Author: lucasr

More love to EOG
Some more bug cleaning. It’s good to see that we came from 108 to 90 bugs. Well, there are lots of bugs to clean but I’m just happy to have some boring/critical bugs solved in EOG.

Movies

• Monsters, Inc. – very funny!
• Out of Time – nice triller!

Movements and communities
I gave a talk about some issues that I see as relevant about free software. One of the key subjects was the important distinction between the free software communities (the several actors directly involved with the free software projects developement) and the free software movements (social actors dedicated to spread the free software philosophy, informing about its social, political and economical relevance, deploying free software in the public sector and social projects and so on). I argue that the communities are not necessarily always involved with political free software activism, the movement. Here in Brazil (and I think in other countries too), this is a very important distinction to be made because it avoids wrong perpeptions like thinking that free software is just a cause of a specific party or something with a homogeneous ideology set, which is not true. Social actors with very diferent ideology sets support free open-source sofware and hackers are quite heterogeneous when we talk about social and political positioning (which is natural people from diferent cultures and social contexts). There are marxists and companies like IBM, Novell, Sun looking at the same “thing” with a great happiness but with very diferent “eyes”.

I haven’t being posting for a long time. So, I’ll talk about some cool things I’ve done and seen in the last days…

EOG
I’ve been giving some love to EOG. It really needed it: lots of critical bugs (crashes!) and a “dirty” bug list on bugzilla. So, I cleaned up some EOG bugs by triaging and patching. I wrote a Roadmap for EOG 2.14 with the topics I think are relevant for the next stable version. Sorry Tim Gerla about all those messages on IRC! I just want to keep you informed. :-)

Mallard
I love Project Mallard. The GNOME docs really needs some revamping. Considering that the users don’t read docs before they use the software (they do it while they’re using it), the current “software manual” approach is not very nice. A context-based help is much more useful here. Some random ideas about this:

• We’ll need a good search feature to make it easy to find the right answers the user is looking for. This involves good indexing for the help topics.
• A new documentation for writing manuals will be necessary because the docs will be written using an hypertextual topic-based approach. Very diferent from the current linear one.

Cool new projects
Dogtail is a GUI test tool which will be VERY useful for QA stuff. It will be possible to reproduce bugs and perform several GUI tests by just writing Python scripts that interact with the user interface.

Tango (for GNU/Linux coherent desktop experience) and BetterDesktop (an interesting GNU/Linux usability effort) are great iniciatives!

Kill Wanda?
There is a very funny discussion about what should be done with the old fish Wanda. Don’t kill her! It has a very historical meaning!

Projecto Software Livre Bahia
Our local free software activism group has made its 2 years of existence! Congrats to all of us! Some photos from our little party.

Zenity 2.12.0
This is the final Zenity stable GNOME 2.12 release. News:

• New and updated translations
• Evandro Fernandes Giovanini [pt_BR]
• Changwoo Ryu [ko]
• Telsa Gwynne [cy]
• Danilo ¿egan, Slobodan D. Sredojevic [sr, sr@Latn]
• Priit Laes [et]
• Ignacio Casal Quinteiro [gl]
• Baris Cicek [tr]
• New documentation translations
• Vincent Untz [fr]

Tiny hack
I had some spare time in the last days, so I had a quick look at the EOG critical bugs for GNOME 2.11/2.12 and fixed one of them.

Music
Luis suggested me to listen to Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain” album. Well, I liked it, very good one. Specially the “Concierto De Aranjuez” songs. Though, the album is too much “classical” in some ways. I liked “Bitches Brew” more. :-)

Last week, I played with Pã twice. Good shows. In the other band, Paroano Sai Milhó, we’ll start recording our 4th album. The recording process per se is very repetitive and tiring but the end result is always compensative!

Readings
I’ve been reading some interesting books about democracy and ciberspace:

• Democracy in the Digital Age by Anthony G. Wilhelm
• Cyberpolitcs by Kevin A. Hill

Work
It’s been hard to me to have to work on things (mainly web development) that I don’t feel almost any pleasure. I wish I could work on GNOME more (quantitatively and qualitatively), this would be REALLY great. Well, just dreaming…

Gift and Free Software
I’m reading some basic work about the “gift” sociological Marcel Mauss (anti)-paradigm. I strongly suggest reading this Godbout introdutory article (in portuguese). Those who are involved in free software communities will have lots of insights about why we hackers do what we do. Mauss paradigm seems to be the sociological aproach that best explain lots of aspects of free software culture.

Tiny hack
I and my great friend Aurélio hacked firestarter to fix a little problem.

It’s been a long time I don’t post anything. So, here are some stuff I’ve been doing.

Music

• Coltrane (dudes, this is REALLY good!)
• Miles Davis (two great albuns: “Bitches Brew” and “Time After Time”)
• The Brand New Heavies (cool acid jazz)
• James Taylor Quartet (one of the best acid jazz band)
• Incognito (lots of groovie stuff)

After a short talk with kmaraas on IRC about GNOME and musician hackers, he created the GNOME Musician Index at l.g.o. GNOMusicians, add yourselves there, so, we can have a huge jam session at GUADEC 7!

GNOME

The last development Zenity “Muqueca” release (2.11.92) before GNOME 2.12 is out! Here are the news:

• New and updated translations
• Christian Rose [sv]
• Zygimantas Beru¿ka [lt]
• Duarte Loreto [pt]
• Kostas Papadimas [el]
• Gabor Kelemen [hu]
• Jordi Mallach [ca]
• Mugurel Tudor [ro]
• Maxim Dziumanenko [uk]
• New documentation translations
• Francisco Javier F. Serrador [es]
• Maxim Dziumanenko [uk]

EOG was crashing when navigating through a directory with invalid images. This bug is solved now. :-)

Mastering

I’ve finished a little paper (in portuguese) about Free Software and Ciberculture. INHO, this paper is not good yet but the deadline forced me to release it.

Google Talk
Congratulations to Google for using jabber open protocol in Google Talk. My account is lucasr.at.mundo gmail com. Feel free to add me. :-)

Movies

• Fantastic Four (horribleeee! crap!)
• Before Sunrise (cool)
• Sin City (great!)
• Team America (good idea, no good content)
• Million Dollar Baby (fantastic!)

GNOME Desktop Workshop
I gave a workshop on GNOME Desktop as part of FACED’s Free Software Week. I got very happy to see some teenagers from Alto das Pombas (a very poor place) in the workshop.

I looked for some ready-made slides for this purpose but I didn’t find any. Maybe I’d be good to have “official” slides for GNOME Desktop workshops.

New “All we need is love!” Zenity release (2.11.91). Again, almost nothing new – we’re feature (and, from now on, string) frozen.

New and updated translations (thank you dudes!):

• Artur Flinta
• Laursen Dhima [sq]
• Hendrik Brandt [de]
• Funda Wang [zh_CN]
• Ilkka Tuohela [fi]
• Chao-Hsiung Liao [zh_TW]

You can get it here.

My head

Two days ago I had the worst headache ever! I think the cause was something I ate in lunch…

Movies

• Shi mian mai fu (wonderful photography, cool action scenes)
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (cool photography too, comic books style)
• Finding Nemo (funny but worse than I expected)

Music

• Joss Stone (nice R&B work)
• Norah Jones (jazzy country, folk style)
• Jamiroquai (one of my favorites bands though they’re getting too pop and less acid jazzy)
• BNegão e os Seletores de Frequência (hip-hop from Brazil)

Mastering

I have to write three articles in the next 40 days! Oh shit, I need to hurry…

New “Almost there!” Zenity release (2.11.90). Almost nothing new:

• gnome-doc-utils migration
• New and updated translations:
• Vincent van Adrighem [nl]
• Yair Hershkovitz [he]
• Ivar Smolin [et]
• Ankit Patel [gu]
• Rostislav Raykov [bg]
• Clytie Siddall [vi]
• Kjartan Maraas [no, nb]
• Ilkka Tuohela [fi]

Get it here. Enjoy!

I created a zenity maintenance page in GNOME wiki to keep track of potential development tasks for 2.13.x releases.

Spent this weekend having resting and watching some cool movies:

• The Crying Game (very good, great performance of Jaye Davison)
• Super Size Me (cool documentary, it reminded me that I need to make physical exercises urgently)

I’ve migrated zenity to use gnome-doc-utils. So, now It should be easier to translate zenity manual. Go, go, go translators!

Bad news today:

• A woman committed suicide in the building where I work. She threw herself from a window in the 12th floor.
• More coward bombing in London.

I and Carol saw the following movies:

• The Forgotten (good suspense, terrible story)
• Hitch (typical comedy, normal)
• Meet the Fockers (good comedy, great actors)

I played some days ago in Canavieiras (a litle city near Salvador) with Paroano Sai Milhó band. Paroano Sai Milhó is one of the most traditional carnival groups of Bahia – more than 42 years of existence. We play popular brazilian songs and rhythms like ijexá, samba, frevo, galope, baião, xote and many others. Canavieiras is a beautiful place. Here are some photos:

Canivieiras has wonderful beaches	Snake found in the beach
We play dressed as clowns	People that saw our show