Last week was a busy one with more than one day and a half devoted to meetings besides the usual hacking in MeeGo and SeriesFinale (yeah, I could still devote a couple of hours to keep the work on the GNOME port) but a great weekend was waiting us.

On Friday, after work, we went to Brión (close to Santiago de Compostela) for another Igalia Winter Summit. The trip was quite interesting with me sharing the car with Victor, Claudio and Guillaume, which is a funny thing because in a company with a majority of Spanish members, none of us is Spanish

The first night was composed of hard, philosophical discussions, card games, general get-together and, for some of us, 4 hours of sleep.
On Saturday, Piñeiro (AKA A.P.I.) and Martin Robinson gave a talk about how they got to Igalia, that is, where they come from and how they got into this life of a Free Software hacker.

After lunch, I had a brainstorming with a few other Igalians about Grilo and SeriesFinale’s (unrelated) world domination plans.
This year is also Igalia’s 9th anniversary and some of us were having our companions joining in for the anniversary dinner on Saturday night, so, we had a magician performing impressive card tricks and a Queimada.

For this summit, a few of us had a new challenge, to give the first concert of the Igalia Blues Band as kind of a spin-off of the concert given in last year’s GUADEC (or GCDS). So, Andrés, Claudio, Piñeiro and myself practiced, when we could, the five songs we selected for this after-dinner show. After the concert, we continued with a “less official” setlist where I performed an disastrous alternative version of Bad Things (opening song of the True Blood TV show).
It was quite nice. I think we entertained the people and everybody seemed happy.

Igalia Blues Band (Claudio is not present because I couldn't find any picture with the four of us)

The next morning, Juanjo gave a presentation about the history of Igalia. It is impressive how the company evolved in these 9 years, from a group of Computer Science graduates from Galicia, into having 40 people across 8 different countries, always considering people as its main value and Free Software as a philosophy. I’m proud to be part of it.

The traditional group photo

Last week I posted about the first Grilo developers IRC meeting and how we had this week for people to send suggestions; some ideas were sent to Grilo’s mailing list and we’ve been talking about when should the meeting take place.

So, this first Grilo developers meeting is taking place in September 14th (next Tuesday) around 15 PM UTC.

Hope to meet you there!

Like Iago announced in Grilo’s mailing list:

“Now that we want the basics of Grilo working reasonably well, I think it is time that we get together and share our ideas as to what we want Grilo to be in the close future and define some kind of roadmap for,
let’s say, the next year or something like that. The idea would be to define a set of specific tasks that we can add to our TODO and Wiki and keep that up-to-date (we can review this roadmap when needed and make updates any time we see fit, but we should have something to start with)

I think most of us may very well have some ideas as to what we think
would be cool/important to have in Grilo already, but let’s have some
time to think about it and then arrange an IRC meeting to discuss the
ideas.”

This brainstorming period will be until next Friday, September 10th.

If you’re not subscribed to Grilo’s mailing list, consider doing so and share your ideas there. If mailing lists are not your thing, you can always leave your ideas as comments to this post and I’ll make sure they reach the mailing list and the meeting itself.

We’ll later announce the date and time of the meeting.

Yesterday was the last day of the 7th edition of GUADEC Hispana, originally to be organized in Chile but due to the disastrous earthquake, it was moved to the city of Corunna, Spain.

Between hacking on OCRFeeder (expect a new version soon), giving a talk about it, attending nice presentations and chatting with people, I had a great time.
Diego’s presentation about Epiphany was simply epic and Mario gave a very complete crash course of git.

I guess there’s a first time for these things but Thursday, while I was giving a demo of the new OCRFeeder’s features, it crashed on me… Never again will I laugh at Mr. Gates and friends when their products freeze out of the blue (nah, it is too funny).
Now that I think of it… was this the first time a Portuguese man gave a talk at GUADEC Hispana?

The presentation was a cut-down version of the one I gave at FOSDEM this year and you can check its slides below (it’s in Spanish):

(thanks to Manuel Rego for reviewing my Spanish in the slides)

Here’s the group photo of the GUADEC ES attendants:

And from next Monday on, I’ll be in Den Haag for GUADEC 2010. My lightening talk about the Predictor Input Method got accepted, so if you’re into this kind of stuff, I hope to see you there.

One more year, Igalia will give me the chance and the pleasure to attend GUADEC one more year, this time in Den Haag.

My fellow Igalians Iago, Alejandro Piñeiro and José Dapena will give talks about Grilo, Cally and Modest 4, respectively.

As for me, I’m hoping my lightening talk about Text Prediction on GNOME gets accepted.

So, as usual, if you wanna talk about GNOME, OCR, Input Methods, Grilo, Django or Free Software in general and have beer while we’re on it, come along!

Hope to see you in Den Haag.