ENLi 2008

My talk, La comunidad GNOME para principiantes (The GNOME community for beginners), seems to have gone over well here at ENLi 2008 (the 2008 National Linux Meeting in Puebla, Mexico), with a big audience and interesting followup questions. The slides are available as a collection of plain PNG and JPEG images in a zip archive (use the link above).

I’m having an excellent time. Will post some pictures from the conference later.

Update: Pictures.

Audience

My wonderful audience

openSUSE discs

I clearly didn’t bring enough openSUSE discs

Evolution goodness (and some badness)

My laptop went south a couple of days ago, so I’m having to make do with a screen that is bigger but endowed with fewer pixels. This has been a source of frustration, especially in Evolution, where I depend on the efficiency afforded me by the tri-pane view. Crank down the resolution a bit, and it’s suddenly not so efficient – there isn’t enough space to display the subjects in the message list anymore. The problem is compounded by useless mailer “Re:” and mailing list prefixes.

So, since I don’t need to see the mailing list and reply status repeated for every single mail, I cooked up a little patch to trim the subjects in the message view. When applied, it makes available a new column in View -> Current View -> Define Views… -> Edit -> Fields Shown… -> Available Fields. This column implements the trimming, and can be used instead of the traditional Subject one:

Evolution, traditional subjects Evolution, trimmed subjects

Traditional

Trimmed

The patch applies to both Evolution 2.22 and 2.24, although unfortunately, a couple of nasty, new bugs are preventing me from running the latter. If you happen to be running openSUSE Factory like me, and Evolution 2.24 is preventing you from getting work done, you can get my unofficial 2.22 build for Factory from the build service. It includes the above patch as an added bonus.

Home, sweet home

I’m finally back in Xalapa after more than three weeks on the road.

After the wildly successful GTK+ Berlin hackfest, I spent a day in the Hague with my good friends Andrea and Marcus, then headed for home. The flight was awful as usual, but mitigated by the fact that I was bringing back good memories and lots and lots of Belgian and Dutch candy.

Three happy hackers
Christian, Alex and Benjamin: Three happy hackers
(Ryan was AWOL for the picture)

GTK+ 2008 hackfest crew
The hackfest gang
(Picture courtesy of Tor Lillqvist)

Andrea, Marcus and their parrot, Perla
Andrea, Marcus and their pet parrot, Perla

Bikes at the Hague central station
Bikes parked at the Hague central station