Hacking for fun and profit

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 :-)