Category: general

The latest issue of the GNOME Journal has just been published. It
features insights into the Portland Project, gained from a conversion
with one of its lead architects, Waldo Bastian, an introduction to
GNOME’s new deskbar, an interview with Elijah Newren, GNOME’s releaser
manager, and three tricks for designing application interfaces you
should know. Writers of this edition are Sri Ramakrishna, Davyd
Madeley, Lucas Rocha, and Claus Schwarm, respectively.

The GNOME Journal features original content and commentary for and by
the GNOME community. All articles are published under the Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Read it!
Read it!
Read it!

I’m very excited to meet some GNOME fellows at FISL and III Fórum GNOME. We’ll have a very small booth there. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any sponsors to cover marketing material (t-shirts, banners, flyers, live CDs, etc) costs. Well, I’m sure It won’t make us have less fun! I’ve arrived to Porto Alegre today. Let me know if you’re coming too!

One of the “ongoing” activities of the Marketing Team is Collect and document GNOME deployments. It seems the list of deployments we have today doesn’t correspond to reality. For example, I’m sure Brazil has much more than 4 cases. There lots of people using and loving GNOME right now and we just don’t know anything about them.

Based on a Jeff post about the The Red Phone, I had the idea of a big “institutional” campaign to gather more and better information about the successful GNOME deployment cases around the world.

This campaign (in practice) would involve:

• A w.g.o front page banner
• An official announcement (that local groups would spread around free software related websites and mailing lists in several languages)
• A translatable web page with general information about the campaign with a form or list of contacts for deployment report submission. I thought about the following required information for each submission:
• Title
• Deployer type (company, education, digital inclusion, NGO, etc.)
• Summary
• Full description (organizations involved, background, human interest, personalities and hopes – as suggested by murrayc – We want believable, compelling stories.)
• Number of users/Number of computers
• Technical information (distribution used, specific GNOME Desktop configuration details)
• Photos (links)
• Testimonials (from users, local authorities, IT people, etc.)

These deployment cases could be on Front Page as planned for the new w.g.o (Happy users enjoying GNOME in various cool ways). Also, they can provide initial contacts for future GNOME Journal articles.

Knowing who is using the software we develop is a very important step for the 10×10 goal because succesful deployments bring more respectability and trust on GNOME.

Comments?

I’ve just posted the EOG and Zenity 2.16 plans. Have look, assign to some task, give some love to GNOME! :-)

I’m happy to see that my post about new contributors barriers had some influence on the Gnome Goals. Nice!

The article submission deadline for the 8th issue of Gnome Journal is April 1st. Don’t lose it! GJ is always waiting for new writers with good articles!

23 days before the III Fórum GNOME and 7th Fórum Internacional Software Livre. Don’t forget to tell us you’re coming!

Wikipedia defines Tapioca as…

…a woody Shrub of the Euphorbiaceae (spurge family) that is extensively cultivated as an annual crop in tropical and subtropical regions for its edible starchy tuberous root, a major source of carbohydrate.

But for INdT guys Tapioca is…

…a framework for Voice over IP (VoIP) and Instant Messaging (IM). Its main goal is to provide an easy way for developing and using VoIP and IM services in any kind of application. It was designed to be cross-platform, lightweight, thread-safe, having mobile devices and applications in mind.

The lastest release brings full interoperability (SIP + Jabber) with GoogleTalk. Also, there’s a very nice client (which needs some UI love). Experiment it! Installation guide is here.

GNOME 2.14 released!

After six months of hard work of contributors from all over this beaultiful planet, GNOME 2.14 is released! Big thanks to all the people who contributed to this awesome release! GNOME is powered by multitude!

Cooking

I and Carol bought the recipes book. So, we tried to cook some nice home-made bread. Our plan was to prepare some basic french bread and fogazza. Well, this project really failed. The result was a lot of hard-definitely-not-tasty bread! Some days later, we prepared a delicious chocolate pie which made us keep believing that we’re capable of doing some nice food.

EOG and Zenity

I released EOG and Zenity 2.14.0 yesterday. Working on these litle GNOME modules has been very nice and funny. I’ll bring some 2.16 plans for them soon.

III Fórum GNOME

As most of you probably already know (from the gnome.org front page), the III Fórum GNOME will happen as a community event of the 7th Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL) on April 19-22, at Porto Alegre/RS. FISL is the biggest free software event in Latin America. GNOME dudes, this is a very good motive to come to Brazil! For this 3rd edition, the Fórum GNOME will have talks from GNOME popstars Jeff “perky pants” Waugh and Nat Friedman and of course from other vivid brazilian contributors. See our official site.

GNOME Journal & Behind the Scenes

As you probably saw, I launched the Behind the Scenes series on the latest GNOME Journal issue. The idea is to bring to the public the “human” side of our community with funny and informative profiles from people who contribute to GNOME. I created a wiki page to organize ideas about the interview itself and the potential interviewee candidates. As always, I’m accepting contributions. GJ had more than 120.000 visits on march! See GJ stats page.

III Festival Software Livre Bahia

The III Festival Software Livre da Bahia is the event of the free software addicted/enthusiasts people from Bahia. It will happen on August 24-26 at Lauro de Freitas/BA, a city near Salvador. There’s an open call for papers (in portuguese). See the event website.

New Me

I’ve got some new glasses! Now I look like a modern designer! Good bye Harry Potter look! :-)

Nice web things

Two weeks ago I started to use some well-know services on web: Digg (story sharing), del.icio.us (bookmarks sharing) and Last.fm (music profiling). See my Last.fm profile here. The profile says that my favorite genres are jazz, acid jazz and brazilian music. Oh, that’s totally right! My latest listenings:

• The Meters
• Morcheeba
• Incognito
• Jaga Jazzist
• Jazzanova

Well, there were too many things to tell and, of course, I forgot some other nice stuff.

We from Paroano Sai Milhó started to record our first DVD show. Yay! Also, our website is under construction. Nice! :-)

My other band, now called Pretutu (the name WAS Pã) started to record its first album. You can listen to some old dirty recorded songs here. Well, recording sessions are happening very often so I hope we can finish and release the album in the next monthes. The album will be (probably) CC licensed. First, I need to convince the other members of the band.

Last week, I went to the Whitworth College Jazz show at Teatro Castro Alves. Nice show! There were no super-mega-powerful-ultra instrumentist but as group the band is great! They performed songs from Thelonious Monk and others.

Movies:

• The Lord of the Rings trilogy (watched three times each movie!)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (nice!)

Music:

• Vanessa da Mata (good dudes, very good)

I haven’t been posting for a long time. Well, lots of things happened since Christmas. I’ll try to post a summary of the nicest things here.

Christmas and New Year were REALLY great! I and Carol went to Arantina (a very small town at Minas Gerais state). The town has a web site! Wow! There we met my loving family. It was wonderful to meet all my cousins, uncles and aunts. I ate a LOT and got fatter (lucasr += 4kg). Here you can see some photos.

I’ve got an ibook 12″, 1ghz, 724mb RAM, 60gb HD from tiagovaz. Very nice! Installed Breezy with no problems. Everything works just fine.

Carol, my wife, has just graduated in CS! Some people on IRC commented about how wonderful is to be together with a woman who understands what you’re doing. Yes, it’s really nice! :-) Some photos here.

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!