Older blog entries for kov (starting at number 33)

Yesterday I went to the movies with my friend Vanderson to watch 'My uncle killed a guy', my en_US translation for the brazilian movie's title 'Meu tio matou um cara'. Nice movie, and one of the characteres had a 'GNU & Linux the dynamic duo' stick glued on her monitor, as my friend gwidion had mentioned to me previously. Cool.

I've not been able to take part on the BSP for the weekend, again, as I travelled to my grandma's and had no time for hacking at all. Some nice photos were taken, though. I also could not hack on localization-config to handle brazilian keyboard selection correctly, too, but I will give my perl a try soon, though... I just found the debian-edu's CVS repo.

nanda has taken the time to be online twice, I think, since she went to Las Vegas for IBM's Software University. She is uploading some photos taken with her new camera, which she bought there, whenever she is able to be online.

Really big event, but debconf was nicer as Internet conectivity was much better =D.

New Year went fine for me. I went to São Paulo to be with my girlfriend. We had a nice time drinking champagne and italian wine she got as a gift from Enrico when he came to Brasil for CONISLI. We walked a bit through Avenida Paulista which was having a very big party with 2 milion people expected, but we turned around and went back home real soon. On sunday we had a really fine time hacking together, which is always very cool.

I've been playing around with trying to help sort out some problems in GNOME's keyboard configuration stuff. I think many of the problems reported come from the fact that sarge's xlibs package has a bug which is already fixed in unstable.

I even installed a chroot to install xorg on it using packages from external sources so I don't fsck my system consistency to try to reproduce some segfaults on gnome-settings-daemon but with no success 'till now.

Joshau Kwan, then Jordi, then nanda and me.

Is the Debian flu coming back?

Christmas was really cool. I went some days before that to Belo Horizonte, my home city, to meet friends and then went on to Porto Alegre, where debconf4 happened, to stay at my girlfriend's family's.

It was an awesome time. During the week nanda went back to São Paulo, as she needed to get a visa to enter the United States. She's going to take part on an IBM conference in january, and then LinuxWorld in february. Lucky girl.

The cool part of she going to the airport and leaving me alone with her parents for one day was that we found the BRA (a brazilian aviation company) operator was using GNOME with the bluecurve theme on the laptop at the check-in desk. We should really buy a digital camera. Another very cool thing was caused by her one-day travel: she came back bringing her wireless router, which she had forgotten. The bad thing is she end up forgeting it at Porto Alegre when she flew back to São Paulo yesterday. Shit happens.

On related news, I've played the Santa Claus for her family, this year. I wore all those red clothes and white beard and stuff, and distributed the gifts to everyone. I told her 'Tonight I'm gonna play the capitalist pig and alienate inocent children'. It was fun, anyway. I believe Nicolas, her nephew, who's only two years old did recognize me, though, as he kept looking at me with a confusing look in the eyes when he got close. I'll post photos when I get them. =D

24 Dec 2004 (updated 24 Dec 2004 at 17:15 UTC) »

As Pablo already noted, we now have http://www.debianbrasil.org/, which is an alias for our http://debian-br.alioth.debian.org/. nanda has registered the domain for us as soon as spectra showed us damog's post.

Here we go, 2005!

11 Dec 2004 (updated 12 Dec 2004 at 00:08 UTC) »

Some cool little news. I've managed to kill katie's run some days ago with incorrect version numbering in gnome-mag. This mistake made all of the packages with names starting with [h-z] to not be processed that day. This includes nanda's first official Debian package, mozilla-firefox-locale-pt-br, which finally made me try firefox again, as I needed to test her package as her sponsor. One thing I really dislike about firefox is it won't select the word before or after the cursor if I press Ctrl+Shift+arrow while in the address entry, but the whole URL.

I will not deny, though, I do like it. It's /-enabled search feature, although I'm very used to the epiphany type-ahead thing is very good and it looks very beautiful with the GNOME theme. What some people may also notice on this screenshot is that firefox is also being used in the GNOME 2.8 advertisement at http://www.gnome.org/. Heh.

Attent readers will also notice a small picture on my notification area. I've been doing some code on the way to work in the mornings, to preceed the bureaucratic work with cool programming. My last little trick is a simple hack called trayphoto. It will take pictures you put in ~/.trayphoto and keep changing them in the notification area from 10 to 10 seconds, and will magnify the small photo a bit when the mouse is over it. It needs lots of fixing and error checking, but looks cool =D. It was eating loads of RAM, btw, 'till I added an explicit call to the garbage collector to collect the garbage using the gc module. I wonder if I'm doing anything wrong.

In other news, today I talked about GNOME and Free Desktops related issues with Helio de Castro, from KDE and Conectiva, like I said I would on my last post. It was a fun, informal presentation and involved lots of discussion on desktop-related issues and projects like utopia. We even presented GNOME running on my laptop automagically show a dialog 'this camera contains photos' and make gthumb show the images after the button was clicked. I also showed nautilus-cd-burner off, which I simply loved since I got around to trying.

It is a shame we did not have a real KDE machine for Helio to present the same ;).

So, one month is past now. I wanted to blog before about a couple of things that I can't remember right now.

Life is going forward. I took part on another event in the meantime and made a presentation on 'how does the Debian Projet work', to make people think about what's behind the products they use. I still think the brazilians are too tied to what is the end result of Free Software projects and do not give enough attention to the processes that are carried to actually build them.

This weekend I've been to Florianopolis, a southern city in which the 5th Open Beach was held. It is a very nice event organized to bring people involved with free software together for some days on the beach. It last for only two days, but it was very good to be close to my girlfriend for those two days, appreciating nice moments in the beach, swimming pool and talking with friends like maddog, who seems to be in love with Brasil ;), and people from the Brazilian community. There are photos already.

This weekend I'm going to be in a round table about Free Desktops, talking about GNOME, while Helio Castro is going to speak for KDE.

The only thing I'm sad about is I'm not having time to hack. I am always working on the ministry from some time in the morning to 20:00 or so, because there are lots of stuff to work on... get home very tired, very hungry, hacking motivation is low these days. I hope next year will be a better one for me on this front. I am surely going to get some motivation injected, to which I'll comment on later on.

It was an interesting week the one before this one. I went to São Paulo to meet my girlfriend and just after me Enrico Zini was arriving; He came some days before CONISLI.

I had to leave my friends at São Paulo to come back to Brasília and work for two days before going back for CONISLI. I and nanda presented a talk on the challenges the brazilian Free Software Community has to face, mainly advocating that brazilians need to contribute more code, translations, documentation to the projects, and really take advantage of the free software benefit we always talk so much about around here: enabling us to become technology developers instead of just users.

I also gave a very basic talk on Python and GTK+. The Debian Brasil group, mainly through the Debian Bahia and Debian Paraná local groups, ran a booth for showing off Debian and getting people together.

It was lots of fun, and I think the community received more fuel to go ahead. Now I'm back to Brasília, and will try to continue working on the debian-br packaging team infra-structure, which I'm basing on gnome-pkg-tools. Tomorrow I'm going to Foz do Iguaçu, the boundary for Brasil/Paraguai/Argentina and is very beautiful, to take part on Latinoware, where a mini GNOME developers and users meeting is going to happen. Here we go again!

So, the Debian GNU/* tests I was trying to do didn't go very well for me. I tried installing Debian GNU/Hurd on my toshiba laptop and found out it would not support my pcmcia network card.

Then I installed FreeBSD, as Debian GNU/kFreeBSD's livecd would reboot everytime I tried booting it. I wasn't able to make FreeBSD use my network pcmcia card too -- Linux controls with the pcnet_cs module, I though it'd work with the 'ed' driver, but it didn't.

I then tried forcing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in by unpacking the tarball above the FreeBSD instalation and I even got some stuff to work, but it was not fun without networking, anyway.

So well, I'm still trying to find a way of testing this thing... maybe I'll buy a better network card =P.

I'm trying evolution for the nth time, and still cannot get used to its keyboard controls. I miss being able to use the keyboard 100% of the time, but did not find a way of going to a folder and then being able to navigate through the message list and then being able to scroll the message without using the mouse or huge amounts of TAB pressing.

In other news, I finally made a hackergotchi to myself, to be used on Planet Debian, mainly... though my girlfriend didn't like it a lot, I loved it =D.

So yeah, life is getting better... more time for hacking is coming, I hope =).

23 Oct 2004 (updated 22 Nov 2004 at 19:55 UTC) »

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.

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