Mutiny on the Bounty by John Boyne


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was offered to me and, having read some good critics about the author’s previous books, specially “The Boy in Striped Pajamas”, I was looking forward to check how this book was and put my dislike of nautical adventures behind my back.

The books tells the (mis)adventures of 14 year old John Jacob Turnstile on board the HMS Bounty from his own thoughts and words. Turnstile gets the position of Captain’s servant boy as an alternative to spend time in jail after getting caught in an act of thievery. While the ship heads towards Tahiti, the young boy shows the reader how hard life on the sea can be and how harder it seems to have been in the 18th century.

While all this seems like an interesting adventure to read about, I found most of the book quite boring. Page after page I was think there were more words used to make it sound like 18th century’s English than actually to tell interesting events and catching the attention of the reader. Things move really slowly in the book. I was urging for the mutiny to happen in hope that the book got more interesting.
Surprisingly, a while after the mutiny (you realize I’m trying to avoid any spoilers here by not mentioning what exactly happened that while after), the events seem to suggest that then would come some new and interesting things but it seems the book enters in fast forward mode and the whole story is finished in just a few pages leaving you with a feeling that either the pages number was too much for the author to keep writing or he was running out of time and had to rush things.

I would recommend this book only if you are a fan of reading about sea adventures in past centuries. If you do not specially enjoy such a scenario for an adventure, then do not read this book, the pace is slow and and it make you feel you are wasting your time.

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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!

I’ve just released OCRFeeder 0.6.

This new version introduces the following changes:

* Hide import pdf and unpaper menus if the respective commands are not available
* Several code improvements
* Removed Studio from the application name
* Removed unneeded engines folder
* Lowered the package name font case
* Updated copyright notice on the about dialog
* Swedish translation (thanks to Daniel Nylander)

Another very important change is that I moved the development of OCRFeeder to the GNOME infrastructure.
This means I’m using GNOME’s git server and will soon use GNOME Bugzilla to track bugs.
I always thought of OCRFeeder as a unique Free Software application (in the way that there isn’t anyone similar to it) and that it would be great to get it more involved with our favorite desktop environment.

I’d like to thank Claudio for supporting me on this move.

You can get the latest source from GNOME FTP.