I’ve spent last week in Den Haag, attending GUADEC 2010, with many other fellow Igalians.

Although last year I also attended GUADEC, this year was like a first time to me as last year’s GUADEC was co-located with aKademy forming Gran Canaria Desktop summit and it felt different.

What do I think of this year’s? Javascript, web, introspection and shell, that’s what I think.
This is GNOME’s new route, making desktop development more webbish and it is seems like a smart one too. Now, I don’t really fall for Javascript, I think it’s ugly and not really the best choice (imho) for large projects but anyway that’s the beauty of GObject Introspection, in the future it should be easy to use whatever language one prefers.

As for the talks, I really enjoyed Luis Villa’s keynote. Xan and Fernando did a great job getting the tragedy that some times the Foundation’s mailing list is and turning it into a comedy.
Iago gave a good talk about Grilo and Juan complemented it in a lightning talk about the plugins we did using Rygel-grilo.

This year I gave again a lightening talk, this time about the Predictor Input Method which you might one day use in a mobile device or on the desktop itself if you need assisted typing. There must be a GUADEC’s rule saying that the laptop where people present the lightening talks must be a crappy netbook that takes 2 seconds before it changes a slide…

For an overall feeling of GUADEC, you can check out Victor’s post covering GUADEC, I agree totally with him.

I could also meet and chat with nice people like Eitan Isaacson, Patricia and others.

So let’s see how the projects presented in GUADEC evolve and wait GUADEC 2011 in Berlin.

And what this week? This week I’m on vacation doing an InterRail across a bunch of European countries together with my girlfriend. I visited Paris already, where I found out my french is good enough for basic stuff. Today we’re in Brussels, it’s my third time here but the first one as a turist. I’m sure the beers will taste as marvellous as always.

I’m also doing a new thing: travelling without my laptop, the N900 seems to be a perfect replacement, I (still?) love this gadget and it surelly spares some space in my backpack.

See you in some European city, I’m likely to be wearing a GNOME/Linux/Metal t-shirt… what else is new…?

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.

Igalia, a Free Software Galician company, offers for the ninth consecutive year the possibility of undertaking internships for twelve to fourteen weeks from early June to early September, at its offices in A Coruña and Pontevedra (Spain).

This opportunity is offered to Computer Engineers or Computer Technical Engineers who have completed over 50% of their degrees.

Why do it?

* Most of us undertook internships when we were students.
* It is a good way to give back something to the university from which we come.
* It is also a good way to hire people. Almost 50% of the people who made undertook internships with us in the past are part of the company today.

How are the internships?

* 350 hours with flextime, with a minimum of 5 hours/day and a maximum of 8 hours/day during July, August and September.
* 325 hours working on a Free Software project and 25 hours to write the report.
* Help 1500 €.

If you are interested in applying for the internship, the period for receiving of applications starts from May 14th to May 28th.
Please, fill this form.

It’s been a while since last SeriesFinale’s version and I have been a bit busy meanwhile but still got time, together with Juan, to pull up some nice new features. In the end, we had so many changes and the app felt so smooth that we nicknamed it “Xmas Comes Earlier”!

So what can you find in this new version?

* The covers are now downloaded in the background which allows users to keep using the application and improves idle times when adding/updating shows.
* No more database deletions. Many people complained that sometimes it would suddenly delete all the database. We have now introduced a few verifications that make it harder for the database to be deleted unless you do it yourself.
* The format of the JSON of the database and the way the serialization is done is now faster which allows faster load and save times.
* The impossibility to delete shows is also fixed.
* No more problems with characters like & on the episodes and shows’ names.
* Already added shows are now marked with color when searching for shows.
* The highlight of episodes is now fixed, when marking them.
* A new logo that works in a black background has been added.
* Images are now downloaded to temporary files which allows a safer assignment to the shows/seasons.
* The images are now deleted if it’s not being used anymore (when shows are deleted), and are not downloaded more than once (when a show is added twice).
* The removal of the application now deletes the images folder.
* AUTHORS, README and THANKS files were added to the package.
* Translations were updated.
* The search dialog now allows you to search shows in a chosen language.
* The About dialog was added. Here are a few screenshots:

Shows when no cover has been added

Temporary image when downloading cover

Search dialog with Language choices

About dialog

Two other things that are new are the creation of two mailing lists for SeriesFinale:
seriesfinale-general for general discussion, help and feature requests
seriesfinale-development for discussions related to features development and bug tracking

You should be able to upgrade SeriesFinale from the extras-devel repository. I’ll promote it extras later.

Enjoy!

Vimeo is one of the main video sharing places in the web and I thought it would be useful to develop a Grilo plugin to search videos on it.

Yesterday Juan committed the code which means you should now be able to easily search videos from Vimeo and watch them in your desktop using Grilo’s test UI. Here are a couple of screenshots:

I really like the way Grilo is going. Together with GStreamer, the effort needed to create and media player with sources such as your hard drive, YoutTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc. is just minimum.

Let’s hope more plugins will arrive at Grilo!