Category: general

I got this comment in my previous post with the screencast about writing Python plugins for Hildon Desktop.

There simply is nothing cool about python. It’s VB on Linux, and a horrible language with horrible OO bolted loosely on the side (split/join/len illustrates it beautifully). It’s worst sin however is that because it looks easy, really bad programmers unleash things on the world. Like VB. (Anonymous)

WTF!? How can someone see Python this way? As a counter-argument for this “worst sin”, this nice article by Paul Graham comes to my mind. :-)

Good news! The deadline for student application in Google Summer of Code was postponed! This means that you, students, have more time to submit your project proposals! The new deadline is March 26.

The GNOME Journal is preparing for another great new edition!

Join our We-tell-the-world-about-GNOME-and-it-rocks club, and find the
love of your life! The deadline for submitting articles is December, the 1st..

The next edition is going to appear on December, the 15th 2006. General information about the GNOME Journal, the submission guidelines, an other stuff is available in the wiki.

Don’t forget to add you article to our article submission queue! Do
this within the next 24 hours and win flight tickets to Saturn. :-)

Importante note: GNOME Journal is urgently needing regular writers. Tip for all GNOMErs (journalists, users, developers, lovers, all this at the same time, etc): if you’re planning to blog something more structured (be it an opinion, a tutorial, an application review, desktop feature review, development tips, etc) this is a good chance to submit an article to GJ! GNOME Journal reaches a different (and very important) audience from our mailing lists, GNOME Planet, wikis, etc. It’s about reaching the “outsiders” with high quality GNOME-related content. Let’s make the GJ’s december edition rock!

I have this idea of promoting a contest to choose the GNOME Song.
IMHO, this is kind of activity promotes community integration and
helps creating passionate users™. Also, having a GNOME Song would be cool for marketing stuff! My intension is to put the several recordings of GNOME Song from several people around the world in the GNOME CVS repository. l10n work could be done on recordings with translated versions of the lyrics. Isn’t it awesome!?

I’ve prepared a draft here. This is far from complete/stable. I want suggestions about the submission process and how to rate the submissions. Also, not sure about the best release date yet.

Comments?

PS: Jono, this could a great oportunity for Jokosher to get more users. You could release a tutorial teaching how to easily record melody submissions only with rocking free software. :-)

Carol’s blog
Carol, my lovely wife, created a blog (in portuguese) to post her impressions about our daily life in Finland. Check out her first post!

Finnish food impressions
I’ve received lots of comments (well, much more than I expected!) on my last post about my first finnish food impressions. Actually, I received support from many people at work. Funny to see the finns defending their food in such a positive way! Actually, I’ve received some cool restaurant suggestions. tigert, Zetor is in my top list for future dinners, let’s go there!

PS: If someone considered that post arrogant or felt offended in some way, please don’t. Those are just impressions from a foreigner, nothing more! :-)

Nice coincidences

Carol in front of “Carrols”.

Drinking czech beer (Velkopopovicky Pivo) at “Chico’s”
which is my father’s nickname.

Once a cousin of mine who lived for 6 months in India told me that when you move to a totally strange country, the most anoying thing is always something you were not expecting. She was right! Before arriving to Finland, the most scary thing for me seemed to be the weather. Well, considering that the lowest temperature in Salvador (where I used to live in Brazil) I’ve ever gone through was 15 degrees. So I thought I would suffer with the extremely cold finnish weather. But then I arrived here, bought some warm clothes (coat, gloves, scarf, shoes) and everything went fine (except when it’s windy, rainy/snowy and f* cold at the same time).

Snow in Matinkyla

What is really anoying Carol and I is the food. Finnish food is horrible! (Of course not in absolute terms. This is just our impression based on our cultural background. Well, I’ve heard from some finns that they don’t like finnish food either. So this is becoming more absolute!) The general pattern is: cooked potatos with salad and “something else” with a bizarre sauce. They put tuna in the pepperoni pizza! Shit! Also it’s very common to see people drinking soured milk in the lunch (I haven’t tried soured milk yet but I will. Some day I’ll be drinking it too. Who knows?).

Brazil@Finland

Brazilians are like a virus. They’re everywhere! I found out that there’s a quite big brazilian community in Finland. Carol and I started to make contact with some brazilians living in Helsinki and Espoo. There are some brazilian culture related places here too i.e samba and capoeira schools. In Finland, you can find any kind of information about the cities in the Internet. We found lots interesting cultural activities (music and movies mostly) in Helsinki and Espoo. (Cultural life in Helsinki region is cheaper than I expected by the way.) Interesting to see how the e-territory makes life easier in the territory.

Here I am in Finland. Long time no blogging. The last three weeks were very intensive and demanding (in all aspects) for me and Carol: apartment search, initial work-related activities, first zero-degree weather, first snow, first days in a totally strange place. It’s been a tragicomic experience (much more comic than tragic!). Finland is the exact oposite of Brazil in terms of culture (cold, quiet, silent, extremely organized, “self-service society”), economy (developed country, excelent social benefits for everyone, very expensive life, no poverty), politics (the least corrupt country of the world), weather (very cold, windy, and snowy). We’re are living in Espoo, very close to Helsinki, 15 minutes from office. Our neighborhood, Matinkyla, is beautiful and near to everything we need in a daily basis: supermarkets, drugstores, clothes stores, fast food, restaurants, etc.

Matinkyla, our neighborhood.

Work is great! Office is cool, people are kind. The coolest thing is that I’ll be working on the Desktop UI Framework Team which, as Karoliina has already mentioned, will try to get even closer to the GNOME community as our work has lots of similarities (I’ll write more about it in the next days). It’s just wondeful to be able to work on cool things as your official job!

Nokia Ruoholahti, where I work now.

I’ve been posting lots of pictures in Flickr from my N93. Also I’ve been posting some videos to YouTube with some daily frivolous activies in Finland but they are private, just for family and friends. If you want to watch them and you’re a not a stranger, send me your YouTube login and I’ll give you permission to watch them.

Freezing my butt in the park!

I hope to get back to my GNOME activities as now I have computer and internet connection at home. EOG has 186 open bugs! Normally I keep this list with less than 90. Lot of work to do! Cooool!

That’s all for now! A brazilian GNOME developer is back. And now with much more ice!

I and Carol are going to move to Helsinki in the middle of October. The reason: I’ve got a new job at Nokia. I’ll work on the Maemo project. We’re just waiting for the visa. As genuine latin americans, south americans, brazilians, brazilian northeasters, from Bahia state, from Salvador city, I’m sure that living in Europe/Scandinavia/Finland/Helsinki will be a huge change for us in all the aspects.

+

I’m very excited about this brand new job because it’s the first time I have a job where I’ll work directly/indirectly on the stuff I could only do in my free time: GNOME and open source/free software hacking. Yay!

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Last saturday, we had a party to celebrate our moving to Finland and our marriage! Here are some photos.

Thanks everyone for all the positive wishes (phone calls, e-mail, blog posts, blog comments, etc) about my marriage!

I and Carol have been engaged for more than 5 years, almost 2 of them sharing the same roof. We decided to officialize our steady relationship and married this morning. I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful woman beside me everyday!

Yesterday, I gave a talk about the GNOME project for grad students from Ruy Barbosa Computing Science Faculty. Sandro, a great friend of mine, was the host teacher. This talk is part of a series of free software activities organized by GNU Ruy, the Ruy Barbosa’s free software group. Some students got very interested in contributing to the project (I’ve received e-mails at the same day).

Sandro, my friend and host

The super-sexy-speaker with his only GNOME t-shirt

The attendees

I’m very happy to know that some of the people who have contacted to get help on their first steps inside GNOME have already started to give their first contributions. I’ve known of at least three people that have already sent their first patches (some of them accepted!) and other three that are now part of the brazilian l10n team. Yay!