Claudio Saavedra

csaavedra@gnome.org

Go forward in time to March 2011.

Mon 2011/Feb/28
  • Together with the next version of the Eye of GNOME, the oldest open bug to date (coming from 2002) will be finally fixed. This bug, about adding a copy action to the Edit menu, somehow got unattended and slipped between all the other features that we and the previous maintainers of eog have been working on during the last 9 years.

    This, until the last days of 2010. Then, out of the blue, we received in bugzilla a patch coming from Adrian Hands, implementing this feature. Felix had a look at it, the usual way, and seeing that it was almost there he pushed it to the master branch and resolved the bug fixed. We were happy to see this long requested feature finally added, but the full story would not unveil itself until a few weeks ago, when Ian Hands, son of Adrian, dropped by in bugzilla to let us know that his father had passed away. He had ALS and one of the last things he did, by means of a Morse-code mouse and when he was almost unable to control the computer anymore, was to write the aforementioned patch and to attach it in bugzilla. And about two months later, he would pass away.

    If you want, you can read Ian's message, which is very touching to say the least. I talked to him privately and he was open to share this story with the GNOME community, for which I am grateful, so here you have it. I believe that there are many things to learn out of this, not only for each one of us at a personal level, but also at the community level. In the rush of the industry we've chosen to work on, sometimes we forget that there are people behind the patches, emails, and lines of chat that we exchange every day, and that behind each one of us there are different stories, motivations, and feelings that make us to actually be here, right now, doing this. How can we, as a community, make sure that we don't forget that the main reason why we're here in the end is to deliver something for people? That we are here because of people? I don't have the answer but, for certain, knowing what Adrian did for eog brings me back to earth from my bubble, at least for a while, and makes me feel proud to be part of a world where, if we don't forget about it, people like Adrian, you, or me, can make a difference.

    Thank you, Adrian, for this wonderful gift.

Thu 2011/Feb/17
  • So, now I am a Finnish resident. It took around a year of paperwork to get the permit but it finally happened and I got a self-employment work permit. So I can now officially move from Spain and stop being in the Spanish-resident-but-in-Finland limbo.

    All in all, I am amazed at the Finnish way of doing things. It took time, yes, but their willingness to get the stuff done and not to put ridiculous obstacles in the way is remarkable. Also, their good faith in foreigners is something I never saw before. In order to get a self-employment working permit, I had to submit a complete business plan, including sales and profitability estimations. Seeing that the numbers were sound and the business would be profitable, they just saw no reason why the permit couldn't be granted, so they just granted it. I wonder whether there are many other developed countries where self-employment permits are granted to foreigners just when they could be, but I don't think there are that many. I've heard bad things about the US on this regard, for instance.

    What comes now is getting started with my one-man business. That way I will continue doing cool stuff with Igalia but with all my life going on in Finland, as it's been for some time already anyway. It's a great thing to be part of a company where this kind of things are possible.

    By now, you start wondering why on earth would I want to stay in Finland? Well, if you should know, you would know already, after all, it's been two years. If you don't, you can just keep wondering.

Thu 2011/Feb/10
  • I had a post pending since last week, but a flu put me down and lagged me behind the world.

    Last week Carlos and I started working in the GTK+/MeeGo integration project. He already wrote about his ongoing work on the pannable area and has received very interesting feedback. Thanks to everyone for keeping an eye on it.

    From my side, I spent the week getting a recent image of the Handset SDK up and running, and getting a grasp of the current Input Method status in MeeGo. For this, Michael Hasselmann and Jon Nordby have been more than really helpful. I met Jon in Brussels during FOSDEM and he was kind to put me up to date to what Michael and he believe are the most relevant points to take into account to get a good IM integration. Thank you, guys.

    In a nutshell, one of the integration points for GTK+ applications in MeeGo is the Input Context that needs to communicate, through DBus, with the IM UI Server. There are currently two implementations out there, targetting the MeeGo 1.1 platform, but the DBus interfaces have changed since then. Trying to get the parts to agree, have one single GTK+ input context for MeeGo, and updating the DBus interfaces seems the most logical starting point for this side of the project, so it's what I'll be doing now that I'm not going to die anymore. There are, of course, other parts that also need to be worked on (related to the UI part of the IM), but we'll talk about that later.

Go backwards in time to January 2011.

Thu 2011/Feb/10 16:45:21 +0200