Claudio Saavedra

claudio@codemonkey.cl

Wed 2012/Feb/08

• Si la lluvia llega hasta aquí
  Voy a limitarme a vivir.
  Mojaré mis alas como el árbol o el ángel
  o quizás muera de pena.
  Luis Alberto Spinetta — Canción para los días de la vida

  Thank you for everything, Flaco.

Thu 2011/Oct/06

• Most of us who work in technology, secretly wish that one day, something we've created will change the world in a positive way, or that we will be able to look back at some point and realize that we've contributed somehow to make this world a better place. For many of us, this is the driving force that put us in this field in the first place, even when we rarely admit it to each other, let alone to anyone else.

  Some of us get to achieve it, one way or another. In an anonymous way, most likely in the form of one single link in a chain of events that, individually, might seem insignificant, but altogether, represent the continuous and dynamic steering of human progress. Our names will not be remembered, neither will our individual contributions, but they will be there for others to build upon, one link at the time, one step after another.

  And then there are those who manage to envision that things are possible in ways that would be unthinkable for the rest of us, and not only that, strive to make them happen. They don't work alone and rely on others, that's certain, yet it's their unique inspiration, persistence, and the exceptional love for what they do what motivates others to flock along them and help them change the world. Steve Jobs was probably one of the most remarkable examples in the latest times of this rare but wonderful people, and we've been lucky to be challenged with his contributions to technology. I am not sure whether being in this industry would be so challenging and exciting as it is, if he hadn't been around.

Sat 2011/Sep/24

• After three years in Finland, I finally spent a weekend in a traditional mökki, with wood stove sauna, makkara, mushroom picking, midnight drunken cold-lake skinny dipping, rowing, and getting up with dawn for the sole purpose of getting gems like this one:

  

  Since it was the weekend of el dieciocho, I made some pisco sour, too.

Wed 2011/Sep/21

• Let's say, you have a product that relies on a free software platform. Let's say, you want to add a particular feature to that product for differentiation, but you know that the free software community is not very keen of your practices of keeping code in-house. So you want to give back, at least to avoid some criticism. How to make it so, that the feature is still exclusive to your new product?

  Well, it's very easy. Wait until the free software platform where you added that feature is already in code freeze, and only then do a code drop in their bugzilla. That way, you make sure that they won't be releasing it until at least 6 months after your product is already on the market. Touché.

  Cynicism in this entry is for free and any resemblance with reality is merely coincidental and should not be taken very seriously.

Sat 2011/Aug/06

• Several years later, back in one of my favorite cities, together with my favorite people, to celebrate our favorite project:

  

  Yesterday, Igalia hosted the Desktop Summit pre-registration event at the übercool c-base. It was nice to see so many good old friends again. It already feels it's gonna be a wonderful week.

Tue 2011/Apr/26

• It took longer than I wanted, but it finally happened. Over the weekend I managed to fix the idiotic bits that were keeping the MeeGo IM framework from working with GTK+ applications in MeeGo. Raymond Liu merged my patches upstream and hopefully this will make it into MeeGo 1.2. There are still some rough edges and things to improve but at least now input will work.

  A kind thank you goes to Michael Hasselmann and Jon Nordby whose patience and help have been extremely valuable all along the way.

Thu 2011/Apr/07

• It's finally here! GNOME 3 is for you! Enjoy it!

  

Mon 2011/Feb/28

• Together with the next version of the Eye of GNOME, the oldest open bug to date (coming from 2002) will be finally fixed. This bug, about adding a copy action to the Edit menu, somehow got unattended and slipped between all the other features that we and the previous maintainers of eog have been working on during the last 9 years.

  This, until the last days of 2010. Then, out of the blue, we received in bugzilla a patch coming from Adrian Hands, implementing this feature. Felix had a look at it, the usual way, and seeing that it was almost there he pushed it to the master branch and resolved the bug fixed. We were happy to see this long requested feature finally added, but the full story would not unveil itself until a few weeks ago, when Ian Hands, son of Adrian, dropped by in bugzilla to let us know that his father had passed away. He had ALS and one of the last things he did, by means of a Morse-code mouse and when he was almost unable to control the computer anymore, was to write the aforementioned patch and to attach it in bugzilla. And about two months later, he would pass away.

  If you want, you can read Ian's message, which is very touching to say the least. I talked to him privately and he was open to share this story with the GNOME community, for which I am grateful, so here you have it. I believe that there are many things to learn out of this, not only for each one of us at a personal level, but also at the community level. In the rush of the industry we've chosen to work on, sometimes we forget that there are people behind the patches, emails, and lines of chat that we exchange every day, and that behind each one of us there are different stories, motivations, and feelings that make us to actually be here, right now, doing this. How can we, as a community, make sure that we don't forget that the main reason why we're here in the end is to deliver something for people? That we are here because of people? I don't have the answer but, for certain, knowing what Adrian did for eog brings me back to earth from my bubble, at least for a while, and makes me feel proud to be part of a world where, if we don't forget about it, people like Adrian, you, or me, can make a difference.

  Thank you, Adrian, for this wonderful gift.

Thu 2011/Feb/17

• So, now I am a Finnish resident. It took around a year of paperwork to get the permit but it finally happened and I got a self-employment work permit. So I can now officially move from Spain and stop being in the Spanish-resident-but-in-Finland limbo.

  All in all, I am amazed at the Finnish way of doing things. It took time, yes, but their willingness to get the stuff done and not to put ridiculous obstacles in the way is remarkable. Also, their good faith in foreigners is something I never saw before. In order to get a self-employment working permit, I had to submit a complete business plan, including sales and profitability estimations. Seeing that the numbers were sound and the business would be profitable, they just saw no reason why the permit couldn't be granted, so they just granted it. I wonder whether there are many other developed countries where self-employment permits are granted to foreigners just when they could be, but I don't think there are that many. I've heard bad things about the US on this regard, for instance.

  What comes now is getting started with my one-man business. That way I will continue doing cool stuff with Igalia but with all my life going on in Finland, as it's been for some time already anyway. It's a great thing to be part of a company where this kind of things are possible.

  By now, you start wondering why on earth would I want to stay in Finland? Well, if you should know, you would know already, after all, it's been two years. If you don't, you can just keep wondering.

Thu 2011/Feb/10

• I had a post pending since last week, but a flu put me down and lagged me behind the world.

  Last week Carlos and I started working in the GTK+/MeeGo integration project. He already wrote about his ongoing work on the pannable area and has received very interesting feedback. Thanks to everyone for keeping an eye on it.

  From my side, I spent the week getting a recent image of the Handset SDK up and running, and getting a grasp of the current Input Method status in MeeGo. For this, Michael Hasselmann and Jon Nordby have been more than really helpful. I met Jon in Brussels during FOSDEM and he was kind to put me up to date to what Michael and he believe are the most relevant points to take into account to get a good IM integration. Thank you, guys.

  In a nutshell, one of the integration points for GTK+ applications in MeeGo is the Input Context that needs to communicate, through DBus, with the IM UI Server. There are currently two implementations out there, targetting the MeeGo 1.1 platform, but the DBus interfaces have changed since then. Trying to get the parts to agree, have one single GTK+ input context for MeeGo, and updating the DBus interfaces seems the most logical starting point for this side of the project, so it's what I'll be doing now that I'm not going to die anymore. There are, of course, other parts that also need to be worked on (related to the UI part of the IM), but we'll talk about that later.

Sun 2011/Jan/30

• Last October, I went to Chile in holidays to spend some time with my family. I had not visited the place for almost two years, so I was very excited about the travel. It was a beautiful time, albeit short, with a lovely spring, and also an occasion to see first-hand the consequences of the February earthquake. More than seven months later, there was still plenty to experience, including a couple of heavy tremors in the middle of the night waking me up, with the fear only a person who wasn't there for the earthquake and its subsequent aftershocks can experience.

  

  My visit coincidentally happened at the same time than workers from the biggest drugstore chain were on strike because of highly unfair and abusive salary conditions. This didn't make it to the mainstream media, not even after the strike was over, thanks to the influence a big chain, and all the money they can inject in the media in the way of advertisement, can have.

  Now that my sister lives in Concepción, I took the chance to visit her at the same time than the Día GNOME took place there. We walked around the city and I got to see some of the remains of the Alto Rio building, the only one that completely collapsed during the quake, killing a couple dozens of people. The building was brand new and most of the people who died there had just moved in. If there weren't more casualties, it was only because many apartments were not inhabited yet.

  

  The Día GNOME was a nice event, a bit too rushy to my taste, but it was nice to catch up with plenty of old pals and to meet the new ones who are driving all the community efforts nowadays. Thanks to all of them and also to the GNOME Foundation for making it possible.

  

  When I was there, I had the chance to attend the Rush concert at the Estadio Nacional. I thought that I wouldn't see the band ever and this presented itself as a unique opportunity, that I couldn't resist. Funnily enough, later it was unveiled that they will be playing in Finland later this year, so I got tickets for the concert here as well. Strangely, tickets for the concert in Chile were more expensive than for the one in Finland, even when Finland is a country where people have a much higher purchasing power. I guess we can blame economic inequality for that.

  

  On the culinary side of things, I can say that all my efforts on carrying a healthy diet with mostly organic food, high in vegetables, and low in fats and meats went to hell during the weeks there. Empanadas, chacareros, churrascos, mechadas, asados, choripanes, lomitos, and similar delicatessen took me back to a quite relaxed diet, from which I still can't recover. Also, by the time I visited Chile I had quit coffee and caffeine in general for around three months, but I couldn't help it going back to it (although now I drink coffee only once every other day or so).

  In any case, I enjoyed the time there a lot. Any feelings of being a stranger at home lasted for the first days only and soon I was feeling comfortable again. Coming back to the northern winter wasn't easy but as they say, home is there, where someone is waiting for you.

  I made quite some pics, but not that many anyway since I didn't feel that confident to carry the camera around all the time. However, a handful of them are in the corresponding flickr set, in case you are curious.

Wed 2011/Jan/19

• As it was yesterday unveiled in the GNOME Foundation blog, I'm glad to announce that Igalia is the selected bidder for the GTK+/MeeGo integration project.

  Carlos and I will spend the next months trying to bring the best from the Hildon user experience to upstream GTK+, to make sure that the good old Maemo applications can be easily ported to GTK+ and that GTK+ benefits from all the years of work that went into Hildon and Maemo-GTK+, improving this way its support for mobile applications and environments.

  Also, to ensure a good integration of GTK+ applications into the MeeGo Handset platform, we will need to make sure that the platform's window manager works properly with GTK+ windows and to get one of the existing input method bridges to work properly with upstream GTK+.

  As we want to make sure that we our work is well aligned with the interests of both the MeeGo Handset and the GNOME Mobile communities, we will most likely be settling in #gtk+ in gimp.net and hanging around in other related channels. Also, we'll be publishing updates in our blogs. Any feedback you can have will surely improve our results.

  Last but no least, thanks a lot to the GNOME Foundation for trusting us this task.

• Once again, I'll be attending FOSDEM this year thanks to the kind support of Igalia. I wasn't planning, though, to be in the GNOME Beers event, but now that I heard that the venue will be smoke free, I have changed my mind.

  

Thu 2010/Sep/23

• This is a last call for the people interested in attending the GTK+ hackfest in A Coruña, in October. Please sign up at latest tomorrow and include your arrival and departure dates. Only that way we'll be able to book the rooms for you. Afterwards, you'd be left to the mercy of the hotels in the city. This has been a public announcement courtesy of your fellow hacker.

Thu 2010/Aug/05

• Over the last days, I ported eog to use libpeas for its plugin engine. If you are a plugin developer or are interested in extending eog through plugins (Iván, I'm looking at you), you might want to follow up this thread.

Fri 2010/Jul/30

• It is not without surprise that, with an increasing frequency, people keep confusing me with Garnacho and the other way around. We have been struggling with this, since despite the similarities (both being Spanish speakers, long haired, using a beard most of the time, and being known for playing guitar at GUADEC), we consider a few facts to be good enough for people to be able to distinguish between us. So here it is a rule of thumb for all of you who are still confused about who is who.

  The guy with glasses and the camera is Claudio; the one without glasses nor camera is Garnacho.

  To help you get the rule straight, here is a picture that Berto made of us during the party yesterday.

  

Thu 2010/Jul/22

• I'll be attending GUADEC again this year, arriving on Sunday to Den Haag. I'm specially glad because of the bunch of Chilean friends that will be coming, allowing for some catching up on how things have been in the country during the recent time.

  I'm also glad because Berto and I will be taking part on the GNOME developer training of Monday and Tuesday. We've been preparing a really nice session and I hope it will be productive and enjoyable for all the participants.

  Last and not least, this will mark my 4th time in the Netherlands (third in less than a year) and the second in Den Haag, so I'm pretty excited about getting more acquaintance with the place. After having been in the Museé d'Orsay last week, I'm also tempted to have a quick escape to Amsterdam for a visit to the Van Gogh Museum. Let's see what happens.

  

Tue 2010/Jun/01

• I've pushed support for localization in mafw-lastfm's git repository. There are very little strings, so it should be quick to translate. The pot file is here and I already translated it to Spanish. If you have some spare time, please go ahead and translate it to your language. Feel free to send me the translations directly, but to avoid collisions, I'd recommend using bugzilla.

  I also implemented on-disk cache during the last days. This is something that was really missing from the scrobbler, so I plan to make a release pretty soon including this.

Wed 2010/May/26

• Now that the long awaited PR1.2 release of Maemo 5 is out on the wild, I thought it would be interesting to share some of the cool improvements that you'll see all over Maemo 5, courtesy of my fellow hackers in the toolkit and input methods teams, including yours truly.

  • Live search is everywhere. If you see a GtkTreeView, just type to filter items. If it doesn't work, feel free to file a bug against the application not using our wonderful HildonLiveSearch.

  • Panning and selection in textviews are no longer mutually exclusive. You can now just press Shift and drag your finger to select text. This works in both GtkTextView and GtkHTML widgets inside HildonPannableArea. Release and drag to pan again.

  • HildonTouchSelectorEntry does now smart matching, allowing for a more flexible search of items already in the list.

  • A long-press in the hardware keyboard will give the corresponding symbol. This is configurable in GConf for the minority who might not like it.

  • The virtual keyboard has been modernized completely. Say goodbye to the old layout coming from the old times.

  • Uncountable improvements and bug fixes in the support of the portrait mode, specially in dialogs.

  • Many more fixes that you'll probably won't notice directly, but hopefully will make your overall user experience much better.

  Hope you'll enjoy our work!

Tue 2010/May/18

• Joaquim has written about the internship oportunities in Igalia for this summer. Have a look at them if you'd like to try Pulpo á Feira, hack in something fun, and meet great people this summer.

Mon 2010/May/17

• I had been using Nokia Sports Tracker to keep track of my running activities. This was handy when I was using the Sports Tracker software for symbian in a Nokia N95 and uploading to the service was trivial. Now that the N95 I had is defunct and I actually use the N900 and eCoach, it's not that handy anymore.

  Furthermore, a bug in either eCoach or the Sports Tracker website is making it a less interesting combination – sessions imported manually from the gpx file won't be plotted in the map. No idea why and not much intention to find out the reason.

  So, dear lazy web, is there any other recommendable website that can be used to keep track of training sessions online? Importing from a gpx file, plotting routes, and so on, would be the most desirable features. A lot of fellow geek runners using it to show off would be a plus.

  Answers to my email please. I promise to be nice and follow up with what people suggest.

Sat 2010/May/08

• Today is the Helsinki Half Marathon. Despite how much I enjoyed running it last year and that I really wanted to do it again, I'm not doing it this year.

  The main reason is that, even when I got proper winter equipment for running in the cold during the last months of winter, I wasn't expecting weather to constantly be under –10° C. That, together with having moved out from Helsinki's downtown and the comfort of having Töölönlahti around the corner, and having started to regularly swim again, didn't help me to get started training. Probably next year I'll give it a try.

  But on the upside, I'm quite happy with what swimming has brought to my life. I never learned to swim properly when I was a kid. In fact, when I was living in Dresden and took a Schwimmen zur Konditionierung class early on Mondays, it was a complete disaster. I could barely cross the 50m swimming pool at Freiberger Platz without feeling like dying and it was hard to keep myself going frequently. I was feeling completely awful and would rather skip it than ridicule myself.

  Situation has improved a lot since I started to regularly swim, in September last year. At the beginning, the situation wasn't much better than back in Germany. However (and I think that improved stamina thanks to running was crucial on this), I could do much better this time. By now, I'm doing about 3x500m once or twice a week. I've said goodbye to back pain, I feel way fitter, and all this without any joint pain, which is a pleasure hard to enjoy when running.

  Anyway, that doesn't mean that I don't run at all. For instance, on one of my last trips to A Coruña I ran around the city by it's seaside. Really cool place to run.

Thu 2010/Apr/22

• Now that I'm working from home and Igalia was kind to provide me with, among other things, a cute SyncMaster XL2370, I've been experiencing with different display setups, trying to find something that's most comfortable for me while working. I came to the conclusion that having separate X screens (the LCD one and the laptop one) is the best for me, since it allows me to run secondary tasks (like building the desktop or watching the news) without cluttering my primary display.

  Unfortunately, an annoying bug was making gnome-settings-daemon die every time I hit one of the volume keys while hovering the pointer in the secondary display. It turned out to be a bug in GTK+ that was easy to fix. Amusingly, it's exposed very easily with a multi-head setup, however it was present since ages. This makes me wonder whether people actually use multi-head setups at all or I am the only freak.

• On a similar note, Evolution was crashing like crazy on me at random intervals. I got fed up with this so I started using it under gdb for a while to try to get a stacktrace of the issue. It took a couple of days before it crashed and I could get a decent stacktrace. This time, it seems to be another very evident bug in evolution-data-server, in which it seems I am the only one to hit a code path using a memory address out of bounds. Patch seems to be trivial but I haven't tested it.

• All that being said, I start to miss hacking on the desktop instead of a phone.

Thu 2010/Mar/04

• Now that things have settled down a bit in Chile, I can write about how Saturday's earthquake has affected my family and friends.

• First of all, all my family, friends, and people I know are fine. Some material losses, in different degree, affected to many of them, but that's about it. A huge thanks to all the people who one way or another helped me to find a way to communicate with my family and all of those who showed their support and concern. By now, I can communicate directly with all of them without any problems.

• For good or bad, one of my sisters was in Viña del Mar on Saturday and Catalina, the youngest, was with my father in Santiago. That means that the quake found my mother alone in Talca, one of the cities that suffered the most with the earthquake. Nothing major happened to her house nor the neighborhood where she lives. The same can't be told about most of downtown Talca. She is still very sensitive about the situation, like most of the people in the area. Sisters didn't manage to travel to Talca until yesterday but, at last, they are all reunited and well communicated with me.

• Unfortunately, my great-aunt's house in the downtown of Talca collapsed. She and her family were able to leave the place in time but, as many of the old adobe houses in the area, the house couldn't resist at all. I haven't had further updates on their status but I can imagine their suffering right now.

• The same happened with the student-house where Catalina rents a room in Concepción. Since the semester hadn't started yet, only the elderly landlady was there and, according to my sister, she was rescued right in time out of a window before the old house collapsed. We'll need to find a new place for my sister and replace the things she lost, but luckily that's about it. Glad that no one got hurt; at the same time sad for all of those whose luck wasn't the same.

• Needless to say, my email at codemonkey.cl is down until further notice, since the server is (or was?) in Talca. You can still reach me through my GNOME or Igalia email addresses, though.

Sat 2010/Feb/27

• An earthquake of magnitude 8.8 striked the offshore of Maule, in Chile 03:34:17 AM local time.

• Tsunami warning and watch in effect for Chile and Perú, due to the characteristics of the earthquake. Tsunami watch in effect for Ecuador.

• Further updates on the tsunami warnings.

• Live streaming from TVN with news. Please give the link to your Chilean friends abroad.

• CNN is streaming the live coverage from Canal 13 as well as their own coverage.

• After hours, finally managed to get news from my closest family members. Besides the shock and fear, they are all fine. Wishing for the best for everyone.

• Calling to Chile right now is almost impossible. I recommend everyone trying to reach friends and family to contact someone online in Chile and ask them to call. It is much easier to call from near areas than long distance and of course international calls.

Wed 2010/Feb/17

• By the end of January, I started to feel an annoying pain in my right hand, starting somewhere in the thumb and moving through the wrist on to the arm. Pain was mild, but enough to scare me, so I made a visit to the doctor (when I finally discovered that terveysasema was the word I was looking for).

  The doctor at the Finnish health center diagnosed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Something that I didn't really believe in the first place, since she didn't run any specific tests and just checked the inflammation and my story. Also, it is known that CTS is usually misdiagnosed to people with this type of pain and coming from the IT industry.

  Later, I made a new visit to the doctor while I was in A Coruña, who after performing a few basic tests came to the conclusion that it wasn't CTS at all, but some sort of Repetitive Stress Injury. A couple of weeks in a sick leave, away from the keyboard, the phone, and guitar, and I should be fine.

  These weeks were pretty frustrating on the one hand [1], but on the other hand gave me some time I needed for some tasks more related to my personal life, so in the end it wasn't so bad.

  Now pain is mostly gone, and I've changed the way I type to something less stressful. I still need to get used to this and get back to speed with my work.

  [1] no pun intended.

• FOSDEM was really cool. It was a good motivation to stay away from the laptop for several days and allow the hand to rest. Talks were as cool as one can imagine, I met many of the good old friends and made a few new ones. But anyway, isn't that the usual thing at conferences?

  I guess it's better, as usual, to let the pictures speak.

  

• It's been an unusually snowy winter in southern Finland. As a proof of the spring coming soonish, it's already possible to see bicycles starting to bloom in the snow fields:

  

Wed 2010/Jan/20

• After spending the first week of February in A Coruña, for Igalia's 1st Assembly Meeting of the year, I'll bounce to Brussels to attend FOSDEM. Igalia was kind enough to sponsor me this year even when I plan to just attend the talks and catch up with the people.

  

  On a related note, I noticed a bit too late that Pat Metheny will be playing in Brussels one day after I leave the city. It's a pity I didn't notice earlier, since he is touring Europe but won't visit Helsinki.

• During the weekend, I finally met Xan after his trip to A Coruña for the WebkitGTK+ hackfest. This means that I finally received my christmas gift from Igalia: a shinny N900.

  The nicest part of this present is that it doesn't come in a top-down manner as in most companies, but from the Assembly members. Meaning, we all decided if we wanted to give ourselves a present and what.

• mafw-lastfm is doing quite well. Even when the project is still in extras-devel only, the userbase seems to be growing. I received some patches and ideas from Felipe Contreras, and I think that a simple gobject based library for scrobbling will come out of this.

  It's also nice to see that some of the users went ahead and created a last.fm group.

Sat 2010/Jan/02

• Danielle, you are working around this known maemo GTK+ bug, which will be fixed any time when the backported upstream GTK+ fix is released by Nokia.

Tue 2009/Dec/29

• Last night, around 3am, while I was still awake, the fire alarm in the building got activated. I was already thinking it had to be a false positive (it happened once at least since I live here), but anyway quickly grabbed my jacket and phone, in order to evacuate the place. When I was reaching the third floor, the smoke made evident that it was not a false positive: something was on fire, and it was downstairs.

  The feeling of knowing that you are in an upper floor of the place where something (that you can't really see) is on fire, is a bit scary, so to say. Anyway, when I was reaching the first floor I noticed that the fire was coming from inside the store located in a big portion of the floor (Tarjoustalo, for the finns reading this). Something was on fire inside, and luckily at a good distance of the gate I was using, so I had no problem to leave the place, call 112, and wait for the firemen and police to appear.

  A few hours later, the fire was controlled. I read this morning in Helsingin Sanomat that the fire was extinguished by the fire sprinklers in the store, and most of the damage was caused by the smoke and water accumulated. For me, only a good fright, a bit of smoke inside the flat, and a couple of hours waiting outside in the cold. Next time, I will grab the scarf and gloves, even if I think it's a false positive.

  

Go backward in time to December 2009.