Some time around the middle of 2008 I was asked if I would be interested in joining the very young QA department for rPath. I had already been working as a software engineer for them since late 2006, spending a larger chunk of my time working on a single project and not being able to experiment with the cool technology we were developing outside of my project. Somehow the idea of doing QA felt very appealing to me as I would then be able to see, first hand, what type of products we were publishing, as well as experience what our customers and users were going through.

One of the many things I maintain outside work is a blog aggregator (aka “planet”) for blogs about open source and technology from the Brazilian community. I try to invite new authors to this “planet” who have something interesting to share about their lives, regardless of what Linux distribution they use, gender, political views or religious beliefs. It is not as popular as some of the other Brazilian news sites, but I think it has a good number of subscribers.

Nossa, quanto tempo que não escrevia no meu blog em português!!! Muitas coisas aconteceram desde o meu último post, mas invés de descrever tudo aqui, convido a todos os interessados a dar uma “bizoiada” no meu blog em inglês! Então, a vida está uma correria só e depois eu volto aqui prá falar mais detalhes sobre a correria toda. Só queria mesmo avisar a todos que o Planeta GNU/Linux Brasil ficou fora do ar por um tempo devido a problemas com o planetplanet, o programa responsável por gerar as notícias e agregar tudo na página web.

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything on my blog so here are some interesting nuggets: 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)?

Last weekend the Indifex developers released the new version of Transifex, “an open service allowing people to collaboratively translate software, documentation and other types of projects.” Codenamed “Pyro" (all releases are named after a X-Men villains), Transifex 0.7 has a pretty lengthy list of new features and bug fixes to make any translator worth his/her salt cry with joy! The one feature sure to turn people’s head is the ability to do their translations online using their Lotte Translation Editor.

Just wanted to re-enforce what Zhang said earlier today about the bleeding edge GNOME Developer’s Kit, now with extra sauce! 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?

Ok, my apologies for not having written up a post on my trip to the Canary Islands and the whole experience of attending the Gran Canary Desktop Summit 2009! I think I can summarize it in one word: AWESOME! I can honestly say that I had a blast meeting a lot of the people that I only knew from irc conversations, emails and blog posts! A lot of the presentations were very interesting, some of them having that special je ne sais quoi that triggered an avalanche of new ideas for my existing projects!