Older blog entries for kov (starting at number 24)

So yeah, life is still sucky for me: being a "manager" sucks and doesn't help me having time to hack. It's being a good experience, at least.

Two very good things happened since my last post, though: I got a new laptop and a new girlfriend. The laptop is a cool HP nx9010 which enables me to build my packages much faster now =D.

The girlfriend is Fernanda Weiden, a brazilian Free Software hacker who some of you who have been to debconf4 will probably remember. She was the one with the Red Hat symbol in her bag and also the owner of this cool tatoo. Though she used to be a Red Hatter, I'm glad she's been using Debian since before debconf ;).

On the Debian front, I've taken the time to do some work on apt-howto, gksu and its friends, and glade-2, which is now my package too.

Now that I have two laptops I'm using the old one to try some stuff... I've successfuly installed Debian GNU/Hurd but found out I would not go much further as it lacks pcmcia support, so I cannot get into the net. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD reboots on my two laptops just after grub loads the kernel. I then installed Debian woody to try gnome1.4->gnome2.6 upgrades, mainly but now I'm unable to log in after a system lockup =D... testing is not going too well for me, but I'm going to try again right now =D.

Hah! Lots of time without posting... Brasilia is a busy place for me... almost no time for hacking... just a few minutes dedicated to my sponsorees and that's all...

Today, though, I'm with some friends in a bar called 'Azeite de Oliva' celebrating the GNOME2.8 release and we were able to get a wireless connection from I don't know where.

I even got the experimental GNOME2.8/2.7 packages installed =D.

People taking part on this historical moment: Me, Cesar Cardoso, Leonardo Mello, Vanderson Telmo, Marcelo Dantas, Leandro, Pablo Sanchez and Melissa Braun!

uhu!

So, more about Brasilia...

I'm now (since some days ago, actually, I just didn't have the time to blog) officially the general coordinator for the IT department of the brazilian Ministry of Cities. That scared me a lot when the invitation came, but I'm now more confortable and being able to deal with things.

The whole problem is hacking time shrunk a lot, but I expect that to get a bit better when I get my own place. I'm currently staying at the house of a friend.

The cool thing is the Ministry runs lots of its machines on Debian already and the goal, and one of my missions is finishing this transition... president Lula himself has stated that Free Software is a need during his trip to Africa, but still there are lots of resistance, as always.

On a rant, I would hate to see sarge be released with gnome-session still including gnome-cups-icon in its default session. It has a big memory leak (most probably libgnomecups, not the applet, but I won't have the time to track it down before the release, anyway, will anyone? =D) and keeps opening a error dialog if no cups server is running on GNOME startup. Please, please, get it off... =).

My life is a total mess currently. But before I start, I'll take the oportunity to say something I've been waiting on advogato to come back to say: I agree with what Joey Hess said about the mixing of debconf/debcamp and felt the same as he, even though I was one of the people who suggested this way of handling debconf4.

So... I went on forced vacations because my teachers went on strike. Then I had loads of cool new experiences when I went to Belo Horizonte, my home town: I got drunk for the first time in my life, for one example of a big one.

Then I received a call from Brasilia to go there, and I was supposed to stay for two days and go back home. That was on last week's wednesday, and I'm still here. I will only go back on the 22th to take part on an event our local group is organizing (pt_BR only, sorry)... unfortunately I won't be there on time for my gnome presentation on thursday, so my sponsoree fatalerror is going to be doing that for me instead.

I'm just plain unhappy with the fact that all this craziness has been sucking my time and I have not been able to play with gtkfb for d-i and have not been able to participate as actively as I wanted on the debian-desktop / debian control center meeting on sunday... and well, it was on sunday! But that's for a good cause...

And my classes are supposed to come back soon, and it seems I won't be able to go back and stay to finish the semester... it seems like big changes will happen in my life. Lots are to come on the next following weeks. I will talk a bit more about Brasilia stuff later. Good to see you again!

Long time no seen. University has been taking a lot of time. I've been very busy working on my academic stuff but managed to take some small periods of time to do some work on Glade3 and on GNOME packaging, although much less than I would have liked.

I've also been playing a bit with gnome-vfs. I am writing a toy/test gnome-vfs module which turn the user's gconf configuration tree into a file system.

I'm right now becoming very excited about debconf4... only now I really had the time to realize how big an adventure and how cool this event will be. I just can't believe this is happening! I'm eager to see all you people! =)

On a side note, my friend caio1982 is most of the time a very nice and reasonable person, but sometimes I would really like to know why is it that he spends time trolling instead of reporting problems/sending comments to the people concerned. =P

On another side note, I've watched George Orwell's 1984, the movie, and it was very cool thing to do at university. I read the book some time ago and it made me think a lot. I am now reading Orwell's Animal Farm and, in parallel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Reading before sleeping rules =).

So I've been at Brasilia for the training week mentioned by spectra teaching GNOME at the first day and giving a 32-hour course on Gtk+ programming using the material I mentioned in a previous blog entry for the rest of the week.

I wrote some thoughts. The highlight on a free software development perspective, though, was the oportunity we had to have developers from many projects joining to talk about lots of stuff. We had people from KDE, Conectiva, kernel hackers and webdevelopers. Those guys and I (as a Debian Developer and GNOME contributor) took part on a "round table" and discussed stuff ranging from the input layer that is being built on the kernel since 2.4 (IIRC) going through D-BUS, Hal, desktop integration, and loads of nice stuff on "the road ahead": XUL, the discussion that is being raised on GNOME about adopting a new platform and such.

Cool stuff this book "meme" (I've read this word some times, and I guess I figured out what it means already -- my dictionary does not have it and my system load is high enough to make me lazy to run gdict.)

Here I go:

Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Destes constrangimentos não escapam nem mesmo os principados hereditários que pareciam a princípio tão seguros.

Translating:

"Not even the hereditary principalities, considered so safe before, will scape these problems." -> not a very good translation, vorlon would be of help here =D.

Today I'm quite tired. I'm just coming back from a manifestation my university class organized. I am the elected representative of the class, so I wrote a letter containing a description of the problems we discussed in an assembly. Our protest consisted of getting most people of the class to attend the sociology discipline with another teacher in a different time of the day to make it clear for our department that we are not satisfied with the lack of commitment of our current teacher. Cool stuff it was =).

I've been quiet busy these days preparing a Gtk+ course (pt_BR only) for the brazilian government's "training week" organized by the free software people in there. On sunday I fly to Brasilia to give that course and one on GNOME to "end users". It's gonna be fun! =)

My two GNOME teams took most of my non-university-related time in this previous weeks: the brazilian translation effort received a big amount of contributions from lots of people in the last days before GNOME2.6. During essentialy that same period, the Debian GNOME Team was working hard on puting GNOME2.6 into experimental and hey, it works GREAT!

Today I took some time after university and some misc reading to just hack randomly like I did some months ago when I hacked a bit of gtkhtml, producing a GBrowser.

This time I was trying to think about what would be a good 'IDE' for my mother to use to produce LaTeX stuff, which I'll call GLaTeX for now. My main concern is simplicity. Most programs are just too complex or completely inconsistent with GNOME's UI, thus making them hard to use.

I tried to teach her to use gedit and a nautilus script to build the PDF, but that is too hard to remember, the file locations are somewhat "random" and GEdit does not take care of stuff which I can be able to deal with like bibtex and table creation helpers. The build and viewing features, though, are the most important ones to my mother's needs, I think. I finished my hacking session by reading nice stuff on using bonobo controls in Python and producing a window that uses gpdf's bonobo control to display a PDF.

As seb128 blogged, after some time of trying to debug a very weird bug relating to libxft2 with gtk2.4 it happened to be that his build system was the culprit. Now, it would be very good to find out what was causing the problems to have Build-Conflicts.

Indeed, the #gnome-debian channel rocks! I am being able to get up-to-date with my virtual life now, and I think I am being able to focus on stuff instead of trying to do everything. Of course that'll harm some of my projects, but I guess my overall productivity will increase. Motivation is high, and loads of good stuff are to happen on the gnome front!

That means I'm working on devhelp0.8 to unstable, using the gecko engine and devhelp 0.9 to experimental, now that gtk2.4 is uploaded. I hope to be uploading them soon. They won't be commited to the gnome-pkg's svn though, as the alioth repo seems to be really having problems.

In other news, I am almost finishing the code reorganization for gksu: now you can grab three different source packages: libgksu, which provides the authentication and X magic stuff, libgksuui, which provides a convenience Gtk+ widget to ask for the password and gksu, which is the gksu app itself. I found out that morphix is using gksu in some projects, and received an email recommending adding gksu to freedesktop.org. Interest seems to be fairly good on this tiny thing, so I would really appreciate comments on the new API, especially from current users.

Second stage of apt-howto's rewrite has begun! I have mailed debian-doc about my goals and TODO. I expect to have translations started real soon and the core of the document unmodified just for that. Like a freeze. It's time to finish the doc for sarge.

What is taking most of my time, though, is commiting translation updates to GNOME from fellow translators in the brazilian GNOME translation effort. I updated gtk+ yesterday and we only need 2 more big updates to have a 100% translated gnome2.6! Yupi!

The work on libgksu continues. I would like to have the 1.2 API finished for sarge. Maybe I'll achieve this goal. The libgksu library has a development release, already, and now I'm going to finish my modifications on libgksuui, which I split off gksu, which will provide a convenience widget, as herzi suggested.