Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 134

Some months ago, I got a phone call from Rafael Fernández Flores. He wanted to interview me for a book he was working on regarding the history of computers in Mexico. The first computer in Latin America was installed in 1958 at my University (UNAM), and last year there were several activities conmemorating it. One of said activities is the publication of the book Historias de la Historia del cómputo en méxico, by Rafael Fernández and Margarita Ontiveros. The book was printed in November, and Rafael gave me my copy in early December. It is quite an entertaining read -...

This morning, I got a mail that made me very happy. I followed it up a bit, and some hours later, echoed it over the pkg-ruby-extras list. And, yes, a blog posting won’t hurt :) I have done some rantings on why it is so painful to integrate cultures such as Debian and Rails. Those rants were part of quite a large rant-net and attracted a fair share of traffic/comments over here. Flamefesting over your blog is fun! :-) but anyway, I am delighted to say that at least some people worth their weight in code were watching, interested. The...

Say… Is this by any chance a keyboard specifically laid out for writing Python? (Seen in a terminal at the José Vasconcelos library, central Mexico City) Attachments (323 KB)

Our municipal (Coyoacán, Mexico City) government announces 5,147,000 breakfasts are served daily in the Coyoacán public schools. Sounds great, doesn’t it? …Until you remember Coyoacán has only 628,000 inhabitants. I’d venture to say, 100,000 children in public schools can be a decent figure. So… Is the government forcing each child to eat 51 breakfasts a day? Truth to be said: A week after the advertisement appeared, it was replaced by other, more believable figures: Over 5 million school uniforms given to the students for free. And now it mentions Distrito Federal, which contains Coyoacán - The total DF population is...

David Welgon has a nice post regarding his opinions on pros and cons on running a startup in Europe (Italy) and the USA (SF/Bay area). The first of the Italy cons got my attention: Less of a startup culture and mentality. It's more typical to get a "job for life" and hang on to it for all you're worth. Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business. I know I am unlike many people, specially in this field… But anyway. I live in Mexico....

Ok, so a handy meme is loose: Handy Git tips. We even had a crazy anatidae requesting us to post this to the Git wiki whatever we send on this regard to our personal blogs. Following Damog’s post, I will also put my .bashrc snippet: parse_git_branch() { branch=`git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/\1/'` if [ ! -z "$branch" ] then if ! git status|grep 'nothing to commit .working directory clean' 2>&1 > /dev/null then branch="${branch}*" mod=`git ls-files -m --exclude-standard|wc -l` new=`git ls-files -o --exclude-standard|wc -l` del=`git ls-files -d --exclude-standard|wc -l` if [ $mod != 0...

There is quite a bit of software whose upstream authors decide that, as they are already using Git for development, the main distribution channel should be GitHub - This allows, yes, for quite a bit of flexibility, which many authors have taken advantage of. So, I just registered and set up http://githubredir.debian.net/ to make it easier for packagers to take advantage of it. Specifically, what does this redirector make? Given that GitHub allows for downloading as a .zip or as a .tar.gz any given commit, it suddenly becomes enough to git tag with a version number, and GitHub magically makes...

Thanks to some unexplained comments on some oldish entries on my blog, I found -with a couple of days of delay- Rubigem is from Mars, Apt-get is from Venus, in Pelle’s weblog. And no, I have not yet read the huge amount of comments generated from it… Still, I replied with the following text - And I am leaving this blog post in place to remind me to further extend my opinions later on. Wow… Quite a bit of comments. And yes, given that the author wrote a (very well phrased and balanced) post, I feel obliged to reply. But...

Seen in the “Universum: Museo de las Ciencias” library: This hall has an anti-robbery safety system. Avoid it. Attachments (427 KB)

I love it when a lack-of-humor and lack-of-appropriateness-originated flamewar causes somebody to point me towards a very nice display of intelligent humor. Specially when it is so close to me, to my roots, to my family and my personal history. FWIW, for several years, while I was a BBS user, I used WereWolf as my nickname. Great thanks to Frank Küster - and, of course, to Christian Morgenstern. The Werewolf - English translation by Alexander Gross A Werewolf, troubled by his name, Left wife and brood one night and came To a hidden graveyard to enlist The aid of a...