I was extremely thrilled to learn that my good friend Pete Savagedecided to publish his novel “Emblem Divide" online! I had the honor of getting a copy of his work last month and have enjoyed reading it a lot! 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!

Reading today’s post by Miguel about the 10 years anniversary of Ximian’s incorporation brought back memories of a time when I wasn’t as involved with open source… a time when I hated my job and would do anything to score a job with a Linux company. I had decided to attend a Microsoft boot camp in Massachusetts and since I was going to be around Boston, for some reason I decided to send Miguel an email asking him if he would mind meeting with me and maybe grabbing a cup of coffee.

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.

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!

I was browsing through my favorite Linux magazine (it’s Linux Format by the way… I wonder if I mention it several times here on my blog if someone will send me a free subscription? What? A guy can dream, can’t he?) at a certain book store today when I came across a quick review of the game Ardentryst. Ardentryst is an action/RPG sidescoller, focused not just on fighting, but on story, and character development.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“500” caption=“Happiness by Sabrina Campagna cc-by”][/caption] I was hanging out in the lobby of the Catalina Park Appartments last week writing some code when I was approached by Diederik van der Boor (of KMess fame) who was also hacking away and had a question about Git. Diederik: are you an expert on git by any chance? Me: hardly, but what is the question? Diederik: I just made a few changes to a single file and was wondering if it is possible to commit specific chunks?

Thanks to the amazing support from the GNOME Travel Committee, I will be attending my first GUADEC this year in Gran Canaria! I am very thankful for their commitment to accomodate my needs and I’ll try to make the most of it! I’ll be arriving July 3rd around lunch time and will stay until the 11th, so there will be plenty of time to meet up and discuss. I’m mostly interested in localization, accessibility, and tests automation but am equaly interested in community building and the organization toward GNOME 3.

GeekDeck has just released Issue 3, including; Editor’s Letter My look at Foresight Linux Damien interviews OpenCandy CEOhttp://geekdeck.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/interview-opencandy-ceo-darrius-thompson/ Why does society hate geeks? Are modal dialogs a thing of the past? Our feature on creating a Live CD Mark gets angry…Very angry Pete get’s something off his chest Is the Internet really so virtual anymore? The best bag in the business? Pete gets a break as Mark talks E3 What are you waiting for?

Celebrating my 35th birthday today! A year older, a year (hopefully) wiser, and every day glad to have the life I have! Can’t wait to see what the next year will bring! :)

Been quite busy at work these days, as well as playing the host to my parents during the holidays. I did keep up with what was happening around the world, thanks to my G1 (I love this gadget!), and wanted to share a few nice nuggets. First of all, the birth of Lotte, the online translation editor! This new feature will help the Transifex guys deliver a fatal 1,2 punch combination in the fight against bad translation tools and processes!