Advogato blog for rodrigo

Olympics over

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:08:52 GMT

[Note: if you don’t care about sports, just skip this post]

Another Olympic games over, and, as always, I enjoyed them a lot, even though now I miss a lot having top level sport events all day on TV. But good things always last too little. So, here are the things I’d like to highlight:

As always, coverage on the public TV was a not as good as I expected, since they just follow competitions where there are Spaniards (fortunately with some exceptions, like the athletics and gymnastics). While this is good for some sports (ie, live coverage of all Spain’s basketball games), it sucks for others. Luckily, I got Eurosport, which had a better coverage of some sports, like swimming, gymnastics and volleyball.
While there are lots of bad things around professional sports (dopping, corruption, etc), there are many more good things about it, like the case of Aelemayehu Bezabeh, a guy from Africa (sorry, can’t remember the country) who came to Spain, like thousands of other poor and desperate people, in a little boat, risking his life, and ended up in an inmigrants’ detention center where someone from the Spanish Athletics Federation saw him running and got him to get into the Spanish Athletics team (after being naturalised) and to an 11th place in the 5000 meters final of the Olympic Games. Sport helps a lot in integrating cultures, and this is a very good example.
Depending on how you look at the medal table, China has won the Olympic Games, with an insulting superiority in some sports, like Gymnastics (9 golds out of 14 events), table tennis (100%), weighlifting and diving (7 golds in 8 events). They have indeed prepared very well the games, even though they did win very few medals in the most important sports, like athletics and swimming.
Spain’s performance (18 medals, 5 golds, 9 silvers and 3 bronzes) was good IMO, even though the big media here are talking about total failures in some sports (0 medals in athletics and swimming). But, let’s be serious, in Spain 90% of the money and media attention goes to football, so it’s quite funny to see people, who don’t care about other sports the rest of the year, demand medals on those sports, and talk about total failure when there are no medals. It’s true though that the performance in athletics and swimming has been quite inferior to what was expected, but at the end, except for a few surprise medals, medals were won in the sports that get some attention here, like cycling (4 medals), sport events (3 medals) and tennis (2 medals, with the gold for Rafael Nadal). Of course, we would all have liked to have a performance like countries similar to us (economically), like Italy, France and Great Britain (great improvement by the Britains, btw), but in those countries, it seems to me, much more money is spent in sports, and thus the different results, I think.
I’ve read lots of comments and articles about some Chinese gymnasts having fake passports for being able to participate in the games. While I’m not an expert and can’t really comment on whether having a child (or teenager) prepare for top level competitions is good or not, I really think the Olympic games should have the best in each sport, and if some child is the best, why can’t he/she participate? Also, it’s funny to see all the attention to this case because it was a Chinese athlete, but I saw nobody complain about the youngest athlete in these games, Thomas Daley, an English diver (very good by the way, a pleasure to watch him) who is 14 years old, and who became European champion a few months ago, when he was 13. If the English can have 14 years old athletes, I guess the Chinese should be able to also
Even though basketball is clearly my favorite sport, I never have really enjoyed women’s basketball, mainly because even though women are usually smaller than men, they play with the same baskets (3.05 meters height), which make them play totally different when playing inside the paint than what I’m used to. Why the hell don’t they use a smaller height for the baskets? There are a few women that can slam dunk, but just a few, so the women’s games lose that part of the game, which is, IMO, a very needed thing for this sport. When shooting from outside, I see no differences, the women score as good as men, but the inside the paint playing makes it look a bit more boring.

And now for some stars of these games:

The Spanish basketball team have done, once again, a perfect performance, even putting the USA team under some problems during the final (118-107). As the Eurosport commentators said, we changed from being happy about the silver medal before the game to feel sad for having lost the gold medal. And this was because Spain played at the same level, face-to-face, against one of the best basketball teams in history (still eons behind of the 1992 USA dream team, of course), demonstrating, once again, the good health of Spanish basketball (with followers like myself, how can it not be healthy ). European media even said this Spanish team was the best European team in history. But anyway, I’m a bit happy about the USA team winning the gold medal, because Kobe Bryant said he would not come back to the US if they didn’t win the gold medal, which would have been a very bad thing, provided we want him back at Los Angeles Lakers, with Pau Gasol.
Nastia Lukin is one of the stars, IMO, of these games. She’s one of the best gymnastics I’ve ever seen (along my favorite Svetlana Boginskaia), and it was a real pleasure to watch her performing awesome things. The same for some of the Chinese gymnasts, although, I think, in some cases, they got higher points than what they deserved. In most cases they didn’t need any help from the judges, they were simply the best, but there were a couple of gold medals that, I think, were not deserved by the Chinese. But this always happens in gymnastics, even after having found a quite good scoring system, there are always this kind of things for helping the local athletes.
What to say about Michael Phelps that hasn’t been said? I’ll just mention how he does the turns. He was, in some races, a few meters behind the leader, and after the turn, he was the leader, with a few meters distance between him and the 2nd one, just amazing! I’ll also mention the 4×100 freestyle relays, one of the best (if not the best) swimming races I’ve seen in my life, with 5 teams swimming under the previous world record. It’s been amazing to see so many world records (26!) in the swimming competitions.
Britta Steffen was another amazing performer, she won 2 gold medals (50 and 100 m freestyle) at the very last millisecond, in one of them she didn’t even know she had won, since she was behind the leaders by a few meters.
Kenenisa Bekele and the Ethiopians and Kenyans in athletics are just amazing also. And made me think about a good way of convincing racist people about the white people not being superior. On the contrary, the black people are the ones that are superior, at least in sports (and music, I might add ), and specially in Athletics. It’s quite unusual to see some white athlete in the first places in some events, and the medals won by European countries in those events are from naturalised Africans.
The Jamaicans did a great performance in the speed races (100, 200 and 4×100 relays), both men and women, and specially worth mentioning is Usain Bolt, who won 3 gold medals with 3 world records. Worth mentioning also is the case of the 4×100 relays USA team, who, year after year, even though they have some of the best athletes, they end up dropping the relay and losing all chances to win a medal. After watching the replays and hearing the commentators, it was clear that they don’t train passing the relay, which is a very basic and needed thing if you want to do something in this event

Now, just looking back to London 2012, which, I hope, I might be able to feel live, since my sister lives in the UK, so a visit to her during the Olympics is a must.

Olympics’ hopes

Fri, 8 Aug 2008 12:13:04 GMT

With the Olympic Games about to start, here’s what I hope to see:

While I fully support the protests for a Free Tibet (and against the Chinese regime), Beijing was chosen 6 years ago, and if people did want to boycott the Olympic Games in China, it would have been wiser to do it so 6 years ago. Of course, I’m not saying all protests should stop, it is nice to have the dictatorial regime get nervous by all the international media’s attention to protests, but I really hope nothing like this (skip to 4:30) happens again. That is, please protest as much as you want, but please pretty please, don’t ruin the years of preparation of the sportsmen and women that have dedicated a big part of their lifes to get here. Doing so would be like having someone remove all the GNOME (or any other free software project) subversion code, for instance, to protest against the Chinese regime. I’m sure we wouldn’t like that at all, even if we support the protests.
No dopping cases please.
I really hope to see a USA-Spain final in basketball, for a Los Angeles 84 revenge. Although it’s going to be hard, with Argentina, Russia and Greece being part also of the favorites for the medals.
In cycling, the Spanish team is one of the best in history for this kind of race (Freire, Samuel Sánchez and Valverde, accompanied by Contador and Sastre, the 2 last Tour de France winners), so, like every year in the World Championships, it seems it’s going to be a very nice race, specially since the Italians are very strong also (with Paolo Bettini). Also, mountain bike/BMX competitions are quite funny to watch on TV.
I hope to see as many (and as long as possible) Cuban women volleyball team games as possible. If you want to know why, just watch their games
Won’t miss any of the Athletics, Swimming and Gymnastics competitions.
After my experience in the river Sella, I’m willing to watch also some rowing/canoeing action.

Anyway, good luck to everyone, and please, try to not stay too much time in the sofa watching the games You can just do some exercises while you watch the sports or when going to the sofa to somewhere else and back, so as to feel the Olympic spirit also

Asturias patria querida

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:12:02 GMT

I was out last week on vacation in Asturias, in the North-West of Spain. Asturias is one of the few regions in Spain I had never visited, so it was time, and what a good idea indeed. Asturias (or at least the East part of it, where I’ve been) is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in my life. With the sea in the North, and a land full of huge mountains (totally covered with forests or with land full of cows and horses), it is indeed a paradise (that’s what they say when you get into Asturias, ‘Welcome to Asturias, a nature paradise’).

We went to Cangas de Onís, a very nice village close to the river Sella (the real reason we came here, more later), just a few kms close to the Picos de Europa national park, and with lots of things to do around.

First mandatory thing to do was to visit the Lagos de Covadonga, mytical finish of lots of stages of the Vuelta a España (cyclism’ Tour of Spain), with the sanctuary of Covadonga in the way to it:

The road to the lakes, which goes from less than 200 meters to more than 1000 meters above the sea level, is indeed perfect for a cycling race, except for the cows, which just hang around the road and the mountains around without caring about the cars, just laying down in the middle of the road

At the top of the road, the landscape is really wonderful:

But as I said, we came to Cangas de Onís because we wanted to do some canoieng in the river Sella, famous because of the International Descent of the River Sella, a race, to take place on August 9th, where 1000s of people participate, racing and in the different celebrations in all the villages and towns along the river bank. I don’t have many photos of this, since I didn’t want to ruin my camera if my canoe got sinked So the first day we did it, I didn’t take any photos, the 2nd one, I took my cell phone with me and just got a few photos.

You just need to pay 25 € per person, and you are given a single/double/triple canoe, and then you can go on your own, stop in any of the many beaches around the river to eat the snadwiches you are given, or just relax. And then there are different places where you can stop, at 7, 10 or 12 kms. We got, although quite tired, both days to the last exit, and, believe me, we would have continued for more time, since just being in the river, surrounded by mountains, without seeing any civilization apart from the (lots of) people canoeing also and the few bars around the river bank is indeed a very funny thing to do, which, hopefully, I’ll be doing again around here, if I can find a place to do it (there are lots of rivers around here, but not sure if you are allowed to navigate them, and also, I wouldn’t like going on my own without knowing if a place is safe or not).

Also, while I don’t fancy much going to the beach in summer (I love it in winter), I have to confess I’ve changed a bit my mind after being in some beaches in Asturias. First of all, the weather is ok, not too hot (as in the Mediterranean, where I’ve almost always been when going to the beach in Summer), and there are just a few people, and finally, but most important, the beaches are just spectacular. We found one, called Playa de las Cuevas del Mar, which was a perfect place to just sit down and contemplate.

We also did lots of walking around the countryside, some tourism sightseeing, and, every day, we ate wonderful stuff like Chorizos a la Sidra, Escalopines al Cabrales, etc, and, specially, Fabada:

I’ll be back to Asturias soon for sure.

openSUSE build service collaboration

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:11:17 GMT

One of the shortcomings of the openSUSE build service was, until recently, that it didn’t help outsiders (non-Novell employees) in contributing to the distribution’s packages. The build service team worked hard in the last few months, and now it is very easy for external people to send patches directly to be included in the main distribution.

First, you need to create a branch from the package you want to change:

osc branch GNOME:Factory gnome-utils

This creates a branch in your home project (home:$user:branches:GNOME:Factory), so just check it out:

osc co home:$user:branches:GNOME:Factory gnome-utils

Then, just work on changes, and when everything is ok and the package builds, just commit and submit a request

osc commit -m "Changed foo and bar"
osc submitreq create -m "Changed foo and bar"

Before submitting though, it might be wise to re-check your changes:

osc rdiff home:$user:branches:GNOME:Factory gnome-utils

which shows a diff of the changes in your branch.

osc commit/submitreq create will submit the changes to your branch and to the project you branched from (GNOME:Factory in this example), so that maintainers can review and accept (or reject) the submission. Maintainers just need to:

$ osc submitreq list GNOME:Factory

359   new         home:rodrigomoya:branches:GNOME:Factory/gtk2-engines  ->  GNOME:Factory/gtk2-engines    '-------------------------------------------------------------------\nFri Jul 18 17:16:38 CEST 2008 - rodrigo@suse.de\n\n- Tag and upstream patches'
360   new         home:vuntz:branches:GNOME:Factory/pango  ->  GNOME:Factory/pango    'Tag pango64.patch'
363   new         home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/glib2-branding-openSUSE  ->  GNOME:Factory/glib2-branding-openSUSE    'Fix bnc#406741'
364   new         home:rodrigomoya:branches:GNOME:Factory/fast-user-switch-applet  ->  GNOME:Factory/fast-user-switch-applet    'Tag patch correctly'
365   new         home:rodrigomoya:branches:GNOME:Factory/gnome-utils  ->  GNOME:Factory/gnome-utils    'Tag some patches'
366   new         home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper  ->  GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper    'Tag patches'
367   new         home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/icu  ->  GNOME:Factory/icu    'Tag patches'
368   new         home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper  ->  GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper    'Tag patches'

which lists all the submissions waiting in the queue, and then just needs to review it:

$ osc submitreq show -d $id

which shows the patch for the submission identified by $id. And then, just accept or reject:

osc submitreq accept $id
osc submitreq decline -m "Your patch is wrong, don't send me more" $id

Neat, isn’t it? This should help us a lot in getting users’ contributions quicker into the distro, as well as in a better patch reviewing system.

openSUSE 11.1 ideas

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 15:08:59 GMT

Just recovered from the success of the openSUSE 11.0 launch, the openSUSE-GNOME team is already working on the future 11.1 (expected in December), so we are starting to get feedback for new ideas from users. Anyone can add their own ideas to this page, so if you want something new in either GNOME or openSUSE, add your ideas to the wiki.

UEFA Euro 2008

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:25:21 GMT

I have been always a football fan (and player when I was much younger), but in the last couple of years or so, I stopped watching games because I usually just fell asleep while watching them. Compared to other sports I like (cycling, basketball, motor racing, etc), I find football very boring, except for a few games once in a while. But for this Euro 2008 that finished yesterday, I decided to try watching first only the Spanish team games, and, if I didn’t fall asleep, maybe try with others. So I just watched the 3 Spain’s games in the 1st round, the 1/4 finals against Italy, and then the 2 semifinals and, yesterday, the final. I have to confess I really enjoyed those games, specially the 2 semifinals in general and the 2nd half of the Spain-Russia in particular.

But, even though I might be back into watching more football games in the upcoming season (at least until I fall asleep again ), there are some things in football that I wanted changed many years ago and that, as I’ve witnessed during these last few weeks, haven’t changed yet:

First of all is the referees. As in all sports, they make mistakes, that’s normal, what’s not normal is that such mistakes can have such a huge impact on the final result (media here in Spain usually even have an alternative standing with the points lost/won by each team from referee’s mistakes). So, why the UEFA/FIFA or whatever don’t do as in other sports, where video replays are used when referees are not sure? Of course, I’m not saying the referee should stop the game to watch the replay for every doubtful play, as is done in some sports, but there could be a group of judges watching the game on TV, with special cameras, and just communicate via radio with the referee. Also, there could be more referees on the field, like in basketball, for instance, where there are 3 in a much smaller playing field. I’m starting to think nothing is done to fix this so as to allow the media to talk after the games about the referee’s mistakes, which is what the media do most of the week while waiting for the next game, at least here.
Lots of team play very deffensive, and that makes some games as boring as watching your hair grow. I used to like a lot football back in the days of Johann Cruyff’s FC Barcelona Dream Team. The best was Barcelona, playing very offensive, and so the rest of the teams copied the playing style, and it was very common to have very high results, like 7-3, 4-3, 5-4, etc, etc, which make the games, at least for me, very attractive to watch. So, why not do again like in other sports, where the rules are more dynamic, and are changed to cut the very defensive styles and make the game more offensive? That happened a few years ago, for instance, on the NBA, the scores were getting very low, so they added/changed a couple of rules to make the game more offensive. I would really like to have, in football, a much less restrictive off-side rule, there would be many more scores and make the games more attractive, since you can’t be too defensive if you are losing 2-0.
Spanish people got totally crazy last night, with lots of injured people and even one death in Madrid, as I’ve heard on the radio this morning. 2 years ago, the basketball team won the world championship, and, AFAIR, there were no problems, people went to receive the team to the airport and just cheered at them while they were driven across the city, so, why does this always happen around football? I guess it’s got nothing to do with the sport, just that it’s the most popular one around here and it attracts all kinds of weird people.

Anyway, congratulations to the Spanish team for this win, specially because this is the only thing that unifies Spaniards, the football national team. Before and after this Euro Cup, people did/will complain about the other regions’ people, and some did/will even say they don’t feel Spanish at all, but these days, with an European champion team, everyone likes Spain, yay for football nationalism!

Google MapMapker

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:21:18 GMT

Since everything that Google does has a lot of impact, and since they just released MapMaker, the OpenSteerMap project counter-attacks with a Press Release, so please read it.

Summary is: don’t help Google making their maps, help OpenSteetMap instead!

openSUSE 11.0

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:08:29 GMT

Today’s release day for openSUSE 11.0, the best openSUSE distribution ever… yeah, that’s true for all new distributions, ok. But it is the release I feel more proud of, since it’s seen a lot of GNOME-related work, as Vincent explains in this interview. And this work will continue in the soon-to-come 11.1.

Recipes

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:08:29 GMT

Since I now have 2 cooking recipes (and more to come), I’ve put them into a Recipes section on my website. And the 2nd recipe is something not as healthy as the 1st one (Merluza a la Gallega) but much more tastier. It is Migas, a cheap and consistent dish for those cold winter days.

Where we are going we don’t need roads

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:08:29 GMT

Been reading this last week the decadence in GNOME thread in Planet GNOME, so just wanted to add some thoughts:

First of all, I don’t think GNOME is in decadence at all. The development platform does nothing but improve (GTK/glib, new gio/gvfs, libgnome/bonobo/etc disappearing, good bindings for lots of languages, etc), and applications do the same.
We offer incremental updates on each release, a lot of work is done, but it’s true that for some end users, they might not see changes big enough to consider it a new version. So maybe, apart from the time-based releases (which work pretty well, IMO), we should maybe try to have, apart from the individual modules’ roadmaps, some sort of desktop-wide features to accompany each release. If we set, for instance, a “all apps will use gio and support working with remote files” goal, I think that would make a better release feature that end users will better appreciate. Similar desktop-wide goals could be used for each release, which will change, IMO, the user’s impression of the new releases.
I hear some people considering 3.0 should contain a lot of development platform changes. And well, while changes in the development platform are great (that’s why it’s improving all the time), I don’t think the future of GNOME (the desktop) releases should be so tied to the platform. On the contrary, the platform should adapt to the applications being written. Some years ago we did a lots of improvements to the platform because we were writing big apps (Nautilus and Evolution).
Since I started using GPSs, I ended up visiting forums and mailing lists about the subject, finding that most people use illegal software (cracked programs downloaded from P2P networks) and maps (ditto, got from P2P), so if we could offer a free software-based solution for these people, they would probably move on. This is of course just one example, which is even being already covered by OpenStreetMap, but I’m sure there are lots of similar markets out there that we could try to cover better to bring 1000s of new users to our desktop.
As for innovation, this is probably something we need to improve. There is innovation for sure (Gimmie, Pulseaudio integration, Compiz Fusion (not really a GNOME thing, but it’s got GTK-based tools that nicely integrate into GNOME), Banshee 1.0 (try it, it’s great!), Clutter, etc), but it’s true it’s not easy to make revolutionary changes (like using gimmie instead of our current panel, for instance), since it means convincing a lot of people in endless discussions. I think part of the problem is that people working on similar stuff are not put together to come to decisions (like distros working on similar solutions for the same thing ), so we probably need improvement there, like having the hack meetings that were discussed recently.