Links

To make a change to my latest blog articles, here's a post of "links".

First of all, congratulations Prt.Sc. Prt.Sc is a Portuguese blogs aggregator and I'm happy to be one of the screenies that are aggregated there. Prt.Sc is, for me, with no doubt the best information source for Portuguese geeks (since there's a big ratio of Portuguese content, I don't think it is quite suitable for non-Portuguese readers). It is now making 3 years, and I'm quite confident that this next one is going to be exciting.

Then, Merankorii. For those who still don't know, Merankorii is my own musical project. There are quite some news about it: tomorrow is the official release date of Merankorii's fifth album "A Viagem", that is going to be released both in MP3 format and as a 30-copies extremely limited CD edition with a packaging that doesn't let anyone be indiferent about it. Also, and following what happens with the third CD "Melencolia III", now "Sanguine", the fourth Merankorii album, is also available in MP3 in a "Name Your Own Price" regime: from $1 USD to $20 USD, you can choose how much you want to pay to have my music.

As some of you noticed, my recent blog post about the Document Freedom Day is generating a lot of comments, mainly from me and Microsoft's Marcos Santos, where it is being somewhat debated wether OOXML is or not suitable of being an ISO standard. It's not a surprise that the theme is being so much debated all over the internet this last few days: yesterday the vote submissions ended, and now everyone is just waiting for ISO to announce what are the results (is OOXML is aprooved as an ISO standard or not). ISO already said that the anouncement is going to happen wednesday (I wonder if they did it just to avoid having a press release mistaken as an April's Fool joke). There are some blogs doing an excelent job of tracking down all the announcements and rumors about the vote of each country, and predicting the result. By now, we all already expect OOXML to be aproved by ISO, since the chances of the result being another are dimming almost every hour.

I've already linked to my friendfeed, but I'll do it again. I'm using it more regularly, and I really like the way I use it and how I quickly get track of what my "friends" are doing. I'm also using it to post quick comments or links, so if you're fond of this posts where I give you a collection of links, you might want to follow me on friendfeed.

Some time ago I wrote about OpenCoffee and how it was (not) working in Portugal. VD decided to take a slightly different approach and ended creating "OpenPub", here in Lisbon. I really prefer this concept: people get together to have a drink (to socialize), but since you're gathering informally people with somewhat simmilar interests (or at least with interests in the same field), the socialization ends fruitous. I didn't manage to be present in any of the gatherings that happened until now, but I really hope that this starts happening even more spontaneously (with more people yelling "let's have a drink!", and doing it more frequently), and, of course, that I manage to be in one of those gatherings. The most similar thing I had recently was the dinner from the Document Freedom Day celebration here in Lisbon, and I suppose I'll have fun this weekend, at...

...Tecnonov 2008. Tecnonov 2008 is going to happen at the 5th (this saturday), whole day, in Coimbra. The entry is free, and the talks good. We'll also have free swag (t-shirts included), a Debian key-signing party, and the promise of an event that - like last year - is surely extend itself all night long. I hope to see you there!