Claudio Saavedra

csaavedra@gnome.org

Go forward in time to February 2006.

Sun 2006/Jan/29

  • Watched today Kontroll, a very nice and mystical Hungarian film about the work of ticket inspectors in the Budapest subway. It is kinda lovely and full of strange details; as the fact that it takes place completely in the underground. I really recommend it.

    It was really cool to see again some of the Budapest' metro stations and the never ending escalator in the Moskva Ter station. I wish I would have made some pics of it. Next time.

Sat 2006/Jan/28

  • I found an excellent paper describing the usage of monads in functional programming. It is excellently well structured and very easy to understand for people that is only familiar with the basics of functional programming, like me.

    Wadler, P. 1995. Monads for Functional Programming. In Advanced Functional Programming, First international Spring School on Advanced Functional Programming Techniques-Tutorial Text (May 24 - 30, 1995). J. Jeuring and E. Meijer, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 925. Springer-Verlag, London, 24-52.

Thu 2006/Jan/26
Sun 2006/Jan/22

  • Yesterday's Día GNOME Amor was very funny. There were not many people around, but all of them got their .jhbuildrc up and working, and also they understood how to deal with the missing packages and to use JHBuild properly.

    We set up a page in the Hispalinux wiki with instructions to build GNOME in Spanish. I hope this will be useful for all of those who weren't in the IRC yesterday, but who still want to build GNOME.

    Next week we will focus in finding easy-to-fix bugs and in explaining how to generate useful backtraces, reports, and patches. I will send an announce during the following days.

Wed 2006/Jan/18

  • Next Saturday in the #gnome-hispano channel of irc.gimp.org we will be running a GNOME Amor day. The main idea is to help people interested in learning to build GNOME from the sources using JHBuild, in order to start contributing to the code of the next 2.14 release.

    We will begin at 14:00 UTC -- that is at 8:00 in MX, 11:00 in CL, and 15:00 in ES. Being in the channel from the beginning is not a must, so people in MX can jump on the irc as soon as their hangovers allow them. :-)

    More info in the announce (in Spanish).

Mon 2006/Jan/16

  • The mails I've been sent during the weekend to my university e-mail are in a big queue somewhere, but not in my inbox. If someone wrote me an email during these days, please have patience and let's wait the university sysadmins to stop the fucking madness and start working for their real users.

  • I am happy for the Bachelet election as the Chilean president for the next four years. I have my doubts about her leadership capabilities (after having a great leader like Lagos anyone could be afraid) but I am sure that she will have a great team working with her.

    I fell really sad for some right wing people, who without a strong basis, start talking against the new elected president and yellow and threaten with holding the good work opportunities and the money, while speaking very ugly about the different-minded. I am sure they doesn't represent the real opinion of the right wing, and are only a minority, but this stupid, short minded, and antidemocratic minority is the one that keeps Chile afraid of having a right wing government.

  • Released libgnome and libgnomeui for the development GNOME release of Wednesday. Kjartan didn't have the time to do it before the deadline, so I offered my help.

    You know now who to blame if something went wrong.

Sun 2006/Jan/15

  • Three years ago, Eduardo «gato» Alquinta, voice, composer, and musician of Los Jaivas, died of a heart attack in La Herradura, a beach in Coquimbo. Time goes really fast, but not your memory, gato. We miss you.

    Article about gato's decease in LUN and in La Cuarta (both in Spanish).

Wed 2006/Jan/11

  • I can't believe it, but a guy made himself rich (German article) by selling pixels of his homepage. That's the most stupid, simple, and brilliant idea I've ever heard of.

Mon 2006/Jan/09

  • Yesterday I came back to Dresden. The two weeks were incredible, in spite of the bad weather (no more than 0° C and a lot of snow) and a little accident I had. I am sure that it will take me a little to get used to the old Dresden routine.

    I made a couple of posts while off-line, if you are interested in my new year's accident and other details of my travel, check them.

    Chain Bridge, Budapest

    Some of the things we did in Budapest that I forgot to post in time, are:

    • Went to a Tiziano exhibition in the Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts).

    • Watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in a cinema. As usual, I enjoyed the movie as I did the first time I watched it.

    • Went to a Kispál és a borz concert in the Budapest's Művészetek palotája (Palace of Arts). I enjoyed the performance even when Nór said that it wasn't really good. I believe her, she is the Kispál's expert.

    • Visited the Castle of Visegrád, a medieval castle in the top of a hill in the small village of Visegrád. Really beautiful.

    • Cooked Empanadas for the third time since I am in Europe. I am improving.

    • Learnt a lot of useful sentences in Hungarian. Even when almost every Hungarian speaks good German or English, it was helpful anyway.

    • A lot of pictures, of course.

    Princess and the Buda Castle, Budapest

    I hope to go back to Budapest in the summer or maybe before it. I think I'll never get tired of the city and the friendly Hungarians. Thank you all!

Mon 2006/Jan/02

  • New year's evening was really strange this year. I had an accident that ruined our party. If you care, keep on reading.

    Nór and I were invited to a party in Budapest to celebrate the new year's evening. The host was a math student and his math friends, so the night promised to have a lot of math discussion.

    Nóra and I made some Ponche, and everyone was delighted with the mix of white wine and peaches. It was really curious to see people not drinking Ponche but eating it. They were serving it in their glasses and using spoons to eat the peaches while drinking the wine. As every Ponche drinker knows, the main goal of drinking ponche is leaving the peaches until there is no more wine in the place, and then eat them, when they have absorbed all the possible alcohol. I explained that to many of the guys in the party and they were surprised.

    Everything before the 12:00 was exactly in the same way that would have been in Chile. A lot of expectation, some noise, drinking, and watching the clock in the TV. After 12:00, everything was different: No hugs, only kisses and cheers; they sang their national anthem really quietly; and the party continued as quietly as it was before midnight. Then, I felt a little homesick, because it didn't looked like a real new year party for me. I am used to the never ending hugs, the champagne loudly being opened exactly at midnight, a bunch of drunk guys singing our national anthem very excited and loudly, and then the never ending dancing including «Un año más» and «El galeón español». As I was the only Chilean present in the party, nothing of that was going to happen.

    But it wasn't a bad party at all, no sir. Everything was just different, and I tried to adapt to it and it was funny. We went outside to play with some fireworks, as it is legal to do it in the new year day, but one of the neighbors of the hosts appeared in her window at the third floor yellowing us that she was against that and that we should go inside and do not play with these things. Of course, I didn't understand a damn word of what she was saying, and to be honest, I didn't even realized that she was somewhere. Why should I? I wasn't the guy with the fireworks, I just went outside to watch.

    Then, this stupid-asshole-woman in the third floor took some stone or piece of something and threw it to us in the street. She hit me in the head with a 5 cm. ø shit. At the first moment, I was just feeling pain and was very angry and upset about it, and started looking around to try to understand what was going on. When I realized that someone hurt me in the head I told the others and they couldn't believe it. Apart of the pain, I was completely ok, but then, I realized that my head was bleeding a lot and we went back inside the house. I threw my beer bottle against a tree because I was terrible upset.

    I have to say that everyone in the party was very worried about me and treated me very kindly. They were really nice people and I was very sorry that this stupid thing happened to me and I was ruining their party. They were so lovely and worried that I was starting to feel uncomfortable, because I only wanted to be alone with Nór and have some peace. So, when my head stopped bleeding, Nór and I leaved the party.

    As you can imagine, at 2:00 am in Budapest is not a easy task to go home. We needed almost two hours with only - 5° C, to go from the party place to her hostel. My head was looking really ugly and the scar was noticeable easily.

    We got home like 15 minutes before the 4 am, so we watched through Internet the TV shows that the Chilean TV channels where sending. We saw the Valparaíso fireworks, and I was very excited. After all, nothing really bad happened, and as Nór told me, «if you consider that this shit happened to you before the 0:00 in Chile, then you can think that it happened in 2005». I think she is right. 2006 can't be a bad year at all.

Go backwards in time to December 2005.

Mon 2006/Jan/02 11:56:06 +0100