Vacations in Spain

Traditionally at this time of year I spent vacations in the Mediterranean area, this time it was Spain and this time I went with my girlfriend :). It was a 7+7 trip - seven days travelling around the country and seven days stay on Costa Brava in a nice all-inclusive hotel just near the beach. We visited all major cities - Saragossa, Madrit, Toledo, Cordoba, Sevilla, Granada, Barcelona, and more. It's a great country with very rich culture.

I was quite funny when we went to Gibraltar. By plain coincidence Teresa was wearing a white shirt and a red skirt, Polish national colors, which apparently happen to be Gibraltar national colors as well. At that day there was a national holiday so everyone were celebrating in the streets wearing white and red clothes; people took her for a Gibraltarian and sometimes it was quite difficult to find her in the crowds :). Anyway, it was a nice thing to experience a tiny bit of Great Britain (especially that I've never been to England) and drink a Guinness in a British pub :).

Another thing that I've seen for the first time was the famous economic crisis. You see, in Poland crisis only appears in some newspapers and in the mouths of some populist politicians; we're the only country in EU to have positive GDP growth rate and one of the lowest unemployment rate (although sadly some companies, especially large ones, still find an excuse to save costs on their employees). But Spain was heavily struck with the crisis; unemployment rate is growing near to 20% and a very visible symptom is unfinished building constructions in many places, including an entire commercial center near Granada.

Now I'm back to the serious work on version 1.0 of WebIssues which I mentioned in my previous post; a nice piece of the server's framework is already done, the protocol handler is rewritten and a new setup script is mostly finished. Although my initial attempts to gather a development team had failed, it looks like I finally found a good partner, so chances are the prototype of the web client is going to emerge soon. I'm also going to start defining the new features for version 1.0; there are lots of requests from users but obviously everything cannot be done at once and I want to avoid the second-system effect so I'm going to be conservative :). Also in October I'm going to finally release a new version of Fraqtive with minor bug fixes and improvements and I will update the Qt articles, so it looks like the last quarter of this year is going to be very productive.