I’m getting old. I’m very happy with a gadget that joins cell phone (GSM and UTMS), GPS, digital camera, mp3 player, wireless conectivity. Its name is N95 by Nokia.

It goes against Unix philosophy, but I was tired because my full pockets with gadgets, batteries and their chargers. And, even when it runs with Symbian OS, I can launch a ssh client.

I opened a blog at Vox.com with photos taken with the camera and uploaded with a program to do it directly from the N95. Just for fun

Visperas and Benji got married in June. They celebrated the marriage in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid. Alcalá was the first planned university in the world by Cardinal Cisneros in the XV Century. Everywhere in the  city you can find cared buildings of stone and brick that evoke the Golden Age of Spanish literature. You can see some photos I took in that gallery.

About the marriage, I’ll preserve the intimacy, but I must write it was  one of the most emotive ceremonies I have attended ever The baquet  had some romantic and geek details too. You can see in the photo an amount of sparse all-around-the-world geeks joined because our past in  GPUL. We were sitted at the Linus Torvalds table. Visperas’ telecom  engineering friends were at the Graham Bell table, and Visperas and Benji were at Alan Turing table

Good luck for the young family

I have not too much time to update this blog. Really, I never had time to do it, but now I’m aware of this fact but I’m not going to give up now. Last months were very hard but results where positive: I passed more exams than ever, and, in two months I’ll begin to work in my final degree project as I’ll try to pass the last subjects.

There was another reason to be busy: I began to work in the Territorial Studies Lab. I’m updating the databases of the provincial GIS. We use GISEiel, a derivate of gvSIG (so it’s free software), against postresql databases. It’s not a very complex work but it’s very interesting to familiarize and reflect about how the territory was built.

Some of the following posts are about the lost events and thoughts in this ending summer.

Two interesting libraries that will help you in FEM analysis: libmesh, a FEM framework,  and PETSc, the linear/non linear equation parallelized solver.

Via DM, materials engineering consultant Adam C. Powel’s Opennovation.

“A very serious bug in the Linux OS exposes millions of servers all around the world to the intruders. The Linux people reacted quickly and they warned about what keys were vulnerable”
In CNN+ News (Spanish franchise of CNN), about the OpenSSL bug in Debian.

“Google was founded by two students in a garage 20 years ago”
In TVG’s Telexornal (news at the public Galician television), about the Prince of Asturias Award to Google.

I have already written about my affection for the OpenVMS-VAX/Alpha platform. Via Hacksize I discovered a howto about running OpenVMS on a virtual system running in a PC. I didn’t know about The Computer History Simulation Project before. It seems a very necessary project nowadays.

Of course it’s better to have an VAX or Alpha machine to work with it. And it’s highly desireable HP will release any day that wonderful OS forgotten in a DEC office drawer :-P.

About history of computing, I found another interesting web page: An Illustrated History of Computers.

Thanks to… errr… Pensamiento I discovered a very interesting tool based in OpenCascade. This program is called Salome, and it provides a framework to build a pre- and post-processor for numerical analysis. The screenshots are very impressive:

The list of partners of the project it’s very impressive too

This week was a time for recover after Dudesconf. Last year I passed four phases:

1. Two months before: To organize a Debian meeting rules
2. Chaos, death and destruction of the previous and the first day: I *never* will be involved again
3. Congratulations in the last day, and the days after: Ok, we survived… but next year I can’t involve again
4. Two months after: Has anybody some ideas to improve the meeting next year?

Now I’m in the phase number 3

Really we spent a good time in the Dudesconf. Some Debian people that didn’t came last year to Coruña joined to the people that repeated, and it was a very nice combination. We were like a family. I hope too the meeting will help a bit releasing Lenny.

It was a good time for GPUL too. These hackmeetings involve new people, and they force us to tune and improve our infrastructure and to make some new experiments. The congratulations after prove that even when we were bearing bad times with very few new activists, we have a great right staff. I’m very proud of my mates in GPUL.

And now… I return to the civil (engineering) life again

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is out. You can ask for free CD’s too

Thanks to Carlos, via Glynn Foster

It’s 2:50 at the gym/hotel at the Dudesconf. Lights off. Some dudes dream sweetly, some dudes try to dream sweetly, some people try to win an audible competition But most of dudes… err… see the photo

It’s nine o’clock. Contrary to what half Spaniards that are going four days for holiday, I’m in the UDC Campus of Elviña a bit stressed. I’m having a coffee in the Faculty of Laws, because the coffee of the Faculty of Computer Science requires you a stomach trasplant after having it. The music of Marlango still sound in my ears (as Leonor Watling presence on the stage is still in my mind ;-)). But I’ll write about it later.

So, I take Dato’s meme, and I write: I’m going to the Dudesconf II: Attack of the Dudes

These days we had 1.5 good news about wireless & free software:

1.0: There is now WPA/WPA2 support mainstream in OpenBSD. I’ll must wait support for my Atheros minipci card, but it’s a good new indeed

0.5: Luis Rodríguez, ath5k developer, has been hired by atheros. We’ll hope it’s a sign of change in their free software policy.

I don’t forget I’m trying to get my degree ASAP. But it’s  GPUL’s X anniversary, so I must do the last effort and work hand in hand with my friends to organize the 8th free software conference in Coruña that begins in two days, and the 2th in  Ferrol (the  other extreme in the metropolitan area).

Ten years are too many years. It’s true, I needed a change.

I recently feel confortable being a bit friendly with non-IT people. But I was tired of explaining them the different layers in GNU/Linux systems when they saw my old-style WindowMaker, and why I used a so simple graphic environment.

Last week I was making an experiment with a frankenstein terminals server. I installed a desktop. It was beauty and light. And I fell in love again.

I’ll never forget WindowMaker. It was my wm the first time I installed Debian, and it is a great wm with a nice story behind. I’ll maintain it in some of my machines. But I’m beginning to work with Xfce in my laptop.

Mike West (Cowboy Programming) released an interesting, two-part article about simulating fluids (visual simulation, not mechanical simulation): Practical Fluid Dynamics. The article was published in Game Developer Magazine (March and April 2007).

Via Hackszine.

…it happened.

From NoOOXML

The new was released one month ago, but the vulnerability will remain without solution the next months/years. A team of the University of Princeton developed an attack against all the crypto filesystems. The attack exploits a discovery about most DRAMs in the market: the information doesn’t dissapear inmediately after powering off the machine. It remains some seconds, and, if you cold the machine with a simple cold spray, you have until 10 minutes around to reboot the machine with a program and recover the crypto keys from the memory. So, if anybody has phisical access to the machine (it is the main target to use crypto fs’s), they will be able to decrypt the information with some software and cheap hardware.

The cold boot attack paper

Some reactions:

• the new at Slashdot
• the brief at Securitifocus
• comment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• new, comment and PGPcorp announcement at Kriptópolis [ES]

HAL: Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you.

Dave: Yes, I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

HAL: It’s called “Daisy”.

[HAL sings while slowing down.]
HAL: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage. But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

(From the Wikiquote.)

In memorian, Arthur C. Clark, 1917-2008.

Recovering deleted files in the ext3fs is a very hard task. It happens because the journal overwrites the block pointers in the inodes with zeroes.

Carlo Wood knew it, but he didn’t surrender when he deleted accidentally his home directory. He studied how ext3fs works, then he wrote a tool, ext3grep, that helped him to recover sucessfully all the lost data. I had no time to analyze and test it but it seems it performs a jorunal-based attack.

Via LWN.net

Usenix will make freely avaiable their proceedings to everybody

Via Matt Blaze’s Exhaustive Search