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Christian Reis lives here

I know you know. But well, just in case you forgot..

Since 2004, I've been actively involved in development of Launchpad, and in 2005 I became application manager for the project, together with Steve Alexander. These days I lead a team of over 30 people at Canonical working on building a platform for the future of open source development and collaboration.

In 2003, I somehow managed an MSc degree from USP São Carlos, where I wrangled out my dissertation on defining a Process Model for Free Software Projects. My MSc project is described in two long documents (in portuguese). I graduated in Computer Engineering from UFSCar in 1997, though most of that time evaporated into swimming pools and bike trails.

A couple of years ago (just as I had decided I wanted nothing to do with computers) I discovered Free Software and Unix, and I've been working on both ever since then. I've contributed to dozens of free software projects, and I am currently an active developer for Bugzilla, PyGTK, ZODB, Kiwi and IndexedCatalog. I've worked with Web development (who hasn't?) and Usability, additionally, in the past years.

I am a partner at Async Open Source, a company that provides development and consulting services focused on on Free Software. I helped found Async in early 1999.

When I'm not pretending to be a software engineering manager I engage in outdoor sports, travelling, language and vain philosophy. I've raced mountain bikes for a couple of years now, and from 1999 to 2003 I raced a number of national-level adventure races, including the multi-day EMA 2000 and 2001.

Getting in touch with me

Online: Homepage (~kiko)
<kiko at async.com.br>
Phones: +55 16 3376 0125 work
+55 16 9112 6430 mobile
Home: (map) Rua Rui Barbosa 1977
Sao Carlos, SP
Brazil 13560-330

What he's been up to

10.893,82
    34191.75660 85663.982529 50040.380003 8 000
12.05.2012 rdiff-backup and a full disk
  • Do you know what you get when you mix rdiff-backup and a disk full error? I do now: 
     File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/rdiff_backup/regress.py", line
 290, in restore_orig_regfile
 tf.write_from_fileobj(rf.get_restore_fp())
 File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/rdiff_backup/rpath.py", line
 1195, in write_from_fileobj
 copyfileobj(fp, outfp)
 File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/rdiff_backup/rpath.py", line 64,
 in copyfileobj
 outputfp.write(inbuf)
 IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device
    Besides being a royal pain in the ass you won't believe me when I tell you that to repair this requires actual surgery on the filesystem. Here's a bug report [savannah.nongnu.org] and a thread that discusses the issue more widely [comments.gmane.org]
  • The solution I found was to find a couple of really large files (MOVs in fact) in the rdiff-backup-data subdirectories and move them around to a separate filesystem while running --check-destination-dir. Hopefully that won't error out completely -- still running.
  • Ah, indeed rdiff-backup can cope with that -- it basically creates zero-sized files where it would have placed the original file and moves on. In my case it's slightly more complicated to interpret because this is actually a recovery pass (using --check-destination-dir) from a backup that failed and therefore the recovery pass is trying to recreate files in the rdiff-backup master directory which are actually deleted in the live system. But that's easier to amend later!
  • The best solution I've found to this problem, so far, is to keep some easily-freed large files on the filesystem. That way, even if you /do/ run out of space and crash, well, you can move them away and then recover.
05.05.2012 Swaps
  • Swapped the battery on my Powertap Pro
  • Also swapped stem and handlebar on the F2C
24.04.2012 Cycling Complexity
  • Finding the exact replacement part I need from Shimano proves tricky: Y-4BN98060 is what I need according to [www3.big.or.jp] but it did take a while for me to figure out I had an SL wheelset. In fact, I by mistake bought a pair of Y-4B909000 (confusingly labeled 4-4B909000) only to find it didn't actually work! Of course, that is for the WH-7800, etc, etc. Damn.
  • /usr/share/xsessions is where GDM finds the environments available for users to log in to the system.
  • How cool is [www.asciiflow.com] huh?
19.03.2012 Sloppy focus on Ubuntu Unity
21.02.2012 TouchPlayer
  • Man I'm loving the HP WebOS Touchpad. I'll write up a proper blog entry about it, but if you're trying to get an application to play random AVI and WEBM videos on it, you'll need to install a third-party application. I installed TouchPlayer, which apparently is a build of mplayer. It wasn't exactly trivial, essentially because you need to use a host PC to do the whole process.
  • First, you enable "developer mode" on the Touchpad, which involves typing stuff into the tablet's search bar.
  • Next step, you run, on a host computer, something called "WebOS Quick Install". This is just a java archive you run doing "java -jar WebOSQuickInstall-4.4.0.jar". You can get it from [dl.dropbox.com]
  • Before running this for the first time, you need to install a "driver", which is called palm-novacom; you can download the .deb from [developer.palm.com] -- beware, it will run a daemon, which kind of freaks me out.
  • You can now connect the tablet to the computer. You now run WebOS Quick Install, which should detect your device fine. Now, click on a little networky icon, and select "Preware". This gets installed on the actual device. You can later use this on the actual Touchpad to install applications, and there are quite a few.
  • Last stop! You then need to download two .ipk files and install them on the tablet through WebOS Quick Install. The first one is for the filemgr service, which should be installable through Preware, but which is currently 404ing -- no worries, a version is available from [code.google.com] Touchplayer itself is available as a download from [mobilecoder.touchpadhp.info] -- just install both ipks and you'll have it available on the device.
  • That's it -- disconnect and enjoy!
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Complain to me if anything's broken, please?