is to listen Last.fm through a couple of good speakers, I suddenly found out that I should face the big dilemma: ...

Yep… I know that this is a Led Zeppelin song, from Led Zeppelin IV album to be exact. And why not? BTW A great song, a great 70’s rock band (one of my favourite ones) an a great album… so what are you waiting for? Go listening Led Zeppelin for hours right after reading this post! :-) ...

Hi all, It has been a long time since my last post (April 15th, 2007), so I think that it’s time to write something again… and I can’t think of a better chance to do it that talking about this… :-) As many of you could know, last November 1st my mate Berto released the first version of his Gnome/Maemo Last.fm (codenamed “Vagalume 0.1”), which started being just a “three-button application” and evolved to be a nice application to listen your favorite custom radio stations, providing lots of the typical features that a Last.fm user would expect. ...

Today was a nice day here in the DudesConf 07, full of interesting talks about debian and meeting new (and not so new) people from differents parts of the world who came just because one main reason: talk about the debian distro, its current state and about several related things, in general terms. (more info at http://www.dudesconf.org). At first I thought I couldn’t attend this interesting event, but at last I could and I’m happy to do so, because it was an interesting day in which, even though I wasn’t able to pay as much attention as I wished, I learned several new things and met new people that could be difficult in other way apart from this one. And we even had a GPG signing party in which we shared our fingerprints and get our gpg keys signed by each other. ...

Just go to http://maps.google.com, click on the “Get directions” tab and write down the name of the locations that you wish… and don’t worry about traveling across the sea, because google maps is perfectly “ready” to manage that situation as you can see in the following screenshot (traveling from A Coruña, Spain, to New York, USA): Good luck swimming! ;-)

Last sunday, going back home after three days of several interesting speechs at the Guademy, I’ve decided to upgrade my ubuntu distribution in my laptop from the 6.10 version (name-coded “Edgy Eft”) to the new beta released version 7.04 (name-coded “Feisty Fawn”) and I have to say that everything is working pretty well: I had no problems upgrading (not even one), my Ati graphics card works with 3D acceleration, and I can enjoy the new Gnome 2.18 desktop… and the new baobab ringschart developed by Igalia, which is included by default in Gnome in the “Disk usage analyzer” application (formerly known as “baobab”). ...

Well, after naming this post in this way I think it could be a good idea to explain what this is about… :) As the result of working in my Master Thesis, I developed an small “ad-hoc” framework for programming simple and so-so-small web applications using Erlang, since a requirement for doing my Thesis was using distributed functional technology… and web applications are not usually developed with this kind of tools. Well, I know that with ErlyWeb this assertion could be wrong in a matter of months ;), but when I started my work (a year ago) the situation was so much different from now. ...