Nethazard.net

A week ago, I spent most of my afternoon helping Ada with her new Debian system.

She’s writing her thesis and for that she needs to have music notes on the document. I’ve insisted her to write her thesis in LaTeX but she still refuses to learn the syntax and commands. So she’s doing it the tough way in OpenOffice.org Writer.

So, to make my point about LaTeX, I was sure there was a way to write music with it. A quick search revealed that a tool called Lilypond was all she needed.

sudo aptitude install lilypond

Fortunately for her, there is also an OpenOffice.org extension that renders the lilypond output as an image on a Writer document.

It took us about an hour to figure out the syntax she needed and after that, she’s happy and ready to finish her thesis.

Ada is happy she switched to OpenOffice.org, if he hadn’t, her thesis wouldn’t have pretty musical notation.

Emacs identica-mode, a way to read and post to Identi.ca microblogging site and any Laconi.ca installation from Emacs, now has support for several (friends, replies, public and user) timelines. Also added support to send direct messages.

Some of the changes are:

• All API calls are now through HTTPS
• Changed keybinding, pressing “g” on identica-mode buffer now refreshes the buffer.
• New keybinding “C-c C-r” switches to retrieve replies timeline.
• New keybinding “C-c C-f” switches to retrieve friends timeline (default).
• New keybinding “C-c C-d” sends direct message to a given user.
• New keybinding “C-c C-g” switches to retrieve public timeline.
• New keybinding “C-c C-u” switches to retrieve user (self) timeline.

Emacs modeline shows which timeline is currently being retrieved on identica-mode buffer.

Its been a while since my last release of identica-mode. This time, rather than publishing frequent but small updates, I waited to release a bunch of new features.

As always, you can download it from the savannah project page:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/identica-mode/

Or get the latest version from the Git repository:
git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/identica-mode.git

Hope you like it.

After years of talking about it and her coming with me to my free software talks and meetings, she finally let me replace the proprietary OS on her laptop with Debian GNU/Linux.

I think it took us both much time to migrate her laptop for several reasons. First, she barely has time to sit at the computer for other "normal" stuff that’s not urgen school projects. So for her, the computer is just a school tool. In contrast, for me, the computer is part of my daily life.

So after lots of procrastinating and "not now because I have urgent stuff to do", she finally allowed me to do the migration.

I’ve prepared her for the migration years before, giving her open source alternative software for almost all her tasks. Firefox for browsing, audacity for her audio editions (she does a lot of this), pidgin for instant messaging. She tried OpenOffice.org several times on Windows, but couldn’t end up adopting it because of some bugs in past versions with the spanish spell-checking dictionary not getting installed.

I selected the Debian distribution over the typical choice of Ubuntu for a new user. First, since I’m a member of KDE Mexico, it was logical for me to suggest the use of KDE. Then the decision was KDE3.5 or KDE4. I went for KDE 3.5 because of stability. I don’t want things to start crashing or behaving weird and then dissapoint her. This point also made a point towards Debian stable over Ubuntu, stability is a lot better. And finally, since I’m going to be giving her technical support, I wanted her to have the same stack of software that I have so I can guide her through screens and commands.

After we backed up all important files on DVD and my terabyte hard drive, we started the installation. Ada got angry at me after I installed it for her. She really wanted to do it herself from beginning to end. So, we started over.

After a long while of downloading updated packages with a relatively slow connection, the system was all set. I explained her the new desktop manager and how to install packages from commandline. A few more minutes downloading audacity, audio and video codecs and other applications, she was all ready to go.

She quickly went through her frustration phase as every change in someone’s life produces. A few complaints later, and the next day she was back into audio editing for her next dance festival.

Its been three days now since she migrated and all I’ve heard is good things about the change. I hope everything keeps going well. Next step: using Emacs.

Today I gave a talk about DRM technologies and how they affect everyone that consumes products with them. It took place at the UANL physics and mathematics faculty.

It interests me very much the fact that its the second time they invite me to give this talk (and I hope to get invited many more) because typically at schools and universities, at least in general in Mexico, this topic never shows up on anyone’s radar. Probably software licensing, but not DRM technologies and issues.

I hope more universities follow this trend and call people to talk to them about current topics and not just stick to the education program and teach how to be code monkeys.

Maybe it has something to do with the mathematics (cryptography) on the DRM technologies and that’s why I got invited by the physics and mathematics faculty instead of the computer science faculty. I thought about that so I updated my talk and slides to explain a bit more on the cryptography side (very basic stuff) this time.

The talk went very well and got good response from the audience. I even gave out stickers!

I participated at CONSOL 2009 and had the opportunity to give 4 talks this time and meet with "the software libre community".

The talks were great, with very interesting subjects, and there seems to be a lot of interest in virtualization this time. Rolman gave his talk about virtualization with KVM and the basics of virtualization technology and how it all works. Then Gunnar Wolf gave his talk about virtualization techniques and recommendations.

I gave an introductory talk about Git and for the first time talked about Emacs. Also had an Emacs vs. Vi debate with Rolman, and it really went well. It turned out to be a very civilized talk with no flames going on at any time. I think people got somewhat disappointed that it went so well.

The new KDE Mexico team, or part of it, got together to catch up, unfortunately Guillermo Amaral had a plane to catch just before the party begun.

For the first time I tried the famous Duff beer, from the Simpsons. This is a mexican brand that makes it a reality.

And Gladys showed up with an ethernet cable as an improvised belt.

I had a great time and it was a very nice experience. Hope to see everyone again soon.