I watched last weekend Crash, a movie from 2004 that was played this year in Spanish theatres. It's is also an opera movie in which there are quite a lot of different stories happening at the same time and that are completely tied in one or other different ways. Very well written it is sometimes a drama and sometimes a thriller, or perhaps both at the same time, showing how differently behave and think characters with different racial backgrounds. One interesting thing is to see how stressed cops are in Los Angeles, because of everyone carrying a gun (or possibly), and how they behave aiming first their guns and being rude. This is completely different in Spain (and most of Europe), where a cop have to had a very powerful reason to pull his gun out of its holder.

I went to the cinema yesterday evening, and not having a clear idea of which film we wanted to watch, we decided for Manuale D'Amore, an Italian movie. It was great, funny almost all the time but with very emotive moments, all them mixed very well. The history is very simple. The movie introduces different couples that are in four different moments of their love: falling in love, the crisis, the traition and being abandoned. Every chapter is very well driven, and the actors play fairly well their roles. This movie, and the last one I watched, Los 2 lados de la cama, are good examples of European cinema very well made. In my opinion, if European cinema had followed this path more often, and with a bit more advertising, it will get more success than now, in which there are a lot of movies made trying to be different. P.S: I HATE people eating nachos in theaters.

The latest burning of different consulates by outrageous and uncivilized muslims only shows again one thing: they ask for respect for his way of thinking while at the same time they don't respect at all others way of thinking. Clearly, islamic movement is being used lately as comunism was used some time ago in Europe, as a way of control people and make them not thinking freely. Watching those images on TV makes me change my mind on respect to the islamic world. And while I think that perhaps those Mohammed cartoons could be offensive for muslims, their reaction makes me think that they deserve those. But what can you say of people that behave as the year they live in: 1441.

I have just discovered Planet Debian: search while I was looking my apache logs to see who was crawling my system. It has made my day, as I was looking for an article someone had psted previously but that was out of Planet Debian yet. Very nice tool!

I have just upgraded my blog to Pybloxsom 1.3 from 1.2 version. Seems that everything is working fine, and I hope this won't flood any planet.

pacta en la m s absoluta clandestinidad. Tal es la obscuridad y el secretismo, que ni su socio en la Generalidad catalana (ERC) sabe a n lo que se ha pactado con CiU, el partido que all est en la oposici n. Tras la bajada de pantalones que supuso el traslado de los archivos de Salamanca y que se realiz con total nocturnidad, ahora pactamos un estauto para la Comunidad Aut noma de Catalu a inconstitucional y de espaldas al resto de Espa a. Eso s , que sepa el presidente que una vez m s, como en los ltimos 25 a os, cada vez que se le concede algo a los nacionalistas, estos ya no est n de acuerdo y no les parece suficiente. Como perla, las palabras de Arturo Mas:

"Es un salto adelante, que no renunciamos a completar en a os futuros"

Lamentable.

I agree Matthew Palmer, and by extension Joel on Joel on Software that rewriting software projects from scratch is a very bad idea, which in case of FOSS can mean death of the project because people lost interest on it due to the great effort needed to reimplement things that were working before. At the same time I take what Joel says: programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. Being myself a Civil Engineer I cannot agree most. The other option is patchy and result will never be so good as a well planned project, with a good design, time... and money. And this is one of the greatest things of software. With a good planning you can refactorize it, change what you want and even demolish and rewrite some parts, whithout having to throw away all the old code and start over.

I went to the cinema yesterday evening, and not having a clear idea of which film we wanted to watch, we decided for Manuale D'Amore, an Italian movie. It was great, funny almost all the time but with very emotive moments, all them mixed very well. The history is very simple. The movie introduces different couples that are in four different moments of their love: falling in love, the crisis, the traition and being abandoned. Every chapter is very well driven, and the actors play fairly well their roles. This movie, and the last one I watched, Los 2 lados de la cama, are good examples of European cinema very well made. In my opinion, if European cinema had followed this path more often, and with a bit more advertising, it will get more success than now, in which there are a lot of movies made trying to be different. P.S: I HATE people eating nachos in theaters.

Last Sunday I Watched Corpse Bride, an animation film by Tim Burton, following what was made in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of course, animation has improved a lot since 1993 and now this film is plagued of close images of different characters. Though being a bit gore, the plot is quite interestig. Victor, who is going to marry Victoria, as their parents have agreed, messed up his vows during a wedding reharsal (the same day he meets Victoria for first time) and wanders to the forest close to the town, where he starts reciting them again. When he says them right, he accidentally marries the Corpse Bride, messing things even more. Now he has to decide to try to still marry Victoria, or go on living with his new wife. One of the problems we have in Spain with these animation movies is that lately they're are selling that most important roles are being played (dubbed) by famous actors. In this film, Victor is Johnny Depp, the Corpse Bide is Helena Bonham Carter and Victoria is Emily Watson. But as films here are always dubbed to Spanish, for us it is completely indiferent who the actor giving his voice to a character is. And this is worse when the Spanish actor that usually idubbes here an actor is not dubbing the animation film for whatever reason.

Woody Allen. Again, a great movie by him. Of course it has the same schema that most of his films, with a short number but great actors, and as with Melinda and Melinda, he does not play any role in it, but I am sure that main role is written for him. Anyway Jonathan Rhys-Meyers plays it wonderful. Special mention deserves how Scarlett Johansson is introduced in the film. First scene of her makes you jump in your seat. This movie has been filmed completely in London. Not a bit of New York. Even, the american girl is from Colorado. And Woody Allen makes a great picture of London city, showing nice locations, and transmitting well a "London feeling". When a ball hits the net, there is a moment when it can fell in any side.

This is a transcript of what a friend of mine sent as a Xmas card. Of course she is a lawyer, so I hope that this text can transmit you exactly my feelings.

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2006, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. And without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee. By accepting these greetings you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for herself or himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Hey! This is the meme of the moment, so I had to blog about it! Feliz Navidad!

When I connected my IM client today aftera couple of days of being offline for different reasons, I saw that two people had written to me because of Jingle being released as offcial JEP (Jabber Extension Protocol). Those are JEP-0166 and JEP-0167, the former for "low-level" signalling and the latter for specific audio and video calls. I strongly belive that this will expand usage of VoIP, as people will find quite natural being able to call a person that is currently available, which is managed by presence status. Oh! And for those of you who don't know yet... Jingle is what Google Talk is using right now.

Of course I also had to jump into this Web 2.0, and share some photos.

There have been a lot of hype lately about Social Network or Web 2.0. Of course this is not anything new, but a translation of natural social relationships to the network. Haven't you ever showed your travel photos to your friends or family? Well, in an exercise of exhibitionism you can now show them to the World using a tool like Flickr. Yeah, you could show them before using your blog, which it is also a way of Social Network, but now you can see not only your friend's and family's photos, but a set of them made by people from all around the globe. At the same time, you can still publish your thoughts in your blog, and read other people's thoughts in these different Planets or using an RSS aggregator. Was blogging what started all this? Well, talking with a friend of mine the other day we realized that the impulse of publishing in people is amazing. Before blogs started to exist everyone wanted to have his own personal webpage in Internet. And the revolution was GeoCities. With it anybody could publish his homemade webpage... which usually was a webpage talking about a hobby, or the family, with different links, but few live content. People want to share... want to share experiences, photos, ideas, bookmarks, ... want to talk with friends and family, wherever they are, and this is why IM now (and VoIP in a near future) have had so great success. First half of the 21th century is going to be voyeurs epoch!

Ok. Today Autodesk released some little piece of code into the Free Source world. It is nice to see more software released with Free Software licenses, but being myself a Civil Engineer what I would appreciate is a version of AutoCad running in UNIX/Linux (I do not mean here that it should be open, or whatever). It is funny to realize that AutoCad 12 could be ported to Linux easier than 2005 version of the same software, as they abandoned UNIX software so many years ago. And more when you think that they made that because somehow UNIX was dead in workstations by then, and Windows NT was getting all the heat and was the way to go(TM). Though I have said before that I don't mind AutoCad being propietary software, I would be also very interested in .dxf files become an open standard. That would make developing compatible and perhaps open source CAD systems easier, as every drawing and designing tool out there can export files to dxf easily.

For some time I was looking on using different meta-categories in Pybloxsom. When I asked about how to do this on Lazyweb, Tollef Fog Heen told me about using fakecat. This morning I was a bit bored, and I wanted to give it a try. It failed. But being free software world and as I wanted to read some python code, I put some effort on fixing it. It now runs in Pyblosxom 1.2 and have other little improvements. I would put it online gladly, but as original does not have any license sticked on it from Tollef, I am not allowed to publish my modifications. Well, I am not even allowed to modify it, but well, this is for my own comsuption :-)

Upgrading a BIOS in Linux is not usually an easy task, and it is even more difficult if you don't have a floppy drive, as it happens in a modern laptop. Today, I have just read in Bastian Nocera's blog about memdisk, which can be used from grub. Seems a nice tool to test in the next upgrade.

Last Sunday I Watched Corpse Bride, an animation film by Tim Burton, following what was made in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of course, animation has improved a lot since 1993 and now this film is plagued of close images of different characters. Though being a bit gore, the plot is quite interestig. Victor, who is going to marry Victoria, as their parents have agreed, messed up his vows during a wedding reharsal (the same day he meets Victoria for first time) and wanders to the forest close to the town, where he starts reciting them again. When he says them right, he accidentally marries the Corpse Bride, messing things even more. Now he has to decide to try to still marry Victoria, or go on living with his new wife. One of the problems we have in Spain with these animation movies is that lately they're are selling that most important roles are being played (dubbed) by famous actors. In this film, Victor is Johnny Depp, the Corpse Bide is Helena Bonham Carter and Victoria is Emily Watson. But as films here are always dubbed to Spanish, for us it is completely indiferent who the actor giving his voice to a character is. And this is worse when the Spanish actor that usually idubbes here an actor is not dubbing the animation film for whatever reason.

One day like today, 20th November, 1985, Microsoft released its shiny new Windows 1.0 which was the first attempt to implement a graphical multi-task OS in a PC. Do you know how much it cost then? $100 for a license, more or less the same than a Windows XP license costs nowadays.

It is funny to see how things have evolved since then. Being 6 at that time, and PCs not being very common those days at home, I started using a computer at an age of 8 or so. It was an Amstrad PCW 8512, a TV box sized computer which integrated a green screen monitor, two "3" floppy bays and a 9-pin dot matrix printer. It was powered by a 8bit Z80 processor, running at 4MHz and had 512KB of RAM and no ROM at all. Main software was LocoScript, a powerful word processor. It could be controlled by drop down menus at a top toolbar, and initial screen was a file manager, in which you could manage those text files in the floppy you booted from or a floppy in the other bay. It had even support for some kind of multiuser support, as you could declare in each floppy up to 7 user areas, with area 0 being a common root. Also, it had support for limbo a place for deleted files. Although LocoScript didn't need a separate OS to work, CPW 8512 could also run CP/M OS, which added programming capabilities (Maillard BASIC) and support for spreadsheets and databases, along with some games as Batman. After using this system for a long time, my first PC was a 486, running the new Windows 3.1 and later 3.11 for Workgroups version. I even installed there a Windows 95 when it was released, and managed to create a partition in the only 170MB HDD it had to install a test copy of IBM's OS/2 Warp that came in a CD bundled with PC World magazine. Some time later my parents bought a Pentium 166MMX running Windows 95. I was 18 by then, it was 1997, Internet was starting to be widely spread and used, and after a couple of months at University I was installing my first Linux copy, which was a RedHat based version. During next three years I installed different distributions, as they were released with newer software and you could get them in a CD with a magazine. Installing Debian Slink and having an Internet connection available at my Student's Residence at the same time made me be able to participate in mailing lists, send bug reports and download upgrades. I discovered a new dimension in using Linux: collaboration.