Older blog entries for gwm (starting at number 29)

3 Jul 2001 (updated 14 Aug 2001 at 18:12 UTC) »

Hop!

7 May 2001 (updated 14 Aug 2001 at 18:12 UTC) »

What a great day for my nerdity. I've played The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy up to the point where I'm playing with spare Improbability Drives and Advanced Tea Substitutes, almost without reading hints.

This is exactly the kind of game that I hate: one where you can die, it's easy to die and save/restore are essential parts of the gameplay. Heck, if I forget the atomic vector plotter, how long will I stay roaming until I finally discover that it was essential?

At least I'm putting my Palm Pilot to some use.

25 Apr 2001 (updated 9 Nov 2001 at 17:04 UTC) »

Layoffs at Conectiva. Unofficial figures point towards a 15% cut at the main office in Curitiba.

Status update: hop.

Status update part deux: way too many people have been talking about this diary with no understanding of the underlying issues - and it's all my fault for giving out news without context. Yes, I thought the press release was entirely inaproppriate - hyprocritical even. But this doesn't change the fact that Conectiva is one of the few nice places to work in Brazil. No, I'm not overall happy with corporate policy, but we still do a pretty good work here, and nothing is going to change that for the foreseeable future. We rule, even though the company is being managed in a sub-optimal way in my opinion. Even what we consider suboptimal at Conectiva is still light- years ahead of what anyone else is doing.

For another point of view, though, go read ralsina's diary.

It's been a few days since I officially quit mantainership of Conectiva Linux. Feels quite strange, I might say, and I'll certainly miss having final say over a number of things. It's a bit disappointing to see that people can come in and completely change (to your eyes, break) a year or so of your effort, but it also serves to proof that nothing is immutable, and that's the way it should be. Not that I was doing any enthusiastic actual work before officially stepping down, though. What you are supposed to do and what you really do are usually very different things, and nothing in the world can force you to do what you don't want to, and failure to realize that is a management sin.

Weird thought I had one of these days: if computer RPGs had a Iberic rather than anglo-saxon inspiration, would the System of Virtues of Ultima resemble the Roman Law? What about references to Greek/Roman deities instead of Pagan mythology? And none of those cute "races" like elves, dwarves, trolls, etc.? If you know a RPG game (or any kind of game where culture takes a central role) that is not built on anglo-saxon culture, or you are developing one, I'd love to hear from you. Mail me at gwm at conectiva dot com dot br.

First nice day at work in a year.

I'm addicted to Ultima VII. And Exult is great. And there should be a <project> tag.

Logs for yesterday's IRC talk are available here. It was simultaneously translated to Spanish, translation available here. I can't comment on the translation, as I don't know Spanish, but I can warn you it's not a full translation - I don't know if the problem is lack of translation or lack of logging for the rest of the session.

10 Dec 2000 (updated 10 Dec 2000 at 01:15 UTC) »

I had fun today.

acme, epx, andreas and I were invited to give a IRC talk today on the future of Linux distributions. Very entertaining, and the first time I did such a thing. The whole talk lasted more than two hours. acme talked about Conectiva history, epx talked about CUPS, aRts and his initscriptsNG proposal (which you should check out). Then I went to talk about apt - maybe this wasn't exactly what the discussion should be all about, but people seemed to want to hear about it. This is where I started to talk endlessly about a bunch of disconnected facts, with a English do bad I'll probably be ashamed for years to come. andreas discussed briefly about security issues and apt, but I basically stole everyone's right to talk with my bad, overly long speech. Maybe next time I'll have more experience and can manage to speak less and more concisely. But at least it was fun :)

Netscape 6 is the greatest non-event in Netscape history ever. I'll ignore it completely. The five first and last minutes I used it, it behaved like Mozilla M15. Mozilla M18 is more stable (I used it all day long without a crash, unless I visit stupid websites I shouldn't be visiting anyway) and I like it. It has even driven me away from lynx for quick consultations.

Free and totally unrequested-for plug: OpenProjects, #conectiva, enough said.

8 Nov 2000 (updated 14 May 2007 at 20:09 UTC) »

Dinner with rodarvus, ruda and kojima last night. As always, rodarvus's comments were the kindest, and his complaints were true and to the point.

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