Longi's life

I'm officially retiring as a Gentoo developer, simply because I've not really done anything in the last year and will not be getting back into the swing of things anytime in the future, so I feel it's time to retire.
It's been a fun 4.5 years, even if I wasn't present much as developer in the last 1.5 years, and I will definitely continue using Gentoo as my distribution of choice, nothing will change that.
I've had the honor of getting to know some amazing people during those years, and improve a lot of my skills and competences, and for that I'm grateful.
See you all around, Luca Longinotti.

Happy New Year people!!!
Let's hope for a great 2010.

Merry Christmas everyone, have a happy time!

I'll try to blog again more often, so that at least I'll have a log of my life, more or less.

Yesterday (Tuesday) evening I and a couple of friends (Flavio, Andrea and Dersim) went to ExpoVina 2009 in Zürich, a big wine exposition held on 12 boats anchored at the Bürkliplatz port.
We arrived at around 1700 and stayed till about 1920, sampling wines from different countries, regions and producers. I particularly appreciated the selection of sweet wines from Bindella, as I love sweet and dessert wines, and ordered a few right away, their VinSanto "Dolce Sinfonia" and the "Brachetto d'Aqui" were incredibly good. We also sampled a few wines from Valais, Switzerland, (Favre, Dubois), which were quite good, but I didn't order any of those, as they are relatively easy to find here, and I actually know the Favre Caves in Sion personally, as I was there with the military during my Fourier advancement course, and later with my father. They make quite good white wine, such as the Petite Arvine. Being a fan of sweet wines, I also couldn't resist ordering a few bottles of Samos, a very sweet Greek wine, by Keel. We also had our first taste of Spanish wine, from Casa del Vino, they were quite different from the usual Italian wines we were accustomed to, but quite good nonetheless. The people manning the stand were also very polite and helpful, telling us the differences and histories of the various wines as we sampled them, and offering us samples from all regions and types of wines they had. One of the friends with me then told us another guy we know (Simone) already was here a few days ago, and recommended to try the Port wines from Amarela, which we did. Most of us had no particular experience with Port wines at all, so the guy there helped us choose, and we all were pleasantly surprised, ordering a few bottles of Ruby Reserva and Finest Reserve. To conclude the wine-tasting evening, we enjoyed a few Italian red wines at Weibel, and had a nice discussion with the Italian guy there. All in all a very nice event, which I'll be sure to go again next year.
After that we hooked up with a few other friends (albeit we were ~20 minutes late, sorry guys! ) and went to eat Sushi at Nooch. I quite enjoy Asian food, and this was my first time eating sushi, and I must say it was very good, but I still prefer all the fried Chinese food and stuff.
After that we all went home, and me and Flavio watched another episode of "My name is Earl", it's a really hilarious show that I recommend to anyone.
Yo, have a good day!

I'm finally back on the net, after not having any internet access at my new apartment in Zürich after I moved there.
I now started my bachelor studies at the ETH Zürich, of course in Computer Science, though there's a little bit too much maths right now for me to be really excited about it, future semesters will be better I hope.
So I'll try to get back to a few Gentoo things in the near future, now that I also finally fixed up my main dev system (which had its disk die just before I moved)...
Still this blog entry's main focus is to tell you the name of a package I discovered today:

app-misc/tmux

After reinstalling this system I, as always before, emerged screen to take care of my detached terminal needs, I always had the problem with backspace not working correctly from the desktop, which I was never able to fix correctly, but it was bearable. This time it seems something else went wrong too, and inside my screen sessions it didn't source .bashrc or .bash_profile (which sources .bashrc), even if the shell was correctly set to a bash login shell...
So, while perusing Gentoo Wiki's Screen TIPs to see if anyone had seen something like this, at the end of that page I came across the mention of tmux, a "simple, modern, BSD-licensed alternative to GNU Screen".
Seeing that it only depended on ncurses (which is usually installed everywhere), and was only like 100kb of source, I installed it and tried it out. I have to say I'm impressed, this little tool does everything I did with screen too (mainly just having multiple, detached terminals and resuming them, which is probably no "advanced screen usage", but what most people will likely need), backspace works without any fiddling, the Bash stuff is correctly sourced, and the few commands are easy to adapt to, here a little overview:

tmux

Starts a new tmux session

CTRL-b d

Press CTRL-b, then d, to detach the terminal

tmux a

Reattach to the detached terminal

Still, read man tmux to get the full overview, and then happily do emerge -C screen, as I did.

Best regards, chtekk.

Yo all!
Tomorrow to FOSDEM 07 /me goes, along with hansmi, KillerFox and blubb from the swiss crowd!
Later on both flo and EleRas will join us too, so for me not only will it be "the great Gentoo dev gathering", but also "the great SysCP dev gathering", will all three of us present. As flo correctly guessed, I'll be sporting the black Gentoo t-shirt, which is amazingly comfortable, but flo's SysCP t-shirt intrigued me... Is it possible to have more of those @ flo? In black? /me loves black! We'll be able to discuss that at FOSDEM I think...
Now off to bed, as I have to get up early (~4AM) to catch the first train to get to Basel, where the others await, and from there off to Bruxelles.
Lugano-Basel-Frankfurt Am Main-Köln-Bruxelles is the exact route, almost 1000 Km, for a total en-route time of about 11 hours, yay!
On the PHP front, I've finally put PHP 5.2.1 and PHP 4.4.5, with all the needed patches and, of course, Suhosin support, into the PHP Overlay. I'll test it all during the next days and hopefully commit to the tree on Monday at the latest. Many bugs are fixed with the latest releases, concurrentmodphp support was greatly improved and fixed (especially wrt 64bit archs), and the new MySQL extension patches are included to have the connection charset settable per-SAPI, for each PHP version, using php.ini, instead of my.cnf.
Work on VCD is also going steady, we should be near feature-completion soon, so expect some form of pre-release in the next two weeks... Poke Hollow on #gentoo-vserver for more info.
Best regards, cya all, CHTEKK.

Happy new year people!!!

I wish you all a great 2007 full of fun and happiness and all the other good stuff (new hardware comes to mind ).
23C3 finished two days ago, it was really great fun with great talks and great people (yeah, Polish guy living in the USA, from the university near Atlanta, you know who you are ).
Now we've passed yesterday by visiting Berlin and at the moment we're connected through the Hostels connection... It depresses me to know it's at least twice as fast as my home DSL.
By the way, all this convinced me to come to FOSDEM 07, so be prepared to know the CHTEKK (or be scared, that all depends).
Cya, and happy new year, CHTEKK.

Yo! Greetings from the 23C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin.
Great talks and great people here, at the moment I'm attending a talk about JSON RPC (who knows, maybe that can/will be used someday to improve SysCP ), and before that I attended a really great talk about backbone hacking.
As you can see from this blog post, the wireless network works well (as does the wired one).
With regards to Gentoo devs, I've already seen and got to know hansmi, KillerFox and Pylon. I've also been told that mabi is around and hanno should be too (at least based on the fact he gave a Lightning Talk about XGL yesterday, which I sadly missed), we should really define a place to meet and get to know eachother... That goes for Gentoo and SysCP users too.
I myself can usually be found attending some talk or down in the Hackcenter (central position, at a round table).
Have fun!
Best regards, CHTEKK.

I'll be away from this evening UTC until evening UTC 03.11.2006, so don't search for me or await any reply from me.
Absolutely no internet access, so... See ya all in a week!
Best regards, CHTEKK.