Older blog entries for morcego (starting at number 40)

Well, one more project to the list: ijbswa
That is simply a Internet Junkbuster (a banner filter, cookie restrictor, and privacy enhancement software) fork.

Quite a nice software, althoght I recomend using version 2.9.11 (not the stable one), for it supports HTTP/1.1.

Well, I´m in my father´s home. And looks like I arrived just in time.
As you probably don´t know, he is a teacher at a local college (which he hope will soon be upgraded to a university status). Anyway, he told me that they are redesigning all of the college viewable content (website, business cards etc), and asked me if I had something to sugest them. Yeah, right. I just wonder why don´t they ever learn no to ask me about things like that.
He just walked out of the computer room with a hudge list of recomendations (including netiquette [rfc1855] rules, and links to the W3.org validator and the Viewable with any browser campaign). And of course, he promissed me he would do his best to make the college adhere to these standards. I´m crossing my fingers, but considering the level of competence used to design current web site, I´m not holding my breath. (if you are trying to access it, try with a text browser; it´s a once in a lifetime experience :-)).
Anyway, today we managed to get a city mayor´s office to sign with us to change all it´s health computer network to opensource (linux, more exactly). Tomorrow, we have a new city to hit. I think maybe I´ll preach them about the anybrowser campaign ... Then again, maybe thats pushing my luck a little to far. But, maybe not.

Well, things are runnig pretty well around here.
First, our new internet link is up and running. It is a little slower then our previous one, but it does not crash, so we are happy with it. Our old one is still in place for DNS reasons I'm sure you can guess.
I have started studing to get new certifications. RHCE is one that comes to my mind. I read an article stating that most IT personal have 3.something (3<num<4) certifications. Since I only have 2 (well, actualy, I have 4, but only 2 count as good enough for the IT market), I need to get at least 2 others pretty quick. I think I'll try RHCE and BrainBench Network Security (maybe Internet Security too, but I'm not sure yet).

30 Jan 2002 (updated 30 Jan 2002 at 15:11 UTC) »

Well, thinks are a real mess around here. I haven't take a single launch break this week yet. Wow. But at last we are making things happen.
As a by product of all this chaos, I haven't been able to roll out reply-o-matic 1.0 yet. I hope I can do it this weekend.
We are changing our backbone provider too. Things should improve dramaticaly. Take my advice, if you ever have a proposal from ITC, burn it, bury the ashes, and salt the ground.

Well, the last two days have been very good to reply-o-matic. Several new security features, and version 0.99.0 is now out. 1.0 should be out in one week.

On the personal side, I'm getting a CD-Writer (finaly!).
Life is still good :-)

9 Jan 2002 (updated 9 Jan 2002 at 20:02 UTC) »

Well, as of 2002/01/02, I'm no longer working on Conectiva, even tho I still do work for them, once I'm now working on TIS, which is a Conectiva Business Channel.
I started the project Reply-O-Matic, which is going quite well and almost ready for version 1.0
All in all, life is good. I received a good money when leaving Conectiva, and I didn't even have to change my desk, once Conectiva branch office in Belo Horizonte used to be on TIS's office :-)
One a side note, my Cable company decided to do things right (finaly). No more filters and no more two-times-a-day crashes. Lets just hope things continue to improve.

RPM

    Two new problems on the 4.0.2 branch ... Ouch. Had to make 2 backports from 4.0.3. The frist was okey, once it was already integrated on the tree. The second was a little worst, once it will be integrated in the next few days (which scared the hell outta me, but seens to be working ...)

Conectiva

    Boy, we are selling. Conectiva Linux 7.0 is breaking all our records. People is simply loving it. That really gives a warms felling, you know ... Knowing something you helped developing is such a huge success.
    On the service front, I just finished a very insteresting maintance today. Looks like Cyclades PC300 ifup scripts are bogus. Ouch. Still need to confirm with them that the problem is not corrected yet, but that looks like the case. If someone from Cyclades involved on this reads this, please, drop me an e-mail.

Cable

    Ouch. Spent most of this morning having up to 98% packet loss on my cable connection. WTF ?!? Can't this people do things right ? At least my IPv6 tunnel is working, but I don't count that as a great winning.
    Oh, btw, I discovered they are not enforcing that link quota after all. So, I can download/upload as much as I want, without having to worry about having to pay any extra.

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.

26 Jul 2001 (updated 26 Jul 2001 at 14:44 UTC) »

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.

31 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!