This is it folks, I’m quitting the rat race! After working my butt off for the last 2 years as a contractor, I got tired of the long commutes to/from work/home, missing my daughter grow into this almost five-year-old beautiful girl, not having enough time or energy to properly enjoy time with my family, and always being worried if my contract would be renewed. About 2 weeks ago I was informed my project had gotten canceled and with it, my position.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to represent Ubuntu linux at a symposium held at the United Nations, organized by UNITAR. Together with another representative from Novel, I was invited to demonstrate our operating system and answer any question that may come up during the event. Together with my new friend Nathan Eckenrode whom I met approximately 3 weeks ago (he was one of those who answered my post about getting a free Ubuntu book.

Wow!!! I’m absolutely excited to see my name as one of the top contributors and translators for Ubuntu! Believe me, I am not vain at all, but this caught me off guard! Top Contributors: Top Translators: Glad to see 2 more brazilians made the “list”, my good friend André Noel and Tadeu Rocha!

It has been a while since I last wrote about my TabletPC. About 2-3 weeks ago I managed to install Edgy Knot 1 on it and everything was a-OK! That’s when the rug was pulled from under me and I was kindly asked to return my precious. Turns out my friend, who lent me the Tablet, had no authority to do so, and asked me to return it. I confess, I was sad to see it go get a make over and become someone else’s new toy…

I was wondering if anyone out there would have a “recipe” for doing live broadcasting (and podcasting) using only open source applications? The goal is to replace our record-from-Skype-conversation-with-Audacity-and-convert-to-ogg “process” and eventually have sort of a “live” program where people could listen to a weekly talk and/or download the podcast as well.

My post about the bombing of Nagasaki yesterday seems to have caused quite the stir. As in any of my posts, the text contained within these pages are solely my own thoughts and oppinions. I have received quite a few comments yesterday, most disagreeing with my point of view, a few very personal, but that was expected. After the 30th comment came in this morning, I decided to lock it since I felt it had fulfilled its purpose beyond my expectations.

This article was inspired by another article from my good friend Alex Rocha, who has just taken the plunge into the blogging world, pointing out a document showing how one can create their own customized Live CD with Ubuntu Dapper Drake. The document is a detailed step by step which could help you create a Live CD with all your favorite programas, including all the multimedia codecs, flash, and java for a complete “out-of-the-box” experience, specially if you’re trying to convince your aunt or grandparents to migrate from Windows 98.

Today, 60 years ago: Bocks Car Fat Man 21 kilotons of Plutonium Nagasaki 40000+ civilians pulverized to death! The terrorists got away, and today we can see the airplane “proudly” displayed in an american museum. September 11th, 2001: 2,976+ people have died! Afganistan and Irak invaded! More than 3000 soldiers have died after the “end of the war”! More civilians die every day! The terrorists once again got away!

Yesterday while waiting for my wife at the doctor’s office, I managed to take a peek at an older issue of the American Scientist. Ever since I graduated from Pace University with my BS in Biochemistry, I rarely read anything too scientific and tend to browse more computer related magazines. Anyhow, the very first article, “Gauss’s Day of Reckoning" by Brian Hayes caught my attention: In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers.

I’ve been extremelly busy at work since my boss resigned about 3 weeks ago. To worsen the situation, some other developer has also left, leaving me as the new maintainer for his “legacy” application. The so called “program” is entirely written in Java, acting as a “wrapper” for Oracle and Sybase procedural code, written in PL/SQL and T-SQL respectively. It turns out that every quarter this application gets modified to satisfy the new “business rules” that are “engineered” by the major stakeholders in order to satisfy their needs.