Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 8

So, it’s this weird time of year where we make a balance and share with the world some ideas about the future. And… yes, it’s time to take care of this blog, as its activity has dropped once again. So… maybe it’d be nice to start this post by checking how much have I blogged over the years: 2004: 27 2005: 92 2006: 65 2007: 83 2008: 64 2009: 62 2010: 48 2011: 25 2012: 27 2013: 29 2014: 37 2015: 18 2016: 19 2017: 20 2018: 19 2019: 19 2020: 14 2021: 11 2022: 10 (yes, this is an...

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog post by former Debian Developer Lars Wirzenius offering a free basic (6hr) course on the Rust language to interested free software and open source software programmers. I know Lars offers training courses in programming, and besides knowing him for ~20 years and being proud to consider us to be friends, have worked with him in a couple of projects (i.e. he is upstream for vmdb2, which I maintain in Debian and use for generating the Raspberry Pi Debian images) — He is a talented programmer, and a fun guy to be...

Years ago, it was customary that some of us stated publicly the way we think in time of Debian General Resolutions (GRs). And even if we didn’t, vote lists were open (except when voting for people, i.e. when electing a DPL), so if interested we could understand what our different peers thought. This is the first vote, though, where a Debian vote is protected under voting secrecy. I think it is sad we chose that path, as I liken a GR vote more with a voting process within a general assembly of a cooperative than with a countrywide voting one;...

Nowadays, we can assume readers of Computing Reviews are familiar with the ideas behind machine learning, where neural networks are trained with large training sets so that they “learn” to recognize patterns within said dataset; some of those patterns are readily identifiable by a human observer, but some might be deep, very subtle, and impossible for us to understand. Neural networks usually keep learning (and thus adjusting their behaviors) from further data they receive in production. This short article deals with the problem termed as “machine unlearning”: how can we ensure all traces of a given problematic case can be...

Intellectual work draws a lot from communication between collaborating parties. Speed and ease of communication have enormously improved–both qualitatively and quantitatively–in the course of the last decades. So, how come the day-to-day life of intellectual workers (be it in corporate settings or in academic environments) amounts to so much stress? Cal Newport wrote this book based on what he terms “the hyperactive hive mind”: given the ease with which haphazard, unstructured communications flow into our different inboxes every day, with thematically unrelated requests, questions, opinions, personal issues, and so on, our slightly evolved primate brains deal very badly with context...

Last Wednesday my father, Kurt Bernardo Wolf Bogner, took the steps towards his next journey, the last that would start in this life. I cannot put words to this… so just sharing this with the world will have to suffice. Goodbye to my teacher, my friend, the person I have always looked up to. Some of his friends were able to put in words more than what I can come up with. If you can read Spanish, you can read the eulogy from the Science Academy of Morelos. His last project, enjoyable by anybody who reads Spanish, is the book...

I have been a bearded subject since I was 18, back in 1994. Yes, during 1999-2000, I shaved for my military service, and I briefly tried the goatee look in 2008… Few people nowadays can imagine my face without a forest of hair. But sometimes, life happens. And, unlike my good friend Bdale, I didn’t get Linus to do the honors… But, all in all, here I am: Turns out, I have been suffering from quite bad skin infections for a couple of years already. Last Friday, I checked in to the hospital, with an ugly, swollen face (I won’t...

Almost ten months ago, I mentioned on this blog I bought an ARM laptop, which is now my main machine while away from home — a Lenovo Yoga C630 13Q50. Yes, yes, I am still not as much away from home as I used to before, as this pandemic is still somewhat of a thing, but I do move more. My main activity in the outside world with my laptop is teaching. I teach twice a week, and… well, having a display for my slides and for showing examples in the terminal and such is a must. However, as I...

Raspberry Pi computers require a piece of non-free software to boot — the infamous raspi-firmware package. But for almost as long as there has been a Raspberry Pi to talk of (this year it turns 10 years old!), there have been efforts to get it to boot using only free software. How is it progressing? Michael Bishop (IRC user clever) explained today in the #debian-raspberrypi channel in OFTC that it advances far better than what I expected: It is even possible to boot a usable system under the RPi2 family! Just… There is somewhat incomplete hardware support: For his testing,...

Reading Planet Debian (see, Sam, we are still having a conversation over there? 😉), I read Anarcat’s 20+ years of Emacs. And.. Well, should I brag contribute to the discussion? Of course, why not? Emacs is the first computer program I can name that I ever learnt to use to do something minimally useful. 39 years ago. From the Space Cadet keyboard that (obviously…) influenced Emacs’ early design The Emacs editor was born, according to Wikipedia, in 1976, same year as myself. I am clearly not among its first users. It was already a well-established citizen when I first learnt...