A Coruña proposed to hold GUADEC and aKademy 2009

As this will be my first post at planet GNOME, first I would like to thank Jeff for giving me a place between all of you, and I will introduce briefly myself.

My name is Andres Gomez, I’ve been using free software for 8 years, and I’m a free software developer since 2003, when I joined Igalia. As most of my mates, I contributed to project Fisterra, a free software framework for developing enterprise applications, and I’ve been lately involved in some projects related to Maemo technologies.

Now the interesting part of the post 😉

As my mate Chema has published recently in his blog, people from GPUL, Igalia and University of A Coruña have presented a proposal to co-host GUADEC and aKademy next year in A Coruña. The intention was to show all the possibilities that our city and team have in order to organize such a great event to the community.

Foto nocturna de la bahía del Orzán desde el monte de San Pedro (Coruña)

The proposal’s main idea is:”We want to organize a conference by community people for community people“. Here, in A Coruña, we have the facilities, a passionate team and a lot of ideas after attending several conferences and organizing lots of events (DudesConf 2008, GUAdemy 2007, Guadec-ES 2005, …). We know how important the details are, as well as having second options in case the first one could eventually fail. The main goal is to invest a big effort in achieving that people can come here next year. Because of this, the main expense in our budget will go for helping people to attend the event through sponsoring as many people as possible. That will be feasible thanks to the contribution of the University and volunteers. They will provide, almost for free, all the basics needed to run these two conferences. Also, our regional government, Xunta de Galicia, has an important commitment with this proposal and great confidence in our work at every level. So here it is the final proposal:

BTW, if these events are finally going to be hold here, I will volunteer on them so I will be able to give you advices to visit this beautiful Galician city placed in the north-western coast of Spain 🙂 .

La espera ha sido larga … pero ha merecido la pena :)

Premio GuadaLinuex 1

De nuevo, sólo han tenido que pasar otros 9 meses y otros 3 viajes a Helsinki para que pueda retomar el tema del que os hablaba en una entrada reciente, pero por fin están aquí, mis premios por haber estado entre los primeros en el concurso de fondos de escritorio de GuadaLinex.

Premio GuadaLinuex 2

Ahora sólo me falta decidir a donde van a ir a parar estos bonitos peluches. Uno irá a la oficina de A Grela de Igalia, en A Coruña, que es donde trabajo de forma habitual (no, aún no asumo que estoy más tiempo en Finlandia que en España :p ), y donde podrá hacer compañía a otro par de animalitos espachurrables que habitan de forma promocional en las tierras de nuestros escritorios de trabajo. El otro, con gran probabilidad se lo regalaré a mi sobrinita que dentro de poco cumplirá 3 años. La razón, a parte de la edad y el vínculo familiar, es que, de lejos, es la mujer que mejor me ha tratado en los últimos tiempos (a pesar de que a veces se niegue a darme algún beso 😀 ).

Y ahora, con un poco de ánimo y fuerza de voluntad frente a la página en blanco, tengo el firme propósito de actualizar mi blog con unas cuantas entradas sobre mis últimas experiencias, en pisos que parecen sacados de una película de tarzán, y otros temas de similar rareza, pero mejor no adelantar nada 🙂 …

“maemizing” GUADEMY

This weekend GUAdemy, a mixed conference between GUADEC and Akademy, lands in Coruña. As in most of Gnome related events, Igalia is going to be there.

For me, I’m going to give a talk about maemo on Saturday afternoon, as Miguel, Chema, Susana, Iago and Sergio are going to give other talks about several Gnome related issues.

If you want to learn about the Gtk based environment for embedded devices created by Nokia, come and join us.

See you soon!

Cogiendo de nuevo la pluma y el pincel

Fondo de escritorio con Andatuz y un olivo

Ya ha pasado bastante tiempo desde mi última publicación escrita en Helsinki así que, de vuelta en Coruña (ya puedo decir que estoy en casa puesto que me he empadronado 😉 ), por fin me he decidido a escribir con un tema y dibujos para las habituales capturas que acompañan a mis artículos.

Hace unas semanas Guadalinex convocó un concurso de fondos de escritorio. El premio: una camiseta y un peluche de Andatuz, su mascota. Puesto que estoy haciendo renovación de camisetas freakies, me decidí a presentarme.

Fondo de escritorio logo Guadalinex

Como le dije a vari@s amig@s, mi imaginación quedó muy mermada después de 8º de E.G.B. (la quema de neuronas adolescentes no perdona) así que intenté que las mentes lúcidas que me rodean (no demasiado lúcidas viendo la cantidad de ideas recibidas 😀 ) me iluminaran con su sabiduría y, tras varias noches de insomnio y trabajo Inkscaperil (palabro made in Mario) este es el resultado (?) que pude enviar a última hora, justo antes de que acabara el plazo, este pasado viernes 16 de marzo.

A partir de entonces, y hasta el próximo 16 de abril se ha abierto el plazo de votaciones que decidirán los 20 ganadores de este concurso. Como no confío demasiado en mi talento he decidido hacer una petición a vosotros, lectores eventuales de mi blog 😉 . Para votarme lo único que tenéis que hacer es registraros en la página de Guadalinex y seguir las instrucciones que se proporcionan en la página del concurso.

Ah, se me olvidaba, mis dibujos están en la cuarta página del concurso.

gnuLinEx flies on AirNostrum

gnuLinEx promotional LiveCD

As Quique, one of my colleagues from Igalia, had previously posted, gnuLinex was in the Spanish local Iberia’s flights last summer (I don’t know if there are copies of gnuLinex still in this kind of flights), as a present for every passenger.

I think this is a great idea in order to spread free software and I hope other initiatives, like inserting OpenOffice.org as the default office application for public worker appliances would be followed by other Spanish public administrations.

debian lists

Last months I’ve being doing some tasks in order to become a Debian Maintainer.

First, because of some requirements at work, I have being repackaging some pieces of software so I’ve learned about the Debian packages architecture. Once I was confident with what I was doing and I needed to know more about customizing a package (not just rebuilding one) I read the Debian New Maintainers’ Guide and the Debian Policy Manual, I made some new packages and subscribe myself to the Debian mailing lists I thought they would be profitable.

Some weeks after that I realized the amount of mails I was receiving was so huge that I hadn’t the time to even skim them in order to read the interesting ones so I desubscribe myself from the lists I knew I wasn’t going to read ever.

Indeed, some weeks ago, the amount of mails received from the lists I thought I could read was so big that now I’m starting to think of desubscribing myself from all the mailing lists but the mentors one.

In the end, I’ve not found the time needed to start the race to become a Debian Maintainer. I think the dedication needed is so high that I should spend a cople of hours everyday.

I hope I could find an orphaned package interesting enough to give me the energy to retry to be a Debian Maintainer ;-).

hackergotchie proposal for my entries at planet.igalia.com

agomez's hackergotchie

Following with the art serie and the planet.igalia.com subject, this time I’ve being drawing a hackergotchie proposal for myself. This picture is inspired in my own logo and the beautiful drawings made by Ayo. Also, the colours palette is the Tango Project palette, which would give a common style to the full set of hackergotchies, if I finally do them, but, I’m sorry, currently I’ve not following the rest Tango icon guidelines. ASAP I’ll try to draw some desktop icon proposals following the whole guideline.

First time I knew about Ayo’s artwork was when I was working at the A Coruña’s city council educational network. The main work there was giving support to the thin clients used in the computing classes at schools and I did some artwork for CoruniX, the Debian based distro used in the thin clients. I asked Ayo in order to give me permission for using his frozen bubbles‘ penguins as a template for one of the CoruniX friends.

Anyway, I’ve done only my hackergotchie because we, at Igalia, are dicussing about what to use as hacergotchies. In the end, we probably will be using the “heads cut” – sorry Jordi 😉 – used in another “planets” like planet.gnome.org. I think they should be more useful if we want to be recognized whenever we go to meetings like GUADEC.

What do you think?

unpacking my blog

Tanty's logo
Hi all!!

I’m just unpacking my new blog. I’ve compromised to write a bit every week about me and all the stuff we’re developing at Igalia. Hightlights would be my efforts to become a Debian developer, work on Gnome, Fisterra, Mono and Thin Clients related things.

You’re quite wellcome to write any comment you want.

P.S.: Please, excuse me for my english :-p.