Say hello to my little friend NTrunko, my Nokia N800 tablet! It arrived yesterday at my housee, thanks to a good friend and the good folks at Nokia and Maemo! I’ve spent a good chunk of last night playing with it and am COMPLETELY amazed with the quality and potential it has to offer! This post, for instance, is being written using Maemo WordPy. I even connected home via ssh!

Last week I was pleasantly surprised to see the following message in my inbox: Hi, (apologies for the delay in sending this acceptance mail) Your lightning talk has been accepted for the Lightning Talk session at GUADEC 2006, in Birmingham UK.  If you have not already registered for GUADEC, you should register now at http://guadec.org/registration. We look forward to seeing you at GUADEC! Ross Burton GUADEC Papers Committee

Just an update on the development for BillReminder. Real life and work took a good hold of me these last 2 months and I had not been able to stick to my personal roadmap… that is, until last week. The programming itch attacked me again, and the result was several commits along the week, completly stripping BillReminder of its Glade “skin” and re-writing a lot of the code. I must tell you, I am very happy with the outcome so far… The applications “feels” snapier and I am learning a lot of new things along the way too!

Shameless plug ahead: If you speak Portuguese and want to learn how to use the GIMP like the pros, I strongly recommend you check out my good friend Antônio “LedStyle” Cláudio's new project! “LedStyle” and I have worked together before doing podcasts for the Brazilian Ubuntu Planet, and my respect and admiration for him has never stopped growing! I downloaded the first video (out of 10, plus all the exercise material freely available) and was very impressed by his didactic skills!

I figured, why not whip up a quick sample code to show off the genericlist I just published? So I chose the Tasks application, written in C/C++, as my target. A few minutes later, my “port” was born: Bigger picture here. The application to the left is the one I whipped up… the one to the right is the real deal! Obviously I didn’t bother writing up the code to actually store information, and this exercise was meant to be like the penguins in the movie “The Wild"… to look cute and cuddly.

Quite a few people have asked me to publish my attempt at simplifying the process of creating and using a Gtk.TreeView (see this post). The truth is that life has been a bit hectic these last 5-6 weeks and I didn’t get to do any more development on it. But I think it is still very usefull, even if only as a learning aid. The code will be published to a few repositories very soon, but in the meantime, you can copy it inline right here (read the rest of this post).

My daughter Yv had submitted a drawing about a month ago to a contest sponsored by a local magazine called Carolina Parent. The contest, “TV-Turnoff Week”, urged kids to unplug from their televisions and spend some more time outdoors! Yesterday my wife showed me the drawings that were selected, and unfortunately Yv’s was not among them. With tearful eyes, I was able to follow the avalanche of emotions going through her mind… Obviously, frustration and disappointment are not new emotions to me, but seeing it happening to someone still so innocent and unexperienced made me think really hard.