Difficult to believe but it’s true, Linus Torvalds is blogging, first post in the beginning of october and reaching an incredible mark of 5 posts and a sum of 350 comments. Sign the feed and let’s see where it goes…
Software
17
out 08
Microblogs – Jaiku and Twitter
Most part of my life is invested in front of the same screen you are seeing now, perhaps this is the same way I make green paper, for this reason I am not a big fan of things that make me lose time, a.k.a. social networks.
But when things got too hot on Twitter, I registered to see what it really was, left my account there with nothing but my name and zero posts.
Few weeks ago I started using Jaiku, which is now owned by Google and of course it’s beta, like baby gmail, you needed an invite, so I started posting there, and with time, nothing more fair, people started following me, IN TWITTER, where I never posted.
Guess each one am I using now?
21
set 08
Documentation for a successful evagelism
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.
14
set 08
How to organize what you write?
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.
4
set 08
Mobile Hotspot – Wi-Fi in your car, bus, taxi cab, …
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:
