I have been working in F-Spot sometime after the GUADEC in my return to Mono world after half and a year not coding in C#. The return has been very nice, I love to program in C# and F-Spot is a very nice program.

I have being working in implementing the photo duplicate detection system (duplicates video-demo), and the import from Web Gallery and Flickr web photo databases (gallery video-demo and Flickr vide-demo).Update: The video URLs have been updated to point to a site with more bandwidth.

It is cool to see in the maillist some activities and new developers coding things, in special the licenses support in F-Spot so you can specify the license you want for your photos, and I hope, use it in the export process to Flickr, Web Gallery, Original and others. The Creative Commons licenses will be the first to be supported, following Larry Lessig plans about supporting these licenses in the tools we use to create and manage contents.

In the July edition of GNOME Journal you can find a nice article about F-Spot if you want to understand the current state of the art of the project.

Time to travel to Stuttgart. We arrive this afternoon to the city, will go to the Youth Hostel and then, time to walk in the city and find nice places, take some photos and share some german beers. I will be there until Tuesday. I am sure this is going to be a very exciting GUADEC. See you there guys!

Finally I have decided to help in developing a driver for the wireless USB 54 Mbps rt2570, very similar to the ralink 2500 chipset. I have two USB networks card using this chipset: they are very cheap, around 30€. In my student days, I developed an ethernet driver so maybe, this knowledge will be useful. I am learning about USB stuff, using howto develop USB drivers for Linux, the USB Nutshell and finally, with the USB standard. I am not sure how far I will go in the project, but for now, I am trying to understand the USB traffic until we get the data sheets: USB sniff is the right tool to log the USB traffic and analyze it later (grep, cat, awk, uniq, sort ...)

A dude working with me in LambdaUX is developing in C# and Mono a program to update Debian systems. It is getting very nice. A pit I don't have yet screenshots about it.

Evolution 2.1.3 changes in the online/offline support have made that the Groupdav connector contacts doesn't work any more. I am trying to fix it before Evo 2.2, but not sure if I will find enought time.

In Planner, new hackers are coming into scene and Richard is hacking some weekends in it. My heart says me I have to help closing some bugs for 0.13 and 0.14 releases.

Hula hype is being incredible, as normal announcements that comes from Helix/Ximian/Novell guys. I have talked with Helge, an OGo developer about Hula. He has shown me a very nice webclient for his Scalable OGo product (very similar to Hula, and will be released as GPL/LGPL): SOGo web client (login:test.et.di.cete-lyon/password:test, not a production service, it could be off). Not sure if Hula developers could start the web client interface for Hula from that work. They will be released as GPL/LGPL (all the SOGo software).

Hmmm, I can't forget to talk about the II GUADEC Hispana, a warm up meeting before the GUADEC. I will blog about it next days.

In another Extremadura train trip finally I have found time to create a Evolution 2.2 plugin in order to add Planner Task files as Evolution Task Sources from the tasks GUI. You can see how Evolution and Planner are lonely until you save your Planner tasks to a file. Then, you can go to Evolution Tasks view and using the right button you can access a menu in which an entry called "Add new Planner source" is waiting for you. Select it and you can choose from the file dialog the Planner task file you want to access from Evolution. Finally, you have all your Planner tasks as Evolution tasks in the new Task source (called like the planner file). All the code is the Planner CVS just waiting for you.

I have finished the creation of my digital music library with iTunes (around 3 weeks doing it with a 10x import speed). Now I have more than 300 albumns and around 600 authors and 4.000 songs (the music we have bought last 5 years). Now it is time to migrate the database to GNOME and start testing how each music player manages such a big database. And I need to use this library as the source for all the music we play at home. Using the external entry in the hifi system I can plug the mini iPod and hear it :)

Yesterday I have received as a Christmas present a Apple mini iPod with 4 GB as a digital music player. I am right now testing it. It is a bit expensive (240€) but it is more than a music player. You can run Linux in iPods!. The iPod is marvelous when you use iTunes with it, so iTunes+iPod is a killer platform. I have started to use another time MacOS X 10.2 because it. Linux has great support for iPods since 2002 (gtkpod, GNU Pod ...).

After two days working in the weekend, I have put more than 600 songs in the music library (iTunes works 10x encoding mp3 in my powerbook) and now I am very near to have to select the music I will want in the iPod (the 4 GB limit!). It is incredible how many information the users will have to manage so we need to be very clever in ways to manage the information (thousands of songs, photos, videos ...). Beagle, gThumb, jamboree, rhythmbox ... all need to scale so well to manage this amount of information. Could muine new model support that amount of information?

My user experience is being very good with iTunes (sure I could get a similar experience with iPhoto and maybe iVideo). In GNOME currently I feel we haven't this user experience, but we are getting it. I understand now why some of my free software dudes in the university finally started to work in MacOS X and now, they can't stop using it ;-) Guys, we need to reach these user experience in GNOME. But as Richard Stallman remember us, it is not only about technology or user experience, first it is about freedom, but we will get also these ;-)