Marcelo Toledo

Forgetting the fact that rms can be a complicated person, I admire him for various reasons, he was capable of bringing together with his ideas, a revolution. It was impossible to measure what his actions was capable of back then, but even though he worked hard to achieve his objectives.

He acted small, starting with one step, but thinking big, knew he needed many parts to create a completely free operating system, a text editor, compiler, shell, documentation tool, kernel and much more. Creating all of this would take a bunch of time and people to help, that’s where documentation became an important chapter.

Texinfo was created to markup your text and produce beautiful documentation in many different formats, one source, multiple outputs. If you check successful applications in the GNU operating system you’ll see that it normally has a very complete documentation, I would definitely give some points to Texinfo for the success of GNU.

Now leaving the open source business, another case that is shining is Apple, lately I’ve been reading a lot about Objective-C and Cocoa, therefore I’ve been seeing a lot Apple website and it’s development tools. My entire background is in UNIX and the only time I touched Objective-C was with GNUstep, and I say, Apple website and tools concentrate plenty of information and they are doing a great job in the documentation field.

When I see things like this, I understand more and more their huge success, so if you have a project where you need to teach people, evangelize, think very well about documentation and use these two successful cases as reference.

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For a long time I’ve been using diferent softwares for organizing what I write, articles and book basically, my favorite tool is absolutely no doubt LaTeX, I have never seen a software that produce with so much quality the result of your writings.

But LaTeX can be rather complicated and aren’t we all looking for simplicity? When I am writing a book or article I really want to forget everything and focus on content, and that’s what I’ve found, you can even export to LaTeX or other dozen formats.

It’s not free software, but it’s fair, it’s Scrivener.

I sugggest you read the page, watch the movie and read the testimonials.

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Today we launched our first pilot of the VexBox Mobile Hotspot solution. It’s our linux distribution with a new hardware that can take the internet from 3.5G, 3G, EDGE or GPRS, whatever is available and faster. It can be used in places where fiber doesn’t reach or buses, taxi cabs, cars, …

It’s been months doing reverse engineering to understand how the hardware works, also writing the device drivers for a chip that is not perfectly designed and well, we made it! October 1st is the official launch date.

Congratulations for all the team, I know you all worked very hard to make this come true!

They wrote good code, so let’s not complain about the pictures:

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After 4 years of hard working, IEEE approved the standard 802.11r, which handles a fast BSS transition.

What this means?

A big wireless network, is built with a lot of access points, this means that if you would like to cover a big city, you might have thousands of access points spreaded around.

This brought a new challenge to 802.11, with the introduction of applications such as voip, the transition between access points needs a very small delay, you would be amazing how annoying is to have a delay bigger then 300ms, can turn your call into something unacceptable if you are roaming into access points too fast.

Of course if you are walking in this city, it will not interfere much because you are slow, but if you are inside a car, you might be changing access points every five seconds, and this is where you’ll find the big problem. We already had the possibility to roam through access points at 100ms (802.11F), but this standard was defunct in 2006 giving space for r, which can roam twice as fast, 50ms, standard for voice transition.

What it basically do is allowing your software client to stabilish a new access point connection before actually switching for it, with this you can do the magic of roaming almost atomic in whatever state the access point is.

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