Claudio Saavedra

Go forward in time to June 2007.

Wed 2007/May/23

• This week I was feeling in a working mood and I pretended to make some good progress in my theoretical introduction to my thesis topic, but of course, something had to happen. I got a flu during the weekend, probably due to the long nights at the streets (typical in a visit of mine to Santiago).

  So, I've been in bed since Monday, trying to stand the cold nights in Curicó. Sure, when I was in Germany, cold meant -15°C outside, but 22°C inside. Here, cold means 5°C outside, but 10°C inside, due to the lack of a good heating system, typical in an average lower middle class student flat (ok, I'm sure Lucas will disagree with me regarding these numbers, but Salvador is another story, believe me! :-).

  Before living in Germany, surviving this cold indoors wasn't that terrible. A lot of hot tea and coffee, seemed to help. But, as Mariano once said to me, it's so damn easy to get used to the good things of life. I always thought, as a latinamerican I am, that I'd froze my ass in Europe during the hardcore winter months. To my surprise, I only suffered from the cold when outdoors for long hours a very few couple of times: 1) during the reopening of the Frauenkirche, when I made like 4 hours line to get in in October; 2) during a visit to the Weihnachtsmarkt Stallhof Dresden in middle December, and 3) during a long walk through Budapest in January. In any other situation, cold was a few minutes sensation, that once indoors, wherever you go, it'll be gone. And you get so easily used to it.

  Back to Curicó, I'm living the first indoors winter since 2005. It feels colder than then. And even colder with flu.

  So summarizing, no will to work with this flu and this cold. Conclusion: I need another stipend if I pretend to carry on with post-grad studies (or to simply get a job). Sorry to the casual reader, but I had to whine about it.

Sun 2007/May/20

• On Saturday, one of my favourite rock bands played in Santiago: La Renga. Moisés, Mauri, Andrés, Beto and I met and went to the Santiago Arena to attend an evening devoted to the best Argentinian Rocanroll ever.

  The band played for about two and a half hours, including almost the whole first CD of TruenoTierra, their latest album. They also played the classical songs everyone wants to hear in one of their concerts (La balada del diablo y la muerte, El Revelde, Hablando de la libertad, La razón que te demora, Panic Show, and others), and gave the hardcore fans joy with songs like El rito de los corazones sangrando, Veneno, and Viva Pappo (a song dedicated to the memory of Roberto "Pappo" Napolitano, a really good Argentinian guitar player and friend of the band who died tragically in a bike accident in 2005).

  This was my third La Renga' concert (this time I didn't lose a shoe), and I'm already waiting for their next visit to Chile. Those guys are awesome!

Tue 2007/May/15

• I always knew I was not the only one who doesn't watch Lost.

Mon 2007/May/14

• The cover of the classical book Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Lam, Sethi, and Ullman, has been revamped for its new edition. Now the dragon is 3D!

  I'm eager to get a copy of this book... If only someone could be nice enough to send me a copy :-)

Sun 2007/May/06

• Today I was to wear one of the jeans I brought in my luggage from Germany last year, and hadn't used since then. To my surprise, I found in its pockets 5 euros and the pen I used to write all the exams during the second term there.

  As if melancholy weren't enough these days.

Wed 2007/May/02

• Released gyrus 0.3.7. There's nothing really new here, but bug fixing, updated translations, and some UI cleanup accumulated over the last year in the SVN. Thanks to all the translators and the people who contributed one way or another!

Tue 2007/May/01

• Sometimes, a small dialog could make all your work on better user experience and simpler user interfaces useless, if you forget to pimp it a bit.

  That's the case of the Save as... dialog for multiple images in the Eye of GNOME. Somehow, this powerful dialog managed to be forgotten for a long time, and when I discovered it some weeks ago, I just said "eek, this looks ugly!"

  

  Not only it looks ugly, but it uses also some deprecated widgets like GtkCombo, and its widget structure is a conceptual mess. Anyway, I took my ninja rewriting skills, and rewrote the dialog without really introducing anything new, but removing a lot, cleaning and HIG'ifying it for your visual and UI experience pleasure.

  

  Lucas applied the patch I sent and it's already in trunk.

• We've also released a few days ago the Eye of GNOME 2.19.1, the first public release after the merge of all the experimental code we worked on during the last year. I'm pretty happy with the release, and I'm sure cool things will keep going in during this development cycle. Among the things you'll love (or hate) of it that are mostly my fault, you'll find:

  • EOG is now a single instance application, meaning that whenever you try to open a new instance of the program, DBus will take care of asking to the first instance to pop up a new window.
  • The old thumbnails pane was replaced by a very cool one, which uses GtkIconView instead of the gnomecanvas-dependent-and-written-from-scratch one which EOG had. This pane also loads the thumbnails on demand, which solves several issues people were complaining of (ie., EOG sucks all my network bandwidth when I see my pictures over a network, EOG takes too long to load and uses way too much memory when visiting a directory with thousands of pictures, and the like).
  • The printing infrastructure has been revamped, and now you can print all those weird formats which used to cause you trouble (like TIFF, for instance). Now you can even interactively set the image size and position on the page in the Image Settings tab in the Print dialog, which is something I was personally missing in EOG for a long time (I even missed this feature long time before I was first able to write it myself!). For this, I had to write a cool Print Preview widget, because I didn't like the ones I found in other friend projects.
  • There's a new editable toolbar, to satisfy the please put a button for my favourite EOG feature in the toolbar! requests, which were a lot!

  Of course, nothing of this would've been possible without a great maintainer and dude as Lucas Rocha, and without the the ninja skills of Felix Riemann. When working with cool guys like these, you really wish you could drop all your responsibilities off and focus only on EOG. Thanks for the great time I've had guys!

• I'll be T.A.'ing Lenguajes Formales y Teoría de Autómatas this term. I've always felt this is my favourite lecture here in the Faculty, so I'll probably devote a lot of time in choosing carefully the most beautiful exercises to solve during the tutorials.

Go backwards in time to April 2007.