Federico Mena-Quintero

I work for Novell, Inc., mainly on the GTK+ toolkit and other parts of the GNOME Platform.

I live in Xalapa (Veracruz, Mexico) with my lovely wife Oralia. She took this nice picture of me near the bathrooms of the Tate Modern gallery in London.

Here's a little biography of myself, in Spanish, which I wrote in 2003 for the Congreso Nacional de Software Libre in Talca, Chile.

This is my little universe:

• Activity log — A sort of diary where you get to read my (ir)regular rants.

• Conferences — Material for talks I have given at free software events.

• Documents — Mostly technical documents I have written.

• Contact information — Do you need to talk to me?

• Photography — Or learning to see the world.

• Books — Stuff I have and have not read.

• Hacks — little bits of mostly useless code.

Conferences

I frequently give talks or short tutorials at free software conferences. This is a list of my slides and materials for those talks:

Contacting Me

I live with my lovely wife Oralia Silva-Rueda in Xalapa, a beautiful city near the Gulf of Mexico.

Email:

federico@gnu.org

federico@novell.com

IM / Telephone / physical address:

Email me for details.

Documents

Stuff I have written. Newer documents are at the top.

Summer of Code Mentoring HOWTO (Mar/2007)

The Summer of Code, initiated by Google, is a wonderful opportunity for students to learn how to contribute to free software in a short time, while making a nice chunk of money in the process. Each participating student gets a mentor, who is normally a member of an existing free software project. This document intends to give some advice to mentors, so that they'll be able to help their students to complete their projects successfully.

World Domination as an Optimization Hack (Report from the GNOME Deployments, July 2006)

Across the world, there are many large to small deployments of GNOME. The large deployments account for the largest part of our user base. This paper presents an informal study of the requirements that those deployments have, based on feedback which they provided about their particular needs. By fixing the most common problems which the deployments are experiencing, we will make GNOME more attractive for future deployments, and we'll get more users faster.

Performance articles

These are short articles I've written on my activity log on topics relative to performance optimizations and memory reduction, mainly for the GNOME Desktop.

• Making GNOME Fast, presentation at the GNOME Summit, Boston 2005 (Oct/2005)
• Locating poll() wakeups (Sep/2006)
• Limiting your repaint rate (Apr/2006)
• Footprint of non-shared dirty data from libraries (Apr/2006)
• Improving our memory debugging infrastructure (Apr/2006)
• Proposal to reduce the memory consumption of images in Mozilla (Nov/2005)
• Interpreting Sysprof results: Gedit's "replace all" (Oct/2005)
• Profiling with Sysprof

• Compacting the GTK+ icon cache (May/2007)

  1. Introduction
  2. Where do icons live in the cache?

• Improving login time (Apr/2007)

  1. Nautilus startup
  2. Nautilus, gnome-vfs-daemon, and bonobo-activation-server
  3. The desktop's menu bar?
  4. Gnome-session's clients
  5. A more detailed timeline for Nautilus
  6. No history for the Nautilus desktop

• Nautilus (Nov/2006)

  1. SMB slowness and is_local() roundtrips

• Pango (Oct/2005)

  1. Pango glyph lookups
  2. Pango gunichar->script and paired character mappings
  3. Quantifying the behavior of the glyph cache
  4. A global benchmark for Pango
  5. Different sizes for the gunichar -> glyph_index cache

• GtkFileChooser (Sep/Oct/2005)

  1. Initial measurements
  2. Superfluous widgets in OPEN mode
  3. Fixing OPEN mode
  4. Don't load folders unnecessarily
  5. Inside GtkTreeView

Integrating Existing Software with GNOME: Guide for Independent Software Vendors (Sep/2006)

This is the GNOME ISV Guide. You should read this if you want to integrate software into the GNOME desktop.

• GNOME ISV Guide, HTML version
• CVS module for the guide
• Wiki page for the guide's outline

Using jhbuild on Novell Linux Desktop (updated: 2005/Jun/16)

There are some things you need to take into account when running jhbuild under Novell Linux Desktop or other distributions derived from SUSE Linux. This tutorial explains what you need to do.

Unofficial Yamaha S80 Manual (Jul/2002)

The Yamaha S80 is a wonderful synthesizer with a completely dreadful and cryptic manual. I am writing a better manual.

The latest version of the manual is always here.

GNOME Programming Guidelines (Apr/1999)

This is a short article on programming guidelines and policies for people who write code for GNOME.

You can always get the latest version from the GNOME Developer's Site.

GNOME 1.0 Musings (Nov/1998)

These are some random musings that Owen, Jonathan, and I had about what is needed for a GNOME-1.0 release. This was sent to the gnome-hackers mailing list, and some of the stuff in it is already outdated. Use it only as food for thought.

Sun Nov 1 23:42:08 EST 1998 — gnome-musings.txt (10.23 KB)