Several years ago, Pinochet was prosecuted by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garz n:


On October 17, 1998, while traveling to the United Kingdom for medical treatment, Pinochet was arrested on a Spanish provisional warrant for the murder in Chile of Spanish citizens while he was president. Five days later, Pinochet was served with a second provisional arrest warrant from judge Baltasar Garz n of Spain charging him with systematic torture, murder, illegal detention, and disappearances. Pinochet was placed under house arrest in Britain while appealing the legal authority of the Spanish and British courts to try him, but eventually released on medical grounds by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw without facing trial. .

Garz n became my hero since that very moment.

Since then I have been repeating like crazy: Pinochet, al talego , which barely means Get Pinochet behind bars . Now I am smiling as I think Pinochet, al hoyo , which I will not even try to translate. I pity the worms his unpunished criminal corpse will breed.

Go take a look at the Valech Report.

Cheers!

(Translated from my same post in Spanish) A few days ago, McDonald published a cartoon on the end of the dictator Pinochet. Yesterday, fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet died in the Military Hospital in Santiago, after heart and lung diseases, being 91 years old. Now, current president Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist, in case Pinochet is given State memorials, could be attending the ceremony (in a predominantly conservative country as Chile), even after she was tortured and persecuted under the dictatorship and his father was murdered under the regimen, after serving Salvador Allende‘ government. Shitty life, huh? Viva Chile!, just as the ironman stated.

Last night, when we got home after the long weekend up around theawesome Terres de l'Ebre, first thing I learned from the news is that Augusto Pinochet had finally died while we were driving back. It is too bad that once again he managed to avoid a trial that would have made him officially guilty of all the horrible happenings of Chile during his military coup and his bloody dictatorship. But he's gone now, and this will be a great relief for the thousands of Chileans who survived his regime, and for those who lost family members or friends just because they defended some ideals. The world will associate his surname to torture, murder and corruption; he surely won't be remembered for the image of the old, calm man surrounded by family members that an ever-shrinking minority tried to transmit. Last night, I raised my cup to celebrate Pinochet's death. Viva Chile!

So it is hard to believe that in less than a month I will be somewhere, to be exact, Puerto Rico, that will be 80 degrees warmer than it is right now. And after weekend, it will be 100-105 degrees warmer. Yep, the cold (frikken) snap has arrived to Edmonton and it is preety intimidating. So long as there is no wind, it is tolerable but so long as there is some wind, it is unbearable. And I will park myself at home if that is the case. We were going to make a big trip to the mountains this weekend but with that type of weather, that may have been the end of me. And being that I think I am the only person in Edmonton from Puerto Rico…. that would be a shame. And speaking of the RICO… WikiTravel has chosen La Isla del Encanto as the spot for the Wiki Travel Get-Together. HAY Mamita y Papito, que HOT, as one would say… Evan Prodromou a.ka. MrBad, also a Debian developer, kick started the travelpedia and is going to be lucky enough to go. I am not sure if I can make it but I hearby promise to provide a detailed “map” of where the travelpedias should venture as I know the really good goods.. And they range from the Nuyorican cafe in El Viejo San Juan to hitting a couple of beaches on the amazing island of Culebra, going to Pinones Sunday night to listen to Rumba and anyway the list goes ON AND ON… I will be inspired while baking in 86 degrees (as opposed to freezing in-20 of Edmonton) and will provide le map.

We got back from Europe 36 hours ago, and I've spent most of the time sleeping. We'd had a pretty rough flight across the Atlantic -- although of the three of us the baby was the least grumpy. I'm a terrible jet-lag victim, though, and just a few hours of time change really messes with my wp:biorhythms. Yesterday was Amita June's first birthday, and although we were all tired we had a good time just the three of us. My parents, Maj's parents and our siblings all called, and we picked up a few presents that had been shipped here while we were gone. Amita got a trip to the toy store (net haul: 1 rubber ball, one Caillou book, one crapload of block toys) and a special breakfast. Sadly, she and her papa fell asleep together before she got her birthday dinner. We're having a birthday party at our house on Saturday, "from 3PM to bathtime". It should be a little more lively than our quiet day at home. tags: europe jetlag amitajune birthday

Malm I don't think I've posted anything in a little while, since before we went to wt:Malm . We had a really nice time while we were there. I had corresponded with Sean Finney, another Debian developer who lives in Malm , before we left for Europe, and he'd offered a meetup. We had a free day in wt:Copenhagen so I figured I'd take him up on the offer. Malm is only about 40 minutes from Copenhagen by train, so we were able to take a trip over quite easily. There's a beautiful bridge between wt:Zealand and wt:Scania which we crossed by train -- the water was beautiful. We managed to miss Sean at the train station -- I'd given some pretty tenuous instructions on how to meet us -- but we managed to get out and see the town a bit for ourselves. The old city has two squares -- the Stortorget or Big Square and Lille torg or Little Square -- right next to each other. The Lille torg is circled by restaurants and we had a decent lunch at a place called the Moose Bar -- Scandinavian staples like salmon with a Thai presentation. A good idea. Sean managed to catch us as we were walking around, so we had a nice coffee together at a caf on the main drag. He's been in Malm for more than a year, and is taking classes at nearby wt:Lund. We managed to exchange GPG key signature preliminaries (what Maj calls the "Debian butt-sniffing ceremony") and had a good time talking about the state of Debian and Free Software. We split up at the train station and Maj and I went off to explore the towns small castle. It has a number of museums, but it was late in the day on a Sunday, so we opted instead for a walk to the beach, looking out to the bridge and ultimately the skyline and wind turbines of Copenhagen. After a long walk circumnavigating Malm 's distinctive Twisted Tower, the tallest building in Sweden, we headed back to Copenhagen for a dinner at Tivoli Gardens (probably my favorite spot in Copenhagen). tags: copenhagen malm travel sean finney debian

Z rich We made a special stop on the way home to Montreal through wt:Zurich. We flew on Swiss Air, which has a hub in Zurich, and they gave us a free 24-hour layover in town. Fortunately for us, we got to spend some time with our good friends Mark Jaroski and Allegra Biava. They're friends of ours from SF who moved to Switzerland around the time Maj moved there, and they now live in wt:Lausanne. Both are extremely funny, intelligent and clued-in people. They were passing through Zurich on their way back to the US for a family visit there. I'm glad we got to see them, since I got to meet No ma, their 2-year-old daughter. No was born about 8 months after we last saw Mark and Allegra -- they weren't even telling people they were pregnant at the time. She's a barrel of laughs -- a real fun little person. She and Amita June got along great. We spent most of our time walking around central Zurich, seeing some of the sights and taking it easy. There's only so much tourism you can do with one toddler, and two toddlers raises the requirements considerably. I think the big downer for Zurich for me was how many people we didn't see. I'd hoped to connect with Alex Schroeder, founder of CommunityWiki, and also Martin Krafft, another fellow Debianista. Most disappointing, we missed Marco Prestipino, who's doing work at the University of Zurich in information transfer in online communities. tags: zurich mark allegra no ma

My language-jumping post in English about a German advert got the entirely fair feedback of "That's the worst Germanism I've ever seen giving me the creeps!" as well as a pointer to German influence in US English.

Back in April I mentioned the fun and games I had trying to get a nice dual-DVI setup working with my new HP dc7600. The other problem that I’ve been experiencing since then is a complete inability to play any audio. The machine has an Intel ICH7 High Definition audio chipset onboard which is theoretically supported fine by the snd-hda-intel kernel module, and indeed everything loads fine and shows up in /proc correctly. However nothing ever comes out the speakers! lspci output below
0000:00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company: Unknown device 3010
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21
Memory at e0a00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities:
Today I sat down and tried to work out what was going on, it turns out the Realtek ALC260 chipset that is used on this motherboard supports quite a few different pinouts, so while snd-hda-intel knows how to drive it you don’t actually get any sound unless you have the correct mapping setup! The driver attempts to do this automatically for a number of different motherboards and there is a entry in the table for my particular motherboard (Subsystem 0×3010) mapping it to the ALC260_HP patching, but still nothing works! Eventually I stumbled across ALSA Bug #2157 which fixes an identical problem for a different motherboard (Subsystem 0×3012) by using the ALC260_HP_3013 mapping in the driver. So, taking a guess, I made the same change for the 0×3010 mapping, rebooted, and voila, I have sound. Patch below:
--- sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c.orig 2006-08-05 21:13:49.000000000 +1200
+++ sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c 2006-08-05 20:33:17.000000000 +1200
@@ -2951,7 +2951,7 @@
.pci_subvendor = 0x152d, .pci_subdevice = 0x0729,
.config = ALC260_BASIC , /* CTL Travel Master U553W */
.modelname = "hp", .config = ALC260_HP ,
- .pci_subvendor = 0x103c, .pci_subdevice = 0x3010, .config = ALC260_HP ,
+ .pci_subvendor = 0x103c, .pci_subdevice = 0x3010, .config = ALC260_HP_3013 ,
.pci_subvendor = 0x103c, .pci_subdevice = 0x3011, .config = ALC260_HP ,
.pci_subvendor = 0x103c, .pci_subdevice = 0x3012, .config = ALC260_HP ,
.pci_subvendor = 0x103c, .pci_subdevice = 0x3013, .config = ALC260_HP_3013 ,


Photography. My roommate Aigars is quite a photographer, he came with his digital SLR and several lenses, an item I've lusted after for some time. Large apertures and manual controls are what every real photographer demands, and digital SLR's deliver. I told him my idea for a small sky recording station so that people could make movies of the paths that the stars take, and how it changes over the year. Ultimately I want a network of these stations, all uploading their pictures so I can examine them for anamolies. This is a hard problem, because stars are so faint. Aigars said to take a picture of the whole sky, a 1000 millimeter lense and a $50 computer scanner with some modifications should be able to do the job. Programming. Finally made progress in programming, now that I know where everything is in Oaxtepec. My IRC bot didn't handle things gracefully when the server refused to let it log in, but that is fixed now. Tomorrow I hope to add multi-channel support. Reading through the new IRC RFC, I have the information I need to make a proper configuration file for the software. The design is sketched out and feels right, finally. Weekend vs. Weekday. Oaxtepec is much quieter today. Saturday and Sunday there were far more vendors on the street, and they stayed open much later. Today everything closed down around 6pm when the church bell tolled the summons to mass. I couldn't find the coconut man; maybe he only comes on weekends. Half the stalls at the mercado were empty. During the weekend, the resort was full of vacationers swimming, barbecuing, picnicing, playing soccer, or just sunbathing while the kids ran around. Everyone, young and old, but mostly young adult men and women, were running around in bathing trunks and bikinis. The happy noises were great to wake up to. This morning the sounds were quieter, but still present. The swimming pools here get a lot of use. During the weekend, there was a large tent where some ladies were giving body massages for $10. I didn't see them today. Probably they will be here again next weekend. Food. Tried a dish called "pancita" today. I saw people eating noodles and assumed pancita was a noodle dish, like the Filipino pancit. But no. It is a type of tomato soup filled with chopped up beef rind and chunks of fat. For only P31, I bought a small chicken. It was perfectly marinated and roasted, better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. I paid the money, and the shopkeeper brought out a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into all the appropriate pieces for easy eating, just like they do in Korea (viz the use of scissors) Church. Attended mass tonight, since the church was so close. The church is magnificent. It really is a cathedral inside; to see the ceiling you have to crane your neck. And when you do, you see paintings of angels playing instruments. I went into the nave to pray, and saw a giant depiction of the ark of the covenant. It was very realistic, with the cherubim covering it with their wings. And above it, was a painting of the wine and bread offering, which were offered on the altar daily. The priest was a black man from Illinois; after a bit of attempting to speak to each other in Spanish, we realized we both spoke English, and got on famously from then on. The cathedral opens at 10am, closes for lunch from 2pm-4pm, and then is open until mass is finished. This must be what the church was like in the beginning; a place where believers could drop in any time to be with others of their kind, to meet, eat, drink, discuss, and elevate each other to a higher plane. I am sad that we don't have this in Canada. Debian. There were some Debian talks and presentations, but nothing too interesting. Finally met Mark Shuttleworth, Anthony Towns, Manoj Srivastava, and Roblimo Miller. Clifford Beshers of Linspire almost convinced me to look into the Haskell computer language. I couldn't quite tell what Haskell has that LISP doesn't, apart from forcing strong types on you and being very fast and efficient in benchmarks tests. Marga didn't give me meal tickets before, so Graham printed some up for me today. By pure serendipity, I sat at dinner with the only other Canadian developers at the conference; Simon Law and Eric Dorland from Montreal. The drinking started at 11pm and is still going strong; the atmosphere is very convivial right now, but half of us are still tapping away at our keyboards.

It begins like this:

1. Charo posts; gets syndicated on Planet Ubuntu-PH
2. Some bloke notices it, and eventually gets into rant mode talking about freedom of choice’.
3. Same bloke posts something really stupid:

you’ve completely diverged from the topic. the original question is why this individual is advocating non-free and proprietary toolchain in a group that is supposed to advocate free software. Freedom is subjective and we will not be able to end up this topic when we go to technicalities and social relevance.

Um, I’m having a difficult time parsing this. See below:

I guess what the Geekette should do next time is fix her drupal to categorize her blog and have only those free stuff aggregated to the community site then let her non-free stuff just stay here and its case closed.

Or get a better feed reader that filters out what you want to filter out. Be as persnickety as you can be. Go figure. You’re free to do the above, just as the Geekette is free to blog what she wants to blog, in whatever category she feels like posting in. After all, its her blog, and definitely not yours (or mine either.) Which is why I chose to post this as my post, not as a comment. Feel free to be an ignoramus. Planets, for those of you playing at home, can be thought ouf as just fancy RSS aggregators on the Web, especially for those who don’t have the luxury of a good RSS reader (or those who choose not to read via RSS, like me.) The Ubuntu-PH administrators could in theory impose some Draconian criteria for selecting which blog posts from persons to show, but in practice, they just don’t, probably because they feel that contributors are smart enough to be able to judge for themselves what they want to blog. I can understand this bloke’s pain, since our Planet is, after all, a “window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu Team Philippines community members.” However it should also be obvious that the world is not so perfect, since even if we do get to use Ubuntu freely, we also get to have the choice to use some shackled software for some end. Freedom may be subjective, but it is definitely also self-referential too; you may have the freedom to not have a particular freedom to do something, and vice versa. A little Matrix philosophy is in order, care of the Oracle: “You’re not here to make a choice, for you have already made the choice. You are here now to understand the choice.” Now, figure me as stupid. I’ll just move along DhIconCacheChanges, help my fellow cadet in the X-SWAT, fix Debian Bug#360950 (despite lacking an amd64; readers, care to donate one? and continue to give my love for FOSS…

If you base any opinon about something in Debian on the presence of a cabal, your conclusion will be fundamentally incorrect.

Heh, its been more than a day now since I got back from Manila after the Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour, and even then I have some stuff to do here (both IRL and IOL work) before I could find some time to blog Here are the highlights of my trip:

• Feb 1 - Arrived in Manila around 6 in the evening; spent the early part of the evening looking for an internet cafe to check on mail. libmemcache got ACCEPTED, but it FTBFS on powerpc $DEITY, I sure wish I had my desktop with me! (or at least some access to a ppc Looked for someone on #debianPPC to help me solve it (and indeed got the hint by the next day Slept late.
• Feb 2 - Woke up late, checked mail only to be told by Jerome to GO HERE NOW to the Peninsula Manila for the ABT breakfast meeting. After a short tirade with some Ayala traffic enforcers about crossing pedestrian lanes, I was able to arrive (already late) to Garcia Villa, seeing Jerome, Charo, Clair, and Dom, providing a nice representation for both PLUG and Ubuntu-PH. The Inceptions folks (who I met last time at LinuxWorld) were there as well. Mark was already talking when I arrived, while Hande and Malcolm from Canonical were at the back with the local media; and after that, I got to talk with the SABDFL, of all things, about my Debian packaging adventure last night :/ After lunch, we then transferred to the National Computer Center at UP Diliman (Canonical in the chopper, Ubuntu-PH and PLUG in Jerome’s Picanto) to continue the Tour for government representatives and CIOs (which didn’t go quite well in my opinion; imagine crickets signing in the night), NGOs, and academe (which was much better, especially since Doc Pablo Manalastas asked the last question regarding backports.) Mark and company had to leave early, which left us PLUG/Ubuntu-PH people going to the UP Shopping Center for snacks, some talk, and an early wrapup. I however still slept late. Photos by Charo are visible.
• Feb 3 - After doing some errands in the morning, I went to Makati to meet up with Shelley, Markku, and Rommel of Inceptions. I will be doing a project with them

I’ve adopted opendchub, rccp, and xshisen from Grzegorz Prokopski too Heh, I’ll be quite busy this coming week…

Now here’s the thing I’m supposed to write It took me quite some time since I was too busy sleeping Looking back at 2005:

• January :

• I started this blog (on the 22nd)
• Submitted my UPOU application

February :

• I got into using planner-el
• Tried my hand at managing GtkLP for Debian in Subversion
• Got to know more about BitTorrent as well
• Got a Gmail account
• Successfully set up Linux-2.6 on St. John’s Debian Woody box malinao
• Got to know Clair via this very blog

March :

• I met Ubuntu Warty, Clair, and Mario too after my UPOU admission exam
• Moved to Emacs 22
• Delved into Lisp while coding an MP3 playback script on Warty
• more PlannerWiki goodness

April :

• More Lisp programming
• Video card replacement
• Attending my first PLUG Technical Seminar

May :

• The usual summer routine: teach swimming and maths

June :

• Back to school
• Tried blogging under Emacs PlannerMode, in which I have inadvertently spammed Planet Debian and Pinoy Tech Scene, earning the ire of Mako
• Attended the first meeting for Software Freedom Day with Sacha, Clair, and Rick. Also met Jerome for the first time

July :

• Sacha (left for Toronto on the 15th)
• Went back to WordPress

August :

• ITA on ecb
• Preparing the LinuxWorld conference
• Trying out Arch
• Released a new GtkLP for Debian

September :

• New ecb package (which to this day hasn’t been uploaded yet, looking for sponsors

• Software Freedom Day on the 10th!!! Met Donnie too
• LinuxWorld at Dusit!!!
• MidTerms!!!
• Started contributing to Ubuntu

October :

• Finals!!! (yeah, just after midterms
• NatSci finals in Naga City, looking for Linux users too
• Became a Ubuntu Member

November :

• Became a MOTU

December :

• Glimmer of hope
• Another GtkLP release
• Lost cellphone
• Meeting Ealden for the first time at the Ubuntu-PH EyeBall
• Thankful for $DEITY letting me live another year

Things to I want to do this 2006:

• More Debian and Ubuntu work
• Learn some more programming languages
• Try other VCSs/RCSs
• Really finish school
• Catch up with my RL

Things to look out for:

• Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour/Philippines
• PLUG’s very own hacker conference/camp
• Bicol Open Source Forum (and perhaps Bicol’s very own LUG

Rock on, 2006!

I’m at Ayala Center in Makati, enjoying the Sunday life amidst the buzz of the mallrats. I’m also enjoying the free internet provided by Globeline’s kiosk here, as well as access to a (locked-in) HP laptop with wired LAN. Anyhow, I’m not too comfy here, blogging without a chair to sit on, and dragging a backpack too, so let me do this quick. Yesterday I met up with the Ubuntu-PH people (namely, Jerome. Clair, Donnie, and Ealden) for our Christmas EB at Congo Grill in El Pueblo, Ortigas. I almost got lost trying to find the location, which I knew was somewhere near SM Megamall, and since I was coming all the way from UP Diliman via the MRT. Nevertheless, after some asking-around, I finally got to where I was supposed to be, and ate a hearty meal with chicken and garlic rice while listening to the channel, er este, people chatter (amidst the roaring Christmas party another gang was making.) After the meal, we then moved to The Podium nearby and sipped some coffee at Starbucks, then talked some more about Ubuntu, Gnome and KDE (especially the recent and quite controversial thread on desktops,) and some other stuff mentioned in Donnie’s post. There was also some stuff to be brought up at the next team meeting (see TeamMeetingAgenda) that we touched on, in particular that bit about membership to Ubuntu-PH. Well, it took us almost a midnight to wrap up; even then, along the road towards EDSA we were still talking about Ubuntu-PH, PLUG, and the AsiaBusinessTour, before we all finally parted ways. Indeed, EBs like these rock, especially when we’re all doing something great together as a team. Indeed, the next year seems to hold great promise for Ubuntu, Linux, and FOSS for the Philippines—and we’re at the forefront of it. Now, I need to go, and eat some Whoppers…