Emacs for ladies

if you are a lady, a lady that likes the pink color and emacs, then this color theme is the right one for you.

My battery is gonna die!

Today gnome-power-manager warned me about that my battery sucks :( is charging only the 42% of it's capacity, it's a shame, especially, because I don't what to do, I wish to change the laptop for a new one and with hardware that talks better with the penguin OS, like the Dell 1420, but I don't have the money right now to buy it, so I am stuck with this laptop, I like a lot this laptop, except for the lack of a super b class driver for the video card (via k8m800 chipset), because i really want compiz-fusion, FPS games (especially quake 3 mods, like ET), at least the battery for this laptop is cheap (CL$24.000), so probably I am gonna buy it when get paid of a little job that i made a few days ago.

Flisol 2008

Comercial de flisol

floss at the university

will we see something like this in usach?

The lack of real support inside the u is probably our main disadvantage, because the sentence "nice idea, you have my support, just do it!" (read 'you have my support' just like 'I am gonna let you do that, but I don't have any resources') it's useless.

Vista v/s Ubuntu at dell.cl

It's a shame that if you buy a ubuntu powered laptop (inspiron 1420) it's almost US$180 (CL$82.000) expensive, so if I'am gonna buy a laptop with the same specifications (at the hardware level) and dropping the windows vista license I personally expect that the laptop cost me at least the same.

this is not fair.

Windows Vista powered laptop dell 1420


Ubuntu 7.04 powered laptop dell 1420

emacs + w3m + gtk

If you load w3m inside emacs you browse the web from a the comfort of an emacs-buffer :D


And if you develop gtk sofware, you can load gtk-look.el and load the api reference inside w3m :D :D

via + linux + open source

Yahooooooo!!, via technologies made an announcement, the bad part is that my chipset (k8m800) will have no support initially, I hope that this will be added in the near future.

I really hope have a nice 2D and 3D support for the driver.

I think that the movement of via was motivated by results that received intel with his open source support for linux, and because the market of little computers for the living room, like the epia based, pico ITX, is a growing market and via IMO is providing the best price for this kind of hardware.

What is to be a reall hacker these days?

This is something that i been thinking, and it's really hard give an answer.

The oldschool hackers (aka 50's to 80's hackers, at least for me those are real old school hackers, pre-internet boom!) says that part of be a real one is build your own tools, and i completely agree with that, but with the Internet era a new style apply to the FLOSS world, and this is 'do not reinvent the wheel', so these days probable we must say 'a real hacker builds their own tools when there is no tools, but if already there is one, the real hacker joins the development team to make an even better tool'.

This is the free software times, so we must learn how to work in community, because using this methodology we can build nice tools in less time than doing it by ourselves, so it's absurd do not this strategy.

I think the unique case where you must build your own tool from scratch (a tool that already exists) is when all the options sucks, will suck always, unless you rewrite it completely.

This is my opinion :D

boleto de emergencia de la bip

hoy puse un reclamo en el sitio de la tarjeta bip, espero que respondan.

-------
Buen día,

quisiera expresarles mi molestia e incomodidad, debido a la absurda restricción de no poder utilizar el 'boleto de emergencia' en el metro de santiago, es absurda dicha restricción, ya que hay una ventana de tiempo en la que metro ya tiene cerradas sus cajas, pero aun se permite el ingreso de pasajeros (aproximadamente entre 10.30 y 11.00 dependiendo de la estación), esto me ha forzado a tomar un bus.

no puedo imaginar el motivo que los lleve a tener tratamientos diferenciados.

de antemano muchas gracias, esperaré su respuesta

PD: como la pagina web carece de un lugar para introducir una dirección para recibir la respuesta me veo en la obligación de solo poner mi correo electronico.

Will i see this some day?

Will we see this here in Chile?

Bikes parked at the Hague central station (i think is berlin, am not sure), taken by hpjansson
Yesterday, in a tv show (at red tv) were talking about the pollution, and hector precht said that nobody want to ride a bike, that the fact is that everybody is buying cars, so if there is too much traffic the solution is build a flying highway and under that a flying train. Well i only going to say: What the fuck is wrong with you people?. The quality of life here in santiago is awful, do you want to make it even worse?, come on, drive a car is sweet 'sometimes', when you drive a car you _must_ think in the consequences of the act, like the pollution, the expensive energy, and all the bad things related to this.

please politicians, you must define guidelines to improve the quality of life in the long term, not just fix with patches the bugs, you must design the city from here to 50 or even 100 years. because with the current style of development we are gonna be a city that must be crossed if your are lucky in a day (remember that everybody is buying houses at peripheral places (like quilicura, lampa, buin, san bernardo) and also buying cars to move in the city spending hours inside the car.

currently i am using a fucking black hat :D do you what i mean?

Redes abiertas

Hace un tiempo zeus me dijo que habia dejado el access point (acceso a la wifi) de su casa abierto, es decir, sin contraseña, y me invito a que hiciera lo mismo, pero pensé 'mierda, estos leechers de mierda solo abusaran de mi escualida conexion', luego me fui de vacaciones con la naty y habian 3 redes en donde nos quedabamos y 'oh maldicion, las 3 cerradas' (dos con wep y una wpa) y fue lata no poder buscar en internet solucion a un problema que tenia y revisar el correo. Entonces ahora que vtr subió mi velocidad penśe 'le daré una oportunidad a mi barrio', así que dejé el acceso abierto por si alguien requiere de internet de la misma manera que yo lo necesité, espero que no abusen, pk o sino me veré forzado a cerrar el acceso.

los invito a que uds hagan lo mismo, tratemos de que existan más redes abiertas, en especial los que tenemos notebook y constantemente nos encontramos fuera de casa con la necesidad de tener internet en lugares extraños.

job and hobby

The last few weeks i am been thinking about what to do when your hobby becomes your job, everybody need different things in their life, a job (especially a paid job), a hobby, friends, girlfriend or wife, but my hobby always have been the computers related stuffs (programming, chat, play computer games, setup software, ...), it's stressing stay all the day doing stuffs at the computer (the job) and back home to keep doing things in the computer at home (the hobby), i think that this kind of behavior it is not healthy.


I think the cars/motorcycles will became my new hobby :D

Nerd test 2.0

nothing to say :P

Sync the date-time

If you live in Chile, just use the ntp server that has the naval army ntp.shoa.cl that should give you the correct hour even after the day that the computer will change it by design.

I hope that server works like i expect :-\

Design Patterns

The design patterns were created to be used, but at what cost must be followed?, when is appropriated brake it?, it's a complicated thing, specially when you wanna have well documented softwares and extensible.

Rizoma has a new home!

The new home of rizoma is savannah, we moved the project from chileforge, because the lack of a version control system distinct of cvs (we were using a private server with subversion for a few months, thanks zeus) and the apparently lack of support to the forge software. This movement will make us loose some things, like the Chilean aspect of the project (the most important currently), but we will win some technical stuffs that will let us do our work with a little more of comfort.

At savannah we are the codenamed rizoma project and we are using the git repo, the mailing list (rizoma-devel@nongnu.org and rizoma-usuarios@nongnu.org), when we release the next version will start working the bugs tracking system and some other stuffs.

We hope to recruit some developers, documentation writers and a graphical designer, so if you want to enjoy developing a simple point of sale software (current version is gpl2, but the next one will be gpl3) plesae join us a IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net #rizoma) and/or the mailing lists.

Amazing motorcycle

This vacations (that i spend thanks to my girlfriend and her nice family) outside of Pisco Capel's factory i saw an amazing motorcycle, the bad part is that the batteries of my camera were almost dead so i only could take just one picture.

This monster has a 1800cc engine, it has a comfortable heating system for the legs and a lot of other nice things, do you imagine traveling on this motorcycle? (if is with your girlfriend even better)

The friki part was that with then man of the picture (that was the driver) were traveling his mother in back sit, an old woman of 76 years old with skirt :) it's a completely hardcore grandma

Power management on linux

One of the biggest issues on linux is the power management, especially if you have laptop (that probably didn't came with linux preinstalled).

I always recommended the suspend2.net patch for the kernel, the patch now is called tuxonice, this comes with a pretty good set of scripts to interact with this (apt-cache search tuxonice), but the ugly part of this solution is that you must recompile a clean kernel, with clean i mean the kernel.org official release, because if you try to use the sources provided by your distribution you will have troubles applying the patch (offset isues) and it will be necessary that you change the source code manually, so this is a looong way, but i strong believe that the tuxonice is pretty good for strange hardware. But some days ago i recompiled the v2.6.24 kernel + tuxonice patch, it took me a few hours of cpu, and the result was a fully functional kernel, but with a very pour hard disk I/O performance:
v2.6.23-1-686:

# hdparm -t /dev/hda 
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  110 MB in  3.02 seconds =  36.37 MB/sec

v2.6.24tuxonice

# hdparm -t /dev/hda 
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   14 MB in  3.05 seconds =   4.59 MB/sec

so it became pretty useless, that make me dedicate time to make works the uswsusp way (integrated into the kernel.org and obviously present in the the debian kernel package, and probably in almost any distribution).

The simple way of do this in debian is

# apt-get install uswsusp pm-utils

with this we install the uswsusp support and associated tools, then it's necessary configure it with:

#dpkg-reconfigure uswsusp

if you use ndiswrapper for your wireless card, you need to tell to the power-management that unload the ndiswrapper module before it starts the hibernate, you can do this with the following line inside the /etc/pm/config.d/unload_modules file

SUSPEND_MODULES="ndiswrapper"

now you must test the kernel functionality with the following commands 's2disk' and 's2ram' (the first for suspend to disk and the second one for suspend to ram)

if it works, now you mus test the pm-utils with equivalent commands 'pm-hibernate' and 'pm-suspend', these tools are wrappers to the underlying kernel functions, if it worked now the last step is authorize the users to use these shiny new features, for this you just need to add the username to the powerdev group, for example if the user is foobar you must type the following command:

# adduser foobar powerdev

now you restart the session to let changes apply (maybe you will need to reboot your computer to the changes made to the kernel were refreshed) and try to use your {gnome | kde | any-other}-power-manager tool

A good coffe cup

I love internet, thanks to this amazing invention we can obtain information about everything.

I'm gonna make me a coffe cup (no, it's not a java based software :P) and suddenly thought 'i am going to look for how to make a better coffe cup', and the result was that I found a lot of information, even a site called CoffeGeek, this kind of things only can be founded on internet, do you imagine a specialized coffe magazine, in chile at least it would be a dead bussiness.

Thanks cold war for give us this amazing tool :-\

The future ... ?_?

Well, currently my future is a little complicated, first of all i'm running against the time to finish the implementation of my project degree, it will be frustrating not having a almost functional software when march starts, but i'm a little tired of my project degree, i don't know the reason, probably it's just the lack of formal vacations.

The second trouble, that is in second place in the queue, is get real and formal job, a paid one of course, here in Chile there is a lot of opportunities in the field of computers engineering, but none of the them is exciting for my interests, the main fields where i can get a job are:

• Software development, there are two kinds of development here, customized software from scratch, or generic software with a few tweaks to make it works. at first sounds interesting, but most of the developments are with .NET (not mono, just Microsoft) and Java (not iced tea nor , just the sun's implementation), so like an open source enthusiast if i have to choose between these options, i prefer Java. Of course there are other technologies used by the developers, like PHP (4 or 5), a little of ruby on rails, cobol mainly for legacy systems, but one of my biggest troubles is that i really suck in web-based software development, it's just complicated to me, i don't know how to organize a web that must be an application and not just a home style website. Well that's on the tech side, but in the human side, the software developers are like garbage, the enterprises are not interested in have
  
• Systems administration, this job i dont like, you work under constant pressure, you are like the rare of the company (no ofense, but is how the others look the sysadmin), it's not a job where you can climb in the scale of power inside if the company, probably you can became the boss of the department, but nothing else, the manager will never ask you how to aern money :P
• Consulting, this job is less technical than the others, you need to be more polite, there is a lot documents to write, reports and other things, but you can have a large projection, it' a well paid job, but this one does not fit my skills, i am not good with the reports, am just good enough to be an engineer
• Support, it's like an external sysadmin (IMO), the pressure is high, unless you work for a company that cares about his employees (i know people working in oracle, on support, and they are happy with the job, but still does not have the load of a year of work), with this work you must turn off your imaginations and just follow the standard procedures, because the improvisations could cost you the job if the the solutions fails.
• PYME, i always said that i like to work inside a PYME, because you must do a little of everything, but with time i realize that this have complications, because they just want the systems working, if you want to use a super-technologie, but the current is working probably the will say 'no, thanks', so its frustrating and lacks of climb positions of powers (and of course earn more money)

so, am still thinking about it :-\