Niath

Today, the Porto Linux team joined in a nice Christmas dinner. The event started in the beginning of the afternoon, with some Apache talks. I’ve only joined them later in the evening. The conversation was, indeed, interesting, passing through lots of different subjects, from open-source, education and many, many other!

It was a nice dinner, and it is always good to get to know better the ones behind the emails or posts out there.

Before leaving, we’ve had an open-gift exchange. Everyone was supposed to bring something, like some code, a picture, an image, anything. Since I’ve forgot to print it, I’ll share here the little ncurses based application I’ve wrote to share. Download, compile it with g++ -lncurses xmas2007.cpp and run it with ./a.out. Merry Xmas.

Do you love open source? Would you like to learn how to program? Are you a student who’s not yet reached university? Are you aged 13 or above?

This is for you!

Google’s Higly Open Participation Contest will bring together young developers and open-source. They’ve gathered some great projects, like Apache, GNOME, Python, and many other, that will now give to the contestants several type of assignments, like writing code or documentation and patching bugs.

At the conclusion of the contest, contestants will receive a t-shirt and certificate for completing at least one task and 100 USD for every three tasks completed (maximum 500 USD per contestant).

Still waiting?

Google’s now looking after developers to create great applications to the first open handset platform. To motivate developers to download and start playing with the SDK, Google will be offering $10 million among the ones with better applications!

Here’s a video showing some of the already built applications . Amazing!

Microsoft has just released Silverlight, “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web”.

Version 1.0 is ready for download for Windows and Mac, but the final release for Linux is still being developed in a partnership with Novell.

What to learn more?

phpFormGenerator is a Form Generator that will reduce a lot your coding time spent on boring forms creation. It is easily used and very intuitive. You can add as many pages as you want, configure colors, security and what to do with the collected data. When you like it ant it is finished, you can just download the forms in a zip file.

So, remember it, phpFormGenerator can be of great help to you when you have enormous forms to code.

This has been my first coding night. I’ve got a work to deliver tomorrow for my programming class, and, due to the tests, I’ve never got the chance to finish it before.

The work is a simulation problem, coded in C++. We’ve had to simulate a gymnasium, calculating the load of the equipments during the day, with a random number of clients using each one differently. Not that hard, but the lack of practice took me 3 hours around debugging, in order to find this head aching bug inside an if statement.

It is know close to finished, I’ll work on it a bit more now, and, after some good hours of sleep, I’ll try to end it.