Older blog entries for chema (starting at number 2)

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 ... )

Big party Saturday
I had a big party saturday in Cristina's ( my girlfriend ) town called Teotihucan. I had a great time till I wanted to go to sleep and everyone wanted to continue parting. I didn't had a car, which sucked and I had to stay at Cristina's house to sleep, since is like a 1 hr. drive from where I live and it was very late. Cristina really understands my hacking needs which is great ( more on her later ) So, the important thing is that :

I will disconnect from open source for a week
I am very late on school work and have not done ANYTHING for the past month, I think I have attended close to 40% of my classes. Big problems are knocking on my doorstep if I don't do school work so I asked Tuba ( more on him later ) to telnet tomorrow to my PC and change the passwords so that I can't use Linux for a week and to not give them to me, no matter what I tell him. I hope that I get a lot of school work done. I am sick of that guilty feeling.

Gnome-print 0.15 released
After sending several patches to miguel he finally liked my code and committed it to the CVS. He also made a new gnome-print release (0.15) so that we can now print isoLatinEncoding chars. Cool !

Well, my first diary entry.

ghex
I finished a basic version for ghex printing module today and sent it to jaka, he told me it should be in the CVS by tomorrow. It is important for me to get more familiar with gnome-print so thats why I wanted to do it. Also, is very handy to print the hex dump when analyzing output that gets generated from the gnome-print drivers. I used to make a screen shoot of ghex and then print that image !

gnome-print isoLatin characters
I sent the patch to miguel for the 5th time, he just keeps sending it back to me with modifications to make the code look "pretty". I think he is exagerating a bit this time but what can I do, he is the boss !

gnome-print-dialog
I am working to make the print-dialog display printers that get loaded from the .gnome/printer-profiles directory instead of only getting the Generic Postcript driver. Right now is crashing and can't even use the Generic Postcript

gnome-print-pdf
Not a lot of work has been done for this driver as I have not continue reading the pdf standard ver. 1.3. The thing is 500+ pages, but I am enjoying reading it since it's so well designed / written.