Today we had the opportunity to be part of a very important event: Venezuela’s final meeting on DIS 29500 fast-tracking. Even though we’re working on this matter since 2007, and we weren’t approved official participation as a community, we managed to be there today. There was a strong discussion; and we had our chance to participate. I believe we were welcomed by the NB and hopefully we, as a community, can be part of future discussions in a very constructive way. Thanks again to all the committee members and our NB who made it possible for us to participate today.

If you’re using a Virtuozzo-based VPS running Debian Testing or Unstable (and probably other modern Linux distributions), you will probably run into problems regarding the patches used in the default kernel and glibc 2.7, which were properly described in the debian-glibc mailing list.

Yesterday I wrote in Planet Debian requesting information on how to copy binary files to a Linux-based Axesstel modem. Meanwhile, I wrote Axesstel Customer Service with a friendly thank you for making a great product and kindly asking them for pointers. I’ve had some degree of satisfaction when writing to the Customer Services of several enterprises, and I really hoped this would be another one.

48 hours later, they replied with this message:

A few days ago, some people in Venezuela were shocked by Mark Shuttleworth’s claims against Hugo Chávez Government and supporting María Corina Machado, a minor opposition leader in the Country.

In two weeks (Dec 3rd) there will be presidential elections in Venezuela. This will be the third time where Hugo Chavez, the current President, will be participating in the elections. The first time, in 1998, he won by 62%, then dropped to 59% in 2000 and currently some polls are giving him between 50 and 60 percent of vote intention. Since 1998, we’ve got a very active electoral movement and controversial situations which have raised very diverse opinions about our electoral system. If I recall correctly, in 1998 people voted using optic forms. In that moment, spanish Indra was the company in charge for the machines and most of the technology used in the elections. That was the time where the Supreme Electoral Council depended on the Executive power, i.e., the President.

Last saturday around 2100 (UTC-0400) some people started joining the #debian-ve IRC channel at OFTC, in order to participate on the very first Venezuelan Bugsquashing Party. We had a lot of people interested not only in squashing but also developing for Debian and other topics. Some DD’s were around, specially Aníbal Monsalve Salazar (anibal) who has been very helpful on testing and uploading packages.

apt-proxy has become an omnipresent tool in Debian-based environments. Both in work and in my clients I usually install it so we have a great way to save bandwidth (in a Country where a 512 Kbps ADSL line costs you around 50$/month, it matters) I have noticed also several Ubuntu users using it, even in big environments where a local mirror might be justified and even when other solutions like apt-cacher seem to be getting stronger.

I flooded the Planet just by upgrading WordPress.

So this weekend it’s happening in Caracas. The National Free Software Congress (CNSL) arrives to the capital in the second edition of the only nation-wide Free Software event. It will take place on Colegio Universitario de Caracas, in La Floresta, near the Indian Embassy, France Square and other nice landmarks of the city.

Yesterday I was making some operations on the BTS Control Server and found some nice behaviours that I already reported to owner, and Don answered right the way.

If you use reportbug to make an ITP (because, err, you want to) it will say that your mail should be cc’ed to debian-devel, per Policy. It will also cc the report to your address. So yesterday I made an ITP and the mail went out with the following headers:

From: Jose Parrella <joseparrella cantv.net>
...
X-Debbugs-Cc: <debian-devel lists.debian.org>

Everything ok. When it arrived to the BTS, a new header appeared:

While being in Mexico City, I walked around downtown and several other places of the city. One of this places was a block full of chinese restaurants which resulted to be (guess what) the Chinatown in Mexico City.