I know I didnt do any blogging during the summer so I am putting a brief of what happened in the past weeks.
OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 was launched…yaaaay with that the the ES version and went out to all plataforms
We had a good cycle with many people participating with the QA and other aspects of the builds like testing it for different platforms. I think we did a good job overall. This launch feature OOo new image and logo.
Went to NY for my OOo Meetup Finally after 10 years I got to go back to New York city and be able to hang out for a whole week doing shopping and relaxing. The hot NYC was pretty new to me who experience mostly winter NYC. I like it how it all played out and even thought I went a b it over budget I think I needed that trip.
High School reunion Had my high school reunion with some of my friends, which I went on to have a great time and eventually went to a club for the first time since Romania. At the end it was all good and came back home pretty late
Twittab meetups The meetings have been pretty good lately specially last week where many people came to watch the boxing match in Chillis and had a great time all night long.
LeBron James signed to the Heat Wow big 3 in the making, with Dwayne Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh in Miami it seems this will be some great trio coming together for the Championship.
So I am finallyin Mexico and I have been doing a lot of work lately with what I felt that needed some. I have had meeting all along with some of the issues regarding the Open for business initiative, also the ODFKit and the deals with the Valencian government.I have also been interested with the things going on at UX and have solidify my position on getting rid of the upper toolbar. Another project which I have driven my attention is webdev which did a recent upgrade on the wiki and it affect the template from OOo.I wonder if I should update my wordpress theme to the OOo site type of theme. I really like the way that theme blends and is a very cool factor. I also had done this in the past fo the mediawiki and would like to see it on my site. Plus the wordpress community could benefit from it.Finally I am trying to get back in touch with the contacts from Brazil and make an impact and an alliance. The program RCSLA is one of the projects about sustainability on free software development.Well seems that plans keep coming and I will need to be developing them for as far as I can.
This is these conference day of the talk and we got Aaron Newcomb on the talk about using video to communicate about Open source software. The first day was more about the expo, this one is more about the conference, not that the first day had no conferences, but I wasn’t very aware of them until the very end.The talk on Aaron talks about video blog, and general video on the web, with free software of course. Talking about cinerella and other video tools.The issue of flamewars and other issues that make things simpler and less analog. Open network system live with John Fowler Aaron talk about Lumiera which is a new project about video editing. So seems that we could use more and better apps into Linux. OpenMovieEditors another app also useful to do video editing.After the apps we looked into the codecs and transcoding tools about the different formats including Theora, H264 and other video transcoding tools.Aaron went on to do a demo of the video editing tools with cinelerra and how he do some of his editing. He took some recording of the conference and then he replaced it with some external audit track.The final part of the talk was more about the web services to manage videos.
The first day started with me on the air on my way to Sao Paolo, departing from Mexico city at midnight I arrived to Sao Paolo at 11am, just in time to get on the flight into Porto Alegre.When I arrived to the city I was lucky to find it easy to arrive into the conference even before arriving to the hotel. The conference was great, I was able to chat with Knut from Qt and was a great small chat. I also got into the OOo boot which help me managing my lougage and suite.I got to chat with many people but not as much as before since they mostly speak portuguese. I have manage pretty good to know my way around people, however still feel like they dont understand what I say when I speak.I went to one conference where I met back with one government official from Sao Paolo, Marconi, who recognized me instantly and I was pretty surprised. Since I got on the afternoon, I couldnt attend to most of the talks, however they were enough. My only problem is that I havent found many governments or companies from out of state which would be my main target.At night I had some issues finding my hotel but eventually got to it and enjoy a good rest, which I was so tired I couldnt go to the Bar.
I havent been blogging much beside technology, however I would like to give an update on non-tech related news. Recently I have been in a mission to loose some weight and do more activity specially wiht my passion for basketball and I have been going to play basketball with Lalo, my high school friend.However last week, I injured myself by twisting my ankle and was unable to walk or almost 4 days. The injury was serious since I jump high for a rebound and then my 110ish kilograms fell on my twisted ankle making it really painful and sending me to rest for almost a month.Well, I am just on week 2 right now and even if I can walk almost normal i still feel pains and I still see my ankle swollen so i think I still will be resting for at least 1 more week.To be honest the resting time has been a bit stressing and even if I escape a couple of times to the cafe shop or got some visits from my friends I still spend most of my time in my room and it sucked.The bright side of all this if there is any is that I have had time to watch the NBA Playoffs which have been great. Awesome games and awesome plays have been in game after game almost everyday and really cool stuff that I have been able to watch.First series has been Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers who pretty much smashed the Detroit Pistons 4 games to 0 after really four amazing games where Lebron has at least had 2 great dunks per game.Another series that probably has been the more amazing is the current champions Boston Celtics versus the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls have surprised everyone and have really done an amazing effort to make this series really competitive.Two other series on the east has been kind of like a surprised too with Magics and Heat being the favorites having upsets by the 76ers on Orlando and the Atlanta Hawks on Miami.The west has been also very competitive but we knew already that and homecourt weights a ton. however some teams have been able to diminish others way easier than expected. Specially on the case of the Spurs versus the Mavs and the Hornets versus Denver Nuggets.Lakers and Jazz has been very predictable on the opposite almost like Hornets and Denver they diminished them and has been a total control by the Lakers who are favorites to earn the crown in the west.So far so great, let see how it all comes out next week. I think I am hooked into basketball as much as I onced did.
This week I have been with my ankle recovering from a nasty twist that I suffered while playing basketball. Nevertheless I think that some of the most important talks I have had has been when I went with my friend Luis to get away from the intense heat and have a frozen coffee and enjoy of the free wifi. We had a talk on the future of Tabasco as far as web 2.0 and technology is concern. he told me that through his brother he manage to met a bunch of kids that want to start a web 2.0 venture. However this fear doesn’t just go to the web but to technology as a whole. Unfortunately we see that there is not enoughknowledge from the kids coming out from school about the web, business and ho to structure their idea. At the same time I think that one of the people I wil have more hope will be ex/linux users or people tha participate with GULTab. So far I have one reference that has been pretty positive. Vkn a college student that has taken some how of leadership in his school and have been strong on pushing FLOSS in his univerisity. He had worked on the college radio on spreading the FLOSS knowledge. He also have managed the development of FLISOL. He definetly has been a kid that has dkept on with the information about what free software and technology can do for everyone. However my question comes with what about the rest of the ex-GULTAB people, have they kept with Linux and free sofwtare?Lately I found a blogpost from Darkness that talked about the good ol days where GULTab was forming and the fun time that wee shared. After that however I saw a lot of the ex people from GULTab jumping in a conversation about what we can do in the future and revive the organization. Sadly I dont see it likely but I wonder what have they been keep doing and if they finally succeed in their enviroment. El_Diablo dissapeared from the internet but you can still see his old blog from 2003. Kamelott seems to be blogging still, al3jandro (Darkness) still is an avid blogger; eMac also has a pownce account and twitter; OnlyAngel still tweets and finally alzate who I still don’t know what he do besides his 9 to 5. I also don’t know much about mittohuffman except he works like crazy and Dav_0r that also have very little internet life. PCero still online but do very little from what I have googled. Maybe they are doing stuff but I dont know much about it. Anyway I do hope at least their linux love still on and the internet still not a foreign land.
So I have been looking at forex for nearly a year. I have tried to read and understand the concepts. Lately I have been convinced of needing professional help and getting a broker.However there is also a lack of trust on just handing money out to someone that you are not confident of his credentials. However sometimes is the nature of the beast, and the beast pays off.Getting through this first fear can be challenging but I think the best step is to look for people that are in the same position as one. The next step is also to understand that this is the same as a stock or bond. Except there is a larger risk.After all I hope that the market keeps going up but I think if this is not the case forex could be a good way to keep making money even if crisis hits hard. The strategy however is to get people more knowledgable than you and start getting into this world.So far I have taken some steps that include using the tools that I already got to find out about forex and forex brokers. First stop was the linkedin answers site. A site I trust to have better advice on how to get more professional help. Then is the al mighty google with  sites that could get my foot on the door. Finally there is the forums from forex noobs and other amateurish forex sites and e-books.I think that in the end all this reasources doesnt pay off if there is no first step. Here is where you need to say enough and jump in. Once in, then the real work can start learning first and earning later.
At the end of 07 I decide to point most of my energe to the OpenOffice.org project. Increasing my presence and entreprising new things. I put a goal after coming back from Barcelona. To have the Open for business project a reality. A few days before OOoCon2008 with the release of OOo 3.0. The Open for business project was launched.Right after I left to europe to start enterprising the idea and presenting it to governments. This generated a great relationship with many countries in South america and Spain. Right now we are still about to get our first relationship officialized but work has already started with some projects and I think this will be benefitial to everyone.Also I start pushing to become a leader or co-leader of other openoffice.org projects like the BizDev project and the Education project. Both projects have been very benefitial for the rest of us.The first stage is to improve the visibility of the site, make it more appealing to browse and concentrate on providing better content. After these is settle the next step should be about having programs and processes to increase the level of volunteers and communicators. Making it easy to stay in touch and scheduling activities to understand the liveliness of the community.At the moment the site has increase their look and feel and soon we will also have better content to browse.Having project surveys might be another way to go about it but at the end of the day visibility is where is at. Â Being in touch with the podcasting community as well as having a good strategy to promot our project is a great way to start. Having newsletters digged and slashdotted is also a great way to gain attention. Since then I have gather a marketing team to help us settle the framework for this visibility and help us achieve better workflow of the new members.I think the future is really bright in 2009 with a lot to do but hopefully with finally a large amount of profitability.
So lately Mozilla Mexico has been a bit disconnected. The work on the side of the community including the mailing list has been little to non-existent. However even with the uncertainty that surround this community after the summer I have manage to get some work done including the creation of a marketing plan. Althought as a community leader I want this to be a more distributed work. Get people to work on tiny little pieces and enrich the program working together.So during a Hornets at Boston game which I really enjoyed, I start writing on the marketing plan and start gaining from the work. The marketing plan was drafted from the skeleton from OpenOffice.org’s Strategic Marketing Plan.The skeleton covered key aspects of the marketing environment including the analisys of competition, environment, segmentation and many other entities.I am including the strategic marketing plan in case you want to review. So far I do a lot of analisys on competition and has sort of a good idea on how to aproach some of the biggest challenges that we have which start with communication and end with education and visibility.
This post is long overdue however the things that I present in Alicante were pretty interesting. Contrasting what Malaga had, this event was much more smaller yet it was very rewarding in the sense I got the time to chat with people all around the world.Basically I want to propose projects and enterprise deals that will benefit the OOo community and the overal FLOSS adoption. These projects benefit both parties and also make the project even a bigger proposal for everybody. I digress…The conference started with a bit of dissapointing un-attendance in the sence that most of the speakers were just leaved to their own luck. Nobody pick me up from the airport nor help me with my settling around Andalucia. I didn’t had any chance to see the city beyond what my legs walked me through. However on the other side, I got a good time relaxing and finally having a break from the constant flying. So I had the chance to take a long bath and really relax for a while. Also the fact the hotel was also a Spa hotel help me enjoy even more using some of their pillow menu.The next day was pretty good, got to meet with John Maddog from Linux International again and talk about Obama‘s win and what it could mean for the US. After the quick meal we were ready for the event. I came in early because I really want to see the expo before people came in. I was able to see a really great set up full of wide variety of hardware. People had thin clients running the host distro — lliurex. Lliure means freedom in Valencian and this is like freedomX.So I got to talk wtih the people of many of the companies, associations an sponsors that were in the event. I got to chat about developments and innovations and how OOo will be presenting great stuff with the education project.Unfortunately I felt many of the atendees that mattered weren’t there to attend to the conference so my message might have not been correctly targeted. After my talk I sensed many people were simply users and they didn’t had the means to push an education project forward. At the same time I think that through the magic of the internet and since the talk was recorded. There is still hope for many to at least by recycling my conference through services like Slideshare.Other talks were interesting but i most say that I wasn’t attending to many of them since the education target and the fact that they were giving it in valencian really didn’t help my attention span. I rather was doing some work on my laptop about things to make O4Biz and the Education presentation more smooth.Since one of the event participants didn’t make it, I was asked to give a second talk during the conference. That meant that I would be able to give my first part of my tour presentation. The repeat of the great Open for business conference. Again I felt the audience was the best for the talk but I was happy that at least i got a recording out of this great talk which I couldn’t record at OSWC.After the conference I got the chance to talk with many of the Lliurex project including the main manager of the project Sofia Belez, who is a very kind and beautiful woman. We got to get around the option of integrating the Valencian localization into the OOo project and avoid issues during their building process. Is funny because a simple email would have done it. However they had two years talking with Sun and different entities and they have got nowhere. This means that there is still a change of culture to be made. The internet is an open platform but sometimes dealing with phisical people can prove to be a handicap. Instead of contacting developers they contact distros which don’t make software so applying changes will only fork the projects.However now that we are on the right track we can start leveraging and building upon freedom. Not however without the support of the rest of the OOo community. Is important that projects such as big as OOo we can have sustainable communication networks and protocols so that information reaches to a higher than normal spead wtihout falling into the usual pitfalls of flamewars that can stigmatize a project or initiative.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 