Month: December 2005

I’ll be traveling tomorrow for Christmas and New Year parties with my family. I’ll be back on january 3rd. I just want to wish a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year for everyone! 2005 was a special year for me. I hope 2006 to be even better!

GNOME Love is a wonderful and important initiative for GNOME Project. Having experienced developers helping people who want to get started contributing to GNOME is really great. GNOME Love Day should be happening more often…

IMHO, we could improve our relationship with the potential new contributors by “asking them” what are the main barriers they find on trying to contribute (documenting, translating, coding, testing, etc, etc, etc.). There could be a survey on this to raise more information about it.

I’ve been talking with some people who’d like contribute but just did’t get it and the reasons they give range from “I don’t know where to begin” to “The platform is too ‘complicated’ and it’s not well documented.” or “I’m not capable to contribute in such a big project.” and so on. This barriers can be psychological (self-esteem? unclear initial steps? project is too big?), social (community is not receptive? contributions not being considered?), technical (bad platform docs? gobject is too complicated? don’t know C programming?), cultural (don’t speak english? doesn’t have local group to share knowledge/information?), and so on (don’t consider these examples as real. they’re just random ideas).

By raising such information we could build better strategies for GNOME Love and other sub-projects. For example, if the cultural reasons are prominent, we could invest more on the creation of local groups. If platform is being perceived as ‘complicated’, we could invest on high level docs like tutorials about certain technologies. If there are too much contributions from new contributors that are not being considered, we really should check why this is happening.

I’m sure there lots of potential contributors reading this post that have lots of things to say about it!

Comments?

Scale Dialog
Zenity now has a new scale dialog which can used to select a value from a range.

Scale options
  --scale                          Display scale dialog
  --text                           Definir o texto do diálogo
  --value                          Set initial value
  --min-value                      Set minimum value
  --max-value                      Set maximum value
  --step                           Set step size
  --print-partial                  Print partial values
  --hide-value                     Hide value

Movies

• Billy Eliott (nice!)
• The Island (too long, too boring, nice idea)
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith (funny)

II Fórum GNOME
Since I came back from II Fórum GNOME, I didn’t have any time for blogging. It’s awful to arrive from a nice trip and have to work hardly on a stressing project. First of all, It’s always wonderful to meet nice people like Tim Ney, Germán, fatalerror, Izabel (the main person behind the Fórum organization, thanks Izabel!), Daniel Fink, Aparecido Quesada and many others! It was the first time I personally met people involved with GNOME. I gave a talk on GNOME Desktop present and future. The event schedule also had talks on Linux Desktop, Mono, PHP-GTK2, GIMP and other related subjects. I and fatalerror gave a workshop on GNOME translation with some good results: we finished 2.12 translation and have one more active contributor in the team. The event was als very nice in terms of local user and developer group organization. Our plans are to be more prepared for GNOME marketing in Brazil and to promote more local activities dedicated to people who want to start contributing to GNOME. See some photos here.

Germán, wake up!

Tim and fatalerror

After brazilian translation workshop

I and Gérman

GNOME Foundation Board elections
I’m very happy with the GNOME political dynamic related to the elections of the board. Some very interesting discussion took place in foundation-list with questions being answered by the candidates. IMHO, the board should be composed by people with time, energy and well-defined and diverse visions (to estimulate productive discussion). Therefore, here are my candidates: Jeff Waugh, Luis Villa, Germán Poó Caamaño, Jonathan Blandford, Quin Gil, Dave Neary and Vincent Untz.

Music
I played percussion with my brother’s (Tiago Rocha) band in his show at ACBEU Theater. His songs are mix of jazz, samba, bolero, classical and others. Wonderful! Really!

Pretutu, the samba-funk-rock band I play with, started to record its first album. I’ll upload our songs somewhere as soon as the album gets ready!

Stuff I’ve been listening:

• Vanessa da Mata
• Fiona Apple
• Rage Against the Machine

Movies

• Her Name is Carla (nice photography, bad script)
• Nicotina (very funny!)
• Oldboy (very nice!)
• Batman Begins (much better than the previous ones)
• Madagascar (not very funny)
• Others that I don’t remember now :-)