Sulamita Garcia

Com legendas em Português, a palestra da neurocientista “Jill Bolte Taylor, que teve a oportunidade que poucos neurocientistas poderiam desejar: ela teve um derrame, e observar como as funções do cerebro - locomoção, fala, auto conhecimento - desligarem um por um. Uma história extraordinária.” Se você achou a palestra do Steve Jobs foda… você ainda não viu nada.

With Portuguese subtitles - if you’re interest - “Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.” If you think Steve Jobs kicked ass… you saw nothing.

I’m sorry to disappoint some of the readers of this blog, but I actually like The Sex and the City. So I took a look at The Lipstick Jungle. I’m still deciding if I will continue, because c’mon, why so much drama! Or as one of my favorites characters, “why so serious…”

But when I heard this quote, I needed to blog. I wanted to twitter, but since the quote of 147 characters is so absolutely perfect and need to be used so many times, I decide to blog:

“When a woman expresses her concern that an important business matter be dealt with correctly, she’s not throwing a fit. She’s just doing her job.”

O sexo frágil

Lamento desapontar alguns leitores do blog, mas eu realmente gosto de Sex and the City. Então eu andei vendo uns episódios de Lipstick Jungle, dos mesmos criadores. Eu ainda não decidi se continuo assistindo, estão apenas no terceiro episódio e tudo já é drama. Ou como diria um dos meus personagens favoritos, “porque esta cara tão séria…”

Mas quando eu ouvi este quote, eu precisava blogar. Eu queria twittar, mas como o quote de 147 é perfeito demais para editar, resolvi blogar:

“Quando uma mulher expressa sua preocupação que uma importante negociação deve ser lidada com correção, ela não está tendo um piti. Ela está apenas fazendo o seu trabalho.”

Que meu blog mudou de cara e endereço: http://sulamita.net/

that my blog changed to http://sulamita.net/

Are all male geeks made from the same material?

Don’t let me get me

Never win first place
I don’t support the team
I can’t take direction
And my socks are never clean

Teachers dated me
My parents hated me
I was always in a fight
cause I can’t do nothin’ right

Everyday I fight a war against the mirror
I can’t take the person staring back at me

I’m a hazard to myself
Don’t let me get me
I’m my own worst enemy
It’s bad when you annoy yourself,
So irritating
Don’t wanna be my friend no more
I wanna be somebody else

I wanna be somebody else

L.A. told me
You’ll be a pop star
All you have to change
Is everything you are

Tired of being compared
To damn Britney Spears
She’s so pretty
That just ain’t me

So doctor, doctor—won’t you please prescribe me something?
A day in the life of someone else

Cause I’m a hazard to myself
Don’t let me get me (No)
I’m my own worst enemy
It’s bad when you annoy yourself,
so irritating
(Don’t want) Don’t want to be my friend no more
I wanna be somebody else
Yeahhhh

Don’t let me get me (Don’t let me)
I’m my own worst enemy (No)
Its bad when you annoy yourself
So irritating
Don’t wanna be my friend no more
I wanna be somebody else

So doctor, doctor—won’t you please prescribe me something?
A day in the life of someone else
Don’t let me get me

Ohhh, I’m a hazard to myself, yeah
Don’t let me get me
I’m my own worst enemy
Its bad when you annoy yourself
Yourselllffff
So irritating
(So irritating)
Don’t wanna be my friend no more
Don’t Don’t
Wanna be somebody else

Don’t let me get me (Don’t let) (Don’t let)
I’m my own worst enemy (Don’t let me get me)
Its bad when you annoy yourself (Its bad its so bad)
So irritating
Don’t wanna be my friend no more (How)
I wanna be somebody else
(Don’t let me get me) (Don’t let me get me).

I’m in Mar del Plata, Argentina, for the 8th Debconf, and just finished my talk.

First of all, I’ve heard about the special dedication the organization team put together before I got here, and I have to say it is really “putting a smile on your face“. There are small thoughtful details adding to the content: the bot in the irc.oftc.net#debconf saying who just arrived, what is the next talk, when the dinner is served; a souvenir and local guide in English – Super Cow Powers include – with some cultural and historical facts, places to go around, what to eat, some phrases in Spanish to help, and such. The streaming seems perfect, several volunteers and the people attending it demonstrate their appreciation to the organization and also help to keep the silence in the quite hacklab – right next to the video-audio station.

I talked about LessWatts, a project around many efforts and initiatives around power consumption in Linux. A year ago, when the project was launched, PowerTop was the tool and some documentation. It is impressive how much the project grew in just one year, how many other tools where added: BLTK(Battery Life Tookit), PPM(Power Policy Management) and others, and many many guides, documentation, tricks for development. Like:

• Polling Avoid frequent, unnecessary polling
• Race to Idle Save power by running at the highest speed
  Processors tend to be so good at saving power during idle, that often it’s better to go as fast as possible so that you can then be idle longer.
• Turn devices off Open devices can prevent the system from entering power saving state
• Group Timers Many programs use times, so group them to reduce idle wakeups.
• Use large buffers Media playback requires a large buffer, large enough for a minute of audio or 20 minutes of video.
• Optimize Sleep Duty Cycle It matters how frequently you go in and out of idle. Stay in idle for long periods of time. Avoid interrupting idle as much as possible.
• Beware of high level languages High level languages are convenient tools to achieve results quickly and often have features to do complex things with minimal effort. However, be aware that some of these contructs are hard to implement and sometimes the runtime environment that implements the high level language does so using polling at a high frequency. When using high level languages such as Java*, Visual C#*, Python*, and Ruby, check the end result and try to avoid some of the more complex threading primitives. In addition, where you have a choice of runtime environment provider, evaluate different alternatives and versions.

There were some questions, which I was glad because I spoke too fast and were expecting more questions as I finished before I should. I was glad to see some developers asking for people to adopt PowerTop and BLTK as packages for Debian, everybody downloading, testing and some funny comments: “Now I will harm the environment again by opening my Firefox”. Of course, many “I would love my battery last longer”. Some nice ideas about areas to be researched and focus: swapping, booting, memory. The video for the talk will be available soon. And the always happy moment of giving t-shirts Funny coincidence, this was a special batch from the t-shirts we are doing at Intel for giving to people in conferences, and for my surprise this new ts provider uses the same logo as Debian.

I’m really glad I’ve came, and I think my difficult relationship with Debian may improving. Now I can just relax and enjoy my friends. I will post some pictures later.

Da série “Só Jesus salva, o resto tem que fazer backup”:

Um dos problemas da impulsividade é a crença de que “não vai acontecer comigo”. Então por mais que digam que sempre é bom ler os changelogs antes de migrar mais de duas versões, esta destemida autora que vos escreve decidiu migrar do WordPress neo paleolítico 2.0 para o 2.6 sem muita enrolação. Pelo menos fiz backup….

Na versão 2.3, o WordPress inseriu o suporte a tags, o que eu achava que era o mesmo que categorias. Ainda não tive tempo de ver no que elas são diferentes, porque e qual melhor pra mim, só sei que no upgrade, o WordPress migrou minhas categorias, só que sumiu com os nomes e as descrições delas. Pelo menos manteve os relacionamentos entre os posts e as categorias…

Busca daqui, busca dali, e a solução “mais amigável” que eu encontrei foi editar as tabelas no PhpMyAdmin. Como não uso o PhpMyAdmin, o jeito foi relembrar como se fala com o Mysql e corrigir na unha mesmo. Pelo menos eu havia feito backup antes, então podia consultar que categoria era qual.

Passo a passo:

1)Faça backup – mysqldump -p nome_blog_db > wp_backup.my

2)Atualize – Leia as instruções, rápidas (para usuários mais experientes ou que gostam de viver a vida perigosamente) ou detalhadas

3)Recupere as tabelas: antes do 2.3, a tabela que cuidava das categorias era wp_categor*. Agora é wp_term*: wp_terms, wp_term_taxonomy e wp_term_relationships – leia aqui para mais detalhes. Então, comparando as entradas do backup – tabela wp_categories:
+--------+-------------------+-------------------+----------------------+-----------------+----------------+
| cat_ID | cat_name | category_nicename | category_description | category_parent | category_count |

+——–+——————-+——————-+———————-+—————–+—————-+
| 1 | Momentos Musicais | mms | | 0 | 47 |

com a nova tabela wp_terms
+---------+-------------------+----------------+------------+
| term_id | name | slug | term_group |
+———+——————-+—————-+————+
| 1 | | | 1 |

corrigimos a entrada:


mysql -u user -p
mysql> use nome_meu_blog
mysql> update wp_terms set name=’Momentos musicais’,slug=’mms’ where term_id=1;

4) Vá a página de gerenciar categorias – seublog.com/wp-admin/categories.php e se quiser atualize também a descrição.

4) Recupere seu usuário no site do WordPress e preencha um bug report

Claro que vale lembrar que se você não entende de SQL, e não entendeu como eu consegui o prompt do Mysql, melhor optar pelo PhpMyAdmin, ou se decidir que é até divertido fazer umas destas de vez em quando e ler o manual de referência do Mysql.

Apesar disto tudo, devo dizer que o 2.6 está excelente, com muito mais recursos e melhor organizado: opção para fazer backup – no servidor, no seu computador ou enviar por mail; busca e instalação de pluguins melhorada; opções novas para publicar mídia; importar/exportar, e mais, e isto que não faz um dia que estou mexendo. Uma aplicação totalmente “web 2.0”…

At OSCON 2008, Danese Cooper asked me to give a lightning talk about the Art of Community. She mention I could talk about what the Brazilian politicians are doing wrong (been there, done that), or why Chaos Communication Congress rocks more than LinuxWorld, but I asked “can I talk about sarcasm?”

I love sarcasm. A lot of people in the open source community does. I can’t help myself - or we can’t help ourselves. So, that’s what I said - and what I didn’t had time to say - at the lightning talk game:

I’m Sulamita, I work for Intel in open source strategy - you could say that one part of my job is community management - I’ve working long time with Linuxchix, but I’m not standing here as Sulamita. Right now, I’m Sumalita, my evil alter ego - lots of people misspell/mistype my name in Brazil, and there was this particular time at a store where they were driving me nuts until they ended calling me Sumalita Gárcia. I also have a twitter account for Sumalita, where I post only my evil thoughts.

Sarcasm is an art. It’s the “smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite”. A research have mapped the brain area where sarcasm would be recognized - they thought it would be on the left side, responsible for language and social; but they found it on the right side. Once I read an easy way to put it, it’s like the left side understand you’re seeing a lion, and your right side says it’s not right for it to be on your yard.

People with head injuries often loose their ability to understand sarcasm. I have this theory that people under 18 years old also don’t understand it. The research suggest that sarcasm is an evolutionary mechanism, and people use it as a way to create groups - if you understand my jokes, you can be my friend.

Open Source community also loves sarcasm, especially on our t-shirts. The favorite one I’ve seen so far in this conference is “my other t-shirt is funnier”. (I’m using my own favorite now, “come to the dark side, we have cookies“.) It may be bad for newbies and building communities, but we do love it. Ok, probably not absolutely everyone…

A great source of sarcasm is Uncyclopedia, and here’s the Brazilian Uncyclopedia - Desciclopedia - definition about community:

Community is the most important part of Free Software, although the reciprocal is not the same. It’s composed by ‘engaged individuals’ looking for a better ‘ecosystem’ where the ‘knowledge’ and ‘ideas’ ’sharing’ through ‘debates’ and ‘conferences’ in a big ‘digital group’ will happen in another time, because it’s more important go to conference, have lots of beer and take pictures with your colleagues.

Community does not code, does not translate anything, does not make bug reports, does not make any draw or manual, and throw the trash on the floor. But they’re against the system, the transgenic, and against all that stuff.

Community spend the day repeating words like community, free software, free software scenario, windows is evil, repeating it all day long, and repeating it next day. By mail or in big conferences where they can hear it from the speakers and keep repeating in the corridors.

They organize themselves in some kind of entity with several hierarchy levels with all kinds of names and spend most of their time resolving real problems like

• The logo
• The next president
• which is the best distro
• which distro is more free
• when it’s going to be the next conference
• which is going to be the t-shirt color
• why people should follow Stallman, love him despite anything and believe everything he says

Another great example is the Uncyclopedia definition of GNU - “GNU (pronunciation: Gh-Moo) is a recursive acronym meaning GNU is Not Usable, and therefore GNU is Not Usable is Not Usable, GNU is Not Usable is Not Usable is Not Usable and so on. It can also be interpreted as Generally Not Used” .

Ok, 3 minutes and I’m totally blogging this

“I wanna bust the world wide open
The way that you do when you’re filled with youth
I wanna engage with people..and lovers..family..fellow cops..and enemies
I wanna be physical and I also want to ask the big questions
I wanna taste the taste… and fix the problems.

I wanna run headlong into chaos..and bad guys..and darkness..and pranks..and fun..
and laugh laugh laugh.

I wanna be the best friend.. and I wanna be the greatest aunt and the most complicated daughter
I wanna be the mystery in the room… and I wanna be known.
Embrace your Grace.”