Older blog entries for cascardo (starting at number 3)

Last Friday I decided to get otcl and tclcl packaged for Debian and met a big problem. Some license terms are missing and others do not allow for another use than research. This is what open source gives to us. That's why we should forget about it and talk only about software livre. My good friend kov is in town and we've met and talked about some recent events regarding software livre in Brasil. Today I must study for an exam tomorrow involving Formal Semantics.

Have just written an ALSA plugin for the MPFC, a song player for use in the console, based on plugins. Although I have signed the alsa-devel mailing list for a while, I've had no experience in writing such an application, and have just started reading a couple of simple tutorials, the doxygen documentation and both alsa-lib and alsa-utils sources. I couldn't figure out why periods should be set to 2, but it was needed to get a good result, and the plugin works finely. The master volume is used for volume control, and I couldn't make certain the first mixer element is the master volume either.

Yesterday, a professor asked me to help on a project that uses multi-head with X and more than one graphics card on a PC, which they call multidesk. That was my first contact with XFree86 code (besides when I built my LFS). That Int10/VM86 thing is going to need a lot of study in VM86 and VGA architecture from me. Updating to XF86 4.4 was of help, since the computer stopped crashing. I've taken the chance to take a look at the new license that is making lots of people talk about it. It was not that great a deal I thought it was. They are still non-copyleft and now, non-"GPL compatible". To me, being non-copyleft is worse than being non-"GPL compatible". So, still the same old song. Still non-copyleft libre software. Let's give them a chance. So, now, I may decide about working on this project, in this company that does not produce libre software, but works with it. I have a chance of making them change their minds about one point or another, and that would be a start. Let's just wait some couple of days.

Last month, I've found out it was possible to change the number of pages available for the printer users where I study. I've told about it to the administrator, which already knew about it, and since there were many other things to worry about, they simply ignored it. They were promising to migrate to CUPS and Pykota since november. (They've told me this then, because I couldn't print using Linux systems, only Solaris, which I did not accept.) Last Wednesday, I've decided to write a hack that would allow people to transfer pages, without this security problem. The administrators suspended my account, and claimed it was not a right, but a privilege. Now, my hack is quite ready (except for some authentication decisions), but it's kinda useless, unless for my learning. I'm going to claim my rights in some higher degree, instead of discussing with the administrators using e-mail (with copies to every class list).

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