Joomla!

Hi! It feels good, very good indeed! Joomla is installed and runs on my new server!

My Joomla! can be accessed here.

Well before I lose anyone on the way, Joomla! is a CMS – Content Management System, and is the best CMS to my mind. Drupal isn’t far behind but i fell for Joomla!. It is an open source CMS for publishing to the web, and hosts inbuilt features such as polls, RSS feeds, blogs, news flashes, searches and language internationalisation. Joomla! is backed by OpenSourceMatters which disseminates info. to developers, web designers and the community as a whole.

Joomla! is pretty simple to set up. All you need is some server space, an FTP software (try FileZilla) , admin rights on a database (MySQL is my first choice), a web browser (I proudly use Firefox) and some free time to configure everything. Upload the Joomla! installation files onto your server, create a database and a user with ‘dba’ rights for the CMS. Begin installation by accessing the CMS through a browser, follow the steps onscreen, remove installation files from server through FTP. And it’s done! …as simple as rolling a joint

Ubuntu Studio

I just installed Ubuntu Studio and it was an instant orgasm! It truly is the best multimedia-powered linux distro I’ve used so far. Developed for the audio and video enthusiast, Studio delivers more than mere sound engineering and video manipulation. It is an entertainment platform with every feature set to amaze you. The kernel is boosted to sustain intensive multimedia apps and the scheduler allocates 95% of CPU to currently running apps. It’s like driving on a highway with nitro

The default interface is GNOME and the distro has an interesting set of bundled packages:

1. Audacity - sound recording & editing

2. Ardour – audio recorder, editor and mixing console

3. StopMotion – frame by frame animation software

4. Cinepaint – image processing & manipulation s\w for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching

5. Gimp – ah good ol’ gimp! :: image manipulation program

6. Inkscape – same as gimp but uses vector graphics. nice alternative to Illustrator

7. Scribus – desktop publishing

8. FontForge – font editor. creates ttf, postscript, opentype,..

9. LilyPond – creates music notations. of no real use to me..

10. PiTiVi – video editing software. written in Python and based on GTK+ & GStreamer

I think they could have included JahShaka as well, but they opted for Kino instead. Who said Vista had the best graphics and audio capabilities?! lol.. Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) is also out but I think i’ll take some time to enjoy Ubuntu Studio before switching to anything else..

All i need now is a beer & some potato chips!

Cidade dos Homens

I’ve recently bumped into “Cidade dos Homens”, or the “City of Men”, a Brazilian TV serial burried deep within one of my hard disks and playing hide and seek with me for a few months now. I’ve loved it for everything that it is so far. The City of Men is somehow a crude and innocent view at life in the favelas, the Brazilian slum, with its background of crime and poverty. The story is that of two kids, Acerola and Laranjinha living in a community of drug-dealers, delinquants and teenagers striving to fulfill their dreams. Each episode injects some dose of graphic violence into the viewer’s veins, as if to drag one into the everyday lives of these kids, surrounded by what you’d think to be everything bad in this world… The favelas has rules. You abide by these, you stand a chance of reaching adulthood, else have your dear ones ready to mourn you.

Cidade dos Homens is a vibrant call of hope and the will to exist.