Zak B. Elep — blog, stories, and other stuff
There was no power again at the office today (thanks to my boss for sounding me while I was laying in bed 
so I had a pretty free day today. This is the first of my Unexpected Series of Events (although, in retrospect, this is somewhat expected since we did lose power at the office yesterday, giving credence to Clair’s story…)
Yesterday, I was at the UP Engineering Theatre at Diliman to join in the worldwide Software Freedom Day celebration. I was supposed to be there earlier, but due to new work (and some new stuff to learn too I woke up rather late that day. So, I found myself there in UP at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, rather tired and sweating (note to self: walking around the campus and looking for the venue at that time is not a good idea) but also looking forward to have some FOSS fun with fellow FOSS enthusiasts.
I found Dom, Jerome, Paolo, Dong, Charlton, Ian Dexter, and Doc Mana there at the theatre listening on the technical seminars that were held by PLUG as part of the celebration. This time, the TechSem was particularly interesting, due to the new `student project presentations’ by UP Engineering students, covering areas as diverse as Embedded Linux and SMS-to-Speech technology. I missed the special video from Richard Stallman though, as it was shown earlier, but I was able to grab a copy thanks to Dom :D. In between presentations, there were also mini-matchups of Frozen Bubble, which drove the (mostly geeky) crowd crazy with the rocking music and players’ itches.
Representative Teddy Casiño of Bayan Muna also dropped by later that day, to observe the goings-on as well as to bring his filing of the draft FOSS bill to the public fore. This bill has been much talked about in the PLUG list, where the especially cynical posters (me more or less included had been taking their time nitpicking many of the details on the draft (especially on the section where it essentially says `all your base are belong to us’ Turns out that RMS also saw some things that he thought needs improving (towards the end of his video, he took some time reflecting on the proposed bill,) and he wanted to see more emphasis on promoting FOSS to the education sector.
Ubuntu CDs were also given away, as well as custom SFD/UP stickers. I also finally got to meet the UnPLUG hackers who, with PLUG, jointly organized this year’s SFD.
Google’s Summer of Code is on! And I’m a part of it! 
I’ll be working with my mentor, Kees Cook, on improving the Sendpage alphanumeric pager software for OSDL’s infrastructure events reporting, especially on getting the various modules of the software communicate clearly, improving the documentation, and updating the packages on Debian, Ubuntu, and others. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fulfill my goals for this project, as well as even extending it further for the long term.
/me is now happily grokking the dead-trees version of the source...
Update: You can see my project proposal.
I’m back in Manila, again, to attend class. But this time around I’ll be staying longer here, maybe up until Thursday next week, since my dad will be coming here on Sunday so we can finally pack the last stuff we have back in our apartment at Makati.
That means, among other things, I can actually attend the PLUG induction tomorrow. That also means, however, that I won’t be able to continue my work on my adopted packages or on MOTUToMerge in the coming week :(. Then again, I think I can fill in the blank hours by working on translations for Rosetta or do (ocular) inspections of packages up for REVU.
Well, to keep focused here’s my TODO when I get back:
As I’ve blogged earlier, I uploaded the updated Debian packages for robotour and animal last night on mentors.debian.net, and am now looking for sponsors.
I also noticed that Clint has some packages for sale; I’ll take dbacl and bricolage 
And my fellow MOTU Stephan also has njam from Ubuntu up for adoption, and I’m taking it into Sid, not simply because I feel its my duty being a Ubuntu MOTU to give back to Debian, but because I am an existing Debian maintainer who wants to contribute more to Debian in that capacity.
Some of those newly-adopted packages would have to wait, however, until I get back. I’ll be leaving for Manila this Thursday to take my UPOU midterms, as well as to get some things from my old house in Makati. I might be seeing Jerome, Clair, JM, Sacha, and the other PLUG folks at their induction.
Among other things, some of my IE-using friends noticed some breakage with my blog layout (sigh). I’ll try to fix this later…
Update : Anibal Avelar seems to be the DD for njam already, but I couldn’t see the package in the package pool or in the static packages page, despite being said so in the developer QA page (even the QA page for njam itself doesn’t exist). \sh, it seems that the game is still afoot!
Update 2 : Ken Bloom comments that Anibal’s package is in the NEW queue.
Now here’s the thing I’m supposed to write It took me quite some time since I was too busy sleeping
Looking back at 2005:
Things to I want to do this 2006:
Things to look out for:
Rock on, 2006!
Hey blog. Long time no post.
Where was I? Ah, yes. I was so distracted with so many things to do at the moment. Things such as rebuilding a woody chroot via debootstrap only to fail inside a Ubuntu breezy system because of an obscure bug that affects Linux >= 2.6.12, as well as wgetting, building, and testing source packages for The Great Merge. Not to mention that my books for the second semester have arrived, and pending some grokking.
I owe EClair a howto for mozex and gnuclient, although from our recent chat she seems to have managed.
What? I need to attend to my debdiffs again. Ah well.
*Deep breathing here.*
**Finally, sem break!** Well, actually, it already *is* sem break since the 15th, and only now at the end of this month did I felt it. I was so busy doing things, both online and offline, that I didn’t even realize that the next sem will be up in the week after next. *Sigh*…
So, what have I been doing since school’s close? Mostly [Ubuntu](http://www.ubuntu.com) work:
* *Translating.* At [the Lauchpad](https://launchpad.net) the [aboutubuntu](https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/breezy/+source/ubuntu-docs/+pots/aboutubuntu/tl/+translate) document has been completed, and now I’m slaving over the [faqguide](https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/breezy/+source/ubuntu-docs/+pots/faqguide/tl/+translate).
* *Packaging.* I notice that [Lighttpd](http://www.lighttpd.net) has been included in [UniverseCandidates](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UniverseCandidates), so I decided to start my MOTU work there. It also turns out that Lighttpd also need [libmemcache](http://people.freebsd.org/~seanc/libmemcache/), which is missing on both Debian and Ubuntu. There’s an [ITP](http://bugs.debian.org/304721) of Lighttpd already, but it seems stalled; I guess this needs pinging. And on the Debian front, pabs3 from #debian-mentors shares some hints for [ecb](http://ecb.sourceforge.net) that I need to fix for the next RFS.
* *Reading.* There are lots of Fine Documentation at the [Ubuntu](http://wiki.ubuntu.com) and [Debian](http://wiki.debian.org) wikis that I’m grokking atm; among these are [the CDBS manual](https://perso.duckcorp.org/duck/cdbs-doc/cdbs-doc.xhtml) and [MaintainerScripts documentation](http://women.alioth.debian.org/wiki/index.php/English/MaintainerScripts).
* *Writing.* I’ve managed to put up a [WinModemConexantHSF quick-howto](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WinModemConexantHSF), and soon I’ll write up about my experience in maintaining packages with GNU Arch/Bazaar.
Aside from hacking, I’ve been busy baking as well, and preparing for next sem. The only thing I’m quite missing is the “traditional” Halloween get-together with my High School batchmates; hell, it is only 1 year to go before a Homecoming…
**PS**: My Ubuntu work [has paid off.](http://people.ubuntu.com/~fabbione/irclogs/ubuntu-meeting-2005-10-26.html) Thanks to Kamion, Seveas, smurf, dholbach, tseng, and ogra for voting me in as a [Ubuntu Member](http://www.ubuntu.com/community/processes/newmember)! And to Jerome Gotangco and the Ubuntu-PH team: *mabuhay kayo!*
Hey guys and gals, are any of you in Naga City? I’ll be there
tomorrow to take my natsci final exam at USI, and I thought it would
be nifty if there are some Linux geeks to meet up with. I hear there
are some Fedora users at AdNU; how about Debian dudes or Slackers? =)
If any want to meet up, just text me at 0915-5380648. =)
Things I’m doing/did (in no particular order):
I think I still need to master this blogging thing…
Zak B. Elep is a freelance IT consultant, UP Open University student, cook, swimmer, tutor, Debian maintainer, and Ubuntu developer, all of these done in no particular order. Zak lives in the relatively peaceful countryside of Daet, Camarines Norte.