Gunnar Wolf

Every now and then, I want to understand a bit better English. Today, when Joeyh mentioned nettle soup, I had to ask Wikipedia what a nettle is. And Joey, no wonder it itches... It refers to around 45 species of genus Urtica in the family Urticaceae - In Spanish, of course, urtica is known as ortiga, or as blind person's herb, as even a blind person will quickly recognize it to touch - Touching it will cause the apt-named urticaria, which Joey seems to have discovered and learnt to fear. At least in Spanish, urticaria is generalized and used to call all kinds of skin diseases.
It happens to be a very common plant in the area I live and dwell in (the ecological reserve REPSA spans a good portion of the University, and limits my neighbourhood), a large extension of Southern Mexico City where the lava of the small Xitle volcano covered everything, rendering a good portion of the Mexico City valley unfertile, known as malpaís (badland, literally).
Anyway... I don't think I'll rush to cut some ortigas and make them into soup, as both Joeyh and Wikipedia (Spanish and English versions) suggest. But it is always an option, having so many fine specimens around.
This posting serves no other purpose than to show my appreciation to the Mexico City Area

May 1st is a holiday in many countries around the world - It is, at least, here in Mexico. So, what's a man to do when faced with really-crappy network connectivity at home?
Yesterday I had dinner with Gigio, and among many other things, we talked about the Ciclotón, which I've only done twice. And on my way back home, I crossed (twice) the path of a group of ~100 cyclist going over Colonia Roma.
Anyway, whatever the reason, I woke up very well in the mood for a nice 20km ride:

Now, lets get the day started!
[update] I was told about a worldwide nudist cycling activity, the World Naked Bike Ride. Their page states their main motivator:

We face automobile traffic with our naked bodies as the best way of defending our dignit and exposing the unique dangers faced by cyclists and pedestrians as well as the negative consequences we all face due to dependence on oil, and other forms of non-renewable energy.

Of course, Mexican groups take part in this interesting activity - Ciclomarcha nudista.
Will I be there? I don't know - Quite probably, yes. I first thought of it as a joke, and as a dangerous activity. But, come think of it, I am a move-by-bicycle-in-the-largest-city-in-the-world activist. I have been knocked over or shit-scared (and fortunately not more than that) by careless drivers, but than won't force me back into driving my car when not needed. And this kind of activities, which do get their good share of exposure, need all the participants - I hope to be there, June 7 12:00PM, at the beginning of Mexico City Ciclopista (FFCC de Cuernavaca esq. Ejército nacional, Polanco) Chapultepec's Lions' entrance, at the crossing of Lieja and Reforma.

Share the awareness. There are very good promotional pictures. And collective nudist activities are quite fun, experiences to remember for life.

I like them. And if there is such a thing, I hope they carry good luck with them - Not that I believe in good luck, but anyway - Yesterday was a very good day, in quite many fronts. And it's nice to make a nice, closed leap on so many bases:

>> puts [was,am].map {|age| [98,111,100,120].map {|s| sprintf "%#{s.chr}", age}.join(', ')}
11111, 37, 31, 1f
100000, 40, 32, 20

And just for coolness sake: It gets even better when looking at coincidence with my father - at least for the next couple of months:

>>puts [f_was, f_is].map {|age| [98,111,100,120].map {|s| sprintf "%#{s.chr}", age}.join(', ')}
111111, 77, 63, 3f
1000000, 100, 64, 40

So, in most useful systems, we are both in a very nice and closed number. Sadly, I can no longer say that five bits should be enough for anybody.

One week ago, I went to a branch office of Servicio de Administración Tributaria, the government office in charge of processing taxes. This year, I plan on doing something quite bold, as my Mexican friends will acknowledge: I will prepare my (quite simple, I hope) tax declaration by myself. I do not want to be held hostage of the accountant guild - So I might end doing some fuckup which in the end costs me money or time. I hope it is not the case.
Anyway... Last week I went to this office, as I needed either a CIECF (Clave de Identificación Electrónica Confidencial Fortalecida - Strengthened Confidential Electronic Identification Key) or a FIEL (Firma Electrónica Avanzada - Advanced Electronic Signature). No, please don't believe it is a security token, a card with printed numbers, a one-time-pad or the sort - The CIECF is... A password. Why is it strengthened? Because it has the feature of including a question, in case you forget the key, to allow you to change it. I guess the FIEL is a more reliable device, but I prefer not to even request it.
And as far as the questions go, the emergency questions for CIECF suck. First, I was not even asked the meta-question - I was not told why this information was needed. So imagine the clerk saying: Full name? ... Date of birth? ... RFC (Tax ID)? ... Favorite color? I was there just... Stunned. Why do you need it? Oh, just in case you forget your password. Ok... Don't you have any other questions which I am not prone to answer a different thing, and that are not dead obvious for a casual passer-by? (I guess that at least 1/4 of the public will say blue. Feel like brute-forcing SAT to its knees?) Other questions include your fathers' second family name, your favorite soccer team, your pet's name... It seems they took the first "security dos and don'ts" book off the wall, and started reading backwards.
But anyway, that's the system, and I must play nice with it. So I get back home, and decide to start hacking up my declaration. No, Mr. Policeman, I'm not saying I would try to break into the SAT - I just say it is a complex and non-obvious task to do. Now please release me. Thanks.
And I enter the system. Of course, I tried first with Iceweasel, knowing it would fail (it is documented: MSIE 5.5 recommended). I tried again with Konqueror. I tried, sigh, with MSIE from inside Wine. No luck. Well, even from within qemu's Windows 2000. Wrong password. WTF?! Stranger: It worked with SAT's My portal, although it didn't with the declaration, which is what matters now.
I cannot take the time every day to come to the SAT and move my data - It was a full week until I came back again. I insisted on fully logging in to the system, to be sure the password I entered this time was right. As well as my über-secret safety question, of course.
And it failed.
Twice.
Until the clerk noticed something strange in the way I typed...
Sir, excuse me..., he muttered, why are you typing such a long password? Well, basically because I value my tax declaration, and I know brute force is a powerful force. (explain it, of course, in simple terms) Oh... No, the password must be eight characters long.
No wonder.
So I entered the first eight characters of my password, which was a true work of prose for their standards, at around 20 characters. And it worked.
Now, for bonus points: What do we gather from the fact that the long password works fine in one system, but in another system it only the short version? Why, but of course! I guess the passwords for every economically active Mexican is stored in their master database in plain text. Isn't it just beautiful?
Anyway, it seems I have a lot of work to do. If all goes as planned, maybe next year I will be for hire as a public accountant? Hmh, does not sound too much like fun, does it?

It seems everybody is ranting in Planet Debian about what our planet should be about, what content should be acceptable, whether technical-only, Debian-only, everything-goes... Even archiving the posts via a mailing-list interface has been mentioned. Besides, following the planet seems to have become mandatory to people linked to Debian, almost as mandatory as following debian-devel-announce.
I won't bother linking to other posts in this topic, as they are far too many. The whole discussion seems childlike and sterile to me. For different people, Debian means different things - This topic has come up in the planet a couple of times in the past (funny, hah, using posts in mutually-unlinked personal blogs as a way to follow a discussion). And a planet should IMHO cover a specific use case: Providing a place for those of us who think of Debian as a social frame, and value knowing -exactly- the type of information each of us publishes in his/her blog: What's up with Debian-related people's lifes.
Of course, a large fraction of this information should be somehow technical or Debian-related. But I do value having a place to learn about my peers' life accomplishments. To know if they are going through a hard time. To understand the personal interests of them. Maybe to learn I'm not the only DD who enjoys running (although I'm far under Dirk's or Christian's league) or cycling in a big city (although I lack MJ's political involvement and dedication). I actually like trying to find some logic in senseless Steve-like messages, there are some funny bits in his stuff. I like knowing I can share what I feel important about my life in a simple way with my peers, without having them drop over to my site. And yes, of course I do enjoy learning about the ongoing technical work of the bunch, even if it is often in fields I would not wander into at all (i.e. Simon's frustration with writing device drivers for Windows, Michal's advances on Gammu).
So... Please stop over-regulation. Leave the planet as it is. If you don't like it, come up with a way to filter and maybe adjust its content based on user profiles. But don't try to censor it.

Vicm3, you know I'd probably ignore this, as following internet memes goes against my principles. But what are the principles there, if not to break them?
Ok, so what you request is, basically, to get a list of sounds to build my life's soundtrack. Following the list you mentioned, it is quite exhaustive, creative and long.
In my case, some other time, I'd probably jump over some über-sarcastic Leo Masliah and the like. Particularly, I would not ever talk about my life without his Todo así.
But not today.
Today, I'd love my life's movie to be an old-fashioned, mute movie. Yes, quite in line with the nice grey life theme I've had on my blog for several months... I'd love having a nice, quiet, mute movie, just letting me live along, think a bit, work a bit... Settle down on too many things, lead to some peace.
No, this message bears no dedication to any character or person I have or will meet. Just inner my mood and needs.

It is hard. Some parts of life are just continuous joy. Some are hard.
This is a hard part for me. At one time, I feel the urge to come to my dearest and closest people -and even to the complete unknown ones, such as probably you are, anonymous reader- and speak of whatever comes to my mind. At times, I just want to shut up. Completely shut up, not even talk with myself.
And that is a big problem. My stupid self does not shut up, and keeps thinking over and over.
Anyway... Good friends, anonymous bystanders: A new epoch dawns for me. For bad? For worse? Who knows?
For different? Hell, yes.
[update]: Thanks for the support, here and off-band :)

I have been maintaining several minor sites hosted at Dreamhost for about a year. And since over one month ago, my personal website is with them as well. And I must say, I am very pleased with them. No, not (well, not only) because they run Debian on their servers, nor because they are probably the cheapest game in town (I paid something like US$200 for a basically unlimited package , for three years), but because of their degree of responsability and personal service.
Responsability? Aren't they well-known for their network outages? Why, yes, of course - Today's example is paramount: Somebody edited the wrong firewall entry, and all of Dreamhost became unavailable. In general terms, Dreamhost has a great blog-like structured page where they inform customers of every network or server problem they have - No, you don't have to dig in to understand why your site is down: They bring it up to you. Upfront. And in a familiar, very non-formal style.
Whenever I have submitted an issue to their request tracker, I get prompt reply. Does it always solve the situation? no, by far. I'm often told to, basically, go screw myself if I really need such feature... But they are straightforward with that, they are good, nice BOFHs (if such thing ever existed), and they don't present you with corporate-minded studies backing up their solution. Yes, I know that in their servers, it's plainly their way or the highway. But hey, that's what I paid for, right?
That is what wins my heart. Yes, Dreamhost is no good for many, many tasks - including, for example, anything that requires a real RDBMS (forgodssake, they offer MySQL but not PostgreSQL, damnit! WTF!?), nor any legendary five-nines reliability. But they are great for the vast majority of the Internet sites' needs. They even exceed what a simple person like me would ever dream of.
So, my hat off to you guys. Again.
(No, and I'm not getting paid or discounted on services because of this blog post. Although maybe I should! ;-) )

Madduck complains about the lack of attractive data plans for mobile phone providers in Switzerland. Madduck: As always, you will have to remember there are many people confronted with a much worse situation than yours.
Up to a month ago, I never envisioned using my phone for anything besides... Well, talking. But yes, since I got my new gadget, I keep playing with GPS or using it for simple things that require Web access and do not require much interactivity (the suckiness of a 12-key keyboard is überhuge!) - Provided, of course, that I am near a WiFi hotspot, of course. My mobile service provider, Telcel, just publicly launched its 3G network - this means, of course, prices are well over the roof:
The cheapest plan starts at MX$59 (around US$5.5) a month, and gives you a whooping 1MB of allowed transfer - Anything you do over 1MB will cost you MX$0.06 per kilobyte. Yes, Telcel offers a 1.5Mbps connection, so it'd theoretically take only 6 seconds to exceed the monthly plan. After the joyful first seconds of network access, each second of full-fledged data transfer will cost you 9 pesos - Around US$0.85. How nice!
Now, there are plans for 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 100 and 1000MB. Their price increases at a slow pace up to MX$459, which is still somewhat expensive if you even thought on using your cell phone as a gateway (say, over Bluetooth) for your regular computer's connectivity. Of course, if I buy 1GB of data transfer, I'd expect a much lower price for each additional Kb. Well, no, it only goes down to MX$0.03. Per Kilobyte, yes, you read right. Those little things your Vic20 was full of.
There is even an unlimited plan. Well, yes, unlimited but limited - For MX$579 (~US$55) you get a nice deal, right? After all, I pay MX$350 for my 1024/128 DSL connection - it is on the right range. Well, no - If you get over 3GB in one month, your data rate will drop to 128Kbps for the rest of the month. Nice. No good as a gateway either.
So, I'm not hiring a 3G plan at all. But that's also a danger - If I open a net-using program at the wrong moment, I'll be billed at MX$0.14 per Kilobyte.
Bah.
[update] There is another similar service in Mexico, IUSAcell's BAM. Pricing is equivalent, though.

I just spent the productive part of the last couple of days going over several alternatives, as I didn't want to do the most obvious thing.
But I ended up doing it.
I think I did it carefully... And in a restricted system.
Still, having a Web-facing script that executes a password-changing script running with Sudo-granted privileges... No matter how much correctness and sanity checking it involves...
Makes me feel dirty.

Ok, the time has come. I have postponed this change too much - But finally, after three months of having hired my Dreamhost account (and stating so in this very blog), I finally made the switch from Jaws to Drupal.
Now I only hope I don't flood any planets with my RSS (I was careful to check the dates are consistent, but you never know), finish moving over my static content (I carried over about half of it already), play a bit with the theme, and... that's it! :D
Anyway, I promised my oh-so-not-generic-but-what-the-heck Jaws (0.7 at least) to Drupal (5.x) migration script. It worked like a charm - Ok, I only used it to move blog and photo albums/entries, but that's at least the most typical use AFAICT.
Now, I'll have to understand still some more terms and details in Drupal. For example, WTF? Why was jaws_to_drupal.pl renamed to jaws_to_drupal.pl.txt? (stated content-type, I guess) Why do my uploaded tar.gz files get renamed to tar_.gz even if I explicitly requested to allow .tar.gz suffix uploads? (same thing, I guess)

Call me reiterative, but yes, it is this time of the month again: Last Sunday. Today we went cycling to my city's Ciclotón. Although Nadezhda already took part in the August 2007 ciclotón, I was flying in from Europe that day. When I did the Ciclotón in October, she was in Monterrey. Then in December, Rodrigo reminded us that we missed it. So, this is the first time I do the Ciclotón with Nadezhda! (To my defense: Yes, I sent a SMS to Rodrigo... But too late - He probably didn't plan it on time, so we just didn't meet once again).

And what, am I going to come and brag each time I take my bike out for a longer-than-usual ride? (40Km is no small feat. Well, not for me at least!) Probably not. But if you remember, I just got a new toy, and I can now prove it to you all:

Some days ago, my RSS reader found Mark Jason Dominus' Help.pm - Yes, the module is (so far, at least - I could not find it on CPAN) only published as a blog post. But don't let that fool you - It's a beautiful (and simple!) Perl module that can help developers that are too lazy to go look up methods in the man pages.

Perl's introspection capabilities are not behind other dynamic languages' (i.e. Python's or Ruby's, speaking only about what I'm familiar with). However, it's used much more seldom, partly because Perl does not ship by default with an interactive console (such as Ruby's irb or Python's regular behaviour when called without an input script). Of course, writing a Perl console is an easy task, and good Perl consoles exist, although its use is not part of the Perl culture.

But of course, just glancing over MJD's code made me come up with a simple, yet useful, way to use introspection in Perl, usable as a simple one-liner. Say you want to look at all of the methods provided by IO::File:

gwolf@mosca[25]/tmp$ perl -e 'use IO::File; print join(", ", grep {defined &{"IO::File::$_"}} sort keys %{"IO::File::"}), "\n"'
binmode, carp, confess, croak, gensym, new, new_tmpfile, open, qualify, qualify_to_ref, ungensym

Want the scalar variables? Of course:

gwolf@mosca[26]/tmp$ perl -e 'use IO::File; print join(", ", grep {defined ${"IO::File::$_"}} sort keys %{"IO::File::"}), "\n"'
VERSION

Same goes for arrays and hashes. And, of course, leaving out the grep gives you anything. Yup, it's the magic package-name hash trick. Main difference between this and MJD's Help.pm? That Help.pm goes up the inheritance chain, and is thus much more correct.

Of course, I'll be uploading Help.pm to Debian very soon - And, why not, I think I'll add a way for it to query on different symbols, not just on methods. And the simple binary to call from the command line. Sounds very much worth it ;-) Thanks, MJD!

This could have just been a nice Summer morning, uneventful as they usually are, were it not for the fact that it was already 19:00, and it was mid-winter. (with due apologies, of course, to Bob Dylan and Les Luthiers)

Nadezhda called me, warning me about a very dark sky and strong winds, and went off for her meeting. I told her weather looked decent from mx office... But started paying attention. And yes, wind was crazed. Hints of an upcoming power outage were felt in the Institute. I left my office as soon as I could. Cycling back home was quite a challenge - The 3.1Km route back home, usually much easier than the way there as it's mostly downhill, was quite a challenge: Biking with eyes almost-closed because of the flying leaves and dust, and little but menacing raindrops... Scary, all in all.

Anyway, it gets scary... At least one person was killed because of the winds not far from here. This city has the fame that febrero loco y los vientos otro poco (February is crazy, but the winds are even more). And the first crazy wind of the season are always scary.

[update] One person dead because of the strong winds in Mexico City; Power outages in several areas; Three more hours of strong winds expected; Heavy winds caused by the #24 cold front(?); Winds cause mayhem on DF streets;

A week ago, I got my fourth cell phone so far. This is the first time, however, that I pay for it - even though the first one I had was a very nice smartphone for its time (basically, a not-really-well-integrated Palm Vx and a bulky phone very worthy back in its time. Anyway - Some months ago, I decided I wanted a Wifi-able phone, in order not to need to carry around my laptop for simple tasks such as checking my mail. Shortly after I started looking for phones which fit my needs, I found Nokia's N95. The map-maniac in me found it had a GPS, and... Well, it just became matter of waiting until my phone company brought it to the Mexican market (as I paid about half its street-price... Y'know, points for customer loyalty, blah blah).
Anyway... I've been extensively playing with my new toy, and although I am still often frustrated by Symbian's so very-very-propietary-minded OS and general culture (it's amazing the number of for-a-fee very simple applications!), I'm very happy. So far, my favorite application (and, of course, the one that made me jump for it) is Nokia's Sports Tracker. While it does have some issues (particularly the web application - at least its interaction with firefIceWeasel is somewhat buggy; it abuses AJAX interaction and some pieces of information are just not linkable, they lack a proper URL), I'm delighted at using it - tracking my theoretically daily excercise sessions, be they excercising per se or my bike rides to work, linking photos taken during those sessions, tagging them to the point and moment they were taken (although, I must admit, it is awkward to take photos while running - And next to impossible while biking, of course).
Yes, to many this is not so impressive... But it is really the toy I was looking for.