handyfloss

I have put my thesis under deposit! It means that it will stay that way for a month, then I will have to follow some other bureaucratic requirements and… for mid-December I’ll defend it! I’ll be a Doctor! I can not believe it only took me… well, too long :^)

OK, this entry is just a reminder for myself.

Install ATI drivers

I followed the instructions at this wiki. For the record, I used method 1, and it worked.

Update: The link above seems dead. Read a a more recent post about Compiz Fusion under Debian Lenny for info on ATI drivers instalation.

Install a SMP kernel

My CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo T7200… I want a SMP kernel, otherwise I am wasting one of the two cores!

Problem is, the friggin Ubuntu has no 2.6 kernels labeled “SMP”. Why, oh why!? OK, I found out: all 2.6.*-686 kernels are actually SMP, even if they don’t say anything. If you have 1 CPU, fine. If you have more, they’ll be detected at boot time. No more “-smp” in the kernel names.

Wireless with 686 kernel

The default 2.6.15-686 supports the wireless just fine, but installing a 686 kernel (required for SMP, see above) seems to break the wireless. However, the solution is easy. As stated in this Ubuntu forum thread, one just needs to install the “restricted” kernel modules corresponding to her kernel (in my case 2.6.15-27-686):

% aptitude install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.15-27-686

After that, reboot. I guess that the new module is loadable (try modprobe ipw3945), without having to reboot… dunno. Also, if you want to have the restricted modules package upgrade automatically, install linux-restricted-modules-686.

WPA encription for WiFi

Update: Read a more recent article: WPA under Ubuntu/Debian.

Install a 64-bit kernel

OK, installing the mainstream 32-bit Ubuntu was a success. Now I have given Ubuntu amd64 a try (amd64 is for both EM64T (Intel) and AMD64 (AMD)).

Everything went smooth, except installing the ATI drivers (as explained above): the screen froze black when loading GDM. To solve this, I read the troubleshooting section in the link above, and found out that I could either add:

Load "extmod"

or:

SubSection "extmod"
  Option "omit XVideo"
  Option "omit XVideo-MotionCompensation"
  Option "omit XFree86-VidModeExtension"
EndSubSection

to the Section "Modules" of /etc/X11/xorg.conf (beware, it’s one OR the other, not both). For me the Load "extmod" did not work, but the SubSection "extmod" did.

Now, for the Xgl thing in 64-bits…

Xgl for 64-bits

I followed the instructions in a previous post, but I found out that some packages were missing, so I manually downloaded them from the Xgl.compiz site. Namely, I downloaded them from the “Edgy” section. However, it didn’t work for me :^(

Update: Compiz Fusion under Debian Lenny in a more recent post.

I previously posted about the sudoku fever that had attacked my family. I have found amusing solving some sudokus, but what I really thought was interesting was making a computer program to solve them automatically. Not that it would be more “challenging” (some sudokus are quite difficult), just more fun for me.

OK, so that I did, and today I have released a Perl program that (hopefully) solves any sudoku we feed to it. The program is called Sudaku (well, one sweats when solves a sudoku, doesn’t one?), and can be freely downloaded from my home page. I have licensed it under the GPLv2.

Yes, I know there are other sudoku solvers around, probably better than mine, on top of that. However, I just wanted to make it, and releasing it may help someone, or (more probably) even me, if some better programers than me out there e-mail me proposing changes/corrections.

What the heck, I just felt like releasing it! :^)

I’m back to work (and blogging) from a three-week holiday period in Valencia.

I have a couple of things to blog about. I’ll blog them, then try to hack the entries to pretend they were blogged the day I would have blogged them, were I not AFK :^)

UPDATE: silly me, posts can be given any date. It’s not even a “trick”. It’s just an everyday feature.

I had resisted the social pressure to start making Sudokus until this August. I just didn’t want to make them “because they are fashionable”.

However, I have finally succumbed, and tried them. I have to say that (unlike my parents, who are hooked), I found them mildly amusing. Yes, they are entertaining, and yes, they can be quite difficult sometimes. I can not say that they bore me because they are too easy, or desperate me because they are too difficult. I enjoy them, just I don’t go crazy over them.

An anecdote about the matter is that one day my father and I went to a newsagent’s looking for a booklet of Sudokus, but found none in the pastimes section. We were puzzled, because Sudokus are such a hit, and a newsagent’s not selling them made no sense. We asked the seller, and she pointed to another section: the Sudoku section. They had devoted a whole section to them! Now, that made sense :^)

Well, probably not first, and not a big “use” either, but still…

Yesterday I mistakenly deleted an important file, and hadn’t noticed until 10 minutes ago. I make daily backups, using rsync, as I mentioned some time ago, in this blog entry.

The “bad” part is that, since the error was made yesterday, the last backup (made last night) was “corrupted” (had the file missing). The good part is that I make incremental daily backups of the last seven days, then weekly of the last 4 weeks, then monthly of the last 6 months (son-father-grandfather backup). I just checked the backup of the day before yesterday, and there it was the deleted file!

You can make an idea of the efficency of incremental backups if I say that I keep 15 backups of my home/ directory (1 “current”, 7 daily, 4 weekly, 3 montly, because I started 3 months ago) in two different machines (appart from my own, of course), which would amount to about 43GB in each machine, were they all complete copies. Being as they are incremental, they actually fill up 5.9GB of disk space in either machine (more than 7 times less).

For an idea of what incremental backups are, read this link of my blog entry. Actually, I also started a Wikipedia entry for “incremental backup”. Maybe you can watch it before someone sensible deletes it (it was a redirection to the backup rotation scheme” entry, but I do not think they are the same thing). You could even add something to that entry, to make it more complete.

The times, they are a-changing…

Indeed they are! The Dylan I saw and heard in the concert he gave yesterday in the Zurriola beach was not the one who earned his glory, but one living of his glory.

His voice has always been singular, but yesterday it was just degradated. He never let the camera get closer than a certain point, and we were so far away from the scenario that the giant panels were our only hope of catching a sight of his face. We never did.

He also made the whole performance seated in front of the piano, didn’t even introduce himself in the beginning, and actually said nothing during all the concert, except near the end, when he gave a brief speech of which I understood nothing.

I am no fanatic of Dylan, but I do like his most famous songs (“Blowing in the wind”, “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Knocking on Heaven’s door”, “Like a rolling stone”), but also some others that are not that famous (“The times, they are a-changing”, “Don’t think twice, it’s all right”, “It ain’t me, babe”, “Maggie’s farm”…). However, yesterday he sang such twisted versions of them, that no one managed to identify half of them. He began with, The times, they are a-changing and Maggie’s farm, if I recall correctly… and I identified them by the lyrics, not the music. When he played Mr. Tambourine Man, the song was 3/4 through by the time people would recognize it.

Before Dylan played, Mikel Laboa did. He is getting really old, and it shows. He sang quite correctly (faithfull to his particular style, that not everyone understands), but his mental and physical health are deteriorating. Anyway, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy his songs. Some more than other, but all in all it was fine.

Ayer tuve una amarga discusión con amigos a quienes aprecio, a causa de una noticia que leímos en el Diario Vasco.

La noticia en cuestión parafrasea a un grupo de gente que (supuestamente) dice lo siguiente:

Si no fuéramos felices creyendo, dejaríamos de creer en Dios.

Yo dije que eso es ridículo, y a continuación voy a exponer mis argumentos para pensar así. Vaya por delante lo que NO es objeto de discusión:

1) Si Dios existe o no. Es irrelevante la “corrección” de sus creencias. Solo juzgo la validez de sus argumentos.

2) Si es cierto o no que esas personas han dicho eso. Es irrelevante que lo dijeran ellas, o que sea una interpretación incorrecta del periodista autor del artículo. Lo que yo juzgo es la frase que se cita.

3) Si esas personas tienen derecho a pensar así. La libertad de tener unas creencias, por estúpidas que sean, no afecta al hecho de que sean estúpidas.

4) El que sea lícito creer en Dios o no. Lo que juzgo estúpido es el razonamiento que aducen, no el hecho de que crean o no.

5) Cualquier otro razonamiento a favor o en contra de la existencia de Dios, cualquier otro contenido que tenga el artículo, cualquier otra cosa que no sea la validez del argumento de “creer porque eso me hace feliz”.

Lo que sí que intento demostrar es:

1) Que ese razonamiento no es válido para “demostrar” que Dios exista.

2) Que si ese es su único argumento, entonces realmente no creen en Dios.

3) Que ese es su único argumento.

Dejado esto más o menos claro, paso a exponer mis argumentos.

Todos debemos estar de acuerdo en que, si Dios existe, será al margen de que esto nos haga felices o no, al igual que la gravedad existe aunque a mí no me guste romperme los dientes cuando me tropiezo. Por poner un ejemplo, supongamos que estoy jugando a las siete y media, y tengo un siete. Pido una carta boca abajo, y no la miro. No puedo decir, que, dado que necesito que sea una figura, creo que es una figura. La carta será una figura o no, pero yo no puedo creer que lo sea porque lo deseo. Puedo creer que es una figura porque soy (o creo ser) telépata, o porque ha bajado San Pedro y me lo ha dicho, y eso es lógico (sea cierto o no). Pero si mi única razón para creer es que lo deseo, entonces está claro que realmente soy consciente de que no sé si es así, con lo cual, en el fondo no tengo fé de que sea así.

Se ve, por tanto, que esté razonamiento de “creer porque eso me hace feliz” disocia (en la mente del supuesto creyente) el hecho de creer en algo, de la realidad del hecho en que se profiesa tener fe. Por consiguiente, la creencia se practica por conveniencia, no porque se piense que aquello en que se cree exista, lo cual es una contradicción lógica: no puedo creer, al margen de creer.

Pero hay una razón más simple. Si decimos que creemos porque eso nos hace felices, y que si no fueramos felices no lo haríamos, es un caso de falacia lógica, relacionada con o descrita por: argumento de consecuencias adversas, argumentación ad baculum, y pensamiento desiderativo.

Un argumento de consecuencias adversas indica el caso en el que se concluye que algo es cierto, porque las consecuencias de que no fuera así no son aceptables, y es un argumento falaz, por razones innumerables, que se detallan en las entradas de la Wikipedia que cito arriba.

Podríamos argumentar que, aunque el wishfull thinking de estos tipos no demuestre que Dios exista, aún y todo sigue siendo un argumento válido para su fe, pero tampoco es así. Si dicen creer porque eso les conviene, y es su único argumento (y lo es, porque dicen que no creerían si no fuera por ello), entonces son unos hipócritas, porque en el fondo deben admitir su ignorancia, como en el ejemplo de las siete y media uno debe admitir que ignora qué carta va a salir, aunque desee que salga una en concreto. Dado que meramente desearlo no es un argumento válido para su veracidad, o bien estos tipos deben admitir su ignorancia (en cuyo caso no pueden decir verazmente que crean que exista Dios, en el sentido de que tengan fe), o bien tienen otros motivos para pensar que Dios exista (en cuyo caso deben admitir que sus deseos no son la razón de que crean).

Podrían intentar evitar esa disyuntiva si dijeran que admiten su ignorancia, pero que a pesar de ello se declaren creyentes, pero en tal caso la frase citada arriba es un non sequitur, esto es que la conclusión no está relacionada con las premisas.

Uno puede pretender que cree en algo por conveniencia. Esto es lógicamente consistente. Pero no puede creer realmente en algo por conveniencia. Es tan estúpido como decir que amo a mi pareja porque me ha puesto una pistola en la frente y me disparará si digo que no. Puedo hacer como que la amo, pero no amarla. Y si la amo, será por otros motivos, no a causa de la pistola.

Heracles is the name of my computer at home. I have been “tuning” it this weekend, and I think the result is reasonably attractive. I am publishing a screenshot (see below) of the resulting desktop, partly to show off, and partly to keep a history of the evolution of the looks of my desktop.

The screenshot shows three different adesklets, namely Calendar 0.5.3, modubar 0.0.1 and SystemMonitor 0.1.3. The modubar is currently docking the icons for Konsole, Firefox (currently highlighted by the cursor), amaroK, OpenOffice, TVTime, Quake IV, and the Xfce settings. As I write these lines, I am considering getting new icons :^)

The icons of the bottom-right corner correspond to the Xfce Icon Box, a nifty program to show the icons of the currently open windows (in this case, amaroK, Konsole and Firefox).

The black texts correspond to two Conky instances. The top-left one gives general info, and the bottom-right one tells me how much Internet traffic I have had the last days and months. This is not trivial, since my ISP (Euskaltel) overcharges me if I download+upload more than 4GB/month.

The desktop environment is Xfce, and the Linux distro it is running on is Debian.

Today I changed the name of this blog from an unappealing Iñaki Silanes’ Blog to an intendedly witty handyfloss. I was going to name it Mental floss, but the name is taken :^(

The new name fuses the british expression candyfloss (meaning “something attractive but insubstantial”, according to the Merrian-Webster OnLine dictionary) and the acronym FLOSS (which stands for “Free (Libre) Open-Source Software”).

*some minutes patting myself on the back, for being so witty and humorous*

I *ehem* humbly *ehem* think that the word neatly sums up the message I want to transmit with the blog: that the free software is useful!