grilo – Joaquim Rocha

FOSDEM 2011 and GNOME Foundation

January 30, 2011

That’s right, once again I could count on Igalia‘s kind support to be able to go to this great conference one more year.
Just like last year, I’m giving two presentations:
* Making the printed world accessible: A11y in OCRFeeder, in the Accessibility DevRoom on Saturday at 11:00;
* Grilo: Integration of Multimedia Contents in Applications Made Easy, in the CrossDesktop DevRoom on Sunday at 13:45.

This will be my fourth time attending FOSDEM and every year I love it more. In what other conference can you attend presentations about: GNOME, MeeGo, Django, Accessibility and much, much more. And let’s not forget about the Friday Beer Event, that allow us hackers to socialize while sipping on the finest beers on earth. And of course, to some of you, I don’t need to tell again how much I like Brussels, and Belgium in general.

By the way, this year there is a new, more Maemo-ish, FOSDEM Maemo app called Sojourner which will help you schedule the talks you wanna attend, so, be sure to install it in your N900. (I’ve contributed with a couple of patches last Friday, which are pending integration 😉 )

Other news from my part is that since last week I am a member of GNOME Foundation. It’s been a year since I started developing OCRFeeder under GNOME’s infrastructure and I finally decided to apply for membership. The process was really easy and I thank the folks involved. It’s good to be around such good hackers.

Hope to see you all FOSDEM next weekend!

Igalia 2010 Winter Summit

November 30, 2010November 30, 2010

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.

First Grilo developers meeting, now scheduled

September 12, 2010September 12, 2010

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!