Yesterday we went for some Japanese food, and while Amaya and Miriam were talking in Spanish, Franzi and Jonas spoke German and I was thinking of some English sentence, one of the waiters made a remark in Japanese. That was where I lost track.

While Catalan in the computer industry slowly advances, thanks to volunteer efforts and Free Software, it's difficult to see any sign of improvement in other areas of the technology world. Mobile phones are not an exception. In Catalunya, many people own a Siemens, Alcatel or Sagem mobile phone because they are the only companies that include Catalan as an option for their terminals. When I first got my mobile phone one and a half years ago, I chose an Alcatel, and while the phone was more or less ok, and Catalan was present in the interface, it lacked some Catalan characters like , , or in the input system. The battery wasn't that good, and it was a bit slow at times, but in general I was happy. Three weeks ago, I decided to switch to Telef nica's mobile phone provider, Movistar, because Vodafone has no network coverage in my mother's town, Vall de Almonacid, where I spend many weekends and vacations, and I was getting tired of my mobile turning into a plastic brick when I went there. I hoped the switch would be painless. As people talked positively about Siemens, I went for one of their free Siemens offerings: the Siemens AP75. Ugh, fellow Catalans: DON'T DO IT. So, it seems Siemens has sold or merged their mobile division with BenQ. The girl in the shop said one of the cool new features was better battery lifetime. This terminal was advertised as having Bluetooth, Infrared and other goodies. As soon as I got it (and couldn't give it back), I found out the extensive language list in BenQ mobile phones doesn't include Catalan anymore. Actually, it just offers Spanish and English. Had I known this, I would have quickly got a Nokia, which I believe are the best phones out there. But I'm silly enough not to pick the best just to support some practices, in the same way I won't but nVidia unless they do something about their drivers. Anyway, ignoring the lack of Catalan fact, the mobile was supossed to be quite good, or so I thought, until I tried to transfer my contacts list via Bluetooth. My mobile phone wasn't able to find other devices at all, and the interface doesn't list IrDA at all. What's the story? Yesterday I had the opportunity to go to the Movistar shop, and I was told a tale about the mobile phone having those features built in, but they are deactivated by the telco. This is pretty difficult to believe, and googling around, I haven't seen any proof about the AP75 having any Bluetooth support for anything other than voice transmission (ie, for use with headphones, etc). It plain sucks. So, dear Catalan readers, if you're getting new phones, avoid these BenQ-Siemens idiots, as they don't have a clue about Catalan. Either choose Alcatel, Sagem, or one of the older real Siemens mobiles. Softcatal has a Catalan mobile phones Wiki page with detailed information of the current situation. I'll have to update it to warn about current Siemens practices. In a happy future, Nokia will hopefully support Catalan and things will be a lot easier.

I put a few ideas on the wiki page for some Summer of Code projects based on getting the Telepathy Framework used on the GNOME desktop. We’ve hacked out a spec for doing most IM & VOIP stuff via D-Bus so that you can add whatever functionality you want into any program like Nautilus, Evolution, Gossip, etc, and share the use of your server connections from wherever in the desktop makes the most sense. We’ve been working hard on our flagship XMPP backend implementation, telepathy-gabble, and Rapha l Slinckx & Adam Lofts have been working on some UI implementations in Python and C#, but we need to get some more people looking at different backends and integrating frontend functionality into the desktop. Get those SoC applications going if you think this sounds cool… :) As well as my ideas, I should also mention I’d be happy to mentor for other deserving ideas such as eikke’s CDIS plans, and I’ve also got some ideas about how cross-program (and cross desktop) music databases should be achieved. I’m particularly keen on helping people with D-Bus related projects because I know that not enough people understand how all this stuff works, so I think it’s worth spending a bit of my time to spread the love (and pain) which I’ve learnt working on Telepathy.

Since it was first proposed I have been following Nicolas on CDIS. I think this is the next step now that a lot of apps are adding DBUS interfaces to different extent. Though this interfaces can also serve a purpose by their own, allowing specialized applications to comunicate one to each other, my opinion is also that the main use of this is desktop integration: being able to automatically pause music when I get an Ekiga call, put my IM client as Away if screensaver starts (meaning that I am not at the keyboard) and so. He seems to be searching for a mentor for Google Summer of Code 2006, so if someone seems inclined to have a better desktop experience I think it will worth.

Why not? It actually never went away, as most of the existing nuclear power plants are still being operated at full level to produce electricity, not only in countries like France, in which about 78% of the electicity is produced by nuclear power plants, but also in other countries as Spain, UK, or the United States (20% of the electricity produced at nuclear powerplants). Asian developing countries are nowadays building several nuclear power plants, as they have an increasing demand that cannot be only satisfied by fuel, coal or natural gas, leaving apart the also crucial problem of the cost of those commodities. For example, India, having 15 nuclear plants in use right now is building 8 more. With a population of 1100 million people, they need those watts. As Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, says:

Here's why: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple.

Of course we have to think also in wind and solar power. And not only for generating electricity to put on the net, but also as a way to reduce home energy consumption. For example, in Madrid, local goverment is forcing that every flat building designed from 2007 have solar panels on top for generating hot water. This will mean a lot of fuel saving. But it is only a local measure (not country wide) and at the same time it cames a bit late: there have been a construction boom during last 10 years and the cycle is somehow reaching an end. And also wind or solar energies have other environmental problems. Wind mills require elevated zones, with good winds, to be placed. And those will affect landscape and birds. But solar and wind energies cannot be promoted and think at the same time that they will not have any impact. Will have to deploy in not a far future (perhaps we are late now) every non fossil baseload sources of energy we have. This includes solar, wind and also nuclear. There are environmental, economical and also polical and estrategical issues that must be considered when a range from 60% to 80% of our energy is produced using coal, fuel or natural gas coming from always conflictive world areas, and at even higher prices, as more demand from developing countries enter in the market and resources end and other more expensive locations have to be used. At the same time, we can not leave apart those problems that nuclear power has, including accidents, but we have to consider them from a neutral scientific and technical point of view. Or we can shut down our computers and chat around a table with a light candle.

The "I'm bored" release.

nice -n 19 find /usr/share/doc -name changelog.Debian.gz -exec zgrep "\* The .* [Rr]elease" \; sort uniq bogosort -n head -40


* The "Crack-smoking Squirrel" release.
* The "I should not have got out of bed yesterday" release
* The "Wohoo-we-are-going-to-main" release.
* The "And I thought IE had security bugs!" release.
* The "First snow in Finland" release.
* The "please buy me a brain" release
* The "I speak better English than this villian Bush" release.
* The "Brief Return From The Hell" release.
* The "Stoned Monkey" release.
* The "Let's do it cleaner" release.
* The "Fuck Me Harder" release.
* The "All or Nothing" release
* The "What's my name? Say my name, bitch!" release.
* The "next time I will buy myself a powerpc" release.
* The "I'm in such a hurry" release!
* The "I *hate* when that happens" release.
* The 'DOH!' release.
* The "laptop envy (damn tbm for having a nicer one than me)" release.
* The "Drunken Iceweasel" release.
* The "Follow the white rabbit" Release.
* The "someone should take my compiler away from me" release
* The "Ooops, I did it again" release
* The "Argh-I-took-the-wrong-version" release.
* The "Friday before Christmas" Release :-)
* The 'Yes, I need more sleep, and also to test my releases' release.
* The "you can't get sunburn at Finland" release.
* The "Chainsaw Psycho" release.
* The "Son of Drunken Iceweasel" release.
* The "Perl Sucks" release.
* The "I fucking hate libtool" release.
* The 'No, I don't use CVS' release.
* The "Throwing stuff away like mad and seeing if it still builds" release.
* The "This Space Intentionally Left Blank" Release
* The "From now on all of my world-killing weapons will be kept a TOTAL SECRET!" release.
* The "Lesbian Seagull" release.
* The "Oh my God, they killed Python, you bastards!" release.
* The "Evil Bitch Monster of Death" release.
* The "Pain as bright as steel" release.
* The "I've been hiding under a rock for two weeks" release.
* The "Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die..." release

I didn't bother to run it on the whole Debian archive on one of the Debian developer machines, as that would have probably pissed off some admins... (via Jonathan Carter)

I made a shocking discovery today.

Terah called me in from outside to inform me that the washing machine was just sitting there. No action. Just stalled in the middle of the cycle. I poked around a bit, and sure enough. It's stuck.

I then turned on the water faucet next to the washing machine. Nothing came out. So naturally I thought: the terrorists have attacked our water supply! Run for the hills! (which in Kansas are a 3-hour drive)

(Actually, what I thought was we want to put this house on the market next week, and the last thing we need now is a lack of running water. But I'm sure if I watched the cable news channels, I'd think of terrorists first.)

Now before I can explain how SUICIDE ANTS were the cause of our water problems, we need to take a small diversion into the fascinating realm of rural plumbing. When you have a well supplying water to your house, there's a pump connected to a pressure tank, which is then connected to the house's plumbing. When you turn on a faucet, you drain water out of the tank. When the pressure reaches a certain minimum, a pressure switch turns on the pump. The pump pumps water into the tank until the pressure reaches a maximum, at which point the pressure switch turns the pump back off.

Now, inside the pressure switch are little metal plates. To turn on the pump, the plates snap together, completing the circuit. To turn off the pump, the plates snap apart.

So, back to our story.

I went out to the well house (the small outdoor structure that houses the tank and switch) with my usual well-adjusting tools: pliers, screwdriver, gloves. I open up the well house and cut the power. I take the cover off the pressure switch and stare at it for a minute.

Hmmm I think to myself. The system pressure is 0 PSI, so the pump should have been running... And indeed the pressure switch plates had snapped together....

...or had they?

No! There was -- and I am not making this up -- a cake of DEAD, PARTIALLY SINGED ANTS between the metal plates. In fact, there were ants crawling around all over the pressure switch. So I used my screwdriver to scrape the plates off as well as I could. I couldn't get them perfectly clean because of the angle, but I figured it'd be enough to make contact.

I turned the power back on. Little blue sparks appeared at the pressure switch (burning up the last of the SUICIDE ANTS), and then half a second later, the pump sprang into action.

Now this raises some alarming questions:

Why didn't our government do anything to stop the SUICIDE ANTS from attacking our water supply?

And more importantly, who is behind this sudden sinister interest in pressure switches on the part of our hill-building friends?

I can see the headlines now:

"Ants attack water supply in Kansas... Is New York far behind?"

"Gitmo Intelligence Links Suicide Ants to bin Laden"

"Price of Raid Hits $200 A Barrel Amid Fears of Ant Attacks"

"5 Troops Deployed With Cans of RAID to Terrorist Ant Training Camps in the Pakistani Mountains"

"Thirsty Latchkey Children Forced To Scrape Dangerous Terrorist Ants From High-Voltage Switches Before Using Faucet"

"Is Your Water Safe? Watch the story about the latest threat tonight at 11"

"Small-town Kansas man detained for posting instructions for attacking rural water systems using ants"

In this weekends newspaper was an article on brands in fashion. That the big brands are going down, and instead smaller brands are coming up. This was explained with people wanting to be "hip" and faster than the trend. "Cutting edge". This is very interesting, since Google basically defied this trend. Google started as this "insider tip" for search engines, back when everybody was using Altavista, Yahoo, Hotbot and such. Back then, Google was "hip" because of it's simplistic interface and quality, and meta searchengines such as MetaGer. Many of these search engines from back then have gone away. And Google has become a really big brand. Using Google is not "hip", everbody does use it. So what is it keeping people this loyal to the Google brand, and not going for new "hip" stuff like ExaLead. Another counterexample are iPods. I didn't buy one, because everybody does (and it doesn't play my .ogg files, and doesn't do gapless playback) - but millions of people did. So iPod is another "old-style brand" that just popped up a few years ago. Will the same thing happen on the net that has been happening in fashion? The next big thing, will it be an influx of "lifestyle search engines"? Maybe built around top blogs like BoingBoing? Should companies try to buy their way into the top blog sites? Or are they actually more likely to kill them that way? Or is the net actually ahead, and big brands are coming back? But given that one of the key features of so-called "Web 2.0" is the social interaction thing, isn't the net just changing right now to add more "community"? Will it happen to operating systems and software, too? Apple OSX is doing well in becoming a "lifestyle OS". Windows can't. But how about the Linux UIs? KDE has tons of features, some people say it's overloaded. GNOME is going the other way, keeping things simple and easy - too simple and easy for others. What if we'd "lifestyle" user interfaces, and do the next step past "theming" - offering desktop OS styles like "power user", "hip and quick", "just let me get the work done quickly" and "less is more". I guess we don't have to workforce for that. Yet.

Last FOSDEM, I snatched one of the free OpenBSD 3.7 CD-ROMs with me. Not that I was planning to switch to OpenBSD or anything; but I have this spare 10G partition on my laptop that I use to play with all the time. There's never anything on that partition that is insanely important; and usually I change it to something else after a few months. It had been containing MacOS for a fair number of months, since there was an issue with my kernel that made changing my screen brightness impossible for some reason; but that has been fixed now. I wouldn't know what the problem was, but switching from my own-built kernel.org kernels to the Debian-precompiled kernel fixed it. Heh. As it happened, this weekend I was looking for something in my backpack, and stumbled upon that OpenBSD installation set again, which I'd completely forgotten about. Since I'd grown tired of MacOS by now, I thought about installing OpenBSD on the play partition. Obviously, their installer is a slight bit more spartanic than the Debian installer. Heck, they're a BSD system. One of the first questions was whether I wanted to use an OpenBSD-specific partition table or an HFS-based one. Since Linux uses the latter, and I didn't want to lose the Linux partition, I chose HFS. Next, it threw me into a partitioner, telling me that I needed to end up with (at least) one partition that had 'OpenBSD' as its type and name. So I made sure to do it that way, which took me a few tries to get it right. After that, I had to create a BSD-style "disklabel". I happen to think those things are pretty crazy, but, well; it's how the BSD systems work. First, I made a 4.3BSD slice for my data (slice a), and next a swap slice (slice b) that was 10% of the size of the partition that I'd created for OpenBSD. Or so I thought. The problem was that none of the above steps used gigabytes, megabytes, or even kilobytes, as its unit; instead, I had to create partitions and slices in blocks. Not that I don't know what a block is, but it's not as easy to spot issues that way. After I'd written the new partitions and slices, and started to format the a slice, suddenly the system decided to show me the size of the thing it was formatting after all. I didn't notice it immediately. But then it dawned on me... It was formatting my entire hard disk. That's right, even though I had clearly and explained that it shouldn't touch anything besides these 10 gigabytes that I set aside for the thing, it still decided to go on and format everything. Aaargh! I quickly switched the thing off, and rebooted it to check the damage. Of course, I didn't reboot it by using the system that I'd just corrupted; that would only make matters worse. However, since the Linux partition is near the end of the disk, it could just as well have been so that there was nothing wrong. Unfortunately, that was not the case; my ext3 partition had been corrupted. Luckily, not entirely; I've been able to rsync most of my data to another system, including the list of packages and most of the files in my home directory. But the OpenBSD disk is sooo toast. No, really.

During the weekend, while I was in Mallorca, Joey Hess wrote an email to me in quite a hurry, he was coming to one of the Extremadura Sessions and needed a place to sleep at in Madrid. So, of course, due to my legendary hospitality, I happily accepted having him over. Franzi, Simon Richter s GF joined us, and so did tbm, who we had not welcomed to Spain yet. We set up a nice little dinner in order to properly celebrate Joey s 30th Birthday. OMG, I am also older than Joey Hess! Bummer.

I just asked him to bring some English Muffins, I got the standard answer:

> Please bring English muffins with you :)
You like (American) English muffins? :-)

Same as Erinn told me on IRC when I asked her to bring some to Mexico in exchange for vegan Allioli.

<Amaya> helix: english muffins!
<helix> Amaya: I don t think US english muffins are any good, but I could be wrong

WTF is wrong with English Muffins? They are my favourite breakfast, but I must acknowledge that not having an oven to slightly roast them into sucks :(

Anyway, I will take a bus really early in the morning tomorrow to join the Extremadura crowd. And I will start a little Staying at Amaya s HOWTO . It has been Holger, Miriam, Mooch, Hanna, Tuukka, Lars, Joey Hess, Franzi and Simon so far since I rented this small, run down attic that I call $HOME. That s less than a year :)

I was invited to give a talk on Debian Women in Mallorca, last weekend, during the Jornades de Programari Lliure hosted by Bulma, the LUG from Mallorca. The island is a beautiful place, sure, over exploited because of tourism, and full of Germans, which is not intrinsically bad in itself, but if you know where to look, there s still virgin beaches with no electricity (power is provided by the sun) or tap water. There is 350 sunny days a year in Mallorca. Amazing. My pics are up at My gallery. My slides are also here. I even run into a mgp bug that I still need to report.

The organizers treated us wonderfully, we were hosted in a luxurious countryside hotel, where I found a cat that was Vi s wild twin, it was semi-feral, but enjoyed having (mooching) breakfast next to us in the sunny patio. Speakers even got a rental car to get around the island, which was greatly appreciated. If you want to meet some of us, download the hello world video . The organizers went out of their way to make us feel comfortable and at home, had video-streaming during the talks, real-time screenshots of the speaker s slides on a website, and every single detail that makes you realize they are one of a kind. I want to thank them for a wonderful weekend, that really recharged my batteries and karma, and also helped me remind the reasons of my involvement in Free Software, (total world domination, and of course, changing this ugly world into a more fair place), and why Free Software is (or should be declared) Heritage of Humanity.

Marcelo Branco attended with his wonderful namorada, Renata, a great girl. You might have met Marcelo in Debconf4 in Porto Alegre. He is in part responsible for Brazil s embracing free software, the point of reference in every party, and now employed by the Spanish Administration to build an international network of Public Administrations throughout the world to make Governments use, defend and embrace Free Software. His talk was one of those critical moments in life after which you find find yourself thinking faster and harder, on why. The figures he gave were hair-raising. Brazil s annual budget to put an end to hunger in the country is roughly half of the money spent on proprietary software licenses. It is a hell of a lot of money, given that only 8% of the population use software at all, and only half of them, that is 4%, is actually paying for a license. We also rode one of those rental cars around Mallorca, spotting the loveliest of places, wanting to retire there, after we change the world.

Ricardo Galli, upstream for Men ame.net, an improved digg in Spanish, also gave a mind blowing talk on ethical responsibility, intellectual property, and introduced me to the whole Zen-talk concept. His slides were awesome, so was his talk, and he was a pleasure to listen to.

Dato also gave a talk, on Debian, very complete, and very to the point. He could not make us play Mao, though, we were too tired at night.

Antonio Larrosa, one of our national glories. He is a KDE developer since KDE was born, and even got to work for Suse until it became Novell. As far as I remember, he was one of my youth idols in the times when Linux was still not ready for the desktop, he was one of the many that changed this. And we made a deal that turns him into one of my all-time heroes. He will write a KDE client for Mao, according to my specs, but I will have to switch to KDE. Therefore, here is my gpg-signed part of the deal:

I hereby declare that I will switch my desktop to KDE if my friend, Antonio
Larrosa, writes a Mao Client for me. This client will be networked, and have a
Chat window. It will follow the Cambridge Standard Five-Card Mao rules.
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFEP/FONFDtUT/MKpARAiiaAKCZUGEzGDA1ioCFK60TrS7APp71/ACgsMJh
rENpTKAsUSmPf/YzDkY7wU4=
=OHpi
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Sound Juicer "Don't Just Sit There Going Crazy On Your Own" 2.14.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. A small selection of bug fixes before I branch:

• Fix reversed check for invalid iterator, allowing playback to work!
• Add some buffering to the playback pipeline
• Reset the window title even more
• Namespace the copied gsttaglibmux to avoid conflicts

NP: 1st Born Second, Bilal

Dear LazyWeb: What’s the best ogg- and linux-compatible hard drive based portable music player? Unlike the old days, there now seem to be a large number of portable ogg players, but most of the mainstream computer press sites give short shrift to linux compatibility issues. So what does someone “in the know” buy? I’m interested not just in compatibility, but also a player with a thoughtful physical design, user interface, and that doesn’t have little plastic-y bits that will break over time. (By the way, the ‘official’ LazyWeb site seems to be completely overrun with spam trackbacks.)

Recently Spain remembered the 65th anniversary of our tragic Civil War, an episode which broke the state in two halves which still today haven't been glued together at all. The origin of that nightmare is the dream of many Spanish people of the early 20th Century. In the morning of the 14th of April, 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed in Madrid, after two days before, a majority of republican and leftist parties won the local elections; many people celebrated throughout the Spanish territory, and the tricolour flag was shown in many town hall buildings. With the king in exile after these quick happenings, Spain was again a Republic, as decided by the election results. The Republic brought many social measures to Spain: women suffrage, eight-hour day and many other labour related improvements. The nobility titles were abolished, and those properties were confiscated by the government. And this was just the provisional government. All of this is regarded like a big social and cultural revolution, which was just starting. Not everyone was happy about this, of course. The newly approved Constitution of December 9 gave the government power to confiscate many of the Church's properties, and limit their great power in political matters. Soon, the episcopacy came with a strategy to defeat the Republic in any possible way. The Royalists were also not happy. There were a series of revolts in the South, and an attempt of coup d'etat by General Sanjurjo. These attacks were repealed; the Republic was still strong. In 1933, the Anarchists started to be seriously unhappy about the moderate path the government was leading and started striking, which led to violent repression by the Government. The General elections of November brought a victory of the right and extreme-right, and many social and anti-church measures were repealed. Riots and strikes spread throughout the territory. The Martial Law proclaimed by the right wing government resulted in thousands beings imprisoned. Things went even worse when three ministers of the fascist CEDA entered the Republican Government. A big worker uprise started the 1st of October in Asturies, and Catalunya proclaimed the Catalan Republic. The revolts were supressed by General Franco, who would be well known in the world just a few years later. Thousands were killed and injuried during the few weeks of revolt, and the Socialist Party was dissolved, leaving the Spanish Courts with barely no left representation. The next years saw a very unstable government from the right due to internal disputes within the parties that formed it. New elections were called in 1936, and the left united under the Popular Front, which won by a slight margin; Manuel Aza a was the new president. The right, the church and the army continued to undermine the Republic in any possible way. In an attempt to make the military heads more loyal to the established government, the fascist Falange Espa ola was dissolved. The 2nd Spanish Republic received a massive blow on the 17th of July, 1936 when Franco and other generals attempted a new coup d'etat in the Northern African territories. The Republic started to die as people started fighting the coup back, and the Spanish Civil War started throughout the territory. With the aid of Fascist Germany and Italy, Franco managed to seize control of more and more areas of Spain during the nearly three years of war, and the Government of the Republic had to move a number of times, to Val ncia and Barcelona. In January 1939, most of Spain was in Franco's hands, and Catalunya soon fell. Two months later, the fascist troops entered Madrid, and hours later, Val ncia surrended. Still today, people talk about dos Espa as , the victorious and the defeated. Still today, the is much difficulty in having official recognition for the thousands who died while defending what a majority of people had voted for in a democratic way. Still today, one of the major political parties in Spain refuses to acknowledge what the forty years of Franco meant for the disidents, for the exiled, and for the dead. They are the legacy of Franco. Today Spain celebrates the 75th anniversary of our Second Republic, with many events in many cities, which will be ongoing for a few weeks. Izquierda Republicana has a good list of events.

There are some peahens in a pen in the little park by the university here in Jarandilla. Why sit at home in the sun at home and watch a peahen when I can do the same in Spain eh? Oh well, back to work..

I bought myself a digital camera today. It's probably the most low-end camera you could imagine, approximately the size of the insert-delete-home-end-pgup-pgdown key block on an average keyboard. Well, slightly larger. Obviously the quality isn't very good. In fact, I suspect that many cell phone cameras are of better quality (I wouldn't know, I don't have a cell phone with camera). So why did I buy this thing? Because of its price, which is so low that it's laughable. And, well, because of the size—it can be stashed away nicely. Only I just found out that the battery life isn't very good. I had connected it to my laptop for a bit more than an hour, and now it doesn't power up anymore unless it is connected. According to the manual, it should not use the battery while it's connected to a USB port, but I guess they're wrong. Something else that isn't very good is the English translation they've been doing. Mooha.

Thank you for purchasing this digital camera. It not only can take photos but also has the built-in camera functions. This camera is equipped with a 64Mbit built-in SDRAM; if you want the photos in the camera to be download into the computer ,you are only required to connect the USB cable; and if you want to use the built-in PC camera functions, you can hold the video conference via the Internet to have a face-to-face online chat with others.

... is exactly what the back-cover of the wrapper contained. With no typos. No, not with typos in spaces and commas either. I do have one grunt with this thing, and that is that the 'viewfinder' (sic) is totally useless; if I want to take a picture with the thing, I have to point the camera towards the general area of my subject, cross my fingers, and hope for the best. But, well. It works, and while the pictures aren't very good, they're not that bad, either. I guess that's all I could ask for 14.40 euros.

• East Campus is full of pyros (”could you please put out the carpet?”).
• Microwaving motherboards is actually not a very smart thing to do.
• Always bring multiple printouts of your GPG fingerprint to hacker parties (if you don’t have business cards with it).
• There are lots of fun toys in the Media Lab.
• Train conductors don’t actually read your tickets.
• Trains are almost always late.
• Falling down staircases in the dark at concerts hurts.
• It’s important to Love Your Beaver.
• MIT will kick your ass, get used to it.
• When you lose your phone card PIN, you have to go back to the same store you bought it at.
• It would have been smart to leave extra space in the suitcase for all the extra stuff I brought home that I didn’t bring there…
• Fear the ever-expanding Wiki People in the seedy underbelly of boston-soc!
• Acetarium parties don’t have ending times.
• The MIT Press loading dock sale is a veritable treasure trove.
• Best. Hack. Ever.
• Nothing ever works out quite as planned. Solution: plan less.

As shown in the image below, the highway (A-6, Spanish North-West main route) is almost empty. The image is from 18:56 CEST, and the problem is that it was supposed that this highway (like every other highway going out from Madrid) had a very heavy traffic jam today, as we start Easter holidays today. But almost no one of those has even a light traffic jam. At this rate, it will be impossible to reach the 2 million of car movements predicted for today. Update 04-13-2006 12:33.- And people appeared, as you can see in the left of the new image. And I waited till today to go to my parent's for not getting any traffic jam.

David Berlind: “In a way that seemingly minor conflicts around the world can erupt into flash points between superpowers, the bottom line is that if a consolidation wave sweeps through the industry in 2006, it’s this acquisition of JBOSS that will have sparked it.”