With my 34th birthday fast approaching I figured I’d publish my wish list in the off chance someone wants to buy me a gift? wink You’ll notice that a subscription to Linux Format magazine is ranked as my highest priority… double wink It just takes forever for me to get a hold of them here in the US via the book stores.

Give it a shot! pretty cool actually!

I came across Global Pandora after checking out the anonymous tip left on my previous post. Apparently it is a site that explains how you can gain access to the services provided by Pandora in case you live outside the United States. I was not aware of this, but due to some legal mambo jambo, Pandora is only available in the US, which is a shame! Since I do live in the United States, I didn’t try out the tip, but took the time to check out some of the other music sites listed on Global Pandora.

I don’t know how your work environment is, but where I work all the engineers spend their entire days with their headphones glued to their heads listening to music. Each one of us must own a couple of thousands music files (all legal copies, I can assure you) in our laptops, and since we all share our collections through the office, one could say that we have a pretty decent online selection of music for all genres and tastes.

I started today using the new GNOME Display Manager, aka GDM. This new version (under development) was initially written before the GNOME 2.22 release but never made it on time for that release. Some of new features are: Better fast-user-switching support (bug #343539 etc) Enable a smarter people chooser in the greeter Better ConsoleKit integration (seat awareness, coordination etc) Facilitate creating a new blingier greeter Dynamically configure displays Allow session agents to run in the greeter session (gnome-power-manager etc) Have the ability to only run a single greeter per seat (currently gdmflexiserver will start any number of them) Use PolicyKit for reboot etc authorization/handling Use a better configuration mechanism that is more compatible with a hypothetical systemwide D-Bus based GConf Provide a D-Bus API so that agents like fast-user-switch applet can be written more easily and operate more efficiently Fix all the horrible non-reentrant POSIX signal handling and various race conditions in the current code (bug #336549 etc) Make it easier to do “hot desking” type things Use a more modern design to simplify maintence and enhance flexibility (use of GObject etc) Use a more robust, secure, and flexible IPC … and many more.

Everyone who works with the translation of free and open source software must know the web site Open-Tran.eu (if you don’t, I highly recommend it!), a translation repository online. To quote Jacek, the brain behind the project: Proprietary software vendors may (if they can afford it) use CAT or TM software in order to ensure the consistency of their applications' terminology. Unfortunately, there are many different software vendors who are not willing to share their knowledge (which includes translation memory databases) with the others.

I’m extremely proud to announce that the XFCE desktop environment, well known for being a lighter alternative to GNOME or KDE, is completely translated (upstream) to Brazilian Portuguese! A total of over 80 different programs and components off the XFCE and Goodies repositories, with over 6000 strings, I believe that XFCE is the first complex desktop environment to be completely translated to Brazilian Portuguese! The core components had been 100% translated for about 1 week now, as can be see in the stats page, mas yesterday I finished my research and noticed that all the other components were also finished.