It's been quite a while since my last post, so this will mainly be an update on what I've been up to the last weeks or even months. Overall the past time has mainly been pretty busy. It was the end of the semester, a time that always brings a lot of work, and in this case it was the end of my last semester, which adds a little extra pressure to the whole business, since I didn't only have to take care of the usual stuff, but also had to arrange for an appropriate topic for my upcoming thesis, which is always a kind of a "balancing act". Things are however looking good now and I am quite confident that I'll be able to spend the six months I have for my thesis on a subject that actually interests me, my tutors, complies with the official guidelines, has some purpose beyond getting me a Master of Arts AND EVEN has a realistic chance of actually working out! Yay academia! Apart from university work I've been kept additionally busy by my jobs, which unfortunately also both had a kind of peak during the last weeks. The problem about this is, that actually both of them were intended to be "only-jobs" since they both provided me with enough money and consumed just as much time as I could spare during the semester. But then I got accepted for both of them and absolutely couldn't decide which one to chose (one was at the university as a teaching assistant, the other at a pretty cool IT security consultant's) so I did both and have been juggling those two, my studies and actually getting to sleep/eat every now and then during the last weeks. This has been pretty exhausting, but on the bright side, I have a little spare money now to spend while the holidays. (Luckily both bosses are on a 3-4 week trip in August :)) One thing that suffered rather greatly from my very tight schedule this semester (apart from my horribly neglected sweetie of course) was my Debian/Free Software work that got almost entirely stalled ever since I returned from DC6. So I hope to be using the more quiet summer months to spend some time on this, maybe write a nice new talk and package some things I've had my eyes on for quite a while already. Oh, and I'll sleep. A LOT! PS: Last night, to celebrate the end of the semester, we went to see the Pirates of the Caribbean double feature. Hilarious!! Go see it!

So recently the prime minister of Iraq criticized Israel for a disproportionate response in their attacks against Lebanon. I don't know his exact words, but in general, I agree with that sentiment.

It's no big surprise that Bush and Republican leaders have all been rushing to support Israel and taking their sweet time before helping with a ceasefire, and taking plenty of time with that process, too.

So it's also no big surprise that a number of Washington politicians mustered up a good deal of righteous-sounding moral indigniation at the Iraqi PM. There were some that boycotted his address to Congress today. Lots of fiery rhetoric.

But here's the surprise: it was the Democrats doing this.

Huh?

The populist party, the one that's supposed to be valuing life and perhaps has recently started to grow a backbone in opposing ever-broadening war, is now in support of Israel's tactics?

I think it's all politics. The Republicans don't want to criticize the PM because he's part of the process their party started. And the Democrats want to pander to their base and criticize anything related to an unpopular war.

I don't think very many people in Washington from either party have genuine ethics these days. They just take whatever moral position they think will win votes.

John Goerzen professes not to understand the apparent inconsistencies in the Presidents positions on life issues. While I can't speak for him, I am as near to a "typical Republican" as you are likely to get around these parts and although I'm busy with other things I feel compelled to explain how they are in fact consistent.

The foundation is a belief in the innate dignity and right to life of Man simply by virtue of being a member of the human species. Therefore the default position in any case should be to protect against the unnecessary taking of life whenever there is a choice in the matter. Therefore abortion is wrong precisely it is as its defenders say a "choice." Stem cell research is also wrong on these grounds but as a clump of cells is not clearly a human being you can agree to disagree on that. Those who do think it is wrong should not be forced to participate in murder which is why the government is against Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research not against the practice altogether. (Also remember there are other sources of stem cells.)

The innate dignity of a person can be made forfeit by an act of will on the part of that person. Thus a murderer has no right to life, by his personal actions he has surrendered it. If fetuses started leaping out of vaginas and attacking people, they would forfeit their right to life too but they don't.

What John conspicuously fails to mention concerning the 30,000 Iraq civilian deaths is how they died and who killed them. In the vast majority of the cases it is at the hands of those who putatively were on their own side. So how is Bush or America morally culpable? In the few cases where Americans have deliberately caused civilian deaths, they have been punished for it. But where is the outrage when terrorists do not wear uniforms and deliberately hide amongst civilians and in religious sites? (May I note that such behavior is against the Geneva convention and UN resolutions though I'm aware such things only apply to Israel.) It is the Baath party and Al-Qaeda have right to life issues concerning the war in Iraq not the US.

You can disagree with any of these positions--even from a conservative or Republican point of view but my point is they are consistent. And I daresay being easier to understand, they resonate more strongly with the electorate than the muddled messages of the Democrats.

Hall and Oates in '08!

Speaker break-in tme myth or reality tries to debunk the myth of audio speakers needing time in orders of 30-50 hours to get to ther best audio properties after purhase.
I bought a new set of Sennheiser HD 215 a few weeks ago. I unpacked them and conected to my laptop. I was blown away by their performance, but something at how the bass frequencies were “muddy” and not clean confused me. Then I read in the manual that I should play some music on the headphones for at least 30 hours to break them in and only then they would get to their best audio characteristics. So I left the headphones on the laptop and left some music playing in them overnight and only came to them after at least 20 more hours of breaking-in. I put the same music on as I did the first time and I was not dissappointed - the bass was much more clean and instruments in the bass area were finally as distinct as they should be at this level of headphones. I did not listen to the music during the break-in time, so my brain did not adopt to the sound of these headphnes - they acctually sounded better.
I do not really care that a distinguised loudspeeker engineer can not find an explanation of how this break-in happens, but that does not change the fact - it exists.
Update - A few more links:

• Discussion - fun starts around page 10
• Pro-burnin article

In the end peple end up playing sine waves and measuring frequency response thus oversimplifying the problem. It is well possible that non-sinusiodal sound is needed for proper break-in (as in sound with multiple different frequencies at once, or sound with harmonics, …). It is well possible that the “sharpness” or “mddiness” that is reported by the audiphiles as the characteristic of a non-broken in sound system is not something that is measurable by frequency response - aharmonic dispositions, temporal dispositions and other distortions of the sound are easy to detect by a trained ear, but very hard measure with precision unless targeted. Also people ignore the real complexities of the materials that are used. We think that wood is simple and plain and understood material, but in reality wood is such a superior microcomposite material that it has properties that are still not nderstood by modern material science. And when we get cooperation of metalic parts, wood, chemicals and, most importantly, natural and complex vibration - predicting all effects of such vibration on the complex system, that is a simple speaker, is … well … complex. Audiophile ear can easily hear distortions that normal audio equipment simply can not measure with any confidence. Discarding phenomena that one simply does not know how to measure or explain is just blindfolding yourself. I was even more fascinated by the description of an simple non-scientific experiment showing break-in effect on audio cables. This was discarded outright as impossible, but it is acctually much easier to understand. Cable is simply a thin piece of metal through which a stream of electrons is flowing. It is not too hard to imagine that these electrons traveling at light speed could impact any impurities or defects in the cable. Any such impacts would distort the analog signal going through the cable. Also after multiple weeks of electron bonbardment it is not impossible to imagine such impurities or defects (or the material around them) being changed in a way to ease the flow of electros (like wind erosion of rocks) thus breaking-in the cables and improving their sound - making it more fluid. That is quite easy to see - why should not there be a set of similar efects working on a whole audiospeaker?

My maternal grandmother Estill Winfree Barksdale passed away on Saturday night. She was 101 years old. I was fortunate to grow up near all of my grandparents and many other elder relatives. They each had some impact on my perception of the world, on what I think is important, and on how I try to lead my life. But it's the little things about Grandmother that flood my mind today... from lemonade made pink with juice from the bottle of maraschino cherries always in her refridgerator when I was little, to the firmness of her grip several weeks ago when I last saw her. She was extraordinary, and I will miss her.

Came home from a weekend in the mountains with my family to discover that the UPS serving the stack of networking gear and the main gag.com servers had shut itself down, apparently during a big thunderstorm last Thursday evening. Fortunately, pushing the "on" button on the UPS was enough to bring everything back to life with no apparent loss of data. But I can't help wondering if there isn't something wrong with the UPS, since it should have powered itself back up even if the batteries got run all the way down... nothing useful in the error logs.

My wife couldn't read her email last night. Turns out the old Apple Airport wireless access point we still depend on had failed again. All lights blinking red, and a low buzzing sound in time with the blinking. Same symptoms as the other time it failed. Turned out to need the same fix again, too. Disassembled the flying saucer, and started wiggling parts on the board with the power applied until I found where the buzzing was coming from... one of the electrolytic caps in the power supply. Fortunately, I had a suitable replacement in my parts stock and we were back on the air ten or fifteen minutes later. One of these days, it'll fail during daylight hours and I'll just drive into town and buy an 802.11g hub to replace it... after all, my current laptop supports a/b/g, and the old hub is b-only. But, when it's night, it's snowing, and there's a hockey game on... having tools, parts, and experience troubleshooting recalcitrant widgets is good for family harmony!

Quote from Joey Hess: In 1999, Debian began moving /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc to comply with the FHS. Due to unfortunate dpkg issues at the time, we couldn t simply move the directory and be done with it, but decided to move things peicemeil by updating all packages. Due to some silly concerns about users having to look in two places during the transition, we decided to start by making /usr/doc/ -> /usr/share/doc/ symlinks. In 2001, putting any documentation in /usr/doc became a serious policy violation. The symlinks were still allowed. In 2002, we completed the first stage of the transition, released woody with complete /usr/share/doc and /usr/doc directories, and policy was changed to not require the /usr/doc symlinks. debhelper was changed to stop adding postinst and postrm fragments to manage the links, and so most packages only needed a recompile to finish the transition. As a result, More than 250 bugs were filed, blockers of #322762. Most of these bugs, rot in peace in the BTS for years, some maintainers fixed them themselves, some other maintainers NMUed and others did QA uploads to deal with this issue. But it was not enough. It looks like at a certain point I decided we would not ship Etch with a transition from 2002 still in progress, so I did approximately 114 NMUs between the 11th and the 18th of July, fixing 152 bugs, 46 of which were not related to the /usr/doc transition. I also closed the ones affecting packages not in testing or unstable, unblocked the ones for packages that would not ship with etch (as exim3, that will be replaced by exim4), and updated the MIA info for several of the maintainers. At the same time, I revamped packaging a bit if I felt inspired to do so. Sure, things went wrong at bits and places, which I later fixed the best I could, but inmense love was poured in these NMUs. Several maintainers thanked me and the most NMU-unfriendly people didn't even complain. Lars Wirzenius pointed me to other related bugs, found by upgrading from testing to unstable with piuparts, and added blocking relationships with #322762 where needed. At this stage, less than 5 open bugs remain. I suspect that more packages once created this link and don t remove it on upgrade. I would need some help to find them. All this NMU fever happened while Joey was away on holidays, and when he returned, he confirmed my fears, I had DoSed his email and bandwidth: <joeyh> amaya: did you have to fix all the /usr/doc bugs while I was on vacation?
* joeyh watches his inbox and BW groan at the seams :-)
There is still several important and minor issues that we should deal with before Etch is released, Release Goals or not, just because we are Debian, and just because we care about this sort of things:

• The "You still Build-Depend on Xlibs-dev" Transition.
• The "You left a link link in /usr/doc" Transition.
• The "Please use Invoke-rc.d in all maintainer scripts" Transition.
• The "Let's switch to Cdebconf" Transition.

Some of you will argue that these might not be transitions per se, just mass-bugfilings. I don t really care how you d rather call it. If you are looking for easy ways to help Debian, or to fill your lazy summer afternoons with, provide a patch today and CC: me. I intend to group these bugs either using user-tags or blocking bugs in the BTS. Help locating them and grouping them will also be appreciated. [Updated entry to reflect more accurate NMU and bug totals]

FAT32 code has a different license to other parts.In addition to usual BSD clauses, it is restricted from use outside of EFI.This is bad.Fortunately, it seems like Mactels supporthfs+ filesystems. Which is good.Source to efi-shell is available.

Our TV set was broken, and when my dad went to have it repaired, he was first suggested to buy a new one instead. The sales clerk basically told him that it's outdated anyway, not being 16:9. Fortunately, my dad doesn't let people talk him into buying stuff that easily. We got out (100 Hz, 4:3) TV set repaired at a different place, and cheaper. Actually most TV productions are still at 4:3, so IMHO it doesn't make much sense to buy a 16:9 screen, unless you are a cineast and watching DVDs every day. I don't. Where 16:9 strikes me as even worse is with computers. Why would you want a 16:9 screen unless you are watching DVDs on it all the time? For most people, the relevant sizes are 4:3 (photos) and their paper size (e.g. A4). So if you are using word processors a lot, a 16:9 screen is just stupid. You'd probably be better off with a 9:16 screen, which could contain a full page and the edit toolbars. However, such a screen on a laptop would look odd, and probably be not too stable. But 4:3 works, and is better than 16:9.

Yesterday I got my new workstation, a Dell Optiplex GX620. And after my bad luck with Ubuntu 6.06 in my IBM T42 notebook, I wanted to give Ubuntu another try. And it failed again. Installation with the Alternate CD just hanged when writing much to the harddisk, e.g. when installing the packages. I had to reboot the machine, which ended up in a kernel panic. This was reproducible a few times, but happened at different positions during the installation. I played around with some apic, acpi and pci boot parameters, but none of them helped. Then I decided to try it again, without any special boot parameters, and finally, it worked! Packages unpacked, grub installed, and reboot. It ended up in grub telling me "Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition". The reason was because the installer used one of my two swap partitions for the root device in grubs menu.lst. After fixing this, the machine booted fine. Everything looked good, until I rebooted the machine. Again a kernel panic during shutdown. This kernel panic during shutdown still happened after upgrading the kernel to the latest security update. Then I took a Debian CD, and it just worked. Altogether I really can't understand the hype around the Ubuntu distribution. Compared with Debian, it's indeed easier at some points, but it's also much more broken.

Last night's CC Salon in Montreal went extremely well. I spent the time haranguing Marcus and Tina Pipers (the co-director of Creative Commons Canada) about the evils of anti-DRM clauses in licenses. (See Free content and DRM for my opinionated take on this matter.) Apparently there was a lot of talk about this at the iCommons summit in Brazil. Amita June enjoyed the noise and attention and spent an inordinate amount of time patting one hacker's very long beard. We'll see what kind of psychological symptoms that develops into later. tags: cc cc salon montreal marcus bornfreund tina pipers cc ca drm

Ben Macintyre on Wiki It was kind of tiring to see Ben Macintyre's note on How wiki-wiki can get sticky in The Times Online.

• Many years ago, I wrote a book about a Victorian crook called Adam Worth, a subject so obscure that no one had ever written a book about him before, or since. When I found an entry for Worth on Wikipedia, I was at first astonished, then flattered to find the book cited in the references, and then slightly infuriated: whoever had written the entry had plainly read my book and summarised it, but added several small but irritating errors.

Wikipedia isn't perfect and contains some errors? Oh, really? Boo hoo hoo. Yawn, turn the page. Wait, though; what's that last paragraph say?

• At first, I ignored the mistakes. This was only Wikipedia, after all. But the landscape of knowledge has changed since then, and I have joined the club. Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.

Huh. A mainstream journalist who realized the way to deal with errors in Wikipedia is to fix them? Am I dreamin'? tags: wikipedia wiki media ben macintyre adam worth

Lately we are looking at groupware options, and have been looking at Scalix and Zimbra. We may need the features in the proprietary versions of these products, unfortunately.

So I downloaded an evaluation copy of Scalix.

They say they support RedHat and SuSE. Fine, I think, I'll just alien the RPMs to debs and be happy.

Not so fast. They have a whole proprietary install system. They check for /etc/redhat_release or /etc/SuSE_release (or something like that) and do different things depending on what is there. Ugh. Why can't these proprietary vendors just target LSB? The differences seem mostly related to init anyway.

So I touch /etc/SuSE_release into existence, run the installer again. It complains that DISPLAY is not set. UGH. I log in with ssh forwarding, to root (sigh), and run it again.

Now it complains that the SuSE_release file doesn't contain a valid release. I google a bit, but the file format doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. I extract it from an RPM somewhere, but no luck.

So, I figure at this point, let's try an actual RPM distro. I'm running this in a Xen domain anyway, so it should be no big deal, right?

I think CentOS will be a good choice. It's RHEL with the non-free stuff stripped out. And they support RHEL and don't need any non-free stuff. I google, and find instructions for installing via rpmstrap for Xen uses.

Let me say, rpmstrap is not nearly the nice tool that cdebootstrap is. rpmstrap totally hosed the networking on the Xen host machine, requiring me to reboot to get it back to proper state. The resulting install wouldn't boot, either -- I later found out that, even though I listed explicit devices in /etc/fstab like usual, it requires labels on all my partitions to boot. Ugh. There are a host of other problems with the rpmstrap-installed chroot, and it's broken beyond my ability to repair due to problems with the rpm database.

So then I downloaded the "Server" CD for CentOS, which is supposed to have just the stuff a person would need for a server, and leave off all the graphical tools, multimedia, etc. I fired up VMware and did an install. Then I booted Debian From Scratch in VMware and used tar and netcat to copy the installed image over to Xen.

I got it booting fairly easily. But now I start to remember why I had this instinctive gag reflex last time I used RHEL.

First off, the network configuration, by default, is tied to the MAC address of your ethernet card. So if you replace your Ethernet card, your network is broken by default.

Then, there's the way the network is brought up. It uses arping as part of its procedure to bring up a NIC. If it sees a reply anywhere on the network with the IP you're trying to assign, it leaves the NIC half-up -- it's been ifconfig'd up, but without an IP. So that's right, if somebody happens to have a rogue device plugged in at the moment your server boots, your server will come up without a network configured. This is *Enterprise* Linux and it's pulling this sort of thing. Terrible design.

Next, there's the way the network is *configured*. There are commands such as system-config-network-tui, -gui, -cmd, -druid, etc. I go for -tui. to start with. It's a dialog-like interface, and asks the basics like IP address, etc. It doesn't have any way to configure more than one Ethernet card that I can tell. And some of the settings -- like nameserver -- apparently require you to press F12 to visit. But the program doesn't recognize F12 as sent by an xterm, so it doesn't work.

All the other options require X. So, I reluctantly ssh -X into it as root and run system-config-network-gui. It doesn't work -- complains it can't find DISPLAY. Strange, I think; DISPLAY is set properly to localhost:whatever. It turns out that /etc/hosts is empty by default, so the thing can't resolve localhost! Argh. I add a line to /etc/hosts and it fires up.

This tool works decently. I save, uncheck the tie to a MAC address box, and exit. I then think it might be good to fire it up again and see what it did. I try running it again, and get the same error about DISPLAY. The stupid tool blew away /etc/hosts and replaced it with an empty file! This is NOT what I would expect from an Enterprise Linux. You don't blow away a config file the administrator touched without asking, EVER.

Next, I figure, let's try installing the XFS tools so I can switch the root filesystem to xfs. I start with "yum update", which doesn't quite do what I expect. (It is more like apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade) So I hit Ctrl-C, but -- surprise -- IT DOESN'T WORK. I press it a few more times, and it seems to just make the downloader cycle through mirrors because of a "download error". So I hit Ctrl-Z and kill %1. I have my prompt, but it's STILL DOWNLOADING STUFF and spewing all over my console. Ugh.

I finally use ps and kill -9 and eventually get it killed off. Stupid thing.

I don't understand why anybody would want to use RedHat Enterprise Linux in an enterprise. It seems more suited to a hobbyist system at home. From reading some forums, it seems there are quite a few people out there using Debian for enterprise systems for similar reasons.

So now, maybe I'll have the chance to actually try Scalix.

(BTW, our intern got Zimbra installed on Debian just fine, so that's a plus for it.)

So, I'm on my way for a short visit to work before I leave for Wolverhampton, specifically, LUGradio live. I am, as tradition expects me to be, awfully late, but I didn't forget my passport (like I did for Mexico) or my ticket (that was Oslo IIRC). Fortunately I noticed early enough both times. Obligatory comment whoring: what else is there that would be bad to forget?

At home I run an Ubuntu server which I unfortunately upgraded to the sigh Edgy Eft. Damn, I used to think Debian unstable was unstable! On the couple of occasions the machine wasn’t broken, I stupidly did a dist-upgrade. When will I learn? Perhaps I like to “repair” a broken system to learn more about my system. Who knows. Anyway the last dist-upgrade with X failing to start with some “fixed font” error, had me thinking about rolling back updates. As far as I know, downgrading to dapper requires some precarious apt pinning and some praying. I should try that. Rolling back and comparing with old versions could be easier. Of course there is the great resource of Debian snapshot though I usually just download the package I require by hand. I could try set it up with apt, but I highly doubt down grades work with wild inter-dependencies like the X server suite. Anyway it could be better integrated. Like a version control system, without the conflicts. ;) I can’t help but think why should my box ever be broken? If an upgrade b0rked, why doesn’t it just go back to the last working snapshot? Oh well, we’re still miles ahead of Windows update. Though having to restart firefox is almost as disruptive as rebooting the entire system.

Dear etch-a-sketch-lovers. Or basically, anyone who cares about etch hopefully being released in december. If you aren't busy with fixing RC bugs, probably because you don't trust your own skills enough (or don't have upload privileges, or are taking a break of your favourite BSP) - how about working on Debian artwork? Ubuntu is working on their artwork for Edgy. I'd love Debian to have (optionally) some cool Debian look. I mean, we'll probably be never as polished as Ubuntu artwork-wise, but we sure could do a lot better than now. That is, do at least something... You don't need to be a DD to work on this. You can just use the existing linux theming web pages such as art.gnome.org, Gnome-look.org and KDE-look.org to share your artwork, and maybe use the Debian Wiki to coordinate your efforts. If enough people are interested, you probably can organize a mailing list, too. P.S. Although the release will be codenamed "etch", there is no need to make the default desktop look like an etch-a-sketch. Just make it something smooth... ;-) [Update: The EtchGNOME status page lists "update desktop-base" as work in progress. This is where the artwork will be "deployed". However, KDE and XFCE integration is still a bit lacking apparently.]

On July 10 my trainees started a project on Sourceforge called bibliotheque. The training is about web development (Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, SQL) and the whole six month day time courses, they use Debian GNU/Linux (guess why ) (well, some installed Ubuntu on their laptop). The last big exercice is often a pain because they are looking for a job and they have a lot of interviews. So we decided the last project to be team oriented. I have the idea to publish it on Sourceforge so they can learn all how to use Bug tracker, Subversion tools the way we do in Free Software. Also, it’s amazing to see the enthousiasme of the trainees about a project that is published. Even those who are not ’so good coders’ did a lot of things like documentation, logos, maintaining the MediaWiki website (french). The web application they are doing is made with tools they’ll use in companies: Struts, Hibernate; they also use patterns like DAO, MVC; and they’ll try to integrate AJAX in the application. Congratulation to this group.

Sad, but true. Well, not so much networked, as attached to my Linux box... With Sarah going back to school, we needed a working printer. Numerous attempts at step-up transformer technology had met with failure, to the point where it was rapidly becoming more economical to buy a new printer. So we did. Today it arrived. We got a Brother HL-5250DN, for the princely sum of $230 from Amazon. Main reasons for going for it were it had built-in duplexing, like the Panasonic KX-P7100 it was replacing, but unlike the Panasonic, which I unfortunately discovered after purchasing, was a WinPrinter, the Brother is a full-blown PostScript/PCL printer. And it's network-ready to boot. Very sweet. It's very important to be able to telnet to your printer. It does the whole gamut of networky things (naturally the first thing I did after plugging it in was run nmap over it): FTP, Telnet, HTTP, SMB, LPD, IPP and JetDirect support. Oh, and SNMP. Awesome. It gave me a good excuse to have a quick tinker with CUPS, and now we can print from Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. Very nice. Much better than the stupid WinPrinter. Hopefully the consumables won't cost a fortune, and I wonder if A4 paper exists in this country?

A few months ago I wrote about the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic which was celebrated throughout the state. That weekend I visited a fantastic exposition of Republican and Revolutionary war propaganda posters, in Segorbe.

Today, Spain remembers the beginning of the end. During the evening of the 17th of July and morning of the 18th, a group of generals of the Spanish regular army raised against the democratically elected left-wing government of the Republic. History says that the murdering of Calvo-Sotelo, a right-wing leader, was what finally provoked the conflict. It was no secret that the same right-wing and some elements in the army had been conspiring for weeks about an uprise. The only question was when, but the government was fooled by general Mola and didn't take really effective measures to prevent it.

Warning from sanitary authorities against venereal diseases Mola and Sanjurjo planned to start taking over official buildings and army quarters and quickly seize control of the major cities. During the first hours of their rebelion, they managed to take over most of the southern regions in Andalusia, Extremadura and parts of the Northwest, plus most of the islands and the Moroccan protectorate area. Meanwhile, the Republic did not manage to react quickly due to the weakness of the government, and in the first days of the crisis, the government changed a few times. Finally, the Republican parties decided that to defend the state they should give arms to the unions, and soon after many militia groups were getting organised in the cities, and columns sent off to liberate other towns.

Solidarity of Catalunya to the Basque front The insurrection was suffocated in Barcelona after some heavy fighting against the military in the Montju c castle; the Anarchists of the CNT grew strong in Catalunya and Arag n, and offered good resistance in those fronts. After the first days of the coupe d'etat, it was clear neither the legitimate government or the rebels calculated how things would go after the first days. The government was confident in being able to end the rebelion as they did four years before; the fascists thought they would have quickly brought down the government with a successful coup. But after the first week, the country was divided in two halves, and both sides of the conflict were keen on fighting, due to the big social fracture during the last months of the government. The Republic asked for help to the League of Nations, but the United Kingdom and France decided not to intervene, scared about the conflict trespassing the Spanish borders and becoming another bloody war in European fields. The only official external aid came from the USSR and the International Brigades, formed by volunteers of more than 50 nations. Some well-known personalities like Ernest Hemingway or George Orwell came to aid as well. Orwell wrote about his life-changing experience in a Barcelona immerse in the social revolution, where he joined the anti-stalinist socialist party POUM. Badly wounded in the neck, he left the front and went back to Barcelona, and witnessed the assault of the Telef nica by the communists against the anarchists, during the fets de maig, after which the POUM was declared illegal. Orwell captured his experiences in the frontline and Barcelona in his book Homage to Catalonia.

To defend Madrid is to defend Catalunya Franco and Mola, aided by the Northafrican troops and soon after by their fascist allies of Italy and Germany, didn't have big problems seizing the Basque Country and Asturies in the North, but not before making the town of Gernika disappear below the nazi Condor Legion bombing, in what would be a test for the massive aereal bombings of Word War II. The battle for Madrid was fierce, and the city wasn't occupied until the very last days of the war. The long defence of the capital made was immortalised in the famous phrase No pasar n.

Madrid's No pasar n During the war, anarchist groups controlling fields and towns in Arag n and Catalunya managed to bring a Social Revolution to the area. The people collectivised the land and industries, administered by local assemblies. This experience is regarded as the time when Libertarian Communism has been successful. The experience ended dramatically when the anarchists were treasoned and blocked by the communists, and eventually defeated by Franco at the front.

Each bullet for a target After the first and a half years, the fronts had stabilised in Madrid and the East of Andalusia, until early in 1939, Barcelona fell in Franco's hands, after the bloody Batalla de l'Ebre, being followed by Girona and the rest of Catalunya. The fate of the democratic state was clear. Two months later, Madrid fell and Val ncia and the small area still under Republican control surrended.

Robert Capa's Muerte de un miliciano Franco declared a totalitarian regime to, according to the fascists, reconcile the two Spains. In the first five years of the regime, up to 100.000 were executed in the franquist repression, including the Catalan president, Llu s Companys and many intellectuals. The dictatorship continued executing people until two months before Franco's death, 36 years later. Hundreds of thousands also had to exile in M xico, France and other destinations, leaving Spain in ashes, road gutters full of scattered bodies and the population facing famine. The cultural elite left the country, making the state's clock go back at least a decade. Their reconciliation really meant humiliation and repression. Many people were also murdered during the war behind republican and rebel lines, but the genocide of the aftermath had was unmatchable.

The Republic promoted education among the troups It is a bit late to restore the dignity of the victims, but not too late. Some associations have been fighting since the end of Franco's regime to get some kind of public recognition for their suffering, for their priceless fight for the legal and democratically elected Republic, for the people who didn't make it.

Excellent anarchist poster rejecting the politisation
of children by any of the three loyal groups Other people reject these efforts banning them of "revisionism". Not too surprisingly, these are the sons or grandsons of the people who won the war. The current government is about to pass a Historic Memory law which aims to give recognition to all these people who gave their lives for an ideal and freedom. Unfortunately, due to pressures from the right, it is probable that the text will be ammended to make it more acceptable by them. I fear it will end up not pleasing the victims at all. I have a passion for Spanish Civil War related matters, and in the last years I tried to use any opportunity to listen to my Catalan grandmother talk about war affairs in Barcelona, and my grandfather, from a town in the middle of the Republican side of the Teruel front, but born in a very catholic family, about how the war went on in Vall and the nearby mountains.

From the defensive No pasar n to the encouraging Pasaremos! I know my grandfather only told me the less compromising stories, like how he was sent to dig refuges until he was 16 and apt to fight in the Front, or how he was put in charge of hiding the church's valuable relics in a few barns. He never told me about how life was after the war in the small town. It is dramatic to see that all the people who were old enough to have a sense of what was going on at the time are so old that these unvaluable memories and stories will be mostly gone in ten years. (Most of the pictures are taken from the Sociedad Ben fica de Historiadores Aficionados y Creadores' website, which has a huge documented catalog)