Archive for January, 2005
After some years as a
NetBSD user, wondering why there wasn’t a dedicated shop for this wonderful operating system. Finally NetBSD Foundation has got their
own at
cafepress.com.
The stuff they are selling now is not too fancy (look designs by
OpenBSD), just the NetBSD logo printed on t-shirts, mugs, bags, even underpants! Having a nice
NetBSD mug in my geek-thingies collection could be cool 
(I have one mug that says WTF? from
ThinkGeek).
So, NetBSD users! go quickly and get as much items as you can afford, this is another way for making little donations to
NetBSD Foundation. 
Read
here the official announcement.
Finally, yesterday I bought my 1GiB SD card, I went after work to
PCGreen’s zone, where most of the cheapest computing shops are in Barcelona. After walking around each for about 1h, asking for one 1GiB SD card, I thought I was going home without it. It seems like everybody in Barcelona has been buying one (maybe more) because there wasn’t stock in any place.
When I was going to catch up the train, I saw a kind of technology bazar, with lots console games, mp3 players, digital cameras and so on, I thought to myself: “hmm maybe they’ve got SD cards, little bit more expensive…but I need it. I came in and there it was, an OEM 1GiB SD card and the best was its prices, 67€ after taxes! The shop is called “Bazar Kavi”, it is ruled by a Chinese man with some employed young girls, little weird uh?
Now, I can transfer lots of files to my Tungsten C, I’ve been messing mostly with video files, I’m using a trial version of
MMPlayer, it plays Xvid, DivX and most common video codecs. A common compressed file use to have a huge bitrate for my little CPU (XScale @400MHz), so I’ve downloaded
PocketDivXEncoder, it is licensed under GPL, but built for windows. It is basically a front-end for
MPlayer and mencoder, so I should be able to produce same results under Linux/Unix. I tried to resample a South Park chapter, resizing it to 320×320 (my actual screen size), video rate of 164kbps and an audio rate of 48kbps, sampling it to 22.1kHz/mono (cause Tungsten C has mono output). The results are amazing, I can watch and listen quite properly the whole chapter and just wasting ~20MiB!
Reading
MyPalmLife, I’ve found an interesting post talking about
Visual IT’s Rough Guide City Maps. I think this could be the missing program on my Palm, they said that during this year a
Barcelona guide will be available (also Amsterdam will be).
Why do I need this? Easy, I use to get lost in the city, I’m from
Montcada i Reixac which is a little town about 9.5 miles from Barcelona city. I don’t visit too much the big city cause there’s lot of traffic, few free places to park and drivers…well what can I say about the angry drivers of Barcelona…summarizing, I don’t have a deep knowledge about Barcelona’s streets.
I know this is not as good as a GPS, but maps has at least one advantage over GPS, it is you don’t have to carry another device with you when going out. Besides, I am not saying maps are far better than GPS, just that they could fit better for my needs and GPS is far more expensive, look my options:
With such prices I think Visual IT’s maps would be good enough for just walking around the city.
UPDATE: As
pof told me this evening, my Palm only takes SD cards and the last two links are SDIO, so I only got one left. I knew it, but you know I am so newbie with PDAs and all this stuff.
I’ve been messing with
Gentoo Hardened since when I woke up yesterday. It seems to have great potential, introduces some security projects like,
PaX which has been adopted by some other projects as security feature,
SELinux, a MAC system adds policies and roles managing what a process/user could do in the system.
I am basing my installation mainly on these two projects, but check
Gentoo’s Hardened site for more information on what else it offers.
PaX provides a way to stop most common bugs (right?) in software history, buffer and heap overflows, it works better with userland compiled using PIE. Gentoo provides stages compiled with PIE and SSP. PaX can be managed from userland using paxctl to enable/disable security features on executables.I cannot say too much about SELinux, I have to read and understand how to manage all its features.
In addition I’d like to provide data redundancy to protect the system against hardware failures and an easy way to add space on partitions when they’ve run out. So I’ve set up Gentoo Linux using RAID-1 and LVM2. I’ve used
this document, very nice, step by step. With Gentoo’s hardened documentation and this wiki entry, I only got one problem (at least one which I can remember now…), in hardened there is not devfs so you’ll need to create /dev/md* for RAID devices and /dev/mapper/control for LVM2’s kernel driver.
I read this morning on
tuxmobil.org about
AvantSlash, it’s a tool which enables you to read
/. on any Palm or WinCE device using
AvantGo and others PDA web browsers, also mobile phones with WAP are welcomed.
I know there’re some other ways to read /. on such devices, but AvantSlash claims to be properly designed for handheld’s web browsers, provide a better interface for comments reading and some useless links have been removed making everything easy to read. Sounds cool, uh? but the best is…AvantSlash is licensed under
GPL.
I just set it up on my server, it took me about 2min:
-
Download it..
- Unzip and place it where you want it to be on your server
- Write the proper ScriptAlias and Directory (these are
Apache literacy) entries on your web server configuration
- Test it! did it work? if yes, Congrats! but if it does not work try next steps
- Check Apache’s error log file, I had two errors:
- YOU’RE DONE!
Please, take just 30s to test it and make a comment here, I am at work and don’t have any Wireless AP to try it from
my PDA,
AvantSlash @home.
I was working this morning when my mobile started to vibrate, as usual, I answered. Someone (a man voice) told me he’s calling from the
Fundació UPC, and needs to know my account number because there’s some money left to pay the postgraduate I’m enrolled in. Last part is actually true, cause I’m paying monthly (each payment is near to 400€), somehow I felt odd about this man. When I’ve been called before by them, use to be a woman talking and usually asks for your name before asking for your bank account number. Last I told him was I deposit the money every month in their bank account, I already did two deposits and I’ll do next the 1st February week, that was all…he said bye bye and nothing else.
I was still feeling weird so I decided to send an email to Info Tics/UPC which is the info email address given by the Fundació UPC to all the students, they answered after lunch saying they don’t know who could call me, the lady who uses to reply the mail said she asked all her co-workers (all female, I know because in Spanish we can make differences between gender while writing and she specified “compañeras”) and no one has called me, and they don’t even know who did it…
I’ve been the target for a fraud?
I couldn’t believe it, I was at
eBay.es looking for a 1GiB SD card when I saw a guy selling a
Gmail’s account! Bid starts with 0.99 euros, but luckily no one has bid yet.
I’m wondering if this is even legal…if it’s so, I’ve got about 10 Gmail’s invitations yet!! (just kidding , if anyone needs/wants one just ask for it.
BTW, I think I’ll buy the SD card at
Componentes y perifericos.com cause they’ve got the cheapest compared to
Optize,
eXpansys,
fnac,
EuroMemorycards and
Tu tienda digital. I’ll be searching a little more and I’ll update this entry with any new site with good prices.
UPDATE 13:40h:
I’ve found a cheaper shop in
Madrid, it has
the cheapest 1GiB SD card I’ve found, even cheaper than
my usual reference.
I’m starting to plan a little trip to
Amsterdam, I don’t know dates for sure yet, because I have to ask in my job for a week off.
I have about 22 working days per year to spend on my holidays, I must get 10 of them between July and August (company rules), this let me 12 more to enjoy during the whole year. I’m thinking on taking 5 by February to do this
Amsterdam travel…why February? because it seems to be cheaper than other months (getting closer to summer seems to be high traveling season), but that is not the only reason thinking on how the national holidays, single day holidays,
Holy Week and so on…February seems a good month. From January to August, I won’t be without a without little holidays more than one month, what seems very reasonable for my mental health 
…
So…what’s the problem then? I need to save some money!! because getting to
Amsterdam without some exclusively saved money for some smoking seems silly for me, I like smoking, so I know I will spend some euros in all those coffee shops full of
Ganja, also in a place where sleep and usual traveling fees.
Does anyone want to join me? =]
I’ve just made my first post in
Arch Linux’s forums, I’ve finished all changes I needed on the named’s rc.d script (
here). I’m asking for feedback (bugs, improvements…) and waiting to see if users are enough interested on it to be added in the official package.
It’s been 5 months since I came back from
Leicester, I’d like to do a review of my life right now and right here.
I arrived to
Barcelona on August 14th, during two weeks I was doing nothing but trying to take my life where I left it. It was pointless because lots of things have changed here, my usual friends, with who I used to go out…actually to go anywhere, each one is with his girlfriend and they are not too much in touch with each other. So I was the only one without girlfriend, without an own place, without own car…I started to be more alone than I used to be, and now my mum is worried because she thinks I’m getting troubles with personal relationships and she asked me to go a
psychologist…maybe I should take seriously the advice, because this also could worsen my job life.
By September first, I started to seek job, mainly using
infojobs, I was quite lucky here cause job market is hard these days, lots of requirements and usually get paid less than you deserve. I found a job, not too bad, earning about 1.000€/month as IT manager junior. Bad things are…I can’t think on buying a car neither a place to live (these are usual things to buy in
Spain when you are young), also it’s so difficult for me to think on saving money to buy a little flat, they are so overpriced and they don’t seem to be going cheaper soon (I mean in some years…). Anyway…I think I’d feel better doing another kind of job, I have to admit I am learning lots of things, mostly
Windoze, which is boring and pointless if I want to work with open source systems…
Trying to keep my mind busy, I got enrolled in a postgraduate called Free Software, I thought it’d be interesting to have a paper from
La Fundació UPC (very popular in
Catalonia) saying I know about
Linux and other open source stuff. Now, January 10th, I think I was just trying to do something else, trying to fill a big gap in my life…but again I did not the right thing, my current evaluation about the course is negative, it’s too lame, I thought postgraduates were for people with a little background, but I found people who ever ran an open source system, and don’t know nothing about open source philosophy, etc. Even a teacher was too lame to know why a
Fedora’s
rpm was claiming about some missing keys and the worst was when he said he got this error since
Fedora Core 1 (we were using Core 3 when this happened),
Google brought to me the answer in few seconds.
Last, but not less, personal relationships. I think this is the worst in my life, I didn’t meet new people since I got @
home, neither at job nor at the postgraduate, I think I demand too much when meeting new people, I use to feel good with
geeks. I don’t even know if I am one of them, but I feel like they are like me in many ways. Before returning to Barcelona, I met lots of people, but most of them because people who I already knew (friend->friend), many times I asked myself if the best idea was coming back…it’s not so important now, I have to live with it even if I was wrong.
I don’t really know if this is the best place to write/talk about this, but I needed to and I felt like this was the only place where I could do it totally free. That’s why comments are disabled this time.
Patience is the mother of lots of things...
/me was built without this patience crap…
