Reading Scott James Remnant’s latest post on what he calls “Parallel Peer Programming” got me wondering if the same approach could work for the small project I’ve been secretly working on. Scott fired up 3 separate screem sessions to which his co-worker Gustavo Niemeyer synced to. From that point one, they could see what each other was doing “live” in their respective terminals/laptops. Scott would write test cases in one terminal (to which Gustavo could now “watch”), Gustavo would then write the code in the second terminal to make sure it would pass the test, and use the third terminal to test it.

'nough said!

Managed to install Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) on my laptop last night! Very impressive, including the fact that I didn’t have to manually download the driver and firmware for my ipw2200 wifi card!!! And just take a look at the ultra sexy notification message on the upper right hand corner of the screen!!! After adding more repositories to my source.list, I proceeded to install Banshee and Gajim! F-Spot will be joining them next!

Early this week I decided to lure more people into participating more with the task of translating Ubuntu Breezy’s packages to the Portuguese (Brazilian) language. A quick email to our distribution BrazilianLoCo list with promises of eternal gratitude from $DEITY was able to attract a few replies and by Tuesday (or was it Monday???) night I met up with a few people at #ubuntu-br (Freenode) who were willing to spend some time doing the job.

Complying with my decision to learn how to package software for Debian-based distros, I spent some (unfortunately very little) time this weekend going over this tutorial on packaging for Debian. Almost everything worked as per the instructions, minus some minor changes I had to perform in order to end up with a working .deb file. The experience was very rewarding and I have already started to plan more “real world” practice trials to get the hang of it!

Got my reservation for Dec. 1st… Should be very interesting! Not to mention they’ll be giving out FREE copies of it too to all attendees! =)

Edd Dumbill’s article on how to install Debian is worth to check… and for a quick recipe-like instruction, check out (shameless plug) my article “Installing Debian For The Faint Of Heart.”

… or, how I finally got off my butt and became more involved with the open source community. It was not long ago, during one of my recent rants about open source not always being open to non-contributors, that I first heard of Stephan Hermann. He had written something that really clicked with my way of thinking, and shortly after exchanging some emails/posts replies I was convinced that it was about time I got more involved with the community.

I’ve been following a very interesting discussion that has taken place these last few days on Planet Debian about application usability and how much information exposed to a user is too much. In one end you have Axel Beckert (with some commentary support by Wouter) talking about how some of the new changes made to the Galeon web browser have actually “crippled it” for the more “advanced” user. On the other side of the “rink” is Erich Schubert, who believes that most users are not interested in seeing every possible configuration option a web browser has to offer.