PyGTK on Windows land

It’s been a while since my last adventures on PyGTK on Windows land. A week before GUADEC I actually managed to spend some time on getting pycairo and pygobject working for VisualStudio.

The pycairo stuff is ready for upstream, check FDO#22940. The pygobject stuff on the other hand needs some love to be suitable for upstream, however I have a git branch if people want to try out.

As for pygtk… that beast is hairier than I thought! It’s going to take me a while before I can get it throught though. If anyone has some knowledge on python distutils and pygtk bindings, any help would be appreciated!

If I manage to get this through, I’ll be very very close to a proper PyGTK installer! 🙂

A month and a half in the UK

So… yeah, nearly two months since I moved to Manchester, and one month and a half working for Codethink. Moving is been a tough thing to do, I’m living alone for the first time now and I do miss all of my flatmates from Dublin and Willowdale (the house where we used to live the four of us). Besides, starting social life from 0 again is a bit of a pain. Paperwork is pretty much sorted out already though!

Anyway, despite all the downsides, I have to say that now more than ever, I’m extremely happy with the decision. Codethink is turning out to bet the best place I ever worked in as I’m starting to use all my potential and skills at once for the first time. Rob is being a great boss, he never puts constraints on people’s imagination and gives space to try new things, something essential to keep people’s motivation high and deliver innovation. I have loads of fun with John Carr everyday at the office (and sometime on the weekends too ;-), the rest of the guys work from home so contact is less frequent, but as pleasant as with the onsite guys.

All in all, I feel like I’m surrounded by some of the most talented group of engineers involved in the GNOME landscape, no wonder why our motto is PROVIDING GENIUS., however, more than anything else they are starting to become my friends, something I think is a key to achieve a pleasant and motivating work environment.

Exciting times are not ahead anymore, I’m living exicting times right here, right now!

RE: On the Meme (WAS: Gran Canaria wrap-up 1)

Dave, regarding the meme, it isn’t particularly aimed at RMS himself, but to the whole anyone trying to stop third parties on writing code on whatever platform they like, specially trying to stop them writing free software, with a free software platform! Technically speaking, some of us might not like Mono (I don’t like the idea of a desktop running 2 or more interpreters/vms as it is right now) but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stand up and support those who like it and deserve the freedom to use it. Some people might not like mono, but they shouldn’t be afraid of people writing code with it!

RMS stood in front of us, and said we were wrong, and he didn’t even bother giving us a plausible reason, he just referenced the software freedom law center as a source, no explanation at all, that is just not right, do you imagine Steve Ballmer. In the meantime, none gives Miguel the credit of what he is achieving, quite the contrary, everything he and other people in the Mono community got so far is loads of negative input and no credit.

Miguel is pushing Microsoft to play within our rules, and to be honest, I rather see a world where Microsoft plays nicely with open source (or free software), than a world where beating Microsoft is more important than free software itself. The more we treat them as our enemies, the later they’ll commit to our game rules.

We wanted to stand up and support those who believe in software freedom and that look for pragmatic and effective ways to bring everyone into the game. We are not afraid of anyone excercising his/her freedom to write free software! We support them all! That was what the meme was all about.

As fot the sexism issue, Richard is been parodying the Bible for quite some years, if anyone has a problem with Richard’s parody, I think they should complain to every christian church around instead. To me the whole issue is like claiming that Monty Python’s Life of Brian is sexist or antisemitic as well. But that’s just my opinion.

By the way, I, for one, am not afraid of people porting applications to C++ either!

GCDS is over

It’s been a hell of a crazy month for me, first I get moved to Manchester, a few weeks ago, I get my new flat keys, and a week after that I get a plane back to my home town, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, in the meantime, I’ve been catching up with my new job at codethink. This is the first conference I attend as a codethinker, and it’s been quite fun to feel part of the small but mighty team. This is one of the very few times a year that the whole gang meets together (except for muks, who couldn’t attend this year).

All in all, a very productive week and half, but a very tiring one, specially for me, it is actually quite hard to be at GUADEC, to take care of work stuff and to be at home all at the same time. I don’t even have enough energies to post any of the technical outcomes of the conference at this point. But I’m generally happy, specially after so many positive input from people after enjoying their time at Gran Canaria. It is a weird feeling to have two completely different worlds kind of melting, seeing people like Michael Meeks or Federico Mena walking over the streets where I used to walk when I was dreaming on becoming a GNOME hacker is quite of a mind twist, but still a nice feeling.

Anyway, I’m now off to refuel my batteries and rock hard on the stuff codethink want me to come up with! Expect some updates on techy stuff soon.