Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 159

A phone call in December made me very proud: A colleague I met thanks to the Espora collective told me she was involved in the Mexican activities for this year’s World Social Forum (FSM Mexico 2008 site). The Mexican activities? Yes. This year, the World Social Forum will not be held at one -or several- distinct places, but it will happen globally. There will be activities in tens of countries. The activity program for Mexico (full PDF version) is quite loaded - And I was invited to give one of the talks, this Friday (Jan 25) at 12:00, about Free...

I just went to our Institute's yearly ceremony of rosca de reyes. What's that? Well, according to the tradition, on January 6 the tres reyes magos (boringly translated to English as three wise men - It should be something like three wizard kings) payed a visit to the newborn baby Jesus. In Mexico, the tradition mandates that every family, group of friends, or whatnot should gather and eat rosca de reyes, a round, sweet bread, usually some 10cm wide. The rosca has some plastic babies hidden in it, remembering how baby Jesus had to be hidden and smuggled out of...

First time I had read the Bible It had stroke me as unwitty I think it may started rumor That the Lord ain't got no humor Put me inside SSC Let's test superstring theory Oh yoi yoi accelerate the protons stir it twice and then just add me, 'cause I don't read the Bible I don't trust disciple Even if they're made of marble Or Canal Street bling From the maelstrom of the knowledge Into the labyrinth of doubt Frozed underground ocean melting - nuking on my mind Yes give me Everything Theory Without Nazi uniformity My brothers are protons...

Ok, so two people replied to yesterday's post about triple negations - Dato (by email) and MadCoder. Both, said basically the same thing: || false and && true are silly noops. And yes, knowing this, I added them. Why? Clarity... At least having them at the end of a test shows the statement is of conditional nature (and not just another obscure attempt to do ${DEITY}-knows-what). They at least look cleaner than a one-line-squashed if block in a makefile. To me, at least ;-) But... If you noticed this post's title, it goes beyond this comment - One of the...

Yes, yes, I know I already said so, and surely in a more visible site, and even he also announced his victory over DAMnation… But still, having more Mexicans in this little project I call home makes me very happy. So, welcome on board, Rodrigo!

I'm packaging Ruby's PDF::Writer module for Debian - It is a simple module and (almost) ready for upload. But anyway, it carries some issues I had to bring to debian-legal's attention, mainly, five files licensed under Creative Commons licenses (specially two of them, which are under its NonCommercial variant - clearly non-free), so I'm repackaging the .orig.tar.gz into a +dfsg version. But I know I'm a lazy and sometimes stupid bum. Even more, the package will be group-maintained by the pkg-ruby-extras team, so we must be as careful as possible not to forget to remove the non-free material - To...

As of late, I've shifted quite dramatically my sysadmining/development activities. On the development front, although Perl is still my mother tongue and I maintain many systems I wrote with it (and my main involvement in Debian is through the <a href=""http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-perl/>pkg-perl group</a>, of course), I've been largely switching over to Ruby - both under the Rails framework and doing standalone stuff. But somehthing that's new to me (well, relatively - it has been observed I have been playing with the idea in and out for some more time) is entering this maze of twisty little passages, all alike called Drupal....

Last weekend, Nadezhda and me went to the the San Nicolás Totoloapan park, a beautiful area in the slopes of the Ajusco mountain. We cycled only for a short while, as we are not really used to slopes nor to non-paved roads - But all in all, it was very fun and a very nice time. But, only now I realize, thanks to the oh-so-always-nice Rodrigo, that, because of having fun while being at the Ajusco, we completely missed November's Ciclotón. Crap. Cycling over 30 Km in Mexico City is very fun. Nadezhda loved it when she did it in...

Yesterday I went with Nadezhda to the always interesting teatro/bar el Vicio. as she found that Klezmerson were going to play there. We tried to get some more friends to join, but gave too short notice, and ended up having a great night out just by ourselves. Just as a side rant: I just hate that places I want to refer to, and I want other people to get to know, have Flash-only sites! You can read some more things about Klezmerson at -ugh- their MySpace site, even get some of their music there. Their name give away their basic...

Yay, the club seems to be getting bigger and bigger. While I’ve been mostly away from this blog, Bubulle has joined the group. Also, the long-disappeared Evan promises to be back, and running as well. I didn’t get to see him, but Gaby told me she saw Mauricio (making a IMHO very nice 0:51:33 time for 10Km) on last week’s Nike race. Of course, I was also at the race, with a 1:07:36 total time. Not bad for such a strange period!