Welcome Vista

So browing around stickam I found this and is pure gold.. really awesome funny video from a ‘Firefox’ user:… This is hillarious.

Coding for Tabasco

So what is contributing back, recently there was a big disaster hitting my hometown. Tabasco was flooded and the amount of people hit by the waters was impressive. However thanks to new media I was able to help out beyond the limits of my physical presence. I was able to join forces with other technical people and come up with software to improve the connectivity between the entities in the state.We basically launched different projects and use some of the web tools to coordinate a better map of what’s going on. We used some of the google tools to provide communication between everyone. We first use Gtalk to have live conferences thanks to Gtalk bots, at the same time we used Google Groups to have a group about it. Facebook was actually the group that it all started and kept providing daily media (videos and images) of what was going on in Villahermosa.Google code also had a repository of our website and how it would work. Finally we had the advantages of friends that provide high availabilty servers to put the projects on line and start the communication structure.So far we were able to get 40,000 people on shelters registered to the different groups. We where also able to find a common ground to work with the different technologies including the API and other high powered useful development. Mostly done in Free software we were able to have a substantial infrastructure faster than the government web applications which were death slow, expensive and not that impressive.In the end this was a great proof of what Open source software can do and more importantly how many people it benefit without even having to move to Tabasco.

Conversations with Ismael Olea

Recently I had the chance to talk with Ismael in an interesting conversation about the global attitude of free software and teir projects within. The two big branches is the software that gets built on the Web and the software that is for the desktop. We basically have a big disconnect from one to the next.This became very clear in Barcelona when something interesting where the DrupalCon in one side of the city and OOoCon on the other. Both projects push for similar goals but we are radically different. Drupal is about the web, Javascript, HTML, CSS and web technologies while OpenOffice.org is on more traditional software like Java, C++, UNO and more traditional way of building software.The common mission is to help people exchange information between them on an easy transparent and accessible manner. We both want to show the advantages of free open source software. The degree of success vary since the level of compromise vary in itself. It would be nice to have a more insight into what we are doing and what we can learn from each other.

OpenOffice.org Certification movement

So this in the OOo front are starting to stir up to a certification and an organization, both of them will have a well enough impact on the different countries that are beginning to get an OOo certification project in place. We the OOoES community already have a head start. The syllabus is available at the OOoES wiki.This is the first level of syllabus development, the next stage would be concerning the development of a student manual as well as a project targeted to vertical markets, like universities and textbooks.The certification is very important as is the first service that the new OOo organization will execute. This mean that we will start making ourself present on local countries as a legal entity for the matter of having an organizational network toward giving the officiality of the project.

Huge alert in my hometown

So I am originally from Tabasco and some of the things that have been happening lately had been really alarming. There has been a flood all over the state due to the heavy rain. The damps were saturated and a overboard of the rivers got the city virtually underwater. You can see some of the dramatic pictures that have been coming up lately: