Nethazard.net

13%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

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I’m more into free software, the Apple stuff sometimes is too restrictive for me. Which brings me to the next quiz:

78% Geek

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The questions on that one were funny. I was the geekiest in my office.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Its been a while since my last update here on my blog. Truth is that I’ve been distracted with other types of blogging but mainly I’ve been through major changes.

I don’t know if I wrote about it before, but I used to work for HoraDeComer.com a web startup for restaurant searching in Monterrey. Micro managing there didn’t work for me, so I looked at other opportunities after 5 months of developing interesting stuff there.

Fortunately I got a call from Danilo Black. I’m happy to say that I’m working with Drupal and hope to be contributing some patches someday soon. Its been a great experience for me so far because I get to work with Basilio, a good friend of mine and I’ve been learning to work with a larger team.

Work on the twexter project has been progressing a lot these days, and we have already a nice demo to test. There’s still a lot of work to do on that interface but we’re getting there step by step. Its my first “open source project” I’ve contributed and curiously I’m the mantainer of the main code. I’d love some input from others but I think the tool needs to mature more to wake some interest for contributions. I just hope the tool will help kids and people in general to learn new languages easily. It can also be used as a nicer translation tool.

I’ll try to keep up my publishing and will try to publish more interesting stuff, and less personal life gossip.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Its been a long day but it has finally come to and end. It all started with a lot of javascript hacking for HoraDeComer.com. It was getting tough but I finally beat it.

But the javascript adventure wasn’t over yet. Duke Crawford came to visit for a couple of days, so we started hacking on the twexter interface. Nice to say we managed to rewrite the whole interface to take a simpler approach. Its a pity we can’t continue with the interface we had before, thanx to some browser bugs, but since we need some more things going, we cant hold out for perfectionism. This way, we’ll soon be happy to announce a version 0.4

I’ve been using twitter lately and still don’t find its awesomeness. Although its entertaining to post my twitts every now and then. Feels reflexive and relaxing some how.

FLISOL is only a week away and I hope I can make it there. Also, Ubuntu Hardy is coming out soon.

A lot is going on and I’m about to go to sleep. Yes, a long day indeed, but a nice day after all.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I tried to resist the twitter thing, but I just kept hearing about it and my curiosity won. I’m now on twitter: http://twitter.com/gabrielsaldana.

I don’t know much about how it works or why it’s cool, so any tips are appreciated.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Finally I’m on my way to CONSOL. I missed the first day, but I hope I didn’t miss much. I’m a bit nervous because I don’t know my way around on south Mexico city, but I’ve been on worse situations.

The main thing that worries me is that I didn’t bring any laptop with me and I’ll need to review my slides.

Its the first time I attend this event, so I don’t know what to expect. All I can say is that I hope it will be at least as good as EnLi 2007 was.

Writing on the nokia n800 is still cumbersome. Hope I get used to it soon. Well, at least I’m still using Linux and free software…to a degree.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’ve been fighting a battle (one of many) about the use of free format files on private/public organizations. And I think I finally won this one.

The Casino Tampiqueño is a social club in my hometown Tampico. So they organize balls and carnivals and multiple events. Recently, they “discovered” email. So they started sending “spam” to all their members about their notices and future events.

The bad thing was not the “spam”. It was that they decided to attach all event or notice details on a file. And guess what file was that? OOXML .docx format. Not only I couldn’t open the file, but also every other Microsoft Office user that hasn’t updated (legally or not) to the most recent version. And for what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of people that haven’t.

So with every email I got, I sent two emails explaining that the file they sent couldn’t be opened by everyone and suggested the use of PDF or JPEG files (yes, I know jpegs of documents are not nice, but its a file extension everyone knows….and mp3s are not suitable).

Then I finally saw the problem affect a non free software or Linux user: my mom. She got one of those emails and tried to open it. Since she couldn’t see it she called me up to fix the problem. Then I explained what the issue was about using proprietary formats on files (without detailing the OOXML vs ODF politics) just the essential stuff, and then told her to write back to the club explaining what I just told her. So she did.

And I haven’t confirmed if our emails did any change. But this past two weeks I’ve been getting new “spam” from the club with PDF and JPEG file attachments. Yay!

Well…its still spam, but now its spam I can view or throw away, without swearing and shouting about proprietary file formats.

Popularity: 8% [?]