The novel will be available completely free of charge, no strings attached! To top it off, being the nice guy that he is, he’s also setting up a donation system to take advantage of the traffic that his web site will most like generate so that you can support a charity of your choice! More details on that will be available soon from his site, but feel free to recommend a charity to him directly via a comment.

• Issues with latest *goocanvas/pycairo mess [0][1][2];
• Epiphany issues with latest WebKit in x86_64;
• Exotic side effects of kernel changes that make audio CDs not easilly playable (not a Foresight exclusive issue);
• Mono is somehow partly busted (part of gnome bindings) in x86_64 – hits latest banshee;
• Getting Anaconda to play nicely with newer kernel drivers for some motherboards;

Some of the cool things we’re cooking in the development branch are: latest KDE, GNOME, Chromium/Firefox/Opera web browser, gst streamer bits, latest kernel, Banshee 1.5.1, F-Spot, and many, many more applications!

If you’re trying Foresight for the very first time, you’ll notice that the first update will take a while but that is expected. Since it is a rolling release, our current state is many miles ahead of the ISO images we have published. Conary, the package management system, has to pull in all of those changes as well as version your entire system in order to “apply” these changes. If you’re interested in playing with fire and feel like helping us detect issues before we release a new version, come on over to the #foresight IRC channel on Freenode and we’ll get you started!

Ever since that day, I had the opportunity to meet Miguel 2 more times while attending some of the open source conferences. Our conversations were always very brief as he was always being mobbed and there wasn’t much room to keep a normal conversation without him being interrupted by someone requesting his attention. He was always very cordial and always complemented me for not having an accent when I talked (he knew I was Brazilian but I don’t think he realized I had lived here in the US for quite some time).

So I never really got to hang out with him and I never got a chance to tell him how important his work with Mono was to keep me motivated while trying to transition from being strictly a Microsoft developer to trying out C# and writing cross platform applications. I remember telling my friends that I would love to work for him and would even work free of charge just to be under his tutelage! Alas, when you’re a father you have to make sacrifices and my plan to ask for a job with no pay wasn’t going to cut it!

Anyhow, I just wanted to say to all the early GNOMErs, Ximians and whatever else you may call yourselves these days that I appreciate your hard work, perseverance and foresight! The open source world would be at a loss without you guys!

Shortly after the initial conversion and learning curve factor from going to thinking like a developer to thinking like a user were over, I decided that the best thing for me to do was to start using our tools on a daily basis. Not as I validated issues and tried to test use cases, but as a user or customer. Eat our own dog food! I started looking around for a good project to convert into an appliance, something that would benefit from a dynamic versioned controlled system. So about 1 year ago (12 months and 6 days to be exact) I started a new project on rBuilder Online called “Transifex appliance” based on the Transifex project.

What is the Transifex project, you may ask? From their web site:

Transifex is a highly scalable localization platform with a focus on integrating well with the existing workflow of both translators and developers.

It aims in making it dead-simple for content providers to receive quality translations from big translation communities, no matter where the project is hosted.

The Transifex Appliance is a self contained, all parts included with just enough operating system based on the rPath Linux distribution that allows you to get a full fledged Transifex installation ready to be used! Several image formats are available, including an EC2 image that can be deployed on Amazon’s AWS clouds with a single click of a button. It comes pre-populated with a couple of users and projects that you can play with as well as with its own web based appliance management interface so that you can manage system tasks such as taking a backup, updating it, start or stop services, view system logs, among other things.

Early on I decided to maintain the appliance to work in synchrony with the Transifex project itself, following the development (main) code line and finding issues as the code was being developed, and keeping a stable branch and updating it whenever a new released was published. This has worked fairly well for the project as they can identify issues right away and make sure they are handled before making it available to the public. It has also served as an excellent means for delivering quality software as the appliance itself is a pristine environment with no “contamination” from external dependencies and making sure that what gets developed is what you get!

During the course of working on this project I developed a very healthy relationship with the developers and the fruits of this “investment” have been returned to me (and I believe to the project as well) many times fold! I have learned a lot about the tools we’re developing here at work and have actually become a “perfect use case” for how our customers use our tools! The appliance has been downloaded a few hundred times in the last few weeks and this is what brought me to write this post!

You see, early on I had to choose a database to use for the appliance and the first thing that came to mind was the MySQL database. Turns out that when the Transifex project decided to launch a free web portal to showcase their product in the shape of Transifex.net, they chose to use PostgreSQL. I’m not facing the situation where I also want to switch the appliance to use postgreSQL but with so many downloaded images out in the wild, I wanted to know from the users:

1. Would you mind the switch?
2. Would you want a migration script to move your data between databases?
3. Would you want this to be done automatically on update?

I really look forward to your feedback and please feel free to leave your questions or suggestions in the comments section of my blog.

The engine behind it was for the last 3 years the well known planetplanet feed reader and for most of the part it did its job well. Every now and then there would be a hiccup here and there, mostly due to badly formatted feeds, but things usually worked itself out without any intervention. Well, it turns out that this aggregator had stopped working for quite some time without my knowledge (what can I say, I’ve been busy and selectively picking what emails to read) and people started complaining to me that they couldn’t receive their news anymore.

To make a long story short, I spent many iterations trying to get rid of all the brokenness by parsing the configuration file and error logs, and whacking the “bad” feeds when it dawned on me: “This should be easier like maintaining a blog!” The first thing that came to mind was to use WordPress as the “framework” and see if there was a plugin to turn it into a blog aggregator. A few hits on a Google search brought me to FeedWordPress, “an open-source Atom/RSS aggregator for the WordPress weblog software. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; if you syndicate several feeds you can use WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregator (planet) website.”

If that sounds too easy of a solution, then rest assured: it is! After performing a standard WordPress installation, I added this plugin and… voilá! The aggregator was born! There’s even an easy to use web interface that not only allows you to copy and paste the url of the blog you want to syndicate, but it validates it too! How convenient!

So far the web site seems to be running just fine, updating blogs as they come fresh out of their respective sites. No more ssh’ing to my server to enter new entries into a configuration file… Lots of already developed/created plugins, widgets, themes, you name it out there for me to use… and a huge user base to answer any question I may have about the platform!

Now, I don’t know anything about performance issues and/or benchmark numbers for running an aggreagtor with WordPress compared to any other tool out there (if you do, please share), but if you need something done quick and painless, you may want to try it yourself.

• I’ve been house hunting for the last 3-4 months and I can honestly say that it is a very intense experience! There are so many things to learn and remember and so many different things to consider! Wouldn’t be nice if you knew right up front all the costs and fees involved in purchasing a house, the same way you know how much it costs to purchase a pair of sneakers (cost of sneakers plus sales tax)? Alas, the hard work has paid off and in about 3 weeks I’ll be a home owner for the first time!
• Work has kept me very busy these last few months but thanks to some new goals and new hires, the future is looking pretty bright for rPath and I’m very excited to be a part of it all! I managed to hack on a proof of concept for a Django-based tool for our QA department which received a good deal of good feedback! I’ve also spent some time cleaning up our wiki and getting things ready for the new QA engineer who’s starting in a few weeks.
• Foresight Linux, my distribution of choice for the last 3 years, has undergone a lot of updates and changes these last few weeks, including a new sub-project called “Boots“, a Fedora remix. Basically, “Boots is proposed to be as faithful as possible an import of the upstream binary platform packages, within the constraints of being repackaged for Conary using Conary best practices.” Also, as Foresight follows a rolling release model, I’m enjoying having latest Firefox, Chromium, kernel 2.6.30.x, Xorg 7.4, OpenOffice 3.1.1 only an update away. GNOME 2.28 is already in our development label and should be hitting the stable branch soon!
• Speaking about GNOME, the Brazilian translation team went through a (much needed) last minute change in the coordination and the entire team rallied to deliver, once again, a completely translated desktop! Though the new coordinator lacks experience using git and managing a translation team, he makes up with a good attitude and humility.
• Still talking about translations, I’ve been keeping the Transifex Appliance up to date on both development and stable fronts. Thanks to the power of having a system version controlled management model under my finger prints, maintaining and delivering the appliance in synchrony with the development and release schedule of the the Transifex project is child’s play!
• I spent some time playing with Mallard and using it to implement a new User Guide for Foresight Linux! In the next few weeks I will also port Cheese to mallard so that they can also enjoy of this great documentation tool! Speaking of Cheese, I had the pleasure of lending a helping hand proofreading the tour page and was honored that Daniel Siegel asked my permission to use my daughter’s pictures to show off the new 2.28 features! Thanks dude!
• When not going nuts over the many different inspections needed for purchasing a house, reviewing and committing translations, maintaining packages and software appliances or spending quality time with my family, I try to keep up with my new year’s resolution from last year of reading a book every day during my lunch break. I’ve read quite a few books this year, some times juggling more than one book at a time. Lately I’ve been finishing up “The Last of the Mohicans” and am gearing up to start reading  ”Emblem Divide“, a novel by my good friend Pete Savage. My curiosity got the best of me and I just had to read the first page! The best part of the book in my opinion is not as much as all the “easter eggs” he sprinkled here and there, but the reason why he wrote it! Want to know about it? Check out the web site for the book!

I guess this is about it for now. If I haven’t replied to your email, please accept my apologies. I have a pretty lengthy cue of emails to reply and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Feel free to ping me on IRC (nick is OgMaciel in pretty much all servers, including Freenode and GimpNet) as your chances of getting a reply will be much higher.

The one feature sure to turn people’s head is the ability to do their translations online using their Lotte Translation Editor. “Its main features are still under heavy development, but following the ‘Release early, Release often’ principle, we’ve unleashed this lady out in the wild to get some feedback and improve”, says Dimitris Glezos, all time mountain climber and Indifex’s head honcho.

Fine-grained permissions, submissions to a mailbox, user profiles, and publican-like I18n support are only a few more nuggets that you will find on Pyro, making it one of the hottest releases of 2009 so make sure to put on your oven mittens!

If you want to play with the latest Transifex code, you may want to use our development images for the Transifex Appliance. Following the stand-alone, “batteries included” model of software appliances, you get a complete Transifex system with all dependencies and services pre-configured so that you can start experimenting with it right away. Choose from ISO, VMware or Amazon EC2 images, for both x86 and x86_64 architectures to run on a virtual machine, dedicated server or using a virtualization software.

Your appliances can be updated using its own web based management system by pointing your browser to the appliance’s IP address using port 8003. Login with the credentials ‘admin’ and ‘password’ and make sure to change the password once you’ve successfully logged in.

This appliance comes pre-bundled with a couple of projects already created for you to play with. Log in to the Transifex interface using either guest/guest or editor/editor as your user name and password combination and tinker to your heart’s content!

A couple of new features that have been added to the appliance itself was the ability to read/download Transifex, Apache and My SQL log files and a new customized front page (just see above).

I’ve also customized the list of services one would most likely want to manage (start, stop, restart) to simplify this administrative task. For the next customization, as the appliance already allows you to take backups over NFS, CIFS/Samba and/or local storage, I will configure it so that it includes all the files related to Transifex itself, including database dumps and configuration files.

Have you got a pretty cool project hosted on Github, Gitorious, Bitbucket or any one of these cool self serve code hosting services and want to attract more translators to help you make your project “speak different languages”? Don’t want to move your source code to another host? Don’t want to run your own version of Transifex? Not a problem! Just head down to Transifex.net and register your project for translations completely FREE of charge! You see, Transifex.net is also a hub for translators to offer their services and showcase their skills, so once you’re in, it will be dead easy to attract collaborators!

Need to step it up a notch and get quality support service, direct access to new releases and even on-site support? Get in touch with the amazing Indifex folks and check out their professional services. Some amazing projects are already trusting their translations to Transifex, so what are you waiting for?

What is it? It is a continuous build of GNOME packages all bundled up into a distribution (in this case, Foresight Linux) and distributed in a few different formats, such as ISO and VMware.

“What’s so special about it”, you ask? Is it the fact that different image types can be generated at will? Nah, generating images is children’s play, just ask the Suse Studio guys. What is special is the sauce used to not only allow the quick and painless releases but also managing it as if the entire system was under a version control. Did I say “as if”? I meant to say, “manage it under a version control”! If you want to try this succulent sauce, ask your favorite release and management provider for conary!

So Zhang has created a mechanism that allows him to package (and maintain and update) the GNOME applications directly from their respective Git repositories on a daily basis and bundling it all up under a distribution. Every day you can then ask PackageKit to update your system to whatever was built the previous day (or you can run sudo conary updateall from the command line) and check what new things have arrived.

If you are a developer, you could then push your code to your repository and see what it looks like running under the GNOME Developer’s Kit without having to jump through many hoops!

If you are a contributor, you could test these applications and report issues right away to the developers so that they can look into it. Better yet, you could even generate a patch and send it along with your report! Want to kick it up a notch? Learn how to package that same application with your patches and play with it before sending it in!

If you’re a translator or writing docs, imagine being able to see the application you’re trying to translate running right in front of you! As the GNOME Developer’s Kit already comes with a lot of tools such as gettext, intltool and poEdit, you got your work cut out for you!

So, are you interested? Go download it right now and join us on #foresight on irc.freenode.net today!

Can you see me here? Look all to the in the back to the left. By jcorrius under a Creative Commons license.

I don’t want to talk about specific talks or give a detailed account of what happened during that week but only to recollect a few interesting things that caught my attention. So, without much further ado…

My Spanish has improved by leaps and bounds as I forced myself to avoid using English as much as I could. The one thing that really got me started was the night I hung out with Diego, Gérman, Gil, Silvia and (Aparecido) Quesada at the lobby of the Catalina Park Apartments. I absolutely loved talking to them and learning a lot about them as well as about Spain, Catalonia (and the political aspect between these two, thanks to Silvia), all while improving my vocabulary and learning new idiomatic expressions!

I think that meeting Seif Lotfy deserves a paragraph of its own! We met up one day early in the morning by the beach and we talked for many hours on different occasions about every possible topic you can think of! He’s a very energetic and fun guy to hang out with, and best of all, he actually knew about my pet project BillReminder. That will definitely earn points with me!

Seif taking a nap

Speaking of BillReminder, I was told by 2 GNOMErs that not only they’ve used it but also borrowed some code ideas from it! Flattery issues!!!

I also enjoyed meeting Simos Xenitellis and probably bugged the poor guy more than I should be allowed! Due to all the rain we had in the Northeast of the United States I missed my connection flight from Boston to Madrid by 2 lousy minutes and was forced to spend 24 hours in Boston! I took advantage of the time and started playing with Simos’ GNOME i18n Manage VCS script and kept working at it until it got to the point where I had several decent patches I planned to show him. We talked for quite some time and it turns out we sort of share the same ideas for his script and the direction he wants to take it. During the following days he pulled all of my patches to his repository and have added me as a developer!

Something interesting that happened was the fact that 3 developers of the very small (but proud as heck!) Foresight Linux distribution, all living in the United States mind you, managed to get together for lunch in Las Palmas: Paul Cutler, Ken Vandine and yours truly. Ken sports the color of (Ubuntu) brown these days but I know that deep down he is still very much (Foresight) green!

The Foresight gang was present!

A super duper cool project I had a chance to see up close and personal was the GNOME Voice Control, a great tool being developed by my (new) friend Raphael Nunes. The poor guy had barely gotten to the hotel from his flight and was already hacking away on his presentation. I unfortunately missed it but was told that when told that you could pretty much tell your GNOME desktop to do anything you wanted, Everaldo Canuto (another new friend) walked up to the stage and leaning on Raphael’s laptop, said: “Make me a sandwich!” When several seconds had ellapsed and he didn’t see a sandwich being delivered to him, he politely added: “Please?” Priceless!

Speaking of new friends, I made a ton of them and the night before I left Las Palmas I managed to schedule a get together by the shore with a few of them: Everaldo Canuto and his lovely fiancee Rosa, Raphael Nunes, Aparecido Quesada and Rui Matos (unfortunately I did not find Jonh Wendell and Vinicius Depizzol at the hotel). All Brazilian except for Rui who is from Portugal and graciously put up with a lot of jokes from us! I have to tell you, the level of camadarie and intimacy that we developed during such a short time was proof of how much we all have in common working under the GNOME umbrella. I had not laughed so much and so hard in quite some time. In the end I was saddened to say goodbye to such a great bunch of guys!

So was the Brazilian and Portuguese crew!

It is funny how little things grow into you when you least suspect. I miss sitting down at the lobby and just talking to whoever happened to be around, even the doorman! Watching the sunset by the shore while drinking a cold Dorada, drinking freshly squeezed orange juice and cafe’ con leche for breakfast, trading those vouchers Intel gave us to get more ice cream or coffee, or even fighting to the end with the other hundreds of attendants for a free IP in the ever so jammed and slow wireless access… I miss all of these “little” things already! I keep telling myself, “had I only slept two hours instead of three I could have done so much more!”

If the walls of this lobby could talk...

To the very generous sponsors whose support was fundamental during this trip, my most humble and heartfull “Thank You” and to those friends I made during those crazy days, “You have all become much more than an irc nick!” I look forward to the next opportunity we’ll meet again!

By mariosp on Flickr.

Ardentryst is an action/RPG sidescoller, focused not just on fighting, but on story, and character development. Strategy as well as reflexes will be needed to overcome the game. The game is set in another world. It is somewhat a cross between Donkey Kong Country, Mario, Castlevania and Kingdom Hearts. Ardentryst is focused on a fantasy world. The player is guided through a storyline which he or her must act in and play a major role in keeping peace and order in Ardentryst. It features two playable characters and a variety of weapons, items, armour, monsters, and beautiful level scenery and graphics.

I hardly ever play any games these days but I immediately thought of my older daughter who is just now discovering computer games and such. So I wrote down the url to take it for a spin once I got home and completely forgot about it. To my surprise, the moment we got back home my daughter reminded me of the game and asked me to put it in our main computer. The dependencies, python and pygame, were fairly easy to install on my system and once I downloaded the game and unzip it, all I had to do was run the “executable” and everything just worked.

For the next 5 minutes I followed the training stage, taking my time as I explained how the game worked to my daughter at the same time that I was learning it. I had barely finished it when she told me she was ready to give it a try.

I went to the kitchen to fulfill my cooking duties for the evening and what followed were 40 minutes of a lot of hacking, slashing and spell casting by a very excited little person who would come running to the kitchen and proudly do her winning dance every time her character would level up!

The game is fairly safe for little kids and it doesn’t require a lot of button mashing to conquer the objectives. The only “negative” aspect of the game was the fact that the heroine Nyx can not be used in the early stages, which was almost a show stopper for my daughter who was very reluctant to play with the “boy” character at first.

Take the game for a spin and enjoy!