Things I love about Ireland, partial list.
This:
I'm typing this from the departure gate of the Beauvais airport, about to board my plane back home. I came to Paris for the Debian MiniConf, a/k/a another excuse to meet so many friends. Needless to say, it was great fun.
I already signed and mailed all the keys from the KSP, and spent some time during the weekend finishing the transition of my blog from Blosxom to Ikiwiki. I liked Blosxom, specially the fact that it produced static pages, but I wanted to try Ikiwiki, with its elegance and so many interesting features. The combination of web-edition, backed by revision control, with a static blog finished convincing me.
So, I have just changed the feed link in Planet. I hope I don't flood you! (I took the effort of adding meta tags to all my old posts so the GUID won't change).
And thanks to the MiniConf team!
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.--Foreword to the book. Just finished this book today. It was written in 1985, it talks about Dallas, and the 700 Club, Reagan and many other (by now) old fashioned things. It only talks about computers in passing, as this new thing that everybody is talking about. And it is extremely current. It's been 27 years, and it could have been written yesterday. You'll just need to replace some TV shows with Twitter, Reddit, or G+, but it has made me think a lot about my own relationship with information, and amusement. I couldn't help but think about this book when reading various essays that touch culture, education, or politics these days. It has also made me realise my own incongruence: being proud of not owning a TV, while I spent hours of my waking ours watching cat videos, news snippets in Google Reader, or curating links that have been reshared dozens of times. If you're at all interested in understanding our culture and discourse, do yourself a favor and get a copy. It's not long, nor dense in academic jargon. It's only 9 euro with free shipping in the Book Depository, and they even have a Kindle version in Amazon. Tags: Libros, Planet Debian
It was a surprisingly busy week. The commit notification service CIA was shut down about a week ago, so I
spammedsent some messages
to announce that KGB could be used as a replacement, and Don Armstrong wrote a
great tutorial on
how to set it up. As a result, many people came to us to use our
bots, or to set-up their own instances.
Since then, 14 Debian sub-projects started using our bots, and we know of at
least two other bots being run independently. For a small project that was
mainly developed and maintained for our own use, this was quite some unexpected
popularity!
With bug reports and feature requests starting to flow in, Damyan Ivanov
(who's basically the one doing most of the work these days) sat down and
produced a new
release. So, I present you, KGB 1.16!
What's new
kgb-add-project, eases the addition of new
projects to the server configuration.
Well this weeks log comes bit late as my week got extended till today ;-).
I had working day at office on Saturday and Sunday due to 2nd Quarter end
and instead today is declared as compensatory holiday and tomorrow any how
is Gandhi Jayanti. So here
it goes.
Debian Related
Most of my work this week was done for Debian-IN team
I should have posted this a few days ago, better late than never they
say...
On Saturday, 8/9/12, a BSP was held
in Dublin for the first time. Google kindly offered office space and some food
and refreshments for the event, so we had a nice room with good Internet access
and two big screens to project IRC activity.
I consider the event to be a big success. There was a good attendance: 15
people showed up, with most of them staying a solid 8 hours. There was a good
balance of experienced Debian people and newcomers, as well as a few DDs that
work for Google.
Even if the squashed bug count was not huge, it was great to see people
helping each other, people who had never done any Debian work getting up to
speed with the basics and getting excited about helping. I think the biggest
outcome of this BSP is that after we packed up, we had already agreed on
holding a second BSP in October, and to bootstrap a local Debian community!
(Now we need to convince the listmasters to create the mailing list at #687430).
A few stats:
Another great DebConf is over. Two weeks ago, I was lingering a little
longer in Nicaragua, enjoying some tropical holidays, and having a few To as
with some fellow debconfers in Granada, and I exposed some rough ideas I've
been incubating in the back of my head for some days. Since it had a positive
initial reaction from the table (Gregor already volunteered to help!), I want
to show it to a larger audience, in the hopes of getting some useful feedback,
ideas, and maybe even some volunteers!
The trigger was Zack's Bits from the
DPL talk, and Enrico's post on the same topic. We need to recognise more what people is doing in
the project, much valuable work is done in the shadows, and it is in our
interest to make the people doing that work feel acknowledged, feel they are
part of the project.
The core of my idea is to create a web service that, for each person
known to the project (let's say, http://whois.debian.net/tincho),
shows a simple page with information about the person, optionally a
mugshot/hackergotchi, what are they working on, maybe some stats and links (the
Debian portfolio stuff, for example), and the core of this idea
badges of merit, and attribution for their contributions.
What I picture is having badges that say: Closed X RC bugs ,
Active translator for Esperanto , #1 video team camera
operator in DC12 , Created 100 bugs .. You get the idea.
In this ugly mock I created with my null designing skills, the idea might be a little more clear.
carnivore, so we
can match between different email addresses, a name, a Debian or alioth user-id
(if applicable), IRC nickname, or any other identification that might be used
to distinguish a person inside Debian.
This might sound scary, but I don't plan on exposing or crawling any
identities that are not currently publicly exposed, I just want to be able to
see in a single page all the information associated both with my debian.org
email address and with my gmail one.
I have some basic design ideas, but I don't want to make this post even
longer than what it is now. Please get in touch if you have comments, ideas, or
if you want to flame me.
Tags: Planet Debian
Thanks!!!
Ugh, in the last year and a half I've only posted once. With the move to
Ireland, starting a new job, and then using too much Google+, I forgot
about this blog thing.
So, to start with something easy, I'll tell you about some films I watched
recently. This weekend I had a marathon of films, after sometime without
watching any, I watched two at home and two at my favourite cinema in Dublin:
the IFI, which I recommend to anyone
living here.
First, on Friday, I watched Brazil, the 1985
classic from Terry Gilliam. It was a long overdue obligation to watch it, and
some discussions with a friend about cinema made me finally do it. It was an
amazing film. Among the many memorable scenes, and cinephile winks, I liked the
one copying the famous Odessa steps sequence. The problems related to its US
release reminded me a bit of the problems with the edition of Touch of evil, although
in the case of Brazil, what the big studio did to the film was to butcher
it.
On Saturday I continued on the Gilliam streak and re-watched 12 Monkeys, which I had
forgotten completely. Another great film, with a clearly bigger budget, it does
not rely on the money but in the plot, art, and acting to be memorable. Also, I
love the main theme, a tune from Astor Piazzolla called "Suite Punta del
Este".
Just after finishing the film, I read that some people from the local Couch Surfing group were meeting at the
IFI to see one of the many features of the Polish film festival that took place
this weekend. So I went and saw A short film
about killing, a powerful and shocking movie about the death penalty.
Considered by many to be one of the most horrifying depictions of a killing
(two, in fact), it didn't shock me as much as some other films had done, maybe
it was because of the cinema overdose... Anyway, it was another must-see. IMDB asserts that the Polish
government suspended the death penalty in Poland for five years after the
release of this film, but I could not find sources to confirm this.
This morning I woke up pretty early, which is completely uncommon for me on
a Sunday. So I decided to use the tickets offered by the IFI for a
pre-screening that I had assumed I would not use, since I had to be in the
cinema at 11! This time it was an Irish documentary about Bernadette
Devlin, called Bernadette:
Notes on a political journey. It was really interesting, even if I had
never heard about this important figure of Ulster politics in the sixties.
Sadly, because of my ignorance on the topic (and some northern accents that I
have trouble understanding), I missed many parts of the film. In any case, it
has increased my appetite to know more about the Troubles, which had
started when I visited the Republican neighbourhood of Belfast, specially Falls road.
Tags: Life, Planet Debian
Many times we can recognise different periods in our lives, but the line
that divides those periods is not always clear. As I write this on the plane
that is going to take me back to Argentina, I know I am closing something.
20 months ago, I took a plane in the opposite direction. The idea was to
live and work in France for something like 7-9 months; I stayed more, got a
Master's degree, met a lot of people, made some good friends, found a place
that we would call and feel as home; and generally had a great
time, so much that I almost didn't have time for any hacking.
Good bye, France, the fond memories of this time are going to stay with me.
Maybe someday, life brings me back.
Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, Vida
The last few weeks I have been using LaTex a lot, to write the final report
for my master's course. During that period I found a couple of LaTeX goodies
that might be interesting to share: the memoir class, gnuplot integration, and
some stuff to help preparing cover pages.
The memoir class is a kind of all-in-one package. It is meant to be
used in place of the book and report classes, but it
can also replace simpler environments, such as article. It
provides many ready-to-use templates, and loads of commands to easily customize
them. It seems to be specially tailored for dead-tree publication, dedicating
an entire chapter in the manual to page layout.
It also aims at removing the usual cruft you have to add into any medium
sized project, it is macro-compatible with: abstract,
appendix, array, booktabs,
ccaption, chngcntr, chngpage,
dcolumn, delarray, enumerate,
epigraph, framed, ifmtarg,
ifpdf, index, makeidx,
moreverb, needspace, newfile,
nextpage, parskip, patchcmd,
setspace, shortvrb, showidx,
tabularx, titleref , titling,
tocbibind, tocloft, verbatim, and
verse. Furthermore, it provides functionality equivalent to the
following packages: crop, fancyhdr,
geometry, sidecap, subfigure,
titlesec. In the end, you have a project that only needs a couple
of packages, and a few customisation commands, which is nice and also eases distribution.
Other nice thing I have found is that there is not one, but many ways of
merging gnuplot graphs into your text
while having LaTeX typeset all the labels. There is some LaTeX packages aimed
at this, but I have more success using a special gnuplot terminal. Again, there is more than one option:
eepic,
epslatex, latex, lua, mp,
pslatex, pstex, pstricks,
texdraw, and tpic. While I could not try them all, I
tried a few and the easiest and prettiest was epslatex. This
terminal creates two files: a EPS file, as would have been created with the
usual postscript terminal, except that it does not contain any
text; and a LaTeX snippet meant to be included with
\input foo . Finally, I could generate graphs that match the rest
of the document!
To end this post, a couple of things about creating the dreaded cover page.
First, a suggestion: don't fret too much about finding a ready-made template,
once you understood the basics of how to insert arbitrary spaces around text,
it is quite easy to roll your own cover! Having said that, the memoir manual
has some sample cover pages that can be useful to use as a base, and there is
another really useful resource I have found: titlepages.pdf, a collection of 40 sample title pages with source
code for you to choose.
Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, latex
If the Debian package of the day website were still alive, I would post this
there. Since I still have the backups lying in my harddrive waiting to be
restored in some other place, I'll post here.
In the graphviz package
there is a neat shell script called vimdot that will open
vim and a X window showing your progress with the drawing, updated
each time you save. Simple but really useful, probably not much people know it
exists.
Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, tips
Lately, I have recurring WTF moments when working with Python. I'm still
more or less a novice in Python, as I started to use it in my day job last
year, so sometimes it could be blamed to ignorance.
Today I was writing some code that takes any file descriptor as argument,
and thought it could be nice to accept also objects that represent one. But it
seems there is no common ancestor to file objects and socket objects, for
example. In Perl, I'd just check for IO::Handle.
Then, I wrote code to check if a passed argument was a socket, or a file
descriptor to one, with some obvious check: isinstance(s,
socket.socket). WRONG, when you create sockets with
socketpair, they are of an undocumented type which is not a
descendant of socket, nor of SocketType! (There is a patch for this since 2007)
In general, I have found a lack of any reasonable object hierarchy, and many
inconsistencies in the low-level interfaces, which is a pity, because Python is
in general quite tidy. Comparing with Perl is unavoidable, and I would have
expected that Python had learnt more from it.
Another thing that amazes me is the lack of anything like CPAN, which is one of the reasons
Perl was so successful. The cheese
factory doesn't come close, as you need to publish your files
somewhere else, there is no automated testing, no automatically generated
documentation, or anything that requires access to the source code.
In Perl-land, many people loathe the venerable MakeMaker, and some of the
alternatives are ugly as hell. The Python equivalent (or so) to Makemaker,
distutils, looks to me like a bad joke: advanced customisation is black magic
(if possible at all), and doesn't provide absolutely basic things like running
your unit tests! After fighting with it for some days, I decided to go back
writing my own Makefile and calling distutils just to build and install.
Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, Programaci n
After one year in France, there's still something I cannot completely
understand; I don't know if it is something common in Europe, or a artifact of
the French law, or if it is just that French people like to do things so
formally all the time...
I was taking a look at the website of the local LUG, and was
amazed that they have association loi de 1901 status, an
administration council with 11 members, statute, and written bylaws. Also, to
be a part of the association, you need to send a paper form and at least
10.
According to the Wikipedia
page , an association loi de 1901 is just a
non-profit organisation, and it has that status even if it is not registered.
But it seems that is not mandatory to have any of the hierarchical structure,
written rules and the such!
So it seems that any group of more than 10 that gets together to do
something go through all this trouble when it is not needed, there should be
some explanation for all this...
Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, Francia
That's a phrase I fully adhere to (I don't want to work), but that's not the
point. There's a catchy song that I like a lot, it's sung in French and sounds
like an old song (most places say it's an Edith Piaf's song). The chorus goes
"Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas d jeuner...", and one would imagine
that that's indeed the title.
But nothing of this is true, once again the Internets is full of fail. The
band who performs the song is called Pink Martini, two
of them are the authors of it, and they are from Oregon. It was recorded in
1997 (some audio filters did the magic), and it's called "Sympathique". It also
seems that it was a big success, but probably not in my part of the world. I
thought that somebody should set this straight somewhere, as I couldn't find
anybody speaking of this confusion.
Having settled that, I invite you to listen to this
wonderful song, and sing along that you don't wanna work (forget about the rest
of the lyrics, it's a love song :-)).
Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, M sica
I spent a few minutes trying out the new support for using the Facebook chat
with Jabber/XMPP, which is a great idea, since I hate to chat using the web
interface. Sadly, it doesn't support grouping your contacts (you set a group,
but it doesn't keep registered, probably they didn't implement that feature),
and that make my empathy client look quite untidy...
I'll keep my account setup for a while, but I guess it will not be long
until I remove it and continue not chatting with Facebook. Maybe some day they
can properly implement the protocol...
Update: As Tobias Wich and Clifford Hansen had kindly pointed out to me, you can actually group your contacts, but only from the web interface. I've tried it and it works, but it's not really comfortable.
Tags: Planet Debian
For the first time in my life, I'll be going to FOSDEM, yay!! So I hope to
see a lot of Debian friends there, drink a lot of Belgian beer and have a great
time.
Also, I'm finally going back home on March, after almost a year living in
France, I expect a continuous stream of meetings, barbecues and random
partying. I can't wait!
Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi
Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very
very hard work, DebConf8 has come
and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress,
I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out.
DebConf8 was a great success. We had great talks, many opportunities
for developing interesting ideas, a lot of social interaction, an awesome
video team that allowed more than 200 people from all around the world to
be part of the conference even if they weren't in Argentina, and in
general almost everyone had a very good time. It was really nice to have so
many people from Debian over here, and it was specially nice to see them
working and enjoying themselves so much.
This was all possible thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the many hours
spent during the previous months both by the DebConf orga-team (the usual
suspects) and specially by the local team, which includes
Tincho,
Dami n,
Romanella,
Maxy,
Sebas,
Zero,
Mendieta,
Dererk,
Melisa,
Angasule,
Lisandro,
Nueces,
and also thanks to the all help of the volunteers that came to work with us
during DebCamp and DebConf, which include
Tom s,
Tinchito,
M nica,
Lucas,
Germ n,
Diego,
Fefu,
Nicol s,
Mart n,
Marcos,
Hern n,
Alejandro,
Mat as,
Rodrigo,
Alberto and
Joaqu n,
and finally, DebConf wouldn't have been the great event it was without all
the people that managed to travel thousands of kilometers to get here. To
all of them, thanks, for making DebConf8 such a great conference
Now, at last, DebConf8 is over (although there is some stuff that we
still need to do before we can really forget all about it), and life goes
on. Today, I did my first NMU after a long time. I'm particularly
glad to have time for fixing bugs again, but I won't lie, I'm also
extremely satisfied with how DebConf8 turned out.
See you in Extremadura!
Dear Lazyweb,
I'm tempted to buy one of this neat boxes with embedded hard drive, network
interface, sound card and TV output to use as a media center for the house.
I've seen some of them in an ample range of prices, but all of them lack any
detailed description of what's running inside. I'll bet that most of them are
running Linux, but I'd like to be able to modify it to my heart's content. For
example to use MPD as a music server, be able to mount filesystems with sshfs,
and whatnot.
I'm also tempted to take the 'Neuf box' that was given by the internet
company, add a USB sound card and external hard drive; but already some people
jumped to warn me about the dreaded terms of use contract, and all that jazz.
Plus, having everything in a compact box seems more convenient for a not so big
price. Does anybody have a recommendation on this? Being able to buy it in
France is a plus :)
Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian
Just wanted to share comments on some movies I've watched recently.
Next.
