martes, febrero 26, 2008

Rizoma has a new home!

The new home of rizoma is savannah, we moved the project from chileforge, because the lack of a version control system distinct of cvs (we were using a private server with subversion for a few months, thanks zeus) and the apparently lack of support to the forge software. This movement will make us loose some things, like the Chilean aspect of the project (the most important currently), but we will win some technical stuffs that will let us do our work with a little more of comfort.

At savannah we are the codenamed rizoma project and we are using the git repo, the mailing list (rizoma-devel@nongnu.org and rizoma-usuarios@nongnu.org), when we release the next version will start working the bugs tracking system and some other stuffs.

We hope to recruit some developers, documentation writers and a graphical designer, so if you want to enjoy developing a simple point of sale software (current version is gpl2, but the next one will be gpl3) plesae join us a IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net #rizoma) and/or the mailing lists.

domingo, febrero 24, 2008

Amazing motorcycle

This vacations (that i spend thanks to my girlfriend and her nice family) outside of Pisco Capel's factory i saw an amazing motorcycle, the bad part is that the batteries of my camera were almost dead so i only could take just one picture.



This monster has a 1800cc engine, it has a comfortable heating system for the legs and a lot of other nice things, do you imagine traveling on this motorcycle? (if is with your girlfriend even better)

The friki part was that with then man of the picture (that was the driver) were traveling his mother in back sit, an old woman of 76 years old with skirt :) it's a completely hardcore grandma

viernes, febrero 22, 2008

Power management on linux

One of the biggest issues on linux is the power management, especially if you have laptop (that probably didn't came with linux preinstalled).

I always recommended the suspend2.net patch for the kernel, the patch now is called tuxonice, this comes with a pretty good set of scripts to interact with this (apt-cache search tuxonice), but the ugly part of this solution is that you must recompile a clean kernel, with clean i mean the kernel.org official release, because if you try to use the sources provided by your distribution you will have troubles applying the patch (offset isues) and it will be necessary that you change the source code manually, so this is a looong way, but i strong believe that the tuxonice is pretty good for strange hardware. But some days ago i recompiled the v2.6.24 kernel + tuxonice patch, it took me a few hours of cpu, and the result was a fully functional kernel, but with a very pour hard disk I/O performance:
v2.6.23-1-686:

# hdparm -t /dev/hda 
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 110 MB in 3.02 seconds = 36.37 MB/sec

v2.6.24tuxonice
# hdparm -t /dev/hda 
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 14 MB in 3.05 seconds = 4.59 MB/sec


so it became pretty useless, that make me dedicate time to make works the uswsusp way (integrated into the kernel.org and obviously present in the the debian kernel package, and probably in almost any distribution).

The simple way of do this in debian is

# apt-get install uswsusp pm-utils

with this we install the uswsusp support and associated tools, then it's necessary configure it with:
#dpkg-reconfigure uswsusp


if you use ndiswrapper for your wireless card, you need to tell to the power-management that unload the ndiswrapper module before it starts the hibernate, you can do this with the following line inside the /etc/pm/config.d/unload_modules file
SUSPEND_MODULES="ndiswrapper"


now you must test the kernel functionality with the following commands 's2disk' and 's2ram' (the first for suspend to disk and the second one for suspend to ram)

if it works, now you mus test the pm-utils with equivalent commands 'pm-hibernate' and 'pm-suspend', these tools are wrappers to the underlying kernel functions, if it worked now the last step is authorize the users to use these shiny new features, for this you just need to add the username to the powerdev group, for example if the user is foobar you must type the following command:
# adduser foobar powerdev


now you restart the session to let changes apply (maybe you will need to reboot your computer to the changes made to the kernel were refreshed) and try to use your {gnome | kde | any-other}-power-manager tool

jueves, febrero 21, 2008

A good coffe cup

I love internet, thanks to this amazing invention we can obtain information about everything.

I'm gonna make me a coffe cup (no, it's not a java based software :P) and suddenly thought 'i am going to look for how to make a better coffe cup', and the result was that I found a lot of information, even a site called CoffeGeek, this kind of things only can be founded on internet, do you imagine a specialized coffe magazine, in chile at least it would be a dead bussiness.

Thanks cold war for give us this amazing tool :-\

jueves, febrero 07, 2008

The future ... ?_?

Well, currently my future is a little complicated, first of all i'm running against the time to finish the implementation of my project degree, it will be frustrating not having a almost functional software when march starts, but i'm a little tired of my project degree, i don't know the reason, probably it's just the lack of formal vacations.

The second trouble, that is in second place in the queue, is get real and formal job, a paid one of course, here in Chile there is a lot of opportunities in the field of computers engineering, but none of the them is exciting for my interests, the main fields where i can get a job are:

  • Software development, there are two kinds of development here, customized software from scratch, or generic software with a few tweaks to make it works. at first sounds interesting, but most of the developments are with .NET (not mono, just Microsoft) and Java (not iced tea nor , just the sun's implementation), so like an open source enthusiast if i have to choose between these options, i prefer Java. Of course there are other technologies used by the developers, like PHP (4 or 5), a little of ruby on rails, cobol mainly for legacy systems, but one of my biggest troubles is that i really suck in web-based software development, it's just complicated to me, i don't know how to organize a web that must be an application and not just a home style website. Well that's on the tech side, but in the human side, the software developers are like garbage, the enterprises are not interested in have
  • Systems administration, this job i dont like, you work under constant pressure, you are like the rare of the company (no ofense, but is how the others look the sysadmin), it's not a job where you can climb in the scale of power inside if the company, probably you can became the boss of the department, but nothing else, the manager will never ask you how to aern money :P
  • Consulting, this job is less technical than the others, you need to be more polite, there is a lot documents to write, reports and other things, but you can have a large projection, it' a well paid job, but this one does not fit my skills, i am not good with the reports, am just good enough to be an engineer
  • Support, it's like an external sysadmin (IMO), the pressure is high, unless you work for a company that cares about his employees (i know people working in oracle, on support, and they are happy with the job, but still does not have the load of a year of work), with this work you must turn off your imaginations and just follow the standard procedures, because the improvisations could cost you the job if the the solutions fails.
  • PYME, i always said that i like to work inside a PYME, because you must do a little of everything, but with time i realize that this have complications, because they just want the systems working, if you want to use a super-technologie, but the current is working probably the will say 'no, thanks', so its frustrating and lacks of climb positions of powers (and of course earn more money)
so, am still thinking about it :-\