Research in Spain

I’m more and more disappointed with the university. Before start working at URJC I thought that working at uni as a researcher was really great, and ideally after finishing my PhD I could become a teacher. Right now, I’m not even sure whether I want to do the PhD.

Here is an evidence of how so many times being the best is not enough, especially at university:

http://gsyc.escet.urjc.es/~anto/#science-spain

Antonio is the best teacher I’ve had since I started studying in 1998.

Hopefully I have a wrong idea about the university in general and this kind of things are not so common in other universities.

FOSDEM 2006

The last weekend I was at FOSDEM with many people of GSyC (where I’m working since February). It was a great experience.

Just arrived there, we could attend the end of the Richard Stallman talk. Then we all went to the Calibre devroom. First of all Isra made a brief introduction about Calibre, and then Grex started with his presentation.

After the grex talk, acs and I went to the GNOME devroom, it was a little bit difficult to find, because it was moved in the last time. In the presentation jdub asked all of us introduce ourselves. In my opinion it made the GNOME devroom even cosier.

Again in the Calibre devroom Juanjo talked about the Developer Tracking System, it seemed people liked the idea, even grex said that TradeDT (now DeTraS) was the killer-app of the Calibre devroom. Yeah! 🙂

I was very interested in the pvanhoof talk about design patterns with GObject, so I went back to the GNOME Devroom. And the talk didn’t disappoint to me.

Finally on Sunday I was one of the few who got up early to go to the FOSDEM. I wanted to attend the maemo presentation, and was very interested in the svn and valgring talks.

The experience has been really successful.

ACME

I’ve just discovered wily, it’s an acme (the programming environment for Plan 9) for Linux. It’s available as a debian (or ubuntu) package.

acme
Wily: acme for Linux

Anyway, I think I’m going to use emacs for studying plan9 . . . (I hope nemo doesn’t read my blog 😛 )

A month without writing anything

I’ve been very busy the last days and lots of things have been happened.

GNOME

My paper for the II GUADEC Hispana was accepted. I’m going to talk about the desktop integration in GNOME, I hope the talk will be interesting for the people. The schedule is available in the GUADEC-ES website yet

Interesting discussion about GNOME and fun started by Edd Dumbill on Planet GNOME.

Evince is more and more fast and useful, and it’s the best rated application in gnomefiles right now. Jrb has added support for continuous and dual scrolling, one of the most requested features that in addition I think make the difference with other pdf/ps viewers.

University

Many works to do . . . It’s the moment to be focused only in uni stuff. There is only one month until the exams

No Software Patents: There were a protest in most of the spanish universities and of course in the URJC too. There are photos of the event in the ACM website. There are also photos and comments in the steve-o’s blog.

Basketball

Today, I’m going to play the last game of the 2004-2005 season for me. There is another one in two weeks, but I’ll be at GUADEC-ES then. I’m a little bit sad because the league is over, but in the other hand, I’m very happy remembering all of the games played.

The next Friday, there will be a 3 vs 3 championship in my uni (URJC). I already have a team 🙂 with steve-o and gabi. I’m sure it will be very funny

Mortal Kombat II

I’ve never been an enthusiast of the computer games, but if there is a computer game of my childhood, it’s Mortal Kombat II. I’ve wasted many hours of my life playing it.

The first time I tried dosbox, MK2 was not supported, but when the other day steve-o talked to me about dosbox, I thought I had to take a look at the list of supported games again. God! MK2 is perfectly supported since dosbox 0.61!!

I was remembering my childhood playing for a while. I had forgotten all of the fatalities and the Shang Tsung morphs, so I was googling a bit.

Mortal Kombat II
Shang Tsung Wins!

Dell Latitude D600

I’ve acquired a new laptop: Dell Latitude D600. I’m going to talk here about my experiences with it because I think it can be useful for somebody.

First of all, the laptop has the following components:

  • 1.6GHz Intel Pentium-M (2MB L2 Cache 400MHz FSB)
  • 14” SXGA+ TFT LCD (1400×1050)
  • ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, AGPx4, 32 MB DDR
  • 2x 256MB SDRAM
  • 80GB hard disk (EIDE ATA 100)
  • 8 x DVD / 24 X CDRW
  • Intel soundcard (AC’97 Audio Controller)
  • 10/100/1000 Ethernet LAN (Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet)

Linux Distribution: Debian GNU/Linux
Kernel version: 2.6.9 with no patches

ATI Radeon 9000 M9
  Works perfectly at 1400×1050 using Xfree 4.3 and radeon driver, but without 3D. You can check if you have 3D:
$ glxinfo | grep “direct rendering”
direct rendering: No

To get 3D:

Add the following line to your /etc/sources.list

deb http://people.debian.org/~daenzer/dri-trunk-sid/ ./

then

# apt-get update
# apt-get install xserver-xfree86-dri-trunk xlibmesa-gl1-dri-trunk

Reboot the X server and check it again:

$ glxinfo | grep “direct rendering”
direct rendering: Yes

My Device section in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:

     Section "Device"             Identifier  "ATI Radeon 9000" 	    VendorName  "ATI" 	    Driver      "radeon" 	    VideoRam     32768 	    Option      "AGPMODE"           "4" 	    Option      "EnablePageFlip"    "on" 	    Option      "SWCursor"          "true"     EndSection
ATI TV-OUT
  Works out of the box by doing the following:

  1. Install atitvout (# apt-get install atitvout)
  2. Turn on your laptop with the cable plugged and the TV turned on
  3. Set your resolution at 1024×768 or less
  4. As root simply run atitvout -f t
  5. To switch back run atitvout -f l

If the image is showed in your tv, but you lose the colors when you move the mouse, enable the software cursors by adding the following line into the Device section of your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

Option “SWCursor” “true”

SpeedStep / CPUFreq
  Since my CPU model is not still recognized by the cpufreq, I had to compile the kernel with the option

[*] Use ACPI tables to decode valid frequency/voltage pairs (EXPERIMENTAL)

and it works perfectly

ACPI
  Works without patching the kernel
Dell i8k
  The module has to be loaded with the force=1 option

The rest of the components works perfectly and they don’t need to be commented