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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

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]
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!
21.02.2014 DHCP in the eyes of Wireshark
  • We had a cable modem that was annoying the hell out of us because it needed to be restarted periodically -- twice a day in the latest weeks. So we called the cable company in and convinced them to swap the modem out. In putting the new modem in I did a lot of log-digging and realized that actually the request note that goes out periodically: 
     Feb 20 21:31:05 anthem dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 177.34.169.88 on eth3 to 189.7.80.20 port 67
    is actually not a request which is going unanswered, since Wireshark shows clearly that there is a Request packet followed by an ACK from that IP address. Oh, actually, I am just grepping the log wrong, because if you look at the full successful operation it looks like this: 
     Feb 17 12:22:51 anthem dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 179.154.136.190 on eth3 to 189.7.80.20 port 67
 Feb 17 12:22:51 anthem dhclient: DHCPACK of 179.154.136.190 from 189.7.80.20
 Feb 17 12:22:51 anthem dhclient: bound to 179.154.136.190 -- renewal in 4407 seconds.
  • The problem we were having previously was that at some point the modem stopped working, and the refresh DHCPREQUEST never got a response, which looks like: 
     Feb 17 20:01:24 anthem dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 179.154.136.190 on eth3 to 189.7.80.20 port 67
 Feb 17 20:02:32  dhclient: last message repeated 6 times
 Feb 17 20:03:35  dhclient: last message repeated 4 times
    Sometimes the modem would do 7 refreshes before stalling, but lately it was rare to get to 4. The log looks much healthier now!
  • One particularly weird thing is that in the actual IP allocation request comes from a different DHCP server than the one which provides the response: 
     Feb 20 17:37:45 anthem dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth3 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
 Feb 20 17:37:45 anthem dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 177.34.169.88 on eth3 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
 Feb 20 17:37:45 anthem dhclient: DHCPOFFER of 177.34.169.88 from 177.34.168.1
 Feb 20 17:37:45 anthem dhclient: DHCPACK of 177.34.169.88 from 177.34.168.1
 Feb 20 17:37:46 anthem dhclient: bound to 177.34.169.88 -- renewal in 4840 seconds.
    So 177.34.168.1 provided the response, but if you look at the DHCP Server Identifier that comes back in the OFFER packet it says 189.7.80.20. I don't think that's illegal, but it's certainly not what I've seen in normal site-wide DHCP. And if you look at the updates afterwards the refresh DHCPREQUEST is ACK'd by 189.7.80.20.
27.01.2014 Undocked Libreoffice panes
  • I had this problem for the longest time, and just found out that it is actually a documentation issue: [askubuntu.com]
  • How on earth did they get to control-doubleclick, though?!
22.01.2014 ADSL and Telefonica
  • Once a year I try calling my operator to see if they can upgrade my uplink. I'm amazed that to this day I can only get a 4MB/s link on an ADSL connection from Vivo (ex-Telefonica, ex-Telesp), the local wired operator. It's even weirder that on my current line, which I've had for about 10 years, I can't get an upgrade at all from the current 1MB/s. At the same time, Virtua offers me 20 and 100MB/s on cable at not much more that Vivo charges for their measly 1MB/s. Maybe I won't call again next year!
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Complain to me if anything's broken, please?