Category Archives: Igalia

Back from Mobile Rules

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Mario and me have just arrived from our trip to San Jose (California) for the Mobile Rules! awards ceremony. Unfortunately we had no luck this time and we didn’t get the award.

We had a great time nonetheless and I’d like to congratulate Nokia for having organized the event and all the other participants (namely the winners, specially the people from MyStrands who beat our Vagalume in the Multimedia category). The trip was great, we enjoyed it a lot and we met some cool people.

A thing I’m more sure about now is that Vagalume still needs lots of improvements. I’ll continue working on it very soon (but it’ll take me some days because I’m starting teaching this weekend in our Master of Free Software). So it is time to get back to work!

Oh, no, we didn't get the award!
Oh, no, we didn’t get the award!

Alea jacta est

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Greetings from California!

The Mobile Rules award ceremony will begin in a few hours. Me and Mario from the Vagalume team are already here in San Jose ready to talk about our program and tell everyone how cool Maemo and Gnome are for developing software for mobile devices.

Let’s cross our fingers and see what happens!

San Jose City Hall

Back from FOSDEM

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After a weekend of talks, meetings and networking (but also tourism and nightlife) I’m finally back home.

I still have a lot of work to do, many e-mails to read and tons of PGP keys to sign, but I was very fun to meet you all 🙂

I have to upload some photos too, but here’s one of them: the great Dirk-Jan waving at the camera during his talk about our beloved Modest.

Dirk-Jan Binnema during Modest talk

By the way, the latest betas of Modest are frankly quite stable, so update ! 🙂

The development of Vagalume has been stalled during these days but we have some news nonetheless:

And now, back to work!

FOSDEM 2008 is here

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FOSDEM 2008 is around the corner. Of course I’ll be there along with other igalians so I hope to see you there 🙂

If you’re a Maemo user/hacker then you’ll probably be interested in this wiki page where we’re trying to coordinate a meeting.

By the way, some people have suggested me to use GTK themeable icons in Vagalume instead of the custom ones that come with v0.5. Here’s a couple of screenshots comparing both (click on the images to view them full size).

Vagalume 0.5 using GTK icons
Vagalume 0.5 using custom icons

I’ve just created a survey so you can vote which one you prefer 🙂 If you don’t have a user at garage.maemo.org, just leave a comment in this post.

See you at FOSDEM !

Vagalume 0.5: back from the dead!

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The last version of Vagalume was released more than a month ago. And although it was dead for some weeks because I had many other things to do, here comes Vagalume 0.5, back from the dead!

Vagalume is back from the dead

As I said before, I’ve been busy lately so the list of changes is not as big as it might be, but thanks to the help of my colleagues Mario and Felipe we have some new things. The list of changes include:

  • New buttons and other minor UI improvements
  • New plugin for the Maemo status bar (IT OS2008 only) (*)
  • Fixed a bug that made scrobbling fail under certain conditions
  • A window to see the progress of downloads (and cancel them)
  • A new setting to select the download directory

Here’s the new look of Vagalume under IT OS2008:

Vagalume 0.5

And for those interested, now we have a new vagalume-users mailing list.

(*) Mario has written a detailed post about the status bar plugin, including a screenshot. Check it out!

Go here to download Vagalume.

And that’s all. Enjoy!

Satanic messages in the computer era

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Everyone has heard of stories about hidden messages in songs, many of which could only be heard by playing the record backwards. That was in the vinyl era. CD owners had to rip their songs into wav files and process them with a suitable software tool. For example the manpage of SoX describes its reverse efect as “Reverse the sound sample completely. Included for finding Satanic subliminals”.

Some years ago I was listening to a CD by the Scottish band Urusei Yatsura when I heard the disctintive sound of a ZX Spectrum audio tape in one of its tracks. That sound had already been used several times by some artists (such as Aphex Twin), but this time it was very sharp and sounded like a complete program.

So I loaded it into the emulator and I found a funny satanic message written by the band:

Satanic message by Urusei Yatsura

The source code (it was written in BASIC) had some comments, including this one:

What is sadder?
a. Finding this
b. Writing it

For those interested, this message can be found at the beginning of the song “Thank you” from their last album “Everybody loves Urusei Yatsura”.

You can also load this program using a ZX Spectrum emulator. Get the file in TZX format here.

Boas festas a todos!

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This has been a good year, I met some great people, travelled a bit and went to lots of interesting concerts. Concerning my work, the development of Modest and Vagalume has been very exciting too. I’m sure that 2008 will be even better!

However, now I need to rest for some days and turn off the computer. See you in 2008!

Santa Claus

Bom Natal !
Merry Christmas !
Feliz Navidad !