Month: July 2007

No words

I have no words on what’s happening at home. A forest guard set up the Gran Canaria south western forest on fire to protest against his job situation, smart move huh?. One of the most beautiful landscapes of my Island, lost. There is also another forest fire on Tenerife, the authorities suspect that it’s also intentional. This is the scary landscape:

Sadly, those are not clouds.

I cannot describe what I feel. Being away from home is making it even more strange. The saddest thing is that it was intentional, someone did it, someone wanted this to happen. Most times I’m faithful about the human kind, today is not one of those days.

Jilorio: Gnome backgrounds and themes two-dot-zero

One of the first things that I missed when I realized that my laptop was lost was (beside tons of photos and college documentation) a couple of old hacks, most of them on pygtk, more than a year ago I started lurking on the #art-gnome channel trying to add atom feeds to art.gnome.org, benzea did a great job adding support to art.gnome.org back then. Once the support was added, I hacked a small pygtk app to use the feed to select backgrounds from the site and apply them without browser interaction.

Fortunately, there was a copy of the hack on my gmail history, and Jilorio backgrounds has come alive again. Check out the git repository or the 0.1 tarball.

YouTube / OGG

If you are looking for an easy hack, metacity and gtk themes variants of the app would be really cool. Any patch or comments are welcome.

Post Guadec post

Guadec

At last, my post Guadec post. What a crazy week, the first day I lose my backpack with my laptop and my home’s keys, so it wasn’t a good start. However, I had a great fun, and it was great to stay there again.

I would like to congratulate Paul and Thomas and the rest of the organization for such a great job, and I’m looking forward to go to Istambul next year.

Clutter rock my ass

One of the things that I most enjoyed was the clutter+opt+poppler+gtollina mushup that fer and me hacked at Guadec. I decided to go a step further and I have hacked a formal patch to add pdf support for clutter’s opt. Check it out at openedhand’s bugzilla.

I would like to add PDF transition support and maybe slide caching at some point. By the way, the Clutter api is just beautiful, kudos to the o-hand hackers.

Thoughts on the Virtualization area.

Yesterday a coworker passed me a link about an OpenGL virtualization project from GSoC ’06, VMGL. Basically it allows you to show OpenGL accelerated graphics of applications running in a virtualized guest OS like Linux.

The results of the benchmarks are just impressive. Almost native performance and concurrent execution of various games like Quake3 or Unreal. It’s been tested with Xen and VMware as far as I have read. Further work to achieve the same features with Direct3D is planned. Meanwhile, guys on VMWare, are making amazing things like this.

I’m starting to seriously believe that this kind of progress on the virtualization space is going to change we think about applications, operating systems and even debugging. The boundaries of the platform where you run your applications are just going to be blurred, and users, developers and customers, are going to be able to have real choice.

Spec Files Extras Developer.

Spec Files Extras, is a project maintained by some guys at Sun to provide an easy way to create Solaris/OpenSolaris packages from rpm-like spec files. You can check the software available on the repository here.

Laszlo Peters (laca), from the JDS Common Build Environment fame, has granted me today commit access to the SFE repository:

Sending        ChangeLog
Sending        SFEgit.spec
Transmitting file data ..
Committed revision 329.

Thanks laca!

PS: Wondering why am I fixing the git package? I cannot tell you yet 😉

Developing GNOME is going to rock even more very soon!

When I started to getting involved with GNOME, I missed some features and got frustrated on how many details I needed to know to solve simple problems. However, the magic of opensource makes every problem a matter of time.

It seems that Gtk 2.12 is going to include the GtkBuilder API that Johan has been developing for a while, this is going to allow to abtract a lot of details, it not only replace libglade and UIManager, but also, it will be possible to define treeview columns and even populate data on it from a ui designer, such designer doesn’t exist yet, this ui is yet to be created, but again, time will fix this.

Alexander Larsson is working on GVFS, a new API for accessing files and perform IO operations, that whips gnome-vfs’ ass in terms of simplicity and portability. Kudos to Alex for this work.

On the other hand I realized today via FootNotes, that Anjuta 2.2, the first stable release of the 2.x series has been released, congratulations to the developers. I hope they can include it for the development suite for 2.22, this is a must have.

We have the wider and best maintained set of bindings for a graphical toolkit, just take a look at the development activity in PyGTK, ruby-gnome, java-gnome, gtkmm.. (the list goes on). This is a core asset of the GNOME platform since it encourage our so beloved freedom of choice. C haters, you have no excuse to become a GNOME developer 🙂

GNOME is getting simpler, easier to develop and more usable every day, and we are not even braking backwards compatibility! Kudos to all the GNOME community.

The personal side

Work keeps me busy enough to being unable to accomplish the promise I made myself to release a Gtk+ msi installer before GUADEC. Hope is not lost yet, but I still need to focus on other things yet.

Working on Sun is being great so far, at last I have the opportunity to learn some things that I’ve been delaying for too long. Some of them funny, others  just mandatory, but I’m enjoying my time here as I’ve never did in the past, I couldn’t have thought in any better first full-time job in my life.