Its being almost a month since my last post… so, lets catch up a little.

On the last February 19th I drove down from Galicia to Portugal, it was quite a boring trip of more than 7 hours. Luckily I had my girlfriend right on my side and the iPod’s battery honored its fame and soundtracked the whole trip.

I went to Portugal because on the next day, February 20th, I finally presented my Master Thesis in Computer Science Engineering!
Yeah! A little more than a year after I went to Seville and about 8 months since returned to Portugal, I finally presented it and culminated my Master of Science degree.

The thesis was about the developing of an OCR suite for GNU/Linux, based on some ideas I had before. I started developing it the when I returned from Seville and finished it on October (had the luck that the deadlines got extended and wouldn’t need to deliver it before September), then it took me until the mid of December to finish writing the thesis and (final tests of the program included) — I delivered it the 15th of December. Thanks to the bureaucratic services at my University, the sooner the thesis presentation could be arranged was the mentioned February 20th… But hey! Now it is done!

About the OCR program, it is written in Python featuring a GUI powered by PyGTK and can use several Open Source OCR engines to perform OCR. It allows user correction/edition of the results, etc. and generates ODT or HTML file. You can also use it from the CLI in case you want to automate some tasks or link it with other apps.

I am releasing the program soon as GPL, so stay tuned.

I’d really like to thank a lot to all the people that supported me all the time and keep supporting:
Mom, Dead,  Bro, Girlfriend, Professor Luís Arriaga, and friends such as Luís Rodrigues and Pedro Salgueiro.

PS: My absence in the www world outside of work due to the fact that I’m internetless since I came to A Coruña, *hopefully* next week the ISP I chose will turn the switch of information in my flat and I’ll be connected once again to the world. Then I’ll post what’s happened in my world of GTK, Igalia and Django.

Señoritas y Caballeros, Rancho is now in the romantic and expressive Spanish language!

Rancho was first launched with the English and Portuguese (translated by me) languages and Spanish was a language we definitely wanted it translated to.

My dear friends Javier Sánchez and Antonio Santos from Seville, Spain (and ex-colleagues of mine from BitRock) were kind enough to collaborate with the Rancho Team and translate it to their mother tongue.
Javier and Antonio are also highly skilled in what comes to programming — it is what they do for living as well — and good people with whom I shared great moments.

Thank you guys for all the patience when I sent you another email with another untranslatable lost string! I miss hanging with you, BTW!

So go ahead and upgrade your SVN to get Rancho fully translated into one of the most spoken languages in the world.

We’re looking forward to have Rancho translated into more languages, if you want to participate in this project and translate it to your language, drop me an email or contact the Rancho Team at our official site.

Rancho is on the Community Catchup of the great weekly Django podcast This Week in Django (TWiD).

If you don’t know what’s TWiD read this previous post.

So I let Michael Trier know about Rancho and he was kind enough to consider it for this week’s podcast.

I would really like to thank Michael and the rest of TWiD’s crew for mentioning Rancho in the only podcast I listen to.

Since a while ago I started a project with friends to develop an Open Source group/project management tool with the best web framework out there – Django!

Today is the day! Rancho 0.1 alpha is out!!!

Rancho goal is to make it easy for any company or group of people to manage its projects and people.
Here are some of Rancho’s feature:

• Clear and simple graphical user interface
• Wikiboards that provide collaborative editors that also keep old versions
• Exportation of wikiboards to several formats like PDF or HTML
• Multi-lingual
• Companies to group people
• Threaded messages
• ToDo lists
• Milestone lists
• Files with support for versions
• Simple users management
• E-mail notifications for actions within the projects
• Statistics of every item in every project
• Powerful permissions system

Go ahead and download Rancho from here or try a running demo here. Both the user name and password are ‘admin’.

In case you like Rancho, give us a hand and help us translating Rancho to your language.

For this or for questions, feedback, etc, please write to us using the contact form here.

Have fun with Rancho!