Hacking for fun and profit

Update: 0.9.7 released.

Some months ago I wrote about Feedjack, a Django powered Feed agregator. Finally I have decent templates to release it.

You can read all the details or directly download it.

The basic features are (taken from the readme since I’m that lazy):

Like the Planet feed aggregator:

• It downloads feeds and aggregate their contents in a single site
• The new aggregated site has a feed of its own (atom and rss)
• It uses Mark Pilgrim’s excelent FeedParser
• The subscriber list can be exported as OPML and FOAF

But FeedJack also has some advantages:

• It handles historical data, you can read old posts
• It parses a lot more info, including post categories
• It generates pages/feeds with posts of a certain category (example)
• It generates pages/feeds with posts from a certain subscriber (example)
• It generates pages/feeds with posts of a certain category from a certain subcriber (example)
• A cloud tag/folksonomy (hype 2.0 compliant) for every page and every subscriber
• It uses Django templates
• The administration is done via web (using Django’s kickass autogenerated and magical admin site), and can handle multiple planets.
• Extensive use of django’s internal cache engine. Most of the time you will have no database hits when serving pages.

Originally written to be used in ChichaPlanet, it is handling now a lot more planets in the same instance:

• Planet Gnome (mirror)
• Planet Debian (mirror)
• Planet Django (mirror)
• Planet Python (mirror)
• Planet Mozilla (mirror)
• Planet Ubuntu (mirror)
• Planet KDE (mirror)
• Planet Fedora (mirror)
• Planet Debian Perú (mirror)

Share and enjoy.

It is now on slashdot and groklaw, so there is no reason now to wait. The Peruvian Congress passed a bill (translation) four days ago that

aims to establish the measures which permit the purchase of software licenses by the public administration in conditions of neutrality, free concurrence and equal treatment of suppliers.

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I’m sorry for this post in spanish, it’s about a silly peruvian distro-flamewar and a friend just blogged about a PRIVATE conversation we had. If you can’t read spanish, just ignore this. (and if you DO know spanish, maybe you’ll want to ignore this anyway). Thanks.

Walter Cuestas:

Ya que te gusta ventilar conversaciones privadas en tu blog, por qué no pones el log para que se entienda lo del ejemplo de win32?

Como a tí mismo te gusta decir de los demás, “te vas por las ramas”. No te culpo por no entender el ejemplo en mención: no eres programador. Y de la misma manera no eres especialista en muchas cosas de las que hablas, mas sí en otras. Como ya te dije, nadie es experto en todo. Tienes que aprender a escuchar críticas, y ser mas caballero cuando te hacen ver tus incorrecciones, que en el caso de tu post anterior (el que originó todo esto), eran muchas.

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This is a good day for Free Software. The city of Munich is finally making its migration to Linux official, and they will be using Debian (translation). They were going to use SUSE, back when it was still a German company.

The announcement happened a few days after the election of Branden Robinson as the new DPL. I hope things change in Debian soon. The current stable version of Debian was released in July 2002. That can be ok for a server, but as a desktop computer it means extremely old software. That’s why most Debian desktop users use the “unstable” version of Debian: sid. Don’t be fooled by the “unstable” tag, it is more stable than the most popular distros out there.

Still, the future is unclear. I am a big supporter of Debian, but nothing is perfect. The Debian organization is extremely vertical and bureucratic. It seems that sarge will never be released. And there is the rise of the Debian based Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is, IMHO, the best “final user” linux distro out there right now. There are several Debian Developers working in Canonical (Ubuntu’s sponsor), and they basically fork Debian unstable, put the most recent GNOME desktop in it, and release. And they DO release. And best of all, they release OFTEN. This is the complete opposite of Debian. Probably the only thing Ubuntu lacks is some kind of distro-control-panel-for-the-linux-newbie, like SUSE’s Yast2, Mandrake’s DrakConf or RedHat’s redhat-config-* suite.

There has been a lot of noise from some of the most fanatical DDs. They don’t like Ubuntu. Even Ian Murdock (Debian’s father) had something to say. They fail to see that if Debian had a sane release cycle, Ubuntu would never have been the smashing success it is right now. It’s kinda like Minix/Linux in a small scale, Minix was there already, but Linux “won” the market.

Another personal gripe with Debian is the lack of some form of “official” corporate support, specially a Debian Professional Certification or something like that. I know there are lots of business out there offering Debian support, but still, some form of cert would be nice to see. Note that I am not a strong believer in certs (this belongs to another post), but a Debian certification would really give a big boost to Debian in the Enterprise World. Sadly, most Debian developers don’t even care about the corporate market.

But even with these minor gripes, I use Debian as a desktop (unstable of course). I think it is, on the technical side, the most solid distribution right now. And when used as a server, it is a pleasure to administer, thanks to the Debian Policy. My complaints with Debian have nothing to do with Debian as a distribution, but with Debian as an organization.

I hope Branden can improve some things now, specially because he signed the Vancouver Release Team Meeting. One of the consequences of this meeting would be that Debian will abandon most minor architecture from stable, focusing on i386, powerpc, ia64 and amd64. Other architectures will still be supported, but they won’t cause delays in Debian stable releases anymore, which is a Good Thing for the vast majority of Debian users.

There has been some adoption of free software lately at my current job. I’m not talking about the servers running apache, postgresql, samba, postfix, squid, etc. I’m talking about free software in everybody’s computer. Note that everybody (but me) is still using Windows, but hopefully once they all use free software a migration to Linux will be painless, since people use applications and not operating systems.

The first free software application used around was the most obvious: Firefox. It started by word of mouth. It is faster, safer, smaller, it blocks popups. People love it. Not everybody is using it but still, it’s an spontaneous move, nobody is forcing them to do it (there was a squid rule for a couple of users with lots of spyware problems that forced them to use firefox, but it’s gone now).

Now the second move was an official one: OpenOffice.org. This is the BIG money saver. Microsoft Office costs A LOT of money, and most people just use Outlook and the most basic features of Word. Excel is used mostly to store lists of stuff, not as a spreadsheet.
Management gave me the freedom to prepare an OpenOffice migration. And it has been a success. Right now almost half of the people around here is using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Note that I installed the 2.0 beta. It has an excelent quality, is VERY stable, and the users love it (once they get used to the fact that it takes longer than MS Office to load). Disabling Java and tweaking the memory settings helps A LOT.
In the first days I gave a “migration talk”, I prepared some case uses and everybody noted that the way oo.org works is very similar to MS office. What I didn’t expect was a general concern: How to setup keyboard shorcut keys. I was in trouble, I didn’t know how to do that. So I was honest and I told them the truth, that I didn’t know how to do that but we can use the search feature in the help system and we immediatly found what we were looking. Props to the OpenOffice.org documentation project for this, it saved my day.
Real non-geek-final-users are using oo.org here. It is an excelent product.

But there is something that Microsoft Office has that OpenOffice.org doesn’t: Outlook. Final users love that buggy piece of crap. Sysadmins and helpdesk people hate it. I hate it. It’s buggy, sometimes it refuses to work and it has a lousy security record. I want it (and Internet “explorer”) outside my nework. But I just can’t say “don’t use outlook anymore”, I must come up with an alternative. At the time I was using Evolution to test the “linux-final-user experience” (I am a disciple of the mutt order). But evo has a serious problem: it doesn’t run on windows (at least not yet). So I had two choices, both from mozilla: Thunderbird and the Mozilla suite (codename seamonkey). I tested both in my debian workstation and allthough I really liked thunderbird, I fell in love (again) with the Mozilla suite. I loved the integration of his parts: a (mature) web browser, a (mature) mail/news client, an excelent html editor, and a calendar application. It is every sysadmin’s dream for his users. But I chose Thunderbird instead because:

• Mozilla is devoting all it’s efforts in the “birds-suite” : firefox, thunderbird, sunbird (firefox used to be a bird: phoenix/firebird). And now it is official, the mozilla suite won’t have a new release. The birds suite is the way to go.
• Outlook stores all it’s junk in .pst files. Both Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail can import .pst files, but only Thunderbird could import the attachments of the messages. We have a winner.

And of course, Thunderbird is the tool of choice if you have spam problems (and who doesn’t). It has a built-in bayesian filter that WORKS(tm).

On the server side, FreeBSD is taking over the server room. But this belongs to another post…

Again a long time without posting. First, I want to congratulate my friend Rodolfo since he got married. Congratulations! :-)

And now for the “monthly update”. Last week I gave a talk in UNMSM, again a nice audience and spreading the free software word. I gave them a copy of Ubuntu so they can copy it and distribute it between the students.

Last week, was also DebianPeru’s first event: the Debian Day. It was all very interesting, and I was in a very good mood since I got three new IBM Model-M keyboards. Rudy gave an excelent talk about what debian really is: the people.

And now in more interesting news, it seems that Keyra of supertangas fame is now a celebrity. A site hosting her pics was mentioned in Howard Stern’s show and got “keyradotted” (I set up a mirror: Keyra Agustina Photo Gallery).

UPDATE: Some sites are calling her “Agustina”, but she always signs as “Julieta”. She is getting incredibly famous, and has been nominated girl of the year (and ass of the year) in several sites, and the year isn’t even over. supertangas seems keyradotted to death.

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.

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 :-)

I am in my new job now, the Lima Chamber of Commerce and it is great. I am working with my good friend Jorge, and my new boss is very open to try new solutions and Free Software. For instance, he is quite impressed by the power of regular expressions and how they can save time.

My first tasks here were the development of a PHP site and fixing the EXTREMELY messy code of the existing apps. Also modifying some (ew!) COBOL apps to generate some reports. COBOL is EVIL. And lucky me, I’m in charge of a big cobol2python project here. Nobody likes cobol it seems :-)

On the business side, aurealsys is going well, we are in the process of getting our labs running :-)

And finally, ULIX, the LUG I formed with breno in our University is going very well. We have lots of very active members, a lab with 6 sparcs and a cluster running in there (debian powered of course).

And also, happy birthday my friend. Some day we will have another 2-day-long hack-a-thon, but NOT YET :-)

PS: the blog motto changed, this time it is not job-related, this one is to stay :-)

I’m happy to announce that I got a new job at the Lima Chamber of Commerce (Camara de Comercio de Lima). So, again, the motto of this blog (trapped in the NOC) must change (again). Suggestions are welcome.

Also, I’m now a (happy?) gnome user. I still miss some things from fluxbox like EXTREME key-binding to launch apps and shells and do everything, and silly things like using the mouse scroll in the desktop to switch workspaces. If I can’t find a way to do that, I’ll have to hack gnome :-) (I switched to gnome because I want to be a gnome hacker anyway).

OTOH, my migration to GNU/Emacs was a total failure. I am one with vim. Maybe I’ll try again in the future.

And something unexpected, I’m using Evolution instead of mutt for the Chamber’s corporate email. It’s something very, very different but it is very useful, even for minimalistic freaks like myself.

oh, and I got a haircut <o/