Older blog entries for faw (starting at number 23)

Ok, an amazing number of events happened in the last three months, sorry for not post/report it here (and I'm still curious if somebody really reads this diary). One of the most important things for now is that I was at FISL 7.0 and I was one of the people involved in the Debian Booth. andrelop post is very good. I will work to update some stuff here and also in general related and non-related stuff. Changes are on the way! :-)

BTW, I would like to say "thanks" to everaldo that certified me as a Journeyer. Thanks!

I sent bulk-mailer to one of my sponsors (Otavio Salvador) and now the package is sitted waiting for approval. Nowadays, NEW-queue processing is pretty fast, it could take a couple of weeks, but I'm happy that Otavio already approved it. I also prepared a new version of lifelines (3.0.50) and sent it to bubulle (Christian Perrier), finally I sent the "since package" to finally adopt the package from Luk Claes (and he is going to sponsor me for this package).

On the debian-l10n-portuguese field we are working hard to get translations and translators using pseudo-urls and discussing around the list. Which is very good, since we have a huge amount of work.

Another thing that I did in the last days was sign and send GPG signatures from OLS2005 KeySigning Party, thanks to the signing-party package and its really cool caff, 45 keys signed and sent much faster. The other thing is the preparation for the FLISOL 2006, a very big InstallFest, that happens simultaneously in over 10 countries (last year we had more then 100 cities).

I couldn't forget to talk about this: I played with Xen 3.0!!! I'm on a team of sys/net admin volunteers to take care of some free software project's server. We are finishing a migration and the new structure is using Xen 3.0 that is a very interesting technology. Not just because of the technology itself, but because I also remember some nice days that I spent in 2005 attending Ottawa Linux Symposium.

Happy New Year!!!!!!!! Happy 2006! I really like 2005! But I hope 2006 is going to be even better! :o)

Ok, we did it! After seven untranslated files and one hundred one out-of-date files, the revision process of the d-i manual by the pt_BR team finished and we got included in the next release. Frans Pop announced a freeze of the English strings and a deadline to January 1st, we work hard but we need one extra day and finally we update it! Thanks to pt_BR team and to debian-boot team! Thank you very much! :o)

Still in Debian field, DebConf6 is scheduled to May and I would like to attend! I'm trying to get more involved with Debian, recently I start helping Debian Volatile Team. I'm also working in the Debian Wiki and, of course, I did not forget l10n-portuguese. The other area of interested is the QA in Debian and the i18n FrameWork.

Debian-BR-CDD is now rolling again, since the coordinator is back. :-) I'm working with QA, putting MIA tests in place and trying to help out with some tickets. We hope to get 1.0 in the wild until March 2006! Of course, I have to finish my packages to sent to my sponsors, I have some work to do... finish some new packages and update others.

I'm working hard to reduce my TODO list. There are some technical and non technical itens that I'm trying to solve in the last week and that I hope to finish until the end of this week, because Jan 9th I came back to work (yep, end of vacations). The week is just beginning and I did a lot, but certainly it is not enough. :-)

Remember that I told you about Cathedral? Well, we had a conversation by mail and we also talk on IRC about that... I'm feeling better, sounds like (and looks like) that I'm still part of it and that I can help and be useful! And I hope that I don't need to post "sad entries" here again (at least not about this topic). \o/ wheeeee! :o)

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!).

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).

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. :-)

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)

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!

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)

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! :-)

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)

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. :-)

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".

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)