Older blog entries for faw (starting at number 20)

Quick updates... that's nice! :-)

Hey! Of course I didn't forget it!

So, yesterday (19.dec) was my birthday! I start it in a flight that was delayed. After some sleep I had a normal work day (except for the fact that we did a small party with cake and the Happy Birthday Song. After work I met some friends to have a good cup of coffee and/or chocolate. Got some e-mails and also some phone calls (and of course a couple of delayed friends with some excuses because they didn't called on the right day). I also faced the "Orkut Scrapbook effect", which means that I got almost 50 scraps during the day. Cool! The "not so cool part" is answer everybody, since I don't like scrapbook interface I sent a lot of e-mails today! :o)

As I said last year, having a birthday in the end of the year is a good opportunity to do a wider analysis about my life, my last year and the plans for the future. I hope to visit Advogato until the end of the year with more info on that area (I know it is not a blog - it's a kind of nerd blog - but hey! It's my birthday, it is important even in my geek/nerd/hi-tech life!).

Hi Advogato! :-) Once again, a long time without any posts, I'm not sure if somebody actually reads my diary. I'm still trying to get a couple of itens more up-to-date (including blog/diary), I hope to achieve that! This post is splitted in two parts tech and non-tech stuff. :o)

[TECH][Debian]

We are working hard on debian-l10n-portuguese. There is a proposal to split the list to create a Brazilian Portuguese localization list, the idea is sleeping for now but I'm planning to wake it soon. My packages are a little bit stopped for now, I'm still working with Luk Claes and Christian Perrier, but I have a couple of new packages to work out with Otavio Salvador (another sponsor). I'm also trying to take good care of Debian-BR-CDD QA area and to give some attention to DebianZine (Brazilian fanzine).

[TECH][Events]

During the last weeks I got the chance to visit nice places and the oportunity to met really good people. I attended Conisli, Latinoware Mercosul, SOLISC and OpenBeach. Very good events, I had the chance to talk about Debian in all of them. The last one, OpenBeach, is more social then techical, the idea is get people from free software projects having fun without computers (going to the beach, talking around the swimming pool, going out to have dinner). Well... it is not completely without computers, but we try to use it a little bit less the usual. :-)

[NON-TECH][Sometimes, it is time to move forward...]

Well... I did not setup a blog yet... and I try to keep advogato more technically, but sometimes... we could make some exceptions. :-)

I consider myself a member of Cathedral for quite a while now. Even if I contribute just a little bit (and my contributions is far from how much I would like to contribute) I always felt like being part of something, being part of a team, being part of a kind of family, which is really nice. Cathedral is not a project, it is more a kind of "Web of Trust", which means that sometimes, you trust people even if you never meet them, and the reason to do such strange thing is because you trust some member of Cathedral that told you about the other person. It is not easy to explain, it is about being friends and it is about believe.

Anyway, in the last days I'm facing a hard time, I had a fight with one of the guys that started Cathedral many years ago. No, we do not fight in real world, we had a hard discussion in our IRC channel. It shouldn't be a big deal, and if I try to explain that as simple as possible here is what I should tell about what happened: I was sad with a couple of friends because the night before and after I told that in the channel we discussed, I'm not quite sure why we discuss, but as I understood, I shouldn't be sad with them, and they are trying to prove me that.

Ok! There are lots of ways to say to somebody: "hey, come on, you shouldn't be sad!" but complain, fight and use hard arguments with a sad person, instead of make the person feels better will get things even worst. Time is a bless and after talking with the friends that make me sad I was able to get things rolling again... anyway, I was not able to figure out why we fight that morning. I always say in my work place: We are living strange days... and that is an undeniable truth (right now!). I mean, he is a great friend of mine, we used to talk a lot, exchange ideas, make fun of each other, teach each other (ok, I learn much more with him than he learns from me, anyway, that is not the point), and now, we almost don't speak with each other. I'm not sure what are the feelings on the wire, I don't know if he is angry, mad, crazy, sad or if he has plans to kill me, what I know is that I don't like how things are going. :o(

But... in the last days, something cross to my mind... maybe (and I really mean maybe) my time on being part of cathedral is getting to an end (Matrix: everything that has a begin has an end). Which means that, unfortunately, I did what I was supposed to did and walk forward should be the next reasonable movement. I thought that a week ago but I was not sure. Looking again, maybe my role was bring more people to Cathedral to create a really good team, a really group! It is strange to say that, it is even stranger to think about that, but if you look carefully, I'm not contributing as much as I can (and specially as much as I should) and I'm not being part of Cathedral like the others. There is another detail to be considered: the fact that some people came do what they have to do and leave, like some tools, they do what they are supposed to do and them we move them to another place where people will need it.

I had no intention to leave Cathedral, but the last events and the delicated situation in which I'm feeling like disrupting something or bothering people, make me think about starting cleaning up and progressively moving away to give people the space they need. Sun Tzu said that a general should know when is the right time to fight and when is the right time to leave. I do not want to fight, I do not want to lose my friends, so perhaps it is time to leave. Yeah! Now you can say that this is one of that sad posts! Maybe I'm wrong and we will be able to find out what is going on and I will discover that I'm still part of Cathedral (and hopefully I will be for a long time), maybe I'm right and it is time to change (2006 is right there, knocking on the door), maybe I'm just too asleep right know, maybe not... who knows? Probably the time will say... hope that it don't take too much time. :o)

Long time without post, time to a quick (happy!) post and to try to keep it up-to-date again! In fact, I'm keep saying that I should try to get advogato more up-to-date, I need to get a lot of stuffs more up-to-date, but I'm working on this. :o)

[Debian]

Yeah! Today I received mail from katie (Debian Archive Kit), luk uploaded translate-docformat it is now in incoming and soon will hit unstable. I adopted from Luk after he requested an adopter. He is going to "sponsor" me in the mean time (someday I'm planning to subscribe to NM). I also sent a couple of days ago a new package for lifelines, I'm waiting until Christian Perrier upload it (he is my sponsor). :o) I'm also working on another packages that I plan to upload soon.

In the l10n field I started a discussion with the idea to split the pt and pt_BR translation efforts since we have different areas of interests and we are putting hard work on different places. Looks like that DebianPT translators agreed with me. I hope we can find a nice solution to get both languages in Debian infrastructure. We are also working a lot with WMLs and the demand to update potfiles and manpages. Lots of work!

TracMultipleProjects tricky!

So... in the last weeks I've been playing with Trac to setup it inside my company. We have a Multiple Project environment and I was trying to get it working under a name like this: "projects.foo.bar".

After some fight and after read the really nice mod_rewrite documentation (1.3 here) and the really cool URL Rewriting Guide (1.3 here) I get this setup to work:

Alias /trac "/usr/share/trac/htdocs/"

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/trac(/?.*)$                       - [L]
RewriteRule ^/+$                                /index.cgi [L]

RewriteCond /var/www/projects/$1                -d
RewriteRule ^/([[:alnum:]]+)(/?.*)              /trac.cgi$2 [S=1,E=TRAC_ENV:/var/www/projects/$1]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)                              /index.cgi

The rest of the tricks are in the TracMultipleProject page, anyway, looks like that the new versions of Trac are using mod_pythons and some new resources, really good stuff. Congratualtions to Trac Team! I'm using this setup with Apache2 in a Debian Sarge environment. Enjoy it! :o)

You made the plans, that's good! Did you make a backup plan and/or an alternative plan, just in case? :o)

Server Breakdown!

04.sep.2005, about 22h 00min I got a phone call, it was otavio. Breaking News: Debian-BR-CDD Server stopped again. I said "ok", there is nothing to be done, I have to get a new harddisk and go to change it. On Monday (05.sep), the hard disk arrives almost 19h 00min and I really need to went to College, after that I went to my home to met otavio on IRC and told him my plans for the next day: get earlier on DATACENTER on tuesday (06.sep) change hard disks and everything should be fine!

The real problem here is that I had never looked to that server personally, I only know it digitally. My first mistake that day was not bring my camera. And of course, I shouldn't assumpt that it is going to be "easy" to restore the server.

I changed the hard disks, turned on the machine, listened a very very strange noise and the machine freezes, a quick look in the cooler revealed to me that it is "stoped" (and also melted), great! Ask for a new cooler and the nice guys at the DATACENTER bring me another one. Good! Now we are ready to go! Turn it on again, checking the boot it is a Pentium 3 Celeron 733MHz, the BIOS opens in the maintainance mode because in the last boot it crashed and it is using 1100MHz for CPU, ahhhhh now I understood why the old cooler melt.

The server had two hard disks, I replace one of them, re-organize the internal arrangement to create some space to let the air flow inside, now we are ready to go! After a lot of ninja magic, and after I discovered that several live CDs doesn't reconigze LVM2, I finally get to duplicate the data and check it using rsync. Of course that I had some problems in /var directory, it was the exactly place where the old hard disk present some problems, but with some faith, the previous ninja magic and somo voodoo techniques I was able to bring all the data! :-)

Holidays! Toooo much TV for me!

Oh yeah! Sep.07 is a national holiday and Sep.08 is a holiday in my city, so I just have to work on the friday and I have to days to rest and work to put some of my tasks up-to-date. And that was really the plan, but instead of doing that I got one of the worst colds in the last years, which lead me to stay in the bed for three long days (including the friday), no holiday, no work, no up-to-date, in fact, things get delayed and I never watched so much TV (which is bad, but I can't turn on the computer).

Yeah! Amazing! Now I'm bloging the last week adventures in the hope that the next week things get better. :o)

There is no big deal

On the evening of August 28th (Sunday) to August 29th (Monday) I got a message from otavio about Debian-BR-CDD Server, I'm the closest sys/net admin (the server is in the same city I am), we had a downtime, about ten hours until I get there, reboot the machine check the things and everything was just fine. (Ok, of course that i get some sleep, wake up in the monday morning and go to the server). :)

One of our hard disks is dying, there is an administrative stop scheduled for this week, I hope that the actual disk keep the good job until the time comes (which means the new hard disk arrives) and then the "Bit Heaven" is waiting for him. :-)

Why Debian is an incredible amazing project?

Today on d-u-p we receive a message asking help to translate debian to Guarani which is one of the official languages of Paraguay but also one of the Tupi-Guarani languages that is used by a lot of indigenas and people in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay.

Do you know why he wants that? Because they are installing eight computers in an "indigena area", hey that's great! Debian definitely rox! :o)

Of course, I'm still facing "time slice" problems, anyway the notebooks is helping me a lot... but I still have to figure out some ways to improve my "time maintainance".

Hmmm, doing better, update it in short time TODOs that I really need to DO!

Debian

I'm still trying to get the backlog down, which means read my mails and put my work up-to-date. :(

Software Freedom Day

So, we are going to have some celebrations for SFD 2005 in my city (and I'm hoping in other brazilian cities). We already have support from a High School and we are planning to get events in Colleges, Universities and Companies. :o)

Linux Kernel

In the past months I'm reading LKML, which is great, I'm discovering nice things and learning a lot. Planet Kernel is also a very good reading.

In fact, I have a great TODO list, I'm trying to organize a couple of things, while I'm trying to change the way of doing some approaches to solve problems and to contribute in some project. Hope it works. :o)

Oh my!
Yeah! Once again, I'm still alive and trying to keep advogato more "up-to-date"! :o)

One of the biggest problems when you do not post news often is that when you do, you have the "old news feeling". Well, they are old news, I mean, at least for me, but I still want to tell people about that... for now, just some "quick news" and I hope during the next days (...weeks... ???) I'm going to publish more news!

Desktop Developers' Conference and Ottawa Linux Symposium

Yes! (Thanks Jon!) I went there, spent an entire week, knew a lot of people, and really enjoy myself! :)) I also ran a BOF about Debian Women, had the chance to participate in a Key Signing Party (Thanks willy!), Hope to put some pictures online!

Mobility

Great news! I got a notebook! :-)

Debian

My first Debian Package hitted "testing", now I'm working on two other packages to upload them. :) I'm also reading a lot of "delayed" mails to start helping again. We are trying to put QA in place for pt_BR team. And I'm also planning to propose the pt split into pt_PT and pt_BR.

Hurry!

College, Work/Job, Free Software, Volunteer! Yeah! Time is decreasing as fast as my TODO list is increasing... :-)

And at last, but not least, I would like to say "thank you" to fike, he certified me as an Apprentice.

Sorry for the long time without posting. :o)
Now, time for a great post and to keep it more "updated".

Debian - Working with packages

I'm working with Christian Perrier (a.k.a. bubulle), he is helping me and also sponsoring my uploads to Debian of package lifelines.

Christian sent to Debian-Women maillist a pre-RFA (pre Request For Adoption) offering some help in a menotor/mentee model for three of his packages, one of them is lifelines. I'm working with him and today he uploaded 3.0.46-1. There is another version ready to go 3.0.46.1-1 which is considered the upstream stable version.

More Debian Packaging

I believe it is "lucky" for myself, but in the same week, Luk Claes sent RFA's for some of his packages, I decides to adopt two of them (ITA - Intent To Adopt). Packages since and translate-docformat are ready for upload, just waiting for Luk approval, he is going to sponsor me as IANADD (I Am Not A Debian Developer).

The since package is a kind of tail but with "state information". For translate-docformat I also became upstream, it is a shell script to convert between different file formats.

New server, time to organize a little bit my personal stuff

With some friends, we just setup (we are still finishing it) a new server and finally I found a good place to put some of my talks and the Debian Packages that I'm working on.

Past

Since last post a lot of things already happened. The FISL 6.0 was a great event and a great time for Brazilian Debian Community. We took some time to talk about QA in debian-l10n-portuguese and try to get together all Debian User Groups in Brasil. In the last weeks, I configured two new domains for two DUG's, now DUG-RJ and DUG-SC are sharing the machine with DUG-PR.

RJ is Rio de Janeiro, SC is Santa Catarina and PR is Paraná, all of them are Brazilian states. :o)

Future

I'm still working in some Debian Packages that I would like to add to the repository, thumbs is one of them, the other on is tuxfrw and pagode. But I still have to figure out a couple of things and get some spare time. :)

We have to turn on the QA proccess in debian-l10n-portuguese, in the next day we probably have a new release of Debian Zine (a Brazilian fanzine about Debian) and also the report and some nice pictures about FISL6.0 (at least, I hope so). :))

I would like to say "thank you" to caio1982 that certifies me as an Apprentice

It should be like any given sunday, but...

Today was a common day except by one special and very isolated event. I went to the Book Store with my mother, she wants to buy some office things (papers, folders and stuff like that). As usual, while she was checking her list of things to buy I went to look around and visit the Technological Section with books, software (almost only proprietary), hardware and peripherals.

First I checked some book prices and then the new hardwares available. So, I decided to take a look at the games shelf when I found something unusual. Without even stop to think I got the pack, went to check the price in the machine and saw this:

R$ 58,00, special offer for only R$ 2,90

I can't believe! It is an Original Netscape Communicator pack, for just R$ 2,90 (which means about US$ 1,00 or less than "one euro"). Bought it! You can see the pictures. It is a relic, it's not free software, but remember me from the Browser War and the begining of the Mozilla Project based on the Netscape Open Source Code. :o)