As I told in my previous post, I’ve spent the last week in Seville attending the GNOME Accessibility Hackfest, which was an amazing experience to me, so I guess now it’s time to talk about some (mostly personal and subjective) conclusions. First of all, let’s repeat this was the first time I attended an a11y related hackfest, and from that point of view the experience was even better and more rewarding than what I’d expected. Meeting other a11y developers in real life and putting faces to them, along with being able to check the real needs that people demand from assistive technologies was an awesome experience, and way richer than just having a list of bugs in need of getting fixed. ...

As my mate Alejandro said back in June, next week the 1st AEGIS international conference will take place in Seville, Spain, and there I’ll be attending, together with him, the GNOME Accessibility Hackfest that is planned to happen there as a parallel event to the conference (see AEGIS web page or GNOME live wiki, for more details). As for me, this is the first time I attend to an a11y-related hackfest and I must said I’m quite excited about it, as been there should be the perfect scenario to work hard on moving things forward related to a11y support in the WebKitGTK platform, which has been what I’ve been working on most of the time during the last months here in Igalia, as part of our WebKit team. ...

After having a great time last week in the seventh edition of the GUADEC-ES conference in A Coruña, I’m now announcing, in the same way some of my mates from Igalia already did, that… I’ve arrived yesterday to Den Haag, along with most of the Igalia gang (still some of us coming tomorrow), and will be here just until Friday morning, since I’ll need to miss the last day of GUADEC to attend my brother’s wedding. So, don’t hesitate to talk to me if you see me hanging around and want to share something, chat, or just to get a nice Igalia shirt… or even something different, who knows… ...

Con motivo de la celebración de la VII GUADEC Hispana (o GUADEC-ES) una invasión de GNOME hackers y allegados invadirán tierras coruñesas durante toda la semana que viene, y esta vez no estará María Pita para defender la ciudad, por lo que si todo transcurre como debería, y no hay nubes de ceniza ni cosas por el estilo, la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad de A Coruña acogerá durante dos días 19 ponencias/talleres sobre temas diversos relacionados con GNOME, como comentó Chema en su blog recientemente. ...

Even though I’ll be stating the obvious for so many ubuntu users/developers reading this post, I’d like to post a quick recipe for those who don’t know how to easily install the latest version of epiphany with the WebKit backend, as well as all the needed dependencies, without having to mess with compiling the source code (which is not always an easy nor a quick task, by the way). So here we go ...

During the last days (well, actually during the last nights [*]), I've been spending some time in adapting frogr 0.2 to also compile and work on my brand new N900 (thanks Igalia!), and this is the humble result up to date: Perhaps you’re thinking why the hell I needed frogr to upload pictures when the N900 already comes with a nice and handy sharing application to upload pictures directly from the camera app or the image viewer, so here you have some use cases where I found the sharing app not enough for my needs: ...

I’m writing this post from the Igalia office on Sunday at 23:00 pm and no… I’m not crazy nor I was expulsed from home or something like that. It’s just that today is the last day of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest and, although was not officially an attendant to the hackfest (see http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk/Hackfest2009), I don’t regret to have joined yesterday, since it was a quite productive and interesting experience, and hopefully quite productive as well for the projects that most of the people here were working on during the whole week. ...

After coming back from an awesome week of holidays in Paris (lovely city, btw!), today I finally managed to get some time for making up what it became the second upstream release of frogr: frogr 0.2 Just trying to give a brief update on “what is new”, here you have an excerpt from the NEWS file: Generate ChangeLog from git log with 'make dist' Added .spec file for fedora 11 packaging system (thanks Adrián Pérez) Added drag'n'drop support for loading pictures in frogr Added support to add tags to pictures (instead of just replacing) Fixed (legacy) support for libgnome2 to compile in debian lenny Use accesor functions instead direct access and removed some deprecated GTK+ symbols (thanks Javier Jardón) Added i18n support and a es_ES lang file (thanks Alejandro Piñeiro, aka API) Support silent build rules with automake 1.11 (thanks Javier Jardón) Bugfixes and several minor improvements Entering in more detail, and as you can easily extract from the list above, the main improvements from the user's point of view are: Drag'n'drop now supported, so having to add pictures through the filechooser is no longer the only method to load pictures in frogr. New "add tags" dialog, very handy to add tags to some specific pictures before uploading them. i18n support, which should make easier to get more contributions for frogr in further releases, in the form of new translations to make it even more accessible for people all over the world (did I say we're eager for new language files?) At last, just to mention that you already can find pre-compiled packages for some distros at the web of the project, as well as the source code tarballs in gzip and bzip2 formats. And of course, get the source code from the git repository at gitorius, in case you prefer to directly clone the source tree to make up wonderful and nice patches to contribute with, or just to provide new pre-compiled packages for your favourite distro ;-) So… what else could I say? Just go and get it… Hope you enjoy it as much as I do :-) ...

After perhaps quite a long time since I announced the “pre-release” of frogr, back in June, I’m now happy to tell the world that the 0.1 release is finally here, providing the user a very basic but still useful set of features to upload his/her pictures to flickr. Basically, as it’s told in the NEWS file, most important changes in this first release regarding to the code from almost 2 montsh ago are: ...

Yesterday the GNOME Party took place and we all had a lot of fun there. There was food, drinks, live music performed by a bunch of “gnomies” and even the Ice Cream Deatchmatch took place there as well, and all this stuff “dressed” with a wonderful warm night to enjoy in a nice terrace here in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria… so looking backwards I think we can feel very satisfied of how things finally gone. ...

As many of you know only two days are left now for Guadec and Guadec-es 2009, which will be located this year in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and which will be a “little bit” special this year because it will took place along with Akademy and Akademy-es. Actually, that’s why this year it’s named “Gran Canaria Desktop Summit”. Thus, even though I had a great time last year in Madrid and Istanbul, I’m sure this time we’re going to have fun as never before and that it will be a perfect environment for sharing ideas, thoughts, knowledge… and perhaps even some beer at the wild parties social events both with the GNOME and KDE guys ;-). ...

Right some days before than my son was born I started to hack a bit on a new and small project to develop a C-based flickr manager for GNOME, as current alternatives out there (which I were extensively using for more than a year), even thought being great applications, were not by all means what I was looking for or, in other words, what I would expect from a GNOME application which would not only allow me to upload pictures, but also to do a couple more of things like re-tagging pictures or managing albums for instance. ...

As it was announced a long time ago, I was about to be a father soon… and look at me, the time has already come some weeks ago, and now I am actually a father since April the 15th. So, after one prudent month to better get in touch with him and get used not to sleep too much, the day before yesterday seemed to be like the perfect day to introduce him to a lot of people, friends and workmates, making the most of the Igalia’s new office opening party :-). ...

Just in case you were experiencing, like me, some very annoying problems with your NVIDIA graphic card while using Compiz, here you have a very useful option to put inside the “Device” section in your /etc/X11/xorg.org file: Option "UseCompositeWrapper" "true" After activating this option (available for nvidia drivers >= 169.xx) I found that the problems redrawing windows I was suffering, specially when scrolling (very annoying, for instance, when chatting through pidging), just dissapeared. And it was indeed a very annoying problem, since it used to happen very often and in almost any window (although not in Emacs ;-)) in my system, in a way so any information on it just got screwed up so it was completely unreadable… and the only “manual” workaround I had found so far was just to re-scroll the window or select the text I was trying to read, which seemed not to be a very good idea. ...

Seen in FOSDEM, in front of the GNOME stand: It looks like a original and very visual idea to put many ideas and visions all together, doesn’t it? Pointless to say I agree more with the “love” side, of course :-) By the way, I took this picture today, the second and last day of the conference… so now I’m ready to give a full and complete opinion about it, which is that it just was great: I had a very good time and a lot of fun being there, and not only because of the talks, which were amazing in most of the cases, but also because of meeting people and sharing visions and comments with all of them. ...

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 :-) ...