Musical Snapshot

I really miss the musician life I used to have in Brazil. In order to compensate that, I started a musical research some time ago. Actually, this is making a huge difference for me. I never thought I would miss music so much… So, here are the highlights of the tons of things I’ve been listening to:

Jazz

I found a very nice old CDs store in Helsinki (I’ve heard from a friend that there are others). I’ve found many interesting albums there. For now, my main focus is on the work of John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Miles David and Charlie Parker but I’m listening to lots of other things as well. I really enjoyed albums of the drummers Max Roach and Roy Haynes. Next: continue the infinite and pleasant jazz research. :-)

  • A Love Supreme (John Coltrane)
  • Afro Blue Impressions (John Coltrane)
  • Money Jungle (Duke Ellington, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus)
  • Afro Cuban Jazz Moods (Dizzy Gillespie)
  • Shack Man (Medeski, Martin & Wood)
  • Out of the Afternoon (Roy Haynes Quartet)

Acid Jazz

I’m a big fan of acid jazz movement in general. I already have Jamiroquai’s discography but I wanted to have deeper view of the “big picture”. I’ve listened to The Brand New Heavies, Incognito, James Taylot Quartet, Jaga Jazzist, Jazzanova, Corduroy, and others. Looking forward to listen to Azymuth, Roy Ayers (one of the fathers of Acid Jazz!) and other cool stuff in the “acid” area.

  • Room at the Top (James Taylor Quartet)
  • Positivity (Incognito)

R&B and Neo Soul

I never really understood what soul and R&B were in practice. It always sounded to be too generic and umbrella-ish. So, I went through the discographies of some good modern artists in this field. Now I got a more clear idea of this whole R&B/soul thing. Special mention goes to Mama’s Gun (Erykah Badu): it’s one of the most “musical” (in the artistic sense) albums I’ve ever listened to.

  • Mama’s Gun (Erykah Badu)
  • Voodoo (D’Angelo)
  • Introducing Joss Stone (Joss Stone)
  • Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1 (Jill Scott)
  • Like a Star (Corinne Bailey Rae)

Funk and P-Funk

I’ve been going through Earth Wind & Fire’s (EWF) and Funkadelic/Parliament’s discographies. It’s just amazing to listen to the roots of most of things we see today in the funky field. Interestingly, I watched documentaries about both groups and they don’t mention each other. It seems there are (kind of) three different “branches” in the funk history: James Brown’s, Funkadelic/Parliament’s and EWF’s.

  • All ‘n All (Earth Wind & Fire)
  • Maggot Brain (Funkadelic)
  • Mothership Connection (Parliament)
  • Live on Planet Groove (Maceo Parker)
  • Good Old Funky Music (The Meters)

Sertaneja and Caipira

I always try to keep prejudice away when the subject is music. In Brazil, the sertaneja music has become too superficial, crappy and commercial in most of the cases. The fact is that the first albums of those famous sertanejo artists are quite nice. They still have some kind of connection with their roots. This is definitely the case of the first album of Zezé di Camargo & Luciano. It’s simple and “truthful” in a very interesting way. On the caipira music area, it’s always an intense experience to listen to artists such as Renato Teixeira and Almir Sater. Next: Pena Branca & Xavantinho, Tião Carreiro, and others.

  • No Auditório Ibirapuera (Renato Teixeira)
  • Zezé di Camargo & Luciano (Zezé di Camargo & Luciano)
  • Sete Sinais (Almir Sater)

That’s all for now! I hope to come with new stuff very soon. :-)

Life + GNOME + Music

For some reason, It’s been about 2 weeks that I feel very tired all the time. I guess this is a combination of work load and post-mastering. Unfortunately, because of that, I’ve been a little bit away from my usual GNOME activities. I guess I’ll be 100% back from next week on.

Congratulations to all GNOME contributors for the project’s 10 years anniversary! I consider myself a quite recent contributor. IIRC, my first contribution to the project was in September 13, 2004. It was a small patch that added save support for the file selection dialog in zenity. Glynn was zenity’s maintainer at that time. Actually, (I don’t know if he knows that) Glynn is definitely my primary GNOME hero because it was him who brought me inside the project and the community. Without his support in my first contributions, I don’t know if I would be so active (and passionate) to the project today. Thank you dude!

As a relaxing activity, I’ve been making some sort of research on the roots of jazz and funk. So, on the jazz side, I’ve been listening to the fundamentals of Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Haynes, and others. On the funk side, Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool and the Gang, Funkadelic, Parliament, and others. I’m really willing to buy the Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary DVD box. I’ve watched some episodes some time ago and it’s just amazing!

GNOME Roadmap – Call for Update

As you probably know, according to our development schedule, we are officialy feature-frozen now. Therefore, it’s time to cleanup and update our Roadmap to reflect the actual result of our development work in the 2.19/2.20 feature set.

We kindly ask you check the roadmap[2] of the modules you maintain. If there are features that were not implemented for 2.20, please move those to GNOME 2.22 section accordingly. In case there are some features missing there, please add those to the respective section.

You can either directly edit the wiki page or reply us with the new roadmap information.

It’s very important to cleanup and update the GNOME Roadmap as soon as possible so that it can be used as a reliable source of information for writing the GNOME 2.20 release notes.

Update: If you want to update your module-specific roadmap wiki page as well, feel free to do so. This will save you some time later for sure.

It’s over!

Yestarday, I defended (via audio-conference) my mastering thesis entitled “Software Livre e produção colaborativa na Internet: um estudo de caso dos instrumentos de comunicação no Projeto GNOME” (in english it would be something like “Free software and collaborative production in Internet: a case study of the communication instruments used in GNOME Project”). I was approved! It’s over! Now I have master degree in Contemporary Culture and Communication. Wohoo! :-)

Quick idea for a revamped HIG

I just wanted to blog about it before I forget. I had a nice chat with Andreas and this idea came out.

Well, everybody knows that our beloved Human Interface Guidelines (aka HIG) needs an update. There are some missing bits for new use cases and the current content needs to be updated for the current desktop (although most of the document seems to be still quite valid). I guess I don’t need to argue about the importance of those guidelines to GNOME usability and UI consistency, right?

My main use case as an user of HIG is to open its table of contents and search for a section related to the topic I’m trying to deal with in my UI. So, would it be nice if the HIG became some kind of a UI guidelines knowledge base? This way we can easily keep the guidelines updated and evolve it every time we find out about a new use case.

Each entry in this knowledge base would provide guidelines for a specific use case or behavior (keyboard shortcuts, search, zooming, drag and drop, etc) or UI element (statusbar, toolbar, menubar, dialogs, panels, etc). Entries could be marked as deprecated and have different versions. Of course, entries could be tagged as well. The initial webpage could have just a search entry and a sane topics tree, tag cloud (or a kind of table of contents). The entries could be submitted by anyone but it would be moderated and improved/fixed by the GNOME Usability experts.

Well, this was just a random idea. I don’t really plan to work on that. I hope it can be an inspiration and bring some motivation to update our HIG and make it rock even more! :-P

GUADEC Highlights

  • I think my talk about Hildon Desktop went quite nicely. Well, that’s what I’ve heard from the attendees :-)
  • Some interesting ideas came out from Havoc‘s and Bryan‘s keynote about Online Desktop. I still don’t see much sense in something like Big Board or an online-only desktop flavor. But yes, we need to take the new web services into account in GNOME Desktop in interesting ways. I have some ideas for Eye of GNOME plugins for instance. :-P
  • Very strong presence of GNOME mobile related people in GUADEC. I’m pretty excited about what is yet to come in this area. Yay!
  • I love the stickers that came in the conference bag!
  • The GUADEC 2007 group in Flickr group has some nice shots
  • Mirco brought some interesting ideas and demo in his talk about a possible next generation GNOME Desktop. There are lots of yet-to-be-answered questions on this subject but I think it’s always good to see people bringing fresh new ideas for discussion.
  • Xan and Fer rocked our world with an awesome intro talk for the GTK+ 3.0 BoF! It’s cool to see the GTK+ community starting to consider in a more concrete way the next iteration of our beloved toolkit.
  • I commited a patch by Hubert that adds XMP support to Eye of GNOME (based on exempi). Hub, you rock!
  • Vincent can’t say “Hello” with a british accent. HA HA HA! Dude, I love you!
  • Danilo, Da Da Da! Dje!
  • Etrunko, thanks for lending me your iPod with loads of cool “caipira” songs!
  • Very nice to meet again Thomas, Andreas, Claudio, Izabel and many others!
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