Live Blue

Finding the Unloved, in the Valentine’s Day. February 15, 2013

Open Your Hearts, Tt’s Adoption Time.

It’s 2013, and the world didn’t end last year like the scientific prediction of a holywood movie.

Unfortunately, not everyone scaped, it seems that while the world didn’t end literally, a lot of developers have abandonned their children, their beloved apps and went to the city of Caracol to survive the mayan’s holywood prediction, and have not ever appeared back.

This left us with a bunch of applications that are in need of someone to care for them, to hug them at night and say that everything’s gonna be all right. But we lack the manpower for that, and that’s why we are asking your help to revive some applications, that are waiting ( some of them for years ) to have people working with them again.

Some applications are used by people everyday, but no one is taking care of fixing stuff, implementing new stuff, porting things, improving it to the new decade that’s comming in.

If you are a developer and remember of an application that’s abandoned, please put it in the wiki, if you remember of something that can be done with it, also add as an GSoC 2013 idea’s page. The whole world will thank you, and you will not make baby konqui cry.

If you are interested in taking care of an application and are ‘just’ a student, a hobbyst or don’t program for a long time, fear not, because you will join an amazing community of friends, coders, artists, programmers, shrinks, animal lovers and popcorn ( because I like popcorn ). You will increase your programming skills and work with state of the art developers like Aaron Seigo, David Faure and Thiago Macieira ( and many, many others ) that are behind KDE, Qt and the blue universe itself.

ps. And helping it will make you a great person, and because it’s Valentine’s, remember that only one thing matters if you are in love:

2012 Recap for me in KDE. January 2, 2013

2012 is not the best year for me in the KDE team, I almost didin’t coded, heal life issues keep me busy in a way that I couldn’t avoid. I did a few things however:

• The program that I started as an University Project back in 2008, Rocs, is now being used in universities around the world for teaching Graph Theory and Data Structures. ( Much thanks to Andreas (CoLa) and Wagner Reck ( wiglot ) for helping me on improve my initial mess into a true opensource project. If you are a teacher or computer scientist student and never heard of Rocs for Data Structures / Graph Manipulation, do a favor for yoursellf and go take a look.
• I’v spend this year much money on KDE related stuff: Bougth one kick ass Konqui Costume ( that costed around 2,200 EUR, + shipping )  and 2k buttons with konqui paintings to be used everywhere in events. It was used sucessfully in FISL and LatinoWare, the two biggest events in latin americas ( one with around 8k participants and the other with around 5k ). The konqui costume was partially sponsored by Blue Systems ( Thanks o/ ), the company that sponsor the work of Aleix Pol and other great KDE hackers.
• I’v Been into the two more importants events for KDE in the latin americas, the LaKademy and FISL, LaKademy was the one place that I hacked, tought. It was done primarely to tight the community in the latinamericas – One thing that I like very much is that the people in KDE-BR is like a family, Sandro, Aracele, Filipe, Lamarque, Wagner, Me, Camila, Henrique. We didn’t know anyone, KDE introduced us all, now we all are friends and BFF’s. <3
• I’v tried to do a internship for KDE with 6 students from one university that I have good relationship with, this experiment failed miserabily and I’ll try to do it again in the future but not in the same way that I did. The students did a few things, but at turtle paces, two quit in the first week, two did nothing for two months, while I was trying and trying to help them, they didn’t want help ( or work… ), that’s a real problem with “Free Software Groups” on universities that I’ll talk more in other post. But seriously, if you don’t want to work, don’t ask for a job. The code that they did will eventually end on KDE 4.11 ( since 4.10 passed by and they didn’t delivered. -.-’ )

This is my small resume for KDE in 2012, I hope 2013 is a better year

Help the Creativity of Children around the world October 16, 2012

People, this is a very serious pledge campaign, I didn’t wrote but actually copied the text to put on planet-kde, thus, making it more spread around the globe.:

Original text from the pledge:

Some might remember a little campaign I started in February. Its time to do it again, bit why now? The answer is very simple LibreGraphicsMeeting will be next year a little bit nearly a month earlier. Additional to that some of the receiver of the campaign need a visa for going to Spain, where the next LibrGraphicsMeeting will be. They have to get the visa 6weeks before they enter the country so that would be end of February. And additional to that the have to show the tickets for the flights especially the back flight and the reservation of a hotel, pension or something similar. So we need the most of the money until that date or they can not go to the event.

This time there are three persons, I like to collecting for:

Gustavo Gonzalez, who is the author of Tupi – Open 2D Magic, a program for doing traditional 2D animations. If you take a look there are really not a lot of alternatives in this area in the FLOSS world, the only one would be SynfigStudio but that is to complicated. Tupi is easier to handle and to learn. In the last months Tupi made also a lot of progress, we tried to package it but it was totally wrong build dependencies like ffmpeg made it not possible to include it into Fedora. So Gustavo removed all that dependencies and structured it new, so that you can use it without ffmpeg and export the animations as ogv. But ffmpeg support is still available as plugin. There was also some other major improvements like a storyboard. I am sure when it is packaged a lot of people will like Tupi, the Design Team cant wait for it.
Gustavo tried already this year to go to the LibreGraphicsMeeting in Vienna but it did not happen because he had no money for doing it. He like to present Tupi at that event and I am very sure that is useful for him and the development of Tupi. So lets help him.

Second person is Onyeibo Oku from Nigeria. Onyeibo is since a long time member of the Fedora Design team, but he is also active as Ambassador in Africa. Onyeibo sketches really good and he is good with Blender. For him is important to meet some other people from the design team and he wishes also to give a talk at LibreGraphicsMeeting.

Last candidate I might know, its Tatica again. She was, thanks to a lot of donations, at the last LibreGraphicsMeeting and learned a lot there and like to go again.

So what will it cost? There are the flights for Tatica around 1200€/1550 US$, for Gustav around 1000€/1290US$ and for Onyeibo around 800€/1030US$. For Tatica last time we calculated 70€/90US$ for hotel. But we didn’t need so much because Tatica slept in an apartment which became much cheaper. I did some research and want to rent an apartment for them again, that will cost another 900€/1160US$. So the whole makes 3870€/5030US$

Because Pledgie and Paypal get each 3% of the sum, the sum would be 4080€/5300US$. Additional to that Paypal gets a small sum for each transfer, but that is hard to calculate. I calculated 80€/100US$ for that.

So what will happen if we get not the whole sum? When we reach the sum for the flight for Gustav, he will get it first, after that Onyeibo and last Tatica as she was already at LibreGraphicsMeeting. But we need the sum for the flights in February otherwise we get no visa for Gustav and Onyeibo. But hopefully we get the sum but that’s up on you.

All KDE-Edu Apps with KActivities on 4.10 October 16, 2012

Ronaldo Fernandes, a Student from faculdades ruy barbosa that is doing it’s first internship for KDE is doing an awesome work porting all KDE-Edu apps to KActivities for inclusion on KDE 4.10, he’s having a lot of help from me, and I’m having a lot of help from Ivan about the KActivities system.

Apps that are already KActivity enabled ( in our branch, I’m reviewing everything before sending to reviewboard the diffs ) are Kig, KAlgebra, Cantor, KTouch, KHangMan and KTurtle.

Intern me on KDE September 5, 2012

For the first time KDE in brazil is trying something that can change the way how we interact with universities and students, boosting opensource development as a whole. I’s a common thing to have big companies like MicroSoft and IBM with partnerships with universities, but what about OpenSource and LibreSoftware? I know that there are loads and loads of GNU-OSS-Free groups at colleges and all that jazz… but that eint what I’m talking about baby. I’m talking about something harder, better, faster, stronger. what about a *REAL* partnership between one of the biggest ( in terms of lines of code, users and programmers ) open source projects of all times, you know, the one that started to be the gift from a loving guy to his girlfriend. ( I don’t know about you guys, but I actually am proud to work in a project that started as a concern to make the world a better place to someone I like )

KDE and the Faculdades Ruy Barbosa are joining forces this winter ( for the winter is not comming in the south, and while winter may be a slow season up north, with 6m of snow in Oslo, it’s pretty damn hot down here. ) Six students will work 20h per week, for six months for KDE. They asked me how they could help a project, I asked them if they wanted to be interns, and they loved the idea.  Right now it’s the beginning. They  started formally at Setp 1st,  are studing the code and all that jazz.

But what are they going to do? What are their premisses? who is behind this? What is the catch?

Six students, Two teams. In an ideal world, I would put them in six teams of one and each one could take care of himself, but the real world eint no plain, so they will work together, this way things can go better.

RainGuards – The Umbrello Helpers – This team is focused on helping umbrello, making it a good and modern UML modelling tool. their initial task is to move umbrello from SVN to Git, they are already studing svn, git, svn2git and the old umbrello rulesset. After this, they will fix bugs, clean the code, do the UML modelling of Umbrello’s code with umbrelo itself to stress test the application. A good app must be able to dogfood itself.

Activators – the KDE Activities Helpers – This team is focused on helping KDE Activities as a whole, porting applications to use the activities, helping the activities daemon, the library and helping Ivan to sing Bohemian Raphsody. Their initial task is to Build everything – and that’s eint no easy task for them, because the Activities are splitted in several subprojects ( library, daemon, plasma-activity-chooser, applications that uses activities ) . Their first task is to sort the Krunner – find-files plugin by rating, and while this seems more a Nepomuk thingy than an Activity thingy, all is related.

Good Luck for them, and for me,  because if this works out, more universities will come next year.

Almost Done July 19, 2012

Konqui Getting Shapped July 10, 2012

More teasing-and-not-correctly-displayd pictures of the Konqui Costume that’s being made for the FISL, LatinoWare and all other conventions to come =)