Me and my girlfriend spent the last week in London where we stood in Igalia’s amazing flat.

I had only been to London once, about 14 years ago, I was 10 years old, in a high-school trip. Of course, things now seemed much different.

Coming from a small town and living in a small city, I was amazed by the number of people everywhere. It just seemed to much people, in the streets (okay, the main ones), in the subway, etc.

I was also expecting things to be more expensive, maybe because of the GB pound devaluation… This led me to spend some money on books. I love books and I (usually) hate translations. Maybe some publishers are trying to save some money by hiring cheap translators because some of the books I got in Portuguese have some really lame translations. I mean, I’m not expecting every translator to be an expert on the various subjects a book talks about but I expect at least some research of what some terms and expressions mean. That’s why, when possible (when I can read them), I prefer books in their original language.

I think that in a week, we could try very different things in London. We went to museums like the Science Museum, the Britain at War Experience and Natural History Museum; we went to Notting Hill; and we even got stuck in the subway due to the closing of the central line because of the amount of people.
Though, what I liked most was Camden Town and it’s really cool markets and shops where I bought a few t-shirts.
The stables market was amazing!

Another thing a small city boy like me noticed was the pollution, just like every time I go to Lisbon, by night at home you get the difference, in the skin, in the nose, etc. I am really glad that in A Coruña you don’t have such problem (I also didn’t notice it in Brussels).

I also loved to be a in a foreign country and understand what everyone is saying (well, I guess I am not considering my *not home country* of Spain to be a foreign one anymore) as the last countries I have been to are Belgium and The Netherlands.

About the food… we all know that the UK is not the country you go for gastronomy but I loved the cheap and huge English breakfasts.

Now don’t get me wrong but I was expecting my British fellows to be a lot more, how should I put it, snobbish. Yet, every person we asked for directions was really kind, British or not (except for a few suits that might have thought I was selling something when I wanted to know where the hell was HMS Belfast).

So, conclusions about London now that I am not 10 anymore: It is a wonderful city and I am looking forward to go back visiting it but the rush of things in there, the number of people, the amount of time lost in the bus or the tube, etc. makes me like more a city like A Coruña to live in. Yes, I would prefer *much more* to live in London than in Lisbon for example, but some things are best taken slowly, and life is one of them.

FOSDEM was really nice this year. Still too many interesting presentations to attend than our physical condition allows but that’s life.

Like I announced on my last post, I gave two presentations there and I am glad with both of them. People seemed really interested in OCRFeeder and I hope they try it out, send me feedback and spread the word about it.
I could personally meet P. Christeas, who had send me a patch for it, and listen to the questions and suggestions of people about how OCRFeeder works.

I must say the most impressive presentation I attended was by  Professor Andrew Tanenbaum himself, about MINIX 3, what a beautiful piece of software it seems.
If you have not attended it, maybe you can watch the video recording once it is available.
Later on I had a nice chat with him regarding web browsers on MINIX and the real portability of applications that are said to be multi-platform.

Here are the slides for the presentations I gave:

Looking forward for FOSDEM 2011!

… and also, this year I giving two presentations there.

I’m presenting OCRFeeder in the GNOME DevRoom and SeriesFinale in the Embedded/Mobile DevRoom!

I just love FOSDEM, the spirit of it, the number of important Open Source projects in there and the city of Brussels!

If you wanna have a chat about OCRFeeder, SeriesFinale, Hildon Input Methods, Rancho (for Django folks), Igalia or other important Open Source projects, while drinking a nice Belgian beer, let me know!

I have been working for the past months in Hildon Input Methods (HIM) and many things have changed in it (and many will) with only a target in mind: make the experience of typing in N900, physically or virtually, a great experience.
Still, one thing I dislike in HIM is the fact that it is semi-closed source. Now what’s this semi-closed source thingy? It means that some modules are open, others are closed (HIM is a complex project).

(this is not the project logo)

For the open ones, and have you failed noticing it, the sad truth was that they were updated from time to time. No open development was done… but this has changed!
Since last week, HIM’s open source modules are now developed “in the open”, using Gitorious (thanks to Kimmo)!
The modules are hildon-input-method and hildon-input-method-framework.

This constitutes another step of freedom inside Fremantle and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

What’s up folks!? I hope everybody is enjoying some good holidays or getting prepared to do so soon.

As for me, I am currently in Portugal to spend Christmas with my family and I have just released a new version of OCRFeeder, its 0.5 version. This will be the last version released in 2009.

So, what’s new in version 0.5?

Hongde Liu (刘洪德), a Chinese user, was kind enough to provide me with the Simplified Chinese translation of OCRFeeder.
This will hopefully allow more GNOME users from China to use what is the most complete Open Source OCR application for GNOME.

The engines Tesseract, Ocrad and GOCR are now automatically detected from the system when no engines are configured.
Regarding the OCR engines, some verifications were also introduced to prevent errors when no engines are used.

The bounding boxes are now restricted to be dragged inside the image’s limits, that is, it will no longer allow a box to be dragged beyond the image’s borders.

For users interested in the development, the Makefile now features the generatepot and compilemessages commands which generate the application’s pot file and compile a po file given its language code, respectively.
I plan to replace all minidom code by ElementTree, so, since this version, the feeder module is uses ElementTree.

As usual, get OCRFeeder’s source from Gitorious or download a Debian package.