Stereonaut! » debian

DebConf 11

David Moreno — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 17:46:54 +0000

Last year, I had all the intention in the world to go to Bosnia and Herzegovina this summer to attend DebConf 11, but given my non-existent involvement on the project for the last couple of years, there's no reason for me to do it. Even last year when the event was held in town, I was not entirely thrilled about it. Life has changed quite a bit in the last few years, allowing me to just find and allocate my priorities on their right places.

I hope everybody attending have a great time and snap lots of photos for me to see and regret not being there.

curl POST data and newlines

David Moreno — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:10:35 +0000

I'm writing a Rails application for the microblogging strategy for Debian (which I used to call, debian-twitter, but you know how us Debian folks are ). I came up with a strange issue, that at first I thought was ActionController's fault or some crap.

So, I was testing one of my controllers with something like this:

cat /tmp/mm.txt | curl -d @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

/tmp/mm.txt is a PGP signed message which then I just send as POST data to my application. So far so good. However, when accessing the data from Rails, using request.body.read, I was a getting a single line, with the newlines (carriage returns) removed. So I started looking at how ActionController was getting the HTTP data and stuff. But then I tested:

cat /tmp/mm.txt | lwp-request -m POST  http://localhost:3000/message/new

And that had the carriage returns in place.

So, I started looking at the curl man page and discovered this little gem:

–data-binary

(HTTP) This posts data exactly as specified with no extra processing whatsoever.

If you start the data with the letter @, the rest should be a filename. Data is posted in a similar manner as –data-ascii does, except that newlines are preserved and conversions are never done.

If this option is used several times, the ones following the first will append data as described in -d/–data.

cat /tmp/mm.txt | curl --data-binary @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

…did indeed the tricky. Maybe someone needs this info some day.

DebConf 10

David Moreno — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:04:17 +0000

I was in New York for three full weeks, before, during and after DebConf 10 took place. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend talks or go hang out with folks as much as I would've wanted. Most of the time I was busy at the office with a new product launch we have been preparing for the last few months. However, I was able to come and say hi to a few people, attend the C&W party and talk with friends and ran into. I was, however, following all conversations on IRC so I was pretty informed of all of what was going on. Some random thoughts:

Being surrounded by so many amazing Debian people made me realize how much I've been apart from the project. My involvement decreased pretty much since I moved to New York. But because of that, I'm now slowly retaking my activity, trying to work on actual things that I use on my daily work instead of just packaging tons of shit that nobody really cared about.
DebConf is pretty awesome. After attending six out of the last seven Debian conferences, you get to establish a nice connection with people and they become your friends. This year, even if I only came a couple of nights, I made stronger friendships, and for that I'm thankful. It is only within Debian that this human part of bonding really takes place.
I really regret missing a couple of events: First, the Day trip to Coney Island and the Cyclones game; and the group photo. Both because of work, yes.
It was interesting to hear the thoughts from one of the Bosnian attendees about next year's DebConf there. I'm really sorry I can't recall his name, but it shocked a bit that he stated that they might try to find better speakers next year, because a lot of them "sucked a lot" here. All I can say is that, even though everybody's opinions are valid, this might come from an outsider, not used to Debian conferences. Where are you going to find better speakers? Us developers are the only speakers out there, good or bad, we are the ones making the conferences by and for.
I like Zach's attitude as DPL, even when I introduced him to a very nice friend of mine that came to the party to hang out.

DebConf 10 rocked and I appreciate everybody's participation in it. See you in Banja Luka, next year!

DebConf 10 restricted access

David Moreno — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:47:39 +0000

This is how we roll at DebConf 10.

That chair protects our router

Debian fails

David Moreno — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:06:19 +0000

Generalizations are fun, they always are because they tend to offend people and offended people by stupid shit is usually lots of fun.

Here Debian, as a whole, fails; it sucks. Here Debian blows ass, the entire project is whack.

My good friend Chris Lee sent me this:

If you can't see the above iframe, go here.

Debian, full of fail. Wasn't this generalization fun?

Let the non-sense bullshit horses be released.

Eben Moglen – 'Freedom in the Cloud' 2/5 @ NYU

David Moreno — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:19:54 +0000

Biella passed this flyer around on the Debian-NYC mailing list. If you are in New York City this Friday, you won't want to miss this Eben Moglen's talk.

If you can't see the embedded object, go here or to this post's permalink.

Cherokee Summit 2010

David Moreno — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:02:03 +0000

The Cherokee web server project is hosting the Cherokee Summit 2010 in Madrid, Spain on May 7th and 8th. The summit will be focused on high-performance and scalable Web technologies. I truly believe this is a major opportunity for hackers, developers and administrators looking for the new alternatives on the Web to bond and share experiences to benefit each other's projects and enterprises, and keep up to date on this field.

If you are interested on attending, proceed to the registration site (it's free of charge but seat-limited) and see you there in May!

Vitacilina now in Debian + 0.2 released!

David Moreno — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:24:51 +0000

Remember Vitacilina? A small aggregation library I wrote last year to be intended to replace Planet on Planeta Linux? Well, it never quite replaced it but it achieved some level of stability since I was using it for a number of tasks at work. So, during this long holiday weekend, I received a notification that the Request To Package bug I had filled against the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages in Debian has already been taken care of and the library had been uploaded. Of course, I could have made this myself a long time ago, but at the time it was simpler and faster just to hope someone else would do it at some point.

So, Dario did it. He packaged it and uploaded version 0.1 under the umbrella of the Debian Perl Group. Hurray!

But then I realized that Alexandr Ciornii had implemented some nice changes to Vitacilina back in September that I never got to include or release as a CPAN distribution. And so I just did. I've uploaded 0.2 to CPAN and you can fetch it with cpanf Vitacilina or wait for the Debian Perl folks to update it

Debian Workshop 1 at New York City

David Moreno — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:41:25 +0000

So Debian-NYC, mainly the DebConf10 local team, organized a workshop for people interested on Debian packaging. The nice people of drop.io offered their handy location in Brooklyn.

So this is the first attempt to bring new comers to Debian aiming DebConf10 next summer. Micah and dkg are the ones leading the workshop so far.

Pictures!

Re: Private methods in Perl5

David Moreno — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:41:33 +0000

Peter, I have a single word for you: Moose.