a subversive act of playful cleverness

Mon, 21 Jan 2008

For the time being offline I've been doing a lot of things, and some of them involve free software of course. I'm glad to announce that this march Peru will be heading the direction from its current status-quo to, what we expect, is the first step into a real and sustainable ecosystem where our talented people (from academy, and others) get their hands dirty into to real contribution to free software projects.

involucrate.org has born as a project focused on building an environment to foster a real free software community focused on technical contribution and making our country have a larger spot on the free software contributors world-map.

The lack of appropiate models and the inhability to stablish a link between the real actors on such scenary have led to a poor involvement and groups atomization for "ideological" or political means, making room for "religionization" of a very technical and licensing model matter where debate over technical aspects have gone 0.

Our manifesto (in Spanish) explains our vision and mission, and also how we expect to achieve such a challenging goal. Is in our will to link our academic people, who was somehow behind the walls (a luxury for a country like mine), and the other actors here and globally. We want our talented people to see globally, and offer our life-experience on the field to make them aware and show them the opportunities that they can have and how other people near us who are making it right!.

This time, thanks to the wonderful guys at GNOME Foundation, we are having our very first international conference called involucrate+GOME focused on free software development and, as we expect to be, be the first step of a series of world-class events where we expect to set a yearly world-known free software event here in Peru. Something we dodn't have after more than 10 years since the first group of people gathered together to discuss which is the best distro or something like that and the discussion is still ongoing.

As noted the conference will be focused mostly, well almost 90%, in GNOME, but we expect to have more editions dedicated to one or more projects. So, I invite you to check our program and our cool speakers, all from south america and all contributing on GNOME.

Of course you are invited to attend to, if you happen to like us! Bring your questions and contributions to this initiative to both our project web or DebianPeru web who is coordinating this initiative, I mean this is almost a debianite sub-project ;)

I want to say as a side-note, that despite what media has made people think, we are making a real cool relationship with the chilean community. Expect to hear from us soon, and not because we've buying more wine from Chile and they are importing real pisco from Peru, or because we'll mimic our presidents. I really like this time, it comes 10 years late, however!

Sun, 17 Jun 2007

It's the time of the year I feel a bit nostalgic since for the second, consecutive, time since 2004 I'm not at debconf. This time I've decided so, since I'm currently focused on develop my academic profile trying to catch-up this unfinished business I wanted to pursue sometime ago when I was younger. By May, things were quite on-schedule so I decided to drop this trip, since I didn't wanted to be involved in another unfortunate situation due time contraints, now even more constrained by my new responsibilities in life.

I've tried to follow the conf over the stream since yesterday, but I felt asleep by 1am (8am there). However, as video team previously announced, by 17's night I went to the meetings arhive and downloaded Bdale's talk. I was impressed by the quality and professionalism of the video and the on-time (or time-to-market, aka me) publising. I want to congratulate the video team for this, very good work guys!. It's the second time I follow the conf over the stream and it helps to the being-there feeling.

Anyway, I'm already arranging stuff and scheduling the time for debconf8 in Argentina. Hopefully I'm able to skip some days of class. I believe it would be a wonderful time, I also plan to visit my family there also. So, see you next year!.

Now the usbmgr package. I have quite a feeling for this package (you might guess this knowing there were more mature options available since a couple of years ago). This was the first package I was in charge in Debian, and as popcon says there are still some users. However, things come to an end and I decided, as previously prepared and stated to some users, to orphan it post-etch.

Now that the time has come, I'll do so and request its removal from the archive also in the following days. There are more mature options such the udev+hald mix and they support much more devices and give the user much more pleasant experience. usbmgr is a piece of software that was written when there was no good/integrated support for USB devices, specially pendrivers and memory sticks. There's no activity on upstream from long time ago, in fact I never was able to reach him, but I was trying to keep it useful for new software environments from time to time.
In case you still want to keep or maintain it, please drop me an email: rudy at d.o.

Sat, 10 Feb 2007

In my previous post ( to this Debian section), I've mentioned we were preparing an event focused on direct contribution. Well, we've done it and it was very successful!.

The event name we've choose was involúcrate+, which means "involve yourself" and the plus sign meaning "more", since that was the main idea behind the event. We've worked for a couple of months, this includes live and online meetings, (even we all live in Lima sometimes it's quite difficult to match our spare time) and a lot of online work.

We've just published the event report (currently in Spanish only, translation in progress). The main things I'd like to highlight is the fact that we got people doing real work and breaking the ice from "I want to do something, but I'm quite not confident to get on the teams" to people discussing work-related issues on our l10n-spanish list.

I wanted to people directly learn and use the tools we do and also the infrastructure, so at some point I made the decision of make them directly work on our team's infra, this of course got some people inquiring if I was running a parallel project and complain about the quality, later I had to explain what was this rush of translations and that we were running this workshop and, yes, I knew the work was not going to be as we usually expect but they were quite new and we didn't have much time for have them learn all our policy, terms and all things one knows after being on the team for a while.
My girlfriend also involved herself and did some translation work and took pictures for me, cute.

However, since I had an horrible issue with my main domain for email, and also because my time constraints, I didn't have much time to follow them up but I'm glad about what they did and that some of them are very encouraged and still working on the list. One of our goals was to get at least one people "hooked" on the direct contribution I'm glad to see we over-passed this goal.

The report has the in-depth details, like number of participants, talks, also the problems we faced, as Diego describes (no, don't believe him, I wasn't acting as the contact/manager guy all the time, word). We had a dinner later with some of the people who still had energies or were hungry ;).
There is a pictures gallery at our website, also the talks slides, the videos are still on processing. We'll publish them once they are ready, like everything in Debian of course ;).

Finally, I want to say that this was a great personal experience to transmit the things I've learnt and having people to feel that they also can do it, but even more: doing it!. Sometimes online chat or mailing lists are quite cold for transmitting this knowledge to newcomers. Usually they got scared after one tells them they have to read a lot, or they just got frustrated by their inability to understand the team work-flow at the very beginning.

I'd like to thank our wonderful band, or squad (you named it, we can get it for you), who is responsible for making this happen. We are already working on the long-term (call strategic if you like it) plan for the up-comings involúcrate+. We've already made a shot-term plan for this year and started to work on the next involúcrate+, be ready.
Of course thanks to Peru Pacifico Institute where we hosted the event. We had a post-event meeting with them and directors are very happy with us and with the success, they are willing to work together again on the future. Also to our helpful sponsors, speakers, friends and relatives who support us.

Sat, 06 Jan 2007

Seems that I manage to publish yearly news. Well this time I've many of them.

DebianPeru's event videos.
As promised, we've published the videos for our DíaDebian 2006 anual event. You can find the event videos and also the lightning talks videos.
I want to thank our sponsors and people involved on producing them. We are already working on our next event which is mainly focused on attract, teach and involve more people on directly contributing to Debian and free software.

Talking about Debian events and user-base growth, when I went to the place to make stickers for give out on our last event, I went with the swirl logo and said to the business owner: I want to print this. He said ok, and later he asked me: is it Debian right? I was like... yes!. Later we talked a bit more and he told me that he found Debian on the Internet while looking for alternatives to have his business run safely, since, as he related me looking worried, the police came to their place and seizure all the computers from other businesses claiming that they are running "pirated" software. So he found Linux and Debian. He told me that was having some issues with their devices, mostly his CD/DVD printers and scanners. We talked a bit more and I invited him to our local group and the event of course. It was a very cool incident, and I nominated him our official merchansiding supplier ;)

Debian gaining market share.
Last year was quite good for Debian in Peru, besides the growing user-base, some government agencies have explicitly named as the operating system or linux-flavour they want third party deploy for them. One of the most important cases, IMHO, is the PDT software, which is the program that every business should use to submit taxes information. Currently it's only available for Windows and it's written in Visual Basic. Although, mostly because it's lack of stability and extensibility by third party, some government agencies have been pushing for SUNAT open it's source code. It was, as with many other out of place subjects, source of lot of flames and irrelevant waste of time by the local linux-supporters. Anyway, they didn't open the software, but instead they called for software vendors to compete for the development of a new version which should be multi-platform and according the specs at least run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and on the Linux side they mentioned specifically that the program should be apt-get-able, thus vendor should provide a Debian package compliant with 3.0 or superior.

Microsoft loves Debian.
I was invited to, which was meant to be, the true and first Microsoft vs. free software debate in Peru, but was, as we in APESOL have experienced for years: Microsoft refusing to debate. So it was mostly APESOL being technical, as requested by orga, and Microsoft being funny. I was astonished that almost half of Microsoft speakers mentioned Debian at least 5 times in their talks and dedicated almost half of their time to talk about free software (open source), interoperability and technological neutrality. It was fun for me to see them helping us to get known. There are some pictures on my flickr page.

Personal life and Debian work.
Last year I've lost my two cats, both died in not a very good way, they are missed for sure. I'm sure I want a full white one, but not sure how soon. I've been really busy working on my business which led me to not being able to contribute as much as I wanted but I managed to do some stuff. In the other hand I've learned many important things that we, as free software community should seriously consider. Most of them have been already pointed out by some people on p.d.o already. Ok I believe this is enough, blame this to the not-blogging-for-long-time syndrome due the commies hidden over there locking my access to former hosting.

Mon, 18 Sep 2006

DíaDebian or DebianDay (in English) is the DebianPeru's, now officially becoming, annual event. This was our 2nd year and also served to celebrate our group's anniversary and of course Debian's 13!.

So after a couple of months working on the details we made it, and for what I've heard it was sucessful on words of the people we wanted to target. A good sympthom of success was also that I didn't ended that tired and burn out ;) Personally, I'm really happy and glad of how it went and the way we managed the event this time. From a neutral perspective I have to say that we don't use to see such organization and respect to time on "linux" conferences here. Of course there's always room for improvement, I wonder what next year's will be like.

This time we wanted to be a bit more organized, commit to time strictness and target more to non-technical people. We also didn't want to bore people with long talks and a non-stop program. So we decided to have 3 talks of 45mins and a lightining talks session, which also had participation of people from another city (which is quite new in free software events held here in Lima), and as one of the blogger's community leaders says (spanish) he had fun and a good time.

Together with the trivia games we put in between talks, which also served as trigger to give out gifts such as DVDs, swirl stickers, sarge CD sets and t-shirts, that were kindly sponsored by people from our group and some local free software businesses; were the two things most people liked, especially those who came by first time to this kind of "linux" conference and saw some geeks behaving well and had fun with them.

I've published some pictures. I managed to not adjust my camera settings properly so some pictures are not in good quality, but we did videotaped the conference and the videos will be published after they are processed. I want to thank again to all the people involved on making this happen.

Fri, 12 May 2006

Sometimes things happen, this time they hit me. Suddely I'm not on the plane to MEX and don't even know if I'll make it.

When I was told that Mexican team will take care of the visa issue I was like oh great, that make things a lot easier for me since I've been in busy days working on client's projects. Then one day I received the confirmation for "internamiento", I said yay!.

Then called to the Mexican embassy and asked, as told, what should I do to get my visa. The lady asked my lastname and then she spelled the rest of my name (and I remember this, but yes I'm aware that I had this bad? habit to record things at the very frist time they have been told to me; so its great you may say, but it's not since sometimes I missinterpret and I record that) so I undertood that she checked in something and saw my name and spelled to me.
I confirmed and she told me the requisites and that I have to pay $USD98 and make an apointment online.

I said Oh well and hit the site. It was May 3 and for my surprise there were no available days for apointment until May 11. I said oh well again, since I was planning to fly on May 10, but one day more doesn't hurt and we could save some bucks. Next days I've been trying to find a cheap flight for May 12, I found it and bought it.

May 11 went to the embassy, got to the officer desk asked for the visa, she checked and none found. She told me it hasn't been sent yet. I've asked a friend to confirm the "Oficio" number with Gabriela on IRC then gave it to the lady, she said the same and asked me why did I went since I didn't called to confirm. I said I did and the lady spelled my name so I understood that she was looking at something and checking. She asked me what's this lady name because you are making a serious acussation, I was like "hell I don't go asking names to everyone"; but told I didn't know. Then I cooled down or something and said "what can I do then since I'm supossed to fly tomorrow". She told me to ask Mexican people to fax me a copy or something.

I was supossed to get back home, with my visa, buy some stuff and gifts I wanted to take over there, pack my clothes and the stuff a very good friend kindly checklisted for me, finish some client work and sleep early to go airport. No, ain't doing that!.
I know people in Mexico was working hard to make this work smoothly as possible, I know they are overstressed due the many problems they are facing. I'm even feeling more stupid for not being able to help over there with the organisation. And as time goes and people and friends arrive I feel more helpless. Risking to loose money is something ain't looking at now, I'm not taking this as bad as I've probably would do in other times, since I recently got in trouble with some "investment", I believe I'm also getting old heh.

So far my chances are to wait for INM to fax the order here (when its the question), call to the embassy to confirm, ask for an appointment (PANIC: dates available till today are from May 22 on). Yesterday I was even considering to apply for a visa by myself but as been told this would be duplication, which actually sucks more, and yes there's no guarantee I'll get it.

Things I don't understand is why on earth latinamericans ask visas to each other. I wasn't in such situation before, when I traveled in south america I was free to enter another country without much hassle. The Andean Community have this agreement to let people travel even with their own country' Id. I hope one day other countries will follow such things.

Anyway I hope you have planty fun and hopefully I join you at some point. Thanks to people working on this, I know there are other in almost the same situation, and friends who gave me support on IRC. I'm going out to have some fresh air.

Tue, 09 May 2006

I supose this is my self-introduction to planet.d.o and somehow to Debian.
Last days were crazy and I've felt a bit overwhelmed for the many compliments I've received from local friends when they found it. I thank them again and commit myself to work hard to give more quality free software.

DebConf6
In other news after some issues I managed to get my tickets to MEX!. Antonio also managed but we'll not fly together, he's arriving one day before than I.
I'm looking forward to meet you people and specially those new who come from places like Bolivia. I'm really glad to know there's interest for Debian in such countries. I believe I can blame Gunnar for that.

While I'm still here I made my first non-sponsored upload. I plan to work on my pending (and a bit long) TODO list for packages and translations at DebConf.

Sidenote: I'm looking for people arriving on Fri 12 at 22:30 so we can group to get Oaxtepec or look for a hotel. If interested please email me: rudy AT d.o.

Fri, 21 Apr 2006

As started almost two years ago, I've just learned a couple of days ago that I've been officially approved as Debian Developer.
As I've been telling people this only means a a bit more of the responsibility I already have on my Debian related work, and also that I have upload grants ;).

On the process, which I'd like to develop on future posts, I've learned a lot on technical matters and also on Debian internal affairs.
I'm very proud to be part of this wonderful team of great free software hackers.

Following the tradition I'd like to thank kov for his initial encouragement to apply (at that point I didn't really felt I was ready, In fact I still consider I need to lear a lot more), to my eventual sponsors and friends anibal, gwolf, damog, stockholm, etc etc., also moray who acted as my AM, and of course to the wonderful debian-l10n-spanish and Xfce teams.
Of course to my beloved ones, specially to the best 5 years old betatester of my game packages, my nephew Pablo, and closest friends too!.

This was a quick post since I'm in a hurry but many wonderful things are happening in my life.

Thu, 08 Sep 2005

So far I've almost done the basics for the awaited port of lletters to gtk2.

I still need to do some cosmetic adjustments and probably a bit of messing with some internals then I'll be putting on my site for testing and upload to Debian archive, so we get rid of imlib dependency, and also drop it from the archive, (hooray for another one!).
It's been fun and an interesting way of learn more about gtk, I like it. I hope I can push this upstream but he seems MIA, and the Debian source package has been hacked a lot, so merging will be fun for sure. Well, pictures tell better than me. Enjoy.

Before

... and After

Tue, 02 Aug 2005

Probably one of the most important days have come to end a few minutes ago, this rocks!

Debian love weekend
In order to get on my lazy-maintainer hat and do some real work and fix some long standing bugs, I've commited myself to get my ass to work and fix things up. I'm glad to say that I did great progress, usbmgr is really shiny and improved, now supports 2.6 kernel modules names and some more additional fixes. Thanks anibal for sponsoring this.
I did some work on TORCS for its C++ ABI transition, I still need to wait for freeglut or help a bit and prepare an NMU for it on upcoming BSP. I also checked and revised a few bugs for Xfce related packages and did a bit work on them. This feels good.
And finally I even reviewed my keyring and noticed that I didn't import some signed keys people sent to me almost a year ago! (how evil am I).

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