Older blog entries for kov (starting at number 36)

Almost a month since I last posted here. It seems like I've been giving more attention to my "brazilian" blog. There you'll find lots of paragraphs reporting my adventures on CONSOL.

I've been hanging around with Debian people like damog, vorlon (who gave a nice talk in spanish on tuesday, ashaming both me and nanda, the brazilians who gave talks in english while the gringo talks in spanish =D) and gwolf. There are also lots of people with perl, python, FreeBSD and Gentoo background.

I've spoken about Free Software in Brasil and about Python/GTK+/Glade. I'm still amazed that most people I've met here speak english. This has made it easy for me to live here, because when my portuñol fails I can always talk in english.

I've also taken the time to submit one more proposal for this year's FISL's call for papers. I suggest you submit yours quickly, because they're due on february 28th! =)

After the sad 18th, I'm almost fully restored now. I'm doing the arrangements for going away from Brasília. My friends at the Ministry are working on a petition for me to stay... my boss has signed it, which makes me happy, as I have some documentation I was not fired, but decided to quit, at least =D.

We made loads of cool things this month there... we finally cleaned up the mess on the servers, I and coredump (a guy who also came from Belo Horizonte) have started from scratch on the Debian GNU/Linux servers and even though it's not yet perfect, at least it's much better than it was before, with a samba file server losing uid <-> username mapping every boot and a mail server having 150 load average peaks. Besides, we finally put the main site running on mambo, which was done by some friends, and now netcraft reports www.cidades.gov.br running 'Apache on Linux' instead of 'IIS on Linux' (uh? =D)

As cool as it was working on the servers, this still is the smallest part of my work... most of the time I have to bother with bureaucracy and on fixing bad administration problems, and this whole thing is still leaving me little time for hacking...

There are some more good news: fatalerror has accepted to take over 'Guia Pratico para o Debian GNU/Linux', a simple, practical guide to help people who already are into the GNU/Linux world coming to Debian, and is probably going to rewrite it in english now. Now I need someone to adopt apt-howto. He's also been helping me a bit with some gksu bugs and documentation, and we're probably going to be making a new release today or tomorrow which will make a number of people happy, I think.

The day I should not have waken up.

Not only personal problems happened this night, which I may or may not go into later on, but I dreamt of waking up and deciding to not go to work. I was dreaming - I end up waking up at the expected time and decided the dream was no problem.

I will finally send my disclaimer letter to the FSF to become involved in the Translation Project, thus I decided I would go straight to the post office. I had to go to a bank first, though, to get some money, as my wallet is completly empty.

When I reached the bank, where's my bank card? I forgot it in some shirt's pocket. I could not send the letter and had to walk to work, which is not that close to the Ministry of Justice, where I intended to do my stuff. I'll have to borrow money for lunch and going home. I'm expecting the worst for today - tomorrow is another day, of course. What scares me is tomorrow is still 13h 22' from now.

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.

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

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!

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.