Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 163

Ok, so LPI will be at Debconf, giving discounted certifications to registered attendees. Is this good or bad? Mario likes the idea, Madduck is in the middle ground, not decided on his stance on this regard, and Joerg basically says it’s not worth much to him personally. Actually, I’ll quote Madduck, as he has an interesting point:<blockquote>I am not looking for employment, and if I was, I’d certainly not want to work at a company that thinks certifications are the true proof of capabilities. So I guess that leaves me with a ‘no’ still.</blockquote> When confronted with this topic, I...

This looks like random blabbering, right? A very specific random blabbering that has somehow appeared in blogs of at least tens (if not hundreds, maybe even more) blogs of techies all over the place. What is it?For the more tech-friendly readers, it has some resemlance to a number - a long number, a 32128 bit one. And for those of you who are not Computer Science minded, you might actually prefer to see it as a simple base-10 (that means, decimal system) number: 13’256,278’887,989’457,651’018,865’901,401’704,640. I don’t know how to spell it in English, but I do in Spanish (why? Because...

Thanks to Romain Francoise, I found and watched Martin Michlmayr’s Release Management in Large Free Software Projects talk on Google Video’s Open Source Speaker series. Martin: Thanks a lot, great talk. I’ve been following your presentations lately, as I’ve given some talks on this topic - Quality Assurance on Free Software Projects (Spanish only) - However hard I try to remain faithful to the subject, I end up giving a talk on what Free Software is and how its processes are naturally more prone to yielding better quality than propietary projects. Anyhow, with this post I want to do basically...

I was trying to make a credit-card purchase on the web. The site I was trying to give money to prefers not to directly handle such messy details, and outsource their credit card application to Google. So far, so good - I got redirected to Google Checkout. Ok, I start filling in my personal data, until… WTF? and yes, I do mean it. WTF? I live, as many of you know, in a little country called Mexico. No, it does not appear on many world atlases. It’s so very small, only slightly below two million square kilometers, that it’s easily...

Ok, so it just seems like a hot topic - I just submitted a BoF for Debcamp to talk about the init-related ideas we’ve been discussing. As Debconf’s Pentabarf conference management system does not like disclosing talk details before the talks are accepted, I’ll reproduce here my short blurb: This BoF comes out from several ideas posted in Planet Debian by Erich Schubert, Sven Müller, Joachim Breitner, Mike Homey and myself (so far). It's not to be "chaired" by any of us particularly, but I expect an interesting brainstorming session. There are several different init systems present in Debian -...

First of all, sorry for the delay. Leaving just as the discussion gets started is bad, yes… But I’m only now reading Erich’s and Sven’s follow-ups. Both (as well as some comments in my blog) ask why not integrating the startup links in each of the packages - Well, basically because I don’t think that most maintainers will take care to do this, and we will end up having a situation very close to what we have today: If I’m not interested in supporting your favorite init system in my packages, I just won’t bother to make the scripts. Note:...

I was delighted at finding Erich’s series of posts regarding init schemes - In fact, when reading the bottom of your third message I got disappointing at you stating that this concludes this series of blog posts. Maybe someone can follow up with some details on upstart (which seems to be the most promising init replacement)? - I expected you to delve a bit into other schemes, such as file-rc (which is, AFAIK, quite similar to the standard sysv-rc, but instead of having directories with symlinks has files describing each runlevel in similar terms, and I understand works in quite...

Wow, what a wonderful weekend was this for Debian. And, yet again, I managed to miss the live announcement and party on IRC. So… We got a shiny, new, French DPL. Just after that, we got one last release for Sarge, and right away we got a stable Etch - Who says having a new DPL cannot speed up things? ;-) Anyway… I don’t remember where I started the meme when Sarge was released (it was not on my blog, it seems)… But here it goes again: What were you doing at… Etch release? Having a nice time with Nadezhda,...

As I’ve posted before, I recently read Lawrence Rosen’s Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. And I’m sure many of you will recognize the enormous constructive value of early-morning cavilations. Well, today I woke up thinking about strengths and weaknesses in th different Free Software licenses, and I decided to add my grain to the world of license proliferation. So, here goes version 3.14 of the CoPL. I wonder how long will it take before it reaches /usr/share/common-licenses on Debian systems ;-) CONFUSING PUBLIC LICENSE ======================== This is version 3.14 of the Confusing Public License (referred to...

Wow! I got a mail from the YAPC::Europe organizers telling me I won a book for registering early and sending in a submission (as I have previously told you). I was even more surprised to find out I am one out of two lucky winners! So my new book is Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof. No news yet on whether my talk (Integrating Perl in a wider distribution: The Debian pkg-perl group) will be accepted… But this kind of incentive does push me towards attending even if I am not accepted - Of course, it depends on the University sending me...