Last saturday around 2100 (UTC-0400) some people started joining the #debian-ve IRC channel at OFTC, in order to participate on the very first Venezuelan Bugsquashing Party. We had a lot of people interested not only in squashing but also developing for Debian and other topics. Some DD’s were around, specially An bal Monsalve Salazar (anibal) who has been very helpful on testing and uploading packages. Both me and Jos Luis Rivas (ghostbar) made a couple of NMU’s (in his case, xfe and divine; in mine, sdr and orca), fixing six RC bugs. Jos Luis is like 17 or 18 years old and has proven to be a very energetic Debian collaborator. Other maintainers from Debian Venezuela (actually, we’re eleven persons as of last week) were around but couldn’t make a NMU at the time of the event. Others weren’t even present. It was a very small BSP indeed, but we learned lots of things and hopefully our work will help improving the quality in Debian a little bit. It also settles our desires as a group to improve our knowledge and work together to improve the Project without disrupting the overall ecosystem. By the way, the Venezuelan Debconf is definitely going to happen between October 17th. and 21st. Hopefully we’ll have Benjamin Mako Hill, Enrico Zini, Alvaro Lopez Ortega (OMG! Cherokee!) and Randal Schwartz sharing a nice time with people from all parts of Venezuela and the rest of South America. Some local Debian maintainers will set up some nice workshops and demonstrations, ranging from Xen and LTSP in Debian to QA and the local GNU/Linux distribution projects. This local Debconf is part of a larger event, the World Forum on Free Knowledge, which some people at Debian Venezuela help to make. Returning to the BSP topic, I was looking out at a couple of bugs out there, but I lack the hardware and the experience to handle them. One of this is #333915 and other orca bugs, and other one is #385078 regarding a Debconf script in xserver-xorg. The morning before the BTS I was testing the MBONE tools with a friend of mine, and we were quite unhappy by the fact that sdr was almost unusable (passing the mouse cursor over some buttons resulted in annoying notices). So, if you use sdr, please test the last NMU I sent, which fixes two bugs. Just for reference, the webpage where I keep my Debian-related work is here. The case where I learned most was #386938, regarding xserver’s FTBFS in s390. Events like BSP are a great way to motivate people to participate in the Project: while trying to learn anything about this bug I ended reading documentation from IBM, asking advice from someone with an S/390, sending a couple of emails to debian-s390@lists.d.o, browsing at a DD patch in upstream, looking at buildd logs, searching the Web for opcodes lists… usually trying to explain how all this pieces join in a sane way (most times; well, some times, well, seldomly) is quite difficult for someone who tries to promote Debian, but technical events like the BSP provide a really accurate way to see how things work in and around Debian.

apt-proxy has become an omnipresent tool in Debian-based environments. Both in work and in my clients I usually install it so we have a great way to save bandwidth (in a Country where a 512 Kbps ADSL line costs you around 50$/month, it matters) I have noticed also several Ubuntu users using it, even in big environments where a local mirror might be justified and even when other solutions like apt-cacher seem to be getting stronger. Sadly, current state of apt-proxy is not so good (see bugs 282746, 316670, 274679, 262528, 327268, 302503, 295329 and probably others). While upstream is doing a great job implementing fixes, the user base has evolved very quickly and it’s starting to find (and fix) bugs by its own. One example of this is the current release of this version of apt-proxy, made by Daniel Baur, which implements pending patches for eight bugs, including patches which solve Ubuntu-specific issues. A partial debdiff which shows the relevant changes on the code is here for the lazy admin. Chris Halls has acknowledged these fixes and plans to upload a new version to Sid soon. That would be a happy-ending chapter of saving apt-proxy from death. Personally, I’m going to have a closer look on apt-cacher while this new package appears.

I flooded the Planet just by upgrading WordPress. So this weekend it’s happening in Caracas. The National Free Software Congress (CNSL) arrives to the capital in the second edition of the only nation-wide Free Software event. It will take place on Colegio Universitario de Caracas, in La Floresta, near the Indian Embassy, France Square and other nice landmarks of the city. The event is promoted by GLoVE, a national NGO which is currently organizing the CNSL and hosting several Linux User Groups (the whole list here in spanish, follow the links) including CHASLUG, the Free Software Users Group for the Young. I’m part of the group, but it’s currently run by three guys under 18. As in FLISOL Caracas, this will be a themed event featuring two days of conferences, keynote speakers, workgroups, expositions, installation festival and security related events. The first day is aimed to Free Software in Society, including presentations from government officials related to recent activities towards the Country migration. As Enrico pointed it in debconf-discuss and debian-project, some recent activities have been turning stronger the Free Software migration process in Venezuela. The announcement from the Department of Science and Technology of the mass capacitation of the citizens in the usage of computers featuring the Gnome Desktop Environment took everyone by surprise. Numbers are varying, being the more conservative around 400.000 people having their first computer relationship with Free Software, GNU/Linux and Gnome. Distribution? I haven’t see it yet, but most likely it will be Debian (the whole Department is using Debian) Saturday will also feature some conferences from community members about their experience on Free Software usage and how they can change the way people communicate and act with each other, specially noting the nationwide speech from Octavio Rossell about Free Software and GNU/Linux and the interesting presentation from Efra m M rquez-Arreaza on Business Models. Finally, on saturday, renowned economist Felipe P rez-Mart will be presenting his work Game Theory Applied to the Free Software Development Model. Sunday will be a hands-on day, like in FLISOL Caracas. The main speeches focus on development, featuring experienced programmers on PHP, Perl and Mono presenting Web and Desktop development tendencies in those programming languages. We will also feature an Ajax presentation and three workgroups about Linux Distributions, Web Development and Free Software and Education. On special guests, CNSL Caracas is proud to announce the visit of two fellow partners from IEEE Colombia: Erika Luque and Jeffrey Borb n from the District University of Bogot , and the special conference from Rafael N ez, who was apprehended in Miami, FL (US) for the massive attack of 679 servers in 2001, one of whom was the Air Force Training System in Colorado. He was also accused of attacking the Department of Defense servers and stealing confidential data from NASA. He made seven months of prision in Denver after declaring himself guilty of all charges and having the Judge to look on evidence of his work against child pornography with the Venezuelan CICPC. (more info in spanish) On the security side, Sunday will host the second Key Signing Party (guidelines in spanish here) and the first CACert assurance in Venezuela. We made the first KSP in CNSL Aragua (where I had the opportunity to speak about Debian and make a hands-on session on Marvelous Debian) with about 10 people. This time we’re aiming to something between 25 and 50 people. This is the first event promoting security culture in our Country and hopefully it will have a warm welcome in the public. Caracas will also be the inflexion point of the Congress, which will now travel to the Eastern part of the Country, usually forgotten by all the hacktivists in Venezuela. In states Sucre, Monagas and Bol var people is ready to have their first contact with free software through this Congress and hopefully next year the Congress will have a venue in each state of the Country (including the two most inhabited by natives, Delta Amacura and Amazonas) If you’re in Caracas, you’re welcome to pass by after registering (it’s free as in who cares) and if you’re not, you’re welcome to listen to the streaming that will be announced here. See you there!

The Latin American Infest finally ended yesterday. In Caracas, it was a week of hard work with people of the Science and Technology Department and the IT Office (government offices) but the event in Caracas ended succesfully. It was a world-class event featuring renowned keynote speakers who spoke about Web Development using Frameworks (featuring TurboGears, Rails and Catalyst) and software development paradigms migration from privative platforms to GNU/Linux (Gambas and Mono). Other talks included basic security in Debian GNU/Linux and a speak about electronic signature security by an officer of the Venezuelan Government CA. We had a speak about Clusters, hosted by a female member of the Venezuelan Free Software Community and Debian User, and a speak about Free Software in the Venezuelan Education, by a 16-year-old Venezuelan GNU/Linux user and a willing Debian Maintainer. Of course, the Installation Festival took place in the Knowledge Square, in the Auditorium Building Lobby, with the extraordinary support of the Venezuelan Free Software Users Community. Debian GNU/Linux Sarge netinst and CD1 was distributed (several hundreds) as well as Knoppix and Ubuntu Hoary. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (maintainer) and me wore Debian T-Shirts on Saturday, and he made a great speech about the Project, named “Debian is inexorable“. We had demonstrations of Linux on a Mac Mini, using XGl and presenting several applications, as well as Debian running Enlightenment on an old Presario 1246 laptop. I would like to thank all the speakers and the attendees for making of FLISOL Caracas a great event. More information about FLISOL Caracas is in my blog and the homepage (spanish). Pics are here.

Yesterday I booked a flight with TACA from Caracas to MEX, via SJO. I’m flying on May 12th. (so hopefully I can arrive for Debian Day) and returning on May 25th., in the same flight. The flight is gonna take 6 hours from Caracas. Ana (from Debian Venezuela) will be flying with me in the return flight.Nos vemos en Mexico!

I was at a client today when I remembered that David was due to arrive to Caracas circa 1430, so I called him to his brand-new-venezuelan-GSM-cellphone and I found out that he was in problems. In big, dark, awful problems. As I told in previous posts, he went to San Crist bal (near the border with Colombia) to visit his girl and know the city. He departed from Caracas in a bus on Friday night and arrived on Saturday morning. He spent the whole weekend there, and in Monday he was due to leave San Crist bal through the Mayor Buenaventura Vivas Military Airbase, in a civilian airplane. He arrived just on time for his flight, rushing to take the plane on time, and he was stopped by two so-called Inmigration Officials who demanded to see his passport. He recently got a new one from the Passport Office in Mexico City, so he had a brand new passport with the Venezuelan Entry Stamp (Mexicans don’t need a visa to enter Venezuela)
ONIDEX, the National Office for Inmigration. Praised for lots of people for fighting against Passport Corruption, kidnaps people in San Cristobal. The Officials told him that his passport was a fake, and they told him that, from this time on, he was under arrest. They made him leave the Airport quickly and took him in a civilian vehicle with no identifications. They started the trip to San Crist bal City (1 hour away from the Airport in a very scary road) and they kept telling him that his passport was fake (they claimed that the Passport didn’t have the watermarks, and stuff) Soon their position changed and a common practice in Venezuelan officials started: extorsion. They told him that there were “several ways to fix the problem”, and asked him what was in his backpack (which had a laptop, but he denied it): they were demanding money, and David wasn’t prone to do that.
National Guard. Doesn’t have a /proc/clue about anything. They drove David to the Inmigration Office in San Crist bal and told him that they “made” some tests to the passport and they determined that the passport was fake. They told David that their “Commander” told they that he should be deported into Colombia, since he was a “very important member of a Cartel that they were willing to capture”
DISIP: the Venezuelan Political Police. They were helpful in this episode, but they’re not angels. Finally, hours after that charade of Officials telling him funny laws, stupid suppositions and wanting him to give them money, they left David in the Bus Terminal in San Crist bal, where he was able to talk to Ana, from Debian Venezuela, which picked him up and went back to the Airport. The two “Officials” weren’t there anymore, and he had a last problem with the National Guard which had stupid suppositions about his trip, and stuff (this is common, but at least it’s not illegal) before he was able to get into the plane. Being in Caracas, I was really worried. Between Ana, my mother and me we were able to move several people to check David status in the Airport (my mother called four members of the Venezuelan FAA, I called the Venezuelan CIA and Ana called the Vicechancellor) and this probably saved David’s life and money, since the “Officials” might have been scared by the movement of people caring about David. He’s safe now, back in Caracas, in home. He has all his stuff and his health is OK (yet he was scared when he arrived, which I fully understand) Why am I writing this post? I’m really concerned about what happened to David, and I want to make a public statement on this. Somehow, we venezuelans got used to this kind of practices in our Country. Probably 40 years of pseudo-democracy with messy governors helped, maybe it’s a matter of education and culture. I don’t really care about this, but I do care about what they’re doing with the people in my Country. Today, President Chavez declared that a dance against corruption was going to start. I think it’s the fourth time he’s making something about corruption, and he’s failing. There’s a gang of people in San Cristobal, Mr. President, who tries to rob and scare the visitors. They should be in jail. They arrested somebody illegally. It’s forbidden in our Constitution to arrest somebody without having proofs to do it (we have one of the best Constitutions in the World, experts say, but we don’t have people who obey it). If you’re going to arrest an alien, you need to have a Public Prosecutor in place, writing down a legal document and guaranteeing the safety of the detained. This people should be in jail.
Stop Corruption! Though, as my mother later said to David, two awful Venezuelan people kidnapped David, but probably twenty Venezuelan people quickly acted to find out what was happening. We might be a Third World Country, but we use to be able to get out of our problems by our own. And, hell it’s rewarding. I want to apologize in the name of all venezuelans to David and to make a clear statement against corruption: we venezuelan won’t tolerate more corruption. We’ve grown between that, buying places in a line to get our National ID Card, paying one million bolivares to get a Passport appointment. We’re sick of this. This is not the great Venezuela we live in. Please, losers, shoot yourselves. Or eat rat poison, whichever makes less stains.

The Latin American Free Software Install Party (FLISOL) will take place in 12 countries of the continent, including Cuba, and featuring Argentina and Colombia. In Venezuela, it’s happening in ten cities in several regions of the Country, including Los Andes, Los Llanos, the Central Region and the Paraguan Peninsula. I’m organizing the event in Caracas, which already has a webpage (in spanish) FLISOL will take place on March 25th, a Saturday, but in several cities of Venezuela we will have a two-day event. In Caracas, it will happen on Friday and Saturday. We will feature hands-on workshops and demonstrations (featuring a Debian GNU/Linux hands-on workshop), a Keysigning Party (it won’t be massive, though) and a Web Frameworks and Application Servers Forum, featuring Rails, Catalyst, J2EE, and Zope. I expected David to be in Caracas for the FLISOL, but he’s gonna travel to San Crist bal to participate in their FLISOL. I don’t expect a big attendance to the event (the Auditorium of the Science and Technology Ministry, the main sponsor, has capacity for circa 200 people) but I hope it becomes a fresh event, different from those we’re used to. This will be, also, a good preparation for the World Forum on Free Knowledge, the National Free Software Congress and the DebConf. I hope the main topic on the FLISOL will be the recent, terrible, awful, and completely disgusting Ubuntu security flaw.

As I see it, there are three positions:

• Those who think that everybody except their candidate is a teletubbie
• Those who think everyone has a chance to win except the teletubbie
• Those who don’t care about teletubbies and would rather vote for Power Rangers

Yes, someone already told it: is that time of the year again. This small and insignificant fact (the DPL election) can shock the entire Debian Community. This kind of stuff makes us the fun, social and rewarding Debian Community some people claim we should be. The people who only cares about developing will keep working disregarding all the social conflicts. So most people won’t take much care about the Election, pick up a candidate, vote and keep working
It says: Welcome - Bolivarian Revolutionary Government of the Merida State David has more than one week in Venezuela. I’m gladly offering him accomodation in my house, bandwidth and all the support he needs for the next twenty years. We spent a weekend in Merida (which is in the Venezuelan Andes) in some Free Software Workshops and the rest of the week we have been working in several migration projects in the Company I’m working with. We have setup g33k!, a small server in my room running Debian (and Cherokee and Jaws) just for fun and testing. He’s leaving to San Crist bal (the capital of a state in the border with Colombia) on Friday and I should be finishing my semester as well. The next big Free Software event in Venezuela is the Latin American Infest. See you there!

Yesterday I was making some operations on the BTS Control Server and found some nice behaviours that I already reported to owner, and Don answered right the way. If you use reportbug to make an ITP (because, err, you want to) it will say that your mail should be cc’ed to debian-devel, per Policy. It will also cc the report to your address. So yesterday I made an ITP and the mail went out with the following headers:

From: Jose Parrella <joseparrella cantv.net>
...
X-Debbugs-Cc: <debian-devel lists.debian.org>

Everything ok. When it arrived to the BTS, a new header appeared:

Resent-CC: <debian-devel lists.debian.org>,
<wnpp debian.org>, jose parrella <joseparrella cantv.net>

Notice my lowered-case name. I didn’t notice this, and I was merging bugs later, but the merge operation failed because of a case-sensitive mismatch between “Jose Parrella” and “jose parrella”. So there’s an incongruence in what happens when it tries to get the owner from the pseudo headers and when you try to set it through Control Bugs. At least if you use reportbug, be careful if your name is being lc’ed since merges will fail.

While being in Mexico City, I walked around downtown and several other places of the city. One of this places was a block full of chinese restaurants which resulted to be (guess what) the Chinatown in Mexico City. Besides the real cheap buffet deals (60 MEX -> 6 USD -> 12000 VEB) in chinese food, I found a street seller (which in Venezuela is called a buhonero but I’m not sure how they call it in Mexico) which was selling all kind of chinese overstock stuff. This usually includes those kitties with chinese eyes, and the little bells painted, and maybe some handcrafted sticks… but this guy was throwing a pair of magnets in the air while selling this stuff. The magnets made an incredible sound when they attracted themselves in the air and bounced. I asked if those were on sale (of course, it’s Latin America) and I bought a pair for 20 MEX. While in home, I was playing around with the magnets, impressed by the power they had (in my first term in the University I had to made a maglev train and we spent hard time finding good magnets to show the different forms of generating magnetic fields). If you place one of these magnets in the floor and approach to it with the other at, say, 10 centimeters, the other magnet starts moving away really fast (and chaotically, also) One of the most interesting parts of the magnet stuff was making both of them to spin about 7 centimeters apart. One of them stops at some time and starts spinning again just by the magnetic fields they produce. Of course you can play all sort of stuff like making a dog chase a magnet around a table while you “move” it with the other magnet under the table. All the fun stuff has a bad part, of course. I was hanging around with the magnets around my home and then my girlfriend found out “weird” purple spots in all the televisions and monitors around the place. Damn magnets!

After reading this thread in debconf-discuss, I think we all agree in the following items:

• Madduck’s a cracker. He sleeps inside his fake ID one hour a day (which is the total time he sleeps). The magic fake ID also has anti-agening properties and increases your karma.
• Enrico’s Advocate is the Devil (but only in the Transylvanian Republic) but is currently too busy figuring out an Inquisition model for the DCG
• Since DC7, we’ll be introducing the new term Web of Untrust. It’s a big web made of crazy glue where we will throw the people with fake ID’s. Afterwards we can throw honey at them and eat some popcorn while watching the ants eating them.
• Next year orga will include a large wooden stick so you can hit anyone approaching you without a valid DNA report confirmed by at least three NATO countries, as required by the new GNU Hermit Privacy model. RMS will be selling his signatures for your Hermit Key, cost 50 MXN.
• Next DC KSP organizer will be Pancho Villa
• Most people will get their keys signed by Manoj manyana. Please wait seated.

Now seriously, I think the whole point behind key signing is, as Holger philosophed about and Vorlon answered, to know who is the guy behind the key. If I sign your key, I won’t trust you and give you my money for you to keep it, but if I had to do this and you steal me, I can blame you. And the whole point behind a party is to have fun. So it’s a time to take profit of a useful tool while having fun, so please don’t panic.

For my hispanohablantes readers: this post is written in english since it’s gonna be syndicated into Planet Debian. Expect a post in spanish later in the day. If you can understand spoken spanish, I recommend you to hear the Free Software talk of M.Sc. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Debian Maintainer) which ends noting several benefits of using Debian GNU/Linux. Available here. Update: other posts in spanish are already available in Planeta Linux Venezuela. Yesterday we (SOLVE, a Venezuelan Association of Free Software Users, Developers, Cooperatives and Entrepreneurs) had the opportunity to assist to a Free Software vs. Privative Software forum. This doesn’t sound amazing, indeed. But if you take into account that the Forum was held in the National Assembly (or House of Representatives, anyway I’ll call it AN) it gets better. Now, get this idea: the AN is having a forum to discuss a Law, and it’s listening to the parts involved. Let it sink for a minute. But what if the AN is also bringing this parts to a table to actually write the Law? This is how laws are made in our Country now (Damog always says we are terribly nationalistic. It may be true, indeed.) Anyway, we were there around 10 AM, in the Protocolar Room of the AN. The event was full-house, featuring two thirds of people supporting proprietary software (students between 17 and 20 years from the countryside and big entrepreneurs -and Microsoft, of course-) and one third of people supporting free software, including people working in the Government, students, cooperatives, developers, etc. The session was opened by Representative Luis Tasc n, which once was a great supporter of Free Software (now it seems the same for him, anyway he’s doing a great job changing the law-making roadmap) and the speakers were: Microsoft, the National Center for IT, Cavecom (the association of big software enterprises in Venezuela) in the Dark Side and Felipe P rez Mart (from SOLVE) and Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Sim n Bol var University) in the White Side. Kudos for IBM, in the Gray Side with Black Spots. The session of talks was incredibly amusing. The speakers started to change their opinions based on the last talk. So, this way, Berrizbeitia (Director, CNTI) tried to discuss Tascon (Representative), the Microsoft Brazilian guy tried to oppose Berrizbeitia, the guy from Cavecom fighted Microsoft (this guy was a complete moron, by the way: when he was told that a group of venezuelan people had developed translations into wayuunaiki he said that was useless since we only have 800 wayuu - native americans) the IBM-boy tried to say they were the best, Felipe Perez (SOLVE) tried to dismantle Berrizbeitia’s talk and finally Ernesto Heranndez-Novich roundkicked them all. The kids from Microsoft (wearing MSDN and VisualStudio shirts) said that Microsoft is a good company which is open-source and gives the code for free. I argued some of them that they were working free for Microsoft. They “hadn’t see it that way”. They also said the plain-ol’-good excuse that “free software was weaker since everyone can see it’s code”. They were changing their strategies and opinions sistematically as the Forum evolved. They argued no compatibility, security problems, and finally they arrived to their real reason to oppose Free Software. Several girls and boys (Daddy’s Boys, as we say to them) were arguing “no free speech” in the Country (which was amusing since this is the first time the National Assembly is writing the laws with the People) and that the Law was going to make them lose their years of University studies. Then, the most accurate of the interventions came, made by Rogmar Marin from Venezuelan Patents and Author Rights Office. He said that this event was all about the people controlling the State, not the State controlling the people. He cited two articles from the draft and the 3390 decree explicitly saying that Free Software was mandatory for Government (in the Decree it says the “National Public Administration” and in the Law it says the “National Public Power”) so he said that they were not going to lose their “bicoca” (a popular form to say “rivers of money”) since they still can program in whatever they want, just that the State has the right to decie the best for their people, and the best for their people was Free Software. This was the whole quid of the event. This is not about Free Software vs. Proprietary Software. This is not about Linux vs. Windows. This is not about IBM vs. Microsoft vs. Venezuelan Companies. This is about the best for the People (which is the maximum interest of the AN) and, in this case, the People was represented not only by the intellectual-closed-circles of Free and Proprietary Software, but by Ana Maria Morillo, from the Cambalache community in Puerto Ordaz, at the southern part of the Country. She said that their Community had absolutely no access to technology. They were poor and humble, and willing to learn. CVG Telecom, a State-based telecom company, installed a Nudetel (no, it’s not an ethic-relaxed phone operator. It stands for Telecommunications Endogen Development Kernel) in their Community, using Free Software. This was their first approach to technology and computers. They didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. Free Software helped them to approach the reality of computers. They felt prepared to use a computer, and proud of themselves. When they used privative software in other places, they needed to adapt to that technology. This demonstrates that Free Software is as easy as any Software. You need to adapt to it. The difference with Free Software is that you are free when you use it. The people from Cambalache appreciate that. Felipe Perez Marti talk was really good. He slapped Microsoft and opposed very roughly to the “technological neutrality” position of the CNTI Director, Jorge Berrizbeitia. Technological neutrality is a neo-liberal, right-wing doctrine which is the technological counterpart to laissez faire, laissez passer. The problem is that (Felipe is an economist, and a great mathematician) technological neutrality isn’t actual neutral. It happens under the conditions where the Smith’s “Invisible Hand” Theorem is valid, so, in a scenary of technological neutrality, the powerful always wins. So, Microsoft wins. He also noted the recent study funded by the United States Homeland Security and carried on by Carnegie Mellon, Coverity and Symantec, which stated that Proprietary Software had between 20 and 30 bugs per TLOC (thousand lines of code) while FOSS had only 0.434 bugs per TLOC. The Microsoft guy seemed astonished by the “discovery” and the students were offended by this. Great. What next? We brought CD’s for people, made Debian evangelization to several “disident” students, made a great cheer to every Free Software supporter, brought signs and SOLVE shirts. While the Microsoft dudes where more than twice times us, we were a coherent group which stayed until 1930 (they left at 1600, you know, it’s a Micro matter of Soft) and held great arguments, sometimes slapping the student’s moral, but definitely making our voice be heard after tenths of years being discriminated by companies, Universities and the Government. As a Debian Project volunteer, what’s your opinion about this? Is the State violating Free Speech taking this decisions? Does it have the right to take it? Is Free Software the best solution for the corporate environments of the Government, taking into account that it handles the citizen information? What are your general comments about this?

for gotchi in *; do convert -rotate 180 $gotchi $gotchi; done

I’ve found this photomontage at the Chewie’s blog (hilarious) (the blog also, not only the photomontage) BTW, me and around 6 more people from Venezuela are coming to DebConf 6 in Oaxtepec. That if you don’t count David, of course. Everything can happen. Even some people are waiting for a last-minute Venezuelan government sponsorship… I was originally travelling with Colombian flag carrier Avianca in the itinerary CCS - BOG - MEX, but this was expensive, slow and uncomfortable for me to pay (the travel agency is in a city 2 hours away from Caracas) so I went to my plain-ol’-good travel agency in Caracas and found a special offer from Mexicana with a student fare. I have to wait until April to buy it, but it’s worth the wait. I now have my Venezuelan and Spanish passports, but someone told me that Mexico won’t take my old Venezuelan passport (the Country changed names, from Republica de Venezuela to Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela on 1999) since we have diplomatic problems with them, and also they told me that my Spanish passport won’t do for entering Mexico since I’m not travelling from Europe. So I have to request the new Andean Community Passport (links in spanish). See you in Mexico!

Taken from Getting Around Germany website. It’s worth nothing that Germany is a union country, and transport strikes (Streik) can occur at any time, although it is still a fairly rare occurrence and there is usually plenty of advance notice. Still, travelers should beware that even a short “warning strike” (Warnungstreik) in one city can ripple through the entire system, causing long delays and even cancellations. On these days, be prepared to adjust your travel plans and wait longer than usual. An interesting note about these situations: since trains and punctuality are so important in the German world, the DB will hand-out official “certificates of train tardiness” (Bescheinigung ber Zugversp tung) if a train is late. You can use these as “excuse slips” for arriving late to work, school, or other appointments.

Today my boss asked me for a method to clearly umount and afterwards eject a CDROM media on the event of trying to eject the tray using the drive button. I googled around a bit and found auto-eject-cdrom, in the public domain, and originally written by Jens Axboe, from SuSe, and Peter Willis, in 2001 and 2005 respectively. The problem with this little application is that it was unable to eject both my boss drive and mine. It did umount the filesystem but did not eject the tray. So I dig into the code and found that it used plain, old cdrom events, handled by the cdrom kernel module. The event was, in fact, defined in <linux/cdrom.h> as:
#define CDROMEJECT 0×5309 /* Ejects the cdrom media */ I found out that using system (”eject”); as my quick and dirty solution after the umount was working ok, but I was losing performance because eject is used for ejecting floppy disks, tapes and several other media. In fact, eject can figure out which media is he working with so he selects the proper method of ejecting, but I was bitten by the curiosity. So I implemented both the cdrom commands and the SCSI commands for ejecting the tray, in two functions, copypasted from the eject.c, previously apt-get source‘ed and I’m putting this interesting piece of code to the public domain (most likely it should go with a GPL license, since I used GPL’ed code on it) here: auto-eject-cdrom v0.3. A relevant and important piece of code goes now:

        /* Here I use two different methods for ejecting the CDROM. This is for fun only,
           since I could use system(\"eject\"); but this is the dirty hack. Here I use the only
           two CDROM-related eject functions from the eject.c file of the eject program
           by Jeff Tranter (tranter@pobox.com) - Note by Jose Parrella  */

Installing is just a matter of compiling and copying to /usr/local/sbin and running it as auto-eject-cdrom &. I hope it’s useful for those of you who can not afford to use one of the keys of your keyboard to assign the eject command to it. Enjoy!

Call For Papers for the 4th. World Forum on Free Knowledge is now released in english (non-official translation, sorry for mine) and spanish. The WFFK is a Community-organized Forum, made possible by the sponsorship of Government Enterprises and Private Enterprises, as well as Volunteers and Donations. The first was made in Caracas, on November 2004, in the installations of the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, with the sponsorship of the Venezuelan Oil Company, PDVSA. The second WFFK was made in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala-India, under the name Free Software, Free Society in May 2005, and the third WFFK was made in Maracaibo, Venezuela, with the support of several Institutions, including PDVSA, CONATEL and serveral others. Impressed by the success of the 3rd. WFFK, a group of people is organizing the fourth, which will take place in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, in October 2006. This is the first ocassion a Call For Papers is being done, because the Forum will have a Congress inside it, as well as selected articles. In the past, we only had selected articles and invited speakers on a certain basis. This time, a Call For Papers will also be done, so we can invite nice speakers to come and share with the attendance. Last time in Maracaibo we had David Moreno Garza with us, as well as several Debian Maintainers and Co-Maintainers with us, from Venezuela and Colombia: Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich, Polkan Garc a, Ernesto Crespo, V ctor P rez, Ana Delgado, Gerardo Curiel, Manuel Garc a, V ctor P rez and myself (am I missing someone?). So this was quite a MiniDebConf! Let’s make the 4th. a complete one

I’m really conservative about bags. I’ve got three backpacks, one for school, one for the laptop and one for travelling, a laptop messenger bag and a small messenger sidebag. These accomplish different duties, mostly carrying books, tools, magazines, random stuff and of course the laptop. Starting 2006, I use to carry only the laptop backpack, which fits all my needs. When I go out I use to carry the messenger bags. Anyway… I have this stuff in my bag. What’s in your bag? (no, I’m not a Capital One representative)

The Latin American Infest finally ended yesterday. In Caracas, it was a week of hard work with people of the Science and Technology Department and the IT Office (government offices) but the event in Caracas ended succesfully. It was a world-class event featuring renowned keynote speakers who spoke about Web Development using Frameworks (featuring TurboGears, Rails and Catalyst) and software development paradigms migration from privative platforms to GNU/Linux (Gambas and Mono). Other talks included basic security in Debian GNU/Linux and a speak about electronic signature security by an officer of the Venezuelan Government CA. We had a speak about Clusters, hosted by a female member of the Venezuelan Free Software Community and Debian User, and a speak about Free Software in the Venezuelan Education, by a 16-year-old Venezuelan GNU/Linux user and a willing Debian Maintainer. Of course, the Installation Festival took place in the Knowledge Square, in the Auditorium Building Lobby, with the extraordinary support of the Venezuelan Free Software Users Community. Debian GNU/Linux Sarge netinst and CD1 was distributed (several hundreds) as well as Knoppix and Ubuntu Hoary. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (maintainer) and me wore Debian T-Shirts on Saturday, and he made a great speech about the Project, named “Debian is inexorable“. We had demonstrations of Linux on a Mac Mini, using XGl and presenting several applications, as well as Debian running Enlightenment on an old Presario 1246 laptop. I would like to thank all the speakers and the attendees for making of FLISOL Caracas a great event. More information about FLISOL Caracas is in my blog and the homepage (spanish). Pics are here.

Yesterday I booked a flight with TACA from Caracas to MEX, via SJO. I’m flying on May 12th. (so hopefully I can arrive for Debian Day) and returning on May 25th., in the same flight. The flight is gonna take 6 hours from Caracas. Ana (from Debian Venezuela) will be flying with me in the return flight.Nos vemos en Mexico!