Vitor Rodrigues

I must say that I’m very proud of my company! This article explains why.

MSFT’s always used their economic power to impose their products to people/organizations. Now they should be really pissed that someone is using their own processes to fight them.

I haven’t read the msft open letter, but from this article on itwire there are two interesting sentences:

We can see that the world is opening their eyes. OpenSource tools and formats are becoming a viable and much less expensive alternative, so worldwide organizations now have the cheese and the knife on their hands. I believe the goal of this countries is to get OpenXML to be really OPEN and a TRUE standard, what would lead to free or low price office suites to work with it thus saving the exorbitant of MSFT Office.

While Microsoft describes Open XML as open source, it’s not licensed in a fashion that proponents of open source licensing would recognise as being open. Rather than granting users open source-like rights to the format, the license consists of a promise by Microsoft not to sue those who use the format. It also leaves the standard open to drop in proprietary code.

This is a pearl! Besides not really opening the format to the community, they promise not to sue the people who uses the format. If there is something I don’t trust, that is a promise from a corporation whose goal is just to make money regardless of moral values, even more when that company has had unfair practices in the past and which only goal is to have a monopoly on the software world.

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Originally uploaded by Bitpicture.

The first big snow storm of this winter is gone, and left is only the pain in the back I got shoveling the driveway

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Some of us have been using opensource software for a long time, but how many times have we contributed back to the community? Indeed, it looks much simpler to use a product than to help developing it. However, sometimes this is not the case. There are a lot of projects out there waiting for our help. So, if you feel it’s time to give it back to the community, here are some ways to do it:

• open bugs when the software doesn’t work. Don’t just quit using the software because it doesn’t work properly. Open a bug and you will see that eventually it will be fixed.
• if you have the know-how or the will to do it, fix the bug by yourself and submit your patch, either to the mailing lists or attach it to the bug report.
• subscribe to the mailing lists of the projects you are interested. Soon you will find yourself giving your opinion and suggestion and thus contributing to the project.
• if stability is not a major concern for you, keep updating your software to the latest version and give your input back to the developers.
• help developing new features. Often opensource projects lack new features because the lack o resources to develop them.
  

So, you still think you cannot help because you are not a developer, or you don’t know the programming language being used by the project you want to help? Projects need help in many other ways other than developing code:

•  you can help with translations. Translate it to your own language, or if a translation already exists, review it to ensure accuracy.
• help writing and reviewing the docs.
• you can help by just being a test user and reporting back the problems.
• help maintaining website, moderating forums, etc..
  

Do you feel the urge to help? A good place to start is sourceforge.net. Besides the thousands (or even millions?) of projects that you can browse trough, there is a “Help Wanted” section, where you can see all the requests for help from projects being hosted at sourcefourge. From help with design, to development and documentation, I’m sure you will find something that interests you. 

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Aqui: O JOGO

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Porquê que o simples facto de eu ter uma opinião sobre um determinado assunto faz com que eu seja considerado por algumas pessoas quer como um “burro vendado” que merecia ser aniquilado, quer como uma pessoa “não caracterizável sem recorrer a asneiras“?

A mim não me faz diferença que o aborto vença ou não o referendo (sempre fui muito centrista em relação ao assunto), mas incomoda-me que eu não possa exprimir a minha opinião livremente e sem ser alvo de agressões verbais! Será que é assim tão dificil assimilar os conceitos de “liberdade de expressão” e respeito pelos outros?

Nota: o facto de ambos os comentários acima virem de apoiantes do sim é mera coincidência. Apenas de todos os artigos que li sobre o tema até ao momento (quer pelo Sim, quer pelo Não) acho que estes dois comentários são, no mínimo, muito infelizes.

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Gimp 2.4 will have a new feature called Perspective Clonning. This tool is already available in Photoshop CS3 and it allows you to clone part of your picture maintaining the perspective distortion of the subject.

This feature was developed by Pedro Alonso as one of GIMP’s projects for Google Summer of Code, and you can find some video tutorials and examples on his website. I gave it a try, and the result was this:

Very neat tool indeed!

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It is a generally accepted idea that Apple has a fantastic marketing team. We see their ads, their launch parties, their website, their design, and we almost want to buy the product just because it looks cool, nice and great, but we didn’t even try it yet. Today I was surprised by another company’s marketing ideas. Believe it or not, it was Microsoft and it’s Vista marketing campaign! I should say that I know nothing about Vista, besides the fact that was launched this week and that was being developed for a long time. I still have no curiosity in learn about it or its new features, since I don’t plan to use it in a near future.

To the official Vista’s launch in Toronto, Microsoft built a very cool ice house. The house has been a huge attraction in downtown Toronto, and the house visitors have the opportunity to see the the new msft OS and Office packages in action. This was a great way of calling people and try to impose the “coolness” factor. I checked the house today from the outside and it looks cool. I will try to visit the inside part tomorrow to see how does a ice toilet works!

Despite the factor of the ice house being a huge attraction by itself, the location chosen (the same used by Sony for the recent launch of the PS3) was also very good. It was just outside the main entrance of the Toronto Eaton Centre, that is just the biggest shopping mall in Toronto (and the 3rd biggest in Canada), and currently Toronto’s top tourist attraction regarding number of visitors. What best location can you have to demo a product than a place where all the families go and most of the tourists also go?

After checking out the ice house, I decided to stop and the Indigo store inside the mall to read some magazines and look at the bargain books (sometimes you find really great value in there). And what was my surprise when I looked at the “Hot & New” section at the entrance, and it was all about Vista! There were more than 10 different books on Vista, from the Bible to the Idiots series. That I was not expecting, but I should say that it was also a good strategy. While I was reading a magazine close to the Vista stand, I would see people stopping and looking at the Vista books with plenty of interest and commenting about it. They definitely caught people’s attention to their product launch.

And at the end I came home thinking: if only Linux had an opportunity like this…

In other news: I gave a try to GIMP 2.3.14 and it rocks! Some very good new features. More on that soon.

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