Blast from the past 1: Chefax C1

Not many people know it and even less probably remember it, but a few years ago I was on a quest to build a damn awesome operating system (confession: I still am, I just don't have the time or the tools, at the moment). But I started the project and started coding it. Today I was poking around and found an early screenshot of it booting on VMWare.

(Sorry, only in Portuguese)

This was a project I started before enrolling in the university that I migrated to the first attempt I had at creating a project incubator: the Chefax I&D group. Later, when I left the university (and consequentially, Chefax I&D) I took the project with me and brought it to Onda Technology.

Those were fun days. In a time when coding had class instead of swag.

PS: No, "Marta" was not the name of a girlfriend, it was the name of my baby goddaughter.

Package Doctor First Success

Success! Package Doctor has now created its first binary package! This package management system is now able to fully create binary packages ready to install from the source and the corresponding ".pkd" file. This makes it closer to be ready for download for world-wide testing. The system is entirely built on BASH scripts and works quite well, making use of UnionFS-FUSE to keep everything isolated. The next step is to check the performance of the system while compiling over a FUSE-based mount, to determine if the performance loss over building directly over the real filesystem is significant. Stay tuned.

# pkd -b binutils01
[ Package Doctor ] package management system
Copyright 2010-2012 Onda Technology Institute
[ OK ] Downloading binutils-2.20.1.tar.bz2
[ OK ] Preparing build environment for package "binutils" (binutils)
[ OK ] Unpacking binutils 2.20.1
[ OK ] Preparing to compile binutils
[ OK ] Compiling binutils
[ OK ] Installing binutils
[ OK ] Building binary package /System/Data/L0/default.profile/packages/binutils-2.20.1.pkb.tar.bz2
[ OK ] Cleaning up.

The decay of slashdot, Part 1

It breaks my heart when I see stories like this. The first thing that would cross my mind about a website with over a million visitors a day that carries the tagline "News for nerds, stuff that matters", is far from being an obituary for people that, while having their own merit for what they may have done, little have to do with either "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters". I wish my best to the family of the man, but it seems he has lived a long and very productive life and that his time had come. However, I have lost my own brother recently. He was only 25, and while also living a full life and being a very active civil engineer doing his doctorate thesis, the event that took him seems more memorable to a community of geeks than the passing away of the inventor of Doritos. Not because of the horrific situation, but because of the less bad side of that coin being the good that might come from the tribute of a mourning brother wishing to help prevent the same from fate coming to someone else. So, it breaks my heart that Slashdot gladly accepts publishing stories nothing related to what it supposedly stands for, and prefers to reject the publishing of stories helping to spread the word about a potentially lifesaving project to prevent something that could happen to any of them.

New project: The Life Bracelet

As some of you already know, my brother Miguel passed away a few days ago, on 25th of May. He was only 25 years old and the details surrounding the accident are yet unknown to us. His lifeless body was found on a public pool which should have been under surveillance. For incomprehensible reasons, no one was watching the pool at the time.

Because of that incident, a new project was created and added to the list of public projects. "The Life Bracelet" is a project to develop and implement a bracelet to monitor life signs of people in sports facilities, amusement parks, nursing homes and hospitals. The bracelet would resemble a small watch and constantly monitor pulse and oxygen saturation, transmitting the data to a central server through specialized access points. Should any problem arise, emergency teams can be dispatched immediately to the site. This way it may be possible to save lives in similar situations and give patients of healthcare institutions much more liberty and independence.