In order to celebrate the holidays and the success of the Brazilian Ubuntu community, I have decided to sponsor the Ubuntu Sweepstakes 2005!!! Rules: First of all, register yourself at the Launchpad site and sign the code of conduct. Then, send me an email with the subject “Ubuntu Sweepstake 2005” with your complete name and your actual Karma points. For those who already have an account at Launchpad, send me your actual Karma points.

No, I’m not in Australia but the other down under… South America! hehehe Am headed toward the last couple of days of my vacation in Brazil. Last time I stepped on Brazilian soil I was almost 17 and had barely travelled outside of my (then) home state of Espirito Santo. Now, 14 years later, I came back to re-visit old friends and relatives. Though things have dramatically changed and a great deal of my friends have moved out, I have managed to enjoy my stay so far.

Disclaimer: I am definitely not a show off and am only posting this here so I can always look back and remember the responsibility I have voluntarily accepted upon me: To be an Ubuntu Member! Here is the report of todays Community Council Meeting General Items Bhuvan suggested that the RSS feed of the wiki RecentChanges page should be advertized more. This is going to happen. The options for reducing the stress on the CC meetings by (partially) delegating membership approvals have been discussed.

That’s right! Microsoft has announced that the newly released Visual Studio.NET 2005 Express edition will be available for download from their website, completely FREE of charge! What are you waiting for? :) Hope to be able to announce the release of Project Mono 2.0 very soon as well!

Just like a teenager who’s about to get his driver’s license for the first time, I was as nervous as one can be early this morning (14:00 UTC), while attending my first Ubuntu Council meeting. One of the subjects to be discussed was my possible membership to the Ubuntu Members Team. Topic after topic were brought up and dealt with… and as the minutes passed on by, I could barely remain calm… I was afraid I’d choke during my presentation and not say anything useful, but then… a huge calm came over me… and I spoke!

Tomorrow will be a very important to me! At exactly 14:00 UTC I’ll be presented to the Ubuntu Community Council for approval to become part of the Ubuntu Member Team! I have spent quite some time helping out the Brazilian Ubuntu community these last 2 months and I think I’m ready for the next level of involvement! The meeting will take place via IRC and I can barely wait to see what comes out of this!

It is with an enormous pleasure that I come to announce the birth of PhPlanet, the first (if I’m not mistaken) 100% Open Source blog agregator written by a Brazilian for Brazilians! Using the Planet program as source of inspiration, PhPlanet already shows many new features such as: Web based administration: Add feeds (authors) Approve feeds enrolled for the site Modify authors' information Add, remove and/or edit Hackergotchis Feeds (RSS and Atom) Archiving of all posts for later retrieval (MySQL) Registration of new feeds Sending of posts via email (optional)… For a complete list of the all innovations, check the project’s home page and take a look at the live demo page (sure, it is written in portuguese but check out the functionality).