~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

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!
08.01.2014 Reminder to self: DBL and sendmail access map
  • The [www.spamhaus.org] DBL is great, but if it is blocking email you should be receiving, the way sendmail integrates with milters means you can't work around it by adding the sender address to the access map. The URI-milter package that we use doesn't provide whitelist support either; it's even mentioned in their TODO at [email.uoa.gr] Should I not be using 0.1-versioned software?
  • Another thing which sucks about the URI-milter is that /any/ match is considered positive; for the DBL, which I just found out lists even bit.ly (see [www.circleid.com] for details), this means that both the 127.0.1.2 and 127.0.1.3 are blocked, but they are quite different -- the first is for actual spam domains, and the other, for redirector domains which may be abused by spammers (see [www.spamhaus.org] for details). 
     Non-authoritative answer:
 Name:   bit.ly.dbl.spamhaus.org
 Address: 127.0.1.3
  • PS: I've been invited to speak at the Brazilian Campus Party this year! I'm presenting at the Socrates stage on the 29th from 15h30 to 17h00. Joining me will be Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana, Fabio Pires, Marcio Junior Vieira and Marcelo Marques.
07.01.2014 Spreadsheets and Locales
  • I hate locales in spreadsheets. [webapps.stackexchange.com] -- why on earth does the locale change the ARGUMENT SEPARATOR in formulas??
05.01.2014 DHCP root-path weirdness
  • There is an odd bug in the DHCP root-path setting. I just don't know what it is.
  • I used dhcpdump to study it, FWIW; see [bentis.calepin.co] for some handy DHCP debug advice.
  • Cooked up a very crude overall boot time measurement system using rc.local and /proc/uptime. I wonder how reliable it is.
  • PS: for the FAQ "why does /proc/uptime show a larger number for idle time than raw uptime", see [ubuntuforums.org]
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Complain to me if anything's broken, please?