Monday, August 13, 2007

The article at last!

Just to change a bit (and follow Danilo's advice), I've been really busy but I've submitted the article at last.
The last weekend has been quite insane. Sleeping around 2 or 3 hours per night and working the rest of them on this article for the Eclipse Technology eXchange conference to take place at the OOPSLA 2007. The last result was not the best thing ever produced but I am quite happy about it.
Even if it is not accepted, the parallel developed with IDEs and CADs looks promising. Even more since I've read this article (http://sigchi.org/cdg/cdg2.html) where programming environments (IDEs) and CADs/CAMs are joined together in a design software category. Maybe with this kind of support, I can have stronger arguments further on to support my theory that CADs should have a platform to be built on, just like Eclipse is a platform to build IDEs.
I'm sorry since revisions won't help to submit the article since it is gone already but I'm sure Mariana and Alfredo (my co-authors) would be glad if the article was improved only for its own good. For those interested, the article is published at http://nightao.googlepages.com/ArchimedesETX.pdf and you can send me comments, critics and suggestions to my email, through here or any other way you can find.

With the article madness I haven't been able to do anything else so today I've taken my agenda and solved a couple things. Messages about Archimedes at the sourceforge form have been answered at last, emails are almost all solved but I still have to read about 20 articles and hear some 10 podcasts besides the university works that still need to be done. So don't expect many updates here in the next few days.

Changing of subject abruptly: this morning, while coming back from my run (to keep my not-so-round shape), I got this crazy idea. Since Ohloh is being such a success, I was thinking about a trip network just like the Lions club has but for FOSS developers to attend to FOSS conferences all over the world with reduced costs.
The idea is that most FOSS developers really love what they do and would certain attend to every single event where they can meet their idols developers or just their friends. Problem is that this costs more than a lot can afford: plane tickets, hotels, meals, conference entrance, etc...
On the other hand, when there is a FOSS event somewhere in the world, there ought to be more than a couple FOSS developers living in that place. Being so, some of them might be able to host a developer for the conference period. The campaign "Host a FOSS developer" can even be spreaded to FOSS friends or even FOSS grandmothers.
In return of being hosted, the FOSS developer could repay the hosting with commits to some project the hoster points. This way both sides benefit and even get to understand each other's world a bit better. If I get to ellaborate this idea a bit better, I will try to contact Ohloh's guys and maybe organize this. I'm sure some well known developers would love to contribute to such an initiative.

Just to finish this post, the WSL article accepted at the FISL 2007 is already translated. I just need Mariana to revise it because my english is a real crap. As soon as it is decent, I will publish it somewhere and post the link here.

Once I get more info to talk about, I will post again. Let's hope it's not too far from now.