I arrived to the event on Thursday evening. Olga drove me one hour and half (thanks so much) from Seville airport to Santos de Maimona. At night, we had dinner in a traditional and home-run restaurant with Olga, Alex and Tony from Fundation Maimona and Jose María Figueres, ex-president of Costa Rica and a wise man. My first dinner ever with a president or ex-president of a country. The conversation was focus on regional and rural development and information society issues. It was like been on a club of the Economist readers.

Next day the conference started. I had the opportunity to listen to Carlos Castro Castro (I actually helped to translated one of his articles into Catalan back in 2003). He talked about the strong commitment of the Extremadura government towards open source, materialized, among other things, in the Linex distribution.

Arround 14.00 the panel about open source and business started. My presentation was mainly focus on highlighting the possibilities that open source offers to companies and what Openbravo can provide as solution. I had lunch with a couple of people and some of the ideas interesting comments were made:

· Many people still thinks that an ERP in just an advanced accounting program. This is obviously far from reality not only from a functionality point of view also for the effort that an ERP solution requires to be implemented.

· Some people are abandoning home-grown solutions and looking at Openbravo as product and platform to build their next generation of solutions instead of investing in their own product (I blogged about this time ago).

Next stop is Galicia. I have a close relationship with Galicia since my book Software libre. Tecnicamente viábel, economicamente sostíbel e socialmente xusto (in Galician) was published two years ago. I'm going to be talking on the 14 of May at University of Vigo. Keep tunned in our site more details.

• Open Source Census is a new project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in the enterprise. It basically means that they count how many enterprise installations for each open source package exist.
• On Monday we published the Openbravo Manifesto (I'm the main author). For a long time, many of us at Openbravo wanted to clarify the extent of our commitment to our projects, and open source in general; we also wanted to share our values and belief with our Community. Today Matt Asay blogged about it.
• I have completed (it was half done) the update of Mono.Cairo to Cairo 1.4 (just now that Cairo 1.6 has been released). I needed some of the new functionality for experimenting with gbrainy. It's cool to have the latest Cairo functionality handy.

That's all for now

    Me: What is this mate?
    Taxi driver: It is an advertisement thing. I get paid for having this installed.
    Me: It does not seem to work.
    Taxi driver: Let me reboot it for you.
    (This is when I start to think how great software is nowadays)

Reboot starts and a little linux mascot shows up in the left corner of the screen and a Knoppix based system starts booting. Four euros of taxi later, the machine is finally initialized. It uses an old hardware and boots from CD. I can then use the application.  It is not bad but there is very little content.

The system is called the Taxi Channel and it is an advertisement platform with some contents. A little research on the Net seems to indicate the service is operated by Taxicom and it is already working on a few taxis in Barcelona and Valencia.

Linux is definetly getting everywhere these days :)

[despertaferro httpd]# cat access-default.log| grep gbrainy-0.53.exe | wc
  12661  250825 2729558

This is not funny if you think that the file is 70Mb and the machine where I have my homepage hosted was already receiving lots of traffic.

So, I decided to move the Windows build to SourceForge (they have better infraestructure) and release a new 0.61 build. All the information of the new location is available in the gbrainy's Windows page.

Version 0.6
* Implemented difficulty levels: easy, medium and master
* Complete revision of the texts
* 1 new calculation game and 3 new logic games
* Bug fixes

• Alfresco Community Conference in Barcelona. The state of art open source content management system is having their European Alfresco Community Conference next 22nd of April in Barcelona, 10 minutes walking from my home! I have already registered for the full day.
  
• Asolif is officially born. After lots of months of talks between different companies a Spanish Federation of free software companies has been established with the support of many other groups like CatPL in Catalonia. This is good news for all the small IT vendors that work with free software and face on a daily basis the same challenges.
  
• Abiword and Google Summer of Code. I added some ideas into the coordination page and I also offered myself as a mentor (I already was back in 2005 for the Mono project). I hope that someone will be able to devote some love to the Windows Unicode port that I started (60% done I would say). If nobody takes into this one I'm considering taking some time off from work and doing it myself. Been still an ANSI application these days is embarrassing.
  
• LinkAt is the Linux distribution for education build by the Government of Catalonia. I heard from my flatmate Jesús Corrius that their presentation at FOSDEM was a success. Version 2.0 is going to be released soon and they are already closing some bugs. Their are doing a terrific job, not only building the distribution but also creating training materials, courses and helping people to deploy it.
  

John Perkins should know - he was an economic hit man for an international consulting firm that worked to convince poorer countries to accept enormous development loans - and to make sure that such projects were contracted to U.S companies. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the American government would request their "pound of flesh" in favours, including access to natural resources, military co-operation and political support.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is the story of one man's experience inside the intrigue, greed, corruption and little-known government and corporate activities that the U.S. have been involved in since World War II. The message is clear, unless these clandestine activities are stopped, they will have dire consequences for our future.