A new journey ahead

Changing jobs and moving to a new country... it's just the beginning.

On September 30th, 2012 I'm moving to Menlo Park, CA, USA because back in December 2011 I accepted a job offer as a sysadmin (the name is fancier: Operations Engineer) in Silicon Valley. Since then I'm working on the required documentation, so far everything had worked out. I'm starting at the new work on October 8th, and as I'm arriving on October 1st, I'll have a week to take a look around and get to know a tiny bit of San Francisco Bay Area.


In different levels and aspects it is a big opportunity for me, and I'm confident it'll be an unique experience, not only professional, which of course involves working in a bigger company with more complex scenarios and bigger challenges, and on the personal side, I'll live abroad, be an expat.


As you may imagine, I'm working on this process for more or less 10 months, but in the last 30 days it got more intense. Quitting my jobs, organizing my stuff, cleaning part of backlog (and finding out a have a huge to-do list awaiting for me). Spending quality time with family and friends, and also saying goodbye to them. Finishing some aspects of the move (travel tickets, temporary living).


It's new, it's different! I'm super excited and I do want to change a few things to make it easier for family and friends to keep up, make it easier to follow the news, which might help with the distance.

And now for something completely different! See you all pretty soon! :-)

29 and counting

Time flies... and very fast.

There are so many things I'd like to share and tell you about but that would make a long and boring post, so I'll divide it in future entries, so I can keep this diary alive, keep people informed and tell a little bit about my story. Eventually, I may split this diary into a technical and a non-technical blog, but for now, I will stick around mixing topics. :-) Last time I wrote was back in 2009 at DebConf9 in Spain and a lot of things happened that year. Not only for Debian, but also for me.


My last year studying Computer Science was 2009 and that same year I was working full time, I helped organizing a large event for Computer Students (ENECOMP 2009), we had some troubles and side effects with Influenza A (H1N1) in my city (Curitiba, PR) and towards the end of the year I got really sick (not from Influenza) and it took a while to know what was going, during this process I did hurt some people I really love and I'm truly sorry. The past, 2010 went on as busy and unstable as 2009, my laptop's hard disk broke twice (January and October) and I survived thanks to backup and recovery procedures. I took some wrong decisions but fixed it later and learned a lot from my mistakes, decisions and choices.


Then 2011 came, my laptop's hard disk broke again and I lost almost 6 months of emails, I find out that after the second crash in 2010 part of my backup got b0rk3d. Fine, I didn't die, everything seems to be fine, but I'm still catching up with a lot of work and backlog. At different times one of my parents also got really sick and I learned quite a bit on how to deal with it.


Due to the laptop and the different things going on in my life I didn't work for Debian as much as I want and I still feel guilty. :-( But that's fine, this is a kind of public apologize for my peers in Debian (i18n, mirrors, release), I still want to help all of you, but I still have quite a bit of backlog to clean and quite a few things to learn in the process. And in general, I'm really sorry if I didn't (or I couldn't) work for Debian as much as I want.


Although I'm taking the chance to apologize in this post, I still want to make clear that I'm quite happy. This last year was pretty good, I had the opportunity to attend DebConf again and also got to know Sarajevo and Zagreb. New lessons were learned, better work cycles, nicer solutions. Today I'm completing 29 years old. 29. This is quite some time, not a long ride, but for one reason or another, I have high hopes for 2012 and what awaits me. And I do plan to learn more, to help more and whenever possible, to contribute back.

Last time I wrote here I mentioned about my graduation and another post to talk about that, I'll write about it as soon as I get my diploma (because of different printing problems it was delayed for almost 2 years). And I do plan to write more frequently. :-)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

Debian

Re: Blog rewrite upcoming

Erich, it seems that you got TONS of recommendations for different blog software, so you probably already received a recommendation for Chronicle: The Blog Compiler, it is written by Steve Kemp inspired by Joey's ikiwiki. I've been also wondering about using ikiwiki and/or chronicle. :-)

From the privacy-issues-department...

This is in my draft for a long time now...

Nico, I never understood what was so private about your debian.net page (Thanks WayBackMachine!).

PS: Happy 2009!

Random news

/back

Yes, I was away... long and sad story involving health issues. :-( I'm trying to get back, hopefully everything will be fine. Let me publicly apologize to some people that was expecting some work from me and I postponed it, not because of slackness but because I was unable to do it. I'm catching up with a lot of tasks and trying to solve long standing issues, feel free to ping me to get some update on a specific matter. I am really sorry!

Slogan

Do you know about the poll to choose a slogan for the release of Debian 5.0, also known as "lenny"?

No!? Shame on you! :-)

People behind Debian Art started a discussion to get opinions! After some input they prepared a poll, maybe they should try to use a doodle. Right now, The Universal Operating System is quite popular, but a lot of people did some nice suggestions, and some of them would like to see a slogan some way related to the Toy Story (tm) character Lenny:



The discussion is distributed across three lists: Debian Desktop, Debian Publicity and Debian Curiosa, I would also point to the comments made by Gustavo Noronha da Silva (here) and Andre Felipe Machado (here).

If you didn't say anything so far, please do!

'churro' is the name of the Debian i18n server (i18n.debian.net), hosted by the Extremadura region in Merida (IIRC). That server was setup back in september 2006, during the first Extremadura i18n meeting. Since then, a lot of hidden work happened on it, mostly moving all scripts that build statistics pages from Debian localization data, for instance the Central Debian translation statistics. Thomas Huriaux, then Nicolas Fran ois, have been the people building all this, with the help of Felipe Augusto van de Wiel for the system administration. Churro for instance has neat statistics pages, built by Nicolas Fran ois. These would just need to be packaged with nice web pages to give a great website for stats junkies(See that example showing how Swedish decreased over time, then revived recently....or that other one showing German reaching the 100% Grail). The DDTP also uses churro as server which is an important brick for having translated package descriptions (which is now an achieved lenny release goal). And now, since this week-end, I think we can say that Pootle is partly in production. The Pootle server is now hooked directly to the VCS of some parts of Debian-Installer related packages (including the core D-I itself) and, since last night, I am not the only one using it...:-) That small bit:

Author: pootle-guest
Date: Sun Jul 13 20:48:15 2008
New Revision: 54294
Log:
Commit from Debian/Pootle l10n server by user pi. 413 of 413 messages translated (0 fuzzy).
Modified:
   trunk/packages/po/sublevel3/eu.po

... indeed shows that Piarres Beobide Ega a, the Basque team coordinator, just committed an update to D-I SVN, through Pootle. We're still working on organizing all that scattered stuff, to finally turn churro into the central point for Debian localization and internationalization work but I think that the i18n team can really be proud of the achieved work, already. PS: as churro turned out to be hard to pronounce for German mouths, please note that it is also called 'spaetzle' :-)

That's it...

Student for now :-)

Damn it, I should had wrote about it a couple of days ago. Anyway, it happened last Friday (20080222), my last day at work. After 4.5 years (exactly 4 years, 6 months and a week), I quit my job to dedicate more time for my "supposed" last year studying Computer Science at the University.

In a far far away galaxy...

During the translation of packages' descriptions, when I found something that looks like a typo or a wrong reference I try to report wishlist bugs and, when possible, provide patches, I know this is somewhat noisy, it is just to register the fact, so Smith Review can also spotted it, sorry for the noise. :-)

BTW, I would still vote for a genius if we are going to elect a mascot.

Thanks: frolic

Bits from the Debian i18n meeting (Extremadura 2007)

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.

First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:

• MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)
• Pootle experimental server
• dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign
• Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf
• Generation of Compendium PO files per-language
• Different types of statistics
• Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.
• DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project
• DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.

And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:

• DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
• ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
• DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.

We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.

Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:

• Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).
• After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant
• Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
  • Added READMEs for the above directories

DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.

A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations

In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the main,contrib,non-free /i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).

One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.

Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.

Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.

Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/

We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:

• More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
  There are two use cases are identified:
  
  • Filling new PO files.
  • QA work to find inconsistent translations.
  Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)
• Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral)
• Debian packages of the services running on churro
  • DDTP (Grisu)
  • DDTSS (Martijn)
  • dl10n (Nekral)
• DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn)
• DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw)
• DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw)
• DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority)
• Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw)
• Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral)
• http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
  http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
  are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)
  • We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
  • Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)
• Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)

There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)

Posted on d-d-a: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00002.html
And a big thanks to Nicolas François (aka nekral), he helped me a lot making notes, preparing the text and reviewing it; and was patient enough to wait for the report while I was solving some personal problems.

It is about time...

qmail under Public Domain

Using qmail-ldap for quite some time (first because of my employer and then because I was used to it), the DJB license was a major pain, qmail-ldap patch is under BSD, but the original qmail was non-free. Yes, was. Yesterday DJB released qmail under Public Domain, and based on a GoogleVideo, he is going to change the license for all his existent software and for all his future works.

For some strange reason the URL direct to the video doesn't work, but if you do a search you are able to use the Watch video here option.

Not only that

Yes, I know. I'm not going to say sorry, I should post more, this last three months were not exactly the best ones, and I thought about writing something about what I was doing for Debian and other projects here but ended up being consumed by University, Work, Real Life and "Other Stuff (tm)".

One of the important things on the way is the Debian i18n Extremadura Meeting to be held on December, when we expect to work on i18n.debian.net, change from CVS to SVN, improve DDTP and ddtss and work with Pootle related stuff and infrastructure.

In the meantime, we are also changing our Primary Push Server for volatile.debian.org from durin to verdi (don't worry, a proper announcement will be made on an announcement list close to you). :-)

Thanks for everybody that had the patient to wait for my replies and/or my actions, and the ones that calmly understood my undergoing situation, giving me support and offering help. Thank you very much!

To Blog, or Not To Blog...

Amazon: in the hands of a few

Thinking about writing something for a while, about my Debian work or about my daily stuff, sometimes you lack the time or the motivation to do so, I should kept this more up-to-date so people can follow a little bit what's going on with me... specially considering that I try to keep this diary neutral about non-technical subjects, but hey! it is somewhat hard to be neutral in every single situation. Anyway, I found that I should help to spread the word from a Brazilian colleague, Sulamita, she posted about democracy (or the lack of it) today. Two videos, about the Amazon Forest area and some of the crazy things we find in Brazil. You can watch the Brazilian Portuguese version or the English one.

A lot of people are not aware of some of the political problems that Brazil faces in the last 10 years, it is not like it doesn't exist before, but it is getting worst and worst and, for a while, I've been wondering...

A lot of friends want to leave Brazil as soon as they can, I love Brazil but I can understand their motivation.


• Where do you find the desire to stay when you look around and you can't find fairness and equality? And if you look to the houses or places that should protect people, you realize that there is no protection?
• How do you keep the passion for a country with huge levels of corruption in public government, in police forces, in your law makers? And day after day, corruption schemas, robbery and law abuse are noticed on the television?
• What to do when you realize that the perception of the disloyal advantage is shared among your colleagues and that the feeling of failure dominates a great part of the population that could actually do something to change?
• Can anybody, or group of individuals, feeling alone, work to change that? How? Specially when you look around and although you know there are people willing to help they need to take care of their lives (money, food, family)?

Or should I ask: Where's the love? (Black Eyed Peas Lyrics).

And before somebody thinks that the entire Brazil is lost, that we are under a Civil War and that monkeys and other animals are walking on our Jungle streets in the middle of the cities, no it is not... yes, we need help; yes people need to join forces; yes, we need to find ourselves and fix it; but it is still a great country to live, and yes, I love it!

Thanks: beraldo and sysdebug. And I'm happy to discover that advogato upgraded my status, I'm now a Journeyer.

Finally, I managed to sent out those “You (maybe) get money” / “Sorry, no money” mails to the DebConf7 attendees that asked for sponsorship. Nice amount of mail. The process to get to this point involved a bit of mail discussion but also two long and exhausting meetings of the whole team. Basically we had to go through the whole list of people, voting if we would give them money. We could vote yes, no, maybe, pass, which gets scored as 1, -1, 0.5, 0. Then after the meeting simply add all votes for one single attendee together and you know a score for him between 100% and -100%. I wrote a little script for my irssi, making it a bit simpler, but still lots of work. That was later on followed by a second meeting where you decide what you do with the score rates, basically - where do we draw the line of “Gets money”, “Gets no money”, “Maybe, if we have enough”. And you are done. Sounds simple, but uses a lot of energy. Fortunately that was most of the needed work. There will be a little bit during DebConf, and some small pieces until then, but majority is done. Now, everyone, say thanks to those who participated in this team, making it possible for me to send the mails: * Anthony Towns * Steve McIntyre * Moray Allan * Holger Levsen * Amaya Rodrigo * Margarita Manterola * Martin Wuertele * Gunnar Wolf * Junichi Uekawa * Neil McGovern * Marcela Tiznado * Felipe Augusto van de Wiel One thing you encounter with such a wide-spread team is that of “What damn time can we meet?”. You end up with some having the meeting near midnight, while the other have problems waking up.,. :)

random(ideas);

Yes... we can too!

Recently I saw somewhere a link to Google Video about a very nice video: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). So please, if you didn't see this go and watch it now: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645. It is a little bit large (~50 min) but I found some nice information from real experiences that could really help to improve our communication inside Debian. So, for the curious and impatient, it is a Google TechTalk with Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick, SubVersion Developers, based on their experiences they show situations that can drain Project resources and they gave valuable tips, ideas and directions on how to protect the "Attention and Focus" of the Project. It is very interesting to find a lot of factors and points that we can see from time to time on Debian. Don't get me wrong, I'm really not whining, I don't think that whining would solve any problem (except if you are a 6-month hungry child), but I would love if it could give us some momentum and maybe a starting point to leave aside some old unresolved issues, giving a chance to new ideas! Which basically means, keep working together to keep building the best Operating System. :-) (But doing that with even more fun for even more people). We can too! On a totally unrelated note: my primary MX is back for quite some time, I should report that earlier, anyway, sorry about the lack of posts, thanks for your attention and see you soon. Over.

Frustration...

No Primary MX for a while

Since last thursday (2007-02-08) my main MX server was stopped to get some maintainance (IDE problems, could be the hard disk, IDE cables or something else, amazing ahm?), anyway, we moved the important stuff away from the line, did our homework testing the secondary MX and stopped the machine. Until now the DataCenter didn't told me when the machine should be back and I'm really hoping to get it back by tomorrow (2007-02-12).

In the meanwhile, the messages are safe, waiting in a temporary queue, we are not expecting to have a downtime of four long days. Anyway, I will need to catch up with my mail in the next days, I'm trying to keep up-to-date using the web archives and doing l10n stuff for Debian. :-(

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo). The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much! You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

Just for the record!

[*.cloud.*]

Alive. Birthday. Happy. Sad. Changes. Freeze. Packages. i18n. Ideas. Plans. University. Life. Family. Mother. Notebook. Frieds. DebConf. DebConf7. Edinburgh. OLS2007. LI. OpenBeach. Work. Free. Freedom. Debian. Brasil. Sorry. Smooth. Standards. Ideas. Core. Philosophy. Beliefs. World. Creed. 24. Translations. Organization. pt_BR. NMU. l10n. Past. Present. Future. Notes. Messages. Kind. Patience. Friendship. Fellowship. Party. Meeting. Food. Discussion. Debate. Cry. Try. Fix. Solve. Together. Alone. Team. Workgroup. Fast. Again. Just. Me.

Thanks: peretto and enerv.

To infinity, and beyond! -- Buzz

[Debian]

I should write about this a few days ago but didn't have the time. Sorry. Well, these are great news (at least for me), a few days ago I sent the second part of my T&S and already got approved. My AM (Hi Cl ment) also pointed out a few changes that were needed in my packages that are already fixed and uploaded; Cl ment already sent the report and considering that, I'm now waiting for the Front Desk to review my application (and after that, DAMnation. I'm happy! I also finish the adoption of xless and levee. I still have to finish the MyPasswordSafe adoption, but before I have to fix a RC bug related to the use of sudo as the gain-root command (instead of fakeroot) in the alpha buildd. Thanks neuro that already give me a few tips on how to solve it.

Following the random ideas season:

• Next week, Extremadura will host the i18n Debian people, the idea is to discuss lots of ideas, specially i18n Infrastructure, but not only discuss, also code a lot!
• I do not like the idea to have sourceless firmware in main and I really like Don Armstrong proposal on that subject.
• I still have to finish the desproxy, tuxfrw and thumbs packaging work to get it in time for etch.
• I'm wondering how a tally sheet with more than 10 choices looks like

[Anti-SPAM season]

Like a lot of people already did, in the last two weeks I've been fighting SPAM in my company and also on the server of Free Software Projects that I'm part of the System Administration Team. In most cases I'm using postfix with clamscan and postgrey, but I will switch to amavisd-new to use SpamAssassin (with razor/pyzor). But I'm still studying the various alternatives in a Debian Sarge system.

Hey silva, thank you! (Journeyer certification).

13 years...

[Debian]

Happy Birthday!!! I was waiting a little bit, in other parts of the world Debian is already celebrating, now people from Brazil (and also UTC-0300) can join the party! Last Saturday our Debian User Group celebrate the Debian Anniversary with a big barbecue, sports and good conversations during the entire afternoon! Next Saturday (19.August) different Debian User Groups in Brazil will coordinate the Debian Day in different cities at the same time. Have fun! 13 years of Debian and counting! :-)

In a quick note, I'm still moving ahead with my NM. I have to fix a few points on my packages (and I'm still waiting my sponsor -- Hi Otavio! -- to upload a couple of packages). And I have a few more to work on, I hope I find the time in the next days.

[Random Stuff]

At Monday (14.August) night (20h 00min UTC-0300) I visit (pt_BR) a very small city in the state I live in Brazil. They invited me to speak about Debian and Free Software for a group of students and also for locals. It was a nice talk and one of the things that got my attention is the number of women interested, of course, I told them to visit the Debian Women Project (which reminds me that I need to translate the site -- and lots of other files). Back to the work!

Here we go...

[Debian]

On Saturday (05.Aug.2006) I sent the answers for some questions that zorglub (my AM) in reply to the first part of T&S. At the same time he sent the second part of the T&S, that I just replied with the answers. The second part was not as time intensive as the first part (but took me almost the entire weekend to finish).

CVS pserver for webwml repository is still disabled, which makes the life for non-DD translators a little bit hard, since we don't have access to CVS using SSH and all the files and/or patches needs to go throught the very cool commiters on debian-www. Recently, a new helping page (while we do not have pserver access restored), based on the mail sent by Raphael Hertzog to debian-devel, was launched by Frans Pop: tarballs of the webwml CVS repository. Thanks Frans! And I would like to point all translators that use check_trans.pl to the website statistics with a special hint to the specific language page that contains almost the same information from the check_trans.pl and could help to keep track of files being too out of date.

Hello Planet Debian! Goodbye University Vacations!:-)

[Debian]

Thanks to Luk Claes, new translate-docformat was uploaded to fix Policy 7.6 Violation. madcoder has a list of affected packages. During the weekend I work on my packages, I'm waiting for my sponsor to get them uploaded to the archive closing the "adoption process" and fixing a few bugs and lintian warnings. There are some news from the DDTP and no news from the CVS pserver for non-DDs (and unfortunately, in this case: no news, bad news). I also sent a mail do debian-l10n-portuguese about the future of our list, we need to change a few points, create and update documentation, change our coordinators in some areas (they are MIA for quite a while now) and structure the team to be ready for future changes and also to work focused to get as much translations as possible in "etch".

[Life]

That's it... end of my University Vacation. Back to classes, busy schedule for the semester, I hope to manage everything in a very good way, so I can keep up-to-date with my Debian work.

Thanks to Cl ment Stenac (zorglub), my nice AM, this diary now appears in Planet Debian. Two old posts already appeared, but this is the first post that I made being aware that it will appear in Planet. :-) Thanks to Cl ment and Paul Wise.