Encuentro Centroamericano de Software Libre! Guatemala! During a national (for us) holiday, so it's easy to go without missing too much work time! How would I miss the opportunity?
Several years ago, I started playing with the idea of having a road trip Probably this was first prompted with the UK crew and the Three Intrepid Motorcycle Riders arriving by land to DebConf 9 I don't know. Fact is, I wanted to go to DebConf10 in New York by land, as well as to DebConf12 in Nicaragua. Mostly due to a lack of time, I didn't Although we did start making some longish trips. Of course, my desire to show Regina what Mexico is like also helped!
So, up until a week ago, our (according to my standards) long distance driving experience included:
- M xico Guanajuato Puerto Vallarta Guanajuato M xico, in early November 2011, for Festival de Software Libre and with Regina and our Blender friends Octavio and Claudia. Totalling almost 1900Km, mostly consisting of wide, toll highway.
- M xico Xilitla San Luis Potos M xico, in April 2012, just for fun and for a nice short vacation, alone with Regina. Totalling almost 1200Km, but through Sierra Gorda de Quer taro, a very tough stretch of about 250Km which we did at about 50Km/h on average. Beautiful route for sure! We didn't originally intend to go through San Luis Potos , and it does not appear to make much sense, as it adds ~350Km to the total, but it was even quicker than going back by the same route and according to those who now, even faster than our planned route, via Tamazunchale and Ixmiquilpan!
- M xico San Luis Potos Zacatecas Aguascalientes Guanajuato M xico, in May 2012, for Congreso Internacional de Software Libre, again with Octavio and Claudia. Totalling 1250Km, and following very good roads, although most of them were toll-free.
But there is always a certain halo over crossing a border, maybe more so in countries as large as Mexico. We convinced Pooka and Moni, and granted, with some aprehension, as we knew of some important security risks in the more rural areas we wanted to go through we decided to go to Guatemala. And, although we wanted to go with a bit more time, Real Life took its toll: We could not take more time than the intersection of what our respective jobs offered. So, here goes a short(?) recap of our six day long, 3200Km trip. Of course,
we have a map detailing this.
Mexico Veracruz
I came to my office early on Wednesday (31-oct), and left with Regina around 10AM towards Veracruz. We agreed to meet there with Moni and Pooka, who would take the night bus, and continue together. Crossing Mexico City proved to be the longest obstacle We arrived to Veracruz already past 3PM, and spent a nice evening walking down the center and port of the city. Veracruz port can still be seen as part of central Mexico; I knew the road quite well.
Veracruz San Andr s Tuxtla Catemaco San Cristobal de las Casas
We met with our friends at the iconic
Gran Caf de la Parroquia at 6:30AM. Had a nice breakfast with coffee, and by 7:30 we were heading south-west.
The reason to have a road trip was to get to know the route, to enjoy the countryside So, given we "only" had to make 650Km this day, we took the non-toll road A narrow path stretching along the coastal plains of Veracruz, until Acayucan. Doing so, we also saved some money, as the equivalent toll road is around MX$300 (~US$25)!
Veracruz is a
hot state. We ended up all sweaty and tired by 19:00, when we reached San Cristobal. We had agreed not to drive at night, due to security issues, but fortunately there was quite a bit of traffic both ways between Tuxtla Guti rrez (Chiapas State capital, around 1hr from San Cristobal, where darkness got us) and our destination, so we carried on.
Now, San Cristobal is a high city, almost as high as Mexico City (2100m), and being more humid, it was quite chilly. We went for a walk, and were convinced that at a later time, we had to stay for several days there. The city is beautiful, the region is breath-taking, there is a lot of great handicrafts as well, and it's overall very cheap. Really lovely place.
San Cristobal de las Casas Cd. Cuauht moc La Mesilla Guatemala
Once again, this day started early. We woke up ready to leave at 7AM, and not earlier because the hotel's parking didn't open earlier. After a very quick visit to San Cristobal downtown, to take some photos that were not right the night before, we took the road to Comit n, stopping just for some
tamales de bola y chipil n for breakfast. Central Chiapas is almost continuously populated, differing from most of my experience in Mexico. It is all humid, and has some very beautiful landscapes.
We passed Comit n, which is a much larger city than what we expected, went downhill after
La Trinitaria, crossed a plain, and continued until hills started taking over again. We stopped in a very chaotic, dirty place: Just accross the border, where
Ciudad Cuauht moc becomes
La Mesilla.
This border was basically what we expected: There is no half-official place to exchange money, so we had to buy
quetzales from somebody who offered them on the street, at MX$2 per Q1 (where the real exchange should be around 1.50 to 1). While on the road, I was half-looking for exchange posts in Comit n and onwards, and found none (and being a festive day, they would probably be closed anyway).
But we were expecting this, after all, and exchanged just the basic minimum: MX$600 (US$50, which by magic became Q300, US$40). The tramit consists of:
- Spraying the car against diseases (which has a cost of Q18)
- Each of us has to go through migration. Note, in case you cross this border: We didn't expressly cross Mexican migration, so officially there was no record of us going out. Be sure to go through migration to avoid problems at re-entry!
Migration has no cost.
- Customs. As we were entering by car, I had to purchase a permit for circulation. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was around Q150, and the permit is valid for 90 days.
- That's it! Welcome to Guatemala!
La Mesilla is in Guatemala's
Huehuetenango Department, and from all of the
Departments we crossed until Guatemala city (Huehuetenango, Quetzaltenango, Totonicap n, Solol , Chimaltenango, Sacatep quez and Guatemala), this is the largest one. Huehuetenango is home to the
Cuchumatanes mountain ridge. We found beautiful, really steep, really fertile mountains. It is plainly amazing: Mountains over 60 , and quite often full with agricultural use Even at their steepest points!
The CA-1 highway is, in general, in very good shape. There are however many (
many, many) speed bumps (or
topes, in Mexican terminology. Or
t mulos in Guatemalan), at least a couple at every village we crossed, not always painted. The road is narrow and quite winding; it follows river streams for most of the way. We feared it would be in much worse shape, from what we have heard, but during the whole way we found only three points where the road was unusable due to landslides and an alternative road was always in place when we needed it.
After Totonicap n, the narrow road becomes a wide (four lane) highway. Don't let that fool you! It still goes through the center of every village along the road, so it's
really not meant for speeding. Also, even though the pavement is in very good condition, it is
really steep quite often. It is not the easiest road to drive, but it's (again) by far not as bad as we expected.
We arrived to Guatemala City as dawn was falling, and got promptly lost. Guatemala has a very strange organization scheme: The city is divided in several zones, laid out
in a swirl-like fashion. East-west roads are called
Calle and North-south roads are called
Avenida (except for zona 4, I think, where they are diagonal, and some are
Rutas while the others are
V as). I won't go into too much detail). Thing is, many people told us it's a foolproof design, and people from different countries understand the system perfectly. We didn't... At least not when we arrived. We got quite lost, and it took us around one hour to arrive to our hotel, at almost 19:00 Almost 12 hours since we left San Cristobal.
Went for a quick dinner, and then waited for our friends to arrive after the first day of work of ECSL, which we missed completely. And, of course, we were quite tired, so we didn't stay up much longer.
Antigua Guatemala
On Saturday, ECSL's activities started after 14:00 so we almost-kidnapped Wences, the local organization lead, and took him to show us around
Antigua Guatemala. Antigua was the capital of Guatemala until an earthquake destroyed it in the 1770s; the capital was moved to present-day Guatemala city, but Antigua was never completely abandoned. Today, it is a world heritage site, a beautiful city, where we could/should have stayed for several days.
But we were there for the conference, so we were in Antigua just a couple of hours, and headed back to Guatemala. Word of caution: Going from Guatemala to Antigua, we went down via the steepest road I have ever driven. Again, a real four-lane highway... but quite scary!
The main focus for this post is to give some roadtrip advice to potential readers... So, this time around, I won't give much detail regarding ECSL. It was quite interesting, we had some very good discussions... but it would take me too much space to talk about it!
The road back: Guatemala Tec n Um n; Cd. Hidalgo Arriaga
So, about the road back: Yes, we just spent three days getting to Guatemala City. We were there only for ~36 hours. And... We needed to be here by Tuesday morning no matter what. So, Sunday at noon we said goodbye to our good friends in ECSL and started the long way back. To get to know more of Guatemala, we went back by the CA-2 highway, which goes via the coastal plains Not close to the Pacific ocean, which we didn't get to see at all, but not through the mountains.
To get to CA-2, we took CA-9 from Guatemala. If I am not mistaken, this is the only toll road in Guatemala (at least, the only we used, and we used some pretty good highways!) It is not expensive; I don't remember right now, but must have been around Q20 (US$3). Went South past Palin and until CA-2, just outside Escuintla city, and headed West. All of Escuintla and Suchitep quez it is again a four lane highway; somewhere in Retalhueu it becomes a two lane highway. We were strongly advised not to take this road at night because, as the population density is significantly lower than in CA-1, it can get lonely at times And there are several reports of robberies. We did feel the place much less populated, but saw nothing suspicious in any way. Something important: There are
almost no speedbumps in CA-2!
The terrain stayed quite flat and easy as we crossed Quetzaltenango, and only in San Marcos we found some interesting hills and a very strong rain that would intermitetntly accompany us for the rest of the ride. So, we finally arrived to the border city of Tec n Um n at around 16:30 Approximately four hours after leaving the capital.
The Tec n Um n Cd. Hidalgo cities and border pass are completely different from the disorderly and dirty Cd. Cuauht moc La Mesilla ones. The city of Tec n Um n could be just a nice town anywhere in the country, it does not feel aggressive as most border cities I have seen in our continent. We stopped to eat at
El pollo campero and headed to the border. In the Mexican side, we also saw a very well consolidated, big and ordered migration area. Migration officers were very kind and helpful As we left Cd. Cuauht moc, Regina didn't get a stamp of leaving Mexico, so technically she was ilegally out of the country (as she is not a national... They didn't care about the rest of us). The tramit to fix this was easy, simple, straightforward. We only paid for the fumigation again (MX$60, US$5), and were allowed to leave.
Anyway, we crossed the border. There is a ~30Km narrow road between Cd. Hidalgo and Tapachula, but starting in Tapachula we went on Northwards via a very good, four lane and very straight highway. Even though we had agreed not to drive at night... Well, we were quite hurried and still too far from Mexico City, so we decided to push it for three more hours, following the coastline until the city of Arriaga, almost at the border between Chiapas and Oaxaca. Found a little hotel to sleep some hours and collapsed.
Word of warning: This road (from Tapachula to Arriaga) is also known for its robberies. We saw only one suspicious thing: Two guys were pushing up their motorcycle, from which they had apparently fallen. We didn't stop, as they looked healthy and not much in need of help, but later on talked about this Even though this was at night, they were not moving as if they had just crashed; nothing was scratched, not the motorcycle and not their clothes. That might have been an attempt to mug us (or whoever stopped by). This highway
is very lonely, and the two directions are separated by a wall of vegetation, so nobody would have probably seen us were we to stop for some minutes. Be aware if you use this road!
The trip comes to an end: Arriaga Niltepec Istmo C rdoba M xico
The next (last, finally!) day, we left at 6:30AM. After driving somewhat over one hour, we arrived to Niltepec, where a group of taxi drivers had the highway closed as a protest against their local government's tolerance of mototaxis. We evaluated going back to Arriaga and continue via the Tuxtla Guti rrez highway, but that would have been too long. We had a nice breakfast of
tlayudas (which resulted in Pooka getting an alergic reaction shortly afterwards) and, talking with people here and there, were told about an alternative route by an agricultural road that surrounds the blockade. So, we took this road the best way we could, and after probably 1hr of driving at 20Km/h, finally came back to the main road.
We planned on crossing the isthmus using the Acayucan-Juchit n road We were amazed at the
La Ventosa ("
the windy") area, where we crossed a huge eolic plant for electricity generation, so of course we got our good share of photos.
From then onwards, not much more worth mention. Crossed the isthmus via a quite secondary road in not too good shape (although there is a lot of machinery, and the road will much likely improve in the next few months/years), then took the toll freeway along Veracruz until C rdoba. We stopped for a (delilcious and revigorizing!) cup of coffee in
Hotel Zeballos, where Agust n de Iturbide signed with Viceroy Juan O'Donoj the treaties that granted Mexico the independence.
Traveller, beware: When crossing between Puebla and Veracruz, there is a steep slope of almost 1000m where , you will almost always (except if it's close to noon) find very thick fog; taking the highway from C rdoba, this is in the region known as
Cumbres de Maltrata. We had the usual fog, and just as we left it, a thin but constant rain that went on with us up until we got home.
Crossed Puebla state with no further eventualities, and arrived to Pooka and Moni's house by 22:00. Less than one hour later, Regina and me arrived home as well. This was four days ago... and I have finally finished writing it all down ;-)
Hope you find this useful, or if not, at least entertaining!
If you read this post in my blog, you will find many pictures taken along the trip below (Well,
if you are reading the right page, not in the general blog index...). If you are reading from a
planet or other syndication service... Well,
come to the blog!
Dreamhost woes
Oh, and... Yes, it sometimes happens: My blog is hosted at
Dreamhost. This means that usually it works correctly... But sometimes, specially when many people request many nontrivial pages, it just gives an error. If you get an error, reload once or twice... Or until your patience manages ;-)
For the last couple of years, one of the topics I have tackled with several columns and a couple of articles published, several presentations on conferences and many comments wherever I can is raising awareness on why security experts around the world oppose electronic voting.
Slightly over a year ago, I started gathering all the published news (in Spanish, with some notes in English if I feel them relevant enough) that came to my greedy hands and archiving them, categorized as well as I could, into what I came to call an Electronic voting observatory. I don't feed it with the frequency I'd like, but overall I do feel there is an interesting amount of information in there.
About a month and a half ago, via Twitterfeed, I set up a Twitter account where my bot echoes everything I get on that regard.
So, while you can follow the observatory via RSS (as probably most readers of my blog will do), I know there are many Twitter users among you @e_voto might be interesting to you if you speak Spanish and are interested in the topic.
I try not to be partisan on the information I copy there; of course I am subjective (I try not to refer to news which don't provide new insight or data points, or to obvious repeats), but I am doing this effort to follow the development as it unfolds, not to push my viewpoints.
The goal of this article is to describe the setup I've made for my
home LAN behind a FreeBox (French ISP Free.fr).
This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who 
I was at the 
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A new version 0.2.9 of
Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (
The lab is hosted on 
From here, each router in the tree knows how to handle multicast
packets from 
Since October 2011 my flatmate and I where quite busy realizing a little pet project of ours called 
The traditional way to mount Windows (or Samba) shares involves hardcoding the credentials in a plain-text file and some 
During (first) connection, you will be prompted for your password and you have the possibility to store it in the GNOME keyring (and here it s encrypted, not in plain-text!).
You should also configure the Gigolo preferences so that it starts minimized in the system tray (because we re going to run it on session startup):
The last step is to ensure that Gigolo is executed at the start of each GNOME session. Unfortunately this GNOME feature is no longer accessible from the control center so you have to execute 
You re done!
The main limitation is that those shares are not real mounts, instead they are available within GNOME s virtual file system (GVFS). If you use only 100% GNOME application, then it s not a problem but otherwise it s pretty annoying. You can t cd in those shares from a terminal for example.
There s a workaround though, it s called gvfs-fuse and you installed it right at the start of this HOWTO. This service hooks into GVFS and exports all the virtual filesystem(s) in a real fuse-based mount that is automatically setup in ~/.gvfs/. However for this to work, the user must be in the fuse group. So you should run something like this:
A friend of mine recently reminded me of the 
Over the years, I have had many different blogs. I mainly use them to post updates regarding my work in the FOSS community, with most of these relating to Ubuntu/Debian. My most recent blog was a Wordpress instance I ran on a VPS provided by a friend. This worked pretty well, but for various reasons, I no longer have access to that box.
Earlier today, I started thinking about launching a new blog. The first problem I had to overcome was deciding where to host it. Many of the groups I am involved with provide members with a ~/public_html directory that can be used to host simple HTML+Javascript+CSS websites. However, most of these sites do not have the ability to use PHP, CGI, or access databases. I realized rather quickly that if I were to find a blogging platform that I could run from a ~/public_html directory on one of those machines, I would never have the problem of not having a host for my blog ever again. There is a near infinite number of free web hosts that can handle simple HTML sites.
One key feature of any blog is the ability for readers to subscribe to it. Usually, the blogging platform handles automatically updating the feed when a new post is published. However, my simple HTML blog would not be able to do that. Since I knew I did not want to manually update the feeds, I started looking for a way to generate the feed locally on my personal machine and then push it to the remote site that is hosting my blog.
About this time, I started compiling a list of features I would need to make this blogging platform usable. In no particular order, they included:
[1] 
There have been a few interesting discussions going on in parallel
about my 
Synaps
Synaps is written in around 7k lines of Python (with 28 % of which are
comments), reuses at least one common module of OpenStack
(openstack.common.cfg) and copy some modules from Nova. One thing that
strikes me, is that there seems to be only a few unit tests compared to most
OpenStack projects. Also, many parts of the code and documentation contains
text written in korean, which won't be very helpful for most people! :-)
It uses some external technologies, like 
Overlap with Heat
For now, there's not a lot of overlap with Heat, because Heat does not
implement completely the CloudWatch API. Heat actually still misses a lot of
the CloudWatch functions. But as soon as it will implement the CloudWatch
API completely, the overlap will be complete with Synaps in this regard.
One divergence point however, is that Heat uses RPC to access data from the
storage back-end via its engine (the central daemon), whereas Synaps
directly connects to Cassandra. Also, Heat relies on SQLAlchemy, like most
OpenStack projects needing a database.
Overlap with Ceilometer
One of the goal of Ceilometer is to provide data probes and pollsters for
all OpenStack components (Nova, Swift, Quantum ) whereas Synaps let the
OpenStack users to put any kind of metric inside it, and therefore doesn't
provide anything for now.
But the storage of metrics is the main common point between Synaps and
Ceilometer. Synaps chose only one technology, Cassandra, to store its
metrics, whereas Ceilometer took care of building an abstraction layer for
the storage engine. Ceilometer currently allows an operator to use SQL or
MongoDB, but Cassandra could likely be added.
Data metric consolidation is done by Synaps. This makes sense, since Synaps
don't need to have the full data history to trigger alarms. On the opposite,
Ceilometer needs to have a full history to allow things like billing, and
don't do any aggregation on data.
Also, in Synaps, the data analysis is done using Pandas. This means the data
used are retrieved from the Cassandra back-end, and then transformed by
Pandas inside Synaps in something else. It's likely that in such a case,
Synaps should use CQL to achieve that. Ceilometer manipulates the data near
their storage: it means that the computation are done by back-end to be
efficient (SQL, mapreduce ).
Conclusion
Considering Samsung open-sourced Synaps late in the development process, I
don't feel like they aimed to have it becoming a core component. This is
always sad, because the effort put into this implementation are big and it
would have probably little to add some abstraction layers to follow what
other OpenStack projects do. But this takes time and energy, and it's
understandable that Samsung didn't want to achieve this in a short time
frame.
There's a part of the code and architecture that overlaps with Ceilometer
and Heat. Ceilometer is becoming a specialized point to store data metrics
from any source: so it's sad, but understandable, that Synaps did not tried
to reuse it. Fortunately, Heat is working with Ceilometer to achieve exactly
that. This means OpenStack would have only one metrics storage point, used
for billing, for monitoring and alarming.
Therefore, I think Synaps is an implementation of CloudWatch that should be
looked at as an inspiration for Heat and Ceilometer to build a better and
more integrated solution!
I recently read this book and it was enlightening -- that is the least I can say. It is organized into a set of recipes addressing the most common problems you have with puppet. I think the whole point is about being practical and it gives you various ways to achieve the same goal, depending if you want to do a quick and dirty hack or pick a long term solution. The whole book aims at being practical and it achieves this goal pretty well. However, it is not for beginners. Puppet itself is not for beginner and you should already have written and run into problem to really take advantage of this book.
I read the book in 5 days (only while commuting), and at each page I thought : "OMG, they do that like this" or "of course, you should use git + that" and wait impatiently coming back home to test all this stuff. The book is really about technical details and how to organize yourself to write nice Puppet classes. I have been an "irregular" user of Puppet since 4 years. I was mainly running it to distribute files on all my computers. Since 3 weeks, I am applying the recipes found in this book and it is just like discovering that you own something worth a million euros.
Let look at some example:
