Claudio Saavedra

Go forward in time to October 2008.

Sun 2008/Sep/28

• Given that past week was the Helsinki International Film Festival, the other day, Iván and I went to the Bio Rex in Lasipalatsi, to watch Cidade dos Homens. As the name suggests, it is closely related to the brilliant Cidade de Deus –gangs and Mafias at the favela style– but doesn't try to be a second part nor a continuation. Its plot is more easy to follow, the story is pretty interesting, and the music is quite cool.

• I've been watching the old HBO series Oz. I'm about to finish watching the 6th and last season (when everybody leaves home so early, you don't have much options), and I still think it's brilliant, same way as I did when I seldomly watched some episodes during '97-'02.

• My favorite bars in Helsinki: Molly Malone's (live music every night!) and Meritähti (cool food, served by his Hungarian owner, and they have Unicum!). I still have a few that I'm interested on, but that I haven't been there yet.

• And now, for no reason, a gratuitous picture of Kimmo and Marius à la Men in Black (I regret I didn't have my real camera with me):

  

Wed 2008/Sep/24

• So, there you have it. A new version of GNOME has been released. Go celebrate with your local gnomies!

• With it, you will find the latest version of the Eye of GNOME. Although I should have summarized this before and not at the last minute, here you have a list with the most interesting changes:

  • This release is finally using gio/gvfs. The patch to implement this was originally written by Cosimo Cecci during the 2.21 cycle, but unfortunately, a bit late to go in. As we are conservative and respect schedules (something that may piss off some people), we only committed it after the 2.22 release. Thanks to Cosimo!
  • We also included now a small set of plugins. These plugins implement some of the most-wanted features for the hardcore users. Of course, there are still many things that could be implemented, but now you can help us...! These plugins are simple enough for any developer to get inspiration from them and create new plugins, with a little help from...
  • ...the new shinny Eye of GNOME Reference Manual! No more excuses about the eog code being poorly documented. Although there is still room for improvement, we spent a lot of time reviewing the eog code in order to document all the public API. We know that some parts of it are not as extensible as we would like, but we will be working on improving it.
  • Tons of bugs fixed, performance improvements, extended metadata support (including PNG metadata), UI improvements.

  What are our plans for 2.26? Well, a list of the things that I would love to get done in this cycle (if my frequent relocation doesn't get in the way):

  • Store locally remote images in order to set them as wallpapers (so that I can get lots of ice cream from Luis during GUADEC).
  • Improve extensibility of the eog API. In some places, the API is too ad-hoc and makes hard to extend it, through plugins. We've learnt that from feedback from nice guys writing plugins, that hang from time to time in #eog. With their help, we will improve the situation during this cycle.
  • Finish the clutter powered widget. I really need to get into this.
  • Eye of GNOME in maemo? I want to play with it and see how would it perform.
  • Obviously, bug fixing, some new plugins, some UI improvements, etc, all based on your feedback.

  We'll see how much of that we'll get done. At least, it feels good to look back to the roadmap for 2.23 and see that we accomplished most of what we wanted to do. Kudos to Lucas and Felix!

Sat 2008/Sep/20

• Being subscribed since a few months to svn-commits-list@gnome.org, it is more evident to me now that this is the time of the cycle when several dozens of unsung heroes do an incredibly tremendous job to get GNOME completely translated to many languages. There are hundreds of translations updates made each day to all of the GNOME modules, that make me feel a lousy contributor compared to the huge work they do.

  If you are a translator, thank you. I appreciate and respect your work enormously. Keep on making GNOME rock in your language, kudos to you all!

Wed 2008/Sep/17

• For work reasons, I've been for about a month living in Helsinki, Finland. It's been a pretty interesting experience so far, in spite of weather, beer prices, lunch break time, and food. I've meet a lot of old pals here and also made some new friends, so I've had no much time to be bored.

• During the weekend I went with Simo and Ghis to Tallinn, in Estonia. Tallinn is a very nice city, not so far from Helsinki, where food and beer prices are much better. A must if you are in Scandinavia.

  We had lunch in a nice restaurant named Vanaema Juures, that's located in a sort of basement in the center. I certainly recommend it, as the prices are quite good for what you get, and it's not that touristic nor expensive as the famous Olde Hansa. Other nice place for drinks and food is the Scotland Yard bar.

  And of course, lots of pictures. I've not uploaded many to flickr yet, because of the crappiness of my internet access, but will do progressively (see the photo set). A favorite one:

  

Go backwards in time to August 2008.