I read in online edition of La Voz de Galicia next December, 29th the Jazz Filloa Cafe will be 25 years old.

Jazz Filloa is the mythical pub in Coruña. Their founders Antonio Rodríguez and Alberto Mella are pioneers of jazz in the city. They gave to the pub the classical jazz pey style, the perfect place to spend saturday night

The celebrations will include jam session and filloas (galician style crêpes).

And, by the way, it’s the first post in a new category in my blog: Jazz

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech You,
for that man that sleep in the street, to be the warmth of his heart stronger than winter cold,
for that prostitute that lives in the dangerous night, remember her nobody can steal her dignity,
for that forgotten ancient, to find a friendly soul that takes care of him,
for that lonely child, join his parents again to know what Christmas mean,
for that inmigrant of far country, to reach the frontier with guardians asleep,
for that abandoned pregnant woman, to find the most lovely place for her and her baby,
for us, the faith in your Justice and Love give us the force to hold their hands.

December 24th,2005

I read in Barrapunto the release of Cube Revolutions, IEArobotics Juan González’s worm-shaped robot.

Every documentation about soft and hardware designs are freely downladable (soft under GPL, doc under CC). You can download funny videos of Cube Revolutions too . The target of the project, in author’s words “is to create an open platform to investigate in modular reconfigurable robotics”

I briefly knew Juan in the CTSL’05, he was showing a proceeding about the free card skype.He’s an enthusiast of free soft and hardware, so I want to desire him good luck to the next release of his creatures

Greenpeace Spain has published an exhaustive outlook on the future of renewable energies in our country.

The report was developed by the prestigious Instituto de Investigación Tecnológica (part of Industrial Engineers School) of Universidad Pontificia Comillas. You can download the complete report (pdf, 12 Mb) and the abstract(pdf, 2 Mb) in reports section in their web.

Kioto is not an option, it’s the one and only solution.

Via Slashdot, we know we must welcome to the blogsphere to Tim Berners-Lee, the Wide World Web first developer. We can read in his first post at MIT’s Descentraliced Information Group Tim explains briefly about his ideas fifteen years ago: use of browser-editor, on-line edition of web pages. So, we can bypass from that times to now: current trends aim to use wikis, blogs… and we think these are new ideas!

I won’t make grow the over 450 comments to his first post, so, from here, Sir Tim, thanks for made it possible!

Engeneers near free software desire a powerful CAD program to their GNU/Linux stations, and, when they read news like this in slashdot about little steps to open source by Autodesk they immediately think it’s possible in nearly future. Projects like qcad are too young, varkon is a good project, it’s used by SAAB Aircraft, but it hasn’t specific features to civil engeneering. By now, we must patiently wait.

About this, there is some confusion about file formats. I can read in Beowulf’s blog his post about Autodesk. Beowulf is civil engeneer and he’s Debian developer, so he can see both sides of problem. But I think he’s in a mistake: he’s interested in .dxf to be an open standard. Actually it is an open standard, but Autodesk includes privative extensions. As it’s explained in white papers of Open Design Alliance, .dxf is a poor format. ODA started its actions in order to achieve an open format compatible with .dwg

In 2003 ODA signed an important agreement with Bentley. The Bentley OpenDGN Initiative was born. So, everybody with his work in .dgn (it usually happen in road databases and maps in Spain and several GIS support it) they have complete control over it. Experts think dgn is better format than dwg, too (i.e. dgn supports serious units management).

Then I think the next step is a great free CAD project based in .dgn, not in .dxf nor .dwg

Since before I began to teach to my children in Portiño, every year volunteers planned a party with parents and children, before Christmas.

This year we hadn’t enogh volunteers, so there was no party

We can read at solidaridad.net about the article published in the Sunday Times uncovering the statistics that points around 50 babies survive to abort in one year in England, they often die off the womb. They relate too histories of surivors: a baby now two years old, been taking care by Dr. Paul Clarke, after bearing three abort attempts, and Gianna Jensen, now 28 years old, she talked in the English Parliament about the abort attempt she beared with saline injection. The consequence, she lives now with cerebral palsy. She is part now of Alive and Kicking initiative.

Here is her testimony before the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on April 22, 1996(in English), and the same declaration in Spanish.

SecurityFocus has published an interesting article about what software we trust in. Columnist Jason Miller express some thinkings about both points of view of programmers and users, focusing in open and closed source developing models.

I discovered kernel patches are signed by three or four kernel developers before commit them. Fair, isn’t it?

It happen some days ago, but I didn’t heard about it because I was ill when it happened. My first professor in the Civil Engeneering School, Mr. Juan Ignacio Vázquez Peña, has died because cancer.

I shan’t never forget my first lesson in the School. It happened one December day in 199X, and the half-chinese, bearded eighteen arrived somewhere in Arteixo City, J.I. was teaching about basis of concrete.

The press release, in the web of the College of Civil Engeneers.

Good travel, Sir.