How to become a hacker

Liked a lot Nat Friedman’s answer to the question “How can I become a hacker?” that he and Miguel de Icaza get all the time during his talks and travels: just get the code, open it, improve something and send the patch to the mailing list.

In the answer, I just miss the social part of being a hacker, including the Hacker Ethic and the Hacker Culture. I don’t see a hacker as someone that changes code, but as someone seing changing code as a way of changing the world.

I guess this is another distinction between Free Software and Open Source supporters.

Free Sound and Free Pics

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

Stock.XCHNG is a Free pictures collection, where the users can browse, share pictures establishing the sharing conditions, and chatting with other members of the community.

Freedom gets more and more out of the software ghetto.

Gnome in the Uncyclopedia

According to their own definition: […] Uncyclopedia is an encyclopedia full of misinformation and utter lies. It’s sort of like Congress or Parliament. Unlike Congress or Parliament, however, we do have a sense of humor […]

This is the definition of the Gnome project: Gnome is a user interface for Linux created by the Young Mexican Miguel de Icaza when he was only 4 years old. At this time, Linux didn’t exist yet so it was pretty useless. The poor boy Miguel is suffering from a disease called Mono and before he dies it is his wish to get into the Guinness World Book of Records by collecting the most business cards. Time passes and, with the growing popularity of Linux, Gnome was developed again, against his rival KDE

They also give information on Acronym and Logo: Gnome stands for “Gtk Networking Object Model Environment” where Gtk stands for “Gimp Tool Kit” where Gimp stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program” where GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Therefore GNOME could be said to stand for “GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix Image Manipulation Program Tool Kit Networking Object Model Environment,” or “GnuGnuGnuimptknome,” and so on. Yes, the name is rather stupid, but what you would expect from a 4 years old kid eating tapas and tacos? They use the Gimp Tool Kit because gimp is another word for lame cripple and Gnome is lame and crippled. Gnome’s logo is a huge footprint, but it is not clearly established whether it is a huge memory footprint or a huge disk footprint.

It is pretty amazing the amount of free time people have 🙂

Mutt sidebar folder list

Evolution is a nice program with integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring; I have being using it for my personal e-mail for several years. But when it comes to my daily mail at work, where I receive and write hundreds of e-mails every day, and sometimes work remotely by ssh, I still prefer to use Mutt.

Mutt is fast, configurable and very powerful, but I always had missed a simple way of knowing the amount of read and unread messages in each of the mailboxes. Two days ago I discovered that Justin Hibbits and Thomer M. Gil had written a Mutt patch that implemented this feature.

The list of detailed features in the webpage is very clear:

  • A sidebar with a list of folders on the left side of the mutt window.
  • Hide/Unhide the sidebar with a single keystroke.
  • Every line in the sidebar lists a folder with the total and new number of messages in it.
  • Optionally highlight folders with new messages.
  • Scroll up and down the list of folders and open the selected folder.
  • Configurable sidebar width and colors.
  • Configurable key bindings.

After installing the Debian GNU/Linux package and following the very simple Documentation of the webpage, the sidebar folder works perfectly.

More infocenters with Gnome in Bahia, Brasil

In October and November, 200 infocenters more are going to be deployed in about 20 cities of the state of Bahia, expecting about 200,000 users. Each infocenter has 10 diskless computers using Debian-BR-CDD (a customization of Debian Stable) and LTSP, with Gnome as the desktop environment.

Some pics of the infocenters can be found here.

Related to this topic, it is really interesting to have a look into the talk that Marcos Mazoni, member of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party), CEO of CELEPAR (the Telecomunications company of the Paraná State), and Paraná State Strategic Issues Advisor, gave during the last edition of the Guadec Hispana (ogg audio, slides and summary of the talk are in Spanish). In the talk, he presented the impressive project for moving progressively to Free Software both in the public and the private sector of the Paraná State, and also talked about the problems of making this a permanent effort independent from the party in the government. As a terrible and quite unknown example, he talked about the famous Telecentros of Rio Grande do Sul, one of the first and most famous huge deployments of Gnome and Free Software, that are now being replaced by centers with proprietary software, after a change in the party in the government of that Brazilian state.

A compilation of the main Gnome deployments can be found in the Gnome Live wiki.

A bit of politics

Recently I have read two very good political texts that I whould like to share:

The second text is a very complete description of the vision of the world from the point of view of the Zapatista community of Chiapas, and explains also their understanding of real democracy.

Women in Free Software, by Fernanda Weiden

Some months ago I pointed to some articles related to Women, Computer Science and Free Software. A couple of days ago, Fernanda G. Weiden, a Free Software developer at the IBM Linux Technology Center in Brazil, has recently written a very interesting article on the topic, focused on the Free Software movement.

I extract some of the most relevant parts:

“When they try to integrate into the user/developers groups of the Free Software community, most women find barriers, mainly related to two diametrically opposed behaviors: either they will be treated as the most loved person in the group, over treating them, or they will be victims of sexist attacks, jokes or dating approachs.”

[…]

Another important point is that Free Software development is often done as a hobby, just for fun, and in one’s spare time. Where is a woman’s spare time? After their working day, most of them still have the second working journey, which is at home, taking care of the home, the children and her husband. If the men can have the privilege of doing Free Software in their spare time, sitting in front of the computer and having some fun coding what they want, women in general don’t have this privilege.

[…]

Another issue I see. Women also usually require too much of themselves, because they have a natural insecurity which results in less women participating in technical discussions, for instance. It’s the old feeling of “I don’t know enough to join this discussion. I’ll let the experts talk.”

We, at the Free Software movement, cannot be at the forefront of technology if we do not solve these issues.

Packages of the Fisterra project

The Fisterra project had before two branches:

  • The Fisterra 2 branch: fresh technology, with some generic modules, and some vertical implementations
  • The Fisterra 1 branch: old technology, with only one vertical implementation for vehicle repairs

The Fisterra 1 branch is going to disappear soon (by the end of the year). The only vertical implementation that is still using old technology, devoted to vehicle repairs business is being ported to Fisterra 2 technology. So soon we are going to stop talking about different technologies and Fisterra2 is going to be just Fisterra.

The current structure and names of the project is the following ones:

  • fisterra-base: new technology, stable version, all the common libraries an, framework technical features
  • fisterra-bmodules: new technology, beta version, allows code reusability, framework technical features
  • fisterra-distribution: new technology, stable version, POS functionality and soon warehouse functionality
  • fisterra-garage: old technology, stable version, ad hoc development for managing an automotive glass repair company
  • new fisterra-garage: new technology, under development