The Free Software Foundation has a Twitter account. Surprised? So am I, in a negative way, of course. And I will explain why on this post. You may not agree with me on everything I write here, and I am honestly expecting some opposition, but I would like to make it crystal clear that my purpose is to raise awareness for the most important “feature” an organization should have: coherence.

Nesse último fim de semana, durante os dias 20 e 21 de Setembro (sexta-feira e sábado, respectivamente), ocorreram dois eventos sobre Software Livre na UNICAMP. Um deles, o Upstream, foi um “evento teste” que ajudei a organizar junto com o Cascardo e o Leonardo Garcia, ambos do LTC/IBM. O outro, o Software Freedom Day (SFD), eu organizei em nome do LibrePlanet São Paulo. Durante os dois eventos (e principalmente durante o SFD) eu fiquei pensando e refletindo bastante sobre vários assuntos relacionados (ou não) com o Software Livre.

It is really nice to see something you did in a project influence in future features and developments. I always feel happy and proud when I notice such scenarios happening, and this time was no different. Gary Benson, a colleague at Red Hat who works in the GDB team as well, has implemented a way of improving the interface between the linker and the debugger, and one of the things he used to achieve this is the GDB <-> SystemTap integration that I implemented with Tom Tromey 2 years ago.

Hi, there! This is the report of the Document Freedom Day event that took place in Campinas, São Paulo state, Brazil. I will talk a little bit about how we (keep reading to know who “we” are!) organized it, and the conclusions that can be drawn to help for the next edition. Organization The DFD (or Document Freedom Day) 2013 in Campinas was organized by the LibrePlanet São Paulo (link in pt_BR) group.

This will probably be one of those controversial posts, but I really cannot just be silent about a behaviour that I am constantly seeing around me. Since my childhood, I am fascinated by the power of the words. I always liked reading a lot, and despite not knowing the grammar rules (either in pt_BR or en_US, the former being my native language, the latter being the only idiom I can consider myself fluent in), I am deeply interested in what words (and their infinite meanings) can do to us.

Olá a todos! Finalmente consegui um pouco de tempo na minha agenda, e resolvi escrever no blog para anunciar a criação do grupo LibrePlanet São Paulo! O que é o LibrePlanet O projeto LibrePlanet teve início em 2006, durante a reunião de membros da FSF (a Free Software Foundation). Ele foi criado para ajudar a organizar maneiras de levar o movimento de Software Livre ao conhecimento da população em geral.

Hi everybody :-). I finally got some time to finish this series of posts, and I hope you like the overall result. For those of you who are reading this blog for the first time, you can access the first post here, and the second here. My goal with this third post is to talk a little bit about how you can use the SDT probes with tracepoints inside GDB. Maybe this particular feature will not be so helpful to you, but I recommend reading the post either way.

I tell you this: it is depressing when you realize that you spent more time struggling with blog engines than writing posts on your blog! It’s been a long time since I wrote the first post about this subject, and since then the patches have been accepted upstream, and GDB 7.5 now has official support for userspace SystemTap probes :-). Yay! Well, but enough of cheap talk, let’s get to the business!

After a long time, here we are again :-). With this post I will start to talk about the integration between GDB and SystemTap. This is something that Tom Tromey and I did during the last year. The patch is being reviewed as I write this post, and I expect to see it checked-in in the next few days/weeks. But let’s get our hands dirty… SystemTap Userspace Probes You probably use (or have at least heard of) SystemTap, and maybe you think the tool is only useful for kernel inspections.

This post is actually a “reply” to Gary Benson’s Working on gdb post. I have been working with GDB for quite some time now, and even though the project officially uses CVS (yes, you read it correctly, it is CVS indeed!) as its version control system, fortunately we also have a git mirror. In the end, what happens is that almost every developer uses the git mirror and just goes to CVS to commit something.