Christian Reis lives here

Hi there. If you made it this far (hey, this isn't exactly the easiest URL to reach), it's either because you want something I have, need to talk to me about something, or are curious about who I am. There's a bit about me down here.

I currently work at Async Open Source, a company that provides development and consulting services focused on on Free Software. I helped found Async in early 1999.

Since 2004, I've been actively involved in Launchpad development, and in 2005 I became application manager for the project, together with Steve Alexander. Together we lead a team of over 20 people working on building a platform for open source development and collaboration.

In 2003, I obtained an MSc degree from USP São Carlos, where I defended 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.

A number 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 and Usability, additionally, in the past years. I'm an advocate of simple interface design, and my work is an attempt to implement it.

My main extra-professional interests are outdoor sports, travelling, language and vain philosophy. I've raced mountain bikes for a couple of years now, and in the past years I've been racing adventure races in Brazil as well. I've competed in a number of national-level events, including the multi-day EMA 2000 and 2001 and tens of shorter events.

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 Orlando Damiano 2212 Sao Carlos, SP Brazil 13560-450

BTW, I'm plugging BuscaML as a good alternative for people that are using MercadoLivre to look for and buy stuff -- it's run by a good friend of mine (good friends are hard to find), and hey, it even has a Firefox extension.

What he's been up to

04.05.2008	NFS sync versus async and /var/run and /var/lock mystery
Bind mounts Wow. [www.linux.sgi.com] [lists.samba.org] [opensolaris.org] [mail.opensolaris.org] [mail.opensolaris.org] Not just server-side sync versus async, but noac also makes a massive difference because of the implied client-side sync. [www.cronicasdebicicleta.com] [www.cronicasdebicicleta.com] [mtb-training-s.blogspot.com] [home.hia.no] [speed-factory.com] [jasper.rc.unesp.br] [home.hia.no] God damned sendmail root@cvs:/var/spool# /etc/init.d/sendmail hoststat -------------- Hostname --------------- How long ago ---------Results--------- smtp.async.com.br 00:02:16 Deferred: Connection time brma.glandata.com.br -21:-3:-13 Deferred: Connection time purgestat and host_status. [www.sfr-fresh.com]
03.05.2008	After upgrading the diskless
Run a depmod -a, because otherwise my screen get busted. Reminder to self! When a server nfs.lockd stops responding, what to do? Well, Bruce Fields sent me a suggestion: Perhaps a sysrq-T dump of lockd would show where (and whether) it's blocked? (So once lockd stops responding, log into the server, run "echo t >/proc/sysrq-trigger", and collect the output from the logs, especially the stacktrace for the lockd process).
01.04.2008	New office
First of April, joke's on us. But we got a new office as a special gift! Rui Barbosa 1977 is going through its finishing touches as we speak and with some luck we will even have the Internet installed there.
31.03.2008	The phones I've owned
Nokia 1100a Nokia 3250 Nokia 7250i (Pink!) Nokia 6120 All but the 3250 can be unlocked with the code calculator at [www.peters1.dk] -- the the 3250 can't be because it requires a flash update? Somebody asked me if it was possible to have more than one SIM in a mobile, and I thought there were no models that allowed that. Well, not a phone, but check this out: [ucables.com]
14.03.2008	USB 1.1 sucks
Had to go out and buy a USB 2.0 PCI card for my server today. Before: 102400000 bytes (102 MB) copied, 76.3268 seconds, 1.3 MB/s After: 102400000 bytes (102 MB) copied, 4.79696 seconds, 21.3 MB/s Much better.
12.03.2008	Super Sony Storage Support
I have an AIT drive that I bought back in 2005 to do backups and archival of the content on our server. We do daily backups of the full content, and rotate tapes weekly. So a few weeks ago the backup started failing randomly mid-process. This happened before in the DAT days, but AIT proved to be much more reliable -- until now. I ordered a cleaning tape (there's a myth that AIT is self-cleansing, but [www.rm.com] says it's not) and when that didn't fix things, decided to send the unit out to warranty. I had to fish a number out of the Sony UK support site but once that was done it was quite smooth! There's this great little software package called sonytape that Sony distributes from [sony.storagesupport.com] and I used it to generate a trace file. One cool thing was that the support team at Sony was able to look at the trace file (after I sent it to them) and find out how dirty the tape head was and how many times the tapes I was using had been cycled (provided the tapes have [www.aittape.com] which mine do). That's pretty impressive! One interesting result of that is that I know (now) you're not supposed to cycle a tape more than 50 times, which means that if you're using a tape a week, it shouldn't be used for more than a year. I hadn't heard that number anywhere else, and the only stuff I can find on the web says the tapes last 30 years. But that's shelf life! In general, the support experience was outstanding. You call a UK number and get a support engineer that can actually tell you something useful and knows enough about the hardware to make the experience interesting and rewarding. If I ever run a support operation, I want to make sure my experience is as good as that one.

(Read older diary entries)

Complain to me if anything's broken, please?