Advogato blog for morcego

2 Jul 2002

Tue, 2 Jul 2002 19:29:48 GMT

Just a quick entries:

privoxy is nearing the 3.0 release. Looks very good.
Our internet link is getting better by the day. TG.
Linux in Brazil (see previous post) is consuming a fair amount of my time, but the work we are doing there is really nice.
I dropped the site engine project for now. Don't have time for it
I'm planning of buying a DVD-drive for my computer. The prices are a little more attractive right now
The reply-o-matic project is at a standstill. It's working nicely on every place I have it running, and I have received some very positive feedback
I'm having a hard time trying to figure out why a PCMCIA network card that works on kernel 2.2 does not work on 2.4. It's kind of wierd.

28 May 2002

Tue, 28 May 2002 20:38:04 GMT

Well, as usual, it is a long time since my last entry.

Notice that ijbswa changes named, and is now named privoxy.

Things a, also as usual, pretty messy around here. A few updates:

I'm now an Editor on the Linux In Brazil news site (see brain)
Our new internet link, mentioned a earlier, is giving us a headache. Not as bad as the old one, but almost there.
privoxy is aproching release 3.0
I'm working on a news site engine. Basicaly, for the fun of it, but I think I'll turn it into a corporate portal engine, something I have been missing on the open software market

Thats all for now.

5 Mar 2002

Tue, 5 Mar 2002 15:07:05 GMT

Well, one more project to the list: ijbswa
That is simply a Internet Junkbuster (a banner filter, cookie restrictor, and privacy enhancement software) fork.

Quite a nice software, althoght I recomend using version 2.9.11 (not the stable one), for it supports HTTP/1.1.

8 Feb 2002

Fri, 8 Feb 2002 01:08:23 GMT

Well, I´m in my father´s home. And looks like I arrived just in time.
As you probably don´t know, he is a teacher at a local college (which he hope will soon be upgraded to a university status). Anyway, he told me that they are redesigning all of the college viewable content (website, business cards etc), and asked me if I had something to sugest them. Yeah, right. I just wonder why don´t they ever learn no to ask me about things like that.
He just walked out of the computer room with a hudge list of recomendations (including netiquette [rfc1855] rules, and links to the W3.org validator and the Viewable with any browser campaign). And of course, he promissed me he would do his best to make the college adhere to these standards. I´m crossing my fingers, but considering the level of competence used to design current web site, I´m not holding my breath. (if you are trying to access it, try with a text browser; it´s a once in a lifetime experience :-)).
Anyway, today we managed to get a city mayor´s office to sign with us to change all it´s health computer network to opensource (linux, more exactly). Tomorrow, we have a new city to hit. I think maybe I´ll preach them about the anybrowser campaign ... Then again, maybe thats pushing my luck a little to far. But, maybe not.

5 Feb 2002

Tue, 5 Feb 2002 18:59:40 GMT

Well, things are runnig pretty well around here.
First, our new internet link is up and running. It is a little slower then our previous one, but it does not crash, so we are happy with it. Our old one is still in place for DNS reasons I'm sure you can guess.
I have started studing to get new certifications. RHCE is one that comes to my mind. I read an article stating that most IT personal have 3.something (3<num<4) certifications. Since I only have 2 (well, actualy, I have 4, but only 2 count as good enough for the IT market), I need to get at least 2 others pretty quick. I think I'll try RHCE and BrainBench Network Security (maybe Internet Security too, but I'm not sure yet).

30 Jan 2002

Wed, 30 Jan 2002 15:11:47 GMT

Well, thinks are a real mess around here. I haven't take a single launch break this week yet. Wow. But at last we are making things happen.
As a by product of all this chaos, I haven't been able to roll out reply-o-matic 1.0 yet. I hope I can do it this weekend.
We are changing our backbone provider too. Things should improve dramaticaly. Take my advice, if you ever have a proposal from ITC, burn it, bury the ashes, and salt the ground.

11 Jan 2002

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 18:45:57 GMT

Well, the last two days have been very good to reply-o-matic. Several new security features, and version 0.99.0 is now out. 1.0 should be out in one week.

On the personal side, I'm getting a CD-Writer (finaly!).
Life is still good :-)

9 Jan 2002

Wed, 9 Jan 2002 19:59:17 GMT

Well, as of 2002/01/02, I'm no longer working on Conectiva, even tho I still do work for them, once I'm now working on TIS, which is a Conectiva Business Channel.
I started the project Reply-O-Matic, which is going quite well and almost ready for version 1.0
All in all, life is good. I received a good money when leaving Conectiva, and I didn't even have to change my desk, once Conectiva branch office in Belo Horizonte used to be on TIS's office :-)
One a side note, my Cable company decided to do things right (finaly). No more filters and no more two-times-a-day crashes. Lets just hope things continue to improve.

14 Aug 2001

Tue, 14 Aug 2001 19:13:07 GMT

RPM

Conectiva

Cable

6 Aug 2001

Mon, 6 Aug 2001 16:47:02 GMT

This was a sleepless weekend.
Oh buy, CodeRed II is hitting hard. Not that I use Windows, but it's eating up my bandwidth. And you know what is even worst ? My cable provider charges me if I use it too much (I have a 4GB/month quota).
Of course, I have send a <sarcams>nice little</sarcasm> letter to my cable provider, but don't know if it will help.
Anyway, CodeRed II is a pain, no matter if you use Windows (in which case, you already have lots of other problems) or not. I'm getting 10+ hits an hour only from my cable modem provider backbone (80/tcp is blocked from the outside). I can only imagine what other people without these filters are getting hit by. And no, I'm not defending this kind of filters. They suck...
Current statistics for the last 40 hours: 195 hits from 39 unique IPs (with the hit rate rising pretty fast)

Actualy, I'm getting pretty sick of my cable provider (which is Virtua, if any of you want to know). They pretty much stinks. Filters all around, transfer quotas, high prices, slow. Not considering, of course, that they take at least a full week to answer any e-mail you send them, and that their support phone line only works from 6am to midnight.
The problem is that I don't have any other choice. ADSL here is if anything worst (you have to access one specifig homepage before being allowed to use it), and even more pricy. I'm simply are lost here. It's a plain abuse to charge something like US$35/month for a 128K connection, where you can get (with luck) transfer rates like 10Kbps (the average is little better then 5Kbps).
Well, thats enough ranting for today.