Older blog entries for chema (starting at number 7)

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 ... )

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.