Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 161

So here I am, sitting at a talk at YAPC::EU 2007, in the beautiful Vienna. It is too early to start thinking about a status report for what I’ve done and talked about, but I can say in advance that I’m very positively impressed - I expected my talk on the integration between CPAN and Debian that the Debian pkg-perl group is carrying out (presentation, full article) to be marginally interesting to a couple of people. Turns out, as YAPC drew closer, I heard from several people interested in attending it. Ok, maybe it is just for courtesy? Lets not...

And no, I don’t mean Mao.How was Thursday 23 for me?6:30 Wake up, knowing it will be a long day. No, don’t get those delicious extra 15 minutes of sleep.8:00</b> Arrive to work, ~90min earlier than usual, to finish the Rails app you have to demo at 10:0010:00 Meeting with the Institute’s Director, Academic Secretary and Technic Secretary to show them the system for following the internal inter-tematic colloquium information workflow. Thankfully, they were happy with it.11:20 (20 minutes after scheduled): As several academics have said they are interested in getting to know Linux, I’m giving a series of introductory...

Joey complains about users filing aggressive or otherwise inappropriate bug reports. Well, in this case I must say I bit the bullet.Yesterday, somebody complained about the maintenance statuse of libapache2-mod-perl2. Usually, I would have sadly nodded and said that, yes, since the API change between mod_perl for Apache 1.x and mod_perl2 for Apache 2.x (which was a long time ago - with perfect timing not to be accepted in the last weeks of Sarge’s hard-freeze period, causing many of us to have to maintain two or even three versions of our code depending on the API used - But that’s...

What does this topic mean? Hmh… Maybe you don’t know Goran Bregovic, a magical Bosnian musician, one of my all-time favorite artists. I have long loved Eastern European music (but I was mostly familiar with the Klezmer style, linked to Ashkenazi Jews but not necessarily performed by them anymore (i.e. Kroke), but it is thanks to Goran that I got familiar with the Balkan style… What can I say about it? It has an addictive rythm, and it has the folk sound of (even very similar instruments to) the Mexican tambora. It is a must-hear genre, in short. There are...

So I have an extra chair today at my office. Is that good?Some weeks ago, I started noticing some stinging and numbness in my legs, specially the left one. I went to the social security, and got a simple prescription: Two weeks having a certain medicine whose name I don’t remember by now. But the timing was not the best, as this happened exactly during my vacations - After finishing with this medication, I still had a full week before coming back to work. And when I came back, things seemed to be fine. But still, this does not tell...

Hmh… It’s hard to get to a decision on this aspect, although I’m mostly sure I’ll vote for a “yes”. I have read most posts on this subject on debian-vote and on the planet, and I’m still not too much at ease… Anyway, one of the most relevants so far is Joerg’s - And not because he is so involved with the NM process, but because he drives me to what I think is a very important point few people have addressed: For long, we have been saying that you don’t have to be a programmer to help Debian -...

Every now and then, I see somebody who -just as Russell did today- talks about the advantages of water heating systems not being tank-based, but tankless! Sounds kewl, hah? Shiny, new?Well… I live at a house that is slowly but steadily started to show its age. Built in 1955 and owned for almost two decades by the very renowned phycisist (of course, my father’s mentor and teacher) Marcos Moshinsky, my parents bought it in 1974, and it has been my home since 1976. And, at least since 1980 (I cannot be sure about earlier events for reasons that might be...

There have been many (too many) social networks coming and going out of fashion in the last years. I got quite excited when I first learnt about them. Advogato was as cool as it could be, and having somebody label me master (even though most had me as a journeyer, IIRC, and that was my level as far as I tracked it) was really inspiring. Then came friendster, and then orkut. I spent far too many hours in them, and was really happy (and surprised!) to find the many ways to my friends, some of them have been out of...

Russell argues (when talking about Mark’s proposed high-end Free Software-based laptop) that laptops are hard (or expensive) hardware to modify and repurpose - Maybe your laptop will one day go to your child or something like that, but it’s hard for it to be a server.I disagree.One of my most faithful and most beloved home servers was my old laptop, a Compaq Armada 4120 we originally got (used, for that matter) in 1998 and that was my main laptop until 2002, when I got my first Dell. 120MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM (later upgraded to 32), 2GB hard disk.From 2002...

Following Zack’s and Lucas’ posts regarding group maintenance of packages: Do I have to AOL with you guys? Yes, I also agree with Zack’s both 1 and 2. And I also want to share the bit of experience we have got in this regard in the pkg-perl group. In our case, group maintainership has often saved our collective butts. We have also debated somewhat which way should our packages’ maintainership be handled. In the end, our packages’ maintainer will (most usually) be the pkg-perl group itself, subscribed through an alias that reaches all of us. Then, every group member that...