Hacking for fun and profit

This has been one busy week. I had a hard drive crash in my job’s desktop box, a bad one. The hard drive is a new one, a 120GB Seagate disc, but the hard drive fan that came with it was defective.

I used Ubuntu Live to reiserfsck the damn thing. Everything was so messed up that I had to –rebuild-sb and –rebuild-tree in my data partitions. I lost GigaBytes of data but, lucky for me, nothing critical. Now all my filesystems are XFS, except for a small 30MB /boot ext3 partition for grub compatibility. God (Cthulhu) bless free software and CHOICE.

Now, the chicha-event of the month, Manuel came to Peru. It was a very short, family-oriented visit, but at least he was present in Nestor’s bithday last Friday. I was there with Rita so finally (almost) everybody met her :-)

He came with a great present:

Since I love british humor, I am a big fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Douglas Adams. And a copy of the Ultimate Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the perfect gift for a nerd like me.

The next day we went to a chinese restaurant and we had an excelent time :-) You can see the mandatory pics in Manuel’s gallery.

Now he is back in New Orleans with Melissa. He’ll probably be back here again in February.

An extension for Mozilla Firefox to see the google pagerank of the active tab: pagerankstatus (install)

Finally. I am the proud owner of, not one, but two IBM Model-M keyboards.

I wanted one of these keyboards for years. It was the first keyboard I used, back when I was 7 years old and I was learning Basic in an institute (I think it was 1988), and since then I always wanted a Model M.

This month, Manuel got me my first Model M keyboard. The problem is, he lives in New Orleans, and I live in Lima. But since Benji was in the States, and he visited Manuel, he would bring the keyboard to me. Sadly, the model-m is damn heavy (2kg), and Benji had to leave it in his house.

Today I went to a street called Paruro with Nestor. Paruro is the place where all the old and useless hardware in Lima goes. And I mean really old hardware, XTs, VESA bus stuff, really old hard drives, incredibly old SCSI controllers, etc. It is possibly the only place where I could find a Model M. I found TWO. And I bougth them both, for only $3!

Right now I’m using this one:

And the other is the one true version of the happy hacking keyboard, this one:

Sadly, the second keyboard is missing the cable, I’ll have to get it somewhere, but the black one is in perfect conditions.

If you want to identify a real model-m, read this page.

Ahhh, the sound of the keys when I press them is just beautiful!

The last week I gave two talks in two universities, one in San Marcos and another in UIGV.

In San Marcos I gave a talk about the UNIX Programming philosophy. I met again with Rodolfo and we talked, among other things, about some encoding problems we are having with planetplanet. Rodlfo has problems with d-Sur and I with chichaplanet (btw, Rodolfo, welcome to the chicha :-) )
I also had the pleasure to meet Federico Heinz. He told me about two Python projects he is involved with:

• PAPO: a software that will package everything what is needed to manage a small company, and
• Cimarron: A graphical framework for PAPO, basically it will be some kind of anygui on steroids, where you can use, for instance, gtk2, a web form, or curses as the presentation layer.

Yesterday in UIGV I gave a talk about Free Software and its future in Peru. I gave it after a videoconference with Richard Stallman, so the people in the audience was quite interested in Free Software. I gave the talk using Ubuntu Live. A very sleek debian+gnome2.8 based desktop. After the talk I gave the cd to the students there, so they can distribute it. They are forming a fre software group, and they will call APESOL for support.

All this made me think…

Last year, after a talk with my Operative Systems teacher in my university, I decided to form a group of GNU/Linux/UNIX users there, and I came with a name for it, ULIX. Sadly I had no time and I did virtually nothing but opening the #ulix channel in the freenode IRC network. Soon a small group of people from #linuxperu joined the channel, Alvaro, Fernando, Marco, Nicolas, Jj, German, and of course Breno. When Aureal Systems got the server running, one of the first thing we did was opening the ULIX mailing lists. A few weeks later, the group took contact with some teachers and ULIX got official recognition from the university as a group. After that I got another job far far away from there, and my participation in the group was almost NULL. Right now ULIX has a lab with 12 SUN SPARC and 6 Intel boxes. The group have been giving small talks in the classrooms, and even organized a installfest. ULIX also implemented a GNU/Debian powered Beowulf Cluster with the sparcs. And we are now planning to support the Gnome Project with development and patches.

The sad thing (for me) is that I have done almost nothing beyond the initial steps to help the group :-( Mainly because my job, Apesol and family obligations. I hope someday I can do more for ULIX, maybe some talk. It’s funny when you give talks everywhere but your own univertisy :-)

Another post after a loooong time. I’m back from Ilo where I gave a talk. This week I’ll be in the UNMSM where I’ll have talks almost daily (actually daily), so I’ll be quite busy.

On the userland side, I am no longer a gmail user. At least not for what I used it for: mailing lists. It sucks at that. I’m back with my good ole mutt (the one true mail reader) and Evolution for my job’s intermal email. (Yes Rudy, you were RIGHT).

Here is a pic of me with Rudy in Ilo, SuperDebian and the next DD debianizing the evangelizers :-)