Today my Grandmother reached the venerable age of 80. And this is my proud tribute to her.

My Grandmother Carmen (‘Carmucha’ to her friends) is an exceptional woman. She was born in the family of a Galician emigrant. She passed her childhood between Spain and Cuba, until her father lost an important part of his business because a cyclon. So my Great-grandfather Gonzalo stablished his family in Pontedeume, north Galicia, the same place he left at the age of 17 towards Cozumel (Mexico).

Her childhood and teenage years was influenced by Fath. Baltasar Pardal, a priest chased in the II Spanish Republic. He worked hard in a poor dstrict of Coruña during the Spanish Civil War and took care of orphans. He also founded the school where my Grandmother studied later. Today ‘Don Baltasar’ is in beatfication process. (more…)

“More in my face
Than is my taste
I grow so weary I’ll surrender

To what they say
Let them lead the way
Till’ I can no longer remember

My darling dreams
Prewritten scenes
Whatever felt my own

So to save face
I’ll take my place
Where I may safely feel alone

Glad the waters are so shallow
When the river runs so cold

I’m quick to wait
Too slow to take
They call me gracious for my patience

And I feel proud
Under that shroud
And all the while it’s all evasion

Some humor here
To fend off fear
And I’m a little more lost, oh dear

So to save face
I’ll hold my place
So I may safely feel alone…”

Poets of the Fall, “Shallow”

They are my soundtrack these days…

Last Tuesday GPUL celebrated the II Jornada de Informática Gráfica y Software Libre (II Graphic Computing and Free Software Conference). The first conference was organized in 2005, and was a block of several workshops about Blender, Gimp and Inkscape. It was the usually GPUL conferences style.

But this year was a very different conference style. We tried to show the state-of-art of the free software in the professional world of graphics computing.

The first speech was given by Juan Javier Martínez, of Acuatica Project, “the audiovisual opensource project”. Juan Javier came from Madrid to talk us about the history of free software tools that are being used today, making emphasis in 3D movies tools. Juan Javier arrived on Monday, so we had time to meet with a pleasant person.

After Juan Javier, our Alberto Jaspe, who showed some of the projects of VideaLab, of the Advanced Visualization Group of my Civil Engineers School. Alberto explained the free and not-free tools in their work (art, management and developing work), justified their use and the multiplatform policy in developing their applications. Alberto is using Windows these days, and defends a more practical point of view about free software. Although he is a very good programmer since 8-bit age, he is still very young, so I think he is a “technological teenager” and I suppose when he reach my age he will be a strong free software activist

The secret to be listened is to speak in low volume. The most corwded speech was given by Jacques Isaac, Technical Chief of Bren Entertainment, the 3D film studio in Compostela that recently won one Goya Award (Spanish Cinematographic Academy Awards) for their work in “Pérez, el ratón de tus sueños” (Perez, the Mouse of your dreams). Jacques Isaac reviwed the history of the free software in the cinema industry, then he talked about Bren’s migration to GNU/Linux systems (with free and non-free sofware running on these), the advantages and the problems of using free software in this industry. Whe he finished, he showed a clip with making-off their awarded movie. And after the ovation , Jacques must to answer a lot of questions of the audience. Thanks a lot to Ryu, our GPUL man in Bren, to make this speech posible

Finally, Antonio Seoane, from Videalab too, take over the real-time rendering applications from Alberto’s speech. He explained the structure of one of this productions and talked deeply on scene graphs and several engines, like Open Scene Graph (that is used in Videlab) and OGRE. This was a very special speech for me, because Antonio is a defender of privative software in his work (he is a great professional but he uses Windows), so I thought it would be very difficult to see him in a GPUL activity. As I explained in his presentation, Antonio and me usually discuss about privative vs. free software having coffee in the morning, but… Antonio gave me my first Unix class 12 years ago, so he is like Darth Vader as I could be Luke Skywalker … and Alberto… ¿Darth Maul?

Some photos in my gallery.

Today I went to a speech in my Civil Engineering School. The speaker was Raúl Escrivá Peyró ,a civil engineer who works as consultant in Navarra (North Spain). This speech was the first of a series about Aesthetics and Engineering, so he introduced the importance of express ourselves not only as engineers. Since we build beauty constructions too, we must express as artists too. The rest of the speech was about of Escrivá’s works and his personal evolution looking for the form since Functionalism to Minimalism: plane shapes, light and open spaces, nude structures: bridges, Navarra Parliament, pelota courts, and the most beauty warehouses I ever saw. I like organic structures, but I think Structural Minimalism has an interesting effect when contrasts with environment.

But the first Escrivá’s thoughts guided me to the question of professional associations. Recently, computer engineers in Spain are beginning to found any kind of professional associations as civil engineers and architects have. Yesterday I was talking with Emilio J. about this, and I must explain I’m not against a computing engineers professional association. Emilio said this is very important for computer engineers to have strong association to raise the perception of his profession, and to block down low quality intruders who work instead of computer engineers.“There must be a supervision of a computer engineer at least, to ensure a quality of the work”.

Today I understood Emilio’s conception and more computer engineers about their possible association is similar to architects associations: their main goals seem to be to block competences of the others, and try to expand their own competences. Meanwhile, civil engineers associations seem to expand our competences, and their spend less time trying to block competences of other professions. Our strength and reliabilty grows with the real fact each individual engineer can do “that x-thing” better than another professional (and, of course, being aware we can’t do “that y-thing” because another professional do “that y-thing” better), not with a paper that says we can do “that x-thing”.

So, if architect Norman Foster and sculptor Anthony Caro dare with the Millenium Bridge of London, and the bridge must be closed to the road because the bridge shakes as it happened, cut off the head to the stupid who hired him because not to investigate their real knowledgement about bridges and to trust in a paper.

I suspect this post will have any answer