Gunnar Wolf

Today I took a break before my usual lunchtime to go to the movies — Boogie el Aceitoso was on at 13:00 (and not at the more usual, late screenings).

Oily Boogie is a great antihero drawn by the much beloved Roberto El Negro Fontanarrosa, a very widely known Argentinian humorist/cartoonist. I got acquinted with Boogie as during the 80s-90s my parents were asiduous readers of Proceso, a weekly political analysis magazine which included one of his cartoons at the last page.

Boogie is a pathological ex-Vietnam, ex-Laos ex-El Salvador, ex-Gulf War, ex-(whatever comes next) USA soldier, who deals with the local mafias whenever he is not active. Brutal, often seen as inhuman.

I remember reading it without really understanding its nonsensical violence at first. And, as I said, Fontanarrosa is a very loved cartoonist - In Mexico I think we were much more acquinted with Boogie than with Inodoro Pereyra, and still, Fontanarrosa's death in 2007 was very heartfelt here.

About the movie: I found it to be very good, of course, knowing what to expect. Most lines are short, screen adequations of various cartoons along Boogie's long life as a thug. I specially liked the animation technique — I know very little about the subject, but it mixed quite naturally and constantly obvious still, cartoony characters with vivid, photo-based items. It creates a completely believable atmosphere inside the absolute amoral, selfish and (fortunately!) grossly exagerated and impossible world of Boogie.

I sometimes feel somewhat stupid when writing in English for a mostly Spanish-speaking audience — Still, if you see Boogie in a movie theater, don't hesitate and go. As always, with non-top-selling, non-Hollywood movies, it is quite probable it will not be showing for long.

Nobody cares about me, I thought. Whatever I say is just like throwing a bottle to the infinite ocean.

No comments, no hopes of getting any, for several days. Weeks maybe? Not even the spammers cared about me.

Until I read this mail, by Thijs Kinkhorst commenting to my yesterday post:

(…)
(BTW, I was unable to comment on your blog - couldn't even read one letter of the CAPTCHA...)

And, yes, Drupal module «captcha» introduced in its 2.1 release (January 2) feature #571344: Mix multiple fonts.

Only... no fonts were selected. Grah.

[Notice] Personal content follows. If you got to this post expecting any of the recurring topics I talk about in my blog, feel free to skip it.

This is one of the topics I don't like to share as impersonally as a blog post goes… But I know I will not be able to meet most of the people I care about that this will reach in person — And even if I did, it is not something easy to say. I have failed several times to communicate this to my closest friends.

And if you are among the group of people I am thinking of, this will most probably not surprise you, given there is precedent. But in the end, it didn't work out.

Nadezhda and I have lived together for practically 14 years. We had a for month long timeout in 2008. And, a couple of weeks ago, decided that we should make the separation definitive while we are in good terms and have hopes to continue having a good relationship.

Anyway… Life continues. It will take a bit for things to fall in their place. I know that many of you (again, the group of people I am writing this for) know and care for Nadezhda as well as me. We will… Try to do things right as much as possible, and keep the many good things that are still there after all. And while life comes back to track, please excuse me for the many oversights I have done and will probably continue doing during the following weeks.

(yes, comments closed. As I said ~18 months ago, Want to say something? Just think it hard enough, it will get to its destination)

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 if I do want to advance for the future, even though I would strongly like at some point to start working in a real academic position — My job is mostly operative, limited to keeping things running smoothly in our network and servers. I work in a social sciences (Economics) research institute, and even though I have taken on an interesting project that is viewed from the social sciences I do expect to finish with a very interesting product in the near future, my interest lies in computing as a science.

Anyway, back on track… This is the time of year to start evaluating many things, many factors, from many different sides. And yes, for me that involves measuring how am I faring in my involvement in the projects I most care about — Specifically, Debian, but also several other Free Software projects, even if my involvement in them is mostly organizational.

I am once again going through a tough period in my personal life, and the impact it carries is obviously deep. However, I am not fond of finding excuses for my underachievement or underperformance. And that's what I feel now. Even more when I see posts such as Zack's and Tim's status updates, and when I see that we continue to be on a history-high streak of RC bugs.

Regarding the several teams I am (at least formally) involved with in Debian, I have been away from the pkg-perl group for far too long... It is still my first group when it comes to identifying myself with - Both as on a personal level, as I consider them as good friends and great people to work with, and I do feel the responsability to share the load with them, as maintaining >1300 packages (even if they are so highly regular) is just not an easy task. But for over a year, my involvement has been basically zero. I have been a bit more active on pkg-ruby-extras, maybe paradoxically as it is a smaller team and with less packages (as I know it is much less probable for somebody to keep my packages in adequate shape if I don't do it)... and also because I am working more with Ruby than Perl nowadays. And finally, about Cherokee, I decided during DebConf9 to redo the packaging to fully use DH7 instead of our old-style quasimanual style. I have had several bursts of activity, and am almost-almost-ready to do the first newstyle upload... But so far, have been unable to do so.

Of course, keyring-maint: With Jonathan's help, I have come to terms with most of the processes. Both Jonathan and I have been swamped lately, but at least I think I am finally helping speed up the process instead of holding it down. We do, yes, have several pending updates - but are working our way up the queue, and I hope not to leave people waiting for too long. And yes, we have discussed several ways of documenting and automating several of the tasks we currently sustain, and that should come soon

I have been also leaving maybe a bit too much responsability aside on EDUSOL, for which today we are entering the second week of activity, and I'm very sorry to see our server is just too overloaded to even reply to even answer to me — And even lacking admin powers myself, I should have worked earlier on setting up redundancy on a more automatic way (as we have an off-site backup we can promote to live and redirect to, but I am unable to do this... Given that I am the techie person on board/the only "professional" sysadmin).

This year I also –quietly– finished the bulk of the Comas rewrite. What? Comas? Still alive? Yes, and you can expect me to show it off to more people soon, and get it used for more conferences. I will talk more about it (and its motivation, and its current status) later on — But basically, the only two things that Comas shares in common with the mod_perl-based system most of you got to know (mainly at CONSOL 2004-2008 or at Debconf 5 and 6, although I know of several other conferences which used it) and the current incarnation are… The (most) basic database structure and the name. The project underwent a full rewrite, and is now a far more flexible, far easier to install, Ruby-on-Rails based application. And most important, it does no longer involve your name being Gunnar Wolf as a prerequisite for successfully setting it up ;-)

Regarding DebConf, I have promoted a Central American MiniDebConf, and we are right on track for holding it in late March in Panamá City. Everybody's invited, and we will have (surprise, surprise!) the very professional involvement of Mr. Anto Recio as local team, as it seems he didn't have enough with last year's DebConf9 and wants to suffer further. What am I lacking here? Motivation. I have been quite pessimistic, possibly turning some people away, even though we have a good first sampling of interested people's profiles and expectations. If you want to get involved, tomorrow (Tuesday 17-nov) we will have a meeting at Freenode's #sl-centroamerica, 17:00 GMT-6. Please note we do need involvement from the Central American communities, it is more than just a motivational issue. Last meeting it seemed Anto and I were the only people pushing the MiniDebConf - and frankly, that would be a basis for not even holding it. We need motivation from the very people involved in it!

Anyway… You can see I have (and it seems to be a constant in my life) a series of contradictions going on. However, the excercise of putting it all into writing helps me understand better where I am standing. When I started writing this post I felt much heavier, much more at a loss… Right now I feel I want to refocus my energy on the same projects and teams I have been involved with, yes, but feel it at least more plausible. Hope so.

I was pointed to this Toast to Turing, by Matt Harvey. Very much worth sharing.

Here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?

What, don't you know who Alan Turing was? Read a bit on him then, one of the core seminal minds for Computer Science. And a scientist vilified for being different from what is regarded as normal.

[update] And answering to some people's doubts: Why this toast? Because the UK Government, in the voice of the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, after over 50 years of leading Alan Turing to commit suicide due to criminally accusing him for gross indecency for being a homosexual and forcing him into a deep body-altering hormonal therapy to cure him, has finally posthumously apologized. Brown said, So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

Funny...

I just woke up. I was having a funny and surprisingly not-abnormal dream. You know, the few occasions where I remember my dreams, I practically always find a really impossible situation going on. Not this time, and that was the first thing that struck my mind.

The dream was staged on a very nice bar, something not very different from the bar on the park by DebConf (in fact, with nice, Spanish-evening-esque light conditions). I was having there some beers with Andrew (NZ), Penny (NZ), Steve (UK), Damog (MX). We were just ordering a nice round of beers; I paid for mine with the €0.50 coin I found yesterday in my kitchen (hey, that's cheap beer! ;-) ). And the conversation was, in fact, quite logical and interesting.

We were comparing the worldviews with which children across our cultures are educated at school. Andrew was sharing how children in New Zealand were taught about the human migrations that led to the population distribution until the 1500s, when Europeans started changing the face of the Earth. Most of the argument was the same one we all know — Early humans leave Africa, their traits specialized for the different weathers, what is widely regarded as the three main racial branches (European white, African black, Eastern yellow - My inner Neo Zealander does not care too much about political correctness, it seems), with Amerindian brown and South-seas black branching off at some point in the process. So far, so good… Debatable but good.

Andrew and Penny continued explaining that the apparent reason, according to New Zealander anthropologists, why the indigenous population in America accepted the culture imposed after the European conquests in the XVI-XVII (contrary to the almost complete annihilation of the Pacific/Indic ocean native cultures) centuries is because the group that crossed Bering ≈50,000BC, and some later groups with whom they inter-mixed came from a semi-developed proto-Christian society, so the new ideas were closer to their own beliefs. Damog, Steve and me gust nodded with interest.

Less than 30 minutes later, awake and after my morning coffee, I'll have to ask you: WTF‽ A proto-Christian society... ≈48,000 years before Christian era? No, no way your argument holds any water!

(on a side note: At least I know that if at some point I develop a multiple personalities disorder, and they are allowed in the same room at once, I will have a good time debating with myself about interesting topics)

During DebConf, Noodles discretely approached me and asked whether I'd be interested and willing to join him as Debian's keyring maintainer. Of course, I felt greatly honored and happy about this. Over the past weeks, we have exchanged some mails where he details how it is handled, and I feel I get the general logic — and this last week (which was quite hectic for me — apologies in advance for all the work and mails I have due for different people!) he finally took the big steps: Requested DSA to give me login rights to the needed machine and RT queue and to be listed in the relevant area of the Debian Organization page.

So, even if I still feel afraid of botching Debian and sending the universe swirling away into chaos, I am most happy, and could no longer hide it. Yay! :-D

[BTW] No, it was not on purpose. I did not grow my beard in order to look like St. Peter. But it must have been part of the decision process!

Oops.

Yesterday (Sunday, 31/08/09) I far from any computer-like object for most of the day. When I got back home, of course, I promptly opened my laptop to check my mail — who knows what destiny might have for me in a 24 hour period? Maybe I won yet another fortune I have to cash in Nigeria? Maybe there is (GASP!) a new RC bug on one of my packages?

But no, my mail server didn't feel like answering to my ssh queries. The connection was established, but shut down before even sending the protocolary SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.1p1 string. Fearing an overload (after all, the little bugger is just a Mac Mini running in another room in my house), I tried to check (via Web) its Munin status — Apache didn't want to listen either. It answered, but got only access denied. Things started worrying me… But (silly me) not enough — The machine runs headless1, so I just danced the boring raising elephants song2.

Allowed for a couple of minutes for everything to settle, and tried to connect. Horror, now even pings didn't work!

So I ran to fetch my old, bulky and trusty monitor. Went back to the machine, plugged it in, switched it off and back on. Everything worked fine this time — At least appearingly. I opened up mutt and started happily reading mails, while trying to understand on another console what happened at 07:06 that didn't get logged anywhere and had the machine dead for basically all the day. And then, BRRRT-BRRRT-BRRRT, I started hearing the HDD seeking.

I was able to send a couple of mails, but decided to let the machine rest and... Will reduce its disk usage to an absolute minimum. Fortunately, I have already the machine meant to replace it — A much nicer, beefier iMac G5, waiting to be vacated from its data, task which has suddenly become prioritary.

So, in short: If you need to get in touch with me in the next day or two, don't count on my usual @gwolf.org mail, as it is down. I hope to be able to get the data out of the poor little bugger painlessly after it rests a bit. And I hope not to drown in a sea of mails after I get the replacement back online :-/

1. 1. for those not used to computerspeak: without a connected monitor
2. 2. For those following at home who don't understand how Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring, this is a (silly, stupid but useful) mnemotecnic for as-properly-as-possible restarting hung Linux systems: Hold AltGr (right-Alt) + SysRq (in reduced/notebook keyboards, Fn+SysRq), and type R E I S U B (leaving a couple of seconds between key, ideally waiting for all disk activity to settle between each). That means:

   unRaw

   Take control of keyboard back from X,

   tErminate

   Send SIGTERM to all processes, allowing them to terminate gracefully,

   kIll

   send SIGKILL to all processes, forcing them to terminate immediately,

   Sync

   Flush data to disk),

   Unmount

   Remount all filesystems read-only,

   reBoot.

   Well... Reboot the system

Safir, Adnan: If you want to push the Bosnian bid, please mention the pleasure it is to drink a good cup of good coffee in the morning. And Bosnian coffee really qualifies as good coffee!

Fino mljevena Jubilarna kava dobivena je izhorom najkvalitetnijih vrsta sirove kave kao rezultat dugogodišnjeg iskustva tvornice Franck.

Hvala ti, brate!

So, the 6:45 train group managed to leave DebConf in time and arrive to Madrid, very badly slept, but anyway... I missed some of them who I had not yet said goodbye to. Well, 100% coverage is a theoretical maximum after all! Lucas got to see me quite distressed, moneyless and unable to lodge my bulky 30Kg suitcase (including bike and wine).

Anyway, I managed to get things in their proper arrangement, and started walking to get some things done in Madrid. After taking care of said businesses, very close to Puerta del Sol (metro Sol), my body started claiming for food, as fresh as possible. And even more, for water. I remembered the recommendation some days ago to some green thingy outside Chamartín, so I was looking on how to get there.

A woman was handing flyers for a restaurant. She took my eye - Not because of any æsthetical reason, but because she was promoting that precise place, Salads & Co. This place is _a_w_e_s_o_m_e_. I would eat here every day if it were my call. It seems to be very new, as customers all get the explanation on how to eat here.

There is a very long cold salad bar, 95% veggie-friendly (I only found so far the dreaded bits of chicken for good taste on one of the salads). The hot food bar is much smaller, and it has pizza, spaghetti, potatos and grilled chicken. There is free refill of Pepsi products, and a small dessert section that is frankly not of much interest to me. Oh! And there is free wifi, so I expect to stay here for at least 1hr. Lets see if it is good enough for some VoIP phone calls I must make.

There are five such restaurants:

• Ctro. Comercial Parque Sur
  Avda. Gran Bretaña S/N
  28916 Leganés
• Ctro. Comercial Isla Azuul
  Calderilla, 1
  28054 Madrid
• Ctro. Comercial La Vaguada
  Avda. Monforte de Lemos, 36
  28029 Madrid
• Ctro. Comercial Cuadernillos
  Carretera Madrid-Barcelona (N-II) KM 34
  28802 Alcalá de Henares
• Calle Preciados 36
  Just by Plaza Callao, ~300m from Plaza del Sol
  28013 Madrid

So, I paid €7.95 (or was it 8.95? Can't recall). They have another promotion: Until September 17, Sunday through Thursday starting 18:00 they work at 2x1.

So, if you are at Madrid or around it... Take a look at this place.

No, they didn't pay me for the publicity. They only fed me and kept me happy. Very happy!

Ufff...

This has been a great two weeks. DebCamp was -of course- followed by DebConf. My blog postings were kept silent to an absolute minimum, just as my measurable productivity. Of course, this does not mean I have been scratching my belly or anything. Orga team work is HARD and tiring. But it is great fun. And sitting at the front desk means you get to interact with everybody. For $DEITY's sake, it is the best way to get to know people,

Anyway... The last session of Mao is about to start. I am closing the computer. GREAT TIME!

As many of you are aware, I am the owner of the universe. Let me correct, the proud owner of the universe. This little bugger has got me a good time in Nicaragua and, although it was a bit sick during the first couple of days, I do expect to use it several times in Cáceres. It is always good to have a bike - a reason _and_ a way to move, faster than walking, getting good views and, basically, drawing bystanders' attention.

But today, thanks to Axel, a permanent impression has entered my mind.

I rode a Brompton. Shortly, for less than a kilometer... But, WOW. And I do mean it. <blink>W-O-W</blink>.

One day, when I grow up, I will get my own Brompton. And the Universe will truly be mine.

I volunteered to work on producing the DebConf nametags, and worked on it closely with César (cek) for most of the afternoon. The process clearly shows no database is comprehensive enough to base DebConf on it - All in all, we managed a very good advance percentage, integrating the data on who sleeps where, how each person eats, and so on. And slightly before lunchtime, we had the final listing. Joy!

…Until I asked César what script would we use for turning the data into nice, printable nametags. He plainly replied, «none that I know of». Ok, so on to produce the layout. The first idea was, as it has been done at other DebConfs, to make a LaTeX layout - but both our LaTeX-fu is heavily limited. Well, to the hell with it, that's why I recently packaged and uploaded Prawn, which is currently sitting in the NEW queue — Fast, Nimble PDF Generation For Ruby. Prawn has two main characteristics which are making me migrate some systems away from PDF::Writer into it:

• Proper UTF8 support
• Cool, easy relative positioning in bounding boxes

So, yes, populating the page with the ten nametags each will take is quite simple:

pdf = Prawn::Document.new(:page_size => 'A4')
pdf.font '/usr/share/fonts/truetype/arphic/uming.ttf'
while !people.empty?
  5.times do |row|
    2.times do |col|
      person = people.delete(people.keys.sort.first)
      next if person.nil?
      pdf.bounding_box([pdf.bounds.left + (col) * 8.6.cm,
                        pdf.bounds.top - (row) * 5.4.cm],
                       :width => 8.6.cm, :height => 5.4.cm) do
        generate_nametag_for(person, pdf)
      end
    end
  end
end

Yay, nice, isn't it? Of course, inside generate_nametag_for() we have all the needed magic to position the text, resize the images and so on. All in all, a cute and nice library, even with Ruby's often strangely idiosincratic culture.

Until we started checking for correctness. First, we hit Eddy Petrişor — The ş was showing as an unknown character. Of course, even though Prawn correctly understands UTF8, the built-in font does not handle Eastern European alphabets. No worries, pdf.font "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf" got us out of the predicament. But then, Andrew Lee (李健秋) appeared as a second case of undisplayable characters. And yes, Andrew has all the right in the world to expect his name, a proper UTF8 encoded string, to appear on the nametag!

…The problem is that all the fonts we could find that work for CJK fail for non-US-ASCII Latin characters. Isn't Unicode supposed to solve this? Yes, fonts need to properly implement the correct encoding… Jonas explained that Prawn (as well as any libraries dealing with fonts) should really use Fontconfig so multiple fonts can be specified, falling back in case some codepoints are not specified in them. But Prawn does not support Fontconfig.

To make matters worse, most Asian fonts (the Arphic family) are now shipped as TrueType Collections (TTC) instead of TrueType Fonts (TTF), in order to save space due to the tremendous similarity they have. And, you guessed it, Prawn does not yet understand TTCs (or I couldn't find how to).

All sorts of ideas were brought up. After playing a bit trying to change the font being used when detecting Asian encoding (and failing at it), I threw up my hands and decided I'd just change the font whenever the name contained the "Andrew Lee" string. Dirty and ugly idea, yes, but would work.

Just as I was about to do it, Andrew came back jumping with joy — He gave me an Arphic font which contains TTF files. And, lo, it properly renders Eastern European characters. All set, yay!

Honestly. What a pain. I hope humanity loses alphabets forever and goes back to the stone age. That's the only sane way to leave all the multialphabet, multiencoding, multifont, multipain behind.

My flight was scheduled to leave at 18:35 UTC-5 from Mexico. It left around 20:30. I took my friend Toño Malpica's newest book, Siete Esqueletos Decapitados, to have a nice reading for the road.

I was worried I would miss my 17:30 bus from Madrid to Cáceres, but I had plenty of time, and everything turned out just fine.

Just as I was reading the last page of Toño's book, when the bus was about to leave, Rhonda and Weasel boarded the bus — Great! Instead of five boring hours on my own (if possible, take the train — The traffic to leave Madrid is really really not fun), I had five boring hours with good company.

After some strange repositioning of my clothes and other contents of my bag (read: My bike!) in several grossly underoptimal configurations, we arrived at Residencia Universitaria Muñoz Torrero around 23:00. We greeted some people. About 90 minutes later, and after a verrry nice and needed shower, I was already deep asleep.

...Today, I woke up shortly after 10AM. Rushed for breakfast (and still got some! ☻), and headed to the first presential orga-team meeting for me this year.

¡DebCamp has started!

Today, I will eat at my office — It's the easiest, and as I arrived at ~11:30 and am leaving at ~18:30, I don't want to invest ~1hr in getting a proper meal, which is at ~3Km from here (joys of working in a very large university, joys of coming to work during the vacational period).

Anyway, I don't do this often, so I started looking for names of takeaway/delivery restaurants in the area, thinking about a chapata (ciabatta? How would you write it in anything but es_MX?) or something saladish. I have a menu in my fridge door of La Artesa, a bakery that recently opened for business near to my house (~3.5Km from here). So, lets look at their page.

First thing I look for, menu and prices. Bah, Under construction (and in the best 1996 style, even with the animated GIF and all). They don't want to attract customers, that's for sure.

However, they do have something very unique, something that sets them apart from any other site I have ever visited: They have the most existentialist Frequently Asked Questions section I have ever seen.

I wonder... Will they have a hidden link to the Frequently Given Answers as well?