I’ve been following a very interesting discussion that has taken place these last few days on Planet Debian about application usability and how much information exposed to a user is too much. In one end you have Axel Beckert (with some commentary support by Wouter) talking about how some of the new changes made to the Galeon web browser have actually “crippled it” for the more “advanced” user. On the other side of the “rink” is Erich Schubert, who believes that most users are not interested in seeing every possible configuration option a web browser has to offer.

Am now officially part of the Ubuntu Brazilian Portuguese Translators!!! And it only took me a few days of bothering the team administrator on #ubuntu-br and some 281 translations too… ;)

For the third time in my life I got a traffic ticket this past Friday. Now, I know I was wrong and parked under a sign that clearly stated no one was allowed to park on that side of the street until 6pm (it was 5:30pm when I pulled up to pick up my daughter from school). But $60 for parking on an empty side street, without blocking any garages, fire hydrants, or important land mark?

Thought I’d share with my fellow programmers my latest finding: Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers. You can download the entire book (approx. 15MB) on individual chapters in PDF format. Now, if Microsoft would only release the bloody thing already! ;) If anyone know of a similar book for C#, please post back.

Over the weekend I finally took the first step towards my resolution to take a more active role in helping out the open source community. As of last Friday, I joined the hordes of developers and open source enthusiasts who signed up for Ubuntu’s LaunchPad project and offered to help with the ongoing process of translating applications and documents from English to Portuguese (Brazil). I spoke with the organizer for this specific translation effort and was told to submit suggestions to some of the sections still pending.

Yesterday a lot of people hanging out on #ubuntu @ FREENODE were complaining of Firefox crashes in Ubuntu Linux after upgrading to the latest 1.0.7 version. This will only happen if you’ve enabled Ubuntu Backports in your apt-get setup. Luckly, Cyphase took the time to write up a small HowTo that will help you fix this minor glitch. For the console-afficionado out there just execute: sudo apt-get remove firefox firefox-gnome-support mozilla-firefox mozilla-firefox-gnome-support sudo apt-get install mozilla-firefox mozilla-firefox-gnome-support