Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother
and the tears she cried, she cried for none other
than her little boy lost in our little world that hated
and that dared to drag him down. Her little boy courageous
who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
Hip flask slinging madman, steaming cafe flirts,
they all spoke through you.
Hey Jack, now for the tricky part,
when you were the brightest star who were the shadows?
Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite.
Now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days.
You chose your words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
The hip flask slinging madman, steaming cafe flirts,
nights in Chinatown howling at night.
Allen baby, why so jaded?
Have the boys all grown up and their beauty faded?
Billy, what a saint they’ve made you,
just like Mary down in Mexico on All Souls’ Day.
You chose your words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls
in Harlem howling at night.
What a tear stained shock of the world,
you’ve gone away without saying goodbye.
10.000 Maniacs, “Hey Jack Kerouac” (Lyrics by R. Buck/N. Merchant)
This bridge is an execptional monument to overcoming the difficulties in engineering works. Political pressure, technical difficulties in the foundation, and the Spanish Civil War (concrete suspenders were the solution against lack of steel) delayed decades the end of works until 1943.
The great touch of this bridge is the reinforfed concrete central arch, 75 m. of tied deck span, the third in the world in those days. About this, there’s an urban legend about the great civil engineer D. Eduardo Torroja is the author of the project. In fact, D. Eduardo helped with his advice making the arch triarticulated better than biarticulated during the execution of the works. But the final result was thanks to several engineers since 1922 to 1943.
There are two very interesting technical articles by engineer Cesar Villalba Granda in the Revista de Obras Públicas(Works Magazine of Spanish Civil Engineers) :
I read in the OpenBSD Journal about the new intitiative against DRM (Digital Rights Management): Defective By Design. The first action was a protest in Seattle, USA, in the Microsoft developers annual conference:
I read in Kernel Trap an email from Greg Kroah-Hartman announcing the release of the Linux Device Driver Kit. It’s a cd-rom iso with a kernel, docbook kernel documentation in easy-browsing format, and the book “Linux Device Drivers”, third edition, by Corbet, Rubini and Kroah-Hartman, published by O’Reilly. All contents licensed under GPL.
You can download the image at kernel.org
…past and present was the title of the lecture by Christoph Hellwig last tuesday in the Faculty of Computer Science. Hellwig is kernel developer. After a fast review of history of the filsesystem namespace in diferent operating systems, he reviewd the history of Unix. Then he centered in Linux.
He talked about relationship between Linux and anothe Unix families. I didn’t knew Plan9 OS, it seems very interesting. And he talked about future. An interesting opinion about union mount, saying to implement it in form of filesystem (unionfs and so) is a bad idea, it’s better vfs-based unionmount implementations (or, at least, it’s I understood). It’s important because there’s now a migration to unionfs in Necromantux, we must see to future.
Bruce Schneier, author of the mythical “Applied Criptography” and one of the most important current security experts, has released a very interesting document with lots of references for block-cipher cryptanalysis.
Via Kriptópolis.
If it’s an injustice the EEUU commercial blocking to Cuba, it’s an injustice too the Internet blocking by the Cuban government to its own citizens. Guillermo Fariñas, a Cuban dissident stated in hungry strike last January, 31, to ask for Internet access to all Cubans.
You can help his struggle signing this letter to dictator Fidel Castro. Freedom of knowledgement is our struggle too.
and the end of bloggy… dayS. The last weeks ended going home from a party in the Civil Engineering School of La Coruña. Santo Domingo, bridge builder in pilgrimage routes to Santiago, is our saint.
We celebrated his day in the morning, with conferences and funny performances (you can see some photos in my gallery), and, in the night, we had a party in the School. It was my first party here, and it was very funny. When School closed, we continued the party in Orzán. (more…)
I tried to go to Gary Burton live, but I was ill. I tried to see Elian Elias in concert. But I was very busy. Finally, I could go to Jim Hall’s. And I enjoyed.
It was a soft and smart concert, centered in Jim’s gitar. A different style than ScoLoHoFo (Scofield, Lovano, Holland and Foster) two years ago, more agressive. (more…)
Don’t have time to think where I am and what I’m going to do. The number of children increased again in these weeks, but the number of volunteers is very low. And, it’s worst, I’m their leader because I’m the veteran :-/ God help us…
Some press media has been echo of declarations of Patrick Moore, Greenpeace co-founder, saying it’s a mistake attack nuclear energy.
Some environmentalists begin to think nuclear energy is the solution to stop climatic change. But I remember:
- Nuclear power plants are still insecure (in fact, some of them uses Windows)
- We still have no solution to radiactive garbage (would you bury it in your garden?)
- Uranium is limited as oil or coal. Are we going to have a new war in Australia?
- The problem is not in the combustible itself, in fact, the problem is in the agressive capitalism that manufactures lots of toys to keep us out of the reality
RMS began officially the war against ATI’s closed specifications (via GNUticias,es), he was expelled from an Norm Rubin speech at MIT three weeks ago.
ATI and Nvidia have the monopoly in graphic devices, we can not allow their abuses.
RSF reported a month ago implication of Yahoo! in a third arrest of a Chinese ciberdisident, Jiang Lijun.
By the way, the veredict of Li Zhi proves implication of Yahoo! in his arrest too.
Be aware you clients of Yahoo!, you’re helping to torture chineses.
Open Document Format is standard ISO for exchangin documents: ISO/IEC 26300
I don’t want receive any .doc from a public institution nevermore
I won’t talk about the Mitnick’s book (in fact, the book is in my wishlist). But I’ll write about social engeneering. Because politics is, in fact, social engineering.
As I linked from the post about VI FS Con, it happen some disgusting facts on free software on politics in my University.So I think it’s time to reflect on. (more…)
As every year around March-April, there are a little conference organised by the Coruña Linux User Group. And, of course, I tried to help with my work and, a little speech if I can.
This con was the first to co-ordinating new President of GPUL, Emilio J., and the People in Black (David, Enrique and Hernique); Millán, Teodoro and Chema were there too 
. I think they performed a very very good work and a high effort (Emilio, someday we’ll give you a pillow to rest in your office 
). The audience were between 15-50 persons in each speech. And sadly, most of them were out of the Faculty of Computer Science. New generations have not interest in free software, they only want fast money. But they are not alone (as you’ll see in the next post). (more…)
…but he was related to mail systems…
While team was incoming to carry out the new works in the Lab, I had my own old problems. I was working in the SAPO (Sistema Autónomo de Predicción de Oleaje- Autonomous Wave Forecast System). SAPO is a program that helps ports authorities in the management sea traffic near and into the port.
The idea is as simple as smart: the machine gets via POP3 an e-mail with the boundary conditions near the port (in my case, the outer port in Ferrol). fetchmail gets the e-mail in the server, a MTA (originally, sendmail) pushes it to procmail, then the cycle begins in user-space. Some scripts give data to SWAN (Simulating WAves Nearshore), a Delft University spectral model program which is the core of the system. Around 30 min later (in an Athlon 2Ghz with 512 Mb server) SWAN polishes the mesh two times. Then some scripts playing with imagemagick and GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) , assistants programs in Fortran 77 build maps and tables of wave, wind, and streams, and upgrade the web. (more…)
The movement began in March, I think. The new generation in the Ports and Coast Lab was growing, and, today, I think the new team is complete. Good fellows in the trench
Leave the train behind. Walk slowly on the old station street, laptop hangin’ the back. Half-shutted eyes, Prelude to a kiss sounding in the ears. It’s Friday, 9:00 a.m., where does the geek come from?
It was the end of an infernal intense month. Next hours you’ll see some posts about this one. Meanwhile, enjoy the rain in May