That hurricane day
Will soon pass away
And someone will sweep
All the jetsam back into the bay

And we’ll come down
Like we always did
And knock on my door
Like the big bad wind

Born in a storm
Is that the only excuse you can give
Born in a storm
Is that you’re gonna live

Born in a storm
Is that the only excuse you can give
Born in a storm
Is that you’re gonna live

Deacon Blue “Born in a storm”, Raintown (1987)

Today I have been in Engineer Legarreta’s speech about an hydroelectric dam in the Lérez River, in the South Galicia. Legarreta is one of the legends of my School (it’s said he made all the problems of two volumes of Beer&Johnston’s Vector Mechanics for Engineers before begin his universitary studies ), he graduated with the first class in 1996, and he’s an expert in geotechnical works.

He remembered us the importance of geotechnical part of civil engineering works. Buildings, roads, dams, ports… they all depend of a perfect execution of the soil.

A doubt about the tunnel execution arouse on me: they could only made 2 of the 5 drills they wanted because there were some archaelogical remains on the surface. I wanted to ask him how they solved this problem. But my school mates didn’t allow: they began to speak high, so nobody could ask anything. They were more worried about the assistance certificate and their stomach. Their knowledgement is trapped in a tunnel too.

The risks of using little pieces of privative among free software: the rotten apple doesn’t recover, just the sane ones decay.

Via OpenBSD Jorunal, a vulnerability to Linux, BSD and Solaris in the NVidia’s binary device driver allows to local and remote exploits get root via buffer overflow.

Via Kriptópolis, we know again about vulnerabilities in the Adobe (formerly Macromierda) Flash player for Linux and M$Win: cookies stealing, cross scripting and more.

Last tuesday was the first class day in Portiño. It was a shiny day, and children (around fourty) were so naughty that I’ve never saw in four years I’m in the project, I think.

Good new: there is a new volunteer in the group, she seems smart and mature, and I hope she will come again next week, she didn’t seem scared . Bad new: three volunteers left from last course because they are not in Coruña, so we are four volunteers. Good new: Ramonín (the president of the neighbourgs) still remains as president despite of he wanted to leave. Ramonín is a very important help in our daily work.

Bad news: some girls left the studies when they are thirdteen. Spanish government pushed thirdteen child into the high schools in a fucking change of scheme some years ago, so their families have the perfect excuse to retire the children from the studies two years before. Good news: some new children came, and they seem will to learn. They worked all evening and they asked me for some books from the library.

If it’s important take care of the server-side of the accesibility, we can’t forget the client-side. A very interesting thread in OpenBSD Journal concerns about the actual usability of operating systems and applications.

It seems OSes that care their command line (i.e. Unix) are more confortable to blind users, but there is still a lot of work to do.

…by David A. Wheeler. In his blog:

“If your goal is to have a useful program that stays useful long-term, then a protective (“copylefting”) license like the LGPL or GPL licenses has much to offer. Protective licenses force the cooperation that is good for everyone in the long term, if a long-term useful project is the goal. For example, I’ve noticed that GPL projects are far less likely to fork than BSD-licensed projects; the GPL completely eliminates any financial advantage to forking. The power of the GPL license is so strong that even if you choose to not use a copylefting license, it is critically important that an open source software project use a GPL-compatible license” (GPL, BSD, and NetBSD – why the GPL rocketed Linux to success, about Charles M. Hannum’s letter aboutNetBSD future)

In his web:

“There are several basic problems with software patents, compared to actual innovation:

1. almost all truly important innovations in software were never covered by patents, so using patents as a primary source would omit almost all of the most important software innovations;
2. as software patentability has increased, the number of software innovations has decreased; and
3. software patents are often granted to cover ideas that are obvious to practitioners of the art or have prior art (even though these aren’t supposed to be patented).”

(The most important sofware innovations)

(Thanks to bille)

OpenBSD Journal has published three articles (in fact, three chapters of a cancelled book) by Daniel Hartmeier about advanced topics using OpenBSD’s firewall, known as Packet Filter (PF):

• Firewall Ruleset Optimization
• Testing Your Firewall
• Firewall Management

Remember OpenBSD 4.0 is near to be released. I’ve pre-ordered my CD box!

Today is a day to remember our digital freedom is not ensured.
Defective by design.

This number was written with marker on the shirt that an African teen weared in a youngers center at Canarias Islands. I saw the scene in the report “Menores a la deriva” (Youngers go adrift) in the program Espejo público (A3tv). It seems there is little interest in the newspapers and tv (and, of course, by the Government) in showing the painful state of inmigrants that arrive on boat, so it was a rare chance to know what is happening.

In that case, we saw a youngers center with 200 seats filled up with 1000 teenagers. In another stealthy report with hidden camera thousands of adult inmigrants slept under the sky piled up in a detention center, in very bad hygienic situation. The scene could be taken in a refugees champ in Africa. But in fact was in Spain, an European, advanced? country. Some reports aim the situation happen in the peninsula centers too, where inmigrants are moved to from the Islands.

This turning a blind eye is ashaming.

I’ve saying for years: vynil LP’s are better than CD to a complete enjoy of music. Recently Dylan declared: “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static… CDs are small. There’s no stature to it.” (analysis in Crave)

Via Slashdot, I read in Crave (again) cases like White Stripes that reached the top ten thanks in part to 5500 copies in 7-inch format. Their next single will be released in the same format.

Vynil will NOT die!

The bull of Tordesillas (and the Spanish form of bullfighting), the yearly hanging of greyhounds by their owners (hunters), the recently filmed killing by beating of a dog in Ribeira… make me think Spain has still an extremely cruel with animals society.

So we can’t be surprised when we see the daily violence between humans.

The concept of free software extended. I read at Slashdot an article about Open Prosthetics Project. This is an wonderful initiative to innovate in designs of prosthetics and make it free for everybody.
They use as CAD system Alibre, it’s a privative software, but it isn’t too much expensive (they offer a free , minor version of the 3D modeller) and its CEO Greg Milliken donated some licenses to the project. Once again, we see the need of free (as in freedom) killer apps in engineering design to go one step forward in what free software can help to the society.

An interesting post by Richard Clayton in Light Blue Touchpaper about design of anonymizing systems, reflects on using randomness as the lonely solution to strengthen the communication. Random even cause the opposite effect, as Clayton and Danezis study in this paper on a P2P anonymizing system.

Eight years ago mi life changed because reading a great article.

Today my duty with the free software movement is stronger.