The image at the left is exactly what Giggle shows in this very precise moment for one of my coding projects. I think this is the most complex commit graph I have seen during my occassional coding tasks… This is how Git is supposed to be used: a branch per feature, and small atomic commits. Definitely I like this way of working 
(This post is no more a small coding break… just to leave some neurons rest before reclaiming them back )
Two months have passed after my last post, and things here have been quieter than usual in this blog, but the world kept moving in the meanwhile so there are some things to tell, and some other that have already been told. Probably the most exciting thing for me and my work mates was the announcement of the shiny Nokia N900. I have resisted the temptation then, because a lot of things have already been said about it. We systems administrators are usually in the shadows, but even so it is a delight working as backing support for people who does big things.
There were a couple of releases this week what are a great example of why Igalia reached its eighth year, and we are still rockin’ in the free world:
But more changes apart from software releases happened: in a more personal note, I am now using Fedora 11 in a daily basis at my laptop. Initially I wanted to try out Foresight, because the Conary package manager looks like an interesting piece of software, but unfortunately the installer does not have support for LUKS-encrypted volumes in the installer, and I did not want to bootstrap it manually. Interestingly enough, Fedora does have such support using the same Anaconda installer. I did not like Fedora back in version 6, but I must admit that the community did an impressive improvement (at least comparing version 6 to version 11!) and I am very happy with my current setup. I am even considering Fedora 11 for installing it on my brand new PlayStation 3: I bought one of the old “fat” models, because the new “slim” ones do not officially support installing third-party operating systems.
Finally, a quick note to finish this “I am alive” post: I am glad that we have decided to push Linux-vServer in our servers, because we are getting some interesting benefits thanks to it, being the main one the ability to easily clone a running machine and use the clone for testing purposes before applying changes in the production environment. Also, we are now able of easily provide sandboxed environments in which users have almost-full administrative privileges without having to worry about other services being affected in case something goes wrong. And we are getting those niceties with a minimal overhead (~1.5%) in terms of kernel CPU usage. As we are moving services which were previously run on physical machines into virtual machines, we are saving power and contributing to the environment while providing a better service and support to our staff
Now it looks like it is time to complete my previous post about DebConf9, after a tiresome journey back from Cáceres to Coruña the 30th, an Igalia assembly the 31st (the first one ever for me ), and sleeping for more than 14 hours today.
Fortunately I did not need to travel alone, as Diego came with me to visit Coruña and the journey was more enjoyable than the other way around. To make the most out of the occasion, we followed an alternative route via Ciudad Rodrigo (where we had lunch and bought some red wine, olive oil, and Iberian “embutido”: chorizo, salchichón and cured loin), then Porto (where we saw the bridges by Gustave Eiffel and his disciples), Valença do Minho (where we bought some goods which are sold in Portugal: salted butter, cheese, coffee, guava jelly…) and finally we made a longer stop at Santiago de Compostela in order to see the cathedral and the old town area while eating a sandwich. It took some time to complete the trip, but was far funnier that going alone to Cáceres.
But going back on to DebConf9, here is the rest of my batch of lectures and events, including summaries of them:
That’s a good selection of the lectures and events I attended to. Of course there were some more interesting things, like the conference dinner, the massive group photo, giving a talk (slides here), the odyssey all along Cáceres to find a proper Irish tavern… The pint of Guinness with Gunnar, Gustavo and Diego was one of the best moments of the conference 
Quick summary: going to DebConf9 was a rewarding experience, even when I ended up extremely tired after it. Let’s try to attend some more conferences anytime soon…
I arrived yesterday at the main venue after a the long trip by car: ~700km in a car without air conditioning. I was very tired so I headed up for my room (which is in an ancient building at the old town area of Cáceres), had a shower and decided to take a nap… with so much success that I slept for two hours and a miracle made me wake up just in time for the Cheese & wine party. It was great to taste an uncountable amount of kinds of cheese, wine and liquors from places all around the world. Among a lot of tasty stuff, it was really enlightening to try out some real japanese sake and the best peanuts I ever tried.
After a quick breakfast today in the morning, my personal schedule included attending the following:
After having a light dinner I went along with Diego for a walk along the old town area, to see how does it look at night. The perfect accompaniment was a glass of beer and a magnificent ice cream. And that is enough for today…
I will pick up my car and embark myself into a 8-hour trip to reach Cáceres tomorrow in the evening, after 699 km of road trip. The goal: attending (and enjoying!) the ninth edition of the Debian Conference, which has already started. As I do not know exactly the arrival time, I will skip the dinner tomorrow, but I will do my best to be at the Cheese & wine party and bringing some “tetilla” (small breast) cheese from Galicia, which has a funny shape as you can imagine:
I am looking forward to be there tomorrow, as this will be my first time at a big community event and it really looks like this kind of things are really interesting and a great opportunity to get in touch with latest developments, learning lots of new stuff, and meeting people from all around the world… The latter is a must for me, as I will not know anyone there because there will be no more Igalians attending the conference. So if you will be there from 25th to 30th feel free to approach me and have some chat
Last, but not least, shell scripters (and anyone interested) may want to know that have a slot in the unofficial track for a lecture on Shaft, a tool which we have been using lately to do declarative unit testing of shell scripts. I am just now polishing the slides, preparing a couple of examples and preparing the code for release.
See you there!
I have never been completely happy with how the widgets of Gtk+ applications looked like. Undoubtedly the “Clearlooks” theme was an impressive improvement, but it has some glitches with some applications (for example Claws-Mail has to be tamed to look good with some themes) and I always had the curiosity of knowing how a theme is made. So I picked up the Chrome theme which uses the Murrine engine, and modified it to have warm gray colors, and the Gnome panel with the same shades as the rest of the widgets. After some tweaking I came up with this:
It makes a smooth, clean environment without too much distractions, apart from the blue shades of the selected items, so it is a good option for everyday use. Especially if you spend loads of hours in front of a computer. It matches nicely with the “Clearlooks” theme included in the latest versions of the OpenBox window manager (which I use).
I think this is nice enough to share, so you may want to get the theme conveniently packaged as a tarball.
Today I updated XulRunner to version 1.9.1 (with accompanying updates to Epiphany 2.26.3 and Firefox 3.5), and made a little experiment which I do everytime a web browser get updated: surf to css3.info and check whether some CSS3 cool stuff which was previously unsupported works with the latest release.
This update brought in the following improvements:
I find very appealing that browsers are finally getting some of this implemented, especially drop shadows and fonts loaded from the web, as they allow designers for crafting very interesting designs while keeping sites accessible. Especially with web fonts: it will be no longer necessary to pre-generate titles and the like as bitmaps or generating them server-side. Something as simple as a good font design can turn a boring website into something beautiful, so this having feature (for now in Safari/WebKit and Firefox/Gecko) is absolutely thrilling.
Good times for web design are coming…
Yesterday my package manager insisted in updating Bash to version 4, which was released some time ago. I was a bit worried because as this new version intruduced new features, just in casethey could cause some of my working scripts to fail miserably. The fact is that finally I decided to bump to the new version, as I have not heard nothing about painful upgrades (as happened in the 2-to-3 transition). After installing it everything continues to work nicely with version 4.0… and I can try out the new cool features (hash tables are one of my favourites!).
I have been playing lately with collectd again, which is a very nice piece of software to monitor out things, especially when you want more than just the network statistics that other tools like MRTG. In a coffee break someone commented that it would be interesting to process and display some if the data sent by collectd daemons installed in machines in real-time, and it sounded like a funny idea, so the first thing I did was implementing the network protocol. At the moment I have a working pure-Python implementation of it working: collectd.py, capable of receiving data (sending data is stil work in progress).
As a quick introduction, you could use the module as follows:
from collectd import Reader
rdr = Reader()
while True:
print "-" * 80
for item in rdr.interpret():
print item
This will join the default IPv4 multicast group (239.19274.66) used by collectd (sorry, IPv6 support is incomplete) and start listening for incoming UDP packets in the default port (25826), will interpret each incoming data packet, and then print each component of the data packet to standard output in a rather readable format:
[1237749608] localhost.localdomain/swap/swap/used [(1, 48082944.0)] [1237749608] localhost.localdomain/swap/swap/free [(1, 1007009792.0)] [1237749608] localhost.localdomain/swap/swap/cached [(1, 18640896.0)] [1237749608] localhost.localdomain/users/users [(1, 5.0)]
Each data item is an instance of collectd.Values (which behaves mostly as a list, and can contain multiple values) and collectd.Notification. Both of them share some fields inherited from collectd.Data. For example, you could filter messages regarding swap space usage from machines containing foobar in their host names:
if "foobar" in item.host and item.plugin == "swap":
print item
If you want to bind to a particular address/port or join any other multicast group than de default (sorry: joining multiple groups is not implemented right now) you can pass parameters to the constructor:
rdr = collectd.Reader(host="192.168.0.32", port=9000)
The protocol was pretty straightforward to interpret, the hardest part was guessing how to properly handle multicast, as I never had to deal with it before. Now it is time to spend some time with PyCairo, or even PyCha which looks pretty convenient, and make a small application which dumps real-time graphs to a window 
I am right now trying to add support for writing files in reStructuredText format to the blogpost tool. In fact, if you can see this post nicely formatted, I would be that the thing has worked and I will be posting the patch anytime soon™…
Stay tuned
Update: grab the patch here