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
GUADEC/aKademy 2009 in Gran Canaria
I have spent some nice days in GUADEC in Istanbul. This year i was not giving a talk but i have the emotion of the bid we presented for hosting GUADEC in 2009. After attending to a lot of interesting talks yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced that next year GUADEC will be co-located with aKademy in Gran Canaria.
I’ve never been to Gran Canaria, but a have a special relation with the Canary Islands. If you check my weblog header it is me with the Teide like background. I have been 5 times in Tenerife and visited La Palma and La Gomera. i have felt in love with these Islands, each one is different with a special charm. I have been waiting for an occasion to go to Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura so next year i have an excuse and i know that Alberto will be a really nice host in Gran Canaria.
At this point i can only say that GNOME Hispano will give all the possible support that we can provide to Alberto and the rest organizers for organizing GUADEC next year, we have had a great commitment in the organization of GUADEC in Vilanova two years ago, so we have the experience needed for helping them as an active part in the organization.
So as i told Alberto i will try to help him about any request and advise he needs. I would like that GNOME community continue wanting to come back to Spain when it is possible, so that we can convince them to come to Galicia in future editions 🙂
Now we should think about a new proposal for organizing an innovative event in Coruña next year but we should think about this in GPUL because we are celebrating our tenth anniversary.
P.D. I hope that all students of the Master on Free Software of Caixanova are working hard while i am “working” in Istanbul.
GUADEC Core Day 1
It has been my first day at GUADEC, i have met some of the fantastic volunteers that have been collaborating in Vilanova as Gil, Silvia and the organizer Baris. They continue being fantastic people with a lot of energy.
Today talks were quite interesting, I liked specially talk from Miguel about his point of view of the integration of web and desktop app development. On the other side I have been always interested on GPS and the development of Geoclue and Gypsy is going forward with the objective of providing to the Desktop the information about where the desktop is in each moment.
But GUADEC is not just the series of talks in a conference venue, is the social program and meeting people from the GNOME community. Today organization prepared a cocktail with the GNOME Band sound on the roof of the University, with a really nice view of the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn. Claudio is a great musician so I think that when he arrives to Coruña the Igalia band will be possible with the collaboration of Calvaris (classical piano), API (bass) and Andres with the battery 🙂 I’ve been speaking with Ivan Frade remembering my latest PhD research regarding indexation, Information Retrieval and tracker.
Later on the street near our hotel, the one full of pillows, I spend a nice time speaking with Lucas Rocha, German and Pedro.I could practice a little my French too with some people from Fluendo.
Today I first met to Stormy Peters, our new executive director of the GNOME Foundation, she is really motivated in working for GNOME. I have watched her last year keynote at Birmingham and i liked. I believe that she can really help spreading all the fantastic work that GNOME community is doing and I think that she can take this responsibility. She has an extra point, she speaks a really good Spanish.
We will know on Friday where GUADEC is going to be next year, I hope that board will chose our proposal for Coruña, and the same for KDE e.V., but nowadays we can only wait for a decision.
It is too late, and lately Igalians have been closing the pillows GUADEC street, so today we have done it again, thank you Mario for showing us the good path 🙂 Just 5 hours before getting up and i can see the sunrise throw my window. Good day and Good luck.
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. 🙂
Esta Semana: Alberto Abella y Marcelo Branco
El fin de semana pasado en el Máster en Software Libre de Caixanova cruzamos el ecuador del curso acadĂ©mico. Esta semana para celebrarlo contaremos con invitados de la talla de Alberto Abella y Marcelo D’Elia Branco, que impartirán un seminario en las instalaciones de Caixanova para los alumnos.
Pero como entre los objetivos iniciales del máster estaba la realizaciĂłn de charlas abiertas al pĂşblico, desde Caixanova se ha facilitado la presencia esta semana de Alberto Abella y Macelo D’Elia Branco como una colaboraciĂłn en las VIII Jornadas de Software Libre organizadas por GPUL que celebra este año su dĂ©cimo aniversario.
Asà que os invito a todos a conocer en persona a dos actores relevantes que nos contarán de primera mano sus experiencias y reflexiones este jueves y viernes en el Aula de Grados de la Facultade de Informática dentro de las Jornadas de Software Libre de GPUL, asà como del resto de las jornadas que continúan la próxima semana.
- Alberto Abella, “El futuro de las tecnologĂas abiertas”, jueves 10 de abril 2008, 19:30 Aula de Grados.
- Marcelo D’Elia Branco
, “Sociedad en red: desafĂos para la construcciĂłn de un modelo social democrático”,viernes 11 de abril 2008, 19:00 Aula de Grados.
Por cierto, ya se puede consultar el Planeta que agrega los blogs de los alumnos del máster y poder seguir su trabajo y reflexiones personales. Más info en http://planet.mswl.igalia.com
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.
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.
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.
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.