Older blog entries for morcego (starting at number 29)

Well, one more unslept night, one more sleepy day ... I should be sleeping a little more. 4 hours a night is really not enough.
Anyway, today promisses to be a samewhat boring day ... unf ...
This afternoon, I have to whatover some peolpe taking certification tests this afternoon. Quite boring. Have to stay sitted on a chair for an hour and a half, without doing anything, while some grownups keep trying to figure out why they haven't studided a little more.

I finaly managed to upgrade my coworkers machine to CL 7.0 (with kernel 2.4) while she is tarveling :-) Hope she likes the surprise. I know that after I started using kernel 2.4, going back to 2.2 is a nightmare (what can I say, iptables is so much better then ipchains ...).

Lunch time ... I'm really hungry, and my wife is waiting for me with the food on the table.

... some time later...
Well, things have gone pretty well. Not only the guy passed the certification test (he finished it in about 40 minutes, thanks god), but he also told me his company wants to ship Conectiva Linux with their product. It's was not a bad day.

So much, so much have changed ...

First, I'm not living in Curitiba anymore. Now, I work at Belo Horizonte. And no, I have not left Conectiva.
The catch is that now I'm no longer a full time developer. Now I have to share my time between development, consultant and linux advocacy. The good news is that now I get paid also for being a Linux Advocate !
What more can I say ... humm, let me see ... it has been so long ...

Oh, yes. I have reviewed the certifications I granted here at advogato. The reason, I have certificated sone persons I don't know enough. I don't remember having changed any certifications. I only removed a few.

Humm, just noticed one of my last posts mentioned I was trying to get a Palm Handheld. Well, I got one (Palm M100). Not a ferrari, but I does what I paid it for. So I have no regrets.

I have not had much time to code these days. Well, what you want, with me moving towns and all that stuff. I hope to get back coding in the next few weeks. Things are almost settled now.

Almost xmas :-)
I'm still waiting for an aproval so I can spend the next week on my parents home. If I do get it, this diary will not be hearing from me til Jan 2nd.
Nothing more to report, AFAIR.

Well, back on the xmlrpc biz.
Jeff gave me an argument that I could not counter. HTTP is the prefered protocol couse it's one of the few things open in firewalls nowadays. Unfortunatly, it's true. And if we must use http, I don't see why we should not use xmlrpc. At least somewhat flexible.
So, I coded a simple proof-of-concept server for Jeff. He is showing it to some people. Hope they like it. :-)

On a side note, I'm looking around to buy a Palm. My prefered model is the CHEAP one :-) If you have one of those, please, drop me a line :-)

Ouch, too much work here. And the weekend, of course.
I have been talking with Jeff (RPM maintainer) about a few features for RPM, and now I have a full workload of things to do :-) I'm even stuck with a thing called xmlrpc. I have one word for it: blounted.
Why, a "generic" protocol (please mark well the quotes), based on HTTP and XML ?!?!?! That is what I call big overhead. And why that ? Only couse XML and other things like that (CORBA etc) are "Business Oriented" blah blah blah marketing blah blah blah customer care blah blah proactive blah blah ?!?!?! I'm seriously thinking about droping all this stuff. I simply can't agree with a thing like that, using a blounted protocol implementation, only couse it's 'nice' (and a whole lot of other marketing oriented arguments).
I know it's not Jeff's fault. Looks like he just have some Pointy Haired Bosses.

Hey, no diary entry yesterday ? What a shame :-)
So, lemme tell you. I've spent most of the day yesterday hacking around RPM code to fix some bugs. The main bug what in the tarbuild code, but one thing leades to another, and I ended up the day with a full bag of TODO's for RPM :-)
Well, the bug got fixed. The patch for RPM3 is in Jeff's hand. For RPM4.1 I'm going to do a little improvement work too, so I'm holding it back. The point is that RPM3 is almost legacy by know, so bugfix is all it's worth doing for it. But there are a lot of things that can be improved on the tarbuild code of RPM4.1. Once tarbuild is not that much used, the patch can wait while I work on the improvements. Thats pretty much what is in my schedule for the rest of this week.
Well, actualy, that is not true. I'm still messing around with OpenOffice. Gosh, I hate that :-) But sometimes we have to do dirt work too, that this was my turn. If you want my oppinion, don't use it. Use vi. Thats a good text editor.
Will keep this diary updated on the development of my RPM todo list.

Well, today was not exactly a very busy day (compared to most) :-)
Updated our etherboot package, which required a few changes on the specs. Okey, I almost had to remake then, but that is a non-issue.
So, I wrote an article about configuring and using xinetd, acompanied to my attempt to explain it to our marketing deparment. Well they say they undertood it. But when I remember how poor my teaching skills are, I'm a little afraid. Also, this article is being examined to be included on the Revista do Linux magazine.

A few ins and outs, and my fiance presented today a report on a research she did. Looks like Conectiva loved it, specialy since she did it entirely on her own, without even asking Conectiva for support. This kind of initiative is something everybody likes. I'm specialy proud of her.
Posted several coments on PontoBR today regarding some vapourware posts there. Wow. People love to spread news without understanding what they are talking about.
Also, I'm now officialy included on the ProFTPD helpers list. I hope we now can take it back on tracks, since it's rater stopped with MacGuyver's busy scheddule. I have a few patches here ready for them as soon as I get a "GO!"
Now, it's time to go home and cook some dinner. Maybe I'll ask claudio for some stones, and we can go hunting some mamooths.

Well this was a non-productive weekend. Well, at least from the opensource point of view :-)
My fiance is back from visiting her mother, so I'll be slowing down things a little bit here. Howver, she may be spending some time here at Conectiva (depends on official aproval), so I'm crossing my fingers I'll be able to do some work at nights still.
Anyway, I should go back a little to may pet projects, namely yafingerd and squid_mysqldb.There is too much spiderweb on it, and I need to clean them. Anyway, yafingerd is almost ready, and should not be sitting idlely around, and an orphan.

UML is getting better and better. Most of the problems are disapearing, and a few patches, for me and others, for improving network performance are trying to find its way into the main tree.
RPM development is a little slow right now. Most of it is happening on 4.0, mainly backports from 4.1
As a side note, the 2.95 tree of gcc is a little wierd. Looks some some ABI changes happened, which I find confusing, once it was not supposed to happen. I'm keeping an eye on it so see if those were real changes or just some buggy patches.
glibc 2.2 is getting better and better.
Oh, btw, Tucows/Linuxberg made a review about Conectiva Linux 6.0. Take a look at it.
All in all, life is good right now :-)

I received a visit from a former employer, who is thinking on changing his systems to Conectiva Linux. He asked me to show him why it would be a good idea :-) Oh well, 2 minutes to convince him, 53 to tour him around Conectiva :-) Also, me and my fiance went to dinner with him latter at night ... Not bad for a day at work ...

Well I submited a patch for user-mode-linux (actualy, to uml-net-tools).
This patch implements threading, making it works faster, even when in debug mode (and dumping tons of data to the screen, which is a samewaht slow process). Hope it gets in.
Nothing more interesting to report.

Well, guess what ? I'm trying to help on user-mode-linux project too. Yes, I know, I should behave and put myself in my place, without trying to mess with this kind of things... Yeah, right. Like I would really do it :-)