A few days ago Amazon was awarded with patent on how to redirect a user to a more relevant page than a standard 404 error: "Page Not Found". It is kind of interesting because I developed a Cherokee handler for this back in 2002, more than one year before Amazon filled their patent.

I wonder how longer this patent craziness will last.

Guess what happens in Spain when you go to a computer shop and you pay an unfair, and I would dare to say, illegal tax?

You get a few blank CDs for a little extra charge!! Check this out:

• Intellectual property tax: 6,10€
• Blank CDs: 2,40€

By the way, I don't know whether you have though of it, but this twisted tax has helped to increase the black market quite a lot: Many shops declare just a little fraction of the CD/DVDs that they import, and therefore they pay this tax only for the declared quantity, but they always charge the tax on the media that they sell.. otherwise, they would not support the abuse.

A unfair tax collected by an association is a damn bad thing; but when the tax is more than 250% of the price of the item it becomes insulting. Someone should stop this intellectual property madness right away.

A new version of Solaris Express Developer Edition has just been released: SXDE 1/08. It brings a bunch of new features, upgraded software and bug fixes. In fact, there are so many that I don't think I will have the time or energy to describe all of them on this post.

Solaris made easy

I am going to go through which, for me, are the most important features of the release:

xVM: the Sun xVM hypervisor based on the work of the Xen community allows running Solaris, Linux, and Windows virtual machine guests on a Solaris host. It supports the two types of virtualization: full virtualization and paravirtualization . If you think of it, a virtualization mechanism like xVM is very important nowadays, I would even say a basic requirement; and now you have it by default, without having to buy or install any extra software. If you have not used it before I recommended you to start by reading xVM(5) and visiting the Xen community at OpenSolaris.org.

CIFS Server: a native, kernel-based service supporting file sharing in Microsoft Windows networks. Like it or not, it is a defacto standard, so the most pragmatic approach is to provide the best possible implementation in order to make OpenSolaris fit into heterogeneous environments.

Web Stack: It includes all the applications of a common AMP stack (not strictly speaking): Apache, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Python, Squid and HTML Tidy. Besides, I would like to point out that the upcoming 0.6 release of Cherokee - which is not shipped with SXDE - has performing amazingly on SXDE during my tests.

Desktop: The desktop continues improving: GNOME 2.20, Firefox 2.0.0.9, Flash 9, etc. You can even install Compiz with a single command!

And there are many other new features on SXDE 1/08: new NIC drivers (Broadcom NetXtreme II, ADMtek Centaur and Comet chips, Macronix, Davicom and AMD-8111), new wireless drivers (Intel Centrino 3945 and 4965), EIST support, new Xorg, suspend-to-RAM support on x86, architectural changes like /usr/gnu, improved HAL support (USB, Firewire and IDE), StarOffice 8, Xvnc client and server, Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) support, automatic discovery of network attached printers, among many others. :-)

Do you know how SIGSEGV feels like? LOL!

Monkey at the Cachamay park

• Six million Java developers (up 20 percent from last year)
• Four million Java Blu-Ray devices
• Seven million Java set-top boxes
• Over two billion mobile handsets running Java worldwide
• Over two and a half billion Java cards
• Over 700 million PCs with Java installed
• Up to over five billion Java-powered devices worldwide

In fact, having 190+ operators worldwide have deployed Java services (Nokia : 2005), 708 million mobile Java devices shipped by the end of 2005 (Ovum, June 2005), 635 mobile Java device models, 32 mobile device vendors using Java, 45,000+ mobile Java applications (Informa Telecoms & Media, June 2005) and approximately 23 million mobile Java downloads globally per month in 2005 (Nokia, November 2005) also helps quite a little bit.

Language Productivity is important, but I wouldn't say it is that important. I would rather focus on Platform Productivity actually. Having a rapid development environment like Netbeans is an important point. You know, completely free, cross-platform and rock solid. At the end of the day, that will make you way much more productive than having delegates.

So, yes, performance is not everything. We do agree. :-)

Have you seen the Debian's Computer Language Benchmarks Game? It is a nice site that aims to compare different programming languages (implementations). Currently it compares more than 30 compilers and interpreters, including C, C++, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, Lua, Haskell, Perl or Tcl.

I expected something similar of what the default benchmark shows. It runs all the test programs in all the languages in order to generate a general language overview: C++ is the champion, C is in the second position, Java 6: 10th, FreeBasic: 13th, Ada95 GNAT: 14th, C# Mono: 18th, followed by JavaScript SpiderMonkey in the 31st position.

Try to compare a couple of languages, it's kind of interesting. :-)

Coroutines in C: "So each time the decompressor emits another character, it saves its program counter and jumps to the last known location within the parser - and each time the parser needs another character, it saves its own program counter and jumps to the location saved by the decompressor. Control shuttles back and forth between the two routines exactly as often as necessary."

I would describe this interesting (and dirty) programming trick as "How to implement yield in plain C. Worth a read.

Big LCD Full-HD panel: quite expensive. Old console: $25. A few miscellaneous cables and connectors: $60. Cushion: $10. Can of coke: $2.

To turn off the light, forget about everything and remember your childhood while you play for hours one of those games you used to love when you were a little kid.. believe me, is priceless. :-)

Here is a quick post about a silly issu I have hit for a few times now: When I try to mount a OpenSolaris NFS share from OS X or Linux boxes it fails because of a time out error:

mount_nfs: bad MNT RPC: RPC: Timed out

Well. First of all, it is a problem strongly tight to you local network infrastructure. In my case, it is a cheap DSL router, a 1Gb switch and a wireless access point; and of course the only device that has something to do with the problem is the router - it works as DNS cache and local DHCP server.

The time-out happens because the Solaris box tries to reverse lookup the IP address that is trying to connect, but it sort of fails because the lousy DNS server built-in the DSL router.

The easiest workaround is to log in to the OpenSolaris box, become root and add a new line to /etc/hosts with the IP to FQDN entry. After that, everything should work as expected.

Santiago de Chile has been my last stop in the Latin America Tour. My original plans included Florianopolis (Brazil) as part of my route, but I have had to skip it in order to make it for the FSL 2007. It is a pity, I would have loved to visit Florianopolis!

The session in Santiago worked alright. It was slightly better than the sessions in Argentina in terms of the number of attendees, so it is an improvement from that point for view (I will write about it in my next post).

As in Cordoba, Bruno also brought his puppets, and we had lot of fun. People just love them! :-)

And we also had a morning free for a really quick visit to Santiago de Chile. It is nice city, I quite liked it. However, I have to confess it was not the kind of city that I expected: from my point of view, it is the most European city in Central/South America I have ever visited.

BTW, there are a few curious things about it: First of all, there are a million drug stores - at least three or four per block; there is a whole lot of dogs within the university campus; and finally, it seems that there are places called Coffee with legs which are some kind of mix between Hooters and a cafeteria.

The Latin America Tour goes on, and yesterday we spent the whole day giving a few talks in UAI and UTN Medrano, a couple of universities in Buenos Aires (Argentina). So far, this non-stop tour is being extremely interesting (but quite tiring as well).

Today shouldn't as stressing as yesterday. We will be heading to Cordoba (Argentina); although there is a little problem that is worrying me quite a little bit: it seems that the something is going on with the plane pilots here in Argentina and many of the scheduled flights are being canceled, so we might need to find another last minute way of getting to Cordoba if something happens with out reservations.

By the way, it has been very interesting to meet Gustavo (ghreyes) at my talk. He is one the most active contributors to the Spanish speaking community of OpenSolaris in Argentina, and even if we talked a million times by IRC, I could not put him a face. :-)

As usual, the pictures I took are available: Latin America Tour: Buenos Aires, and a few pictures of Buenos Aires.

I have just arrived in Buenos Aires (Argentina) after a couple of days in Montevideo (Uruguay). There have been many things going on, so before more things happen I would like to tell you about something that happened in the airport when I arrived to Uruguay.

Everything began when I was leaving Madrid three or four days ago. Right before leaving home I realized that I didn't have the address of the hotel in Montevideo and I was already late to take the plane, so I definitely did not have the time to try to find it out.

The best thing I could think of was to drop a line to two of my colleagues - who were already giving some talks in Brazil - asking them for the hotel address, so when I landed in Montevideo I could just check my mail and head to the hotel.

The funny thing is that when I arrived to Montevideo after a 13 hours flight, I tried to find a wireless hot spot, but there was no one functional. I tried in different parts of the airport, but either there was no WiFi, or the Internet connectivity simply didn't work.

At that point, I was in Montevideo's airport with no way of checking where my hotel was. Damn! I felt so silly :-) The best choice seemed to be to ring some of my colleagues so they could tell me the address of the hotel, but they were flying for Brazil at that moment and I couldn't reach any of them.

My last choice was to go to the Information Desk and ask them about where could I get Internet access to download my mail (I needed either SSH or IMAP), and here is where my luck changed and everything started to improve. The three girls who were working in the Information desk were extremely friendly with me. Seriously, they saved my day!

At the beginning they tried to get me access to one of the closed WiFi networks, but it didn't work. So after a while, they allowed me to get inside the booth and borrow one of their Ethernet cables, but it didn't work either, everything was filtered.

I suppose that, at that point (around 11pm), they realized that an increasing desperation feeling was invading me, so they changed the general strategy and started ringing all the hotels in Montevideo downtown trying to figure out where my reservation was made!!

Finally after 15 calls or so asking for a reservation on my name, they founded where my hotel was. I could not believe it!

So, today, we headed back to the airport to take a flight to Argentina, and I met them again, so I thanked them for everything they did for me. I know that there are not many people who would have worried so much for helping out a guy who forgot his hotel booking, and I am really thankful for that.

At the end, right before boarding the plane to Buenos Aires, we took this picture. It will be a nice memory about when I was lost in Uruguay but a few amazingly friendly girls saved me. :-)

Yuhuuu!! After a almost a month abroad, I am back home in Madrid.. for a few days. :-)

This last conferences chain has been quite intense. It began with the OpenSolaris Developer Summit 2007 - held in Santa Cruz (California), right after which it came a Sun's internal OpenSource Summit in Santa Clara that lasted a couple days. Both of them were extremely interesting for complete different set of reasons: in the first case we hanged out with many of the most active OpenSolaris developers and planned how to continue implementing the Indiana Project; while in the second case, we discussed how to do more and better Open Source at Sun.

OpenSolaris Developers Summit 2007

When those events ended up I left California and headed to Mexico for attending the rest of the conferences from which I had accepted invitations. My first stop was ENLi 2007 in Puebla, a very interesting congress in which - beside the educational stuff - we had lot of fun. :-)

Attendees at my talk. ENLi 2007 - Puebla, Mexico

When ENLi finished I took a plane to the state of Sonora. The latest two congresses were held quite close to each other in the same region - for which I am thankful, actually! The first one was SmartDay 2007, a one day long event - in which I was the only guest speaker - that worked out great. The best thing is that people liked my talk, the crowded theater and the positive press feedback confirmed it.

SmartDay 2007 - Guaymas, Mexico

And the last but not least, was the 7th International Symposium on Computer Science: it was the biggest of them, and therefore the one that needed a bigger organization. One more time I have nothing to say but great things about the congress itself and, of course, all the staff who - I know - worked really hard to make it happen. Good stuff!!

7th International Symposium - San Carlos, Mexico

Now, it is time to enjoy Madrid for a few days and try to recover a little bit of this non-stop congresses tour, to washing my clouts, to read my mail, to apply the contributed patches to the Cherokee mailing list (thanks folks!) and of course to plan the next tour that begins within a week, which is going to include: Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela.

The 7th International Symposium on Computer Science ended a couple of days ago. It is a congress organized by Itesca that this year has been held in San Carlos, Sonora - the same state as the SmartDay.

The congress has been pretty interesting, and the organization has been just wonderful. Honestly, I take off my hat to the people who organized such a great event. I don't know whether they had any organization issue, but if that was the case, nobody even noticed it. (Great stuff folks!).

This has been the second time I have had the honor of being invited to speak at the conference (6th edition), and even more, the honor of giving the closure talk one more time. I am delighted they wanted to schedule another F/OSS talk for the ending!

Jose Luis Joyanes was another of the guess speakers at the conference. It has been great to (finally) meet him; we had lot of fun. :-)

The pictures I took during the congress are already on-line: First set, Second set and a few miscellanea pictures. And I have also uploaded a few other pictures we took during the weekend.

A few hours ago, while I was going through my mail in my hotel room I saw something weird on beach shore: something big and gray - like a rock - appeared to be moving. When I took a deeper look, I realized that it was a seal. The first thing I thought was: "This is the first time I see a seal on the beach. How cool is that! Let's go to play fetch with him!" ;-)

 

The thing is that, when I got over there I realized that the seal was badly injured and that was the reason why he was resting on the beach... so all the joy turned to sorrow. Damn! I hate when these things happen. :-(