javier arturo rodríguez

I just found out -thorugh an email from Thinkgeek, of all ways- that Arthur C. Clarke has passed away.
2001 was a mesmerizing experience for me when I first saw it. I think I was about 8 years old then. A few years later I got to read 2010, 2061, 3001, the Rama series, and many, many of his stories and novels. One of my dearest possessions is a volume of his collected works that I got as a birthday gift from my brother.
I admire Arthur’s foresight and his use of technology to collaborate with people in the other side of the earth, through fax first and through email later. I remember my surprise when I read in a magazine that he was an avid user of PC computer program that allowed him I to explore the surface of Mars from the comfort of his desktop. Moreover, I was frankly amazed when I learned in high school that he was not only a prolific science fiction writer: I found out that he actually devised the use of satellites in geosynchronous orbit to relay radio signals, thus launching the global, instant-communications era that we live in today. As a member of a geographically-distributed family, I can’t be more grateful.
And in regards to his extraordinary vision, bouncing a radio signal off a satellite in high orbit might have seemed like a fantasy for most laypeople back in the 40s, just like the concept of a space elevator -another Clarke invention- might seem outrageously outlandish to the vast majority of people today. But I trust that we might live to see one in our lifetime. While fact checking these sad news, I found a video with Arthur C. Clarke’s reflections on his 90th birthday. I am not ashamed to say that tears come to my eyes listening to his words.
My heart mourns the loss of an extraordinary science fiction writer, but my mind celebrates the life of an extraordinary scientist.
Farewell, Sir!

After pulling my hair for a couple of days I just realized that my DSL provider is blocking all outgoing connections to port 25 with an ICMP Unreachable packet, which translates as a totally bogus “no route to host” message (An ICMP RST would be more kosher, BTW). The only explanation that comes to my mind is that Telmex has finally realized that it has become one of the largest botnet hosts in the world and decided to do something about it. This is a terrible inconvenience for me, because I run a backup MX at my home office and all the email I write while I’m at home is relayed through it. And now it believes that it has been cut out from the Internet, and is suffering from Internet withdrawal syndrome. Oh, and all attempts to use an external relay -like my primary MTA or the office’s- through port 25 fail as well, so I have had to set up an elaborate workaround *just to send email*.
*Argh!* I hate to pay up for those ignorant Windows home users.
Add to that the fact that i get 800KBps tops in a 2GBps line, and recurrent reports of arbitrary bandwidth capping and Infinitum stops looking like a good alternative for home broadband. I’ll have to look for a cost-effective alternative, but after experiencing 20MBps/20EUR in Europe I’m afraid that I’ve been spoiled for life.
In the meantime, if you were expecting a mail from me in the last five days or so, I’m sorry to say that it is either on its way or lost forever.
Anyway… Merry Christmas!
Update 20080104: AJ Gibson points out in a comment that Telmex is willing to remove the block from your account if you are willing to jump through a few hoops. Just go to http://www.telmex.com/mx/asistencia/correoelectronico/faq_puerto_25.html and follow the instructions there. I registered yesterday and today I can connect back to external SMTP servers again. As mentioned in the comments, YMMV.

Easy. Portable. Buzzword-compliant. Ingenuous. Elegant. Right-out wicked cool: Bourne Shell Server Pages. As I write this I’m looking for a excuse to use this revolutionary technology in my next project!
Behold the simplicity of ASP and the power of sh:

Interface21: please take note. I expect a Spring.sh implementation before the year ends. ;-)

The product you are in charge of maintaining has been in active use for a decade. The manual is several megabytes long, and there’s an army of programmers, consultants and technical writers that make a living off it. As you might guess, it’s not an inexpensive product.
One of the routine tasks for that product -let’s say, “create a new UCM project”- is throughtly documented for the GUI use case, but the manual makes absolutely no mention of the CLI-based procedure. You go through the whole procedure armed with the aforementioned documentation and lots and lots of patience, second-guessing the developers and the technical writers every step of the way, but getting the work done with varying amounts of effort and frustration.
Then, in a key command, you hit a wall. The program complains:

Now “POLICY_DELIVER_NCO_SELACTS” returns *exactly* one match in Google, and it points to the aforementioned documentation. It’s “POLICY_DELIVER_NCO_SELACTS” all over.
After a lot of frustration,

shows that “POLICY_DELIVER_NCO_SELACTS” is a typo. They really meant “POLICY_DELIVER_NCO_SELACT” instead. No final “S”, you see! And this happened SOME TIME IN THE LAST TEN FREAKING YEARS.
The list of things I’d like to do to the project managers, documentors, and technical writers of this particular product suite is too graphic even for the Internet.
And most importantly — how do they get away with these levels of incompetence?

Rafael Garcia-Suarez shares a helpful tip to correctly enable APM in his D420 running Ubuntu, but I can confirm that my D620 behaves the same -ignoring APM level 255 and disabling APM completely instead- and that his fix runs equally well, just by adding

to /etc/hdparm.conf and making sure that /etc/init.d/hdparm runs at startup (the default after apt-get installing hdparm in my case).

Mark Jason Dominus just released SuperPython 0.91, “a Perl source filter for the SuperPython language, allowing SuperPython code to be embedded into Perl programs”.
In terms of language, it goes way beyond python itself to give proper semantics to whitespace. For instance, here is the Hello World program written in SuperPython:

Ain’t it neat? Naturally, the result is

just as would be expected.
If you want to try this program yourself you might be surprised to find out that copy+paste won’t work, but that’s a small price to pay in exchange or the benefits of the richness of syntax and expresiveness of the language, and anyway you may download the source code for hello.spy right here.
Mark is very optimist in contributing the new features of SuperPython back to python itself, and has kindly offered to work closely with the Python community to see this happen.
Congrats Mark, and keep up the good work!

I just got a new ASUS M2V motherboard to replace a braindead server that would lock up on POST about 75% of the time. The new motherboard has a built-in Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter that is supported in Linux >= 2.6.21, but its driver is still missing from the daily Debian netinst CDs.

I tried David Johnson’s pre-compiled driver for AMD64 but it didn’t work right away, so I compiled AtL1Linux_v1.0.41.0 for the stock 2.6.18-4-486 kernel in the official Debian 4.0 netinst CD and tested it. Although it was supposed to work right out of the box I kept getting “invalid module format” messages. So I stripped out the version information with

and it worked immediately. I completed the installation and I will upgrade the server to 2.6.21-2-amd64 over the weekend. So here is a atl1.ko for 2.6.18-4-486 that should work just fine.

By the way, I stripped the version information off David’s atl1.ko but I didn’t get a chance to test it because I was in a hurry. Here it is anyway in case someone finds it useful: atl1.ko for 2.6.18-4-amd64.
Oh, by the way, the M2V has four PCI slots but no built-in VGA adapter, and most PCI-e video cards are so thick that the first slot becomes unusable. Since I bought this motherboard precisely to maximize the number of available PCI slots in the server… well, it just sucks.

I tought this was just a SpreadFirefox stunt, but I just found the most strange User-Agent in an Apache server log

*heh!* I guess it takes another Commodore fan to appreciate this kind of humor.

Magdalena Rodríguez Delgado was born last Tuesday, June 5th 2007, sometime around 18:05 GMT. At birth she was 49cm long and weighed 3.220Kg. Just like her mother, she has a strong, commanding voice and powerful lungs behind it.
In the strange state I’m on right now -neither asleep nor awake, with hardly any sleep on the last three days- I can barely believe that I’m a Dad. And I’m completely, absolutely, positively happy.

After I upgraded a few system libraries Adobe Acrobat stopped working and started to print an endless lethany of “expr: syntax error” messages. A quick google search later I found the fix detailed in at least a couple of places: Find acroread (it’s a shell script, probably in /usr/local/bin or under whichever-directoy-you-specified-during-installation/bin) and apply this patch:

Or just fire up vi(1) and add an asterisk after the second [0-9] block in line 418.
Even tough the problem has been solved, now this is kind of moot. See, I’d rather use acroread than xpdf any day because its navigation is a lot more natural than xpdf’s, and just to be honest xpdf is showing its age and is just plain ugly. However Adobe is starting to piss me off with its inclusion of the Yahoo toolbar in Acrobat Reader and its pitiful insistence to install n upgrades every single freaking time I open a PDF file. So I’ve started to use kpdf instead which feels a bit slower but starts up in a blink, looks a lot cleaner, doesn’t include spyware and displays the PDFs I’ve fed to it with decent antialiasing.

So -just to be clear- in my opinion the best way to fix this problem is to stop using acroread and just use something else. Adobe: thank you for screwing up one of your nicer products, and see you never.

Hisaaki Shibata took Michael Rolig’s shark.c -which I use to control my radioSHARK from Linux- made it work with the new radioSHARK 2 and released the new shark2.c (local mirror).
With this development owners of the new radioSHARK 2 can control their shiny new device under Linux to change stations and change its lighting besides other neat tricks like live Internet streaming with icecast2 and darkice as I’ve written before.
I haven’t been able to lay my hands on a radioSHARK 2 but I might do it soon. I hope that griffin has finally managed to solve the annoying bugs in the software that made the original radioSHARK completely unusable under Windows, but keep in mind that Michael and Hisaaki’s work has made the enclosed software completely irrelevant to Linux users, opening a new market for a fine hardware product.

And now for something completely different: This site is now syndicated in Planeta Linux Mexico.
If you haven’t heard about Planets, they are sites that publish aggregated news feeds around certaint themes in the now all-too-familiar reverse chronologic order. Planets are a great way to feel the pulse and hear the buzz of a community without having to maintain individual subscriptions manually. Throught the years I’ve become reliant in several Planet feeds, most notably Planet Perl, Planet Python and Planet Debian.
A few weeks ago Beco introduced me to Planeta Linux -now I’m an avid reader- and kindly offered to talk to Damog and get this blog’s RSS feed into the site.
If you are one of my three regular readers, go visit Planeta Linux, I’m sure you’ll find it as enjoyable as I do. And if you are a Planeta Linux reader, well… Hello!

What’s so special about this number? How is it different from -say- 0×09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BF or from 0×09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C1? More importantly: can someone copyright a freaking number? Read rudd-o’s Spread this number post and find out why 0×09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 is so important.

A couple of years ago Ludovico Magnocavallo tackled the issue of bulk conversion of MySQL tables from MyISAM to InnoDB with an elegant bash snippet.

The original post also suggests using grep to limit the scope of the conversion to just a few tables.
(It seems that now Google *does* yield practical answers to this question ;-)

Last week Jordi Fernández gave me a quick hands-on tutorial for a working Beryl setup on Debian. He owns a Dell Latitude D620 running Debian GNU/Linux just like mine, so leeching his setup was even easier for me. What sold me immediately into Beryl is that you don’t need to install Xgl.
Basically I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf and added these lines to the Device section:

and added a new section to the very end:

My updated xorg.conf is available right here.
After restarting X (ctrl-alt-Backspace for lazy users like me) you can type this on a terminal:

I have the official nvidia drivers (1.0-8776) installed via module-assistant and a Beryl version that is kind of old (0.2.0+svn20070205-r3687+imudebian0, rather ancient in Internet Time). This worked immediately for me but Your Mileage May Vary.
There you have it. A working beryl setup in a few minutes. Thanks to Jordi for this tutorial and the rather impressive demo that followed, and to the Compiz and Beryl developers for their hard work.

So you want to publish that nice family video in your page/blog/intranet without forcing your visitors to download, install and activate some obscure browser plugin and *then* wait for a 200MB download… Well.. That’s easy as cake!
First, let’s use ffmpeg to convert the video from avi, mpg or mov to something that we can stream to a nice Flash video player:

Then we extract the first frame of the video to use it as a thumbnail:

Of course, real men brew their own Flash video players using Ming. The rest of us have to settle for one that has been pre-made, like Jeroen Wijering’s most excellent Flash Video Player. To insert the video in a web page you just have to write

You know, there’s even a neat wordpress plugin that allows a much simpler syntax:

Cool, eh? Now you are ready to take over YouTube!

Last night I opened KDE control center to change my desktop settings and I was shocked when I found that kcontrol was empty but for the OBEX Devices panel. Alll the modules that were supposed to be inside kcontrol where inside the KDE “Lost and Found” folder instead. A superficial search in the KDE mailing lists returned a few matches about this problem on KDE4 (did you know that kcontrol is currently unmaintained and that it’s gonna die real soon now?) but I’m currently in KDE 3.5.5 so that doesn’t apply to me.
Tonight Google came to the rescue: after digging a bit more I found this post in the debian forums which mentions that this might be a bug in a debian package and spells out the answer to my problem:

Voilá! Now my kcontrol is fully populated again.

Orpie is a Reverse Polish Notation calculator for the console. If you’ve ever used an HP calculator you’ll feel right at home. if you haven’t… well, go back to your windows box and launch that buggy calculator desk accessory. In my case orpie let me stop worrying about writing “10 k” every time I ran dc(1).
Orpie was written in OCaml by Paul Pelzl and it there’s a Debian package maintained by Uwe Steinmann.
Go ahead and write:

You won’t regret it.

When my iPod died I complained -ranted, actually- about the lack of a decent backup program for it. Well, I finally found a program that does just what I need. PodsBlitz will display the songs in your iPod, and moreover, it will merrily dump them to your hard disk. For backup purposes, I repeat. This will backup all MP3 files with their corresponding tag information, but you’ll still have to backup ratings and all other metainformation the old, manual, XML-based way.
PodsBlitz is written in Java and is distributed as a single .jar file that will execute under Windows, MacOS X and most Linux desktops with a fairly recent Java Runtime Environment. The best part is that it doesn’t need to install drivers or do any kind of fancy USB magic to find your iPod. You just dump it into the root directory of your iPod and it just works! Kudos to Alexander Dietrich for this nice software utility!

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time … when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstitions and darkness.”

Carl Sagan died 10 years ago today. Blogathon or not, it is as good a time as any to remember the scientist that hrough his TV show, though his essays, through his novels (Contact is my favorite novel), and even through his bare scientific accomplishments has reinforced in me the desire to know and that childlike capacity for wonder and amazement that we humans lose so easily when we grow up.
To Carl’s life. Cheers!