Well, after much time thinking about it and being told by many people that I should do it, I decided to create my blog. I suppose the first thing I should do is to introduce my self 🙂

I’m from Bogotá Colombia, and I’m a new “official” Mandriva contributor since a couple of months. I say official because I have been lurking on the cooker list since years, reporting bugs, helping other Mandriva users, but in April this year I decided to go further.

I had done some packaging for PCLinuxOS before, so I started helping with that task. I started maintaining four or five packages and now the list has grown to 15, and I hope it will be bigger in no time 🙂 my first package for Mandriva was TOra, a database client to connect to Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. My sponsor is Steph, greetings for him and many thanks for all the help and guidance I have got from him 🙂

Let me talk a little more about my self and my background so you can know be better. I have been a long time linux and free software user, developer and promoter. I started using linux with Red Hat 5.1, around ’97, and Mandriva since Mandrake 6.3. Over all that time I have been very involved with the free software community in my country. I coordinated the first two or three editions of the FLISOL (Latin American Free Software Install fest) for my city, founded (the now sadly defunct) LUG of my university and organized many events there. Also I have had the fortune of have been invited to give a lot of talks in different free software events. I also was a teacher at the University I studied computer science, giving classes about linux server administration and security, software development with free software tools and introduction to free software. And now, with the help of other Mandriva users we launched Mandriva-co, to support the little but enthusiastic emerging Mandriva community in my country.

I was for some years a KDE developer, I developed the network configuration settings module for KDE 3.x Control Center (KNetworkConf) but then I got busy with other stuff and never had the time to work on it again 🙁 now my involvement with KDE is mostly vocal, promoting it by giving talks about the awesomeness of KDE 4. I hope one day have the time (and motivation) to start coding for it again. I also like to send some patches to different applications from time to time.

I work as a Java EE developer and consultant for a software and consultancy firm that works mainly on the financial sector. Among my duties are consultancy services to implement Oracle and Sun Microsystems (well, just Oracle now) products for different SOA projects the company is involved in. Other tasks I have to do is java source code quality review using static code analysis tools, and do recommendations on the defects found, mainly on a security context (how to prevent XSS, SQL/Process/Path injection, etc). And last but not least, another of the tasks I have to work with and like a lot is with F5 load balancers, what an amazing piece of hardware (and really expensive, but worth every penny for whom can afford them). Sadly, I just have been in a couple of projects, because of my mainly software development oriented career until now I have been kinda away of networking, but I have always enjoyed it a lot too.

In fact, my thesis project was all about networking. I worked on a modular software router from MIT called Click, improving it’s IPv4-IPv6 network and protocol translator. Our project consisted in designing and implementing application level gateways for DNS and FTP protocols to be able to do address translation of addresses inside the payload of those protocols.

But leaving aside all the geeky stuff, I love to hear music, mostly heavy metal, 70’s rock and blues, I like a lot melodic death, thrash, power and gothic metal genres. I also enjoy gaming and playing paintball at competition level, although I’m somewhat temporary retired from it as it is very expensive when you get too involved.

Well that’s all, I hope to continue to contribute to the best linux distro out there and free software in general. I’m sorry for the long post and I thank all the ones that managed to read it all, I got carried away tonight.

btw, I hang out on #cooker as Maeztro 😉