Yesterday, I was at the UP Engineering Theatre at Diliman to join in the worldwide Software Freedom Day celebration. I was supposed to be there earlier, but due to new work (and some new stuff to learn too I woke up rather late that day. So, I found myself there in UP at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, rather tired and sweating (note to self: walking around the campus and looking for the venue at that time is not a good idea) but also looking forward to have some FOSS fun with fellow FOSS enthusiasts. I found Dom, Jerome, Paolo, Dong, Charlton, Ian Dexter, and Doc Mana there at the theatre listening on the technical seminars that were held by PLUG as part of the celebration. This time, the TechSem was particularly interesting, due to the new student project presentations’ by UP Engineering students, covering areas as diverse as Embedded Linux and SMS-to-Speech technology. I missed the special video from Richard Stallman though, as it was shown earlier, but I was able to grab a copy thanks to Dom . In between presentations, there were also mini-matchups of Frozen Bubble, which drove the (mostly geeky) crowd crazy with the rocking music and players’ itches. Representative Teddy Casi o of Bayan Muna also dropped by later that day, to observe the goings-on as well as to bring his filing of the draft FOSS bill to the public fore. This bill has been much talked about in the PLUG list, where the especially cynical posters (me more or less included had been taking their time nitpicking many of the details on the draft (especially on the section where it essentially says all your base are belong to us’ Turns out that RMS also saw some things that he thought needs improving (towards the end of his video, he took some time reflecting on the proposed bill,) and he wanted to see more emphasis on promoting FOSS to the education sector. Ubuntu CDs were also given away, as well as custom SFD/UP stickers. I also finally got to meet the UnPLUG hackers who, with PLUG, jointly organized this year’s SFD.

Ah, well. I’m such an errant blogger, being focused in doing actual work. But here are some updates:

• Summer Of Code: Sendpage - My code formatting patches have made CVS, and now I’m working on finishing the testsuite. Almost done, hehe
• Debian NM - Still at Philosophy and Procedures 1…
• Ubuntu PH: Picked up where Ealden left off as the PhilippineTeam Leader and LoCoContact, and with Jerome, taking care of the new, Drupal-powered portal for Ubuntu-PH.
• School: I’m loving Philo 173!

<span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://auzure-skies.livejournal.com/profile'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://auzure-skies.livejournal.com/'><b>auzure_skies</b></a></span> and I just passed our 4th year wedding aniversary. We went away and had a good time enjoying one another's company. This partly because we managed to pick a town to visit that had little else to do on a Saturday night. The main attraction in the city is a large catherdral that seems to take up most of "downtown". <div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/91538913@N00/111678841/" title="Cathedral in St. Jerome"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/34/111678841_d75a5acdec_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <br /> <span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/91538913@N00/111678841/">DSC00030</a> <br /> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/91538913@N00/">jbailey</a>. </span>.<br /><br /><div style="float: left; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a href="http://photos/jbailey/111678837/"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/35/111678837_0b3cd503b8_m.jpg"></a></div><br />Had a good time, though. It's nice to get out of the city for the weekend.<br /><br />Meh. This entry was going to be longer. Took too long to figure out how to do redeye reduction in the gimp and how to work <a href="http://www.flickr.com/">flickr</a>.</div>

Heh, its been more than a day now since I got back from Manila after the Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour, and even then I have some stuff to do here (both IRL and IOL work) before I could find some time to blog Here are the highlights of my trip:

• Feb 1 - Arrived in Manila around 6 in the evening; spent the early part of the evening looking for an internet cafe to check on mail. libmemcache got ACCEPTED, but it FTBFS on powerpc $DEITY, I sure wish I had my desktop with me! (or at least some access to a ppc Looked for someone on #debianPPC to help me solve it (and indeed got the hint by the next day Slept late.
• Feb 2 - Woke up late, checked mail only to be told by Jerome to GO HERE NOW to the Peninsula Manila for the ABT breakfast meeting. After a short tirade with some Ayala traffic enforcers about crossing pedestrian lanes, I was able to arrive (already late) to Garcia Villa, seeing Jerome, Charo, Clair, and Dom, providing a nice representation for both PLUG and Ubuntu-PH. The Inceptions folks (who I met last time at LinuxWorld) were there as well. Mark was already talking when I arrived, while Hande and Malcolm from Canonical were at the back with the local media; and after that, I got to talk with the SABDFL, of all things, about my Debian packaging adventure last night :/ After lunch, we then transferred to the National Computer Center at UP Diliman (Canonical in the chopper, Ubuntu-PH and PLUG in Jerome’s Picanto) to continue the Tour for government representatives and CIOs (which didn’t go quite well in my opinion; imagine crickets signing in the night), NGOs, and academe (which was much better, especially since Doc Pablo Manalastas asked the last question regarding backports.) Mark and company had to leave early, which left us PLUG/Ubuntu-PH people going to the UP Shopping Center for snacks, some talk, and an early wrapup. I however still slept late. Photos by Charo are visible.
• Feb 3 - After doing some errands in the morning, I went to Makati to meet up with Shelley, Markku, and Rommel of Inceptions. I will be doing a project with them

I’ve adopted opendchub, rccp, and xshisen from Grzegorz Prokopski too Heh, I’ll be quite busy this coming week…

As I’ve blogged earlier, I uploaded the updated Debian packages for robotour and animal last night on mentors.debian.net, and am now looking for sponsors. I also noticed that Clint has some packages for sale; I’ll take dbacl and bricolage And my fellow MOTU Stephan also has njam from Ubuntu up for adoption, and I’m taking it into Sid, not simply because I feel its my duty being a Ubuntu MOTU to give back to Debian, but because I am an existing Debian maintainer who wants to contribute more to Debian in that capacity. Some of those newly-adopted packages would have to wait, however, until I get back. I’ll be leaving for Manila this Thursday to take my UPOU midterms, as well as to get some things from my old house in Makati. I might be seeing Jerome, Clair, JM, Sacha, and the other PLUG folks at their induction. Among other things, some of my IE-using friends noticed some breakage with my blog layout (sigh). I’ll try to fix this later… Update : Anibal Avelar seems to be the DD for njam already, but I couldn’t see the package in the package pool or in the static packages page, despite being said so in the developer QA page (even the QA page for njam itself doesn’t exist). \sh, it seems that the game is still afoot! Update 2 : Ken Bloom comments that Anibal’s package is in the NEW queue.

Now here’s the thing I’m supposed to write It took me quite some time since I was too busy sleeping Looking back at 2005:

• January :

• I started this blog (on the 22nd)
• Submitted my UPOU application

February :

• I got into using planner-el
• Tried my hand at managing GtkLP for Debian in Subversion
• Got to know more about BitTorrent as well
• Got a Gmail account
• Successfully set up Linux-2.6 on St. John’s Debian Woody box malinao
• Got to know Clair via this very blog

March :

• I met Ubuntu Warty, Clair, and Mario too after my UPOU admission exam
• Moved to Emacs 22
• Delved into Lisp while coding an MP3 playback script on Warty
• more PlannerWiki goodness

April :

• More Lisp programming
• Video card replacement
• Attending my first PLUG Technical Seminar

May :

• The usual summer routine: teach swimming and maths

June :

• Back to school
• Tried blogging under Emacs PlannerMode, in which I have inadvertently spammed Planet Debian and Pinoy Tech Scene, earning the ire of Mako
• Attended the first meeting for Software Freedom Day with Sacha, Clair, and Rick. Also met Jerome for the first time

July :

• Sacha (left for Toronto on the 15th)
• Went back to WordPress

August :

• ITA on ecb
• Preparing the LinuxWorld conference
• Trying out Arch
• Released a new GtkLP for Debian

September :

• New ecb package (which to this day hasn’t been uploaded yet, looking for sponsors

• Software Freedom Day on the 10th!!! Met Donnie too
• LinuxWorld at Dusit!!!
• MidTerms!!!
• Started contributing to Ubuntu

October :

• Finals!!! (yeah, just after midterms
• NatSci finals in Naga City, looking for Linux users too
• Became a Ubuntu Member

November :

• Became a MOTU

December :

• Glimmer of hope
• Another GtkLP release
• Lost cellphone
• Meeting Ealden for the first time at the Ubuntu-PH EyeBall
• Thankful for $DEITY letting me live another year

Things to I want to do this 2006:

• More Debian and Ubuntu work
• Learn some more programming languages
• Try other VCSs/RCSs
• Really finish school
• Catch up with my RL

Things to look out for:

• Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour/Philippines
• PLUG’s very own hacker conference/camp
• Bicol Open Source Forum (and perhaps Bicol’s very own LUG

Rock on, 2006!

I’m at Ayala Center in Makati, enjoying the Sunday life amidst the buzz of the mallrats. I’m also enjoying the free internet provided by Globeline’s kiosk here, as well as access to a (locked-in) HP laptop with wired LAN. Anyhow, I’m not too comfy here, blogging without a chair to sit on, and dragging a backpack too, so let me do this quick. Yesterday I met up with the Ubuntu-PH people (namely, Jerome. Clair, Donnie, and Ealden) for our Christmas EB at Congo Grill in El Pueblo, Ortigas. I almost got lost trying to find the location, which I knew was somewhere near SM Megamall, and since I was coming all the way from UP Diliman via the MRT. Nevertheless, after some asking-around, I finally got to where I was supposed to be, and ate a hearty meal with chicken and garlic rice while listening to the channel, er este, people chatter (amidst the roaring Christmas party another gang was making.) After the meal, we then moved to The Podium nearby and sipped some coffee at Starbucks, then talked some more about Ubuntu, Gnome and KDE (especially the recent and quite controversial thread on desktops,) and some other stuff mentioned in Donnie’s post. There was also some stuff to be brought up at the next team meeting (see TeamMeetingAgenda) that we touched on, in particular that bit about membership to Ubuntu-PH. Well, it took us almost a midnight to wrap up; even then, along the road towards EDSA we were still talking about Ubuntu-PH, PLUG, and the AsiaBusinessTour, before we all finally parted ways. Indeed, EBs like these rock, especially when we’re all doing something great together as a team. Indeed, the next year seems to hold great promise for Ubuntu, Linux, and FOSS for the Philippines—and we’re at the forefront of it. Now, I need to go, and eat some Whoppers…

Deep breathing here. Finally, sem break! Well, actually, it already is sem break since the 15th, and only now at the end of this month did I felt it. I was so busy doing things, both online and offline, that I didn’t even realize that the next sem will be up in the week after next. Sigh… So, what have I been doing since school’s close? Mostly Ubuntu work:

• Translating. At the Lauchpad the aboutubuntu document has been completed, and now I’m slaving over the faqguide.
• Packaging. I notice that Lighttpd has been included in UniverseCandidates, so I decided to start my MOTU work there. It also turns out that Lighttpd also need libmemcache, which is missing on both Debian and Ubuntu. There’s an ITP of Lighttpd already, but it seems stalled; I guess this needs pinging. And on the Debian front, pabs3 from #debian-mentors shares some hints for ecb that I need to fix for the next RFS.
• Reading. There are lots of Fine Documentation at the Ubuntu and Debian wikis that I’m grokking atm; among these are the CDBS manual and MaintainerScripts documentation.
• Writing. I’ve managed to put up a WinModemConexantHSF quick-howto, and soon I’ll write up about my experience in maintaining packages with GNU Arch/Bazaar.

Aside from hacking, I’ve been busy baking as well, and preparing for next sem. The only thing I’m quite missing is the “traditional” Halloween get-together with my High School batchmates; hell, it is only 1 year to go before a Homecoming… PS: My Ubuntu work has paid off. Thanks to Kamion, Seveas, smurf, dholbach, tseng, and ogra for voting me in as a Ubuntu Member! And to Jerome Gotangco and the Ubuntu-PH team: mabuhay kayo!

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe:

• Get the XFT_JHD_BRANCH of CVS Emacs, see XftGnuEmacs on the Emacs wiki, and this page from Deling Ren.
• Get a further patch, from this mailing list post
• Get the emacs-snapshot-debian directory from this arch repository and use it as the debian directory inside the Emacs source tree

Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules :

  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes

After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this:

  Emacs*font: Monospace-8

You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.