Claudio Saavedra

csaavedra@gnome.org

Go forward in time to November 2005.

Mon 2005/Oct/31
  • Today playing with hugin I did this beautiful panoramical view of my balcony:

    I really liked this hugin software.

  • Today I realized that my swap was fucked up. Thanks to Juan Carlos for his valuable help on getting it up once again.

  • My new desktop friend:

Sat 2005/Oct/29
  • The Dresden Frauenkirche is a protestant church in the center of the Altstadt of the city, built during the years between 1726 and 1743. During the bombing of Dresden in the WW2, the 13th February 1945, this icon of the European baroque architecture was completely destroyed.

    Only in 1994, the reconstruction of this church began. Funding from all over the world were received and the work has been carefully made to bring the Frauenkirche the characteristics that had before the war.

    When the ruins were removed, every reusable piece were carefully cataloged, in order to put it in his place once again. The original plans were used, together with modern technology to allow an almost perfect reconstruction. The reusable material pieces are recognizable when looking at the church, because of their darkest color. An incredible work of the guys who did the reconstruction.

    Tomorrow, after 12 years of work, the Frauenkirche will be opened once again. Dresden is completely happy and it is expected that a lot of tourists will come to the city to visit this incredible piece of history. The celebrations begin together with the Reformationstag, a protestant celebration in Saxony, and will go until the 1st November.

    Of course, I'll be there tomorrow.

Fri 2005/Oct/28
Thu 2005/Oct/27
  • Today I've learned to write signals for GObject derived classes with help from Mathieu Lacage GObject tutorial. It is easier than I thought and really rules.

    I am using signals to clean a little the code between objects in gyrus and make it a little bit more generic.

    In the past days I've removed the dependence of gyrus on BonoboUI. It wasn't needed at all. Need to clean a little some warnings before making the commit.

Mon 2005/Oct/24
  • Took the time to configure the kernel module for my Wireless card. With NdisWrapper and the proprietary Windows driver it wasn't so hard to get on. Now I need an access point to see if really works.

    After having it working, I realized of the existence of a guide to configure it in Debian Sarge. Next time I'll read more before getting hands in keyboard and bothering Juan Carlos.

  • Congratulations Alejandro and Pamela! Am really happy to read this good new guys!

Sun 2005/Oct/23
  • The first uni weeks have been interesting. Everything is totally different to what I was used in the Facultad, and I think I like it.

    The first lecture that I attended was the Logik I one. This lecture is intended for first semester students so it is very light. The interesting is the number of students. Audimax is the biggest auditorium in the TU-Dresden and it is full. I think that the number of students attending Logik I this semester is about 1.000. It is a big number for what I was used in Chile.

    On the other hand, Funktionale Programmierung und Typentheorie, has been really funny. I have started learning the fundamentals of Lambda Calculus and I've enjoyed it a lot. It calls my attention that the students are much more proactive than what I know from Chile -- in the first exercise class almost everyone in the room had the exercises previously solved, something that I never saw in Chile in the courses that I assisted.

    Complexity Theory hasn't started yet, for some reason that I don't know. I am thrilled with this lecture because I know how complex this topic can be.

    The only real problem right now is my lack of a complete German vocabulary that would allow me, for example, to write down a proof as formal as I would do it in Spanish or English. I have scratched books and internet looking for solved problems in Lambda Calculus, structural induction, and recursive functions definitions in order to gain the vocabulary that I need but it hasn't been easy. I worked a lot during the week in that but don't feel like I have achieved enough. Time will say.

    Going back to differences, another one is that there is no quota for books in the library. You can take as many as you need (or as many as you can carry). That is positive because you are not limited to a couple of resources in order to study properly (Yes, I know, in Chile there is less money invested in education, but I never thought that anywhere in space someone wouldn't have quota in the library).

Tue 2005/Oct/18
  • When trying to build GNOME from the CVS sources with JHBuild, many problems arise because of inexperience or incompatibility with the linux distribution in question. Most of those problems (unless you're lucky enough to find a exciting one to be reported and fixed) have a workaround documented, and it is not needed to go asking for help on irc and mailing lists. So, here is a little list of resources for people interested in building GNOME for fun, or maybe to start contributing.

  • Have fun with GNOME!

Mon 2005/Oct/17
  • So, as it was supposed to be, my first day swimming was a complete disaster. I don't have a good condition, and the years without swimming showed that I need to train more if I want to archieve something. Crossing the 50 mts. pool three times is not something to be proud.

    Also, the teacher pointed me that I need to improve my technique. Obviously: I don't have a technique :-D. I hope this will get better with time, but I need to make some other sports regularly otherwise, I won't enjoy swimming.

Sun 2005/Oct/16
  • Next October 29th will have place the 3rd version of the Linux-Info-Tag in the TU Dresden. There will be top presentations, workshops, and stands for the most important Free Software and Open Source projects, including GNOME, Debian, KDE and PostgreSQL.

    I'll be hanging around and maybe (if I don't panic due to my still poor computer oriented german knowledge) I'll be helping to the GNOME Deutschland e.V. guys with the GNOME stand. So, if someone in the Saxony area reads this activity log, come to Dresden and join us!

    Sa., 29.10.2005: 3. Linux-Info-Tag Dresden

Thu 2005/Oct/13
Tue 2005/Oct/11
  • So I've finally decided what to do this semester. This is my week planning:

    Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri
    0 Schwimmen zur
    Konditionierung
    1
    2 Security and
    Cryptography
    Complexity
    Theory (old site)
    3 Security and
    Cryptography
    4 Deutsch Logik I Funktionale Progr.
    und Typtheorie
    5 Deutsch
    6
    7

    Two lectures in english and two in german. Also, Complexity Theory is lectured for a magister program, so I guess it will be very hard, but funny too.

    It has to be noticed that the swimming class begins at 6:00. It will be very funny to go swimming in Winter that early. Probably I'll hate myself for that in a couple of months, but I prefeer to be sure that I won't loose any other activity because of sport.

  • Downloaded the documentation of gnutls. As the tar file didn't contain a directory, I got a lot of HTML files all over my Downloads directory. Shit.

    But fortunately, I came up with a clever solution to that problem:

    claudio@dijkstra:~/Desktop/Downloads$ for i in `tar zxvf gnutls.html_node.tar.gz`; do rm $i; done

Mon 2005/Oct/10
  • In Chile, to be accepted in a public university, the students must give a test called Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU), on topics like maths, spanish, history, and basic sciences. This test has place every December and it produces panic to the vast majority of the students.

    IIRC, this year is the first time the students can sign on for the test using the web. The governmental organism responsible of the whole process is the DEMRE, who depends of the well known and respected Universidad de Chile.

    Probably because of ignorance or third parties interests, the web inscription system that they have developed runs only on Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or above. I tried myself to sign up and received this nice message:

    Of course, many students users of other browsers and specially those who doesnt use MS Windows, are having problems to sign up in the PSU, because this restrictive condition. One of them, wrote a letter to the DEMRE after having discussions with them for this matter, and they wrote him back saying a lot of lies about the alternative operating systems and browsers, to justify their decision.

    If you live in Chile, please read those links and make your own conclusions.

Sun 2005/Oct/09
  • During the last weeks, I've been bored of cooking always the same, so today I cooked "Pollo Arvejado" thanks to a couple of recepts that I've found in the web. In spite of not having onions and wine, I have to say that it tasted really good.

    I am not bad in the kitchen, since I'm in Germany I've been trying some cooking and I've learnt a lot. My mother would be proud.

  • In other less tasting news, gyrus made its way into Debian Unstable. So, our fellow debian users, go now and apt-get install gyrus!

  • This udev bug stoped me to see Trois coleurs: Bleu.

Sat 2005/Oct/08
  • The travel to Prague was full of funny details, It couldn't be another way. I try to sumarise the travel and stay there.

    First of all, we were supposed to meet on Thursday in Dresden Hauptbahnhof, but it wasn't 100% clearly defined where in the Hauptbahnohf. So even when we were all punctually there, we lost the train because we had no idea where the train was supposed to stop. Nice.

    So had to pay extra cash to buy another tickets for another train, later. Also, we had to wait 2 hours to leave Dresden. But that is not all, there are still more.

    When we were about to cross the german border to enter Czech Republic, the border police jumped in the train. They needed to check our passports because even when Czech R. is in the EU, their borderlines are still not open to the other countries in the EU.

    So, one of us (protecting name here) forgot his passport in Dresden, so he had to leave the train in Bad Schandau, the last train stop just 10 kms. before the border, and go back to his house, pick up the passport and take another train to Prague. Obviously he didn't want to miss the days in Prague.

    Once in Prague we needed a hostel, we had to walk with our luggage a for about one hour just to finally decide to stay in a hostel that's beside the train station.

    And then... Prague.

    We stoped in a typical czech restaurant. I eated a meal that was giant, and included 1 liter beer. I have to say that Budweiser beer is incredible, but the one made in Czech. I never liked the Bud from USA, but this one is just amazing.

    Some of the guys didn't want to eat so were to the bar of the restaurant. Of course, there they got enchanted by the cheap beer, and drinked a particular beer with 10°. After a couple of bottles we had chileans drunks in Prague!.

    On friday, we visited almost every interesting corner in Prague. Staré Město, Malá Strana, Pražský hrad, etc. Just can't say how lovely Prague it is.

    During our walks in Prague we heard a lot of spanish speakers. Many of them were from Mexico, Spain, but we saw also chileans!. It is always funny to realise that there are chileans in every corner. One of the chileans we found is a girl who studies in Amsterdam and was making vacations on Prague. We were walking through the downtown, and suddenly she just heard one of us saying "¡puta que he gastado plata por la chucha!", and then she turned around and asked us "ustedes son chilenos, ¿verdad?".

    One of the beauties from Prague is the Pražský hrad (Prague Castle). It is really big and has a lot of interesting points, including the Katedrála sv. Víta (St. Vitus's Cathedral), that's just giant (in the second picture of this post you can see it up-left, even when the castle is several kilometers away from the point where I took the picture). The tower of the Cathedral is very tall, around 100 meters, and there is only one little spiral stairway without landings. The stairway is so little, that it is not easy to go up when someone goes down. Anyway, once in the top of the tower, you can have a beautiful and incredible view of the city. Amazing.

Thu 2005/Oct/06
  • Today I discovered that La Tercera has a RSS feed with their news. I don't know how long has been this way, but I'm happy to see this in a chilean news site.

Mon 2005/Oct/03
  • Extract from a chat with a hungarian friend:

    (19:23:01) Nór: ich verstehe msn nicht... ich kann 250kb/sec
    downloaden, aber es ist immer langsam
    (19:23:27) cl: nór die problem ist dass ich linux benützt

  • She says that the transfer from a file from her Windows computer to my linux laptop is too slow. She blames MSN Messenger, but I know that the problem is not 100% MSN Messenger.

    Unfortunatly, Gaim doesn't implement the MSN Messenger direct transfer method. It only transfers files using MSN servers, and that's obviously slow.

    Does anyone know if any other free software IM client implements direct transfers?

Sun 2005/Oct/02
  • If you like gyrus, but are not subscribed to the mailing list, then this can be of your interest.

  • The three days in Prague were just fabulous. Prague is a incredible city, no matter if it is day or night. Always there are things that can fascinate you.

    Starting for the cost of a beer. In a Dresden bar, a 0.5 l. beer costs aprox. 2.5 €. In Prague, it costs only the equivalent to 1 €. And the Czech beer is as good as the german one.

    Women are incredible beautiful. Not only they look great, also they try to look better. It is not just the clothes, or the make up, also it is the way they walk, the way they look at you.

    The historical buildings are beautiful, and there are a lot of them. Bridges, castles, museums, etc. Incredible.

    I will post about it when I feel less impressed. In this state I can say nothing really interesting.

Go backwards in time to September 2005.

Sun 2005/Oct/02 18:42:29 +0200