Ramble on

"Start spreading the news, I am leaving today."

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:05:25 +0100

“Start spreading the news, I am leaving today.”

- Not really, I’m leaving tomorrow, but officially today’s gonna be my last day on the Earth^W city of Valencia (and surroundings).

It’s been a good season. Valencia it’s not the best place I’ve lived ever, but it’s OK. I’m leaving a lot of friends here, what it’s sad… but awesome at the same time.

You may know I’m moving to Exeter, and I’m planning to retake my Fedora ambassador activities there.

The first step will be checking the usual suspects: Fedora UK and the UK Fedora ambassadors. It’s gonna be fun :)

Bugzilla for Humans

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:18:10 +0100

What’s up with your browser? You live in the past, upgrade!

This is a very nice videocast by Johnathan Nightingale, and there’s more info (and a Vimeo video) in his blog post: Bugzilla for Humans.

Bugtracking is an important part of every open source project (well, I would say that it’s important to any software project), and I believe it’s the most nasty part of the community management too.

I have to deal with Bugzilla when I file a bug in the Fedora bugtracking system and the Gnome bugtracking system, and I agree with Johnathan that Bugzilla is scary and against the poor humans trying to file a bug. It’s even cruel, not only you found a disgusting bug, but when you want to contribute to fix it… you have to face Bugzilla!

The videocast it’s worth watching, meanwhile Bugzilla doesn’t turn into something more friendly.

Firefox 3.6, Theora and the Flash Video Player Killer

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:26:00 +0100

What’s up with your browser? You live in the past, upgrade!

I must confess I’m not in the video/audio business, and I don’t know 100% about the differences between Theora and H.264 and its licensing model.

But I do know about GIF and MP3, so it’s easy to choose a side in this topic: go for open source supported and royalty-free technology for the win!

There’s another point. My three years old laptop can hardly play a video in some of the flash players out there, and certainly it’s not able to play most of the HD videos. Flash on Fedora (eh, Linux) sucks and melts my CPU even with small ads.

With HTML5 and in-browser Theora support it’s different. The video in this post plays smooth and using about 30% of my CPU. Yes, it’s the way to go (or you can donate some bucks so I can buy a new laptop, dammit!).

I don’t get the point to buy a Quad Core laptop just to watch some videos on the Internet, do you?

Packaging Fail

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:06:54 +0100

I’ve tried to join the package maintainer team, and seems that I’ve failed.

I summited 4 packages, and 2 of them were already in the sponsor request stage (I updated the wiki, because it’s a good idea to check bugzilla requests), and 2 of them still waiting a sponsor.

Meanwhile I’ve been removed from the ‘packaging’ group in FAS (my membership was waiting approval, of course), and my packages keep getting dust without knowing if I’m doing something wrong:

Review Request: perl-XML-Parser-Lite-Tree-XPath - XPath access to XML::Parser::Lite::Tree structures: I found a bug with perl 5.10 that, after discussing it with the developer upstream, was fixed updating a dependency (perl-XML-Parser-Lite-Tree). Now it’s fixed (stalled since 2009-09-24).
Review Request: nautilus-flickr-uploader - Simple GUI to upload pics to Flickr: nothing, I had some comments but I don’t know if the package needs more work (stalled since 2009-10-20).

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, or I’m missing something important :’(.

"[…] among the two primary corporate-controlled-but-dabbling-in-community-orientation..."

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:05:00 +0100

“[…] among the two primary corporate-controlled-but-dabbling-in-community-orientation distributions (aka Fedora and Ubuntu), Fedora is clearly much more software-freedom-friendly.”

- From Back Home, with Debian!, by Bradley M. Kuhn.

Bradley explains his reasons to leave Ubuntu, see: Ubuntu One server side software (non-free, and it’s future strong integration in Ubuntu Desktop), Canonical’s copyright assignment policies, ‘restricted’ is too close to ‘main’, and finally that all those problems come from a community oriented distribution based on a for-profit company.

I’m not sure if I agree with a for-profit, corporate-controlled distribution can never remain community-oriented. What do you think? Is Fedora different with Red Hat?

Canonical did it well in the past releasing Launchpad’s code, what’s the difference with Ubuntu One?

Moving to Exeter, Devon (UK)

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:24:00 +0100

It’s been two years since I moved to Valencia from Bilbao. That was a very important change for me, not only because Valencia is geographically closer to my hometown but because I was heading a new and challenging project.

Now it’s time to change again, because the join of two different factors:

Alex is going to stay in UK until the end of 2011, and his next destination in the midst of Februrary will be Exeter.
I’m getting old, really :), and I feel that this is the moment to go abroad for a season, or never.

So I’m moving. I’ll end my work here in January, and I’ll start telecommuting from Exeter for my actual company ASAP.

Overall I think this 2 years story in Valencia has been a very enriching experience profesionally, I’ve made friends, and I’ve met Alex (important!).

It would be impossible to summarize here 2 years, so let’s focus in the immediate problems: we’re looking for a house to live in Exeter!

I’m looking also for any kind of FOSS activity in the area (btw, I won’t be Fedora Ambassador in Spain for a long while), so dear lazy web, feel free to post any comment about it. Thank you!

Why I Avoid Using Closed Source Software

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:10:00 +0100

Lemme add: while possible.

--------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------ 

 
 WARNING:  Segmentation Faults in these executables
    npviewer.bin :  1 Time(s)
 
 WARNING:  General Protection Faults in these executables
    npviewer.bin :  9 Time(s)
 
 ---------------------- Kernel End -------------------------

This is an extract of the logwatch report that it’s generated every day in my Fedora system (do you read it, don’t you?)

Yes, it’s the flash-plugin 10.0.42.34-release (non-free, from Adobe repos), and yesterday crashed 10 times and I don’t remember I browsed any page with intensive flash stuff on it (that’s very vague, because almost any page in the Internet has Flash on it).

Anyway, it crashes, it sometimes eats all my CPU (and/or the sound it’s choppy), and it piss me off that I can’t see Vimeo stuff on HD (may be it’s my 3 years old laptop), but there’s no replacement right now that doesn’t exclude you from being a normal web citizen.

I think it’s too late for Flash, but we must learn from this story and try doing something so it doesn’t happen again. I bet you’ve seen links to Spotify, haven’t you? What happens when you click on it? Disappointment.

I don’t know what’s the formula to stop this kind of viral closed source adoption that leads to de facto standards that finally avoids you to be free to choose, but I know that Gtalk and XMPP advocacy helped with the Microsoft Messenger issue.

We may need both: a free implementation of the idea, and a cool company to promote it.

OpenOffice.org announces "end-of-life" for version 2.x of its productivity suite

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:48:00 +0100

OpenOffice.org announces "end-of-life" for version 2.x of its productivity suite:

Via OpenOffice 2.x End Of Life at Hellow’s Blog.

I’ve found pretty interesting the FAQ part:

What does end-of-life status mean? Is the software unusable now?

So, can I go on using the old version?

I’m a Linux user, and my copy of OpenOffice.org comes from my distributor’s repository. Am I affected?

Why can’t the community support older releases for a longer period of time?

Check it, because it’s very interesting. The End Of Life concept it’s very often misunderstood, because people tend to not get the difference between vendor support (also called upstream), and the distributor support.

"It didn’t attract that much attention at the time, but this setting was changed by the small group..."

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:03:00 +0100

“It didn’t attract that much attention at the time, but this setting was changed by the small group who maintain GNOME Control Center. They claimed that text-only interfaces were better.”

- From Get your icons back, where Adrew brings some light to the “dude, where are my icons?” story in latest Gnome.

That was IMHO one of the weird things in Fedora 12; and even after reading the release notes and realizing that it was a decision/change from upstream, I must admit I got pissed off at first with Fedora.

My fault, because I’m not the kind of person that reads the release notes before upgrading. I thought the upgrade broke something. OK, shoot me :D.

Sometimes something it’s broken in a release, and the user that puts all his confidence in a distribution gets disappointed. Shall the answer from the distribution be it’s broken upstream?

Although the release note it’s OK and explains everything, I’m not sure. It isn’t good to disappoint your users.

Windows en el cole por 8 euros, ¿qué fue del código abierto?

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:53:00 +0100

Windows en el cole por 8 euros, ¿qué fue del código abierto?:

The linked text is in Spanish, the title says: Windows in the schools for 8 Euros, whatever happened to open source?

According to the text, Microsoft is selling Window 7 to Spanish education system with about a 90% of discount over the market price (8€ per student/year).

The education Ministry and Microsoft have signed today an agreement that will allow the different Spanish autonomic regions to acquire Windows 7 within the “Escuela 2.0” program -School 2.0 (sic), the government new program for digitalization of the education-.

What can I say? After years of free software support and advocacy, this is very sad and I feel ashamed of the government of my country.

And they keep saying that the laptops they’re going to provide to the students will have dual boot so privative software and free software have the same opportunities. WTF?!