Older blog entries for faw (starting at number 48)

Changing jobs and moving to a new country... it's just the beginning.

On September 30th, 2012 I'm moving to Menlo Park, CA, USA because back in December 2011 I accepted a job offer as a sysadmin (the name is fancier: Operations Engineer) in Silicon Valley. Since then I'm working on the required documentation, so far everything had worked out. I'm starting at the new work on October 8th, and as I'm arriving on October 1st, I'll have a week to take a look around and get to know a tiny bit of San Francisco Bay Area.


In different levels and aspects it is a big opportunity for me, and I'm confident it'll be an unique experience, not only professional, which of course involves working in a bigger company with more complex scenarios and bigger challenges, and on the personal side, I'll live abroad, be an expat.


As you may imagine, I'm working on this process for more or less 10 months, but in the last 30 days it got more intense. Quitting my jobs, organizing my stuff, cleaning part of backlog (and finding out a have a huge to-do list awaiting for me). Spending quality time with family and friends, and also saying goodbye to them. Finishing some aspects of the move (travel tickets, temporary living).


It's new, it's different! I'm super excited and I do want to change a few things to make it easier for family and friends to keep up, make it easier to follow the news, which might help with the distance.

Time flies... and very fast.

There are so many things I'd like to share and tell you about but that would make a long and boring post, so I'll divide it in future entries, so I can keep this diary alive, keep people informed and tell a little bit about my story. Eventually, I may split this diary into a technical and a non-technical blog, but for now, I will stick around mixing topics. :-) Last time I wrote was back in 2009 at DebConf9 in Spain and a lot of things happened that year. Not only for Debian, but also for me.


My last year studying Computer Science was 2009 and that same year I was working full time, I helped organizing a large event for Computer Students (ENECOMP 2009), we had some troubles and side effects with Influenza A (H1N1) in my city (Curitiba, PR) and towards the end of the year I got really sick (not from Influenza) and it took a while to know what was going, during this process I did hurt some people I really love and I'm truly sorry. The past, 2010 went on as busy and unstable as 2009, my laptop's hard disk broke twice (January and October) and I survived thanks to backup and recovery procedures. I took some wrong decisions but fixed it later and learned a lot from my mistakes, decisions and choices.


Then 2011 came, my laptop's hard disk broke again and I lost almost 6 months of emails, I find out that after the second crash in 2010 part of my backup got b0rk3d. Fine, I didn't die, everything seems to be fine, but I'm still catching up with a lot of work and backlog. At different times one of my parents also got really sick and I learned quite a bit on how to deal with it.


Due to the laptop and the different things going on in my life I didn't work for Debian as much as I want and I still feel guilty. :-( But that's fine, this is a kind of public apologize for my peers in Debian (i18n, mirrors, release), I still want to help all of you, but I still have quite a bit of backlog to clean and quite a few things to learn in the process. And in general, I'm really sorry if I didn't (or I couldn't) work for Debian as much as I want.


Although I'm taking the chance to apologize in this post, I still want to make clear that I'm quite happy. This last year was pretty good, I had the opportunity to attend DebConf again and also got to know Sarajevo and Zagreb. New lessons were learned, better work cycles, nicer solutions. Today I'm completing 29 years old. 29. This is quite some time, not a long ride, but for one reason or another, I have high hopes for 2012 and what awaits me. And I do plan to learn more, to help more and whenever possible, to contribute back.

It seems to be a "hot topic" week for Debian, yesterday the announcement of Time Based Freeze Cycles and today the proposal to redesign some parts of Debian. No matter how orthogonal those topics are, communication seems to be needing real improvements inside Debian Project, but I will leave this item for later (and I mean communications amongst teams and developers, nothing related to the Press Team).

First of all, let me state this perfectly clear: I believe Agnieszka (pixelgirl) did an incredible job with her redesign proposal. As a concept. (Or proof of concept). That's why I share some of Rhonda's concerns.

I don't think anybody disagrees that several parts of the Debian project urges improvements in the design field, some of them requires a total redesign, that doesn't mean we need a new logo. It is curious to see how some things happen in a strange related fashion, no matter if you believe in $DEITY (superior power or destiny), life has its ways. Early this week, the new logo of Pepsi was announced and some comparison images were created to show the evolution of Pepsi and Coca-Cola logos. It's possible to find quite a few articles commenting about the new logo, about brand, market share and strangely related to a "new logo proposal".

Yes, I like Debian's logo, it has a strong recognition, I don't think we need to change it and I don't have reasons to believe we need a new one.

The Swirl can be applied vertically and horizontally, it can also be applied alone without the "debian" text and for those wondered about the details of our logo and font, a quick (re)search would review the DebianLogo wiki page, with a lot of details.

That being said, the art work concept is indeed an important first step, but it is certainly not the only one. As I said, life has its ways, yesterday, Rhonda mentioned the amazing work of Kalle Söderman, who has looking for the Debian's Global Picture since 2007 and who did move to the step after the mockups having real instances implemented maintaining part of Debian WWW Team informed and working on feedback and smooth integration.

No matter what people said (or will say), CSS can't do all the magic.

Kalle deserves a big Thank You for his work and, IMNSHO, should be the first option to be considered in a merge (that's why you shouldn't resign Rhonda, you got quite some work to do to get it integrated).

The point, is that Kalle is not alone. There are a lot of people behind Debian Art and it would be great to see a joint effort from all artists interested in helping Debian to have a better unified look-and-feel on the Debian Project, not only on our web interfaces, but also on our products: CDs/DVDs (and its covers), desktops, wallpapers, boot loaders, splash screens, documentations, business cards, banners, t-shirts (and a bunch of other materials). It is not just a matter of writing something completely new without keep in touch with an already existent community, it is also the need to communicate and push such goals project-wide, so we can have massive adoption.

I was surprised by the fact that a lot of people mixed quite a few orthogonal points. Specially the fact that the website also needs some work in the Information Architecture field in order to improve the users' experience, but that's one point of a project-wide concern (that Kalle took into account).

Finally, some may not remember that we vote (General Resolution) to choose our logo, back in 1999 (10 years ago).

Yes, we need to do better on communicating and we need do to better with our design (and probably Marketing), but please do not start such work by changing our logo.

Erich, it seems that you got TONS of recommendations for different blog software, so you probably already received a recommendation for Chronicle: The Blog Compiler, it is written by Steve Kemp inspired by Joey's ikiwiki. I've been also wondering about using ikiwiki and/or chronicle. :-)

This is in my draft for a long time now...

Nico, I never understood what was so private about your debian.net page (Thanks WayBackMachine!).

Yes, I was away... long and sad story involving health issues. :-( I'm trying to get back, hopefully everything will be fine. Let me publicly apologize to some people that was expecting some work from me and I postponed it, not because of slackness but because I was unable to do it. I'm catching up with a lot of tasks and trying to solve long standing issues, feel free to ping me to get some update on a specific matter. I am really sorry!

Do you know about the poll to choose a slogan for the release of Debian 5.0, also known as "lenny"?

No!? Shame on you! :-)

People behind Debian Art started a discussion to get opinions! After some input they prepared a poll, maybe they should try to use a doodle. Right now, The Universal Operating System is quite popular, but a lot of people did some nice suggestions, and some of them would like to see a slogan some way related to the Toy Story (tm) character Lenny:



The discussion is distributed across three lists: Debian Desktop, Debian Publicity and Debian Curiosa, I would also point to the comments made by Gustavo Noronha da Silva (here) and Andre Felipe Machado (here).

If you didn't say anything so far, please do!

Damn it, I should had wrote about it a couple of days ago. Anyway, it happened last Friday (20080222), my last day at work. After 4.5 years (exactly 4 years, 6 months and a week), I quit my job to dedicate more time for my "supposed" last year studying Computer Science at the University.

During the translation of packages' descriptions, when I found something that looks like a typo or a wrong reference I try to report wishlist bugs and, when possible, provide patches, I know this is somewhat noisy, it is just to register the fact, so Smith Review can also spotted it, sorry for the noise. :-)

BTW, I would still vote for a genius if we are going to elect a mascot.

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.

First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:

• MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)

• Pootle experimental server

• dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign

• Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf

• Generation of Compendium PO files per-language

• Different types of statistics

• Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.

• DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project

• DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.

And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:

• DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
• ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
• DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.

We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.

Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:

• Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).

• After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant

• Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
  • Added READMEs for the above directories

DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.

A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations

In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the {main,contrib,non-free}/i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).

One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.

Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.

Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.

Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/

We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:

• More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
  There are two use cases are identified:
  
  • Filling new PO files.
  • QA work to find inconsistent translations.
  Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)

• Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral)

• Debian packages of the services running on churro
  • DDTP (Grisu)
  • DDTSS (Martijn)
  • dl10n (Nekral)

• DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn)

• DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw)

• DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw)

• DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority)

• Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw)

• Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral)

• http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
  http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
  are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)
  • We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
  • Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)

• Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)

There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)

Using qmail-ldap for quite some time (first because of my employer and then because I was used to it), the DJB license was a major pain, qmail-ldap patch is under BSD, but the original qmail was non-free. Yes, was. Yesterday DJB released qmail under Public Domain, and based on a GoogleVideo, he is going to change the license for all his existent software and for all his future works.

For some strange reason the URL direct to the video doesn't work, but if you do a search you are able to use the Watch video here option.

Yes, I know. I'm not going to say sorry, I should post more, this last three months were not exactly the best ones, and I thought about writing something about what I was doing for Debian and other projects here but ended up being consumed by University, Work, Real Life and "Other Stuff (tm)".

One of the important things on the way is the Debian i18n Extremadura Meeting to be held on December, when we expect to work on i18n.debian.net, change from CVS to SVN, improve DDTP and ddtss and work with Pootle related stuff and infrastructure.

In the meantime, we are also changing our Primary Push Server for volatile.debian.org from durin to verdi (don't worry, a proper announcement will be made on an announcement list close to you). :-)

Thanks for everybody that had the patient to wait for my replies and/or my actions, and the ones that calmly understood my undergoing situation, giving me support and offering help. Thank you very much!

Thinking about writing something for a while, about my Debian work or about my daily stuff, sometimes you lack the time or the motivation to do so, I should kept this more up-to-date so people can follow a little bit what's going on with me... specially considering that I try to keep this diary neutral about non-technical subjects, but hey! it is somewhat hard to be neutral in every single situation.

Anyway, I found that I should help to spread the word from a Brazilian colleague, Sulamita, she posted about democracy (or the lack of it) today. Two videos, about the Amazon Forest area and some of the crazy things we find in Brazil. You can watch the Brazilian Portuguese version or the English one.

A lot of people are not aware of some of the political problems that Brazil faces in the last 10 years, it is not like it doesn't exist before, but it is getting worst and worst and, for a while, I've been wondering...

A lot of friends want to leave Brazil as soon as they can, I love Brazil but I can understand their motivation.


• Where do you find the desire to stay when you look around and you can't find fairness and equality? And if you look to the houses or places that should protect people, you realize that there is no protection?
• How do you keep the passion for a country with huge levels of corruption in public government, in police forces, in your law makers? And day after day, corruption schemas, robbery and law abuse are noticed on the television?
• What to do when you realize that the perception of the disloyal advantage is shared among your colleagues and that the feeling of failure dominates a great part of the population that could actually do something to change?
• Can anybody, or group of individuals, feeling alone, work to change that? How? Specially when you look around and although you know there are people willing to help they need to take care of their lives (money, food, family)?

Or should I ask: Where's the love? (Black Eyed Peas Lyrics).

And before somebody thinks that the entire Brazil is lost, that we are under a Civil War and that monkeys and other animals are walking on our Jungle streets in the middle of the cities, no it is not... yes, we need help; yes people need to join forces; yes, we need to find ourselves and fix it; but it is still a great country to live, and yes, I love it!

Recently I saw somewhere a link to Google Video about a very nice video: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). So please, if you didn't see this go and watch it now: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645. It is a little bit large (~50 min) but I found some nice information from real experiences that could really help to improve our communication inside Debian.

So, for the curious and impatient, it is a Google TechTalk with Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick, SubVersion Developers, based on their experiences they show situations that can drain Project resources and they gave valuable tips, ideas and directions on how to protect the "Attention and Focus" of the Project. It is very interesting to find a lot of factors and points that we can see from time to time on Debian. Don't get me wrong, I'm really not whining, I don't think that whining would solve any problem (except if you are a 6-month hungry child), but I would love if it could give us some momentum and maybe a starting point to leave aside some old unresolved issues, giving a chance to new ideas! Which basically means, keep working together to keep building the best Operating System. :-) (But doing that with even more fun for even more people). We can too!

On a totally unrelated note: my primary MX is back for quite some time, I should report that earlier, anyway, sorry about the lack of posts, thanks for your attention and see you soon. Over.