~kiko Resumé Software Diary Present Papers Outdoor Travel Books Technical Pix Family

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

30.05.2014 Updated Server BIOS for out S5520HC
  • Huge filename and pretty massive firmware update: S5520HC_S5520SC_EFI_BIOS64_BMC61_FRU33_ME112.zip
  • Moved from 0050 to 0064 -- a 4 year delta between versions!
  • Only issue was the the FRU and DSR update didn't get done because it printed a scary warning about not being able to detect a temperature sensor. 
     Detecting Front Panel Temp Sensor Device. Please wait...
  
 Front Panel Temperature sensor device hardware is not found.
 Chassis fan Speed Control (FSC) will not work properly without this
 sensor!
  
 Do you want to still Continue (Y/N)?
  • I guess I'm just going to ignore that as I don't really seem to need the update for those bits. What do the FRU and SDR pieces do anyway?
16.05.2014 USB drives and burn-in
  • I'm replacing the server USB backup drives and looking for good alternatives. I've picked a few and am trying to burn them in before making the commitment (as previous drives I was trying to use ended up dying on me mid-flight). Burn-in for me is badblocks for a few days and some SMART self-testing.
  • One of the drives I got was a Seagate, and it annoyed me that there were a lot of errors in the two first SMART values listed by smartmontools as I did a badblocks on it: 
     1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   100   100   006    Pre-fail  Always -       236840
 7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   100   253   030    Pre-fail  Always -       204379
    I say it annoyed me, but then I read this: [serverfault.com]
  • So the lower side of the number is just a counter. And math shows they have zero errors. Yay!
  • And if you have a USB drive that has self-tests being aborted by the host, check to see if it's not sleeping mid-test. At least that is what [ddumont.wordpress.com] says; I'm trying it.
  • Daft Google syncml limitations: [www.nodhing.com]
  • Saved my ass with DD-WRT passwords today not being synced between web and ssh: [www.dd-wrt.com]
  • Quora just taught me: 
     Answer from Susan Ng
 I learned this in 1st grade - it's a REALLY easy and simple way to learn
 your nine times table. Or to teach someone else to learn!
 1) Look at your (or someone else's) hands
 2) Say you want to find 9x7.  Put down your 7th finger
 3) Count the number of fingers to the left of your 7. This is your tens
 digit.  Count the number of fingers to your right.  This is your ones
 digit.
 9x7=63
    Wow!
  • What a trick: [testefromhell.wikispaces.com]
  • Typing the em-dash: [askubuntu.com]
  • Getting .bash_profile sourced: [askubuntu.com]
  • Just ran into: [www.fxp0.org.ua]
23.04.2014 Juju and LXC
  • Debugging session as to why I can't get the local provider to give me new machines in Juju. This is probably a regression in 1.18.1.4, but I still don't know yet.
  • One thing which is interesting is that the log for machine-0 is actually where a lot of the container traffic appears. machine-0 is the bootstrap node, and in the local provider, it's what houses all the other containers.
  • root@chorus:/etc/default# apt-get install lxc/precise-backports
  • Escape the console?
  • lxc-ls is busted?
  • [curtis.hovey.name]
20.04.2014 36ers?
09.04.2014 HP Virtual Rooms
  • The trick to getting [rooms.hp.com] to work is to know that the plugin and application they provide are 32-bit. That's not something which is obvious unless you actually read the page carefully, and the failure mode is completely unobvious (the installer runs, the plugin is there, the test page looks like it works but no virtual room ever opens, with a URL flashing quickly before loading back into the test page). There is a trick which you can use to test manually and see what is wrong: 
     kiko@limpinho:~$ cd .hpvirtualrooms 
 kiko@limpinho:~/.hpvirtualrooms$ ./hpvirtualrooms 
 bash: ./hpvirtualrooms: No such file or directory
 kiko@limpinho:~/.hpvirtualrooms$ file hpvirtualrooms 
 hpvirtualrooms: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1
 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15
    Aha! Okay. So I need some 32-bit libraries..
  • First step, I need 
     sudo apt-get install libc6-i386
  • That lets me see via ldd the situation. And it's pretty bad: I need a total of 44 libraries pulled in as dependencies from this core set: 
     libsm6:i386 libpng12:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libxi6:i386
 libx11-6:i386 libasound2:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libfontconfig1:i386
 libxrender1:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libglib2.0-0:i386 libxfixes3:i386
 libglu1:i386
  • But once that's done, it seems to work. I need to put a bit more effort into validating it in the office, but I at least now know how to do it. And best of all, it doesn't seem to need Java!
17.03.2014 Android and Account Syncing
  • If you look at your Android phone settings and all your accounts have "sync disabled", you will never figure out how to fix it. It turns out that you need to look in the Gmail app and enable sync. That in turn enables Android-wide synchronization, or at least that's my experience and what [androidforums.com] tells you to do. WTF.
  • Ah, now that I looked at [support.google.com] it looks more sensible. So the reality is that you control that same setting in both gmail and in the Data Usage settings screen. I bet I disabled it while roaming internationally!
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Complain to me if anything's broken, please?