Hacking for fun and profit

Our friend and notorious chichero (or chicha as he used to say), toggg, has just passed away. He colaborated to several open source projects, like SPIP, jQuery, Tikiwiki and PEAR.

Dear North American People,

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Now please stop the war.

Love.

- The rest of the World.

Update:

The IntarTubes speak (via BoingBoing):

and my favorite:

(explanation of the meme)

This is one of my favorite (very) short stories:

Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe - ninety-six billion planets - into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honour of asking the first questions is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God ?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a god.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

‘Answer’ by Fredric Brown.
©1954, Angels and Spaceships

Hi computer!

Previously.

People that know me personally know that I LOVE my keyboards.

No really, I love them.

I even wrote about them two years ago: IBM Model M - The One True Keyboard.

These keyboards are a triumph of technology. Future generations will talk about Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, the Great Pyramid of Gizah, and the IBM Model M Keyboard. These keyboards are the epitome of human civilization.

Really, they are that good.

I have more than 10 Model M keyboards now, and before you ask: NO, they are not for sale, and NO, I will not give you one. Some day I will die, and my son will inherit the keyboards. Since every single modern keyboard is a piece of utter crap, I want my son to hack with some style.

But now I see another advantage of using a Model-M, you can kill an attacker with it, and it will still work.

Two scientists, Paul Honig and Anne Jan Brouwer, made this discovery replacing an attacker’s head with, well, watermelons.

Not only that, they also discovered that you can defeat an attacker if he uses a lesser keyboard as a weapon.

The IBM Model-M IS mightier than the sword.

Read more in Keyboard Carnage (digg).

Some moths ago I wrote about the BDFL considering the use of the Django web framework.

Cronologically it went like this:

Please Teach me Web Frameworks for Python! (2006-01-27)

Literally a cry for help. He didn’t quite like the magic in Django, considering he used a pre magic-removal version.

Web Framework Redux (2006-01-30)

Perhaps WSGI represents the “blank slate” approach; Rails/Django represent the wizard approach; I’m still looking for the ideal mix-and-match solution.

Django vs. Cheetah: 1-0 (2006-01-31)

Guido is beginning to like the Django templates.

Which Part of “No XML” Don’t You Understand?

This one is related to his previous post. Guido just think that the use of XML in a template engine is WRONG. I couldn’t agree more.

Django Gaining Steam (2006-5-4)

Guido talks about Jacob’s Django talk in the Bay Area and Jeff Croft’s Django for non-programmers (a great article).

Months after that, Guido got interviewed in FLOSS weekly (2006-08-04) and he declared:

Leo La Porte (LL): Python doesn’t have a native GUI, there is TCL/tk… is that an issue?

Guido van Rossum (GvR): It seems to be coming less and less of an issue because more and more people are doing everything over the web

LL: The web is an interface, yeah

GvR: So of course that doesn’t really solves the problem because then you have, as I say, more web frameworks than keywords in the language. My personal favorite and I expect that will remain personal favorite for a long time is something named Django.

LL: I was going to ask you about Django. There was just a … just somebody published some article, interesting I think it was in the Rails website testing Django, Rails and a Perl framework and Django was by far the fastest.

GvR: Interesting! I didn’t hear about that.

Chris di Bona (CdB): How do you measure something like a web framework?

LL: Well they set a simple site and they used web testing applications to create lots of transactions and measure transactions and Django was like significally faster. So tell us about Django.

GvR: I am a very satisfied user of a very small part of Django. Django is sort of, I would call it probably a second generation web framework in Python where first generation would be things like Zope and Twisted. Django was originally started I think two guys who work for, believe it or not, a newspaper in Kansas. Not a very glorious location.

CdB: Well, it’s funny because Zope and Plone came out of the (??) newspaper.

LL: Well you know why, they have to streamline production workflows, that’s a big deal for a newspaper

GvR: Maybe that’s the case. This paper in Kansas decided that they wanted to set a local website with information for people in their town that was very responsive to the audience. They wanted to publish things very quickly but also not just add new articles to the site which everybody can do, but change the site completly, add new ideas, new features to the site, add new applications. They came up with endless number of examples, for example publish the sports, like the local sports results of the little league complete with hyperlinks to the teams and photos and all sort of interesting stuff. And they wanted to be able to roll that out very quickly and so I think they did that for maybe two years, and the two guys who did it and working with a bunch of editor who where providing the content, as they were doing that they realized that they needed a framework and they sort of grew a framework out of their first application. As they (??) what kind of things their editors were constantly asking them to them change to the site, they developed more flexibility in all those areas. And at some point they said let’s open source it and they got support from the newspaper. And then a very interesting thing hapenned. I suppose the newspaper is still using Django in some form (they are, and in fact they are selling the CMS they build). I think both of the original developers are no longer working there and they started Django the Open Source Project and what I found really great about that is I talked to those guys a couple of times and see them give presententations and I’ve seen how they work, and they really get open source. And they have a good license, but in my view even more important is the whole process, the way they work with the user community, the way they answer, they find a ballance between chaos and democracy and anarchy and sort of between Cathedral and Bazaar. They let lots of users add new features and provide ideas without losing the original thought and flexibility of the framework and I can think they are really doing a fantastic job at making Django a better product that goes way beyond what that original Kansas newspaper needed.

(now they talk about the Django vs Rails benchmark and how Django is an order of magnitude faster than Rails…)

LL: I will have to take a look at Django, because that’s pretty impressive.

GvR: Absolutely, I highly recommend it.

And yesterday (2006-08-17), at least two sources (Titus Brown and The Third Bit) are talking about what the BDFL said in SciPy 2006:

• Django is the web framework.
• It won’t be included in the standard library because of different development cycles, but will (should?) be as “standard” as PIL or NumPy
• He hopes that Django and TurboGears will converge

There is a discussion about this on reddit.

What do you guys think?

I have a personal blog in Blogger, but I never liked any of the templates available, both official and unofficial. So I just ported one of my favorite Wordpress templates to Blogger: Hemingway.

Go to the Hemingway template for Blogger page for downloads, sample sites and instructions.

Share and enjoy.

Google has finally announced their long anticipated “paypal killer”. The name: Google Checkout.

One cool feature of Google Checkout is that you can buy from stores with a single Google login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you’ll see a little icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout. It’s an easy way to identify fast, secure places to shop when you search. And after you’ve placed your order, Google Checkout provides a purchase history where you can track your orders and shipping information in one place.

And clickz reports:

Additionally, AdWords advertisers will receive free payment processing for sales of up to 10 times their monthly spending. A company spending $1,000 in one month for AdWords would receive $10,000 worth of free payment processing the next month. Beyond that, or for non-advertisers, the charge will be $0.20 and two percent of the sale per transaction. PayPal charges 1.9 percent and $0.30 per transaction.

But, is it a paypal killer?

I don’t think so, but it will really hurt paypal since it operates in it’s most profitable market: business online payments. It doesn’t compete in the peer to peer payment arena, maybe in the future.

Now let’s see paypal’s reaction on all this. Competition will be good.

Ned Batchelder writes about a new service providing a live stream of all the matches in the Football World Cup in Germany via Telnet. This is like watching the world cup in the Matrix, really.

All you have to do is telnet to ascii-wm.net port 2006. There are no details on how it is done, but I guess they are using aatv or something like that.

And now for the screenshots.

This is Figo:

And this is Cristiano Ronaldo:

More text mode magic:

• Text Mode Quake
• Text Mode Quake II
• Text Mode Unreal Tournament

And if you use MPlayer, you can watch your videos and DVDs in text mode with the “-vo aa” codec (aalib).

I hate spam.

Email spam is under control thanks to SpamAssassin, but comment and trackback spam was a big problem. Wordpress antispam measures are useless. Every day I had to remove between 5 and dozens of spam-comments. I could have used a captcha or even worst, a moderation queue before a comment is displayed, but there are some issues with these approaches:

• They are rude, like having a “you are not welcome here” sign.
• They discourage participation
• They don’t stop trackback spam, and in wordpress, trackbacks look like regular comments

But the biggest problem for me is, of course, all the time I waste babysitting everything. A moderation queue would take me even more time. That’s unacceptable.

Looking for some solution that keeps blog spammers at bay without human intervention (MY human intervention), I discovered Akismet, a wonderful thing that works like many solutions in the email antispam world: a colaborative database of spam. Quoting from their FAQ:

How does it work?

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

That’s wonderful. For those of you without server admin experience, this is also the (IMHO) best approach to stop email spam.

And now the best part:

Do I have to maintain a blacklist?

Nope! Part of the idea of Akismet is that you’re always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There’s no maintenance, no upgrading, no hassle.

Ahh, no more messing with wordpress’ silly internal blacklists.

And the best of all is, every akismet user contributes back to the system. For instance, if a spam comment can make it and gets approved (something very rare), I will quickly mark it as spam. That will feed Akismet’s central database and every user of the system will benefit.

Let’s see some stats now, Akismet is telling me this:

Akismet has caught 59,503 spam for you since you installed it.

That’s a hell of a lot of spam. I have been using Akismet for like three months. It has caught more than 660 spam comments every day. And in all this time only 5 or 6 spam comments made it to the blog, I quickly marked them as spam. Akismet alone saved me HOURS of blog babysitting and spam removing. I love it.

Months after I discovered FreeBSD’s excellent performance, and because my debian unstable desktop became, well, unstable, I decided to give FreeBSD as a desktop a try.

My desktop needs are pretty basic, I just need:

• GNOME: Originally I migrated from fluxbox to Gnome to “try linux as a real final user”, now I just can’t live without it. It is a solid, simple and elegant desktop. I need an enviroment with excellent Gnome support.
• Mplayer/xmms: I like to watch movies while I work. It helps me to relax. When I need to focus a little more (when I am programming), I need xmms for some good old Ludwig Van.

That is pretty much it. Both Firefox and xterm are everywhere, and I take them for granted.

FreeBSD covers this pretty well. The FreeBSD Gnome project provides a great enviroment and I was very happy with my desktop. I could see ALL my videos with mplayer, and I didn’t have flash installed in firefox (I HATE flash).

But after months of bliss, problems arised:

First, when I tried to sync my palm wigh Gnome, it didn’t work. I remember this was damn easy in Debian. I just forgot about it and never used my palm again. I really didn’t care too much.

But then, something REALLY annoyed me.

When the Snakes and Rubies videos (Django and Ruby on Rails) were released, I couldn’t watch them in FreeBSD. I had to go to use a Windows box. I really tried everything I could but the codecs just didn’t work in FreeBSD. I gave up.

After that, an email in the django-users mailing list mentioned that the snake and rubies videos were in Google Video. The problem is that Google Video uses flash. I hate flash. I hate flash sites. Flash is awful.

But google video and youtube (also flash) are great sites, and have great stuff. I was missing all that.

This weekend I decided to install flash in FreeBSD.

I did. I installed the most recent “supported” version of flash in FreeBSD: Flash6. The problem is, both Google Video and youtube need Flash7 to work. And flash7 support in FreeBSD is pretty bad (there is no flash player for FreeBSD so it must run in linux-emulation mode).

Now, Installing Flash in FreeBSD is not as simple as it is in other OSs. For instance, the port that handles linux plugins for firefox is bugged, and wasn’t creating a plugins directory. I had to read Makefiles to see what was wrong and create that directory by hand.

Also, to install the Flash7 port, you must apply a patch in your core userland source code and recompile it. Can you believe that? Recompile the core of your operating system just to run flash? Anyway I did that. The docs said there was the risk in some systems that nothing would work.

And it didn’t work.

That was my last night with FreeBSD. I decided I needed another desktop. My list of candidates was short:

• Mandriva: Maybe, but it’s too KDE centric, I need a good Gnome desktop
• OpenSuse: Suse is good if you just install it and never touch it again. But it is by far the worst OS to upgrade. It breaks. It commits suicide. You have to fix things. It will waste your time. Avoid it like fire.
• Fedora: I used FC4 for a short period, a very solid desktop, but I still have nightmares with RPM.
• Debian: Now we are talking. The quintessential linux distro. My favorite linux for a server, but for a desktop, why should I use unstable when now I can use…
• Ubuntu: Ubuntu is what I was looking for. They are completly Gnome and Python centric. And best of all, it has everything good about debian (the packages) without what is not good about debian (the politics and the endless flamewars).

So I downloaded the latest beta of Ubuntu Dapper (beta4) and installed it this Monday. As usual with the new d-i I had no problems. But when I wanted to install
the extra (non-free) stuff, like the nvidia drivers, mplayer and the codecs, realplayer, acrobat reader, the flash player, java and all that, I just used easyubuntu and after a few clicks I had everything I wanted installed and working. In minutes. I couldn’t believe that. Last sunday I wasted THREE hours of my life trying (and failing) to make Flash work in FreeBSD, and now after a some minutes and a few clicks, I had even more software I ever had in my FreeBSD desktop.

Probably I should tell you about what a PITA is the installation of java in FreeBSD.

It is a big, very big, PITA.

In ubuntu you can have it installed with a couple of mouse clicks.

Now, I know there are lots of elitist kids around believing that because they use a “complicated” desktop (*BSD, gentoo, debian?, slackware, linux from scratch) they are technically superior. That attitude is stupid.

I have lots of stuff to do, and most of it is a lot more complicated than setting up a desktop. Believe me, I have better things to do than configuring mplayer or making my webcam work. I just want to plug in things or click buttons and everything should work. Ubuntu and OSX do that. FreeBSD and gentoo don’t. Ubuntu and OSX win. The ubuntu motto is “linux for human beings”, it should be “linux for professionals without time to waste”. FreeBSD is for servers. Ubuntu for my desktop.

And I will not, ever, waste three hours of my time configuring flash again. I can design, develop and test a web app in Django in three hours. There is no time to waste.

This will be a _very_short post.

Guido van Rossum is considering the use of Django (among other python web frameworks) to develop a project in Google. He is having some minor gripes with it:

• The templating language is not pythonic: This is IMHO a Good Thing. It enforces separation of code and presentation, and is an ideal way for designers to work directly in the templates (most designers are not programmers).
• Too much magic: Guido should check the Removing The Magic page in the wiki about the magic-removal branch. The branch is available in subversion in http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/branches/magic-removal

Back to work now.

Update: Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote an excelent piece: why django.

The Apache HTTP server is by far the most used web server in the world. It is an excellent, feature packed and standards compliant web server. Extremely configurable, with an endless amount of modules, superb documentation and, due to its license, is being used commercially by companies like Oracle. There is only a small problem with Apache: It’s not the fastest server around. This is because historically, Apache’s priorities have been correctness and configurability, not performance. Correctness and configurability are the reasons why Apache powers almost 70% of the web today, but still, Apache has a big, fat ass (we are talking about system resources here).

(more…)

Google announced today in google blog Google Analytics, based on Urchin, one of the best (if not the best) traffic analyzers out there.

This is big news because urchin used to cost $199/mo, and now it is free for adsense advertisers and everybody else with at most 5 million page views per month. I guess the guys at webtrends, sitemeter and statcounter are very worried right now.

When I was a kid I read all the encyclopedias in my house. Twice. When I discovered the wikipedia a couple of years ago I was pretty excited about it. Not only because of it’s free content, the fact that anybody can contribute to it, but also because of it’s use of free software.

As of today, the english version of the wikipedia has 807,177 articles. Here I can find info about things I would never see in the Encyclopædia Britannica, like Keyra Agustina, Vampire Watermelons, Fingerskating or the entire plot of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Granted, neither Milton Friedman nor Carl Sagan are Wikipedia colaborators like they were in the Britannica, but it makes a good quick reference anyway.

The wikipedia has seen some explosive growth in the last few years, it has more than 1.8 million articles in more than 100 languages (including my country’s Quechua and aymara).

Everything is powered by Free Software like:

(more…)

Hi, my name is Gustavo, and I am a Civilization junkie.

I have sad news for the computer industry: Firaxis and Sid Meier released Civilization IV yesterday and this time they added multiplayer capabilities 3D graphics and customization with Python scripts. What were they thinking? Sid Meier is some kind of video game drug lord, he is responsible of MILLIONS of man-hours wasted on endless cycles of the “JUST… ONE… MORE… TURN…” syndrome. This is WRONG. Here is my story:

(more…)

I am a declared cthulolic, a proud member of the Peruvian Church of Cthulhu, but a couple of months ago I discovered the answer to life the universe and everything.

It all began when the Kansas state board of education decided to allow intelligent design (the theory that a smart being designed the universe, creationism, or in this case, right-wing christianism) in science class along with evolution. It was then when Bobby Henderson sent an open letter to the Kansas board of education, demanding equal time in classrooms to the theories of evolution, intelligent design and Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

(more…)

Finally I managed to fix this place and now I can proudly use this little png:

(more…)

Debian is having serious problems with its core security infraestructure. The main issue being that there is just one (overworked) Martin “Joey” Schulze in charge of the security updates, and the rest of the security team is, well, busy. It is even said that one of the security team members is working in Ubuntu, which is perfectly ok since he is getting paid.

This is a very complex problem. First we have the Debian Organization. It has a large amount of developers and maintainers, and the process to be accepted as a new developer is both long and demanding. Now this has an advantage and a disadvantage: it is good because the process to become a developer somehow guarantees that the new maintainer will be both skilled and with knowledge about what debian, the policy and free software are. The problem is that this acceptance process is, sometimes, incredibly long. Take Ian Murdock as an example. He is the creator of Debian, even the name Debian means Deb (Ian’s wife) and Ian. Ian Murdock applied as a new maintainer more than a year ago, and he is still waiting for aproval. And he will probably wait for another year. This is somewhat discouraging for potential new developers (it was discouraging for me at least when I flirted with the idea of applying) and will become more problematic now that important core debian developers have been hired by Canonical to work on Ubuntu.

(more…)

I’m sorry for this post in spanish, it’s about a silly peruvian distro-flamewar and a friend just blogged about a PRIVATE conversation we had. If you can’t read spanish, just ignore this. (and if you DO know spanish, maybe you’ll want to ignore this anyway). Thanks.

Walter Cuestas:

Ya que te gusta ventilar conversaciones privadas en tu blog, por qué no pones el log para que se entienda lo del ejemplo de win32?

Como a tí mismo te gusta decir de los demás, “te vas por las ramas”. No te culpo por no entender el ejemplo en mención: no eres programador. Y de la misma manera no eres especialista en muchas cosas de las que hablas, mas sí en otras. Como ya te dije, nadie es experto en todo. Tienes que aprender a escuchar críticas, y ser mas caballero cuando te hacen ver tus incorrecciones, que en el caso de tu post anterior (el que originó todo esto), eran muchas.

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tabo@elysium:~$ lynx -dump http://ftp.debian.org/dists/stable/Release | grep Codename
Codename: sarge
tabo@elysium:~$

This is a wonderful day for mankind, or something like that :)

Torrents for the i386 iso-cds: here