Older blog entries for csv (starting at number 210)

Mon 2010/May/17

  • I had been using Nokia Sports Tracker to keep track of my running activities. This was handy when I was using the Sports Tracker software for symbian in a Nokia N95 and uploading to the service was trivial. Now that the N95 I had is defunct and I actually use the N900 and eCoach, it's not that handy anymore.

    Furthermore, a bug in either eCoach or the Sports Tracker website is making it a less interesting combination – sessions imported manually from the gpx file won't be plotted in the map. No idea why and not much intention to find out the reason.

    So, dear lazy web, is there any other recommendable website that can be used to keep track of training sessions online? Importing from a gpx file, plotting routes, and so on, would be the most desirable features. A lot of fellow geek runners using it to show off would be a plus.

    Answers to my email please. I promise to be nice and follow up with what people suggest.

Syndicated 2010-05-17 12:21:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Sat 2010/May/08

  • Today is the Helsinki Half Marathon. Despite how much I enjoyed running it last year and that I really wanted to do it again, I'm not doing it this year.

    The main reason is that, even when I got proper winter equipment for running in the cold during the last months of winter, I wasn't expecting weather to constantly be under –10° C. That, together with having moved out from Helsinki's downtown and the comfort of having Töölöönlahti around the corner, and having started to regularly swim again, didn't help me to get started training. Probably next year I'll give it a try.

    But on the upside, I'm quite happy with what swimming has brought to my life. I never learned to swim properly when I was a kid. In fact, when I was living in Dresden and took a Schwimmen zur Konditionierung class early on Mondays, it was a complete disaster. I could barely cross the 50m swimming pool at Freiberger Platz without feeling like dying and it was hard to keep myself going frequently. I was feeling completely awful and would rather skip it than ridicule myself.

    Situation has improved a lot since I started to regularly swim, in September last year. At the beginning, the situation wasn't much better than back in Germany. However (and I think that improved stamina thanks to running was crucial on this), I could do much better this time. By now, I'm doing about 3x500m once or twice a week. I've said goodbye to back pain, I feel way fitter, and all this without any joint pain, which is a pleasure hard to enjoy when running.

    Anyway, that doesn't mean that I don't run at all. For instance, on one of my last trips to A Coruña I ran around the city by it's seaside. Really cool place to run.

Syndicated 2010-05-08 11:14:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Thu 2010/Apr/22

  • Now that I'm working from home and Igalia was kind to provide me with, among other things, a cute SyncMaster XL2370, I've been experiencing with different display setups, trying to find something that's most comfortable for me while working. I came to the conclusion that having separate X screens (the LCD one and the laptop one) is the best for me, since it allows me to run secondary tasks (like building the desktop or watching the news) without cluttering my primary display.

    Unfortunately, an annoying bug was making gnome-settings-daemon die every time I hit one of the volume keys while hovering the pointer in the secondary display. It turned out to be a bug in GTK+ that was easy to fix. Amusingly, it's exposed very easily with a multi-head setup, however it was present since ages. This makes me wonder whether people actually use multi-head setups at all or I am the only freak.

  • On a similar note, Evolution was crashing like crazy on me at random intervals. I got fed up with this so I started using it under gdb for a while to try to get a stacktrace of the issue. It took a couple of days before it crashed and I could get a decent stacktrace. This time, it seems to be another very evident bug in evolution-data-server, in which it seems I am the only one to hit a code path using a memory address out of bounds. Patch seems to be trivial but I haven't tested it.

  • All that being said, I start to miss hacking on the desktop instead of a phone.

Syndicated 2010-04-22 09:32:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Thu 2010/Mar/04

  • Now that things have settled down a bit in Chile, I can write about how Saturday's earthquake has affected my family and friends.

  • First of all, all my family, friends, and people I know are fine. Some material losses, in different degree, affected to many of them, but that's about it. A huge thanks to all the people who one way or another helped me to find a way to communicate with my family and all of those who showed their support and concern. By now, I can communicate directly with all of them without any problems.

  • For good or bad, one of my sisters was in Viña del Mar on Saturday and Catalina, the youngest, was with my father in Santiago. That means that the quake found my mother alone in Talca, one of the cities that suffered the most with the earthquake. Nothing major happened to her house nor the neighborhood where she lives. The same can't be told about most of downtown Talca. She is still very sensitive about the situation, like most of the people in the area. Sisters didn't manage to travel to Talca until yesterday but, at last, they are all reunited and well communicated with me.

  • Unfortunately, my great-aunt's house in the downtown of Talca collapsed. She and her family were able to leave the place in time but, as many of the old adobe houses in the area, the house couldn't resist at all. I haven't had further updates on their status but I can imagine their suffering right now.

  • The same happened with the student-house where Catalina rents a room in Concepción. Since the semester hadn't started yet, only the elderly landlady was there and, according to my sister, she was rescued right in time out of a window before the old house collapsed. We'll need to find a new place for my sister and replace the things she lost, but luckily that's about it. Glad that no one got hurt; at the same time sad for all of those whose luck wasn't the same.

  • Needless to say, my email at codemonkey.cl is down until further notice, since the server is (or was?) in Talca. You can still reach me through my GNOME or Igalia email addresses, though.

Syndicated 2010-03-04 09:19:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Wed 2010/Feb/17

  • By the end of January, I started to feel an annoying pain in my right hand, starting somewhere in the thumb and moving through the wrist on to the arm. Pain was mild, but enough to scare me, so I made a visit to the doctor (when I finally discovered that terveysasema was the word I was looking for).

    The doctor at the Finnish health center diagnosed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Something that I didn't really believe in the first place, since she didn't run any specific tests and just checked the inflammation and my story. Also, it is known that CTS is usually misdiagnosed to people with this type of pain and coming from the IT industry.

    Later, I made a new visit to the doctor while I was in A Coruña, who after performing a few basic tests came to the conclusion that it wasn't CTS at all, but some sort of Repetitive Stress Injury. A couple of weeks in a sick leave, away from the keyboard, the phone, and guitar, and I should be fine.

    These weeks were pretty frustrating on the one hand [1], but on the other hand gave me some time I needed for some tasks more related to my personal life, so in the end it wasn't so bad.

    Now pain is mostly gone, and I've changed the way I type to something less stressful. I still need to get used to this and get back to speed with my work.

    [1] no pun intended.

  • FOSDEM was really cool. It was a good motivation to stay away from the laptop for several days and allow the hand to rest. Talks were as cool as one can imagine, I met many of the good old friends and made a few new ones. But anyway, isn't that the usual thing at conferences?

    I guess it's better, as usual, to let the pictures speak.

    Leonidas

  • It's been an unusually snowy winter in southern Finland. As a proof of the spring coming soonish, it's already possible to see bicycles starting to bloom in the snow fields:

    That much snow

Syndicated 2010-02-17 18:26:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Wed 2010/Jan/20

  • After spending the first week of February in A Coruña, for Igalia's 1st Assembly Meeting of the year, I'll bounce to Brussels to attend FOSDEM. Igalia was kind enough to sponsor me this year even when I plan to just attend the talks and catch up with the people.

    I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

    On a related note, I noticed a bit too late that Pat Metheny will be playing in Brussels one day after I leave the city. It's a pity I didn't notice earlier, since he is touring Europe but won't visit Helsinki.

  • During the weekend, I finally met Xan after his trip to A Coruña for the WebkitGTK+ hackfest. This means that I finally received my christmas gift from Igalia: a shinny N900.

    The nicest part of this present is that it doesn't come in a top-down manner as in most companies, but from the Assembly members. Meaning, we all decided if we wanted to give ourselves a present and what.

  • mafw-lastfm is doing quite well. Even when the project is still in extras-devel only, the userbase seems to be growing. I received some patches and ideas from Felipe Contreras, and I think that a simple gobject based library for scrobbling will come out of this.

    It's also nice to see that some of the users went ahead and created a last.fm group.

Syndicated 2010-01-20 17:31:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Sat 2010/Jan/02

Syndicated 2010-01-02 10:38:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Tue 2009/Dec/29

  • Last night, around 3am, while I was still awake, the fire alarm in the building got activated. I was already thinking it had to be a false positive (it happened once at least since I live here), but anyway quickly grabbed my jacket and phone, in order to evacuate the place. When I was reaching the third floor, the smoke made evident that it was not a false positive: something was on fire, and it was downstairs.

    The feeling of knowing that you are in an upper floor of the place where something (that you can't really see) is on fire, is a bit scary, so to say. Anyway, when I was reaching the first floor I noticed that the fire was coming from inside the store located in a big portion of the floor (Tarjoustalo, for the finns reading this). Something was on fire inside, and luckily at a good distance of the gate I was using, so I had no problem to leave the place, call 112, and wait for the firemen and police to appear.

    A few hours later, the fire was controlled. I read this morning in Helsingin Sanomat that the fire was extinguished by the fire sprinklers in the store, and most of the damage was caused by the smoke and water accumulated. For me, only a good fright, a bit of smoke inside the flat, and a couple of hours waiting outside in the cold. Next time, I will grab the scarf and gloves, even if I think it's a false positive.

    Fire in Tarjoustalo

Syndicated 2009-12-29 21:32:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

Tue 2009/Dec/22

  • If you've had the chance to play already with a N900, you've probably noticed that you can typeahead your contacts' names in the Phone application, in order to filter them and find the person you're looking for quickly. Similarly, the media player will allow you to filter the list of artists/albums/songs/etc. by simply typing the first letters of the media you're looking for. This is probably one of the most praised features of these two applications, specially in times when contact lists grow up to several hundreds of people and dumping your media collection inside the phone takes no effort.

    This feature, known as live search, used to live inside these two applications, each with a different implementation. Third party maemo developers wanting to have a similar feature would have needed to cook it themselves inside their applications. Clearly, a waste of effort.

    But luckily, that's not the case anymore. I spent a big part of the last two months (when not in holidays nor flying from and to A Coruña) working in a consolidation of the live search widget originally written by the good old Jörgen and later rewritten by Xavier, part of the osso-abook library. With the blessing of Nokia, I took it and removed all the osso-abook dependant bits and made it as generic as possible, in order to allow its usage in any application using a GtkTreeView and a GtkTreeModelFilter. This widget, now LGPL and named HildonLiveSearch, landed in hildon's master around a month ago. Better yet, I also took HildonLiveSearch and made it a feature of HildonTouchSelector, the hildon widget for pannable lists that you can see in most of the N900 applications. This already landed in the stable branch of hildon and I'm confident that Nokia will release it at some point with an update of the phone's software (don't ask me when, though). Rumor has it, this is already a feature in one of the latest releases of Hildon Application Manager.

    HildonLiveSearch in a HildonTouchSelector

    For developers interested: if you use a HildonTouchSelector, don't worry, you'll have live search for free in your application. If you just use GtkTreeView, have a look at the HildonLiveSearch widget implementation and its simple example, as well as the HildonTouchSelector implementation for a more complete example. Of course, you can imagine that the changes to make it work inside HildonTouchSelector are quite invasive, so I'd please ask you to grab hildon's code from the repository, build packages, smoke test it in your application, and file bugs if you find any. This way, we minimize the possibility for regressions by the time this hits the public. Shall you have any concern or question, don't hesitate to contact us in the hildon-devel mailing list.

    Let this be my christmas present to the world for this year. Special thanks to Xavier, who was of great help during the push of the live search into hildon.

Syndicated 2009-12-22 16:15:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog

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