Older blog entries for kov (starting at number 42)

I definetely agree with Andrew Pollock's post: screen rocks my world!

I and my coworker coredump always have screen sessions running on the servers we administer together, and are always looking at logs and fixing problems together. This was also how we hacked the scripts that we used to convert all our users' mbox-based mailboxes to maildir some months ago when we fixed the mail server of the Ministry

I'm simply unable to imagine myself living in a world without screen.

About the vote... my ballot:

[ 6 ] Choice 1: Jonathan Walther 
[ 3 ] Choice 2: Matthew Garrett 
[ 2 ] Choice 3: Branden Robinson 
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Anthony Towns 
[ 4 ] Choice 5: Angus Lees 
[ 2 ] Choice 6: Andreas Schuldei
[ 5 ] Choice 7: None Of The Above

I was quite surprised by Anthony Towns running for the job this year. Although I voted for Branden twice now I decided Anthony Towns seems to be the one with the most concrete proposals on how to get Debian back to being a sane environment which is fun to work on. I still trust Branden would do lots of good on this matter, too, if elected. I decided to give the same trust to Andreas, too... while I think he'd not be as tough in some respects as Branden would I think he'd get results by using other strategies.

I don't know Angus a lot but he seemed to be sane enough to be ranked 4. Jonathan on the other hand has demonstrated that he does not deserve to be trusted and that he is able to completely change his "image" and opinions depending on convenience. I don't want someone like him as a DPL, ever.

Like Robert and Jose I had problems with the fontconfig upgrade, although I don't usually have them. I felt like living one year ago or so again when I saw this. Then I went back to fontconfig 2.2.3 to get this back. Someone said something like "why did it disable the autohinter?" on #gnome-debian when I showed the screenshots. My Bitstream Vera fonts are being rendered like crap, it seems. I know little about all this but will try to dig a bit into Robert's observations tomorrow morning.

16 Mar 2005 (updated 16 Mar 2005 at 23:25 UTC) »

In my last post I talked a bit about how I was enjoying to feel that Debian was understanding that "when we have problems we fix them with Really Good Work, not with long flamewars which end up seeming to just want to protect some kind of holy status quo".

Well, I think Anthony Towns expresses this idea in a practical and very easy to understand way.

Just finished reading the notes from the release team meeting a while ago. Controversial, for sure.

What I think about this is this is a great step on making Debian live again. I've been a developer since 2001 and I felt the same as Adrian Bunk many times... we like to see our work being rewarded, and one of the ways to feel rewarded is seeing your work being used on the Real World. This bad feeling surely made my motivation go down a lot.

OK, so we're droping support for some arches... in this regard what I think is we have very high expectations on the results but really lack comparably high expectations on the day-to-day work. Some time ago the GNOME packages were really badly shaped. They were, IMO because of exactly this reason, only marginally integrated into the system as a whole.

Then came the GNOME Team and proved that GNOME could become a very well packaged and maintained desktop inside Debian. The GNOME Team was good enough to raise Release Team's trustness in that it would respond fast and well enough to breakage and transitions, so GNOME 2.6 was allowed into testing, then 2.8...

The same then happened for KDE and to the Release Team itself through the time. Those teams make information flow high, so motivation and rewards are high as well. What I see is Debian understanding that when we have problems we fix them with Really Good Work, not with long flamewars which end up seeming to just want to protect some kind of holy status quo.

If you want your arch/package/anything considered for release, then get it ready and high-quality enough that it will be accepted in time. Show us the code. Great work! I feel my motivation regaining strength! Go, Debian, go!

The days after CONSOL were a mix of sadness for having left such a great conference behind and joyness for meeting up with my friends again. I went to Belo Horizonte, my city, in the weekend and had lots of fun with friends and cousins with whom I haven't met for a long time.

I also spent some time updating apt-howto to finally build PDF files for Korean and Japanese thanks to Jens Seidel. I also must note that Osamu is doing loads of nice work on the debian-doc team, and has been the main person to blame for any APT-HOWTO infra-structure improvements for some months now.

I've been playing with mod_python these last days, too, before the trip to BH. We discussed, long time ago, this idea of having a localized BTS for the Debian Brasil project to be able to "proxy" bug reports in pt_BR to the official Debian BTS. I've been thinking, together with fatalerror, to actually implement the idea, and maybe do this using mod_python. I've done some initial playing with code, but still need to really understand some more about web session management and plan the way the tool will work.

This is surely going to be a nice toy, after all the apt-br-v2, which I started writing long time ago. apt-br is Debian Brasil's channel infobot but it had many glitches and pt_BR was not that natural to him. So I started playing with python-irclib and created a simple python bot to replace it. fatalerror has continued the work recently and now we have 'debconf' as our infobot, completely python, pt_BR and UTF-8 aware =).

Life is good.

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.

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