I read a brief in Slashdot about the completion of the first supercomputer that breaks the petaflop barrier. Its name is MDGRAPE-3 (Molecular Dynamics GRAvity PipE 3), and it’s 3x faster than the current Top500. The machine will be used to protein modeling in the RIKEN’s (Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research) Genomics Science Center in Yokohama.

The machine has been built during 4 years and costed $9 million. They used application-shaped chips made by Hitachi (they bear the most important computing load) in the special-pourpose units and SGI Altix based in Xeon dual core chips for the 222 CPUs in the host computer.

• An analysis in Newsfactor Magazine Online
• Description of the architecture in RIKEN’s GC web page
• Press release in SGI home (2004)

And, of course, the machine will run linux

I’ve just upgraded this blog from Wordpress 1.5.2 to the wonderful 2.0.4. I’ve seen some annoying effects with RSS feed(every latests post appears as new in RSS readers and planets). Sorry for the inconvenience

Edward Atkinson, a 75 years old English citizen, became in prisoner of conscience when he was arrested and convicted to 28 days of imprisonment because his action against abort. He sent to Ruth May, chief executive of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (Norfolk, England) photos of abortions to show her what kind of operations are made in her hospital. Ruth May described those photos of mutilated babies as “offensive, horrendous and absolutely disgusting” (I suppose she neither watch CSI, House or Nip/Tuck ). Meanwhile, Atkinson declared “I accept that the documentation was highly distressing. It’s horrendous, monstrous and sickening but it represents the truth of what is going on in our world. Everyone in this courtroom knows that abortion is murder and no one has the guts to say it.”

Moreover, Atkinson was ordered to pay 500 pounds of court costs, he was threaten of 5 years of imprisonment if he reoffends and hospital (a public hospital) has denied health cares for life.

• The new via Solidaridad.net (Spanish)
• The new at BBC News
• Mick Hume’s opinion in Times Online
• More declarations in LifeSite

A group of catholic priests in the Canarias Islands signed a manifesto trying to give an (christian) appropiate point of view on the inmigrants drama.
The manifesto consists of five items:

1. Inmigrant is victim not a hangman
2. Spaniards we were inmigrants too
3. Immigration is business
4. Help to poor countries is business
5. Solidarity is necessary

They demand to government to revoke the Foreingers Law and promise legal assistance to inmigrants in order to they shouldn’t bear violations of their rights.
Full manifesto(in Spanish) in Solidaridad.net
A mean of ten inmigrants per day is drowning in front of summer holidays residence of President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Can he sleep without worry?

Michael Hart, the Project Gutemberg founder, said in his speech at the sixth HOPE conference (Hackers On the Planet Earth) the size of the project doubles every 18 months.

The Project Gutemberg was founded 35 years ago and it lodges over 18000 free (as in freedom) electronic books in accesible text and hipertext formats. Its good health is a good new for the humanity, more in this copyrighted and DRMed age.

The full article in Homeland Stupidity by Michael Hampton.

I seize the opportunity to remember the actual inventor of the press was the Chinese 畢昇 Bi Sheng four centuries before Gutemberg

I have been thinking about how the University changes the life. It’s supposed this is time to think with critical mind, and it would be good. But I’m not sure this process really exists.

I saw how the students change their political ideology. Some of them even become in political activists. But the rebound-effect of watching some years to our stinky politicians, or the daily numb convert them in conservative cynics. They finally vote to the no-so-bad party.

I saw how the students lose their religion. It wouldn’t be necessary bad if they should maintain the values that they miss in the Catholic Church. But, in fact, the lonely value they get is to be practical… for oneself. I hear mass criticism against religion. Nonetheless, I only see a very little part of the mass taking action to make a better world.

I could write too about how the students should go out to the real world as ethical professionals. But it’s very difficult when I see day by day unethical actions of some of our teachers and University governors. So, if students go into the University thinking in an speedy degree to get money, they go out of the University thinking only in the money. Knowledgement doesn’t matter.

Last week I met a friend after some years. She was my first pupil, I teached her Maths and Phisics when she was in the last High School year, ten years ago. She was a nice writer in that time.

I asked her ‘Do you still write?’. It was a rhetoric question, I thought she still wrote. It thrilled her a lot. But she sadly said me she doesn’t. ‘University changed my life. People didn’t interest about my writings. So I gave up.’

So, are we talking about a time to begin to change the world, or only a time to become like real world want us?

This jazz fest begun last monday, but I realized today looking for the Jeff Ballard bio.
Of course there will be very good lives and jam sessions with local jazzmen and international ones. But next saturday will be the most interesting day for me: there is a live of one of my favorite pianists, Brad Mehldau with Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums, who replaces the Spaniard Jorge Rossy that recently left the Trio.

Let’s meet there (I hope)!

Last saturday evening I was in the marriage of Jorge Vázquez, one of my best friends in the Civil Engineers School (mental note: I must pass mentest on myself: until friday, I though the celebration would be on Sunday in the morning). These are funny events to meet with friends that we don’t usually meet. We laugh, we dance,we (tried) to make advances… (mental note: if my religion forbid me to be drunk, it’s advisable I should take dance lessons) The situation was pushing me to remember a great Spanish comedy, “El año de la garrapata” (The year of the tick), some of us working, buying flats and cars, and getting married, some of us, single students and living from the people around, freaking to the raise.

But I remember too another marriage in Michael Cimino’s “The deer hunter”. Maybe it’s time to get the life more seriously. It’s time to left behind the University, to live in agreement to my age… fast, agressive, intense, ever, of course

On Thursday we celebrated the 3th edition of our annual crypto workshop. This year we extended the workshop to more stuff related to data security in general.

So we started with an speech about viruses. Javier Muñoz Mellid , from Igalia, got out prejudices about viruses showing it as engineering works, then he showed some examples of code. Finally, he explained the different characteristics of privative and free antivirus programs. We have an interesting round of questions after. As user of GNU/Linux and BSD systems, I usually don’t get worry about viruses, but I think they’re fascinating pieces of code

The caffeine didn’t help me enough. I passed the previous days sleeping 3-4 hours per day. So I think the clearest idea from my speech about data recovering was make backups! I tried to give ordered ideas and tools to use in case of data loosing. Finally I made two examples, metadata-based recovery with The Sleuth Kit and Autopsy, using Necromantux, of course, and data carving with foremost. The first test was ok, but the second failed and I only recovered part of the information I tried to do on an ext3 filesystem

After a pleasant lunch with my colleages of GPUL and my guest Capitain Pedro Varela, from the Spanish Army, I speedy showed dm-crypt in the daily use of ciphering file systems.

Then David Fernandez Vaamonde surprised us once again in a two-part speech. He teached us how to build an cryptographic token, then he gave an introduction to steganography. On videoconference. Bearing 40º C in Alcalá de Henares.

Finally Mauro Silvosa Rivera showed practical aspects on securing data: he built software RAID 1 and RAID 5 servers with GNU/Linux, then he introduced us in the use of DAR as differential backup tool in large systems. The funniest moment was when Mauro teared off a hard disk, then the system reorganized again.

The photos, again, by Fid, in my gallery
And this was the latest GPUL event in this course, I think. Maybe linux picnic?

I couldn’t have rest after the June tests. GPUL planned to middle July this year for first time a web technologies conference, the I Jornada sobre Tecnologías Web y Software Libre, on 12th, and the traditional cryptography workshop: III Taller de Criptografía, Seguridad y Privacidad, on 13th.

The work was hard for all organizers. We have several speakers who travelled to La Coruña, and Visperas and Benji via ekiga

The Web Conference began with Martín Álvarez Espinar, from the Spanish Office of the W3C, who explained us the structure of the W3C, their investigations and developments, and the importance of standards in the universal access to the web. In the same line, David Cabrero Souto spoke about differents aspects of accesibility in the web. The stinky example, the main web of our University .

After “theory” then we have “implementation” speechs. Ph. D.Fernando Bellas Permuy showed the architecture and explained the decisions in the future academic management of USC and UDC consortium, which will be built with free software on open standards. Asís García Chao and David Barral Precedo of Trabe Soluciones gave us an introduction to AJAX. This speech filled up the classroom, AJAX is getting importance because so-called Web 2.0 (I think we should first make work Web 1.0 ok, but I love gmail and meebo too ).

The culminating moment of the day was the Allan Beaufour’s speech. We were honoured by his visit, he travelled from Copenhagen only to give this speech. He talked about the past, present and future of Mozilla Firefox, then he centered in XML technologies and the implementation of the XForms standard in Firefox. I discovered an amazing technology (and how can my English speaking stink, but this is another history).

And finally our Ana Sáiz García gave a CSS introduction. I couldn’t saw the videoconference, but she helped me sometimes with CSS so I know she did a good work explaining how important and easy is detaching contents and appearance

The photos of the event by Fid (with my camera) in my gallery.

These days I put my eyes in Democratic Republic of Congo. There are two main reasons for it. The first one is there are the first democratic election in four decades. DRC has suffered the colonialist Belgian govern, then alternated dictatorships, all these years sparkled with blood leaked in little wars, the Great African War later. I hope this election should give stability to the Great Lakes area… if occidental powers allow it. DRC maybe is the most miserable rich country in Africa. Its very important natural resources attracts too much greedy people.

The another reason beacuse I keep my eyes in Kinsasha is I have a friend there, the Capitain of Spanish Army Bernardo González Lázaro. He is UN observer in this process. Because him and the Combonian missionaries I have the news that newspapers and tv don’t tell us.

After a two months discussion at the Linux Kernel Mailing List and proposal of several patches[slashdot.org], Theodore Ts’o has explained guidelines to develop the next version of the Extended Filesystem.

Full thread at Kerneltrap.