Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 134

Little Gunnar - Gift by Nadezhda’s friend Lulú. Thanks! Attachments (360 KB) Comments Kaz 2009-01-30 08:51:00 Eres un amor… Hasta hay colecciones de Gunnar Wolf en CD, videojuegos, comics y demas parnafelia… quien diría que serías un esclavo hecho y derecho del mercantilismo?

Several friends, from different groups and backgrounds and with different points of view regarding the current war in Israel (and regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict in general) have asked me for an explanation on what is happening there, what is (my view of) the real conflict, its causes… and any possible answers. And yet I am quite far from being an authority, I do want to write something about it. Be prepared, as this post is quite long. And yet, after writing frankly a lot more than what I expected… It is by far not enough. I have still much more...

The phrase on this title is often attributed to Pancho Villa (1878-1923), Mexican Revolution leader. He had a fame of cruelty, killing suspects before even questioning them. Today, it started as a very nice day. I had even time in the morning to find, fix, upload and send upstream a trivial bug in libgruff-ruby… At 11:00, I left the Institute as my father came to the city to do some paperwork… We sat having a cup of coffee in a restaurant near the office we had went to at around 12:00, and my phone rang. And it was from work....

I am stunned no more people have been bitten by this. Or at least, the Intarweb has not heard about it. Censorship perhaps? I haven’t researched more into the causes, but anyway… I was pushing a project I have had lingering for some time from Rails 2.0.x to 2.1.x (yes, 2.2 is already out there, but 2.1 is the version that will ship with Lenny) - The changes should not be too invasive, as it is a minor release, but there are some quite noticeable changes. Anyway… What was the problem? Take this very simple migration: class CreatePeople < ActiveRecord::Migration...

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...