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)? 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. :)