Recent blog entries for brain

I'm back in the saddle again ;-)

There's a new project online on the site as of today: I intend to map all broadband access providers available to the general brazilian (and portuguese, for that matter) public. The first step is to collect the data from Linux broadband users through this form. After two months, I expect to publish the data in an article, and to make it available (translated to English, probably) to the mantainers of related LDP docs, like the Cable Modem Providers HOWTO, that carries some information about brazilian providers already.

I want to know not only which providers are ready for Linux, but also what models of hardware work best. Given all the misinformation that comes from the vendors, I expect it to be useful to many people, not only in Brazil.

After a long pause, I'm back seeking for new missions. I couldn't write many articles for the site during the past weeks, but I'm very happy to be able to announce here that you can clearly see a linux users community building up around the brazilian documentation and technical news sites - and they are willing to contribute!

Yesterday I managed to edit and post two contributed articles. One of them was excelent - how to do everything involved in setting up an IMP webmail server. Since imap and apache install, including all tricks involving PHP, phplib, SSL, Horde and, of course, imp. The other article was an introductory one - gcc, gdb and make introduced to those people who already know how to program, but don't know the GNU tools yet.

Of course, daily news never stop, so I get to write something up everyday - and I keep loving it. I'll try to post my activities here more often!

Yesterday was a busy day - wrote two whole (and both very long) articles about linux networking (from an administrator's point of view) for a printed magazine. Spent some time rebuilding some graphics, and then went on to write two articles for the university (damn teachers!)

I managed to write an article on the Free Software Economic Model for my IT class - maybe I can publish it somewhere. Probably both ESR and RMS would be mad at me if they could read it, but I had to show both points of view to people that still think that free software and freeware games are the same.

The new computer arrived, I'm back to business, and I promise to post more frequent diary entries from now on :)

I am creating more and more imaginative ways to get my free-software works done. I wish there were more hours on my days, 24 aren't enough.

One of the DDS tape units went out of order, tomorrow night I will have to watch the hardware maintenance guy do his work on the server. There will be like 2 or three hours (including the wait until everybody stop doing their jobs on the network) for me to write things. I intend to write some nice words about two mostly unsung heros of unix: cron and man.

BTW, the server that hosts the DDS unit is an ancient PA-RISC HP server. I hope I'll have the chance to install linux on it someday, somehow.

Today I wrote a review (in portuguese) of 'Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls' - great book!

I'm running out of cash and I badly need a new workstation, so maybe I'll have to do something interesting (and not cheap) very fast.

Published the long awaited review of Conectiva Linux 5.0, the brazilian linux distribution. Finished reading the 'DocBook' o'reilly book, will soon restart the book project...

This was not a good week - the Palm I used to love was stolen, among other bad things that I don't want to mention again.

New week, new hopes :)

my grandfather is dead, and I'm away for a while. just sent an article to the printed magazine, and now I'm setting mode +mourn

now I'm really a network operations guy again - php, html no more; just kidding about php and html, but now they will get far less of my attention span. Expect lots of articles on firewalls, packet filters, routing, NAT and so on, now that I got my hands on it again.

Fiddled a little with nessus today; I am reading some concept books (garfinkel, spafford, bellovin) and some practical ones, and can't get much time to write too; but things are gonna change soon

installed suse 6.4, liking every moment of it. realised how much the linux distributions (in general) are getting easier to install; this one recognized by itself every single bit of my hardware; conectiva linux 5.0 did the same - I think it's amazing.

wrote a piece about mail-based worms, and how to stop them on sendmail. seems like everyone and their mother are interested on this topic these days.

managed to publish 2 articles on the site today - one text about migrating NT passwords to unix, and the other about expect. both in portuguese, of course.

finished reading 'building linux and openbsd firewalls' (thanks Livraria Tempo Real!). Good 'real world' book, maybe deserving a review.

I am going to fly to Recife this week - anybody from there reading this? :)

After a long (~1.5 week) interval, I'm back to the free software world. Missed it while I was gone :)

Things are going mad on my day job; now I'm back to the network operations arena, no more web development. More and more command-line and network stuff, but less html and php.

Two of my articles were printed on 'revista do linux' (www.revistadolinux.com.br) while I was away; one talking about text-mode browsers (mostly links - not lynx - and w3m), and the other on tomsrtbt. In portuguese, as usual.

Today I posted two more articles on the site. Both about the same event: 'software livre 2000', pretty interesting stuff.

For the next days, I'll try hard to finish reviewing Conectiva Linux 5.0, or else they'll have a new release before I write about this one.

busy day. really.

published a text about Canvas 7, a (paywere) publishing suite available for linux - not mine, but sent by a reader. interesting stuff...

need to attend to more classes, school is getting a heavy burden