Ok, life is turning upside-down, things are worse every time I look at them, but hey, I could not allow this to happen: Sarge releases and I don't even blog about it?! Come on, not even if I were dead =D

It's been a long time, yes, but a short time for actual release preparation, what makes me feel uneasy about Sarge, really, as we've had no test cycles, and released in a hurry, as if one week more would make any difference after 3 years waiting. But of course, having Sarge released is very good anyway =D

Thanks to everybody involved! We rock!

After some time ignoring my promise of posting regularly, here I am, back from Porto Alegre, to where I went for the sixth edition of the FISL (International Free Software Forum).

It was simply a great opportunity to get to know some people I only knew virtually, and mainly to meet once again some great friends I'm unfortunately only able to meet once every 6 months or so, like kov and Pri. I also ended up being introduced to some wonderful people who became good friends in no more than a day or two, like maddog.

However, nothing is perfect. Meeting these people was great while it lasted, but having to leave hurted a lot, as I knew it would take a long time for me to see them again. You never know how long it's really going to take, but you know it's a loooong time. Usually something like 6 months, that is really a lot for people you love =) As for maddog, I hope to meet him at IBM in São Paulo on Friday (it's only hope, for now, as I'm struggling to get any useful information about his talk and how to get inside the building), but don't expect to meet him again any time soon after that, either. Perhaps even longer, like a year.

Actually, I hoped this not to happen (having to wait so long to see friends again), but hoping is not enough. I'm trying to manage to get us together sooner than expected, but it's only ideas, for now. Let's see what I can do =)

As for the rest of the event, it's far bigger than it was last time I had been there, in 2003, and, consequently, many things have changed. Also, it's visibly not an event "designed" for hackers, but to general public, which includes users, non-users (curious), etc. As of now, I'm trying to remember and write down topics about everything that happened while I was there, and will leave it for another post (a summary of the event itself).

This week went by relatively fast, compared to how long other weeks like this seem to take to go by. Yes, taking tests is a pain in the neck, mainly when you know they are stupid tests that don't contribute to you in any way. However, we have to take them, so, as there's nothing we can do about it, we take them! =)

Physics, Chemistry, History... did wonderfully well on some, quite the opposite on others, but that doesn't really matter... Afterall, they're only tests =D Well, at least I can tell my mother that maintaining packages for Debian and writing software can help me at school... Atomix definetely helped me hugely on the Chemistry test, but that's for another day...

Apart from all that boring stuff, I at least managed to have some time to work on gchangepass (yeah, that very old project of password changer for GNOME), as in tests week I arrive much earlier at home. It's surely much better than it used to be, more intelligent, beautiful, tidy, faster, cleaner code. Doesn't even look like the same thing =) I hope to finish it by the end of the week, package it and get it through the NEW queue, apart from presenting it on gnome-hackers to see if I can get it into the GNOME CVS... let me try not to hope too much and work a little bit =)

(And as you can see, I'm posting regularly - at least more regularly than before - just like I promised =D)

Ok, now I'll make a promise that I'll post to this blog regularly. I was never used to doing so, hence when I remember that this exists, I feel so lazy to post that... I simply don't post anything! I'll have to consider it an obligation to see if I can handle it (posting regularly), afterall, having a blog just to say I have one wasn't exactly what I meant to do when I created this =)

First, as I could foresee when classes started, I'm dying in frustration for not having time to do all I want to... time will tell how I'm going to manage all this, but this definetely proves that life sucks in several ways, although there's not much one can do about it, I suppose. However, at least one of my Debian packages is in good hands, and even though I still do small things to it, Guillem Jover and Elrond (a.k.a. the Debian QEMU Team) are doing simply great work, what makes me feel extremely relieved, at least in relation to qemu.

About other packages like atomix and doc-central, for which I'm also upstream, I've already given up my goal of getting newer versions into sarge. For atomix, I had planned some improvements and mainly the re-addition of the level editor, but I've mainly sticked to bug fixes until now. For doc-central I had planned (and had been working on) a full re-write, with better performance (without some mistakes that explicitly go against it, I'd say), without frames, with better HTML, and some other cool improvements I don't remember clearly right now, apart from filing bugs with patches for some packages, so that they include (proper) doc-base entries.

I have had no time to work on RC bugs either, and haven't been doing much with my GNOME CVS account, as I intended (such as helping with committing updated translations and so on). But that's life, I guess.

But at least my packages are in good shape for the release of sarge, what's already something! =) Let's hope Debian releases soon. Actually, I wish I could help make it release sooner, but (lack of) time won't let me do it, in the few ways that I could do it before.

All right, I confess, this is a kind of 'forceful post', which I'm forcing myself to write, as the beginning of the 'let's post regularly' series, and, therefore, doesn't have anything really useful, or that would belong in a blog that's regularly used, but anyway... as things happen I'll post them (I made a promise!), hopefully no longer needing to do this kind of 'status update'. Or better, perhaps even 'Bits from fatalerror', which is currently more fashionable.

Wow,

this is already the third time I try to post a new entry here, since my last and only one, that has been a quite long time ago. But it's not always easy to write without having much to say... I hope I'll post this one, but we'll only know when I click the button, heh =)

Just a small note before I start to talk about what I really intend to: gnome-blog is really cool! =) The last time I tried to write something to post here I mentioned that it was the first time I was using it, so I couldn't tell whether it was really good or not... Now it's the second time, and it really seems satisfying =)

Well, let me get on with what I was going to write... May readers (if there are any, actually) forgive me for not talking about what happened during the last months, but I don't really like talking about all of it. They're sad memories I won't ever forget, but talking/writing about them hurts. =(

The interesting part is that I had been doing lots of things that I wanted to do... I had time for that =) Now it seems the party is over... Classes restarted today: from one point of view it's wonderful, *but* there are problems... It demands huge amounts of time, there's no time left for anything... Oh, well, let's see what I can do about it. =)

I guess it'll be easier to write here from now on, since it's already up-to-date, I'll have to write about news only =)

And by the way, nothing wrong with gnome-blog so far =D