Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 166

On January 13, I sent a mail to debian-private saying I’d be on a semi-vacation until around February 10 - And yes, for over a month I’ve basically not touched my packaging, and for around three months my general profile in Debian has been really low. I sent this message because the Institute I work at moved, and I got the task of taking care of everything related with electrons flows carrying information (namely, voice and data networks). It’s not that I’m really-really-back now - Work is still too absorbing, users still come too often to me expecting me to...

This morning, we woke up to find out that Vicuña, our most senior cat, had passed away. She was 13 years old, and appears to have went away peacefully, shortly before our wakeup time. She chose our home - In March 1994, the first night my mother, brother and me spent at our current home, we woke up with scared, little meow sounds. We found her over our fence - it took us years to finally understand how a baby cat could have got there. I don’t want to start describing all the ways in which Vicuña brought love and...

One of the leading newspapers in Mexico, often associated with its left-wing ideology (and, I don’t think it’s a coincidence, my personal favorite newspaper) published today this cartoon: So, dear Rocha… Are you implying that many past and present Debian releases are identifiable with the corrupt Mexican government? Our de facto president is like our first official release, Buzz (1.1)? Does Rex (1.2) properly represent the worst of the PRInosauric regime? Is Hamm (2.0) a good symbol for our whole political class? Woody (3.0), the first release I had the opportunity to work on while still being in NM, is...

I’ve been feeling dirty lately - For my netadmin tasks, I’ve been heavily relying on running virtualized instances of the various MS Windows flavors, to check for compatibility with my work. Of course, being a zealot, I would not run VMWare (as it is grossly non-free from every possible angle) - I used Qemu. I’m also, however, impatient as hell - If I’m going to suffer from the sluggishness of the typical Microsoft desktop OS, I just don’t want to suffer from emulation slugishness as well! Of course, the KQemu kernel accelerator module came to my rescue. I felt tainted,...

I had this planned for over a year, but for whatever reasons, I didn’t get around to doing it until last week - Knowing that my Institute was moving to almost the opposite edge of Ciudad Universitaria, and would now be located at over 3Km from home (from around 300m that it was before), I decided to get a bike. And, after having it in my to-buy list, I bought it last Sunday (January 21), and Nadezhda got one for herself as well. I had had a bike before, over 15 years ago, and we rode a bit when we...

Bastian: I’m unable to provide the about:config key to prove it, but clicking on a link on my Iceweasel does open a Mutt mailto dialog. Maybe network.protocol-handler.external.mailto or network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto will do? They are booleans, so I cannot get much insight out of their respective true and false values… Keep peeking around ;-)

I came across this excellent video clip on what Trusted Computing means, and why we should stay away from it. CC-licensed and all, of course.

Erich: Of course that I know XML’s obstination on manually matched closing tags is intentional - That and several other points simplifying SGML were what in the end allowed SGML to succeed (and wildly). However, I still not agree. If you have a tool that generates broken files (which are expected to be read, no less, by any other arbitrary tool which does not require to be very bright), whose fault is it? The file format? No - The generator’s. Besides, if you have a configuration format that’s expected to be used by al kinds of tools, and sent over...

Russell: I don’t think so. I do think that most Free Software people, even more in settings such as Debian, will tend to be in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass. Personally, I ranked Economic Left/Right: -8.00, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.87 - No surprise for me ;-) And yes, we do have some more upper- or right- sector people, but I think our center of mass will surely fall in the lower-left quadrant. More samples needed ;-)

Several people have wondered why were Nadezhda’s and my site offline this weekend. Well, it surely raised my ego ;-) What happened? As many of you know, this blog is hosted in my home machine - A Mac Mini connected by DSL. A couple of weeks ago, my ISP announced the doubling of our connection speed (it was 512/128k, it got increased to 1024/128, so it’s not exactly doubled, specially if you are used to saturating the upstream channel… but anyway). From then on, we started suffering all kinds of connectivity problems. The connection would drop several times a day,...