Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 158

I just love my city.Mexico City, chaotic, unknowable, imposible to understand, so huge, so varied, so broken, so feared, complex, unique… I think few people realize how easy it is to fall in love with this city, to drink its beauty, which leaps up always when you least expect it. Today, it was a good day for loving it. For one thing or another, I’ve missed the five previous ciclotones, which are held on the last Sunday of each month, 7:00 to 14:00. Today, finally, I made it.What is it? It is a 32 Km route circling roughly around the...

That does not mean I'm dead yet, of course - It just means I've been too tied up with real life. Yes, I do feel to be close-to-MIA in Debian as in most other projects I work in out of personal interest... It's that bureaucratic point in year where we have to get all of the paperwork sorted out in order to enjoy another year working in the University. And, of course, it's a huge PITA - but all in all, it's worth it. That point by itself is not the only reason why I was drawn away from my...

I completely agree with Adrian’s comment. I’ve recently installed a lab full of OpenOffice for Windows. Of course, the installation is easy (but you have to explicitly accept the GPL to get on with it - why?), but what’s really annoying is that the first time each and every user starts the program for the first time, they are also prompted for license agreement. Even worse, they are expected to fill out a quite lengthy survey (which I filled once, of course, but still is too much to ask for the vast majority of our users!). Free Software should be...

Bah, MySQL keeps insisting on being a fun way to waste your time.One of my clients hosts its systems at Dreamhost, a quite nice hosting company, which has… Well, a couple of strange details :-/Anyway, people who work with databases know that a BLOB (or its equivalent) is the right datatype for storing images or, in general, files, right? After all, BLOB is just an acronym for Binary Large OBject. And if somebody has a BLOB field in the DB and searches on it, most RDBMS-bound programmers will at very least chuckle at a design flaw - BLOBs are just...

So they say. So, yes, lets wait, even if that means waiting with the trembling heart of the foreigner in Juan José Arreola’s “El Guardagujas”. Sometimes, the wait will be only eight minutes long - who knows? Sometimes, the wait will last for months, even a lifetime - be ready, stay at the nearby hotel, and be ready to rush out once the moment comes. What cannot ever be guaranteed, though, is what happens after the train has arrived - Whether it will travel according to your personal (and extremely naïve) plans, or it will take you to a whole...

I came across John Wang’s posting titled Database Abstraction - code vs infrastructure. In it, he talks about the problems many people face when migrating applications tied to a specific RDBMS to another one. He recommends: One solution of modern programming is to move database abstraction from the code to the infrastructure using a ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) or Data Mapper. A ORM and Data Mapper abstracts the database for you so you no longer have to do tie db abstraction to each app. Not only does it let you code once for multiple databases it lets your users migrate their...

Good comrades, great chat, greater motivation. Some good Scotch whisky, a good friend who was lumped along with me in .br by mere chance. A very good time. A strong whisky aftertaste and numbness in the mouth. My first couple of pages of Terry Pratchet - Thanks a bunch!My mind wanders, I go over all the nice and dear things and peopleMaybe tomorrow I should restart my reading? I know Pratchett is not supposed to make much (rational) sense, but still… Although I’ve enjoyed this couple of pages, I’d rather let the whisky wear out before continuing with the gollem...

So here I am, sitting at a talk at YAPC::EU 2007, in the beautiful Vienna. It is too early to start thinking about a status report for what I’ve done and talked about, but I can say in advance that I’m very positively impressed - I expected my talk on the integration between CPAN and Debian that the Debian pkg-perl group is carrying out (presentation, full article) to be marginally interesting to a couple of people. Turns out, as YAPC drew closer, I heard from several people interested in attending it. Ok, maybe it is just for courtesy? Lets not...

And no, I don’t mean Mao.How was Thursday 23 for me?6:30 Wake up, knowing it will be a long day. No, don’t get those delicious extra 15 minutes of sleep.8:00</b> Arrive to work, ~90min earlier than usual, to finish the Rails app you have to demo at 10:0010:00 Meeting with the Institute’s Director, Academic Secretary and Technic Secretary to show them the system for following the internal inter-tematic colloquium information workflow. Thankfully, they were happy with it.11:20 (20 minutes after scheduled): As several academics have said they are interested in getting to know Linux, I’m giving a series of introductory...

Joey complains about users filing aggressive or otherwise inappropriate bug reports. Well, in this case I must say I bit the bullet.Yesterday, somebody complained about the maintenance statuse of libapache2-mod-perl2. Usually, I would have sadly nodded and said that, yes, since the API change between mod_perl for Apache 1.x and mod_perl2 for Apache 2.x (which was a long time ago - with perfect timing not to be accepted in the last weeks of Sarge’s hard-freeze period, causing many of us to have to maintain two or even three versions of our code depending on the API used - But that’s...