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Today we went to celebrate a good friend’s birthday. And while most of my social circles are in some way geeky or geekier… This one is definitively geekiest. Not so much in the Free Software alignment scale, but in many, many other ways. I was (pleasantly!) surprised to find we were four fellow potential hitchhikers (on the photo above, Jesús Wong; Susana and Aaron were also towel-bearers). Oh, but you are still asking yourself what this is about? I gather you have not yet read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The international Towel Day is observed...

Uff! Remember almost two years ago I announced on this same blog I would start coordinating a translation effort for the (excellent!) Made with Creative Commons book into Spanish? Having made the vey wise decision to choose Weblate as our translation platform, only four months later and with the collaboration from people all over Latin America, we amazingly reached 100% translated strings only four months later! Not only that — other languages were also started, and Norwegian (coordinated by Petter Reinholdtsen) also reached 100%. But editting a book is not just a matter of translating it. In my case, as...

After several years of absence, LIDSOL (Laboratorio de Investigación y Desarrollo de Software Libre) is once again organizing a FLISOL! And what is a FLISOL? It is the Festival Latinoamericano de Investigación y Desarrollo de Software Libre — An activity that started off as an installfest, but went on to become a full set of conferences. Set of conferences? Yes, because FLISOL happens more-or-less simultaneously (the official date is the last Saturday of April, but there is tolerance for it to happen up to a couple of weeks around it) all over Latin America. This year, FLISOL will be held...

Today, we had a little get-together of DDs in València, Spain, with some other DDs. Most of us were here to attend the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF), plus Héctor and Filippo, who are locals. We missed some DDs (because in a 2500+ people gathering… Well, you cannot ever find everybody you are looking for!) so, sorry guys for not having you attend! Sadly, we have no further report than having enjoyed a very nice dinner. No bugs were closed, no policy was discussed, no GRs were drafted, no cabals were hatched. Attachments deb_iff.jpg (3041 KB) deb_iff_mini.jpg (180 KB)

I have been busy as hell this year. I might have grabbed a bigger bite than what I can swallow – In many fronts! Anyway, sitting at an airport, at least I have time to spew some random blurbs to The Planet and beyond! VotingWe all feared when no candidates showed up at the first call for DPL. But things sorted out themselves as they tend to (and as we all knew that would happen ;-) ), and we have four top-notch DPL candidates. It's getting tough to sort through their platforms and their answers in the lists; the old-timers...

Some days ago I read a piece of news that shocked me at different levels: Three blocks away from my home, and after being “unclearly” denounced for harassing a woman, a guy was beaten to death. Several sources for this: El Diario MX: Por acosar a mujer lo golpean hasta la muerte; El Siglo de Torreón: Asesinan a hombre por presuntamente acosar a mujer en Coyoacán; Zócalo: Matan a hombre en Coyoacán; Milenio: Por presuntamente acosar a mujer, golpean y matan a hombre en CU. Of course, when anybody cries for help, it should be our natural response (everybody’s!) to...

Wow. I use a traditional, spinning rust hard drive as my main volume: $ /dev/sda2 on / type btrfs (rw,relatime,compress=zlib:3,space_cache,subvolid=5,subvol=/) I just adopted Lars’ vmdb2. Of course, I was eager to build and upload my first version and… Hit a FTBFS bug due to missing dependencies… Bummer! So I went to my good ol’ cowbuilder (package cowdancer)to fix whatever needed fixing. But it took long! Do note that my /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow was already set up and updated. time cowbuilder –build /home/gwolf/vcs/build-area/vmdb2_0.13.2+git20190215-1.dsc (…) real 15m55.403s user 0m53.734s sys 0m23.138s </code> But… What if I take the spinning rust out of the equation?...

I already mentioned here having adopted and updated the Raspberry Pi 3 Debian Buster Unofficial Preview image generation project. As you might know, the hardware differences between the three families are quite deep — The original Raspberry Pi (models A and B), as well as the Zero and Zero W, are ARMv6 (which, in Debian-speak, belong to the armel architecture, a.k.a. EABI / Embedded ABI). Raspberry Pi 2 is an ARMv7 (so, we call it armhf or ARM hard-float, as it does support floating point instructions). Finally, the Raspberry Pi 3 is an ARMv8-A (in Debian it corresponds to the...

As I mentioned two months ago, I adopted the Debian Raspberry 3 build scripts, and am now building a clean Buster (Debian Testing) unofficial preview image. And there are some good news to tell! Yesterday, I was prompted by Martin Zobel-Helas and Holger Levsen to prepare this image after the Buster Debian Installer (d-i) alpha release. While we don’t use d-i to build the image, I pushed the build, and found that… I did quite a bit of work together with Romain Perier, a soon-to-become Debian Maintainer, and he helped get the needed changes in the main Debian kernel, thanks...

Sometimes, life is measured in semesters. This is the 13th semester I teach. I can no longer feel a newbie. I am still just a part-time teacher, but I know it’s an activity I very much enjoy, and I hope I can at some point manage it to become full-time activity. After three months of slumber (three weeks of which were the hard vacations, but then there’s the intersemestral active period), our university came back to life and full occupation. Due to one fellow teacher taking a sabbatical, I have the largest group that I have been assigned. 40 students...