Marga's blog
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Free as in Freedom
After the campaign
I spent the whole last week in bed with an acute case of pharyngitis, so I haven't been able to gather my thoughts in a blog post up to now.
I'd like to congratulate zack on winning the election, and I have faith that he will be a great DPL. I'm happy with my second place, I'd like to thank everybody that supported me and I think that I'll probably try again in the future, although not necessarily next year.
Running for DPL
During DebConf8, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, there was one night where I had a terrible nightmare: I woke up one day and I was DPL :). I mentioned this to some people during the conference, and to my amazement they told me that I could actually be a good DPL.
I've been thinking about this possibility since then, but the post-DebConf stress was still too high for me to run for it in 2009. This year, however, I'm ready to stand for it, campaign, and either win or lose, whatever the Debian community decides.
Women event in Argentina
Next Saturday a group of more than 20 women that work with Free Software in Argentina and Uruguay will gather to speak at a Free Software event in Buenos Aires, called Software Libre, Pasión de Mujeres.
It's your typical Free Software event, with talks related to the philosophy of Free Software and the Free Culture in general, and also technical talks related to using and developing Free Software. With one important difference: all the speakers will be women.
Barbara Liskov, mother of Object Oriented Programming, among other things
This post is about Barbara Liskov, for the Ada Lovelace Day.
Barbara Liskov is the first woman in the United States of America that obtained a Ph.D. from a Computer Science department, in 1968. However, this isn't by any chance her greatest achievement.
tzdata screwed up most computer clocks in Argentina.
Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone.
Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future:
Life after DebConf8
Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very very hard work, DebConf8 has come and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress, I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out.
The tyranny of Spanish users
Caution: Latin American rant ahead.
With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in:
- English, Italian, Dutch, Basque: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
- Spanish, Galician, Quechua: áéíóú ñ ü
- Catalan/Valencian and Occitan: l·l ç ïü àèìòù áéíóú
- French: àèù âêîôû ëïÿü ç
- German: ß äöü
- Swedish: å äöü é ç
- Danish and Norwegian: æ ø å
- Icelandic: áéíóúý ð þ æ ö
Languages of the world, unite!
After reading Christian's post about the new ISO 639-3, I thought about the "what is the country in the world which as the highest number of languages listed in ISO 639-3" question, and thought, "It must be India or China", and sure enough they both have a high language count (428 and 236 respectively).
Argentina changes timezone
In a sudden rush of stupidity, the Argentinian government decided that we should change our timezone to include DST.
For those that don't know, Argentina lies almost completely in the GMT-4 zone. 20 years ago we used to have DST, switching between GMT-4 and GMT-3. But since 1990 we've been using GMT-3 as the permanent timezone for our country. Thus, noon happens at 13:00 (or even later in more western parts of the country).
RC bugsquashing days 4 and 5
Following the trend, these are the bugs I squashed yesterday and today
Squashing the perl bug
On my last post, I stated that there were a number of RC bugs affecting etch, which was not completely accurate: I was counting only those affecting both etch and sid, this is to say those packages that are in etch and that still haven't been fixed on sid.
It was pointed out to me that a number of packages (around 70 today) are waiting for perl to go into testing, so that they can go in too, and many of those fix RC bugs. In the end, a lot of RC bugs were not being marked as fixed in etch because of perl failing to build in hppa, mips and mipsel.
Getting a Rhino
Ever since I stopped doing webpages, I've been missing having my own Rhino (the one I used in the past was not mine), but since I wasn't doing any JavaScript, it didn't make sense to spend U$S 50 on a book I wouldn't use.
Now, with the interactive web inteface for Debbugs being accepted as a Google Summer of Code project, I finally decided to buy one for me. I ordered it yesterday from Amazon.
I hope it gets here soon.
RC bug-squashing second-week
So, last week was a bit bumpy since I was sick for a couple of days, and then had a power outage on Friday and Saturday, thus not being able to keep up with my daily RC bug fixing, but I've been catching up since then.
RC bugfixing, days 1, 2 and 3
Following Sesse's example, I decided to start bugfixing one RC bug per day, so, this is the result of my first three days at bugfixing: