Today I subscribed to ShowMeDo, a web site dedicated to providing tutorials in the format of screencasts. The tutorials cover many programming topics with Python being the one that got me to get a paid subscription. I managed to watch a few episodes during my lunch break… and was blown away at how easy it is to follow the sessions! Before anyone ask, I’m not getting paid for this plug… I know quite a few people who have shown interest in learning Python but didn’t know how to get started.

I’ve finally found time to upload some of my pictures and movies to Flickr and Youtube. Videos: Yv singing something she learned at school from her friends (with a butterfly painted to her face). Kate babling away! Pictures: More pictures here!

Openbox just keeps getting better and better! The new support for XDG files is just what the doctor recommended. See the full changelog here.

Yesterday I sent out an email to the members of the Ubuntu Brazilian Council (of which I’ve been a member for quite some time now) informing of my decision to step down. For the last few months I have been extremely busy at work as well as keeping up with the translations for GNOME, XFCE, Ubuntu and my pet project BillReminder. As if this wasn’t enough, Kate, my youngest child is now 14 months old and walking all over the apartment… and Yv is almost 7 already!

This last Thursday I was surprised by Johan Dahlin when he showed me the new feature he’s adding to Stoq: colored coded categories. He said he was inspired by the same feature I added to BillReminder. Wow! I couldn’t help but feel very flattered with this… after all, Stoq is a great piece of software developed by a very clever crew!

I meant to write this before but got really busy this past week. About 2 weeks ago I sent my oldest daughter Yv to spend her Spring break with my parents in New York. It was the very first time she went anywhere without my wife or me, and we were all very nervous about the whole thing. I worked from home that day so I wouldn’t have to drive back from work and then to the airport.

Starting this Thursday, April 3, 2008 I’ll be attending this year’s What’s the Big Idea?, a series of lectures given by UNC Chapel Hill scientists focusing on genetics, ethics and human health. For a mere 30 dollars I was able to register for all four lectures! The topics are very interesting and close to my personal interests in bioinformatics and gene therapy. Did you know I have a degree in biochemistry?

So I have finally migrated BillReminder to Google Code, thanks to the helping hand of a few gents from Google. I did expect a full, smooth migration process but, for better or worse, there are a lot of manual steps that you have to perform before you can have the same structure (well, not the same but something usefull) from SourceForge. I figured I’d mention here some of the things I had to do for those who may find themselves wanting to do the same thing.

Very cool news from the land of the Epiphany web browser this morning. Their decision to go with WebKit plus the synchronization with GNOME’s release cycle should appeal to a lot of new developers and contributors! If we could finally get Firebug for Epiphany (this GSoC idea needs a mentor!!!) I could stop using two different browsers. :)

For more than 4 years I had been a happy customer of phpwebhosting.com. That was until last year when my domain (shared) and the entire server went down for no apparent reason! My emails were completely ignored and to this day I don’t know what really happened. This morning was the last straw for me. I have already signed a contract with dreamhost and will be migrating my two blogs in the next few days.