Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 163

A long time ago, I wrote the system that still manages the Cuerpo Académico Historia del Presente group in the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. Yes, I’m happy a good portion of my project, which took me over a year of work… But I must admit a nice deal of shame as well. Of course, it comes from not properly understanding the domain data and information volume my system would be working with - and coming up with a stupid way to implement searches. I won’t get too much in detail because, even if you had access to the full search facility...

After a long time talking this as a mere potential would-be-nice thing, finally we are putting some action behind our words: One week from now, Sergio Mendoza and I will start a ~2 month long extracurricular course on Debian. The students? We have 12 students of the Facultad de Ciencias at my University. The students are pre- and post-graduate (licenciatura and maestría), from the Phsyics and Astronomy areas. Sergio got this group as he is a teacher and researcher at Instituto de Astronomía. While this first iteration is completely extra-curricular, unofficial and by invitation only, we expect this pilot course...

Scott complains on how Linux Format #93’s articles comparing Ubuntu and other distributions often contradict each other, and blames it on the lack of any editorial direction or basic research. I… Have to confirm this. But anyway, I can stand a bit on the different writers’ side - Each article is written by a different person and, although the magazine must try to be coherent (of course, within certain limits - if the magazine suggests editor’s picks in one article, they should not bash them to death in the next one). I write the Linux column in the Spanish edition...

I did it. We did it. The whole lot of us did it. And we liked it. In fact, we loved it. Today, Spencer Tunick held his long awaited <a href=http://spencertunickmexico.unam.mx/”>session in Mexico City</a>. I signed up a long time ago, yet could not believe this was really going to happen - And man, did it happen! For those still wondering who is Tunick (lazy you, as with the first link, it becomes just obvious), he is an artist who enjoys gathering large crowds, getting them all naked, and photographing them. Some people (including me, until this morning) erroneously categorize...

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:...