This past weekend the Ubuntu Brazilian Portuguese Translators and the Brazilian Documentation Team put together a 3-day boot camp for translators and new volunteers. The online classes were held every evening at #ubuntu-br-tradutores, and covered all the steps and methods involved in the process of translating Ubuntu to Brazilian Portuguese, as well as showing people how they can participate in the community.. The very last session, taught by Cássio Martini (and me in the back stage), was performed with live demos and participation of the “students” in real time.

Whenever we work on the Brazilian Portuguese translations for Ubuntu Linux through the Rosetta system, we come across some strings that are pretty straight forward to translate, such as “The book is on the table”. hehehe But… not all strings are as obvious and require some further investigation. Our team has compiled a document (pt_BR) which not only explains how Launchpad and Rosetta work, but also has a section dedicated to some of the “hairy” strings we’ve come across.

The race is on to get Ubuntu Linux completely translated into other languages. We, the Brazilian Portuguese Team, are currently in 5th “place”. Inspired by the Ubuntu Classroom, I have taken the iniciative to create 3 “classroom” sessions in portuguese (pt_BR) to be hosted starting today at the #ubuntu-br-tradutores channel @ Freenode. More information can be found in my announcement (in portuguese), including links to documentation on how to use IRC.

It seems that for some reason beyond my understanding, one of my latest posts (“Back to School”) keeps showing up as a new post every so often in services such as Bloglines. Mind you that ONLY this one post seems to be showing this “symptom.“ I was actually informed that it keeps getting “refreshed” every 30 minutes. The reason why I’m writing about this is because I have received complaints from 3 different sources, citing how extremelly annoying it is to see my ‘gotchi showing up in their news reader dujour.

Feeling a bit rusty with your linux skills? Are you a new Ubuntu linux user and feel overwelmed with packaging managers, gpg keys, and IRC lingo? Well, the solution is right around the corner. The folks at New User Network have launched the Ubuntu Classroom, a project aimed at delivering good, live didatic material to all users, new and “seasoned.” Some classes have already been scheduled for the month of August and there are some open slots for instructors.

It has been roughly a week since I learned about the “new” repository created by Canonical to distribute certain proprietary packages. I’m refering to the dapper-commercialrepository, which supposedly contains packages such as skype, realplayer 10, w32codecs, and opera. I say supposedly because I haven’t tried yet. Since I manually downloaded and installed the .deb files for my w32codecs and other needs, I didn’t feel the need to add the repository to my list.

To all my friends who use Windows for their daily tasks (usually at work) and enjoy tinkering with Ruby, now there’s a way to write, edit, and debug your Ruby code within Visual Studio .NET 2005. Note that I’m not refering to Ruby.NET, an implementation being developed by Dr. Wayne Kelly and Prof. John Gough of the Queensland University of Technology. This tip was sent my way by my friend Gerrard Lindsay, a Microsoft consultant for the East Region of the United States.