handyfloss

This wednesday I watched James Bond’s movie Casino Royale (IMDb|FilmAffinity).

The film has had mixed reviews, with some people saying it’s “the best” Bond film ever, some others saying Daniel Craig fits in the James Bond role like a bulldog in a ballet. I’d say neither is correct. To me, the movie is quite good, and Craig is really well in his role. However, it is a bit too long (time passed quickly for me, though), and has a little too little action. Maybe it’s better that way. The plot is also ridiculous, with extra bits of non sequiturs and flat-out nonsenses, like Bond getting into the unattended security room of a hotel with no hassle whatsoever, not to speak of how fast he finds it (first door he opens, and that’s there). The actual logic of the plot, however, has never been the main point of any action movie, and Bond films are no exception, so “Casino Royale” is on pair with the others.

If you like James Bond, there is no reason why you shouldn’t stop reading this and hurry up to a cinema to watch it.

As the readers of this blog may know, I recently became a Doctor in the University of the Basque Country.

As a follow-up to the Thesis Defense act, there is still some paperwork to be done, as e.g. filling a datasheet called “Teseo”. Anyway, what I will comment applies to all the paperwork I did before, during and after the Thesis Defense.

The matter is that this freaking “Teseo” sheet is available online as a RTF or PDF. An original handwritten copy must be sent to the University, so I used a printed down PDF for that. No problem.

The problem came when the University requested that an “electronic” form be sent by e-mail (for which a scanned copy of my manuscript would not do). These bright minds surely wanted me to fill in the RTF, and send it. However, not everyone who wants to get a Ph.D. has adhered (or wants to adhere) to any expensive and abusive license for a proprietary product like MS Windows or MS Office. Certainly I haven’t, so I had to make do with GNU/Linux and OpenOffice to fill the RTF. The result was crappy, due to incompatibilities of the friggin’ RTF proprietary format… but that I sent.

Now the point is: does the public University of the Basque Country (or the public Spanish Ministry of Education) have any reason to discriminate in favor of the private and foreign company Microsoft? Do we, the tax-payers who put the money for their salaries, have to put up with being forced to use specific proprietary formats to communicate with the public institutions? It disgusts me to no end.

Picture the following example: I want to attend the University, and they tell me that I have to wear shoes for that (e.g., use a computer). OK, this might be more or less arbitrary, but I can accept it. Now, imagine that they ask me to wear Gucci shoes (e.g., a proprietary file format, such as RTF). That would be inacceptable, because a public institution can not favor that way a private company, at least not if there is any conceivable substitute (e.g. acceptable shoes of any other brand). And it doesn’t matter if instead of Gucci they require that one uses any cheaper shoe brand. The problem is not if it is expensive, but rather that they are discriminating against other options. And they have no right to do it. They are there to serve us, not the other way around.

Someone could say that they have to use some electronic format, and any would be equally arbitrary. No, not at all. There is something called “open standards”, to which “things” (e.g. electronic document formats) can adhere. One such standard is the ISO, and one document format adhering to a standard (the ISO/IEC 26300) is the Open Document Format (ODF), so they can use that.

The basics are simple: readers and editors for open formats can be made by anyone freely. No-one can force me to pay them royalties so that they allow me to make a program that reads these documents. With proprietary formats (such as DOC, RTF and others), the owner of the license (e.g. Microsoft) can ban anyone from making a program that writes documents in that format, or charge royalties as they please. Put bluntly: since the exchange of documents in my University depends on proprietary formats (RTF and DOC), Microsoft could decide tomorrow to disrupt its operations by denegating further licenses for e.g. MS Office. Of course, this will not happen, because the University will pay as requested. I call this extorsion, because the University can not afford not to pay, so where do the “free competition” and “open market” ideas fit in here? Moreover, I call the University bunch of fools, because they put themselves in a position that can be extorted. The aforementioned is not possible if one uses open formats, because free (not free of cost, but free as in freedom) document editors are, and will always be, available.

In UNIX-like environments, such as GNU/Linux, command line is often used to operate on a bunch of files, such as:

rm -f *.dat

In the command above, “*.dat” is expanded by the shell (the command interpreter), to all matching files in the present directory (e.g.: “file1.dat file2.dat dont_delete_me.dat this_file_is_rubbish.dat“). However, this expansion is performed as a first step, and then the expanded command line is executed, e.g.:

rm -f file1.dat file2.dat dont_delete_me.dat this_file_is_rubbish.dat

This behaviour can potentially fail if a lot of files match the *.dat, because there is an upper limit to how wide a command line can be (brutally high, but finite). This can happen, for example, if you try to delete the contents of a directory with 100,000 files, and use rm -f * (yes, this can happen). For example, a ls in a directory with 100,000 files works fine, but an rm * does not:

Bart[~/kk]: rm *
/bin/rm: Argument list too long.

To avoid this problem, we can make use of xargs and echo (since echo does not seem to suffer from this argument number limitation), in the following way:

echo * | xargs rm -f

Now, xargs takes care of the argument list, and processes it so that rm does not see an endless argument list.

xargs can also be given other uses. For example, consider the following example: We want to convert some OGG files to MP2 (I won’t be caught dead near an MP3, due to its patent issues), so that a Windows luser can hear them. We can use oggdec to convert OGG to WAV, then toolame to convert WAV to MP2. Now, oggdec accepts multiple arguments as input files to convert, so the following works:

oggdec *.ogg

The above generates a .wav for each .ogg in the argument list. However, toolame does not work like that; it expects a single argument, or, if it finds two, the second one is interpreted as the desired output file, so the following fails (too many arguments):

toolame *.wav

This is where xargs can come in handy, with its -n option (see the xargs man page). This option tells xargs how many arguments to process at the same time. If we want each single argument to be processed separately, the following will do the trick:

echo *.wav | xargs -n 1 toolame

In the above example, toolame is called once per WAV file, and sees a single WAV file as argument each time, so it generates a .mp2 file per .wav file, as we wanted.

OK, OK, having 5,000 songs is not that much. I’ve heard people with collection in the 15,000s and over. The eMule freaks, downloading 24/7 without ever actually listening to anything can easily have collections in the 50,000s.

However, I never downloaded a copyrighted song from eMule, even though my collection does not entirely consist on original CDs. Actually I downloaded a lot of albums from the Internet… namely Creative Commons music from Jamendo.

Some info about my collection (some statistics taken from the Amarok player, since around June 2006):

Total songs:        5015
  - Commercial:     3944
  - Jamendo:        1055
  - Other CC:       31
Total playing time: 1 week and 6 days
Total file size:    22GB
Song playcount:     10910
Different artists:  627
Different albums:   413
In MP3:             1562
In OGG:             3468

There is some mismatch (5030 songs, as counted from actual files (all OGG and MP3 files I have in a given directory) vs. 5015 songs as counted from the Amarok collection), but I see no easy way of filtering the 15 rogue files (update: I did, some time after writing the post).

El susodicho señor Herrera no para de crisparme los nervios cada semana con sus artículos en el suplemento semanal del Diario Vasco. Bueno, todas las semanas no. A veces no lo leo.

Cuesta imaginar una mentalidad tan carpetovetónica como la suya, que igual defiende torturar toros ante la chusma enfervorecida, que, como esta semana, dedica una página entera a soltar improperios (otro argumento no tiene), contra un par de colegios españoles que han decidido no hacer celebraciones navideñas, basándose en su estatus laico. El artículo íntegro puede leerse aquí.

Transcribo el e-mail que pienso enviarle (carlos@carlosherrera.net):

Estimado Sr. Herrera,

Leo con alarma su artículo del 17 de diciembre del 2006 en XLSemanal, “Estúpidos Sin Fronteras”. Alarma porque sorprende que un periodista de su larga experiencia haga tan amplio ejercicio de falta de argumentos y recurso al argumento falaz y el insulto gratuito.

Si se eliminan los insultos, que a la única persona que rebajan es a ud. mismo, el lector se encuentra con una sorprendente retahíla de argumentos falaces, que dada su formación en letras debería saber evitar. Cito:

“Renunciar a esa pequeña fiesta a caballo entre lo social, lo familiar y lo religioso es una tontería manifiesta, habida cuenta el argumento que toda esa cuadrilla de idiotas maneja como excusa principal: una escuela pública es laica, ergo nada se celebra que tenga que ver con la religión.”

Clasificar de “tontería manifiesta” a renunciar a dicha fiesta es una afirmación gratuita. No es un argumento, sino una conclusión a la que se llega con argumentos que ud. no presenta (quizá porque no tiene). Utiliza ud. un petitio principii: su conclusión (que los defensores de esa idea son estúpidos) se basa en una proposición (que es una “tontería manifiesta”) que de hecho presupone la conclusión… no la demuestra.

“Otros aducen la presencia de minorías musulmanas que, por lo visto, huirían, histéricas, al comprobar que en el patio de su colegio alguien se ha disfrazado de San José, ese conocido activista antimahometano.”

Este argumento falaz se llama “hombre de paja”, y se basa, como sabrá, en construir un trasunto risible del objeto de nuestra crítica, y criticar ese trasunto, en vez de el objeto original de la crítica. Nadie teme que musulmanes histéricos huyan ante San Josés antimahomentanos… pero eso ud. ya lo sabe.

“Tanto unos como otros tienen pocas ideas, y las pocas que tienen rebotan en la oquedad de su cabeza[…]”

Más insultos gratuitos.

“¿Cómo explicarles a estos memos titulados que la Navidad forma parte, como la religión católica, de la cultura cotidiana de muchas generaciones de pobladores de nuestro país?”

Este argumento falaz se llama “apelar a la tradición”, y se basa en que algo debe de ser bueno, si lleva tanto tiempo haciéndose. La obviedad de su falacidad puede demostrarse por reducción al absurdo: durante cientos de años (miles) no ha habido democracia, ¿por qué cambiar ahora? Nunca ha habido antibióticos, ¿por qué usarlos ahora? Siempre hemos tirado la cabra del campanario en fiestas, obviamente dejar de hacerlo sería estúpido.

“¿Cómo pelear contra la melancolía, digo yo, que causa tener que esforzarse en explicar algo absolutamente obvio?”

Más afirmaciones gratuitas. Dé (se me ocurre proponer) argumentos, hombre de Dios.

“Si la revisión del calendario festivo español tuviese que sufrir un repaso de tipejos como los que han tomado esas decisiones en esos dos colegios públicos españoles –algunos padres incluidos–, tendríamos que empezar a replantearnos nuestra vida desde el minuto uno de nuestra existencia.”

Más recurso al hombre de paja: nadie propone que se eliminen las festividades en sí (el hombre de paja que ud. emplea), sino eliminar la religiosidad de dichas festividades.

“Como no creo que estén dispuestos a renunciar a sus festividades habituales, asistiríamos al replanteamiento civil de muchas de ellas: de la misma forma que unos cuantos capullos de seda abogaron por instaurar una suerte de ‘primeras comuniones civiles’ o ‘ceremonias civiles de bienvenida a la sociedad’ –por el bautizo, se entiende–, estos pedagogos zaragozanos y murcianos abogarán por retitular la fiesta de la Purísima como Fiesta del Fin de Otoño, la de la Epifanía como Día del Juguete y la del Viernes Santo como Fiesta de la Primavera Jubilosa.”

Estupefacto me deja ud. con esta muestra de ignorancia histórica (amén de reiteración en el uso de hombres de paja). Debería ud. saber que la mayoría de fiestas religiosas (cristianas), empezando por la Navidad, son refritos y reconversiones de fiestas paganas muchísimo más antiguas y enraizadas en la sociedad que estas fiestas actuales que las sustituyeron.

Comete ud. un lamentable non sequitur al usar un razonamiento (básicamente, que cambiar tradiciones no está bien) para defender una posición (las actuales fiestas religiosas) que se basan en la negación, en primer lugar, de dicho razonamiento (ya que estas fiestas abolieron otras).

“Lo único bueno que tienen estas cosas es que se acaban sabiendo antes o después y que del ridículo no les salva nadie. Pero no hay que acomplejarse y creer que ésa es una tendencia a la que vamos de forma inevitable: no y no. Quede constancia que quienes así actúan, a los ojos de este cronista, no son más que una simple, redonda y rotunda pandilla de majaderos. Feliz Navidad a todos ellos.”

Para este viaje nos sobraban las alforjas. Se limita ud. a exponer su respetable opinión de que las medidas a las que alude son una majadería. Estupendo. Bueno es saberlo. Ahora bien, esto podía decirse en 2 líneas, sin darle cuerpo en un artículo que intenta crear la ilusión de que hay cierto argumento objetivo detrás de dicha opinión personal.

Sinceramente,

Iñaki Silanes

Yesterday I attended a gospel concert with my friends, at the Kursaal Palace.

The singing choir was the London Community Gospel Choir, and a really find ensemble it was. The basque society is well known for our coldness, and how shy and quiet we are. However, the LCGC, under the commands of its vital director, managed to make us not only clap hands, but also sing to the tunes, and even stand up and dance! My hands hurt of so much clapping, and time passed like a flash.

I never expected to be carried out by such a music (little religious feeling I have, and little connection to black culture and music), but they made it.

If they sing near you… go see them.

This wednesday I went to the cinema with my workmate Julen, and we watched “Little Miss Sunshine” (IMDb|FilmAffinity).

It is a hell of a good movie, humble and simple, but with a very good plot, and very good acting. Drama and comedy are intermixed, with the latter being more prominent. One does not spend the whole movie laughing, but when the moments come, one laughs out loud.

I wholeheartedly recommend this film to anyone not feeling that a movie needs lasers and explosions to be any good.

Let the world know it: I made my Ph.D. Thesis defense last tuesday, and I passed! From now on, people may refer to me as “Dr. Silanes” :^)

The title of the thesis was:

Ethylene Polymerization by Group IV Transition Metal Metallocenes

The presentation can be freely downloaded as a 3.2MB PDF. It was done using the PowerDot class for LaTeX. The PowerDot style used was designed by me (from the default style by H. Adriaens and C. Ellison), and is available as a .sty file.

The Thesis book itself can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license as a 6.1MB PDF (the PDF I link here is a very slightly modified version, with errata corrected).

Some pics to illustrate the defense day:

Giving explanations.

Good vibrations during the Tribunal’s question turn.

Serious, waiting for the calification.

Videos:

• Giving explanations (1m07s): (4.9MB lavc AVI|2.9MB Theora OGG)
• Thanking the tribunal (10s): (923kB lavc AVI|860kB Theora OGG)