My girlfriend, beyond being a kindergarten teacher, is also a great artist (check her art page here — in Spanish).
She also uses Ubuntu (in fact Xubuntu) and has been brain-washed about Free Software and whatnot since a long time by me, so, I asked her if she could do some art with the GNOME logo.

Here’s the result:

The GNOME logo is actually made out of denim and the background was made with acrylics.

I decided to get the painting to Igalia‘s Corunna office since we’re all GNOME lovers in Igalia and our new office is a work of art itself.

Well, this blog’s title’s not quite fair.
Igalia‘s got more than an office, we got a playground, we got a “spot”, a place where we do what we do best, what we love to do, while calling it our job and sharing it with friends. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s call it just our office.

Yesterday was the Igalia’s New Office Inauguration Party.
We stopped working at 5 as previously agreed and started messing around with, well, anything we could.
First, we abused the Wii, then, we started throwing our Free Software mascot plushes to each other, we later upgrade it to a plush rugby ball so it’d give us a more sportish feeling! It’s interest to see how engineers have fun when they turn off their laptops…

Around 8pm, curiously I was finishing reading an interview with Guido van Rossum in Linux Journal when the party guests started arriving and it was nice.
I met new people and fell good about seeing everyone with they’re family and closest friends having fun and saying that the office is “de puta madre” (something like “f*%kin amazing”). Oh, right, the food and drinks we were served were also great!

I’m not really a photo boy, luckily there are always some people who are so check these photos by Mario and Enrique:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariosp/sets/72157618769128971

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariosp/sets/72157618742618759

http://picasaweb.google.com/eocanha/IgaliaNewOfficeOpeningParty#

Thanks to everyone in the company who worked hard so we can now arrive everyday to this colorful, pleasant place!

So tomorrow after lunch I’m heading down to Vigo to attend a conference by Richard Stallman, yes, that one.

It will be the second time I see a presentation given by him. The first one was in Badajoz, back in 2007 at OSWC.
He’s not by far the better or most enthusiastic speaker I watched in our Open Source world but it’s nice to attend his talk, specially if it’s your first time.
If you’re attending and haven’t been into this small world of FOSS, I hope he inspires you to come in, the door’s always open. If you’ve been living in it for a while, then I hope he remembers you its basis and makes you proud to be part of something (still) so ahead of our times.

An important thing to mention is that Igalia had rented a bus that will get people from A Coruña, Pontevedra and Santiago de Compostela there. The bus is prioritized for employees but not restricted to. It’s available for anyone who asks up to go and obviously limited to its number of seats. Yup, Igalia is just great and I’m proud to be a part of it.

So, it’s the middle of the week and I’m posting about last weekend (yeah, it’s sad…).

Last weekend I could do some work on Rancho and I committed a patch to make its width fluid, that is, to be relative to your screen resolution instead of having a fixed size. (let me know if it’s working right in your machine)
The rest of the day was dedicated to watching some movies with my girlfriend

On Sunday I had the pleasure to show the beautiful city of A Coruña to my parents who came to visit me.
We had a great lunch at La Penela, a restaurant in the main city’s square.
They really liked the city and the people and specially enjoyed the landscape where the sea meets land and the mix of buildings with traditional tapas cafes and small grocery stores.

You should also take a break and visit this kind city where, as the people here say, “No one is an outsider”.

Its being almost a month since my last post… so, lets catch up a little.

On the last February 19th I drove down from Galicia to Portugal, it was quite a boring trip of more than 7 hours. Luckily I had my girlfriend right on my side and the iPod’s battery honored its fame and soundtracked the whole trip.

I went to Portugal because on the next day, February 20th, I finally presented my Master Thesis in Computer Science Engineering!
Yeah! A little more than a year after I went to Seville and about 8 months since returned to Portugal, I finally presented it and culminated my Master of Science degree.

The thesis was about the developing of an OCR suite for GNU/Linux, based on some ideas I had before. I started developing it the when I returned from Seville and finished it on October (had the luck that the deadlines got extended and wouldn’t need to deliver it before September), then it took me until the mid of December to finish writing the thesis and (final tests of the program included) — I delivered it the 15th of December. Thanks to the bureaucratic services at my University, the sooner the thesis presentation could be arranged was the mentioned February 20th… But hey! Now it is done!

About the OCR program, it is written in Python featuring a GUI powered by PyGTK and can use several Open Source OCR engines to perform OCR. It allows user correction/edition of the results, etc. and generates ODT or HTML file. You can also use it from the CLI in case you want to automate some tasks or link it with other apps.

I am releasing the program soon as GPL, so stay tuned.

I’d really like to thank a lot to all the people that supported me all the time and keep supporting:
Mom, Dead,  Bro, Girlfriend, Professor Luís Arriaga, and friends such as Luís Rodrigues and Pedro Salgueiro.

PS: My absence in the www world outside of work due to the fact that I’m internetless since I came to A Coruña, *hopefully* next week the ISP I chose will turn the switch of information in my flat and I’ll be connected once again to the world. Then I’ll post what’s happened in my world of GTK, Igalia and Django.