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!

In a few hours I’ll be flying to Amsterdam in order to attend the Maemo Summit 2009.

I’m also giving a talk about Porting GNOME Applications to Maemo Fremantle where I’ll talk about some common practices and decisions regarding the adaptation to Fremantle of applications that were designed to be used in the GNOME desktop. For these, I’ll use the experience of porting EOG and OCRFeeder to Fremantle.
I hope that it will help developers who are thinking on porting they’re favorite desktop applications.

If you want to discuss matters like “how do I adapt this behavior to Fremantle”, OCR, EOG or OCRFeeder for Maemo, just let me know and I’ll be glad to talk about these topics.

Hope to see you there!

So what-up!?

Today I got up and told my girlfriend we should go take a little car trip. The idea was to go to Lugo but we ended up going to Santiago de Compostela as we were willing to go since a while ago.
The day was rainy but shiny as well, since we woke up pretty late, when we arrived there it was around 4 PM.

The center of the city is really beautiful with it’s main attraction, the cathedral which is the target of the well known pilgrims that journey in the Way of Santiago (or St. James).

I bought a t-shirt with some Celtic art (wich I dig a lot) and the sayings “Arte Celta · Galicia Máxica” — “Celtic Art · Magic Galicia” in Galician. My girlfriend bought a mug with some nice Celtic symbols as well. I know, the souvenirs are pretty cliche but whatever…

So, why the “celebration day” in this post’s title? Today is the 25th of April, a very special holiday since it’s the day when Portugal celebrates the Carnation Revolution which ended Portugal’s dictatorship and brought freedom to the people in 1974.
I am thankful to the people (the directly involved in the revolution and the others who always stood up and against the regime, like my grandfather) that not so long ago made it possible for me and others not to know how is to live in an authoritarian regime.