Older blog entries for chema (starting at number 11)

Advogato Certification ... and my friends from Spain

I wonder how are my spanish friends doing. I haven't spoken with cuenca, rodrigo and acs for a while. I wanted to mail them but I have very little to say to them other than "Hi!". They certified me which is nice from them and this reminds me to tell you why do I not certify other hacers :

• I have not read any code from most of them
• There are different stuff to take into account when talking about someone's hacking abilities
• It's hard to put hackers in 4 discrete levels, but even saying a number from 1 to 10 is a lot Worse
• Cant remember the other one.

gedit recent hacking

After wasting a FULL day [ meaning from 11 am to 5am of the next day ] finding and fixing bugs for the printing algorithm to determine lines and do the word wrapping, I decided to implement it again. It was a wise choice because is stupid to mess with code you do not completelly understand. I was desperated but I learned my lesson. The new one is not done , I still need to replace tabs for a number of spaces in the posctscript printing but it is beautifull. This is one of those cases in which you need to implement something once to learn what the problem is about and redo it to actually do the implementation.

It looks like jleach has lost interest in gedit. I guess I will be on my own in the near future, althou I have not asked him about it.

school

Schoo's summer semester starts this wensday. Yuck ! Have I said enough times how much I don't like going to school. Sitting on a classroom is just not my idea of learning. I guess we are not created equal after all.

My gnome page

I started my gnome page here it does not have a lot of content [ close to nothing ] but I guess the only way to get started is to get started.

CVS howto

I want to start a CVS howto. Not that I know a lot about CVS but a lot of people ask CVS questions.

Comdex Mexico

The talk kicked ass ! The audience seemed very excited about gnome and I got a million questions while demoing GNOME. I think I will become a very good speaker if I get to practice some more. Tuba went with me and he told me that he liked the talk. I saw Mancha, Pato and Pepe which was very good. A reported asked me for an interview after the press meeting we did. I left the place SOoooo excited :). I am a happy hacker.

gedit hacking

I finally commited to the CVS the new search code. It still needs some gui/UI works but the internals seem pretty good to me. I can see a release in the near future. I got this idea of adding pipes support to gedit. So that you can print to gedit , and analyze the printing code or something like "grep text * | gedit" and have gedit create a doc with the text piped to it.

Skydiving !!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am going skydiving tomorow . Yeeeeeeeeeejjjjjjjjjaaaaaaaa !

gnumeric release

I helped the gnumeric guys with some bug finding/fixing power for their latest release. I like gnumeric's internals and can't wait to hack on it. But I still need to learn a lot of other stuff before I do so. I just love (as every other gnomer ) gnumeric. Jody killed a LOT of bugs.

gedit hacking

Today was a gedit hacking day. I am rewriting search.c that hadles :

goto line
count lines
search
search & replace

It has proven a lot more work than I thougth at first, but gedit needs it bad. Plus I am learning a lot of stuff about gtk that I need to know.

gnome-print chat with juantomas

I had a great IRC conversation with juantomas regarding gnome-print. He developed a comercial windows driver and he gave me a lot of good ideas to think about. He needs to get to know the details of gnome-print if he wants to be of some help. Helping from the outside is an oximoron. Great guy !

Comdex 2000 in Mexico City

Miguel said in the #gnome channel that he is not going to go to the Comdex conference he was supposed to do. For some stupid reason, the Comdex organizators didn't asked him before making the schedule and they just DECIDED that he was going to be able to go. He told Arturo that I could do the talk for him. Wow ! this would rule but I expecting that this will not happen.

I am a happy man after fighting with my PC

After figthing with my lovely Dell, I finally made that anoying noise to shut up. It took me 3 hr. to fix it. The noise was comming from the fan of the Video Board, Can you belive it ? now video boards need fans too. I can now sleep without that stupid noise in the background all the time. No need to turn suzzy ( the name of my PC ) off before going to sleep.

EVOLUTION is SOOO cool !

I ran Evolution for the first time today. I was _VERY_ Impressed. It is so beautifull. I asked miguel if there was some printing code stuff to do over IRC, I am glad that he didn't heard me since I have my TODO list pretty much full. Nice job from the Helix Coders.

Diary entries shorter every time ...

Why do I write shorter diary entries every time ? I guess I am too tired at the time I write them, oh well.

Printed today a HI-RES picture with my Epson 840 using Windows ( on shakira, my Laptop ) and it was beautifull. That is a good benchmark to meassure to.

School almost over

Yeah ! but I am going to take summer classes so not a lot of free time. I need to get the school done, not enjoying it by any means.

LOVE ALL, SERVE ALL

PCL driver is out

gnome-print now ships with an unfinished PCL driver. Woooa ! You can't use is yey tho.

Busy, busy, busy

Today is Epson's day. Lotsa work to do

Did I say I just LOVE Hewlett Packard ? their stuff is great. Need to work on non-HP stuff today tho. I wish all the printer manufacturers had the same quality specs out there as HP does.

I haven't written a diary entry in a long time because I am working on some stuff that I am resisting to not tell you yet : ). But I have been hacking like crazy.

I have not been to school in 15+ days, thats not good.

gedit is doing fine we haven't gotten a real bug report since the release. I am thinking of gnome-printifying pan ( the newsreader ) and gnome-db. Pan I will most likely do it this week. gnome-db I am not to sure, I need that rodrigo does some work so that I don't have to deal with anyting other than the printing code.

I am meeting federico today at Nuclecu. Cool ! I have not seen him in a long time.

Miguel is comming to Mexico and he will give a talk on the World Trade Center. I am looking forward to talk to him. He is so busy that is hard to get his attention while he is IRC'ing or hacking.

Love all, serve all.

Toshiba Sucks

I got IP_MASQ working very fast on my desktop thanks to the good HOWTO available. have been trying to get the ethernet PCMCIA card for my toshiba to work without much luck. According to the Howto, Toshiba released incorrect information on ther chipset and this driver is buggy because of that. I sent a mail to toshiba saying "I want to buy a Laptop and I heard that the PCMCIA ... ( you can figure the rest )". The PCMCIA author must be very pissed towards toshiba since he has a note in the HOWTO stating "I do not recommend buying toshiba laptops ...", well I am too. Just wait a couple of years and they will be begging him to apply some patches to that same drivers.

gedit 0.7.0

gedit 0.7.0 should be out today or tomorow. A lot of code got overhauled and should be more stable. I am very satisfied with the work and the prining is nice. Don't forget to download your copy here tomorow.

gnome-print and GNOME Entry level too high

Need to work on gnome-print. I now have a good idea on what to work on. More on this latter. I have not been hacking for long and I think the entry level to hack on gnome has to get lowered, its hard to find small tasks you can use to learn more and become a better hacker.

BARRAPUNTO.COM

This site is cool visit here is the spanish version of slashdot. Visit the gnome link.

Laura's and Nacho's wedding

I went to the weding of of Laura and Nacho in Cuernavaca yesterday ( Saturday ). Both of them are active skydivers and they are great people. They danced infront of everyone that dance that Deniro does in scent of a woman infront of everyone and all the party was amazed. And all of my skydivers friends where there. I had not relized that I have not jumped in 3 months, I had such a good time with all of them. I need to go skydiving soon !

gedit

Jason and myself have been putting a lot of work towards improving gedit, a big amount of the code has been rewritten and gedit appears to be more stable. We wanted to ship version 0.7.0 this week, but there are many things we needed to do before that. Hopefully next week we will be able to do so. The task of fixing gedit has been much greater than what I was expecting. The original author, Alex Roberts, has shown no interest on helping us. He does not seem to care much about gedit.HELP NEEDED!!gedit is in desperate need of a new logo. If you can help us or know someone who can, please mail me.

Broke with gf

I broke with Cristina. I am feeling blue ..... 1yr and 10 months is a lot of time.

I am back

I am hacking for the weekend ! Man, did I missed hacking ! I think I might do the same trick for the following week since there is a lot of school work pending..

gedit and some bug cleaning power ...

Jason Leach and myself have been cleaning the bug reports database at bugs.gnome.org for gedit. We are also fixing some of the outstanging bugs. I have rewriten the printing code using gnome-print functions. There where close to 260 reports when we started but there are only 70 still open. The code for gedit is not very beautifull but it is very fixable and I am sure gedit will be in a more stable state in the near future.

I need to get some sleep ....

amazon.com

I started a list with amazon.com with comments on my recent purchases here . There are not many comments for now and they are in spanish. I will rewrite them in English, since most of my friends here in Mexico, that would be intrested, can read English. I also sent feedback@amazon.com and Jeff Bezos an email ( please note is NOT e-mail, see below ... ) telling them that because of the patent stupidity I will not purchase from them anymore. I am just bluffing, since I love amazon and I can't help it.

Donald E. Knuth

I have not heard anything about this guy, but I read most of his webpage. I enjoyed the reading, if you haven't read about him visit his here . He seems like THE Computer Science guru, he created TeX and published a set of books called "The art of computer programming", they seem to be like the bible of Computer Science. I also learn that using the word "e-mail" will tend to be replaced in the future. Form his webpage :

"A note on email versus e-mail Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)"

School

Schools sucks. I do not want to go to school anymore. But what the heck, I am in 8th semester with only 1 1/2 semesters to go. I wish I could spend the time I WASTE in school doing some hacking activity. My mayor is in Electronic Engineer but I don't want to deal with Electronics or Circuits for the following 10 years. It was a nice hobby but not my mission in life !

Althou :

• the math
• signal processing
• linear systems
• video/audio compression
• microprocesors / microcontrolers

had proven _very_ usefull and intresting.

GNOME

No gnome hacking for this week ( see below ... )