An original text by Mary Schmich for the Chicago Tribune, made song by Baz Luhrmann: Wear Sunscreen makes me remember Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata
Wear sunscreen
April 17th, 2009La Oreja de Van Gogh vs David Bowie
February 21st, 2009¿Soy el único al que le parece que Europa VII, del último álbum de La Oreja de Van Gogh, se parece peligrosamente a Space Oddity de David Bowie? Temática (perdido en el espacio sin posibilidad de rescate), melodía, partes de la letra, etc. Hasta los toques de guitarra. En fin…
Europa VII: vídeo, letra
Space Oddity: vídeo, letra
Am I the only one who finds Europa VII, from La Oreja de Van Gogh’s latest LP, is a bit too similar to Space Oddity by David Bowie? Topic (lost in space without any chance for salvation), tune, some passages of the lyrics, etc. Even some guitar bits. Hmmm…
Europa VII: video, lyrics (in Spanish)
Space Oddity: video, lyrics
FOSDEM
February 1st, 2009Me too: I’m going to FOSDEM 2009. Worst thing of FOSDEM: there are so many interesting talks at the same time I don’t know what to attend! 
How to save the World Economy in two easy steps
December 18th, 2008So it seems we are in the middle of the worst financial crisis we have ever faced, which was also led to an economic crisis. In addition to that, nobody knows for sure what to do to fix our Economy. Great.
Here is my proposal: require cheap-labor countries (China, Guatemala, Indonesia, etc) to give their workers the same rights and benefits they do have in our countries (European Union, USA, Canada, etc). If they don’t, heavily tax importations from those countries.
Why is that measure the solution? Read on.
This single change will for sure:
- Increase the production costs in cheap-labor countries
- Increase inflation in Occident, which now faces deflation
- Create jobs in Occident, as cheap-labor countries will be not-so-cheap now
- Create jobs in cheap-labor countries, as it will put an end to 12-hour and 14-hour workdays and require an average of 1.5 to 2 workers to perform the same work they do today
- Create a middle class in cheap-labor countries, thus creating “good” jobs in those countries (i. e. not just manufacturing jobs)
Not only that: this change is 100% ethical and just. Let us no longer exploit Third World countries in our benefit.
Is this protectionism? No, it is not. It is justice.
Will this destroy jobs in cheap-labor countries? No, it will not. In fact, as we would have cut shifts in half, it will create lots of new jobs in factories. Furthermore: by creating a middle-class in those countries, we will be creating a whole new kind of jobs: the same ones we have now in Occident.
Why heavily tax those importation from those countries unless they abide by this rule? Because it’s the only way to force them to abide
Won’t this make Occident’s situation even worse? Won’t this create inflation? Yes, it will create inflation. Which is exactly what Occident needs now, because Occident is facing deflation and that is really bad.
When this measure is finally adopted by every country, currently-cheap-labor countries will not be so competitive, thus creating jobs locally (i. e. in Occident). Until they do, tax them!
Will this ever be implemented? I don’t think so. A decision like this must be taken in the World Trade Organization context. It may take ten years to reach an agreement. Problem is, Occident will not be able to contain the hemorrhage for more than a year. Either the WTO fast-tracks this decision, or Occident is doomed for the next 10 years.
Set up a public write-access git repository
November 26th, 2008If you are in a trusted environment, or you already have an alternative access/authorization mechanism in place, using SSH keys for git is sometimes an annoyance. Turns out you can easily get rid of that, although you should only do that if you are 100% sure what you are doing.
WARNING The following will make your git repository public and anybody will be able to write to it
$ touch .git/git-daemon-export-ok
$ git config daemon.receivepack true
If you receive the following error:
$ git push origin master
Counting objects: 5, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 323 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
error: unpack failed: unpacker exited with error code
To git://server/git/test.git
! [remote rejected] master -> master (n/a (unpacker error))
error: failed to push some refs to ‘git://server/git/test.git’
Make sure your repository is owned by the user running git-daemon on the server.
In response to “What Sun Should Do”: make selling Sun easy
November 26th, 2008This is a response to What Sun Should Do by Tim Bray
What Sun should do is making sell Sun products easy. Maybe in the US it’s easy to buy Sun through the reseller/VAR channel but it’s not in other countries.
For instance, in Spain none of the major wholesalers (Ingram Micro, Techdata and Esprinet) sell Sun products (they are not even in their product catalog!)
When we the VARs want to sell a Sun product to a client, we have to go through very particular wholesalers (it used to be General Electric Access Distribution, now it’s AVNet), with a very very poor service: you need to phone them and ask for a quote, and they may take as long as ONE SOLID MONTH to answer you. This is unacceptable and it’s the reason I have not sold any Sun product in the last 5 years, even though many times they were the best option: they took too long to answer and many times they configuration I was quoted was not the one I asked for. In addition to that, when GEAD was merged into AVNet, we were not contacted at all.
Sorry but with those extremely poor sales tactics, I’m not surprised Sun is doing so bad.
Of course buying directly from Sun works but that’s a very small market here in Spain: 90% of our business are SMBs and
- They don’t have qualify for a Sun Sales person, and/or
- They won’t phone Sun because they don’t want to deal with the intrincacies of IT: they rely on VARs and IT resellers
So Sun, here is my advice: help us the VARs and resellers sell your stuff and your sales will soar. Start an aggressive (and I mean REALLY aggresive) campaign among wholesalers, VARs and resellers, and clients will start buying Sun hardware, software and support contracts. Help us help you. We really want.
In addition to that, if you supported KDE4 as the default desktop instead of CDE or Gnome, I’m sure you’d sell more workstations among design and graphics departments: a designer who sees a KDE 4.2 desktop with all fancy effects and graphics, is a designer who truly believes that workstation is capable of doing Maya.
Correo perdido/Lost e-mail
November 20th, 2008(English version at the end)
A lo largo de los últimos años he tenido alojado este dominio en un proveedor americano que funcionaba relativamente bien. Aunque algunos correos llegaban con retraso y tenía la sospecha de que algún correo se perdía, por falta de tiempo no había cambiado a otro proveedor. La semana pasada cambié a Google Apps for your Domain. Así, a bote pronto, veo que he perdido centenares (posiblemente miles) de correos en los últimos años. Si me has escrito y no te he contestado, no es porque sea un maleducado: simplemente es que tu e-mail no me llegó. Si me escribes de nuevo, prometo contestar.
The last few years I have hosted this domain with a ISP form the USA which worked acceptably. Although some e-mails arrived with some delay and I was suspicious some mails were getting lost, I was too short on time to find and move to another ISP (hopefully, one which would not have those problems). Last week I moved to Google Apps for your Domain. Now it’s confirmed: I have been losing hundreds (maybe thousands) for mails in the last few years. If you wrote me and I did not answer, it’s not that I’m ill-mannered: it’s just your e-mail never arrived. If you write me again, I’ll answer - I promise!.
US Presidential Election 2008 with D’Hondt Method
November 9th, 2008On November 4th, the US Presidential Election was held. Once more, we were remembered of the President of the USA is not chosen directly but indirectly by the Electoral College.
I, like most Europeans, think the Electoral College method is extremely unfair. Take for example California: 55 Electoral Votes (that’s 11% of the total Electoral Votes), 17.3 million registered voters. One candidate might win the Election in that State by a single vote and still get the 55 Electoral Votes, which means 50% of the voters are totally ignored.
So, I took the data the USA Today newspaper published in their website and calculated how the Electoral Votes would be distributed if the 2008 Presidential Election would have used the D’Hondt Method. Here are my findings:
| OBAMA | MCCAIN | |
| ALABAMA | 6 | 3 |
| ALASKA | 1 | 2 |
| ARIZONA | 5 | 5 |
| ARKANSAS | 2 | 4 |
| CALIFORNIA | 34 | 21 |
| COLORADO | 5 | 4 |
| CONNECTICUT | 4 | 3 |
| DELAWARE | 2 | 1 |
| WASHINGTON DC | 3 | 0 |
| FLORIDA | 14 | 13 |
| GEORGIA | 7 | 8 |
| HAWAII | 3 | 1 |
| IDAHO | 1 | 3 |
| ILLINOIS | 13 | 8 |
| INDIANA | 6 | 5 |
| IOWA | 4 | 3 |
| KANSAS | 2 | 4 |
| KENTUCKY | 3 | 5 |
| LOUSIANA | 4 | 5 |
| MAINE | 2 | 2 |
| MARYLAND | 6 | 4 |
| MASSACHUSETTS | 8 | 4 |
| MICHIGAN | 10 | 7 |
| MINNESOTA | 6 | 4 |
| MISSISSIPPI | 3 | 3 |
| MISSOURI | 5 | 6 |
| MONTANA | 1 | 2 |
| NEBRASKA | 2 | 3 |
| NEVADA | 3 | 2 |
| NEW HAMPSHIRE | 2 | 2 |
| NEW JERSEY | 9 | 6 |
| NEW MEXICO | 3 | 2 |
| NEW YORK | 20 | 11 |
| NORTH CAROLINA | 8 | 7 |
| NORTH DAKOTA | 1 | 2 |
| OHIO | 10 | 10 |
| OKLAHOMA | 2 | 5 |
| OREGON | 4 | 3 |
| PENNSYLVANIA | 12 | 9 |
| RHODE ISLAND | 3 | 1 |
| SOUTH CAROLINA | 4 | 4 |
| SOUTH DAKOTA | 1 | 2 |
| TENNESSEE | 5 | 6 |
| TEXAS | 15 | 19 |
| UTAH | 2 | 3 |
| VERMONT | 2 | 1 |
| VIRGINIA | 7 | 6 |
| WASHINGTON | 7 | 4 |
| WEST VIRGINIA | 2 | 3 |
| WISCONSIN | 6 | 4 |
| WYOMING | 1 | 2 |
| TOTAL D’HONDT | 291 | 247 |
| TOTAL ELECTORAL COLLEGE | 364 | 162 |
Obama still wins, but instead of a 364 vs 162 advantage (202 votes), he only has a 291 vs 247 votes (44 votes). Given that 270 Electoral Votes are needed to be President, the D’Hondt method would make a fundamental difference.
It is interesting to note that even thought the other candidates (Nader, Barr, Baldwin, McKinney and Paul) do not win any Electoral Vote using the D’Hondt method with the current vote count, one can safely assume this is because voters knew very well with the Electoral College method Nader, Barr, etc had no real chance of winning. If the Election method would be changed to the D’Hondt method, or any other proportional method, Nader, Barr, etc would have the chance to win some votes, and more people would have voted for Nader, Barr, etc.
CMake-ifying git
October 8th, 2008I’m going to use git for a project of mine and instead of parsing git’s output (which is the adviced way to use it from your application), I thought I’d rather use libgit and link to it. The first step was getting rid of autohell and moving to CMake.
This patch against git’s current master branch includes the CMakeLists.txt file and a few modifications to the source (mostly due to the different way variable replacement works in autotools vs CMake).
So far, only libgit, libxdiff and git are built. Will I go go for the other binaries (gitweb, gitk, etc)? I’m not sure, as I’m not interested but it shouldn’t be difficult to CMake-ize those.
I think the move from autotools to CMake could be very useful for the msysgit* developers, as they no longer would depend on MSys*
* I have not tried to build git on Windows with my CMakeLists.txt yet, I’ll do it tomorrow
** It’s not actually true yet: I run two bourne shell-scripts but I could easily rewrite those in CMake, too.
Update I’ve produced a new patch, as the old one did not perform a few needed renames
Raising awareness of KDE on Windows
October 5th, 2008Most of my coworkers use Qt4 but only on Windows. Some of them did not even know KDE existed, much less that since KDE 4.1 there are official packages and an official installer for Windows.
Last week, I wandered around the office, occasionally assaulting people to show them KDE on Windows, the API docs, this-and-that widget, answering their questions (mostly technical), etc (if you know how tackatpromotioned Marble at past aKademy-s, you know what I did )
So, what was the reaction of people to KDE? Surprisingly, extremely good! I was expecting more resistance to the fact that to use K* classes, KParts, etc you have to convert your QApplication to a KApplication but they went like “the advantages of using KDE classes and KDE’s ActiveX [that's how some of them call KParts] are so obvious I will do that as soon as I installing a development version of KDE on Windows is easy”. People specially liked the Kate, oKular and KPlato KParts (although I showed KPlato 1.6 and only on Linux). The pie-like ToolBox menu in Amarok also received some praising.
My conclusion: I really think we should raise more awareness of KDE among Windows developers and the “wander-around-and-assault-for-no-reason” approach works very well. Try it with your Win32 coworkers and friends and blog about KDE on Windows. Let’s get some momentum for KDE4 on Windows!
