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Recently I received a series of invitations to join UNYK, an interesting relationship site. Its focus is an automatically updated contact list: when your contacts update their details, your contact list is automatically updated, and vice-versa. Given the nature of the information, I was worried about privacy/confidentiality and data openness, so I did a little web search.
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In little more than a year, I gathered 10000 spams between comments and pingbacks. That’s more then 15 spams for every comment! So far Akismet is doing a nice job, but I presume the sysadmins had a good reason for installing Bad Behavior in GNOME’s WordPress MU.
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I’m looking for a new cell phone, which ought to be usable, syncable with Linux, and cheap. AFAIK, Nokia phones are the most usable among the cheap cell phones, so that’s where I focused my queries. The Nokia 2630, 2660 and 2760 models seem very nice, but they are not officially supported by gnokii or openobex. I found a video of Nokia 2660 being accessed via bluetooth (see also part 2), but I need to know if the phonebook can be synced. Did you ever sync any Nokia 2xxx phonebook using with free software?
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Last weekend I updated the Brazilian Portuguese dictionary for GNU Aspell, and the Portuguese (European and Brazilian) dictionary for Vim. This version features a much improved accuracy while spell checking words with enclisis an mesoclisis.
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I’d like to quickly mention this article on internationalization of people names:
People who create web forms, databases, or ontologies in English-speaking countries are often unaware how different people’s names can be in other countries. They build their forms or databases in a way that assumes too much on the part of foreign users.
I’m going to explore some of the potential issues in a series of blog posts.
So far there are only two articles, but reading is already interesting enough. The first article, for example, demonstrates how the “first name, last name” doesn’t work in many countries. Brazilian Orkut users know that well: the lack of a middle name features makes it hard to find people.
Then the author list a series of Wikipedia articles on the structure of people names in many cultures. Have I ever said Wikipedia always surprises me? The article on Portuguese names (written in English) is great, for example.
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Today I’m not going to write about anything.
Today is my wedding day!
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Finally, I’m back! I had other responsibilities, like researching on the effectiveness of the Family Health Strategy in the city I work for, and presenting the poster in the 2nd Paulista Congress of Family and Community Medicine. The last weekend I managed to dedicate myself to free software, but reviewing the GNOME translation to Brazilian Portuguese took all of my spare time, and it got worse Sunday when Og Maciel delivered the GNOME 2.20 release notes translation, with Kurt Kraut and Vladimir Melo.
I should reestablish the weekly periodicity, which increased sensibly the quality (and hits) of my articles. But I’m also planning on software improvements: besides updating WordPress and the Gengo plugin, I should internationalize the Aqueous Lite theme, and exchange the social bookmarking plug-in. So I ask you, estimate readers: what do you use? Digg? Del.icio.us? Ma.gnolia? …?
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Paulo Zottolo, president of Philips in Latin America, declared recently that we shouldn’t think Brazil is a Piauí, in the sense that it doesn’t matter; no one would mind if Piauí stopped existing. The scoff caused the company to be boycotted by in the state by Armazém Paraíba and other large department stores. Paulo Zottolo was repudiated by the state governor, Wellington Dias, and many other politicians, as well as students, even from other states. Ivete Sangalo, famous singer and Philips poster girl, didn’t make comments on the controversy.
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Answering Walter Cruz’s list of most used commands
(in Portuguese):
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I published on Viva o Linux a tip on how to set the system to make Gmail show up when you click on a link to an e-mail address. It should work with every web browser with JavaScript (Firefox, Epiphany, Konqueror, Opera, IE, Safari etc.), desktop environment (GNOME, KDE etc.) and operational system (Linux, BSD, MacOS X, Windows etc.). Unfortunately, the tip was written in Portuguese, so I’ll translate it for you here.
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