From 5th july from 9th july the Mozilla Summit 2010 happened in Whistler, Canada. An event organized by Mozilla to gather their most active collaborators and this year's theme was "Be more like the web".

This year the event gathered a little less than 600 mozillians from all over the world and 12 Brazilians among them. In the picture below we can find 10 of them (including me). João and Wellington are missing.

The place couldn't have been better, at the bottom of the Whistler Mountain, British Columbia, Canada and surrounded by landscapes like this one:

My first time at the event was awesome, the keynotes and sessions were inspiring and the demos left everyone speechless. The Web is about to take a huge leap in direction of a better user interaction and richer applications. And we must fight for it to remain open!

WebGL will allow us to render 3d graphics inside the browser with JavaScript manipulation and unbelievable speed thanks to hardware acceleration.

HTML5 will allow the inclusion of video and audio to a web page without the need of any external plugins, also a lot a coll stuff! See more at this wikipedia link and at the w3c draft.

I was flattered by the invitation and amazed by all the incredible things I saw and the people I met there. In one word: AWESOME.

To wrap-up, my flickr gallery with more photos of the event:

I have a pretty small desk to work with my notebook and all the cables are always hanging on the desk when the notebook is not there. These cables were always falling behind the desk. When you need to get them in a hurry they'll entangle on each other and make a mess.

A while ago I bought some cable organizers at DealExtreme e they just arrived. After a little bit of work (on replacing their tapes), look what I got:

My opinion:

The rubber part of the organizers is pretty cool, you just have to push the cable into it and it will hold. No need to pass the entire cable through a tiny little hole.

However, they will not stick very strongly with the tape that comes with it. I had to buy a 3M double face tape that is intended to outside use. It worked like a charm and looks like it won't be easy to take them off if I want to, so be careful with delicate surfaces like textured walls.

By the end of the day, I ended up spending a little bit more money than I expected, but for about 30 Reais (about $16 USD), I have twelve of these cable drop organizers with the stronger tape. A good price to pay to avoid your cables from falling or just to keep your desk organized.

A few days ago I installed the ubuntu netbook remix on my recently acquired aspire one d250. The machine performance is up to my expectations, but my objective is mobility. The keyboard is confortable and easy to get used with, except by the fact that the keys Home and End are function keys, awfull to code

My aspire came with an english keyboard, so I configured the layout to USA Alternative International but the cedilla still do no work as I expected! the result of 'accute accent' + 'c' is just a 'c' with an accute accent on it! hehehe

I configured the cedilla acording to this tutorial from Jansen Sena. Simple, effective and functional.

See ya!

Tired of this gray window of your browser? The Personas is a Firefox addon that allow the user to change the background and font color of your Firefox with a couple of clicks.

You can also create your own persona and share it with other users in a very simple way.

Watch the official video below to get to know it.

Getting Started with Personas from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

To install new TrueType fonts (Microsoft or the free ones) you just need to copy the .ttf files to the folder /usr/share/fonts/truetype and then run the following command in your shell:

$ sudo SuSEconfig

Ps. For the absent-minded, you do need to use the capital letters as typed above!

Hope it's useful!

I needed to post  a screenshot of my current desktop. Just configured it in a way that pleases me:

My beautiful desktop

For the curious, the lower dock is a Cairo-dock, for desktop effects used Compiz-Fusion. Music player that put the album cover on the desktop is Exaile. To develop I use Gedit with plugins and Bash . Free wallpaper from Panedia. For those who noticed the little green chameleon, I'm a big fan of OpenSuse, but you can use your favorite flavor of Linux!

All this stuff on a 22" screen with resolution of 1680x1050 (Strongly recommend this big screen, it can make any programmer happy e consequently more productive)

Bye!

After 4 long months without internet connection at home, here we are again! This time I decided to install the VirtualBox to explore it a little deeper, I've had some experiences with it some time ago but the only thing I can recall is that it ran Age of Empires 2 better than VMWare.

For those that don't know, VirtualBox is a virtualization framework developed by innotek and bought by Sun, yes... that Sun, the owner of MySQL, Java, OpenOffice and a couple of other famous softwares.

The goal of this endeavor was install a virtual machine (vm) to use as a web server to test small projects and learn. First, I installed a vm with Debian Etch and no graphical interface over VirtualBox in a openSuse 11.0. Then I installed Apache, MySQL, SSH and others... Now we get to the interesting part, how to make the hosting system have access to the servers and applications installed on the guest system.

With the vm's network interface configured with NAT (default option I guess), you just need to add the NAT port forwarding rules between the host and guest systems. As an example I'll use Apache, you'll need the three following command lines (the vm must be turned off):

$ VBoxManage setextradata "Debian" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/Protocol" TCP

$ VBoxManage setextradata "Debian" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/GuestPort" 80

$ VBoxManage setextradata "Debian" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/HostPort" 8080

With that done, just turn on your virtual machine again and test! If everything is configured correctly, the address http://localhost:8080 should take you to the pages stored on the guest system's Apache server.

On the command lines above, the name "Debian" refers to the name of the virtual machine you set on VirtualBox when creating it, the "apache" can be replaced with anything, it's just a name for the configuration. Also the ports used could be changed as you prefer, the ones displayed were the ones I used here, but it's pretty much up to you. The VirtualBox manual tell us that under linux hosts we must not use ports under 1024 for the "HostPort" because they are reserved for applications ran by root and the vm may not start in this case.

The only problem I'm having so far is the fact that I can't connect to the MySQL server installed on the guest machine and get the following error message:

ERROR 2013 (HY000): Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 0

If anyone knows something about it, please leave a comment!

See you.

Recently my friend Vinicius indicated me an amazing web site that measure the performance of some of the most popular JavaScript frameworks in your browser and it is excelent both to compare the perfomance of your applications within different browsers or to pick one of the frameworks to use.

The site is http://mootools.net/slickspeed/

Once the page loads, click at "start tests" buttons on the top of the page and it will execute all the tests to compare the frameworks. But remember, the performance measure is relative to your browser, do the test again with other browsers to check their perfomance.

Besides, this very interesting article from Brian Rendel offer a little more information to help you choose among the variety of frameworks.

What is going on with the giant? Lately we can see lots of news about interesting softwares and features from Google but everytime I look into it I get the message "This app is not yet available for Linux.".

This is meant to express my frustration when I discovered that Gmail voice and video chat is not available for Linux at this time.

I haven't had the opportunity to test it yet and besides my little protest, here is the vídeo about the feature:

Cheers,
Filipe Grillo

NOTE: This is my first post in english! I'm planning to make this hole blog bilingual asap! So, any corrections and/or sugestions are welcome!

A grande questão é que o KDE possui alguns aplicativos muito bons e consequentemente eu sempre os instalei no meu Gnome, aqui vão quais são os aplicativos e quais as alternativas que utilizo atualmente:

Kile

O Kile é um excelente editor de texto para documentos em LaTeX, usei por muito tempo e só recentemente descobri uma alternativa para ele.

Alternativa: Eclipse com o plug-in TeXlipse (visite a página do projeto no sourceforge), note que ainda é necessário ter os pacotes do LaTeX instalado, mas nada de KDE.

kTorrent

Outro excelente programa que utilizava do KDE, quando começeu a usar o linux (ubuntu na época) instalei todos os gerenciadores de torrent que constavam na minha lista do APT, deixando o kTorrent por último porque ia precisar instalar um porção de bibliotecas do KDE. Aconteceu que foi o único gerenciador de que satisfez àquela altura.

Alternativa: Deluge BitTorrent Client é um software que faz uso da libtorrent e utiliza pyGTK em sua interface, então você pode precisar instalar algumas outras bibliotecas do python. Esse software supriu todas as minhas necessidades e substituiu o kTorrent sem perder em nada!

Amarok

Novamente um excelente programa! Player/Gerenciador de músicas com o estilão do iTunes.

Alternativa: Por enquanto estou testando o SongBird da Mozilla, por enquanto esta se saindo bem e as atualizações dele caminham para boas melhorias, a nova versão 0.7.0 já possui capacidade para mostrar/inserir arte de capa para os albuns! Está instalado a apenas 2 dias e ainda estou testando para ver se me adapto a ele. É o último aplicativo que falta para eu não mais precisar das bibliotecas do KDE!

Qualquer dúvida, crítica ou sugestão: feel free to comment! Outras sugestões de softwares também são bem vindas!

Até mais!