Category: english

4 hours for Gran Canaria

Last year i was travelling to Istambul because of GUADEC. Now, after a year, i’m travelling to Gran Canaria to attend the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, in 4 hours from now i’ll be landing to Gran Canaria. This island is a new destination for me although i’ve been to Canary Islands five times before.

This year we are having a join event with GNOME and KDE people, the program of the event is really exciting, and i expect that our local team isn’t exhausted after the hard work they have been doing during last months. We expect more than 1000 people in the conference so success is assured, although weather seems to be cloudy until tuesday, but this wouldn’t be a problem because temperature is around 24 degrees.

I’m try too keep you informed about how everything is goin in Gran Canaria, and the rest of Igalia crew will give a lot of reports because we are more than 24 people attending Gran Canaria Desktop Summit with several talks in GUADEC track. We are already sponsoring the conference :-).

Don’t forget attending GUADEC-ES, this year we have really good talks.

Another year in FOSDEM

FOSDEM has already finished this afternoon. It was an interesting conference with a lot of parallel tracks and as my friend Javier Muñoz says “Everytime you go to a talk you feel like you were losing 10 interesting talks”. This year i’ve being changing from different tracks touching a bit of security, kernel, x.org and KDE. This year i’ve decided to review topics i usually don’t follow because here at FOSDEM you can have a nice general picture of the FLOSS movement.

I’ve already seen some people from our GNOME community but i couldn’t attend the GNOME beer event this year because i needed to recover from Friday Beer FOSDEM event in order to get up early to attend some interesting talks today’s morning.

This year we haven’t done so much sightseeing in Brussels, but today evening we have been looking for something really special because Mario was having a craving for 4 kilos high quality cacao mixture similar to Nutella… i hope we have no problem with the chocolates we have bought in the plane.

Tomorrow there is a kind of big storm in Galicia, so i hope our plane could land, in other case we will lost the day in Barajas in transit.

Blogging in the darkness

It has been a long time since i last wrote a post in my blog, my blog is included in several planets so every time i published anything it was published at Planet Igalia, Planet GNOME HISPANO , Planet GPUL and the Planet Caixanova Master on Free Software, but today if finally i finished decided to create different tags for each target of public so i can start using my weblog for a more personal use not only related to Free Software or my work in Igalia. So my family and friends can understand something 🙂
So i am publishing this as my last general post for all the planets i am aggregated

A Coruña 2009, GUADEC and aKademy, the proposal!!!

Last weekend Emilio, José Millán and me were working hard our proposal to co-host GUADEC and aKademy next year in A Coruña. In our bid we try to show the community all the possibilities of our city and our team to organize such a great event, but we are better working hard than writing long documents. We try to do the best.
Our proposal main idea is:”We want to organize a conference by community people for community people“. We have the facilities, we have a passionate team and a lot of ideas after attending several conferences and organizing a lot of events. We know how important is that details do not fail and having always prepared a second option.

Our main goal is investing all our efforts so that people can get here next year. So the main expense in our budget will be helping people to attend the event by sponsoring as much people as possible. That will be possible thanks to the contribution of the University and volunteers. They provide almost for free all the basic for running these two conferences and our Regional Government, the Xunta de Galicia, has an important commitment with this proposal and a great confidence in our work at all levels. So here it is by GPUL, Igalia and University of A Coruña:

GUADEC and aKademy 2009, Coruña, why not?

Last two weeks we have been working hard preparing a proposal for hosting GUADEC and aKademy in a Coruña next year. After organizing GUADEMY last year we decided that this could be the moment for writing a good proposal for next year, and I feel that we have done it.
The following organizations GPUL, Igalia and the University of A Coruña are proposing together the organization of the most important Free Desktop event in the world, all GNOME and KDE developers together in the same Venue going ones to aKademy and others to GUADEC.

This would create the possibility of organizing cross-desktop global meetings, following the spirit we wanted for GUADEMY.
I would like to thank all the organizations that supported our bid including the Regional Goverment of Galicia Xunta de Galicia, AGASOL, ASOLIF, GNOME HISPANO and other organizations and people from KDE and GNOME that give us really interesting comments to improve our proposal.

In the proposal is the mandatory Queimada and as almost all the people that attended to different events organized by us we can organize a lot of amazing surprises. Excellent food, almost-proffesional organization (lot of years of experience), fantastic volunteers and a lot of love for Free Software. Hope see you next year and we hope you want to come to Coruña. 🙂

Next Master on Free Software Lessons

After the hard work that Students have done preparing their presentation for FOSDEM during next weeks we will continue with the subject “Development with Free Software”. The first part of this subject is devoted to get in touch with the platforms and technologies used nowadays in Free Software.

This weekend will be devoted to Ruby and PHP.

AsĂ­s GarcĂ­a y David Barral from Trabe Soluciones will show the possibilities of Ruby and its web development framework Ruby on Rails. These guys have a lot of experience on this topic and they are working on Free Software in Galicia as we do in Igalia.
Lorenzo Tilve and Xavier Castaño from our web development group in Igalia will teach the PHP Framework.

Next week it will be devoted to the most important Desktop development frameworks GNOME and KDE. The introduction to GNOME as platform based in the combination of the C language and GTK+ will be prepared by Carlos GarcĂ­a Campos from the URJC and member of GNOME HISPANO. And the KDE session is being organized by Albert Astals Cid, one of the main KDE developers in Spain. This session will focus on the platform C++ and QT. Both of our Desktop teachers are working in applications related to the presentation of PDFs (Evince and Okular) documents so students will be able to compare different approaches in Desktop Development.

FOSDEM 2008 Balance

Fosdem 2008 was an interesting experience for me, because it has been the biggest free software conference i have ever been. Fosdem is a community conference so that the presence of companies is not as visible that other ones like the Free Software World Conference of Malaga or even GUADEC where I usually go.

The program was really full of interesting talks with more than 10 parallel sessions about different projects (GNOME, KDE, Java, BSD, Mozilla, Postgresql, Mobile gadgets, Research, X.org, etc… ) so it was impossible to go to all the interesting presentations i wanted.

I attended to the GPG signing party too, it was quite funny and i exchanged my GPG signature with more than 100 persons, i will spend some time this weekend sending them my signature of their GPG public key.

But the most important event for me was the presentation of our Master on Free Software Students, it was presented by Pablo Sangiao and they explained the the application of OpenBRR in order to decide witch is the better GNU/Linux distribution for an average user. Finally the best result in their study was Ubuntu over Fedora, OpenSuse and PCLinux. Here are some photos of the Research Room in FOSDEM durring their presentation.
Research Room FosdemFree Software Master presentation at FOSDEM

Night in Brussels before FOSDEM

I have spent a nice night in Brussels. I’ve arrived this afternoon with the rest of the Igalia crew in order to assault FOSDEM this year. Tomorrow, … in a few hours the students of the Master on Free Software will defend an interesting paper related to the Quality on Free Software. They have made an hard work analyzing four different GNU/Linux distributions in order know which is the best distribution based on an medium users point of view. So i a few hours Pablo will present the collaborative work of all our students.

We have been tonight to a nice pub near the “Bourse” of Brussels called “Celtica” there I have drink a pair of beers with my Igalia partners and some Master Students, but i had an especially nice night with the main Vagalume developer, Alberto Garcia, who has been my flatmate for almost ten years, and has just become one of the finalist of the Nokia Mobile Rules competition. Good luck Berto in San JosĂ© (USA). Here is a photo of Berto tonight.
Sugar in Brussels

Countdown to GUADEMY

Last year the First edition of GUADEMY was organized by GPUL and it was a fantastic experience, this year we are proud of the Polinux guys, because they have decided to assume the challenge of organizing a second edition.

Last year it was quite a success because of the participation of almost of the people from the spanish KDE and GNOME community.This year goal will be improving the communication and sharing of experiences among people from our communities and we will try promoting an international participation.

So will see you in II GUADEMY from April 25th to April 27th. Thanks Polinux.

Master Students going to FOSDEM

Today, during the afternoon session of the Free Software Master we received really good news. Ismael Faro, the Caixanova manager in charge of this Master, confirmed that Caixanova will afford the travel and accommodation for all the Students to FOSDEM. One of the most important European conference focused on Free Software.

So all the students will spend a nice weekend in Brussels during February. They will meet a lot of gurus from the Free Software community and improve their networking in the community. Students are working on an interesting paper related to the evaluation of different distributions, so i hope that they finish writing their article before the deadline of the conference.

So there are only 35 days until FOSDEM.