Older blog entries for morcego (starting at number 33)

This was a sleepless weekend.
Oh buy, CodeRed II is hitting hard. Not that I use Windows, but it's eating up my bandwidth. And you know what is even worst ? My cable provider charges me if I use it too much (I have a 4GB/month quota).
Of course, I have send a <sarcams>nice little</sarcasm> letter to my cable provider, but don't know if it will help.
Anyway, CodeRed II is a pain, no matter if you use Windows (in which case, you already have lots of other problems) or not. I'm getting 10+ hits an hour only from my cable modem provider backbone (80/tcp is blocked from the outside). I can only imagine what other people without these filters are getting hit by. And no, I'm not defending this kind of filters. They suck...
Current statistics for the last 40 hours: 195 hits from 39 unique IPs (with the hit rate rising pretty fast)

Actualy, I'm getting pretty sick of my cable provider (which is Virtua, if any of you want to know). They pretty much stinks. Filters all around, transfer quotas, high prices, slow. Not considering, of course, that they take at least a full week to answer any e-mail you send them, and that their support phone line only works from 6am to midnight.
The problem is that I don't have any other choice. ADSL here is if anything worst (you have to access one specifig homepage before being allowed to use it), and even more pricy. I'm simply are lost here. It's a plain abuse to charge something like US$35/month for a 128K connection, where you can get (with luck) transfer rates like 10Kbps (the average is little better then 5Kbps).
Well, thats enough ranting for today.

Well, things are getting a little better here.
First, my IPv6 connection is up and running. Now, I only need to find out how laforge managed to make apache 1.3.19 bind to IPv6 addresses, and I'll be a happy person. The best part of it is that I managed to get my cable provider to remove some filters they had had in place that prevented the IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel to work (ip-proto-41). And it only took me 3 weeks to make they understand what I was talking about lol ...

Also, things at work are improving. I'm managing to get some companies and schools to partner with Conectiva for Linux software development. All we need now is to get the partnership contract (or whatever other form it takes) done, so we can start working. I'm accepting sugestions about softwares to assign development to them.
Oh, almost forgot ... My new credit card just arrived, so I managed to order some books. Amazing enough, Amazon still have the best prices on the books I usualy buy.
I just received a letter from my ISP (in Brazil, you have to subscribe to an ISP plus the Cable provider... ouch) telling I can get a copy of WinXP for only R$ 29,90 a month (about US$12.50). Lol ... Really funny. I'm just entertaining an idea about writing to tell them that they can get a copy of Linux for only R$ 0.00 a month, but I'm afraid they will not know that I'm taking about. It's amazing how stupid people can be sometimes.

Ouch. Things have been so chaotic lately that I simply had no time to post anything here.
Well well, lost of things have happened, both on personal and professional basis
First, my fiance finaly got a job at Conectiva. She is taking care of our training centers on Minas Gerais, but hopefully someday in the near future she will be up to advogato :-)
Lemme see, I have been working on a set of filters so procmail can filter the SirCam worm. If anyone wants it:

begin 664 sircam.filter.gz
M'XL("#8G8#L``W-I<F-A;2YF:6QT97(`M9!+3\)`%(77G5]Q4[H`DFG5)<08
MQ"(F((D8XX*8#--+G=AY9#H82-O_[A0T*BLW+F9Q'W/.^6Z'=&`B"H=6J!PV
MVL)26,XDO`N[+?WP"6TIM(*+^!Q\N=Z#U)9CKMN/?GU;LAS!+T35=#%/FR0V
M5G/)1&$YZ9#!&4RO21]>QEHY5(X^[@T.@!E3",Z<5TZDV&$V!,4D7L;]5=R^
M+M>R+M1;;<2FQAW6:^9ZX55$RD,Z+TQ2,,PRT)"@X\FWZ8#XZ=^A?C$!4QFD
M12XT+/EK@1+M*>:)VS\@5B3PDIP$-71]]M8'J`4JPHG5T@LK)PX@0%NN\1<7
M9.B0.\Q"H*/PF<ZT-C^VP^&*!#[/D>#0HL=KQK+,>W6T3.]OYJ.[&5`M@#K2
8QB!!5"T>;MMV$W_>OO','_H!_*\W`@``
`
end

Anyway, lets get back to work. Will post again when I manage to find the time.

Well, I'm back coding. Well, almost. I'm taking a good look at my projects source code, to chcek that I have not forgotten anything important :-) They have been on hold for so long, that I'm not sure they are as ok as I suppose.
Thursday I'll be taking a trip to Campinas to install a Firewall. Cross your fingers for me, once I'll be installing it using Conectiva Linux 7.0 BETA ! Yes, I know I should not be using it, but it's a developing network, and no other version of CL works very well with kernel 2.4 (and they need stateful package analysis). Will report here how it worked.
On the buggy side of the world, I just found out that xinetd, then compiled with IPv6 support, crashed on linux unless I have the ipv6 module loaded. This is just plain wrong. I guess I'll have to make a patch for it, if they don't work fast :-)

Well, one more unslept night, one more sleepy day ... I should be sleeping a little more. 4 hours a night is really not enough.
Anyway, today promisses to be a samewhat boring day ... unf ...
This afternoon, I have to whatover some peolpe taking certification tests this afternoon. Quite boring. Have to stay sitted on a chair for an hour and a half, without doing anything, while some grownups keep trying to figure out why they haven't studided a little more.

I finaly managed to upgrade my coworkers machine to CL 7.0 (with kernel 2.4) while she is tarveling :-) Hope she likes the surprise. I know that after I started using kernel 2.4, going back to 2.2 is a nightmare (what can I say, iptables is so much better then ipchains ...).

Lunch time ... I'm really hungry, and my wife is waiting for me with the food on the table.

... some time later...
Well, things have gone pretty well. Not only the guy passed the certification test (he finished it in about 40 minutes, thanks god), but he also told me his company wants to ship Conectiva Linux with their product. It's was not a bad day.

So much, so much have changed ...

First, I'm not living in Curitiba anymore. Now, I work at Belo Horizonte. And no, I have not left Conectiva.
The catch is that now I'm no longer a full time developer. Now I have to share my time between development, consultant and linux advocacy. The good news is that now I get paid also for being a Linux Advocate !
What more can I say ... humm, let me see ... it has been so long ...

Oh, yes. I have reviewed the certifications I granted here at advogato. The reason, I have certificated sone persons I don't know enough. I don't remember having changed any certifications. I only removed a few.

Humm, just noticed one of my last posts mentioned I was trying to get a Palm Handheld. Well, I got one (Palm M100). Not a ferrari, but I does what I paid it for. So I have no regrets.

I have not had much time to code these days. Well, what you want, with me moving towns and all that stuff. I hope to get back coding in the next few weeks. Things are almost settled now.

Almost xmas :-)
I'm still waiting for an aproval so I can spend the next week on my parents home. If I do get it, this diary will not be hearing from me til Jan 2nd.
Nothing more to report, AFAIR.

Well, back on the xmlrpc biz.
Jeff gave me an argument that I could not counter. HTTP is the prefered protocol couse it's one of the few things open in firewalls nowadays. Unfortunatly, it's true. And if we must use http, I don't see why we should not use xmlrpc. At least somewhat flexible.
So, I coded a simple proof-of-concept server for Jeff. He is showing it to some people. Hope they like it. :-)

On a side note, I'm looking around to buy a Palm. My prefered model is the CHEAP one :-) If you have one of those, please, drop me a line :-)

Ouch, too much work here. And the weekend, of course.
I have been talking with Jeff (RPM maintainer) about a few features for RPM, and now I have a full workload of things to do :-) I'm even stuck with a thing called xmlrpc. I have one word for it: blounted.
Why, a "generic" protocol (please mark well the quotes), based on HTTP and XML ?!?!?! That is what I call big overhead. And why that ? Only couse XML and other things like that (CORBA etc) are "Business Oriented" blah blah blah marketing blah blah blah customer care blah blah proactive blah blah ?!?!?! I'm seriously thinking about droping all this stuff. I simply can't agree with a thing like that, using a blounted protocol implementation, only couse it's 'nice' (and a whole lot of other marketing oriented arguments).
I know it's not Jeff's fault. Looks like he just have some Pointy Haired Bosses.

Hey, no diary entry yesterday ? What a shame :-)
So, lemme tell you. I've spent most of the day yesterday hacking around RPM code to fix some bugs. The main bug what in the tarbuild code, but one thing leades to another, and I ended up the day with a full bag of TODO's for RPM :-)
Well, the bug got fixed. The patch for RPM3 is in Jeff's hand. For RPM4.1 I'm going to do a little improvement work too, so I'm holding it back. The point is that RPM3 is almost legacy by know, so bugfix is all it's worth doing for it. But there are a lot of things that can be improved on the tarbuild code of RPM4.1. Once tarbuild is not that much used, the patch can wait while I work on the improvements. Thats pretty much what is in my schedule for the rest of this week.
Well, actualy, that is not true. I'm still messing around with OpenOffice. Gosh, I hate that :-) But sometimes we have to do dirt work too, that this was my turn. If you want my oppinion, don't use it. Use vi. Thats a good text editor.
Will keep this diary updated on the development of my RPM todo list.