knocte :: MonoTema

My flatmates and I are moving to another place. Actually, it's a place that is very close to the previous one, so we will still live in the center of Madrid. Basically the place is a bit better, with less traffic noise, and we now have a big terrace to enjoy the summer better!

However, the move is turning a bit irritating because it has coincided with the Q1 timeline of our project and I'm becoming crazy trying to give my best with both things. This move was planned even before I joined Novell; if I had joined before, maybe I would have preferred to stay in the previous place because now it's very likely that I move to Cambridge (MA) on October of this year.

It happened also that in the last step of our brand new Bridge (let's call it proof of concept for now), we had a very strange crash (you need GLib# and ATK# from SVN to build the testcase) just because we referenced in the last moment to the SWF library. Sandy did a wonderful work debugging it thanks to the help of Sebastien and Geoff, and we now are certainly sure that this problem comes from the fact that SWF happens to depend on GTK for a very specific feature related to colours.

We have for now two alternatives to fix this:

• Drop this dependency (Jonathan Pobst pointed out he would be glad to find a way of making the colours functionality not depend on GTK).


• Change GTK+ initialization in order to detect the existance of another library for managing ATK (very similar to Gail).

The latter will be the one I'll look at (because it seems easier, but a bit more less comfortable regarding packaging, because we would depend on GTK from SVN), so if you happen to think of another one, we will be happy to listen to your suggestion.

Well, now you would ask: why the title of this blog entry. Well, it turned out that yesterday when I came back from another trip for carrying furniture, as I was very concerned with this issue, I turned on the laptop to keep on working on it (that was when we figured out the cause of the issue, discussing it on #monodev and #mono-a11y channels), and I went to sleep at 2 AM, forgetting completely that I had my car badly parked (in order to take out the sofas in the closest place to the building), so this morning has happened to be a pain in the ass because the police has put me a fine.

And then I had a fantastic idea about fines that I didn't want to forget, which would be awesome if the government approved it because:

• It would avoid the fact that many people claim: the city's councils are lately having an overwhelming increase of traffic fines, just with the sole reason of collecting more money, making the police busy with this instead of tracking real crimes.


• It would allow the people not to feel so bad about having to pay such a high penalty, without loosing the real motivation of penalties: education.

Of course I don't want to pretend that I should not pay the fine, but my suggestion is: what if this money was given to the NGO of your choice? Recently I got contacted by some people from the WWF organization and was still wondering if subscribing to this one or to GreenPeace (I would also support Obama, but I think I can't because I'm not american ;) ). And now I realise I will pay for a fine more money that I would give for a one-year subcription to a NGO like these ones...

And now two questions to the readers (wow, I admire you if you have read until here):

• Does anyone recommend me a specific NGO that is worth being a member of?


• Does anyone recommend me a way to send this suggestion to the politicians? Do they have a bugzilla.congress.gov?

Update 21-JUL-2008: I'm a bit worried about these Obama's statements.

Update 16-SEP-2010: Talking again about fines, compare what other governments do to what the Danish government does (sorry, link in Spanish).

Labels: CSharp, General, Miscelanea, Mono, Politica, Programacion, SoftwareLibre