handyfloss

Esta mañana en La Mirada Crítica de Telecinco han hablado sobre conciliación de la vida laboral y personal, y sobre el “teletrabajo” (trabajar desde casa).

Como ejemplo han mencionado Igalia, y han entrevistado in situ a un par de trabajadores de dicha empresa. ¿Por qué lo menciono? Pues porque Igalia es una empresa dedicada al software libre (hecho que los entrevistados han mencionado dos veces en la breve entrevista), y porque T5 ha dicho que Igalia factura un millón de euros al año (o sea, que funciona bien).

Al describir las facilidades (horario flexible, ayudas para guarderías, etc.) que daba Igalia a sus trabajadores, me ha recordado, salvando las distancias, a Google, que repite como mejor empresa estadounidense donde trabajar, según Fortune.

Cerraba el presentador diciendo: “[…] claro, no todas las empresas trabajan en un sector que esto pueda hacerse”. Se refería a IT, obviamente, pero se hace extensivo a, concretamente, el software libre. ¡Trabajad con SL, que se vive mejor!

I’ve read in a post in Genbeta [es], about a “service” for e-mail senders called SpyPig. It basically boils down to sending a notification to the sender of an e-mail, when the recipient opens it. This way, the recipient can not say that she hasn’t read it.

I will deal with two issues: moral and technological. Morally, I think this kind of things suck. I have received these e-mails asking for confirmation of having been read, and I never found appealing to answer. But at least you were asked politely. What these pigs SpyPigs do is provide a sneaky way of doing it without the recipient knowing. Would you consider someone doing it on you a friend? Not me.

Now, technologically, the system is more than simple, and anyone with access to a web server could do it. The idea is that the sender writes the e-mail in HTML mode, and inserts a picture (can be a blank image) hosted at some SpyPig server. When the recipient opens the HTML message, the image is loaded from the server, and the logs of the server will reflect when the image was loaded, and hence the e-mail opened. When this happens, the server notifies the sender.

The bottom line of this story is that HTML IS BAD for e-mails. My e-mail readers never allow displaying HTML messages, and show me the source HTML code instead (of course, I can allow HTML, but why would I?). So this SpyPig thing will never work for against me. And this SpyPig story is just one more reason not to allow displaying HTML in the messages you read. Of course, for the e-mails you send, consider sending them in plain text. Your recipients will be a bit happier.

For more tips on what NOT to do on web/e-mail issues, check the e-mail/web tips section in this blog.

I have discovered the Answers Research Journal through a mention in Nature, and the ensuing humorous comments with my DIPC colleages. Basically ARJ is a pseudo-scientific journal, with dubious quality “peer-review” system, released with the aim of publishing creationist bullshit.

One of the latest articles, for example, deals with the fascinating question of on what Day of Creation did God create microbes.

I am seriously considering publishing two journals in the same vein: the IPUS (Invisible Pink Unicorn Science) and the PNJ Pastafarian Nature Journal).

I’ll parrot here the news shaking the blogosphere today: apparently the German government intended to obtain software to spy on Skype users. What’s next?

Links:

• Boinc Boinc
• Slashdot
• The source of Slashdot: Wikileaks
• Kriptópolis [es]

I keep track of what pieces of music I listen to through last.fm since June 2006. This can be done automatically for you with Amarok, if you configure it to. As you can see in the following screenshot, I just listened to 30,000 tracks in this time!

(click to enlarge)

I listen to music continuously while I work, and I also count the music I listen at home too, so that’s why I have heard an average of 50-60 songs per day.

You would think that, as a researcher in a serious center like the DIPC, one would hardly ever encounter a MS product, at least in the server/cluster section (more than one fellow here has Windows in his/her computer, but don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret).

However, we do have some server running Windows, and its presence is almost transparent for the user (which is good). And I say “almost”, because it stumbled upon one of its “features”, and the sysadmin ended up confessing :^)

The thing is that I happened to try to create a directory with “CO” (carbon monoxide) in its name (it was a dir for a SIESTA calculation), when a dir with the same name already existed, except it had “Co” (cobalt) in the name. Well, the filesystem complained that a dir by the same name already existed! I could not believe my eyes!!

Basically the filesystem would not make any difference at all for different capitalizations. For example:

<pre>
% mkdir testdir
% mkdir TESTDIR
mkdir: cannot create directory `TESTDIR': File exists

% touch testfile
% rm TESTfile
rm: remove regular empty file `TESTfile'?
</pre>

The explanation? The directory I was in was exported from a NAS running… ta-da: Windows 2000 Server!

How incredibly stupid and annoying is it to have a filesystem that ignores character case altogether? And how error prone? Because if you are not aware of that, you might delete a file you didn’t intend to!! Someone could try to excuse MS by saying that, OK, that was in 2000. But, look, Linux could tell upper case from lower case since its inception in 1991, and Unix since the seventies! The root of the problem is the filesystem used by the OS, of course. But it so happens that the filesystems used by Linux since 1991 (beginning in ext and then many others) had this capability (and many more), and are free. All that MS had to do was to use them, instead of FAT or NTFS. But instead they chose to develop those (inferior) filesystems in parallel for almost 20 years now. I call that stupidity.

No need to say that the sysadmin of the DIPC absolutely regrets having been naive enough to ever buy that MS crap.

I have just read at Barrapunto (Spanish version of Slashdot), that T-Mobile registered the magenta color (#FF0090) in 2000. Read more in Spanish at Tecnoaldea.NET, and in English at COLOURlovers. As Servicemarks comments, Red Bull also sort of owns a color.

Now, I ask myself how can a company register something like a color? I don’t know if registering is related to patenting, but for the latter you can not patent something if it is covered by prior art. And a color has certainly history: all colors existed before they were “discovered” or “invented”!

No more Pink Panther, because magenta belongs to T-Mobile
(taken from freemagenta.nl)

Given this stupid situation, there even is a platform of people asking to “free” the magenta color: freemagenta.nl. That is the place I took the above picture from.

Quería hacerme eco de la noticia, aunque no es nueva (creo que es una decisión de principios del pasado diciembre). Tal y como se puede leer, y bien comentado, en softwarelibre.deusto.es y en cybereuskadi.com, el Gobierno Vasco se ha sacado de la manga un informe (por ahora, secreto) por el que han concluido que el software libre no es una alternativa viable al actual sistema de software privativo (básicamente, Windows con Office) para los ordenadores oficiales.

La declaración oficial (PDF) de la Vicepresidenta del GV, Idoia Zenarruzabeitia, es una respuesta a una petición realizada por la diputada del grupo socialista Idoia Mendia.

El detonante de este post es otro en la página de ELSE (Asociación de Empresas de Software Libre de Euskadi), donde comentan una reunión mantenida hace 4 días con el GV, de la que ESLE salió (aparentemente) con bastante buena impresión. Yo no comparto tal impresión. Más bien creo que el supuesto informe es una excusa barata. Dice ESLE en su blog:

También hemos solicitado acceso al informe realizado a lo que Gobierno nos ha trasladado la imposibilidad de sacarlo al exterior, ya que se trata de un documento de uso interno […]

Y yo me pregunto: ¿es que un informe así no debería hacerse público? ¿No tiene la ciudadanía el derecho a saber? ¿No debe el gobierno dar explicaciones a sus ciudadanos?

Ocultar el informe convierte lo dicho por el gobierno en un simple argumento de autoridad. Como lo dice Zenarruzabeitia, o cierta consultora, o cierto informe, o el gobierno, o _____ (introduzca la autoridad que desee), debe de ser verdad.

A mí a lo que me suena es a que tienen otras razones, más inconfesables que las dadas, para rechazar el SL, y se escudan tras el informe para justificarse. En otro foro propuse que quizá (¡qué mal pensado soy!) en caso de dejar de malgastar dinero público comprando software de mala calidad a una empresa privada extranjera, quizá ciertas personas (las que decidían si hacer dicha compra o no) dejarían de recibir misteriosos maletines por Navidad (negros por fuera, y llenos de verde por dentro, creo que se me entiende).

Pues bien, parece que hay más gente defendiendo estas “conspiranoias”. Por ejemplo, hay gente que dice que difícilmente el GV se pasará al SL después de saber que MS lleva un tiempo “negociando” con el GV instalar una sede en Arrasate. Dicha sede, supongo, traería mucho dinero para el gobierno Euskadi, con lo cual pasarse al SL y enfadar a tito Gates podría ser muuuuy malito para los políticos la ciudadanía.

It is not uncommon to hear (mostly from Windows users berating Linux and its “useless console”) that one of the benefits of Windows is that everything can be done through a GUI. After all, clicking on icons and finding stuff in menus is more intuitive, and everything is easier that way. In contrast, with Linux you have to “type an awful lot of things, which is boring, slow, and difficult. And ugly”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, GUIs are great. I quite like them. What annoys me is the lack of command-line interface for some tasks. Both GUIs and CLIs have their place in computer use, and the wise should use each when appropriate. In this post I will try to illustrate a case where the automation allowed by using the CLI and some scripting is largely missed. The user (me) is forced to use an “intuitive” GUI, with the result that my patience takes a direct hit below the flotation line.

The first task I faced was to plot some orbitals of a molecule. The data for each orbital is saved in one file, and I am running a program that can read them and plot the given orbital (Molekel).

The following YouTube video, made by myself, shows the process of plotting 2 orbitals (I had to plot 17). Notice that, due to the program running so slow, the process takes around 1 minute per orbital!

Notice also that all the previous work has been done: choosing the colors of the background, atoms and orbitals, choosing the orientation, opening the atomic geometry… The comprehensive list of what to do for each orbital follows, with each line preceded by the point in time (seconds) when it happens:

1. 00.00 – Click on “Delete surface” to remove previous orbital
2. 07.80 – Click on “Load” to load a new orbital
3. 12.67 – Choose a file from the dialog window, and click on “Accept” to load it
4. 30.27 – Click on “Both signs”, because we want both positive and negative part of the orbital
5. 31.33 – Introduce a value for the isosurface (0.05) in the “cutoff” box
6. 33.13 – Click on “Create surface” to have Molekel render the isosurface
7. 37.33 – Isosurface appears
8. 37.93 – From a drop-down menu (called with right-click of the mouse), choose Snapshot -> RGB
9. 52.66 – “Save as” dialog box appears
10. 62.73 – Introduce filename for snapshot, and click “Accept”
11. 65.00 – We’re done, and can repeat the process for the next orbital

One can’t help but notice that 65 seconds are needed to make eight clicks and introduce a short text in two boxes! The issue is that human attention is necessary during the whole 65 seconds, because the time between actions is too short to do something else in between (although long enough to get on your nerves, like the full 15 seconds to have the “Save as” dialog appear).

Another obvious point is that from the two short texts introduced by the user, one (the value of the isosurface) is always the same, and only the other (the name of the file to save the snapshot as) varies. Also, only one click of the 8 we do is ever different (the choice of orbital file to read). It would be nice to have a robot do this task, the only data we would have to feed it being a list of orbitals (to read, and then to save a snapshot). But we can’t. We are stuck with this sluggish process!

In contrast, I will next show a case where some automation was made. The process is that of cropping the snapshots taken in the previous step (the Molekel thing). Sure, we could use GIMP, or some other GUI tool, but applying exactly the same process to a list of 17 images (and this is a short list, it could have been 1000) is the kind of thing that cringes for automation.

The following video shows the process:

Recall that it takes 4 minutes to process ALL the images. This may not sound like a huge improvement over the 18:25 that it (in principle) took the process above (17 x 65 sec). However, the time spent with Molekel scales linearly with the number of orbitals. 100 orbitals would need almost 2h. The automated cropping process would have taken more than 4 minutes, but only slightly more: maybe 5 or 6.

Also notice that the 4 minutes are full of decisions, and there is no repetitive, unnecessary task (except the fact of committing errors). Let’s take a look at the actions taken during the 4 minutes:

1. 00:11.00 – Open a Perl script I had half-done (another benefit of automation: you can reuse old stuff)
2. 00:17.87 – Shade window to take a look at the number and name of files to process
3. 00:21.33 – Change script accordingly
4. 00:47.93 – Save changes
5. 00:51.60 – Back to the CLI, and run the script
6. 00:55.00 – Ups, nothing happened!
7. 00:58.27 – Reopen the script, and look for the error
8. 01:05.53 – Found it. Fix it.
9. 01:07.33 – Save and execute
10. 01:06.87 – It works!
11. 01:13.00 – Finished running (0.36 sec per picture)
12. 01:21.73 – Open a cropped image in viewer
13. 01:22.93 – Realized the crop is wrong!
14. 01:30.73 – Alt-Tab to script file, to modify it
15. 01:55.67 – Save and execute again
16. 02:11.73 – Open the cropped images. The first one seems to be OK!
17. 02:29.80 – We reach one that is wrong
18. 02:34.20 – Back to the script, and fix it
19. 02:45.07 – Save, and back to CLI to re-run
20. 02:53.00 – Reopen in image viewer
21. 02:56.00 – Cropped part is not centered!
22. 03:02.00 – Back to the script, and fix it
23. 03:12.33 – Save and re-run
24. 03:19.73 – Reopen in image viewer
25. 03:27.87 – Yet another error: an image could have been cropped more, to hide an unwanted part
26. 03:32.40 – Back to the script
27. 03:40.80 – Rerun
28. 03:47.13 – Reopen images
29. 03:59.93 – See that all of them are correct. Stop and rest

Recall also that if I were to repeat both processes tomorrow, the image cropping would simply require to run the script again (0.36 seconds per image, and you can do something else in between, if you have 1000 images and don’t want to waste time waiting). The creation of the orbitals, on the other hand, would require to repeat the whole process again!! (65 seconds per orbital, plus you have to spend that time paying attention to the process. You can not run something and go away). And the whole problem with the creation of the orbitals is that there is no command-line way of doing it, to be able to automate it.

Some time ago I helped a friend to install Linux into a Vista laptop (incidentally, another friend asked me about the subject today). The only aspect I’m covering in this post is the re-partitioning of the disk, which is a wee bit trickier than with XP and previous Windows versions.

With my laptop (one with XP preinstalled), I just inserted my favorite Linux CD, rebooted, and used the built-in partition utility that all Linux installation CDs have to downsize the Windows partition, and then make the Linux partitions in the remaining disk space. With Vista this is not the case. You have to be very careful, because Linux can not resize the Vista partitions (at least at the time of writing these lines). The problem is that Vista uses a modified NTFS format, and Linux can not cope with it yet (read more at my source for this info: pronetworks.org).

You can also find at pronetworks.org a detailed HowTo for making the resizing of a partition. In summary (e.g., for shrinking a partition to make room for Linux):

1. Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management
2. Click on Disk Management (under Storage in left hand panel)
3. Locate partition to shrink, right click on it, and from the context menu choose Shrink Volume
4. Fill in the self-explanatory dialog box. Basically, enter amount of MB you want the partition to be reduced by.

You will thus end up with a smaller Vista partition, and some empty space. Now, you can insert the Linux CD, reboot, and install Linux in that empty space, without touching the Vista partition.