2nd gvSIG Conference

I have not written anything on this blog for a long time and after someone told me about it I decided that I could do it today; the long delay between posts comes from the fact that I'm quite busy with my current jobs and they don't leave me free time to work on Debian or Free Software related projects in general.

Today I've been on the 2nd gvSIG Conference, a two day conference related to the gvSIG project, a GPL'ed Java based GIS (Geographical Information System) promoted by Regional Council for Infrastructures and Transportation (CIT) of the Valencian Government.

I know about this project since it was made public, but I never tried it because I have a very poor GIS knowledge and I always try to avoid Java based software if possible (luckily one of the main reasons for that will change soon).

Some months ago I tried the tool, but I left it soon because I found its interface quite weird and had no data to play with. Today I've seen a presentation about the raster capabilities that will be included on the next version of gvSIG and I have to admit that I've been quite impressed by them.

I don't think I will use the tool much, but it is good to see free software projects like this one succeed; having local GNU/Linux distributions is not bad, but IMHO projects like this one are a much better way of using public money and promote the use and development of Free Software.

My only complaint about the project is that the project development is not as open as I would like it to be (there is no public revision control system, no bug-tracker, ...), probably because almost all of the work is done by local software development companies that don't like to share their work until it is finished and don't have a free software development culture...

... but hey, nobody is perfect... ;)

Posted Fri 24 Nov 2006 00:54:03 CET

La MaratOO'o 2.0.1

I've been all this weekend on the Computer Science Department Labs as the owner of the keys. We have celebrated for the second time this year a MaratOO'o, a work meeting to fix and review the Catalan translations of OpenOffice.org. Last February we had other meeting that was devoted to translation, but this time it has been more a review thing.

The meeting has been organized by Softcatalà, a non-profit organization devoted to promote the use of Catalan on the IT world. They do a lot of l10n work for a lot of Free Software projects and had developed a set of tools for translators, including a style guide, something I believe is really important and I miss from other l10n teams for other languages like Spanish.

While I don't translate (I'm very bad at it), I belong to the organization because of jordim and jcorrius, as they convinced me to help them organize the previous MaratOO'o (for this one it was jordi the one that convinced me).

I believe this second session was good, I have not seen a single .po file, but I've helped with the migration of services from the old Softcatalà to a new one. They have a lot of things configured in weird ways and the migration has not been really planned (I don't understand why some services were moved this weekend when there were 30 people using them), but probably is not strange as it seems that none of the people with admin rights on the machines has worked as sysadmin and they don't care much a about it, so things seem to be done and left alone once they work, but for a migration like the one they are doing, with a lot of program upgrades, the configuration of each service has to be reviewed or things break easily.

On the L10N front it seems that things went well, we had near 30 people translating during two days and that means that all the program localization has been reviewed and some of the help files have been translated also, so we will probably have a better Catalan langpack for OpenOffice.org soon and maybe the help files also will be available.

I was going to include a photo on this post, but jordim told me he was going to use it on his blog, so use his bandwidth if you want to see the people that was on the lab before we left (I'm not there, as I'm the one that took the photo).

Posted Mon 28 Nov 2005 10:39:16 CET

IV Jornades de Programari Lliure

I'm back home after the IV Jornades de Programari Lliure, the fourth edition of a Conference I already visited last year.

I went to Vilanova on Thursday afternoon, as I was invited to join an open table about technologies to build LiveCD systems. I'm not an expert on this subject, mainly because I have not had the time to look deeply into the latest systems and technologies, but as I've tried knoppix, morphix and metadistros in the past I had things to tell.

We had some points of disagreement, for example I'd love to have two names for distribution, at least for a lot of the Debian based LiveCD Distributions out there.

I don't have anything against LiveCD systems, I feel they are good for things like demonstration systems (great for free software advocacy), rescue systems, or as a quick system to clone installations, but they are not the same thing as the product of a project like Debian.

The Debian distribution is driven by a big developer and user community, has a well defined policy and a full development infrastructure behind it (package archive, auto builders, bts, qa, mailing lists, security updates, ...), while the Debian based LiveCD distributions are simply snapshots of an installation of Debian, generally based on unstable or testing, with packages taken from repositories that don't have to follow the Debian policies nor be compatible with it in the long term.

Anyway, all of us agreed on other things, for example everybody feels that the way to go on the LiveCD systems the near future will be related to technologies that let you mount the file system image as read-write, something that avoids the need of dirty hacks to be able to write files on a read-only file system and making the live system run almost as an installed one.

The air conditioning on the room we were having the meeting was not working right, so we moved the discussion to a pub near the University, in front of a some beers. After that I went to have dinner and to the residence we were sleeping to finish the slides I was going to use for my morning talk.

On Friday I had a complete day, at 10 I had to give a half an hour talk representing the company I work for, T-Systems.

The talk was titled Free software development from the IT Industry and I decided to write it after being at a round table with a lot of people from companies from Catalonia some months ago.

Unluckily I have not had all the time I would have liked to have to work on the talk (i.e., I would have loved to review the Mako article), but everybody told me that the talk was good and in fact some of them also asked for the talk slides.

After the talk I went to the residence to finish the slides of my evening tutorial, called Building Custom Debian Distributions with the CDDTk (tutorial slides). I ended up reusing most of my last year's talk and adding some slides about the cddtk.

At 14:00 we went back to the University to meet other people from the Congress and have lunch, I met Martin there and also was introduced to Markus Gamenius, from Skolelinux. While we were starting to eat I got a call from Toni Hermoso, a member of Softcatala, that joined us at the Restaurant.

After lunch Neli went to the residence and I went to listen to the Toni's talk about l10n of mozilla. The talk was good, as the people on the room participated a lot on it, but I have the feeling that I spoke too much, as I usually do... ;)

Once that talk ended I went to the auditorim when I was going to give my tutorial, as I wanted to use my PowerBook with the cannon, and I was unsure if it was going to work. Fortunately it did, and I was able to do all the presentation with it, half of it using an OpenOffice.org presentation and the other half using a full screen terminal with white over a black background.

My tutorial was supposed to be one and a half hours long and that was the time I spent with the slides. After the explanation I told them that I could show them some examples of the cddtk system using the current LliureX packages after the questions, if they were interested on it.

The questions and my demo ended up being one houre more, as the people in the public asked me to keep going. This kind of thing make me feel good, as I got the feeling that my work is not only interesting for me.

After the tutorial we went to the Congress dinner, we were on three tables on a restaurant near the beach and we had a very good time; once we finished we went to drink something on a place on the beach, but we were so cold that we ended up going back to the residence to rest a little bit.

This morning we woke up late and when we went to the Conference to say goodbye, there were some interesting conferences going on, but as we wanted to come back early, we saw none of them. It's funny that Neli was afraid of not going to a talk this morning, as she does not know anything about CS, but after listening to me and the others during two days she is more interested on Free Software, although mainly on the social part of it.

Ah, btw, have a good time at the Debconf, maybe next year I'll try to go, this year I have too many things to do.

Posted Sun 10 Jul 2005 00:22:09 CEST

LliureX and the II Free Software Congress, Valencian Community

As I already said and Branden announced on his latest DPL Report, last week we celebrated the II Free Software Congress, Valencian Community in Castelló (Spain).

During the Congress the LliureX distribution was presented to the public, the CD that was given away is a LiveCD built using the Metadistros system that includes a simple script to install on Hard Disc; we plan to distribute also another LiveCD based on Morphix during this week to show the users that we can have more than one LiveCD and because the work has been done anyway.

The distributed version is based on a snapshot of Sarge from last month, but for the next academic year we will distribute a newer version based on the released Debian Sarge, this time with a debian-installer CD that can be used to install the standalone version (the current LiveCD), a simple classroom server and the classroom clients (of course the LiveCD will also be updated, and if I manage to have time to do it, there will also be one Live system based on debian-installer, similar to the Ubuntu LiveCD, but probably using unionfs).

On the Congress I've learnt some things that have surprised me:

• As far as I know, the distribution has been very well received by the teachers; the people that went to the Congress received a copy of the LiveCD and a User Manual written by two of my co-workers and a lot of them told me that the system looked good and they liked it (for the ones that don't know it, it's simply a selection of Sarge packages running on a GNOME 2.8 desktop). Why has this surprised me? Well, because everybody critiziced the project a lot last year and I thought they will do it again this year, but probably the LiveCD has left them happy for now.

• Normal users don't care about how the system is built, they only care about it's look and feel and about functionality. That could seem obvious, but I dislike how customizations are done now (it was meant to be a temporary way to do it, but it has been the one distributed, at least for now) and always thought that the system was going to be criticized by how it was implemented, but I doubt that anybody cares.

• Don't over engineer; our distribution is aimed at Primary and Secondary Schools, and when we started to think about it we followed the ideas behind Skolelinux/Debian-edu and defined a Classroom Model to be implemented on the schools, but after testing on about 10 schools we've had problems with it and have not been able to build or select a set of tools to administer the full model.

  Anyway, the biggest problem is that we were solving a problem that the teachers don't have, as, at least on primary schools, the people is not from the Computer Science field, and they don't know how to use the facilities we were giving them.

  After thinking and talking about this issues we've arrived to a compromise for the September edition of the distribution; this year we will provide a light version of the classroom server with a minimum set of services (probably only a dhcp server, a proxy and thin clients support) and configuration options and will continue testing the full classroom model only on some schools, as we won't be able to solve all problems if everybody starts to use the full model, we and our users have to develop and learn step by step.

• Cooperation on free software projects; I'm preparing a paper for a Congress about my ideas of how people cooperates. I don't know why, but it seems that for all the free software projects everybody says that needs the code to cooperate, but later nobody does if it means effort from their part.

  In fact, when someone asked how to cooperate on LliureX I redirected them to the Custom Debian Distributions lists, but I have not seen anyone on the list or on the irc channels. Let's hope that now that the distribution is out we will at least get some user cooperation in the form of useful bug reports (if we do, we will work as a bridge between them and the BTS if they are not able to do it directly).

Well, that's enough for today, tomorrow I'll talk about the CDD Development Camp we celebrated inside the Congress.

Posted Tue 10 May 2005 00:46:49 CEST

Who's the man?

Yesterday I got a SPAM mail with a from line that had the name of an old friend of mine that I have not seen for years, so I searched for him on google.

In Spain we have two surnames, but the mail I got had only a name and a surname; looking for that gave me a lot of results, but as I remembered both surnames of my friend, I searched again using a quoted string with his name and both surnames. That time I found four or five matches that I'm sure are related to him, but no address or anything useful to find him.

Then I could have left it at that, but I did something everybody does when first tries google: I searched for my name (name and two surnames, quoted) and I found a lot of matches (more than 3500 results) and started to look at them (after a quick look there were only 22 google pages).

It was curious to look at the results, I found a lot of old messages posted to mailing lists years ago, references to an HTML manual I wrote back in 1996, contributions to projects I haven't used for years and so on.

But the best finding I did was an article titled Social Networks From Free/Open Source Developer Weblogs. I have not found the way the author did his initial calculus about who was the man, but he found my name on his first try, so it has to be bogus in some way (in fact the article says that I have a lot of references to external sites on my blog, but that's simply not true, at least I'm sure I'm not the one with more external references, maybe the test was done with the output of only one day?).

Anyway, it was funny, but it's sad to know that I'll probably won't be the man any longer, as I can be removed from Planet Debian as Ian Murdock has been because I'm a real sinner:

• I've posted messages about Custom and Derived Debian Distributions,
• I've announced meetings related to CDD and to a derived distribution,
• I've said I'll use Debian instead of Ubuntu and that I don't like their Customization Model.

And a lot of other things I'm sure I've done or written without knowing...

It's sad to see this things happen on Debian, I hope it gets fixed ASAP (BTW, I would prefer to add Ian again, instead of removing to almost everybody else... ;)

Posted Tue 03 May 2005 00:07:09 CEST