Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 135

It’s sad that today in Planet Debian we have hit an Eurocentric geographically discriminating meme. Particularly, one I’d love to take part of. Well, at least I can assure you we have reached the usual low temperature of 2 Celsius in Mexico City… As always, people say it’s so cold that this year we will get snow. And as always, I’m sure it’s just wishful thinking ;-) So, even with Marcelo’s frozen Zócalo live again for this winter, I can only reinforce our tropical paradise stereotypes by reminding you that this is less than 500Km away from home - All...

Wouter insists that Ruby Gems are enough of an argument to keep Rails at a distance. Even though I agree with the basic claim and think that Gems are basically insane and sick, this should be taken a bit more under perspective. We are blessed. We are blessed to have Debian, such a rich OS with such a great package management system, and with superb integration between so many packages. Blessed are also the users of most Free Software based distributions, as they share the advantages of systems growing with full consciousness of their interaction’s benefits. However, integration with the...

This might be a good message to write in Spanish… But then again, a long time ago I decided this is an English-posting site. So be it, I’ll only have to give more background information. This day marks the date when, 98 years ago, Francisco I. Madero started the Mexican Revolution - About a decade of unrest, civil war and ideologies. The revolution is what created the violent, uncivil image of the Mexican, which accompanied us for long years in many foreigners’ minds. The revolution brought to an end 30 years of a single-man rule, the Porfiriato. But that’s only...

Yesterday I took part of the fourth inter-state bike ride, requesting the construction of proper and safe cycling ways. Tens of Mexican bike-rider organizations were part of the organization, althought the effort is basically grouped under the Ciclopistas y Ciclovías Interestatales project - For further details on the route we took, you can look at the México-Pachuca road map, although it was not followed literally. I am very happy I decided to take part of this - I went with Adrián, but after the first rest/grouping we lost track of each other, and decided the best would be for each...

Michael blogs about Critical Mass. What is Critical Mass in case you are too lazy to go to Michael’s or to the Wikipedia? A cyclist-awareness movement, showing how bikers are safer (i.e. more visible) when there are more of them. The (dis)organizational nature of this movement (at least according to Wikipedia’s information) seems quite fun and interesting. However, I have to oppose what Michael says is a strong point of CM in Austria - At least, given my country’s culture. People who don’t bike often say we have the least bike-aware culture, and that this city must be like hell...

Via Kees Cook (and sorry for the reiteration for people following along Planet Debian, thanks to Caspar Clemens: Recent (>= 5.1) versions of OpenSSH (found at least in Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Intrepid), have the VisualHostKey option. What does it do? $ ssh -o VisualHostKey=yes 172.16.10.1 Host key fingerprint is db:7a:d8:a8:2e:41:a2:e5:51:e1:7f:d0:73:bd:85:bf +--[ RSA 2048]----+ | .. | | .. . . . | | .. . o . o . | | + .. . o + | | + + . S . . | |. . . . o . | | . .+. E | | ....

Last Wednesday I went for the first time in many years to FES Iztacala, the UNAM faculty where I worked for four years (1999-2003) and where I have most learnt and advanced in my career so far. I have a very special spot in my heart for Iztacala :-) But it was not just a nostalgy drive - In no small part, I had not visited Iztacala -despite several invitations- because… It is really far away, in Tlalnepantla, Northern Mexico City (while I live in the South, just by UNAM). It takes me approximately 1.5 hours to get there via...

Virtualization is the technique (or rather, the set of techniques) that allow to share a single computer’s resources so that, for the user, it appears as several independent computers. There are several motivations to virtualize our systems, such as: Ease of administration (keeping our installations as simple as possible) Isolation/security (limiting the damage a potential attacker can achieve to the smallest possible domain) Resource control (avoiding a system failure to consume too many resources in others, leading to a denial of service - Or selling our computer resources by volume) High availability (transparent service migration between servers for maintenance tasks)...

[ updated on December 2009 ] The Free Software movement has traditionally been seen mainly as a technical movement, working towards a common knowledge body, expressly focused towards operating computer systems. We are presenting it, however, as one of the triggerers -and as one of the clearest success cases- of the Free Knowledge movements. We explore how the Free Software movement’s ideary, born as an ideological movement in the mid 1980s, corresponds with the historical logic of the scientific development that has evolved all along mankind’s growth, and is presented as a mechanism that should reempower the scientific and technological...

Almost a month ago, Mauro pointed towards acerfand, a daemon to keep the Acer Aspire One’s fan quiet while not needed. Thanks, Mauro, you made my life more pleasant ;-) Today I had some free time in my hands (of course, putting aside everything else I should be doing), so I decided to un-uglify my machine. I hate having random stuff in /usr/local! So I packaged Rachel Greenham’s acerfand for Debian. It should hit unstable soon. Of course, it will not make it to Lenny - which is a shame, giving how nicely Lenny recognizes everything in this sweet machine....