Older blog entries for cascardo (starting at number 5)

Have not post for a long time. Ignoring my personal problemas, some regarding college, I have been in some local free software events, like Encontro Mineiro de Software Livre em early April and Encontro Nacional Linuxchix in late April, both in Belo Horizonte, Brasil. Last week I went to Porto Alegre to be in FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre). Well, all those three events gave me the chance to meet new people, make new friendships and discuss about some projects.
One of those is jabber-br, a non-software project. It's a group of people (users and developers) that will promote jabber and xmpp in Brasil. I am building a client right now and intend to do something in Google Summer Code (although I don't like Google a lot).
I have been learning a little more on GTK+, have used a little of libgnutls, and like GNET a lot. Studying a little of GObject and GLib in general, I hope to build a very modular and extensible application, although, some times, I think that contributing to Gaim would be a good idea.
However, I've been working in some projects that will need my own code. Perhaps, I will build a library containing what I may reuse when writing something for Gaim (perhaps, any other client).
I thinks that's all for now.

Just came back from CONISLI (www.conisli.org.br), an International Software Libre event. I met jahnke there and other people I've already met and made some new friends. Watch the talk made by Georg Greeve from FSF Europe. We had the opportunity to make some discussion about Debian-BR-CDD update. People want a more end-user-friendly interface to install new software. I was in favour of a Debian way of doing it, instead of making a new and centralized application. My proposal was of extending control files with a new field and new sections, besides an icon identifying the package in every one of them, with one default icon identifying some section, when it is not provided (for libs and devels software, mainly). That way, every maintainer would do its job, instead of having a CDD team doing it for every package. Let's see where it goes.

Last Friday I decided to get otcl and tclcl packaged for Debian and met a big problem. Some license terms are missing and others do not allow for another use than research. This is what open source gives to us. That's why we should forget about it and talk only about software livre. My good friend kov is in town and we've met and talked about some recent events regarding software livre in Brasil. Today I must study for an exam tomorrow involving Formal Semantics.

Have just written an ALSA plugin for the MPFC, a song player for use in the console, based on plugins. Although I have signed the alsa-devel mailing list for a while, I've had no experience in writing such an application, and have just started reading a couple of simple tutorials, the doxygen documentation and both alsa-lib and alsa-utils sources. I couldn't figure out why periods should be set to 2, but it was needed to get a good result, and the plugin works finely. The master volume is used for volume control, and I couldn't make certain the first mixer element is the master volume either.

Yesterday, a professor asked me to help on a project that uses multi-head with X and more than one graphics card on a PC, which they call multidesk. That was my first contact with XFree86 code (besides when I built my LFS). That Int10/VM86 thing is going to need a lot of study in VM86 and VGA architecture from me. Updating to XF86 4.4 was of help, since the computer stopped crashing. I've taken the chance to take a look at the new license that is making lots of people talk about it. It was not that great a deal I thought it was. They are still non-copyleft and now, non-"GPL compatible". To me, being non-copyleft is worse than being non-"GPL compatible". So, still the same old song. Still non-copyleft libre software. Let's give them a chance. So, now, I may decide about working on this project, in this company that does not produce libre software, but works with it. I have a chance of making them change their minds about one point or another, and that would be a start. Let's just wait some couple of days.

Last month, I've found out it was possible to change the number of pages available for the printer users where I study. I've told about it to the administrator, which already knew about it, and since there were many other things to worry about, they simply ignored it. They were promising to migrate to CUPS and Pykota since november. (They've told me this then, because I couldn't print using Linux systems, only Solaris, which I did not accept.) Last Wednesday, I've decided to write a hack that would allow people to transfer pages, without this security problem. The administrators suspended my account, and claimed it was not a right, but a privilege. Now, my hack is quite ready (except for some authentication decisions), but it's kinda useless, unless for my learning. I'm going to claim my rights in some higher degree, instead of discussing with the administrators using e-mail (with copies to every class list).

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!