GUADEC, Vilanova, Spain

GUADEC

Tomorrow I fly to Vilanova, near Barcelona, to attend the GNOME conference. Afterwards, I’ll stay in Barcelona over the weekend for some touristing.

I’m looking forward to GUADEC as a kind of holiday where I can spend the time just doing things that I find interesting. I’ve had the guilty pleasure of not helping at all with the organisation, though I’ve been on the mailing lists, so I’m more than usually grateful to Quim Gil and his team for their fantastic work, and for the stress that they will probably endure/enjoy for the week.

I know that they don’t speak Spanish in Catalonia, but there will be people from other parts of Spain. I would really love to practice some of the simple Spanish that I’ve learnt. I’m now up to lesson 17 of part 2 of Pimsleur’s Spanish, and I need to see if I’ve really learnt anything.

Contributing to Glom

At GUADEC, I’ll try to recruit contributors for Glom. So far, I’ve not had success getting people involved, though I knew there’d be a delay while it even got into the distributions for testing by users. At least life is easy now with Ubuntu Dapper at least – you can even build Glom without using jhbuild.

To make contribution easier, I’ll do some more reorganisation of the source code, and some simple developer documentation. In the meantime, I marked the easier Glom tasks, and added some more clues about how to implement them. Some of these tasks are appropriate for people just getting started with C++ or gtkmm. Interested people should find me at GUADEC.

If you have a laptop with you, I’ll take the time to help you setup Glom and setup your development environment, and I’ll show you how to make patches. If you don’t have your laptop, I’ll show you stuff on mine. I’ll introduce you the code and show you how to get started on one of the simple tasks, based on your current experience. I’ll try to do this online too, but a week in the GNOME Village is a real opportunity to do this properly in person. I’ll do this in English or German.

I also added 3 more examples in CVS, and put some screenshots of the examples online. Two of them (Music Collection and Project Manager) are really simple, but Film Production Manager is quite large and involved and is based on a real situation.

10 thoughts on “GUADEC, Vilanova, Spain

  1. So far as i know, Spanish is an official language in Cataluña, so “they don’t speak Spanish in Catalonia” is not exactly correct :)

  2. The truth is nearly everybody is bilingual, so you can get by if you speaks Spanish. By the way, Catalan and Spanish are similar languages.

  3. “I knew there’d be a delay while it even got into the distributions for testing by users.”

    There’s no need to rely on the distributions. You should be able to use Autopackage. Many users will thank you for doing so, since it’s better to download a 15MB binary package with static libraries than wasting time with compiling a package from source. This way, you’ll probably also get a few more reviews in journals and magazines. Maybe this will also get you more attention of distributions to make native packages.

  4. Catalonians are quite delicate people to deal with. Sometimes, their defense of their language reaches a French level, with the further complication that they’re not a separate country (even though they wish they were). If people in Vilanova shops refuse to speak Spanish they evidently are too proud to take your money, and you should shop elsewhere.

    The Catalan Language is similar to Spanish, yes, but it also has a lot of French mixed in.

    Sorry, but this topic gets on my nerve. When traveling, it’s assumed that a tourist will know at most the language of the country, not the local dialect. When people act as if you owed them to speak Galego / Catalan / Sicilianu / Furlan / Welsh / Schweitzerdeütsch when you are trying to give them money, I get nervous.

  5. “You don’t need me to do it for you.”

    I didn’t request you to do it for me. In fact, I didn’t request you to do anything at all.

    I just made a suggestion. If you prefer to wait for the distributions to package your application, please do so. :-)

  6. What is spanish??? There is no language called spanish!! The official language in Spain is CASTELLANO, and there are others languages like catalla, galego, euskarra (basco). Don’t say mistakes!

  7. Sorry, Claus, I didn’t mean just you personally. I mean that if people are convinced that autopackage is a good thing then they can try to make an autopackage package. I’m not particularly convinced and everything that I’ve read from the autopackage people so far has been quite repellent and off-putting.

  8. RedTuxer, when the rest of the Spanish speaking world calls it, interchangeably, Spanish (Actually, Español), and when I belong to that world, guess how am I going to call it? Català, Valencià, Galego and Euskera are different, sure. I’m sure Andalusians would say something about this, and Extremadurans too. None of those languages are called Español by anyone, whereas Castellano is.

    I understand you might have a peeve about it, just as I have mine as I mentioned earlier. It is, though, offtopic to this site. If you want to continue this discussion, check my website and you’ll find a mail address.

    Adriano.

  9. The reference to Castellano is interesting. Colombians seem to have the same “intensity” in referring to their language as Castellano. My father has a slightly less intense approach. He is from Monterrey Mexico and mentioned that in until the 40s and 50s, Castellano was the term used. It seems that Español has become more normative of late.

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