Category: general

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 :-)

Well, 8 days before II Fórum GNOME, the brazilian GNOME conference. Brazil has some huge GNOME deployment cases and lots of home users but doesn’t have an organized user and developer community. The II Fórum will be an excelent chance to start. So, for now, I’m just creating an IRC channel (#gnome-br) at irc.gimp.net to aglomerate people interested in creating a vivid brazilian GNOME community. Join us!

In brazilian portuguese:

Estamos a 8 dias dias do II Fórum GNOME, a conferência brasileira do GNOME. O Brasil tem alguns casos de adoção em larga escala do GNOME e um monte de usuários domésticos porém não tem uma comunidade organizada de usuários e desenvolvedores. O II Fórum será uma ótima oportunidade para isso. Então, por agora, estou apenas criando um canal IRC (#gnome-br) em irc.gimp.net para congregar brasileir@s interessad@s em formar uma comunidade brasileira do GNOME. Participe!

EOG “super-exciting” 2.13.2 release is out! It has lots of bug fixes and an awesome UI rework. There’s still much to do but EOG is already a much nicer app now. See NEWS for detailed list of changes. I received several positive feedback from users and developers what makes me very happy! :-)

Zenity 2.13.2 is released too. No exciting stuff for now but 2.13.3 will have useful-nice-litle-features!

I and Carol watched some movies (and ate a lot) this weekend:

• The Interpreter (crap)
• The Machinist (nice!)
• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (normal action movie)

Music:

• BNegão
• Jackson Five
• Zezé di Camargo e Luciano (hehe, I know, they are crap but have some nice songs)

II Fórum GNOME
I’ll attend II Forum GNOME this year. It’s the first event I attend as a GNOME dev, this is nice. I’ll give a talk about GNOME Desktop present and future. Probably I’ll talk about the current desktop features, perfomance efforts, potential new modules and some other interesting stuff that some other GNOME hacker suggests. :-)

Tim Ney, Germán Póo Caamaño, and Sandino Flores will be there too. It’ll be nice to meet other GNOME people. Actually, I never personally met anyone from GNOME. I think the Forum could have more hacking activities. There are just a few people here in Brazil directly involved with GNOME development. We need to get more brazilian contributors through hacklabs and workshops. Another problem is that no one here knows about the event. A serious communication problem.

EOG UI Rework
Well, I started the EOG UI rework that is part of our plans for 2.14. I didn’t finish it yet but here is a screenshot (with one of the awesome Garrett LeSage’s photos):

Evince-like UI for EOG

I’m thinking about moving the Image Information side pane to a separate dialog. The current side pane takes too much space and there are too many EXIF data to show in a litle space. This dialog would have an image thumbnail, the EXIF data and next/prev/close buttons for easy navigation through images. I know dialogs sucks but the current approach is ugly. Discussion about this issue is taking place here. Comments?

• I love CIA Open Source Notification System. It’s the free software Big Brother! You can watch commits from several projects in real time by joining FreeNode #commits channel.
• Music: Maria Rita‘s latest album “Segundo” is cool! Vanessa da Mata‘s “Essa Boneca Tem um Manual” is even better!
• Movies: The Final Cut (regular), Assault on Precinct 13 (regular), True Crime (nice!) and The Constant Gardener (EXCELENT!)
• Work: it’s been very boring to work on web development stuff at work. I wish I have an oportunity to work with something different than that.

EOG 2.13.1 is released! This is the first EOG development release and my first release as a co-maintainer. Tim has been very busy at work and other stuff. So we’ll work together on EOG maintainership. See NEWS to know what’s new. Basically, this a heavy-bug-cleaning release. EOG had lots of crashes that needed to be solved. Cleaning these crashes is the first step of our roadmap for GNOME 2.14.

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.