2011 Colombian Mini-DebConf

This weekend we'll be having the 4th version of the Colombian Mini-Debconf. It will be held in the Otraparte Museum, in the city of Medellin. The cool thing this year is that we'll be having mostly Debian contributors than just users, with the kind participation of Anibal Monsalve, who is currently in the country.

There will be several 10-min lightening talks, followed by a key signing party and some actual work in packaging, and of course we'll be having some beers with Debian friends.

More info (in Spanish): http://wiki.debian.org/DebianColombia/MiniDebconf2011

Linux guy working in a Windows desktop

After >7 years of working on my own Linux machine, I now have to work on a Windows XP laptop for my new employer.

It's been almost a week and a half now, and I think I'm starting to get used to it (as far as a Gnome user can be), thanks to the following tools, that I had to install in order to survive and not getting mad:

• Firefox: for obvious reasons, the first thing is to get rid of IE.

• gVim: thank $DEITY there is a windows port for Vim.

• Putty: of course, I still need to log into several Linux machines.

• mRemote: its a wrapper around putty to handle several sessions, and also supports RDP and other protocols.

• WinSCP: just because mRemote doesn't support SCP.

• muCommander: to browse the file system in a decent way. It also supports SCP, but I haven't been able to customize it properly (opening files with gVim), so I'm not using it really.

• XChat: its always cool to hang around IRC.
  

• Pidgin: to deal with the social mess of chats/contacts out there.
  

There is also a GEdit for windows, but I seldom use it.

MiniDebconf at Panama (day Three)

Today is the last day of this conference, which has been a great experience of interaction between Central America and Caribbean communities. Yesterday we had packaging, BTS, kernel, pbuilder and quilt related talks. We also expanded the web of trust with a key signing party with almost 30 participants. Even a BoF about people interested in VoIP was held before going downtown to share some beers :)

This morning we had talks about hands on maintaining and translation tasks, we had also a group photo, and a quick visit to the Panama Canal.

Although it has been hard for me to and others to identify common areas of interest towards future work in Debian, it seems to me that these could be centered around l10n and i18n issues, along with packaging and digital inclusion projects.