Older blog entries for mones (starting at number 63)

Go virtual and die

Yesterday I got a interesting announce in my inbox: try our hosting solution for free during two months. The announce came from the nice people of Gandi, the registrar where I maintain my mones.org domain.

So far, so good. Applied and got my share in minutes. The features are not impressive, just the minimal: 256 MB RAM, 3 GB (system) + 5 GB (data) disk, 5 Mbit bandwidth and a 1/60th part of the processor, which is marketed as something between a Pentium III and Via C7 processor (not very informative).
What took most time was to wait the reverse DNS to be active because of my change of mind in the middle of the process :-). The system installed was Debian Lenny, of course, and took just minutes.

Less than 24 hours later you can see what happens, and I have not access to the server... despite I love the way Gandi does business those are not the things that inspire confidence in a hosting solution :-(.

Syndicated 2009-07-02 10:38:13 from Ricardo Mones

As times goes by

It's amazing to check and see how much has passed since last post. Not that I had nothing to tell, but maybe not in the mood to do it. Anyway there's not much excitement in my life lately, but looking back seems it isn't going too bad.

The project we were working at is already at production stage, and with only two or three phone calls to solve minor issues so far, which is not common, as I've heard. This is something I, as a the project leader, am proud of, and not being wrong with all the work-hours invested in testing and bugfixing ;-). The client seems to be happy with the results, and a second phase is planned, so more work waiting for our group. This contrasts with the landscape in other parts of the company, and the rumors floating around fed by the bad economic situation. Currently we already started other project for the our regional government, so we can't get bored at work until the end of year or so... Anyway, if luck smiles to me, I'll be doing more interesting things by the next year: yesterday submitted a grant application for review. Grants is a R+D program to provide funds for innovative ideas within the company. My idea is not so new, but it will be fun to investigate how to replace our Windows based SOE (i.e.: the image deployed in our laptops and desktops) by a Linux based one.

Time for lunch now...

Syndicated 2009-05-16 12:35:48 from Ricardo Mones

Facts and things that happen

Since last post...


  • A new year has began! (according some calendar systems, at least)

  • Obama is ruling the world! (yes, they could)

  • Debian Lenny is out! (congratulate ourselves!)

  • CVS packages built by hydra are uploaded nightly to claws-mail.org

  • Recent claws-mail packages are again uploaded to unstable (thanks to libetpan maintainer who uploaded it to sid)

  • Still working 10 hours a day...

  • But given current economic situation we have to congratulate for it... :-(

Syndicated 2009-02-28 09:26:01 from Ricardo Mones

back to vacation!

Getting older left me a nice flu as a birthday present. So nice that I had to take my first couple of sick leave days. The fever, which reached 39.1 Celsius degrees at some moment, didn't let me do other things than stay in bed and sleep (when possible). At the beginning of the week I was somewhat recovered, but today my throat still hurts slightly (probably because I've stopped taking analgesics as soon as fever disappeared).

Anyway I feel better now, and despite having missed the Claws Mail 3.7.0 released completely (no Spanish translation updates again) I can at least bring the Debian packages as a Christmas present ;-)

They're at experimental (claws-mail and extra-plugins), as previous ones, because required libetpan is still there.

This time it happened Sylpheed has released also a new version, namely 2.6.0, also in experimental now. On the other side the sylpheed-gtk1 package has been removed from Debian. I doubt someone uses it currently. Anyway, after the massive bug cleanup will let see if someone cares :-)

I have also a pending release of Clawsker, to support the new hidden preference in 3.7.0, but tomorrow we're going to visit Madrid for the weekend, so I guess it can wait until next week or even the new year! Going by car, I hope the snow and ice don't take part in the travel... wish me luck! :-)

Syndicated 2008-12-25 21:55:30 from Ricardo Mones

14

Hint for subject:

final class Age {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    System.out.println (java.lang.Integer.parseInt ("14", 32));
  }
}

It was last Friday, in fact, but I'm so absorbed by work lately that had no time for anything else.

Today I've been (somehow) gifted with the last album from Henry Snowstorm. In one word: captivating. In three words: craving for more. It made my afternoon despite having to waste it filling a powerpoint with useless project data for a Delivery Assurance meeting tomorrow. That doesn't mean I'm against DA, nope. But starting to do it when the project is nearly finished instead doing QA (fixing bugs) is a waste of time IMHO.

As a curiosity this post is being written from Safari under Mac OS 10.5 AKA Leopard. After being able to get a copy for free (free for me, not for its owner) I resized partitions in MacBook and reinstalled everything again (30 Gb isn't enough for Leopard upgrade from Tiger, but a Leopard installation from scratch takes much less space, which I discovered too late, after having doubled it). Now will see if I can use/build Claws Mail natively on it. For now I can see its display under the included X11 server, which seems to be a new feature in Leopard. Another one is "Spaces"... yep they have discovered multiple desktops now... amazing, isn't it ;-)

Syndicated 2008-12-15 23:50:57 from Ricardo Mones

Lenny will rock you!

It took two months, but finally the hard disk replacement for the MacBook has come. Of course I'll think twice before ordering anything else from Alternate (ES), not to mention the fact they served the SD cards without micro adapter (which means they're useless to me)...

Anyway that was not the point. The point was, as you may have guessed, I tried the latest Debian installer for Lenny, which is beta 2 at this moment:

First, the niceness of jigdo downloading the first amd64 DVD image flawlessly and without a single retry.

Second, wodim burning it without error in a disc I had forgotten for two weeks inside the drive.

Third, being able to swap broken disk and the new one despite Apple's instructions to change it forgot to mention you need a very small torx screwdriver to detach the drive from the pulling tab it has (it's located deeply inside and the tab is necessary for removing it).

Fourth, partitioning and installing MacOS X... well, last time I tried dual-boot it didn't work at all, so I had to try again, and with a 320 GB disk using less than 10% for a proprietary OS doesn't look like a great loss ;-). Partitioning is a bit tricky, as detailed in the wiki, but the Disk Utility method worked fine for me. Scheme was 30-2-288 (more or less), you'll discover later why. Worth to mention that the MacOS X showed a lot of upgrades after setting up the wireless, including an EFI firmware upgrade (new boot ROM version is MB21.00A5.B07). I installed all of these before continuing.

Fifth, installing rEFIt, though this one has no trick...

Sixth, rebooting and installing Lenny beta 2 from the DVD. To run an encrypted system two partitions are required, one for /boot (unencrypted, bootable) and other for the encrypted filesystem, hence the two partitions defined. I forgot to add a swap partition, but a swap file can be added later. The uswsusp package will warn about lacking swap, but seems it does complain even if you have a swap partition. You have to avoid installing bootloader at this point, because MBR layout is not the same that GPT (which Disk Utility wrote), hence bootloader installer would be misled.

Seventh, rebooting and entering rEFIt's disk utility, which immediately offers to resync MBR to match GPT layout. Wonderful.

Eighth, restarting Debian installation again, having to reinstall, because the filesystem inside the big encrypted partition is not recognized and had to be reformatted. Not a great problem though. Finally installing grub in the /boot partition, and finish installation.

Et voilà!

Upon restart, rEFIt menu shows both MacStuff and the penguin, and both work fine... in fact I'm writing this from the new Safari in MacOS X, because the wireless card in Debian is still to be configured, but that's another story...

Note: if you're going to try this, first of all read the wiki like I did, it has been improved a lot.

Syndicated 2008-11-12 23:53:50 from Ricardo Mones

Bits, bytes and nibbles

If you think Debian has one of the most time consuming and complicated process to join in, now look at this nice mess our beloved ftp master produced and one of the effects that caused. Despite of helping Joerg with one of his packages I'm not the one to told anybody what to do with their time, but fixing any of the RC bugs which are preventing Lenny to be released would have been more useful for Debian than writing such proposal. Introducing more classes of people in an already clustered project will only end on more problems and, IMHO, doesn't help to address the problems it's supposed to solve.

Syndicated 2008-11-06 18:51:43 from Ricardo Mones

And another one gone...

Yep, another vacation period gone. Lately I'm posting from vacation on vacation, so it may seem I'm on permanent vacation, but, of course, that's not true. It's just I'm more lazy than often, maybe influenced by reading of Why I Fucking Hate Weblogs! this past week. Or maybe not, as I'm posting again ;-)

As these post tend also to be a recapitulation of my, well, activities (or part of them), this will be no exception. In no particular order...

The claws-mail and extra-plugins packages are now in experimental (they require a libetpan which is only in experimental, so no other choice was possible here). Because a strange bug which made CVS Claws Mail crash on exit in my box, I found some motivation to start from scratch again my build script and make it something different: package CVS for Debian. Primary target was to prove that the bug was not in Claws but somewhere else in the build chain, which resulted a right intuition. Secondary was to have an automatic CVS packager, so I could still use CVS and Debian packages and the added benefit of keeping packaging always synced with upstream requirements (otherwise build breaks).The result can't be other than another wild beast. As you may figure out, these experiments are only possible thanks to the strong commitment of the Claws Mail Team in keeping CVS break-free.

Went to watch "El hombre almohada" (ES), which we liked a lot. Curiously we met and old friend and his girlfriend at the theatre, and shared the usual desires to date for some drink, but I still didn't feel motivated to call him. While is no excuse, he didn't do either, anyway I'm happy to know things go fine for them.

Movies have also taken some time, right now I can remember "Burn After Reading" which we laughed nicely (Silvia more than me though) and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" which didn't left me the same sweet mouth-taste than the first part.

I've seriously decided to take over my long procrastinated final project at university and finally get my grade. The idea was born several months ago, but got a sudden stop when I went to Madrid early this year. Now I'm back with it. There was some work done previously, and this week of vacation was preparing all the development environment which a Java based webapp requires... which is more of the same I have at work (well, except I'm on Linux here, not XP :-P), but I preferred not to innovate in order of getting things done right.

At least tomorrow is still vacation...

Syndicated 2008-10-19 18:32:17 from Ricardo Mones

Vacation, whose vacation?

Work

Yep, supposedly I'm on vacation, but these are not going to be as fun as other years. First Silvia couldn't choose vacation period on September, as we would have wanted and had to split vacation between August and October. I don't like to be on vacation on August for several reasons, but as this year we don't have money to go those nice places we used to go most of these reasons vanish. So far we're practicing some short-range tourism, like having lunch in Cudillero and going back home by evening, and some house-keeping ungrateful tasks, like cleaning windows (no pun intended!). I expect the October period to be less static, because not going somewhere feels a bit like having no vacation.

Debian

My Debian stuff is mostly frozen now, as we're in the way of getting Lenny released soon. The newmail crasher is finally fixed also in Debian, so, unless something really nasty appears in the meantime, current versions will be the ones shipped in Lenny CDs/DVDs. The only thing I miss is not having a more updated themes package, because current release dates from beginning of 2007 and doesn't contain any of the new PNG themes.

Hardware

As some may already know my MacBook hard disk (Hitachi 160 Gb) died two or three weeks ago. I've been able to recover most of data from it, thanks to SystemRescueCd and some help to mount encrypted partitions by hand. Unfortunately one of the lost pieces was the trial-error-made deb package with a mostly working driver for the Atheros wifi card of the MacBook (but only with kernel 2.6.21). As I was stupid enough not to document the process or backup it I guess I will have to start from scratch with that again or fall-back to MacOS X for wifi connectivity.

The MacBook was 1 year and few months old, but there's a known conflict between which warranty Apple provides (1 year) and the one supposedly granted by the Spanish law for consumer goods (2 years), and Apple is actively rejecting to follow it (no links, but Google is full of stories). Therefore I've decided not to fight on lost battles and just buy a replacement (another Hitachi but 320 Gb, still don't have it though). Of course I will think thrice before buying anything more from Apple. And for those wandering, no, I don't like to pay another heap of euros for the "AppleCare Protection Plans" when the law already gives me almost the same for free.

I only hope the disks of my main box not to start failing soon (they're two, they're older and they're spinning most of the time: 14:41:56 up 24 days, 22:07, 13 users, load average: 0.11, 0.08, 0.09).

Syndicated 2008-08-21 12:53:49 from Ricardo Mones

Sardine festival

Last Friday was holiday for me, and like previous year I went to the Candás Sardine Festival. This time it was a bit different because seems now I have my five seconds of fame on the globalised TV. Only a hint: I'm the one on green, and Lucho is the one pouring (escanciando) the cider.

Syndicated 2008-08-07 11:44:28 from Ricardo Mones

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