It's been a long time since my last entry here, so I think I'll start by giving an update of my life lately. I've been a bit away from KDE development for too long (but not from the KDE community fortunately). Some of you probably know what it's like: long work weeks that makes the recent EU proposal of a 65 hours work week look as a game (my personal record is around 96 work hours in a week and never below 50 hours), deadlines, more deadlines ... you know how it goes.

Anyway, on the bright side of life, I started to do more exercise from some months ago (biking mostly) which is quite convenient at relieving stress even if in Spain riding a bike is a high risk sport. Also, I'll start teaching at the University of Málaga in the next academic year (which starts in September here), which is something I've been longing to do for years. I'll teach "Real Time Systems" to industrial engineers and "Operating System Design" to computer engineers. I've given lots of talks and workshops about KDE and KDE development (more than 70 the last time I counted them), but of course this is totally different and I'm sure it will be a nice experience (for me, and I hope, for the students too). Any tip is appreciated .

Well, it's been so long since my last entry that I could keep writing for ages, but I better leave something for other posts (I really hope I can improve the frequency of my updates )

Ah, and last year I missed it, but this time I've managed to arrange my holidays in such a way that I can I say ... [image:3551 nolink=1 size=original style="vertical-align: top"] . Hope to see you there!

Finally I arrived to my home. I've been for the last three days having a wonderful time at the Canary Islands with many great people (both, the organizators and the other speakers) at the 1st Free Software event of the University of La Laguna. The problems started when the plane from Tenerife to Madrid was delayed, so I arrived too late to Madrid and I couldn't get on the plane to Málaga. After being put in another plane (that also was delayed), I've arrived to my home something like half an hour ago, and I have to be at the airport again in less than 2 hours and a half to get a plane back to Madrid, and then another one from there to Dublin. This will be a loong night...

I arrived yesterday from a 10 days holidays around Spain. There are some things that I'd like to share with everyone, so I'll try to tell a brief report about it.

As I said in my previous blog entry, I've been with other 4 friends on a rented car travelling around Spain. We did some late changes to the planning, so finally, we went to: Mérida, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Burgos, Fustiñana (a small town in Navarra), Zaragoza, Olite, Pamplona, San Sebastián and Madrid. In total: 3120 Km.

First, I'd like to say I think the people who manage the History Museum of Mérida (next to the Roman theatre), the Cathedral of Salamanca, and the Cathedral of Burgos are doing a fantastic job and should know that people thank them for that. On the contrary, the managers of the Cathedral of San Salvador (La Seo) in Zaragoza, the Basilica of El Pilar also in Zaragoza and the managers of the El Prado museum (in Madrid) are doing it quite bad in my opinion (specially the ones at El Pilar). Why? Because the first ones allow the public to make photographs as long as you don't use flash (which would damage paintings, walls, etc.) but the others don't allow to make any photograph at all, which I can't understand, since there's no difference between an eye seeing a picture and a photo camera capturing light to make a picture without flash. And why do you think that I said the worst were the ones at El Pilar? Because there's a professional photographer inside the basilica taking pictures of small children near the Virgin and later they sell the pictures to the proud parents of the children. And of course, he's even allowed to use flash. I guess his flash doesn't do any damage to the building. Incredible.

Talking about other things, walking around Salamanca I saw this, and I thought of Ellen, so I had to take a picture for her. A traffic light with an even improved usability from the ones at Málaga with leds on the other side of the street.
[image:2255 height=200] [image:2256 height=200]

In Zaragoza, we went to a concert of "Los Delinqüentes" (those learning spanish, ignore the spelling). I didn't know the group a month ago, but I heard a few songs since then, and was prepared for anything. In general it was a funny and nice concert with a flamenco accent. I counted 21 people I saw casually smoking something which smelled "nice".

In Pamplona, the city hall organized a trip to see the meteor shower of the Perseids and we enrolled to it from Málaga. So at 22:00 we were waiting for the bus which would take us to the mountain of Unzué to see the stars, when we noticed that the bus would take us there at 20:00 instead of 22:00 . Having nothing better to do, we searched for Unzué in a map, and went there by car. After arriving to the town of Unzué and asking a group of around 10 children (the only persons we found on the street) for a bus coming from Pamplona, we found them and joined the group . They were quite happy that we finally arrived, since they were waiting for us for a while, given that we organized the trip from so far away. Talking with some people around there, we talked about Linux and I took the opportunity to "evangelize" them into using KDE . Even after arriving so late and seeing few meteors (since we had a full moon), we have a good memory of that trip.

In San Sebastian, I found that the beach of "La Concha" (the shell) is even nicer that what I expected: quite wide, great sand, crystal-clear water... wonderful. I also found an interesting thing, a real d-bus !

[image:2257 height=230]

Our last stop was in Madrid, where I met some old friends with whom I had a great time taking pictures at the El Prado museum and along the afternoon.

In general a wonderful trip. Now I'll have to find some time to assign tags to the 2084 pictures I have from it (in total 6 Gb). Anyway, not all of those are mine. I only made 1500 ...

Wow, it's been a long time since my last blog entry, exactly 10 weeks and 4 days...

A brief summary of the last weeks would be: a great time at a couple of talks (at the 802.party in Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz and at the Technological Park of Málaga), some great time working on the digikam-web interface and related things, and boring time being until late at work (my advice: don't have anything to do with gsoap). Fortunately, today I've started my holidays and although usually I would use that time to develop something, this year I'm going to travel with some friends around Spain, so I guess I'll have little internet access from next Saturday on.

During last weekend I managed to find some time to continue developing the web interface for digikam that I mentioned in a previous blog entry, so I added some new features:

* When viewing the contents of an album, now it's possible to search for images/movies from that album having a tag associated.
* When viewing the list of albums, it's possible to search for images/movies among all albums having a tag associated.
* When viewing any set of images (like the contents of an album, or the result of a search in an album), you can click on "Download images" and it will generate a tar file in the cache directory containing the images the user is viewing in the selected size. If someone else tries to download the same set of images, the same tar file is reused.
* It's possible to configure a different set of albums for different users to see (using http basic auth), or a default album list.
* It stores in its own sqlite db the images downloaded by each user.
* I've created a script that reencodes the videos used in published albums using mencoder and sox. In the case of videos, I think it's better to pregenerate all of them in the cache directory since encoding videos takes too long to do in realtime (any commentary about that?). In my examples, I had a video generated with my camera that takes 220 Mb. After reencoding it, it takes 10Mb, so reencoding videos is a must.
* I've also tried to put all the configuration parameters in a single file so digikamweb is easier to publish.

Currently I have 21458 photos according to digikam's database (which are using 13 Gb according to du ). When someone asks me to put some album in my web server I hate to lose my time exporting to html, generating thumbnails and resized 1024x768 versions of my pictures which occupy space in my HD that I'm usually hesitant to remove.

Also, when kimdaba exports the images to html, it includes the associated tags, but digikam doesn't. which makes digikam's web exports be a bit unusable for me.

So last saturday evening I started a new project: Creating a web interface to digikam. Currently it's nearly done. The current completed features are:
* python cgi based
* In the config file you specify the location of digikam's albums folder, and it opens directly digikam's db as well as the original pictures
* It creates resized images and thumbnails on demand from the original picture and cache them in a special directory (which can be safely removed, since the script regenerates the cache from the original files when needed)
* It keeps track of the number of times each image has been seen (and the persons who saw them)
* The albums that can be seen from the web are easily configurable in a simple text file which contains a like for each Album.
* Uses cookies to always paint images at the same size for each user. Those images (usually in lower resolution than the original) are also generated in run time and cached.
* Shows the thumbnails of the previous and next pictures when seeing one.
* When generating a thumbnail or resized version of a movie, it adds a movie indicator to the image.

There are still some things that I'd like to fix before publishing the cgi scripts (like making the interface localized), but if anybody wants to know how it looks like, here are a couple of screenshots . Yes, my css could be better, but I'm not a designer. If someone has any idea on how it should look like, I'll be happy to read it (or even better, getting an example html file of how it should look like).

It's important to have information organized, and everyone who tried know it's difficult to organize things efficiently. Lately most applications are trying to help the user to do exactly that, and in my opinion that will be the factor users will use to choose one application over another: how the application allows them to organize the information they work with.

For example, amarok is doing an excellent job with that, it knows all the music files the users have and it keeps it very well organized. Users can search for an artist, for a song title, for the year the song was published, etc. without caring where the information is in the hard disk.

Another example is kimdaba/kphotoalbum or digikam, they both allow the user to create tags and assign them to pictures, which together with the exif information allows for very useful searches to be done in order to find specific pictures on user's albums.

So we have tags in kimdaba and tags in digikam, both applications write their data in different places (kimdaba in a xml file, digikam in a sqlite one), which is a pity and forced me to do a conversion script in order to import in digikam my kimdaba tags (and the corresponding image associations I did over a year of using kimdaba) once I choosed to just use digikam for downloading pictures as well as for organizing them.

That makes me think... why don't both applications store their tags in the same place? and going a step ahead, why doesn't every application store their tags in the same place? Maybe we could have a kind of tagging server for KDE 4, which applies tags for files. Having the tags and the file associations in a central place could allow for more interesting searches. Also, applications could register new tags automatically (for example, kaddressbook could create person tags for each of the contacts automatically, or korganizer could create tags in an event subfolder for each of the events). Having a centralized tag list would allow digikam, kimdaba, basket, amarok, konqueror, etc. to unify the tags that they would use to tag things.

I guess kat, beagle and others already do something similar like full text indexing and those things, but anybody knows if they offer tag lists too?

Something to think about.

Btw, if someone wants the kimdaba -> digikam tag/caption conversion script, just email me but keep in mind that it's not yet meant to be used by "normal" users and currently you need to know python in order to use it.

This is a photo of a safety guide I found in my plane from Madrid to Málaga last Sunday:

[image:1940 size=preview]

I don't know how others read that, but what I read is that Iberia recommends "for your safety" not to use Windows .

"I was told by Perez, who was in Mallorca, and there the hapiness never ends during night and day", that's what an old spanish song says , and I had the opportunity to confirm it during last weekend (7th, 8th and 9th) when I went to Mallorca invited to give a talk at Bulma's 3rd free software conference. Bulma is one of the most important LUGs in Spain (if not the most)

The conferences were very interesting and I had a great time there. I saw there many old (and new) friends, among them, Amaya Rodrigo, who I haven't seen for a long time. Amaya was the only person I knew in Madrid when I gave my first talk many years ago. Since then, she's been very active in the Debian and GNOME projects which makes our talk even more interesting. We talked about Mao, a really interesting card game that everybody loves (at least, everybody who has played it ), and we made a deal: If I write a Mao client application following her specifications (it must support network play and have a chat window), she'll switch to KDE. She even signed the deal with her gpg key at her blog. Now I only have to find time to develop it...

On Sunday there was no direct plane to Málaga, so I took one to Madrid, stayed there for some hours meeting some very good friends who I always enjoy to see and having lunch with them, and then I went back to Málaga in the afternoon. On Sunday evening I was completely worn out, and the tiredness lasted for a couple of days, since work consumed more than 30 hours on the 3 first days of the week.

Anyway, it was worth it (I mean... getting tired during the weekend, not getting tired at work )

The short version: My computer was broken and I haven't had mail since the 19th of March until today, sorry if you were waiting for me to answer some mail, I'll try to do so as soon as possible.

The long version: It all started in a sunny sunday morning...