Taking a day off tomorrow to fly to NYC with my oldest daughter so we can both attend this year’s Book Expo America (BEA) at the Javits Center. We’re both very excited about this chance of seeing so many books and the possibility of meeting some of the authors, such as Mo Willems! Unfortunately I’m going to miss meeting James Dashner as he’s scheduled to give out sample chapters of his upcoming book only on Wednesday.

It’s been a while since I pimped my Django Dev Kit Appliance, mostly because I have been really busy with work, projects and my kid’s end of the school year. Anyhow, I rebuilt the appliance to use the latest Django 1.3 release plus several other updated packages such as git and mercurial. I have also stopped building Amazon EC2 images and will from now on only provide ISOs and Raw Filesystem images.

I can’t believe it’s been this long already, but it is time for yet another Board of Directors Election! Having had the opportunity to serve on the Board for these last 12 months, I want to encourage anyone who have the time and interest to improve the GNOME project to run for one of the seven spots on the Board of Directors! For more information on this, please read the official announcement here!

With all the blog posts, newsfeeds and social media channels abuzz with the latest and greatest releases these past 2 days I just wanted to take the time to add one more thank you note: Thank You all developers, translators, document writers, graphic designers, bug trackers, release engineers and everyone else involved in working directly with the upstream projects and for making all of the moving pieces that compose a Linux distribution readily available for anyone to use!

For a while Foresight Linux users had no graphical interface for managing their systems packages and/or updates, mainly because the development for the conary backend fell out of scope and our radar (this is a nicer way to say that we didn’t have someone to maintain it). But thanks to the work of zodman, jesse and others PackageKit is making its way back to our desktop. [caption id=“attachment_1395” align=“aligncenter” width=“296” caption=“Available updates”][/caption]

First off, congratulations to everyone involved in the release of GNOME 3.0! In the past, my contributions were mostly related to translating applications to Brazilian Portuguese, but my role on that front was very minimal this time and consisted of a handful of translations and several commits of the awesome work done by others. Most of my contributions for 3.0 are related to the work I do for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, but I won’t bore you to tears!

Now that you have downloaded and installed the latest Foresight Linux 2.5 release, here are a couple of things you may want to do: Update Your System: Since Foresight has a rolling release schedule, we already have updates for you, including and newer MPlayer with support for Blue-Ray!  Run sudo conary updateall Install Chromium web browser: Try this pretty cool web browser made by Google.