castanyes blaves
Random ramblings about some random stuff, and things; but more stuff than things -- all in a mesmerizing and kaleidoscopic soapbox-like flow of words.2/24/2006
Worth to take a good look at:
http://blasto.iq.usp.br/~tkoide/BayGO
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7/86
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020052
Which refers, among others, to this piece:
http://www.cukier.com/writings/opensourcebiotech.html
http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi
2/23/2006
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html
By automating otherwise difficult, manual aspects of programming, the Octopiler could help enable wider use of Cell-based servers, which IBM and Mercury Computer Systems plan to begin selling this year.
2/22/2006
... and FC Barcelona performs great: Chelsea 1 - Barça 2.
Visca el Barça!!!
2/19/2006
http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0,39024665,39156558,00.htm
According to the Diffusion Group, by the end of the decade both Windows and Linux will have greater market share than Symbian.
In 2010, the analyst house said, Symbian will see its market share halved to around 22 per cent, while Windows will climb to more than 28 per cent and Linux to more than 26 per cent.
2/17/2006
http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=1&langId=-1&dualCurrId=73&catalogId=-840&partNumber=621738U
I wonder how fast one can use pine on one of this...
2/14/2006
First lesson:
Kinglon - petaQ
English - shit (excrement)
Spanish - mierda
Catalan - merda
Oliver Blackwell designs the WashDryIron
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/devon/4712446.stm
Funny note:
"A friend's father said he wouldn't have got married if I'd come up with this sooner"
It seems that Google is correcting the big blob in which their stock was flying, and it is now closer to 300 than 400.
The big players say it still has to loose another 10% to start playing its true value against its future revenues...
Maybe a 300-320 plateau would indicate that things are realistic and start putting money in Google would mean putting money in Google's business, not Google's stock fluctuations...
Oracle has announced the acquisition of long-time open source database supplier Sleepycat Software. "Sleepycat Software's Berkeley DB is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million. Berkeley DB is distributed under a dual license model, i.e. available under a public license and also available under a commercial license. Well-known open source projects such as the Linux and BSD UNIX operating systems, Apache web server, OpenLDAP directory, OpenOffice productivity software, and many others embed Berkeley DB technology." Terms not disclosed. Also not disclosed is whether there will be any changes in the Berkeley DB licensing terms.
Oracle previously bought Innobase, the company behind InnoDB (the store engine that plugs MySQL most of the times), and is currently looking for spare change in their pockets to buy JBoss.
Maybe they will buy http://www.terra.es to round it up all...
Now an open question is how many companies will arise from the people with newly found deep-pockets that have sold their companies, to start up new companies, to be recursely bought again by a megalomonster company... and so on,
and on and on,
and on and on,
and on and on,
and on and on,
and on and on...
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/32204
The governor of the state of California hasn't expressed an interest yet...
PalmSource, Inc., today announced the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP), the latest evolution of Palm OS® for Linux. The ACCESS Linux Platform is designed to be an integrated, open and flexible Linux-based platform tailored for smartphones and mobile devices.
http://www.palmsource.com/press/2006/021406_accesslinuxplatform.html
2/12/2006
Larz Wirzenius shares a link to the Debian Gnu/Linux Device Driver Check page. You can paste the output of $lspci -n at that page and get an overview of the hardware you have installed on your PCI bus, and whether there are drivers in the Debian world to support the hardware.
http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/index.cgi
You can use this to determine if you can or should buy that new laptop or desktop. All you will need is to boot a Knoppix live cd, and visit the website, and the paste the output of lspci -n!!
http://cell.scei.co.jp/pdf/SPU_language_extensions_v21.pdf
2/11/2006
Linux for CBEA
IBM is distributing source patches for the Linux operating system that provide services needed to support the hardware facilities of the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor. These Linux operating system patches include the run-time programming interfaces needed to manage and utilize the CBE's synergistic processor elements (SPE's).
http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/
According to Andy Swan, at least:
http://biz.yahoo.com/tm/060210/13915.html
http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/fi/pr/66964.jpg
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/international/americas/12bolivia.html?ex=1297400400&en=f7ab929a9ee6aa41&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
The coca leaf, which without significant processing has no mind-altering effects and is chewed in Bolivia to mitigate hunger and increase stamina.
[...]
All forms of coca, which has a mild stimulating effect, have been blacklisted by the United Nations since 1961.
Enlighting article that says a lot about "we will make our problem _your_ problem, want it or not" kind-of reasoning...
2/10/2006
This is the hard-coded way:
avb@magneto:/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnomeblog$ diff blog_poster.py blog_poster.py.ori 42c42
< gtkspell.Spell(self.blogEntry, "en_US.UTF-8")
---
> gtkspell.Spell(self.blogEntry)
avb@magneto:/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnomeblog$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-blog && sudo killall gnome-panel
2/09/2006
Panic spread throughout Vienna last week after citizens reported some 40 dead songbirds. Autopsies showed that the H5N1 flu virus was not to blame. The larks, it seems, had developed an appetite for fermented berries, and got so drunk that they flew into windows.
There is an expression in Catalan, to acknowledge someone your approval to do something:
"Vist-i-plau"
Which could be translated to: "Seen-and-pleases-me".
A close relative of mine realized about the relationship between the structure of the expression and its meaning much later than it should.
Another one:
"Ropa Premama" in Spanish
The clothes for pregnant women --- "pre-mother".
And today I realized that, in Perl (this is geek stuff):
A module's file extension is "*.pm"
and in Perl, the local communities are called "_P_erl _M_ongers".
For example, one can talk about the Barcelona.pm, which isn't a Perl module about Barcelona but the Perl Monger's group in Barcelona (great group of people, by the way).
Again, way too late to discover that trick... :-)
injure or wound seriously and leave permanent disfiguration or mutilation; "people were maimed by the explosion"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Google is using (and so working on) a version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux internally. Whether or not this really means anything to anyone else not working at Google is unclear for now.
Even if this is only something they use in part of their production process or they do it on Fridays (the day Google employees can spend office time working on their "pet projects"), it means a lot to the Open Source community. It means that they have, in at least one shape or form, the intention to create a (Linux) Desktop OS that can bring out new stuff they don't find anywhere else right now.
Will Google take Microsoft on in their core business, operating systems? I don't even care. What I am wondering about is if Google will be capable to put Linux in a place in their global strategy where a client of Google wouldn't mind not using Windows or Mac OS X in order to interact with anything computer related that is produced at Google or at any other software producer that has businesses to do with Google.
Right now, Google Earth is only available for Windows and OSX, and not for Linux. I want Google Earth and related products to be Linux-compatible. Let me repeat that for the sake of Google juice: I would like to have all Google's products, including Google Earth and related, available for Linux.
Sure one could argue that Google bought now Google Earth's technology from a company adquisition at a point at which having to make a Linux port would be too difficult. That's why Google being interested in putting Linux in the "mainstream", at any level of "mainstream", is good. They will be able to define, to specify, that the product is meant to be Linux-compatible, apart from Windows- and OSX-compatible, at the starting point of product specification.
They have done a hell of a good job at using Web interfaces: only a little part of Google's products are not Web-interfaced. Let's see how they deal about it in the future.
-----
I am also very pleased about the recent agreement between Google and Sun Microsystems about OpenOffice and related stuff Sun is promoting/sponsoring. Given Google's engineering power at improving software performance, this can mean a lot. Or nothing at all. Will see.
2/08/2006
http://listengnome.free.fr/
There are dapper packages ready to be downloaded...
A study has been published predicting that the price of second-handed flats in Barcelona may fall down to 20% in the next three years.
I haven't found a link for it: I only have the reference from a Radio program that dedicated about half an hour of discussion about the topic today.
The reasons of this decrease in value are, among others, the increase in interest rates in Europe, a decrease in the demand, and the staggering rate of accumulated indebtment in Spanish families.
This is the first study that shows negative rates in housing prices in the last decade in Spain. But other studies have depicted a scenario in the last couple of years in which the Bubble was reaching a plateau, with less pronounced increases in prices.
One of the specialist in the radio program was trying to give null credit to the study. The problem is that some of his arguments were so ironically unfounded that the whole point seemed even more reasonable after his argumentation...
http://tr.sun.com/
http://tr.sun.com/
http://bg.sun.com/
http://middleeast.sun.com/
http://kr.sun.com/
http://br.sun.com/
The participation age by Sun is depicted with a photograph of a traditional Catalan "Human Tower" or "Castells".
A nice Catalan tradition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell
Presumably linked to the human towers used in the coast to seek and alert for pirate ships attacking the towns.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/luawinxp.mspx
http://askask.com/a/2006/02/07/000134.html
$ screen
ctrl-a d
(logout)
$ screen -x
$ screen -x 8
man screen
$ screen -list
ctrl-a K
2/07/2006
This is the first official release of Xgl:
http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/
At the same time, the "Salon International de la Lingerie, Paris 2006" has been celebrating this week:
http://www.lingerie-paris.com/
We can see brilliant transparencies, sexy turns and insinuating fading ins... in Xgl :-)
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/06/1654252
2/06/2006
http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/img/new-bugbuddy.gif
The new GNOME bug-buddy will collect information on crashes in a much more simpler manner to the user.
See the gif-screencast (made with bizanz?) above :-)
Spain couldn't beat France in Handball European. France was fresh, Spain choked.
FC Barcelona couldn't beat At. Madrid and match the number of winnings in a row in the Spanish League.
All the vehicle-related videos of this years' Superbowl:
http://video.google.com/superbowl.html
Had something to do with "clean", "green", "sustainable", ... etc. Except for the Cadillac.
I wonder if the advertisers already knew about George W. Bush "State of the Nation" content by the time they prepared the ads. Or if they had a set of versions to pick depending on that.
Or maybe this big companies have changed they opinion about "renewable" and "sustainable"...
2/03/2006
Add the following line to /etc/ssh/ssh_config :
ServerAliveInterval 5
What this does, essentially is every 5 seconds, the client sends a small keep-alive packet to the server to make it look like the ssh connection is being actively used.
The reason for a timeout could be a NAT firewall that seeks to minimize the nember of active connections to reduce its memory footprint, or to improve performance for other clients.
2/02/2006
Went to see "Match Point" yesterday. Thrilling.
Man I suffered with this film. I would have zapped to another channel many times had I seen it in a TV broadcast...
Also, I got trapped with this feeling of having seen Emily Mortimer (Chloe in the film) before:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0607865/
It is a feeling of her being extremely familiar to me. Yet, I think I haven't seen any other film with her appearance.
She is great in the film. Much better than the blondie that co-stars :-)
2/01/2006
I would never bet on Bush using the terms "revolutionary solar and wind technologies". But he did.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4668320.stm
And in the "State of the Union" address!
Well, having seen this, you never know what other surprises the future is hiding...
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