Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 93

My Debian QA page shows what I consider to be a huge amount of packages — I am currently uploader for 207 packages. Why so many? There are many factors — The main one is group maintenance (I’m directly responsible only for 19; of course, this should not mean I disregard the rest of them), the second one is regularity. By far, most of my source packages (177) match lib.*perl, followed by lib.*ruby with 20. Anyway — A strong factor that allows the pkg-perl group to be successful in maintaining 1411 packages is the regularity of the task: Packaging Perl...

Whew! Is it karma or what? What makes me get involved in two horribly complex, two-week-long conferences, year after year? Of course, both (DebConf and EDUSOL) are great fun to be part of, and both have greatly influenced both my skills and interests. Anyway, this is the fifth year we hold EDUSOL. Tomorrow we will bring the two weeks of activities to an end, hold the last two videoconferences, and —finally— declare it a done deal. I must anticipate the facts and call it a success, as it clearly will be recognized as such. One of the most visible —although...

Sigh… I am starting to fill up my annual report for my real-life work. You know, that chore you must do every year where you score little bullets next to each completed project and talk well about yourself. For my workplace, fortunately, I do not have to lie and convince people I am worth rehiring - As this year I achieved definitividad as a Técnico Académico Asociado C de Tiempo Completo at my University, I can say for sure I have long-term job safety. UNAM is the best place for me to work, and I am most grateful — Even...

As some of you know, yesterday we started the two weeks of activities for the Fifth On-line Encounter of Free Education, Culture and Software. This year, the main topic for the conference is social networks, but not in the twitter-facebook sense — Social networks as ways of understanding and modelling human-to-human interactions. Of course, there is interest from many attendees in using and taking advantage of said social network systems (and others), but the topic is far broader. One of the core tools of EDUSOL, and the only tool that is constantly active through our two weeks of activity, is...

Every year, for Día de Muertos (November 1 and 2) the Mexican tradition is to set colorful, beautiful offerings for our deceased loved ones. The offerings often have the very vivid orange color of the cempalsúchitl flower, and have pictures, food, and whatever our loved ones used to like. The offerings are traditionally set up at home and at some offices and public buildings. UNAM, Mexico’s largest university, where I am very happy and proud to work, has set a yearly offering for many years already. Every year they select a base theme around which the invited groups base their...

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to travel to Colombia, where I delivered a talk at III Encuentro Internacional de Seguridad Informática in the city of Manizales (photos available, of course. I travelled with Colombia’s nacional airline, Avianca. On completely unrelated news, today I entered Avianca’s website to check my miles. To my biggest amusement… Turns out I am now a resident of Bamiyan, Afghanistan! (I swear I didn’t select that) …Seems they do beard-based georeferentiation? NP: Hey, mister Taliban, tally me bananas daylight come and me wanna go home! Comments Anonymous 2009-10-29 09:58:57 Presumably you already know...

Copied from http://www.sciencehumor.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/sign_brain.jpg — Had to do it :) I should fix this to every computer in my workplace.

There has been a lot of buzz recently in Mexico after a tax increase that has been announced for next year. The two main points I have seen criticized are: Value Added Tax (IVA) increase from 15% to 16%There was a great improvement regarding the original proposal by our de-facto ruler (why de-facto? Because it is still unclear whether he won the popular vote. He has about the same legitimacy as George Bush during his first term: Legal but illegitimate): In Mexico, there is a category of items regarded as fundamental, which are exempt of IVA (tasa cero). This category...