A few hours ago, while I was going through my mail in my hotel room I saw something weird on beach shore: something big and gray - like a rock - appeared to be moving. When I took a deeper look, I realized that it was a seal. The first thing I thought was: "This is the first time I see a seal on the beach. How cool is that! Let's go to play fetch with him!" ;-)

 

The thing is that, when I got over there I realized that the seal was badly injured and that was the reason why he was resting on the beach... so all the joy turned to sorrow. Damn! I hate when these things happen. :-(

Here is a great talk on Dtrace, and how to see software without making it slower. Definitely worth watching!

Today, while I was walking in the street, I saw a computer component store. I entered to take a look and ended up buying a pack of blank DVDs. "What an amazing story!" you should be thinking by now..

I wouldn't be interesting it wasn't because I'm kind of used to the madness that is going on in Spain. I have written about this before: basically, there is a greedy association called SGAE, that collects a tax on each single blank CD or DVD sold in the country (actually, the tax has been extended to virtually every device able to store or reproduce music or video).

So, I bought a 50 DVD+R pack for $9.99. It was a good deal, wasn't it? Now, let's see how much would had it cost in Spain (or here) because the of the tax I told you about. It would have been around 70€ (around $96) in the best of the cases.

That is basically ten for the price of one! Isn't it unbelievable? I suppose we should thank the government for this. It surrendered to the greedy and barely legal association, and it even approved a custom law to allow them to collect the tax.

Anyway, I'm very sorry for the shops and businesses in Spain, but I don't buy it.. literally. From now on, I will do my best to buy all my blank DVDs abroad.

What a gem! Check out this Apache's XML-RPC class interface:

RequestProcessorFactoryFactory.RequestSpecificProcessorFactoryFactory

<Sigh!> Over-engineering.. you gotta love it! :-)

A few days ago I started to work on my new position after almost three years in the desktop team, so tomorrow morning I will be heading to San Francisco for meeting my new colleages.

From now on, I'm working as Solaris Express Developer Edition Technical Lead (SXDE for the friends), an OpenSolaris based distribution focused on developers.

Actually, I'm pretty excited about this new role. I used to work with a subset of the operating system technology, but now it will be the whole software stack: from the kernel drivers to an extension module for Ruby on Rails.

Besides, it's kind of connected with the Indiana project (from the engineering point for view), which is going to be pretty much the evolution of SXDE.

So, I will in the Bay area for the next couple of weeks meeting the people with whom I will be working and trying to get familiar with all the new stuff with which I will be dealing from now on. :-)

By the way, if I have the bandwidth, I will try to continue accepting invitations for giving talks at conferences (on F/OSS, OpenSolaris, Cherokee, etc), but it will certainly depend on my work load.

• OpenSolaris Peru
  It seems that people liked the latest talk I gave in Peru. The Peruvian OpenSolaris community has been founded a just couple of days after the conferences ended. Congrats! (The mailing list is about to be reallocated at opensolaris.org).
• TiraEcol on the Microsoft Surface
  Nano tests the MS Surface at the computer electronics show.. LOL.

• The Ten Most Common Photographic Mistakes
  "Here is a quick rundown of the most common mistakes people (like me) make that mess up a good photo or prevent us from taking a good photo."
• Red Hat Rejects Microsoft Deals
  "We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency."
• We will not go to Canossa
  Mandriva also refused to deal: "So we don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone."

Flight to San Francisco

My flight to San Francisco was quite a bit of a disaster. Everything was going alright at the beginning. My flight from Madrid to New York was smooth and arrived on time, I had lot of luck with the US border officer that checked my immigration form (I cannot say he was friendly, but at least he wasn't as unfriendly as some of their colleagues with whom I had deal previously).

Everything changed when I was waiting in NY to take the plane to San Francisco. Basically, there were some congestion problems and the plane that was supossed to be departing in an hour time wasn't in New Your but in Chicago.. so well, long stories short, I had to wait for about 6 hours before the boarding was open.

Linux Foundation: Collaboration Meeting: Day 1

The Collaboration Meeting has been really good event so far.. even if there have been many reveling short presentations the best thing has been to hang out with so many interesting people. 

Here are my pictures of the first day.

Today's HUGE news

Huge news!! A few minutes ago, 4 Front has released the Open Sound System (OSS) under GPL!!

Less than twenty four hours after arriving from COMSYS, I am leaving Madrid again. I'm heading to the forth Desktop Architects Meeting held at Google's Mountain View Campus in the Bay Area.

It's gonna be really interesting! :-)

Back from Peru

I have just arrived from Peru a few hours ago. Even if it has been an awful long flight, it definitely worth attending, COMSYS has been an interesting congress.

During my conference I spoke about the FOSS movement, OpenSolaris and why developers ought to make wise decisions on which platform they use to base their applications on.

I'm delighted about how people caught the message. Even if Peru has been a place ruled by Privative Software and non-standard formats, there are clear signs of an upcoming change. Good for them! :-)

Eating in Peru

In Huancayo (Peru), there are plenty of places where you can have lunch (soup, main course and desert) for 3 Soles, which is about 0,7 Euros. It is quite impressive. For instance, check out this picture:

By the way, Peruvians don't understand pollón as Spanish do. ;-)

Cuy

And speaking of Peruvian food.. I did it again; I ate Cuy!! (Guinea pig in Quechua) :-)

Cherokee bug

There is a bug in the IOcache class of Cherokee-Trunk that I have been trying to fix for quite some time. So far I haven't had enough time to sit down and work on it, but hopefully I will manage to fix it up within the next days.

As soon as the bug is fixed I will release the Cherokee 0.6.0-Beta2. It will include a bunch of improvements over the previous version (many of them thank to ADF).

Arrived to Lima

My flight to Lima was quite smooth, even for being 12 hours long.

The only thing I thought a million times was that I will buy one of those laptops with a extra long battery live. My current laptop battery lasts only between one and a half and two hours, which definitely doesn't help in this sort of trips.

Catalan

The only thing that drove me nuts during the flight was that Iberia displayed a film that was half spoken in Catalan. Does it make any sense?

I mean, in a plane flying from Madrid to Lima you can suppose half of the people on it to be Spanish. Now, let's think how many people speak Catalan in Spain: there are 45 millions of us and 6 million Catalan speakers, which is 13% of the population.

So, supposing a plane with 400 people, of which half are Peruvians and only 13% speak Catalan, that would let us with 375 people out of 400 who couldn't understand the dialogs!! (actually, even more because as I said the flight departed from Madrid).

It's quite sad to be forced to listen a Spanish movie doubted to English. It was very kind of Iberia and the pro-Catalan lobby, indeed.

If you are Catalan, do not get me wrong, just change Catalan for Vasque and you would feel what I felt.

Interviews

I'm going to have a pretty busy day. The conference organized arranged a couple of interviews for the Peruvian press here in Lima, and after that, we will head to Huancayo, where COMSYS begins tomorrow.

I am packing again. Tomorrow morning I'll heading to Peru for attending COMSYS, a computer science congress that invited me over for giving a keynote on Free Software.

Last time I went to Lima was for giving a talk in a huge IT event. I have to admit that I was shocked when the event organizers told me that there were more than one thounsand people attending my speech.

I am not sure whether I will enjoy another of those huge and crowed conference places like the last time, but I do know that it will be interesting. It seems that I am one of the very few speakers who will support the Free Software approach. The rest will be talking about privative products (mainly Microsoft and Cisco products).

Ahh.. I will also be meeting with some of the Free Software community developers in Peru during the event. :-)

Woww! it's great to see how many people will be attending the forth Desktop Architects Meeting. I'm really looking forward to it! :-)

Second Desktop Architects Meeting (orig pic)

Today I attended the OpenSolaris Day conference. As I imagined, it has been a very interesting event; all the attendees were either community members or Solaris users who wanted to learn about the OpenSolaris technology and community. A great mix of people.

The two most interesting things for me have been, in first place, to get in touch with the Spanish OpenSolaris community. Beside all the good stuff that these guys have been contributing so far, it seems that there is still lot of work to do. However, the group will likely continue to grow, so my expectations are pretty high on this community. In fact, from now on, I will try to get involved with them!

The other thing I liked the most was to have the chance to meet Roman Strobl and a few of my Sun colleagues in Spain. :-)

Here is my OpenSolaris Day gallery. I took a bunch of pictures but I haven't uploaded all of them, so if you were there and you miss some, do not hesitate to contact me and I'll send them to you.

 

Free Software Contest

The Free Software Contest finished yesterday. The winner project was one of the projects that I evaluated: a GCC porting to the PIC16F877 architecture. When there are so many good projects as in this contest, it is really tough to choose a winner, although I think this project did deserve to win.

Congratulations to all participants for their great submissions!!

Last day party

Yesterday night, we joined forces with the Ubuntu guys and had some fun.. I couldn't explain the reasons, but all the evens I have attended in Seville have ended with a great party, and of course, this one wasn't an exception. :-)

Pictures

The pictures I took during the Contest and my visit to the Ubuntu Summit are now on-line. Check them out: Free Software University Contest gallery.

Camera

The first thing I did right after arriving from Seville was to test my new digital camera. The package was waiting for me at home..

It's a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50: 35-420 EQUIV objective with stabilization, 10.1 effective Mega-pixels, 360 shot per battery, 668 grams, etc. It rocks!

Web site

Today I have spent a couple of hours hacking my home made blog software. Blog entries didn't support comments, so I decided to go ahead and implement it.

While I was creating a few new tables to store the comments, I though that Miguel's idea about using Google Group infrastructure rather than a data base would be interesting.. and I gave it a try.

After some tests, I ended up setting Google Groups. Even if this approach has some disadvantages: a few more client requests, more Javascript code and a couple of external service dependencies, I think it is a good enough way of getting rid of the spam and some code in the server side.