Archive for February, 2005
This weekend I’ve been searching as much free (either freeware or open source) applications as I could find and hey! I’ve found many useful and free applications for my daily work and entertainment.
- Himoney from
Himobiler.com:
Organic and keep track of your income and expense, with budget control and graph report.
- Keyring @
sourceforge.net:
It lets you securely store secret information on your PalmOS (PalmPilot, Visor, WorkPad) handheld computer.
- DVIViewer at
palmgear.com:
By its name anyone can know what it is, a dvi file viewer, useful to read your TeX and LaTeX documents.
- Keygen from
tamalo.com:
Keygen will allow you to generate random passwords with some configurable parameters like its length and what kind of characters to be used: upper/lower case, numbers, punctuation marks and hexadecimal.
- ScummVM from
scummvm.org:
ScummVM is a ‘virtual machine’ for several classic graphical point-and-click adventure games. It is designed to run: Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution’s Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; and games based on LucasArts’ SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system. Sweet…!
- Power48 at
mobilevoodoo.com:
Power48 is a PalmOS based emulator for the
Hewlett-Packard 48SX, 48GX and 49G series of calculators. It provides a fairly complete emulation of the Saturn CPU upon which these calculators are based and is able to run a majority of the programs available for them. It emulates one instance each of the 48SX, 48GX and 49G, and maintains complete and separate state information for each allowing the user to quickly switch between either one.
In further posts I will talk about some commercial applications that I’m using their trial versions right now and some more free I haven’t installed yet.
After 6 working days, the
ipod was knocking at my door, when I saw it out of the box, my first thought was “oh my god…it seems even cooler when you can put your hand on it…“. And that’s it! I’ve been having great time with it, it’s got a very nice sound quality far better than my two
Creative mp3 players (Zen Xtra 30GiB and MuVo NX 128MiB), headphones are also great quality, globally it is the mp3 player, but the best part is having 1GiB in this little thingie that also plays compressed audio files like AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from
iTunes Music Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4), Apple Lossless, WAV and AIFF. I don’t feel its weight in my neck and its controls…well they are just play, pause, prev./next track and off/on/on-shuffle-mode so it is take and listen! (Do you know the meaning of “keep it simple”? 
.
As someone could be thinking, I’ve been buying in the iTunes Music Store (just two songs 
), and it is a great service, after having an Apple ID that I’ve got buying the ipod at the
Apple’s store, it’s been very easy singing in and starting to buy music. I bought Amerika (Rammstein) and American idiot (Green day), they are really well encoded with great sound quality and very light weight. I just found one little problem, I couldn’t find the genre of any track, maybe it is not a great deal, but for me it’s little annoying because I don’t know many bands and sometimes I search music using same genre as other bands I already know, so if they don’t tell me about the genre of the music I’m buying, I can’t search more similar bands. I’ll try to take more time to see if it was just me looking at wrong places or they have not thought about this.
Finally, I’ve been looking what could I do with the ipod on Linux, I found two interesting projects one for managing the tracks and other to serve music to iTunes clients,
gtkpod and
mt-daapd. The last one works great, I’ve installed it on my NSLU2 and was instantly showing on my iTunes client for windows, it’s also very useful to share your music with people on your LAN, they can listen and download the tracks easily. With gtkpod I wasn’t too lucky, it works transferring files to the ipod, reading them and so on, but when I try to listen them the ipod shows an error, I’ll try to debug a little to see what I am doing wrong.
I’ve been packing my boxes because the builders, everything but my workstation. Because of that I’m trying to set up some light services on my
NSLU2, it is going to be online most part of the day so I need it to provide DNS. Using ipkg I’ve found
bind and
dnsmasq ready to be installed, I’m use to bind, but I think is too fat (in features) for my purpose on the other hand, dnsmasq provides a DNS forwarder and a DHCP server.
Finally I’ve got dnsmasq installed, and configured it in few minutes it came with a sample .conf file which was quite easy to modify for adapting it to my network, it takes those name servers you’ve got in /etc/resolv.conf (you can specify any other file if you wish) to forward your client hostname lookups. I’m testing it with my laptop, and it just works 
, it gives me an IP address which is registered in a leases file and acts like a DNS server.
Another useful package I’ve found is
ctorrent a BitTorrent client which lets you to fix an exit time, a very useful feature for unattended downloads, i.e. using -e 3h will finish the program after 3 hours once the file’s been downloaded.
Next step will be to provide a 160GiB shared unit using two 80GiB hard disks, this will be little bit more tricky because I need to build my own firmware image and the packages for providing RAID kernel modules.
Besides this, I will tell tomorrow to my current employer that I’m going to join
Qualitas Sistemas in about 15 days so I need them to do the paper work to be ready to sign my new contract. Hmm maybe they will try to renegotiate my current conditions….nah, I don’t think so.
They called me about 1h ago and told me to go this evening at 8.00pm, they want to give me an envelope which will contain what actually they are offering to me. They want this to be a face-to-face meeting because there are some points they will explain me and we’ll comment any possible question I could have about them.
This is going so fast, and makes me feel like if they are hiding something….where’s the trick? maybe it’s just they’ve found me interesting for what they are looking…I’ll update this post lately.
UPDATE: The offering is quite good, I’m writing a little list of questions I need to ask to Qualitas before telling them I accept their conditions. I’d like to know things like Where I’m going to develop my tasks?, Will I need my own car? How are they gonna pay for that?, If I’m going to travel, How will they pay the fees?…If anybody read this today and thinks about something I could need to know before answering them…please feel free to let a comment
I was yesterday evening at
Qualitas Sistemas de Información and got interviewed again, this time was shorter than the first one. The interviewer just asked for my working experience, made a little company overview, also he was asking about my English skills and if there’s any problem for traveling. My only guess is that this guy was one of those who has to say I like/dislike this candidate and just wanted to meet me a little bit. To end, he said we’ll call you this week so I have to wait and see what they decide, if they want me to work with them it’ll be time for my questions .
Besides that interview, I am going to break up with my girl this evening, I realized she cares lot more about me than I do about her, I don’t want to harm anybody I mean she is a nice girl it’s just we don’t fit, well actually it’s me who’s not falling in love and I feel bad without having same feelings about her and still keep dating, it’s too rude.
I’ve been like a week without writing nothing, so I decided to explain a little how is my life going these days because it’s been an exciting week.
First of all, I was interviewed by
Qualitas-SI last Wednesday, I thought they won’t call me because I answered to all their questions so clearly, telling them that if I have good conditions (meaning money and working with Unix/Linux) I am able to do some efforts for the good of the company. That came because they ask me to do overtime without getting nothing in exchange, only when working on nights you can take a day off. Since I listened that I got angry, WTF?, do they think I am stupid or what?…So I guess I am going to see what they have to offer, but I don’t see me working for those jerks…let’s see next Monday, I think it’ll be a technical interview this time.
Next, the girl…I don’t see me either with she for too long, we are too different and I know opposites are supposed to be attracted, but not this time cause the differences are to big and our lifes don’t fit in any way. She is a nice person, it’s just I found some little things I can’t take on my partner. What I don’t really know is how to tell she doesn’t like me enough to keep dating, she told me that she’s falling in love with me. I’ve got to break this up ASAP.
New gadget!, just before I started to write this post, I ordered a
1GiB iPod Shuffle because my birthday. It’ll be next 17th and my family is gonna pay for that . It could be nice if all you who read this blog post what could be the best day to at least take just a fucking beer all together! Saturday 19th, I’ll be with all my family, but I don’t mind if we meet in two weeks forward …Well talking about the iPod, I think I’m falling in love with
Apple lastly, they’re so cute but powerful in the same time…That’s my life, a girl’s falling in love with me and I’m doing so with Apple…(that doesn’t sound too good ).
Finally, I’d like to say my
home server is gonna be quite offline, I think maybe some months because my parents have got the builders here and they are making to much dust. So links here pointing to my home won’t work till they finish. In the mean time I am going to see how to migrate everything from
LiveJournal to my own
WordPress which I’ve set up over
Gentoo Hardened. I will write about any change before doing it.
Just 1h ago or so I was in the train trying to not look to a girl who I don’t know why I find somehow interesting, I saw she doing the same. I started to think how to get information about her, because the idea of sitting to her side and ask directly was unacceptable, communication with humans is too difficult for me . I consider myself intelligent but at this situations I’m so silly, trying to sync my mouth with my mind, looking around…
The train arrived to my destination (she gets down in the same station I do), we were walking closely but without saying anything, then we got to a junction where she uses to take the opposite way, but this time she was looking to me and smiling while walking (I was doing the same…), so when we couldn’t see to each other I decided to go back (Do I felt lucky this morning?:) and try to know where she was going or maybe to say hello and see what happens. Instead of that I saw her face smiling again coming to me…Oh my god! I started to be so nervous, didn’t know what to say but she helped a lot.
After 2 or 3 minutes talking, I was trying to say something that make sense but my mind was totally stopped and I said How hard this is to me…I don’t know what to say… and she told me What about asking for my phone number??. OMG this girl reads my mind or what?! Finally we said good bye and I went to catch the bus up. We’ve exchanged some SMS and we’ve got a date next Sunday!! I cannot believe it….it’s all like a movie…
OK, this has nothing to do with technology, operating systems, geekness, etc…but I felt like telling this here
Why?!! I don’t really see the point with
outsourcing, I mean what’s the real profit in having employees that aren’t yours, in paying more than they are actually getting and also thinking on the bunch of problems an employee could get having two employers instead of just one…
My first outsourcing experience was about in 2003 (when I got my 2nd real job), I was employed by
MP-Consultors but I was working for
Bull Spain and finally Bull was giving a monitoring service for
UPC so my work place was in the UPC buildings. I was flipping out when I tried to understand who I had to ask about my money, holidays, problems, etc. Everybody cleaned their hands, and sent me to the next level on this outsourcing hierarchy.
These days, I am again in the outsourcing world but with one less level this time, and again I use to have problems to know who is responsible for my money, who I have to ask when I need holidays, etc…I’ve ended asking both employers.
Why am I talking about this?…I’ve received a call this morning, it was a girl from
Qualitas Sistemas de Informacion, she told me to have a meeting next February 9th because they are looking for someone with my professional profile. I am not 100% sure about them, but I think they need someone to be working on one of their clients. Let’s see what they really want…maybe this time I’ll be luckier.
I’ve been using
HyperWRT on my WLAN router for some weeks now, but I had in mind to change it for
OpenWRT, which allows installing packages managing them with ipkg. I only saw one little problem with OpenWRT (not enough for not installing it), it has not got a web interface.
Pof told me an easy way to overcome this could be configuring first with HyperWRT and then reflash the router with OpenWRT, configuration should be saved and should work without no trouble at all.
This morning, reading my feeds, I think I’ve found an easier solution, there’s a
new release of the
Freifunk Firmware. It is based on OpenWRT, but they add a web interface (I think it is their own code, not the one from
Linksys) but it doesn’t stop here, they’ve made the ipkg package for this web interface, so you can easly remove it, or just take an unmodified OpenWRT, add the freifunk’s packages pool to your list, and simply install it. As they said:
The administration webpages can also be installed on a normal OpenWRT installation. Only the extended restart functions (Admin --> Restart) and the firmware upgrade (Admin --> Firmware) functions are not usable. To install, do the following:
1. Add the "src freifunk http://styx.commando.de/sven-ola/ipkg" line to /etc/ipkg.conf
2. ipkg update
3. ipkg install freifunk-webadmin-en
I’m definitely going to try Freifunk firmware, it has got enough nice features to put my HyperWRT far away from my router , I’d like to take some more profit from it, cause it has CPU and RAM for doing more than just a WLAN access point.
