pmacedo

I wonder what I did to deserve this. I have had my account on ABN AMRO for ages and never had issues. I had an account in Banco do Brazil for all of my university years and no big issues (besides the fact that they are among one of the worst banks in Brazil). And now, I have an account on Credit Suisse for less than a year (8 months so far) and they already screwed up.. Twice (or once, depending on how you count it).

Back in March, I went to the teller to pay two bills. Silly me, who thought payment methods in Switzerland are like in Brazil: in Brazil, when you go to a teller and pay a bill, it *is* paid. In Switzerland, you go to a teller, and the $#$@^$@#@# bill is just *scheduled* to be paid.
Somewhere along the way, CS decided to not process those payments. So months later, I receive angry letters from my landlord and the temporary housing company telling I owe them money. By now, I already have my internet banking account details, so I use it to pay the bills (this time successfully) , which leave me with an almost negative bank account (thankfully my brother had some money he could borrow me for a month)....
I completely forget about this situation... Until today, last Friday on my two week vacation. I log in to pay another bill and lo and behold... They decided to process those long-standing non-processed payments. Lovely... At least this time I have enough money left to pay all my standard bills while I sort this mess out...

This is why sometimes I get pissed off at this country. Supposed to be one hell of an advanced country.. Famous for its banking system.. I guess the only reason they are famous for their banking system is that they know how to not say anything about who owns a given account.. Not for real good service...

I love Amazon's suggestions of items to buy... Now, there's one thing that annoys me a lot: no matter that Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr and Amazon.com are all owned by the same company, none of these sites share data.
For example, I order a lot of metal CDs from Amazon.de, as Nuclear Blast (a very nice Metal record label) usually releases their special editions there.  But then I get e-mails from Amazon.fr recommending the same CDs I bought in Amazon.de . The only way to fix recommendations on Amazon.fr (and the others)? Go manually and check "I own this" for every item I buy on the localized sites. 

This must be just a feature they never thought about implementing, because I know this cannot be pinned on "z0mg, we can't just replicate this data to N datacenters around the world, it's just too damn expensive"...  or "we don't have capacity to store this replicated data" (in this case, just kill the cloud services until you can do proper global replication)...  This honestly doesn't feel right at all. Correlation of purchase data for recommendation is something that can be easily done (they do it for local data in each domain), so why not do it properly? As sites spread to other domains, the separate 'stores' should only avoid showing things they don't have for sale (special items that can only be sold to a given location), but the 'bigger picture' can easily be shared (if a user buys items from 'Iron Maiden' in the UK store, it may be interesting to show Iron Maiden items to the user when he visits the Germany store)...

Until Amazon figures that out, I guess I'll have to either do their work manually or just avoid Amazon completely and buy the  items I want directly from record labels when possible ( Nuclear Blast has a huge catalog and they have lots of 'mailorder' [or online]-only items )....

I just came back from spending a couple days in Barcelona for a company offsite (more on that later). Anyway, this got me questioning 'why the hell do I feel like I need to go back to Switzerland to feel at home?".  After some deliberation (both sober and after having a few glasses of wine), I got to the conclusion that it's only a matter of stability. Switzerland (now) represents to me a safe place to be: I have my own place, with my own rules and my own limits (well, there's work-related limits, but outside of work, *I* am in control). 
This is certainly similar to what I had in Brazil, although I have a more stable situation here (no annoying father to deal with). Back there, I had my job, my car to drive around when I felt like driving, my dogs to play with, my friends who knew me for ages and a safe place to be, my bedroom (AKA my haven).
All this made me worried though. I wonder how I would feel if I had to go back to Brazil and live with my parents for a while (at least until I get my own place)... I'm guessing 'like sh*t' is the best description (going from 'full liberty' to "can only do whatever doesn't annoy my father" would be a very big downgrade... I'll have to see how that plays out if I ever cross that bridge....

Again I take ages to say anything... I should try to fix that (as usual, another promise that may be as empty as all the previous promises to post more frequently). As usual, lots of things happened since my last update. Quite a lot has changed in the last months...  I still own a car... But it's about 9200Km away from me... Last April I moved to Switzerland because of my work, which means being distant from everything and everyone I've ever known except for a few coworkers who moved as well.  For the first time ever, I'm living in my own apartment (rented, of course) and having to multiply the number of expensive items I own..  Before moving, the most expensive items I owned were (in order of most recent to oldest): my new car, my old car (which was about 1/8th of the price of the new one) , my computer (which probably was as expensive as the car.. I upgraded that computer a lot) . Now I have a big TV (hey, it was cheap compared to the absurd prices in Brazil... even after converting to Reais and adding an import tax of 50%, it was still cheaper here), a server (again, less than half of the price from Brazil), furniture, a roomba (sorry, but I am lazy... If there's a robot to do some annoying job for me, I will certainly use it), a PS3... And quite a few bills to pay, sadly (including even a TV license, which was a weird concept for me being from a country that pays for Tv Cultura with money obtained from other taxes).  It's been an interesting experience, although I miss some of the comforts of living in a home, such as having my dogs around and being able to wash my clothes any time I want.. 

Yes, you read that right: in my building, I have a day to wash my clothes, as the washing machine and drier are in a common area and are shared by all the people who live in the building.  Kinda annoying, specially as my day is in the middle of the week. If I didn't have a flexible work schedule, that would be a problem.

Anyway.. My intention is not to make this another "z0mg, I'm an expatriate in Switzerland" blog, so I wont be commenting much about life here.. But do expect rants about this place (hell, I love ranting about anything, anywhere, anyone... :D )

Now time to sleep and maybe later this week I will rant a bit more.

Took me some time to post, but I finally got my car. Took them 147 days to deliver it, only 5 of them with the car in the dealership adding extras and being licensed. But damn, 1.63 times the promised delivery time is a bit too much. Fiat should apologize and communicate to their clients why the damn cars are taking ages to be delivered. Other companies do better. Renault simply stopped selling cars, since they can't deliver any more in under 150 days. They're taking a big hit by not selling, but there's the other side: they prefer to not sell than to sell and not be able to deliver to the clients in a reasonable time....

Anyways, the blue devil (or quantum car, due to it's nonexistence and later due to it's quantum state ["it's in the factory yard in Argentina" , "no, it's in a ship en-route to Brazil" , "no, it must be in Brazil already, because it's in the Fiat Brazil system"] ) is great. I managed to screw up a tire in the first hour , having to buy a new one and to paint the rim (what can I do?? it was the first time I was parking and the damn curb had a sharp edge...), I spent a truckload of money so far on a bunch of things (licensing and taxes, alarm, window tinting, some special polish to the paint job and some special treatment to the seats [I rejected the leather seats for now], then the tire)... And on monday, the first of the 4 payments of the insurance will be made... It's a big one, I can tell you....  But at least it is with a big insurance company, so I shouldn't have any issues. 
The car itself is great. Loads of tiny details I still have to learn about it due to the amount of stuff it has, but I already know the basics: open it, turn it on, drive around in forward and reverse, etc :P
The radio is a little annoying though..If the key is on the car such that the battery is on but the car is not started (and the radio is on), when you start the car, the radio resets, which is a bit annoying when you're listening to the Ipod that is connected to it , since it then has to reconnect to the Ipod , find the song and restarts the song from the beginning. It also will re-pair with the phone if you have bluetooth pairing enabled, so after the song starts, it stops for a while , you hear a beep and then a message shows on the radio saying that a bluetooth connection was made....


As for other things, life has been pretty much the same. The meds helped a bit initially to loose weight, but not much, but now with the new car my knee isn't hurting so much and I'll resume exercises, which should help. I've also spent a week in the US for work (which was painful, considering that United Airlines screwed up the flight to the US, rescheduling it from 8PM on saturday to 6AM on the damn September 7th...) , bought a bunch of crap (mostly hardware, including some HDDs to buid a raid 5 to store all my photos and files) , had some very interesting vietnamese food in San Francisco.... And got hooked to PS3... I brought one from the US per request from a friend and now I'm hooked. I'm just going to wait for my expenses to get back to semi-normal (as the insurance and car payments start to become something normal), then I'll buy a server (to have my raid 5 ;) ) , then a TV and the PS3.

Today marks the 26th day since I took a big step and ordered a new car. Hopefully it should be delivered soon (the sales guy told me it should take at most 90 days, but usually is way less than that). I've been dreaming about getting a new car for a long time (probably since I took my current car to the mechanic for the first time)... Too bad this will cause a big decrease in my available income for the next 5 years... Not to mention that the insurance will be insanely high, since , as they said , I'm 'too young ' (drivers between 18 and 24 years old are in the risk zone , according to insurance companies) 'and the car is too expensive for someone of your age'... Oh well... What can I do but pay it? I'm not willing to take the risk of driving a new and expensive car around without any insurance that covers it completely.

Also, last wednesday I started to take meds again to loose weight... This time, it seems the doctor didn't include any anti-depressive ingredients in the formula, so I'm getting the full effects... Depression ftl..... Hopefully this wont last long and will have its desired effects...

Resume of the second week in Mountain View , one day at a time: work , work , work , work , (airport, flight , airport , flight), airport , flight , sleep(8h).

The following week was the (un)usual stuff. Finish the stuff that was pending from the trip to the US (which took me monday and part of tuesday), then race to get an haircut tuesday night, go to bed early to wake up at 3AM on wednesday to take a flight to Porto Alegre at 6AM for FISL.

FISL was very cool. I kinda expected the reaction we had to the company booth , but I didn't expect it to be in such big scale. Sadly I didn't have the chance to attend any talks, but at least I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with the Fedora and Red Hat guys on the Fedora booth. As for the long work hours , being harassed in all sorts of ways in exchange for swag, I could easily live without them, but it was cool to talk to the end-users as well, getting to answer questions about our products, explain our instance on FOSS , our job with SoC, etc.  A very cool experience, albeit a tiresome one. I've slept less than 12 hours during the 4 nights we spent in Porto Alegre, so by the time I got home, I literally slept 12 hours straight.

Now I'm finally back at the office, having had a full week of work at the office.. I must admit I missed this place... specially now that we got the pirate flags up :P ( Bought in Seattle, in a store called Pirates Plunder... The other flag we bought isn't on the web store)

Back to telling everyone how things are... The second week in Seattle was a bit boring.. Only cool thing was visiting the Museum of Flight and leaving that dark city to come to California (OK. Seattle is cool, but its weather is a nightmare. Spring time with snow? C'mon... ) . The rest of the week was work as usual, with two days of Python class. So now I know the bare minimum of Python, so I have no excuse to use bash and Perl anymore :p

The Museum of Flight is pretty big, probably because Washington is the state were Boeing has a massive operation (in fact, right by the Museum, there's a massive Boeing building that can house a bunch of aircraft during construction). There was a lot of interesting stuff, including a Boeing (of course) that was part of the Air Force One rotation during the government of JFK and several others. Pretty funny to see how the plane was modified for its political purpose... There was also a Concorde . I wonder how people could fly in one of those: the fuselage isn't very big, so a guy as tall as me would hit the ceiling all the time while walking down the aisle; the seats seemed small (I couldn't sit to check, because the seats were behind a wall of plexiglass). Probably the only excuse to fly on a Concorde was its luxury factor and the fact that it was fast as hell (New York - Paris in 2 hours if I recall correctly).    There was also a prototype 737 , that was tested by NASA (sadly we couldn't get inside that one) and a big double deck plane, but that one was locked as well.  Back to the cozy internal part of the museum (did I forget to mention that the planes were outside and it was *raining* all the time we were checking the planes?), we could check some WWI and WWII planes, as well as some of the newest stuff, including a SR 71 cockpit (the only thing left of the plane after a crash landing :p ) , as well as its little brother (the M-21 .. interestingly enough, lots of people post pictures of the M-21 from the MOF of Seattle as being the SR-71).

There was also a F4-Phantom, a few MIGs and lots of space-related content, including one winner of one of those prizes for space exploration.  One of the most interesting things however was the space part, which had a little simulator of the Hubble repair mission (namely floating in the space, using a set of controls similar to the 'jet packs' used by astronauts , to reach the grappling thingie in Hubble in a given time/fuel limit).  Another interesting thing was a copy of one of the US-built modules of the International Space Station. The thing is big , but not very big. I could almost hit the ceiling with my head if I stood on my toes.

The worst part was visiting the Museum store though... Left there about US$100,00 poorer :p At least I got a few very cool replicas , including the SR-71 , the last replica of a Thunderbolt A-10 and a few others.

After that Tuesday, it was time for the python classes on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by a nice lunch with the team on the Metropolitan Grill. Then it was a big race to the airport , to return the car on time (we ended returning it a little late), then checking in , going through TSA and waiting hours for the plane.  The flight initially was scheduled for 6:55 PM , so that would be an almost 5 hour wait. But then , due to weather , the plane got delayed twice: first, landings in Seattle Tacoma International were delayed because of the snow.  Then after the plane landed, they couldn't confirm the take off hour, because landings in San Francisco International were also being delayed due to the weather....  The flight ended up taking off at 9:30PM, landing at almost midnight here in California.  Then fun with the bags (they were shipped earlier, since we tried to get earlier flights but we didn't succeed.. And we were sitting there, waiting for the bags to appear in the luggage claim, when in fact they already were in the United Airlines lockers for a few hours.

As for California, it seems like a cool place. The company campus is pretty cool, albeit a bit too big. Moving around is a nightmare, specially if you need to go from the building where the sysops stay to the main buildings (the ones that people always hear about when the company is mentioned). In fact, we only went to the main buildings one time , to eat burritos for dinner. We probably will go there again to check it out in greater detail this week.

We also went this sunday to San Francisco to check the Golden Gate bridge. Pretty nifty piece of engineering if you ask me, but given that the  city is 1 hour+ away from Mountain View, by the time we got there, we just went to the bridge, took some pictures and drove back 'home'. Next time we can have a better touristic plan, so we can arrive there early and spend a whole day in the city.

Now time to rest , since there's a whole big week ahead, including the long awaited return to the motherland on Friday/Saturday :'''D

It's been a while since I posted (as usual), but lots of things are going on. Since december, not much happened, except for the present. I'm currently in Seattle, for some business and training for two weeks, with two more weeks in Mountain View scheduled for more training.  The flight went pretty smooth, except for the part between BHZ - CNF and SP - GRU , since the pilot's seat belt was damaged and had to be repaired... Not much if you think about it (and you consider that the plane was built in 1989 :O ). But , even though Gol has a repair center in CNF, they managed to waste a lot of time repairing this , so me and my work mates lost our flights to the US. So we had the "joy" of having to find a hotel , reschedule our flights to a friday and sit around in GRU without anything useful to do. 

Getting on the plane itself was an adventure. First, being interrogated by the United Airlines people. Then, brazilian federal police checking passport and X-raying the backpack, then United again checks your hand luggage to check if it's in accordance with TSA rules. Then sit in a shitty economy seat for 10+ hours (the economy chairs looked even more shittier considering you have to pass by the business and first class seats when entering the plane...). Full flight, so no chance of jumping to one of the 3 chair rows in the middle of the plane to sleep.... So I end up arriving in O'Hare International, having slept less than 1 hour....

Immigration (AKA Customs and Border Patrol) was odd. By the time we landed, we had already received some forms from DHS and Customs to fill. Upon arrival, we walked to the Immigration part of the airport, where a weird scenario was set. Imagine a futuristic-looking setting, where you have several booths with government officials. Imagine then two queues, with those queue separators you see in banks. Add a "Big Brother"-esque voice telling "aliens" to go to the right queue and US citizens to the left queue. Seemed way too much like any dystopian society you see in movies.

After that, moving around to the other wing of the airport, to get a second 4 hour long flight to Tacoma, WA.... At least this time I managed to sleep for 90 minutes or so... Specially since I had a family by my side , with two young kids who just wouldn't stop eating and talking (and making a mess in the plane).

By the time we got to the hotel, instead of resting we decided to drive around. We ended up going to Fry's in Renton, to buy cameras and some other stuff. Then to the Apple store, so I could get an IPod.  Had a good lasagna with a merlot from California for dinner/lunch. On sunday, sat around in the hotel during the morning, then went for a walk on Pike Street , then later to a Pirate store, then dinner ; this time, had a nice (and big) salmon hamburger.

Then, a full week of meetings, with a small city tour with the team on tuesday. Checked out the city library (interestingly enough, its non-fiction section is built in the shape of a sloped coil, so adding more items to a part of the collection is easy; also, its external shape is pretty odd), the city center with its historical background and underground.
Then we went for  dinner on the Metropolitan Grill: pretty good food, except for the sizes... The onion rings were massive; the salad alone would make me full, if it wasn't for the big walk opening my appetite; and the main dish (a medium petite filet) wasn't petite at all. One of my teammates got a hamburger so big that he had to take half of it home.. IIRC, it's 20 ounces.. So big that it didn't even fit the bread :P

Besides that, not much happened. Got some mexican food this friday.. Note to self: avoid mexican food at all costs. The amount of pepper on the burritos is enough to burn a small forest faster than napalm. 

After a week, I can say that Seattle is a very nice city. I could easily live here, if it wasn't for the cold: during the whole week, I believe the temperature never went above 10C . The city is very beautiful, the people very polite and the traffic isn't horrid. It really amazes me that the drivers actually wait for pedestrians to cross the street... According to my team mates, the same doesn't happen in LA, NY and other american cities.

BTW, I managed to watch a bit of TV on the hotel. Interestingly , the programs are repeated a lot. On MSNBC, I saw the same program about jails in the US being broadcasted 3 times. On CNN, you can easily see the same news every hour.  No wonder american cable TV has so many channels.. After all, if you show only one thing half a dozen times per day, you need several channels to show different stuff.   Another interesting thing is the constant stream of medical ads. I've seen ads for Viagra, Cialis , weight loss products and every other product you can dream of.

Nothing like a miserable ending to a miserable year. Next year, even if it means staying at home drinking cheap wine, I won`t go to a party in a club unless I got the majority of my friends there...  This year`s party was horrible.. All I could see around me was older people... Not fun when you`re 24 and single. 
But let`s see what was good of this year and what sucked:

Things that sucked:
1 - eleven months of the year were spent working to a company that couldnt care less about their employees (including me).
2 - the previous item means : eleven months receiving an horrible wage and not being able to pay the cheap car I had bought from my brother...
3 - single.. sadly this year I didnt find someone who could share my misery. Lucky girl.. I wish I couldnt find myself to share my misery with me....
4 - the weight.. anxiety made me gain a lot of weight.. I`m at my all time high... Things are critical now...

Thing that was awesome:
1 - Yeah.. sadly that`s only one thing.. I`ve got a new job.. Working for the biggest internet search company on the world... Too bad I only started working for them on december... So far, I`ve learnt about a lot of fun confidential stuff.. Too bad I had to sign an evil NDA.. But if that means big $$$$$ on my pockets, I welcome any NDA.... Now that I got a proper job, I finally paid the car (paid over 50% of the price in just one month.. That`s to show how much better my new wage is) and I can finally dream of getting a brand new car... This time , something that does more than 6Km/L and has  a good engine.....

2008 seems like e a good year.. New car in sight, a lovely job , lots of sweat and exercise to loose all the wiehgt.. All that is missing is someone to enjoy this with me ....  Enough rambling, time to crash.. *gone*

It's amazing how money has the tendency to go away.. And when some of it starts to run away from you, the rest tries to go with it.... The last two days have been horrible for me money-wise... First, my 1GB pen drive blew up (plugged it in a client's computer to install the network card drivers and kaboom)... Then I go to dentist and eye doctor... Then go buy new glasses... And some minutes later, my MP3 player crashes into the ground , breaking the HDD.. Total bill if I consider the price of new pen drive and MP3 player: almost R$3000,00 (my mp3 player was  a Zen Xtra. If I buy a new HDD, it's gonna be at least R$500,00... A new player from Creative, with similar characteristics, is being sold around here by smugglers for R$1700,00)...
At least this month I got a raise.. Nothing big, but I'm still below the average wage for a Linux Sysadmin with my experience.... Hopefully things will change soon... I'm doing some interviews, sending my CV around and hopefully I'll find a place that values my experience.

While I wait, all I can do is work.. And survive the madness... Last week, was filled with travels...  One to São Paulo... Staying in a cheap hotel ("super economy" is how they described it in their ads).. Landing in the worst place to land (Congonhas... Not fun to land there a few months after a deadly accident there... And I was flying in a jet from TAM... The pilots are so scared that as soon as the front wheel touches the ground, they put the engine thrust at 300% to break the plane... The breaking took less than 4 seconds and even then, when the place turned to the right to enter the taxiway, I could see we were less than 300 meters from the end of the runway).  At least I survived (tired, but I did). Then the day after coming back from São Paulo, a day travel to Divinópolis to go to a client install 10 servers.. Not fun at all... Specially because the job was very boring and repetitive (I make a kickstart generator that automatically configures the whole machine. All it takes is someone to insert a CD , boot the machine , type a command line with several parameters and then wait... But I guess the client was too lazy and prefers to pay the cost of me traveling 2 hours, working 4 hours then traveling 2 hours back ....

Now , time to rest, because work keeps showing up in all places...

It's been a while since I've posted here.. Probably because I'm not much into talking about my l ife ... Maybe because I've been busy at work (or not :P )... But as usual, life went on , with me trying to keep up with its rhythm....

Quite a few things happened in the last month or so since my last post.. Let me try to remember it all:
 - Did the first job interview for one big company... follow up interview is scheduled for next week.. and maybe a few others in the next month. Hopefully I wont screw up it as bad as I manage to screw up my love life, because this is one of the *3* companies that I'd love to work for.
- Since I mentioned work... The company I interviewed for in the beginning of the year (was it January or march?) still didn't call me for the follow up interview, although my informant there says they are getting crazy waiting for me to be hired..... That's one of the reasons I hate HR departments...
- Talking about love life.. I've finally come to terms with myself about my last passion (or maybe it was just an infatuation?)... I've come to realize that I want her to be happy, be it with me or with someone else.. And seems the latter is what is going on... So all the best wishes for her.. And in case she changes her mind, I'm still here :P
- Work has been a mix of hectic days and days where I wish I was at home in my comfy bed... In several of those hectic days,  I've had the chance to play with kickstart, making a nice php script (yeah.. php sucks, but it's perfect for something kick and dirty that works)  that takes only a few arguments (namely hostname, network address without last octet [ I'm assuming private class C networks are used] and ADSL user/password) and makes a proxy with VPN, firewall , DHCP , QOS through TC and content filtering with squid .. All with one single command line in the Centos 4.5 install line. Too bad just one person from the whole team at work recognized the quality of what I've done... I've spent several weekends tuning that script to make something that a clueless user could use.. And everyone but one person simply ignores it... No wonder I want to go work somewhere else...

Besides that, nothing much is going on.. Besides the anxiety of waiting for interview for $DREAM_COMPANY , I'm actually getting some brain exercise by moving my server from a FC5 server to Centos 5.0 x86_64.. This will hopefully will reduce the time I spend checking for vulnerabilities in my server, at least until Centos 5.0 becomes unsupported and I have to move to Centos X....

As for other subjects... I've got my hands on the Nightwish Dark Passion Play promo. Quite interesting.. However, I still prefer old Nightwish. And even the "intermediate" Nightwish, when they were without an official singer, were better.. The demos on the Amaranth single show Marco could be an excellent singer, *as long as the songs were written with a male singer in mind*. Otherwise, it becomes just a weird exercise of putting a good male singer to do horrible vocal lines that were composed for a woman.  Want proof? Listen to "Reach" (demo of Amaranth) and then listen to "When your lips were still red" or any other song from Tarot.
Not to mention that I hate stuff that's too "grandiose"... Tuomas managed to make something so big that it becomes annoying.. If we consider the whole CD, the most grandiose music is "The poet and the pendulum".. Which IMHO is the worst track .. "Bye Bye Beautiful", although I don't like the idea behind the lyrics, and "Master Passion Greed" are two good examples of simple songs that are powerful and catchy.

Anyway, I've said too much.. so time to hide away for one month.. Or maybe two, since this entry is huge :P

Yesterday, I had to go to a client, on an unscheduled visit. His proxy decided to die in a freaky way: during the night, the / filesystem became read-only, killing all services that tried to write to the disk (squid mainly).  I told him to reboot and add "forcefsck" to the command line, but little did I know that the hard disk was very damaged. (it seems it got a bad block on the bad block list.. how nice of it...)  Because of this, all the filesystem disappeared.

"Ok", I thought to myself, "just reinstall it and reconfigure it all.. And it has the side benefit that we lost all the insane firewall rules this guy had , so we can simplify it" . Install FC6 on the disk the client provided. Install goes fine, but on boot, the lovely "boot disk error, insert another disk and press any key to continue" message appears. The oddity is that the HDD is recognized in the bios (kinda): it shows up in the first bios screen, shows up in the bios when you go there to config the disk.. But when it should load the boot loader from the MBR, the disk just disappears (that little box with info about all hardware shows no signs of the disk).
So off we go, testing all the hardware.. We end up ruling that the disk is the responsible. So we get a SCSI controller and a 9GB IBM SCSI disk. The fedora installer hangs before loading, with the SCSI bus being reset several times..  We give up on this disk, then move to a very old IDE disk (10GB maxtor disk). At least that disk worked.. After several hours of trying to get the machine installed and configured.

Sadly (yeah, murphy is a !@#$%&%), my client found some backups of his configs, so I'll probably end up with his horrible firewall scripts... And when I mean horrible, I really mean it. Instead of changing the default policy of the input and forward chains to drop, he *manually* drops every single dangerous port... Would be easier to set everything to DROP and then allow what is needed. This approach usually makes firewall scripts way smaller, specially cause most users just need HTTP(s) and e-mail.

I cant wait for a FOSS RPM of java.. specially because of bugs like this... Java 6 requires libstdc++.so.5, but the Sun RPM doesn't set that requirement on its spec, so we end up with pages with blank spaces where the plugin should be and a plugin.stacktrace file is created on the working directory.. Its contents :

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.sun.deploy.config.Config
        at sun.plugin.AppletViewer.initEnvironment(AppletViewer.java:271)
        at sun.plugin.navig.motif.Plugin.doit(Plugin.java:141)
        at sun.plugin.navig.motif.Plugin.start(Plugin.java:104)


And the plugin is listed as registered in firefox in about:plugins....

The fix is simple for F7: yum -y install  compat-libstdc++-33 . Now if only Sun knew how RPM works....

This is just a quick post, since I haven't seen the solution to this anywhere. Latest lzo on Fedora Core 7 doesn't have some symbols (mainly lzo_malloc and lzo_free). Its lib is also called liblzo2.so , so passing -llzo wont work.
Since lzo_malloc(a) is just malloc(a) and lzo_free(a) is free(a), I made a quick and dirty patch that makes vtund compile.. It's available in my page . Also, if you're compiling it using Dag's spec, you need to add:

Patch1: vtund-2.6.0-lzo.patch
and the following line just after the %setup stage, before %build :
%patch1 -p1 -b .lzo

Why can't parents realize when they should leave you alone? If I want to be alone in a corner, I really mean alone, not with someone annoying me all the time saying "talk to me" and stuff like that.. Specially when you keep saying "leave me f***** alone, for f**** sake!".. Can't they realize sometimes a person needs to be alone?

Now that my mother left me alone, I'll go try to figure out what the hell is going on...

I'm tired. Dunno why, since work has been quite calm and I currently only have classes on saturday morning (I'm currently learning german).. No matter how much I sleep, I still feel tired and sleepy the rest of the day. Dunno if it is because I'm having a hard time sleeping . I usually go to bed at 11PM and usually just a few minutes later I'm already asleep. But I'm unsure if I'm sleeping fine. I only know for sure that I haven't been dreaming , which was quite common for me.
Maybe I need vacations.. But I'm currently waiting for the HR company to call me to schedule an interview for another job. Taking a vacation now would make it harder for me to leave the company later (legal issues.. I have to work 30 days after I ask for resignation.. I could avoid working those 30 days, but then I'd have a bite on my resignation payment).

These days, only dreaming I do is daydreaming.. And it's gotten so bad that if I don't focus on something, my mind goes wandering... The subject of my daydreams usually is the same (no, I won't tell, but reading my recent posts gives enough clues :P ) .. And it has gotten so bad that I'm even taking my mp3 player to lunch, so I have something to focus on while eating ....

I guess I'll talk to my boss.. and take the holidays... otherwise I wont survive another whole year before being able to go on vacation if I change jobs... Too bad. The money for not taking the holidays would help a lot in the car payment :'(

This month and the next are shaping up to be good months for music. After Forever will release a new CD called "After Forever" next month (even though I'm already listening to it and it *rocks*.. don't ask me where I got the mp3s, but I'm surelly buying this CD when it comes out. And if you do download the mp3s, buy it if you like the band. And go to the show as well, they deserve it). These songs are awesome, much more powerfull than all previous songs. I just have to check out the lyrics to see if they're just as intense as the ones from Invisible Circles (IMHO, their best CD).

I was also checking the After Forever page, which led me to Floor's Myspace page (interesting.. She says she's 1,83m tall. Same height as me , but she seemed taller than me in the two shows I went here in Belo Horizonte).. From her page, I found Cristina Scabbia's page there (for those who dont know her, please check out Lacuna Coil). She has posted on her blog something quite interesting: Dave Mustaine has invited her to record a new version of "A Toute Le Monde".. Cant wait to hear that...
And also browsing Floor's Myspace, I ended up in Simone Simons' page (the singer from Epica). She was invited to record a song called "Everytime it Rains" with Primal Fear. That surelly will be interesting ;)


As for shows, yesterday I went to Blind Guardian's show. Quite amazing. Sadly I missed the first song (it seems it was my favourite track from "A Twist in the Myth", called "Another Stranger Me"). The show was quite intense, specially with the crowd singing. Hansi didnt even have to sing much during "The Bard's song".. Quite a big choir and if you ask me, probably the biggest I've seen in a show here in my town (I can't compare with the U2 concert in São Paulo, after all, U2 had at least 17000 more people to sing ;) ).
Now to wait and see which band will come here next. Aerosmith will be coming to Brazil next month, but their show will be on a Thursday in São Paulo.. And the tickets aren't exactly cheap. Add that to the travel expenses and it becomes impossible for me to go to their show... Hopefully I'll have another chance....

Just a little note so I dont forget this. On several ASUS motherboards with crappy BIOS, Fedora (and certainly other distributions) doesnt recognize the hardware. The symptom is empty result when lspci is run. Adding "acpi=off" to the kernel command line usually solves this. I only wonder if this is another step from ASUS on their FOSS support policy....

A month has passed since my last post and quite a few things happened. I wont attempt to keep it all in chronological order, because my brain is giving more importance to a few key events, so the others may appear out of order ;)

So let's begin. I've registered a domain and hired a Virtuozzo host from Tektonik.net to play with. I've managed to squeeze a full mail server in just 256MB of RAM, but I've had to make some compromises, like leaving out clamav (otherwise the server would use all RAM and the host would start killing key processes, like sshd). This isn't much of a problem though. The only user of the domain is me and I know how to spot a virus when I see it :D I've already added quite a lot of features to the domain, like album hosting for me and my friends using Gallery2, statistics using MRTG (for CPU, memory , number of new and established TCP connections and number of icmp packets) , hacked a bit into mailgraph, so now I know what option in my postfix setup is more efficient in blocking spam (so far, the biggest rejection rate is due to sender using a non-existant domain. But this is mostly due to e-mail I inject on the system via fetchmail, retrieved from an ISP which has lousy anti-spam policies). I've also installed Maia Mailguard instead of pure amavis, which is giving me a little more of extra work (having to check the quarantine page for each account), but hopefully this will improve in the future, as amavis learns with my spam.

As for real life, "trainwreck" is the best description currently. I'm anxious as hell these days. First because I've got some info that the job interview I did last month went well (even after I considered it a lost cause, due to my performance. Seems like they noticed I have potential to improve). Now I just have to wait for the HR dept to call and schedule a new interview. But I *HATE* waiting :|

But the main reason of my anxiety is a girl. I've seen her in january, just after my last post, after 5 or 6 years being away (she got accepted to the same university as me, but her course was given in a building downtown, while mine was in campus). At the time, I thought this would be something like friends meeting each other. For her, I'm tempted to believe that's how it was. But for me, things were a bit more complicated. The best description of what happened is "love at 1000000th sight" (since we studied together for several years). But now the situation has changed, compared to 5 years ago. At that time, I was in love with another woman. And this girl was in love with me... And now, I'm in love with her.. And she's dating someone... I really hate destiny sometimes, making me review what is the moment of my life that I'm always second guessing.
If I only could stay away from her, but life again is playing with me. This month I'm replacing a coworker twice per week in a client whose office just happens to be in the same street as the company where she works. And she has lunch in the same place as me, in the same time :| Can someone please make this month go faster so the suffering ends? Or better yet, can someone help me show her what I feel so this is solved in a better way ? :P

Now something else.. Was bored and I ended up doing this quiz.. The result is quite interesting...

Your Personality is Very Rare (ESTP)

Your personality type is dominant, driven, poised, and self-aware. Only about 5% of all people have your personality, including 3% of all women and 6% of all men You are Extroverted, Sensing, Thinking, and Perceiving.