Older blog entries for jvic (starting at number 7)

This week a very popular magazine (perhaps the most popular magazine) in Brazil, VEJA, had a small article criticising the government for being pro-FreeSoftware, which has caused some buzz around it.

Basically they point out that, this year, only 0.5% of the population did their taxes using the Linux version of our Tax Software, which means - they conclude - that the government "needs a reality check" (my words), and suggests we should be spending money on other issues.

No, they didn't talk about how many people were actually using illegal copies of MS Windows. Nor did they mention stats from last year so we could make some useful comparison. Like a friend once said: "if tortured, numbers will say anything".

If you take a look at the stats from last year (the 1st year we had a Tax Software on Linux; should be noticed), you'll see what they won't show you: the number of people doing taxes on Linux has simply tripled since then.

It's not the first time the big media here shows signs that it doesn't like Free Software very much (the arguments are always lame though), and that's some food for thought. It's a very irritating situation, because you know millions of people will be reading and believing that crap, and there's not much you can do about it. Luckily, we do have well-known people on our side, spreading the word wherever they go.

Lots of discussion going on about Java and its use by the Gnome/FOSS developers.

I personally think we're exagerating things a little bit on the "Should Gnome use Mono or Java or Python" issue. What i mean is, why restrict things to Mono, or Java? I agree with Jeff, i think things are pretty fine the way they are now.

One thing Christian said is exactly what i've been saying/thinking/doing for a while: we need more publicity. Honestly, if you ask me why Mono is so big between Gnome developers, what i think is: most of the time, because of the huge publicity there is behind it.

But it is unfair to say Java is going nowhere in the Gnome/FOSS world. It's just that we're not getting too much attention in the Gnome world yet; but GNU Classpath is going at full speed, and the Java-Gnome website went from about 5,000-10,000 hits per month to over 17,000 hits per month (and steady) as soon as we got a new website and organized ourselves. Our documentation is steadily getting better and better, as Mark points out. Java-Gnome is definitely growing and maturing nicely.

So, i reinforce Havoc's wishes: give Java, Eclipse, Java-Gnome, a chance.

So i just got an email from Jacob Moorman, Quality Service Manager of Sourceforge, regarding my previous post about changes in Sourceforge. Here it goes:

So all is fine in the end; i think TWiki does have an option to specify the data dir. Thanks for the kind reply, Jacob.

Yesterday sourceforge sent an email to the projects' admin, notifying about some changes they're gonna make to the web service they provide, and other things.

Among the changes, one got me a little worried:

"On 2005-05-23, we will be remounting project group directories read-only on the project web servers (they will remain read-write from the shell server)."

If i understood it correctly, that means TWiki installations on sf's projects will no longer work. Not good. Java-Gnome uses TWiki a lot. Actually, TWiki.org itself is hosted on Sourceforge. I hope i have misunderstood this...

More info:

http://sf.net/docs/E07/
http://sf.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1109940&group_id=1&atid=350001

Today i went to a doctor because my right-hand wrist suddenly started to hurt a little. That sucks.

I've been thinking about buying an ergonomic mouse, such as this one and this one, but i really don't know if they're good and if they work on Linux. Anybody has some experience with this stuff? If so please write me at jvital gmail com...

A problem we're facing now with JG (i think 90% of the Java projects out there have this problem) is that we've got lots of methods which don't have javadoc. That's ok if your project doesn't require a good javadoc, but for JG this is important, specially now that we're gaining more users.

So i was thinking: "ok, let's add javadoc where it's needing." But, where do i start? Do i have to open each and every class, looking for methods which don't have javadocs? Err... boring.

Then i thought: "let me look for a tool that lists missing javadocs for me" - but i couldn't find any!! Maybe i didn't look at the right places? I don't know, but here's what i did:

I just took the source code of gjdoc, and made a few changes to make it list methods without javadoc. And i'm thinking about putting this list in the wiki, like this, so people can write javadoc collaboratively. How cool is that?

Jeff is even suggesting me we could have some sort of prize for the person who contributes more =) Just gotta think of some nice/reasonable prize...

Javadocs have stayed pretty much the same ever since it was created; you know, the white-and-purple simple pages. Not that changing too much is good (consistency is important), but after 10 years of Javadocs, maybe something could be improved a little.

So i was thinking, it would nice if Javadocs would have some dynamic tree for browsing packages, like this. Hmmmm, maybe i should try and play with gjdoc, and try to add this stuff, just for fun...

Ok, so i'm just testing how this blogging thing works.