As time passes more and more applications are web-based. The World Wide Web has switched from being a place where you basically see static data to a place where everything is interactive.

Good examples of this are wikis and weblogs: two of the most remarkable kinds of applications that have appeared in recent years and can be used with nothing more than a web browser. Web applications are nice as they allow you to do the same job no matter where you are: at home, at work, at an internet cafe, at a friend’s house, …

One of the biggest problems of this is that a web browser is not really suited for all kinds of tasks. Example: a wiki is a great tool because you can edit a page very quickly, but the browser itself is a crappy editor. It lets you do very basic things besides moving around with the cursor keys, cutting and pasting text.

A great solution for this problem is Mozex, a Firefox extension that lets you use external programs for some of the actions that you normally do with the browser, including the editing of text areas. You just press a key combination and a text editor pops up with the text of the area that you have selected. Very easy to use.

Here’s an example of my browser editing the Wikipedia using my favourite text editor (click on the image):

A great tool. I’m sure you’ll like it 😉

Today, 23 April is the 25th anniversary of the greatest computer ever made…

25 years! I’m growing old…

Some friends have been asking me how to use QEMU. While there are many other virtualization packages (such as Virtual Box, KVM or the non-free VMware Player), QEMU has been around for a while, it’s already packaged in Debian stable and it’s really easy to use.

Moreover, the (optional) kernel accelerator kqemu has been released under the GPL a couple of months ago, so it’s a good moment to give QEMU a try.

Let’s see the basic usage:

• Install QEMU.
  $ apt-get install qemu
• Create a hard disk image. It’s 2 GB in this example, but don’t worry about the size of the file, it will grow dinamically as you write data to it.
  $ qemu-img create -f qcow hd.img 2G
• Install things in your new hard disk image. You can boot from a CD-ROM, or an ISO image, a floppy…
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -cdrom cdimage.iso -boot d
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -fda /dev/fd0 -boot a
  $ qemu -hda hd.img -fda floppy.img -boot a
• Once the system is installed in your virtual hard disk, you can boot directly from it:
  $ qemu -hda hd.img
• Or you can forget about hard disks and just use a bootable CD:
  $ qemu -cdrom livecd.iso

And that’s it! QEMU has built-in SMB, TFTP, DNS and DHCP servers. Everything in user space, so you don’t need special permissions nor additional configuration: no kernel modules, no tun/tap interfaces… nothing!. I said it was very easy to use, didn’t I? 😉

Of course there’s a lot more, but you won’t need it for the basic usage.

If you’re too lazy to install an operating system inside QEMU, you can download a hard disk image built by someone else. Note that QEMU can read the VMware disk format, so you’ve got a really big collection of images ready to work.

And if you want a bit more, you can compile the kqemu kernel accelerator, which will make QEMU run faster.

Now I can remember the old times when I first installed Debian…

DudesConf is starting in less than 10 days!

DudesConf is a DebConf-like meeting for Spanish-speaking Debian developers that will take place in Corunha University from 13 to 15 April 2007.

The program includes several talks, workshops, bug-squashing parties and BOFs. I’m sure that we’ll have a great time and of course it will be a great opportunity to meet Debian people from everywhere.

Just like other free software-related events such as Guademy, GUADEC-ES and GUADEC, DudesConf is sponsored by Igalia.

See you there!!

This has been a busy weekend.

Guademy, the meeting between people from both Gnome and KDE projects has just finished. We had people from all parts of Spain, with the notable exception of Aaron Seigo from KDE who was there too.

It was a pleasure to meet people like Carlos Garnacho (and his interesting talk about system tools backends), Álvaro del Castillo (who spoke about F-Spot), Albert Astals Cid (who gave talks about Okular and Valgrind), Álvaro López Ortega (author of Cherokee web server and former Fidonet member like me!) and many more. I hope to see you again soon!

Among other things, we even managed to compare Gnome and KDE using a scientific method impossible to refute. And here’s the result: no matter how you look at it, Gnome wins!

Of course Igalia was very interested in this event (we were one of the sponsors, the other one being Trolltech) and some of my colleagues gave talks about some (IMHO) interesting topics such as the Gnome Build Brigade (by Iago) or the Maemo introduction (by Andrés) among others.

For the interested, there’s a blog with more info about Guademy (including slides of the talks) and people are uploading pictures to Flickr.

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away from Coruña, John had been working hard and created some new patches for the Last.fm client. I’ve just compiled and tested the new version this afternoon and finally the new pakages are available: Last.fm 1.1.3.0-msk5 is out!

Besides some minor changes and bugfixes, the most important thing about this release is that John has managed to compile Last.fm 1.1.3.0 on Qt 4.1. Well, I had compiled it too some time ago but the difference is that John has got it working 😉

What does this mean? It means that users of Debian sarge and Ubuntu dapper need no longer stick with version 1.0.7. So welcome to Last.fm 1.1.3.0!

You can get the compiled packages here and the source code, Debian diff and detailed information here.

As usual, if you find any problem with this new version just let us know.

And now I should go to sleep (or, at least, rest a bit).

Always looking for better ways to increase our happiness and being a devoted follower of the great 3.60 happiness movement (proposed by the even greater Sergio), I found a program that enhances the typing break utility included in Gnome.

I’m talking about Workrave, a little tool that will help you taking rest breaks and thus preventing Repetitive Strain Injury.

Major features:

• Take micro pauses (i.e., rest 30 seconds each 5 minutes or so).
• Take rest breaks (3 minutes each hour in the original 3.60 proposal).
• Set a daily limit. Use this if you don’t want to work more than 12 hours a day 😎
• Workrave tells you how to do some exercises (take a look at the the screenshot below!).
• Statistics. This way you’ll be able to know if you have taken more breaks than you should 😉
• Network support. Working in two or more computers at the same time? No problem! Workrave shares the timing information if you want to.

In case all this wasn’t enough, it is translated into several languages. So there’s no excuse! It’s not a matter of laziness^(*): it’s a matter of health. Join the 3.60 movement now!

(*) No, we Galicians are not lazy. Read paragraph 5.