handyfloss

Hace poco que he cometido la blasfemia de cambiarme de [[shit|Vodafone]] a [[feces|Movistar]], y ya me he topado con el primer coñazo: el 1000 veces maldito buzón de voz. Si queréis saber más sobre este “servicio” y sus “bondades”, podéis leerlo en el sitio de Movistar.

Si visitáis la página que menciono, notaréis una curiosa carencia en ella. Venga, visitadla y no sigáis leyendo esto hasta que la hayáis encontrado… ¿Ya la habéis encontrado? Pues efectivamente: la puta página no dice cómo leches dar de baja el servicio. Mis amigos me odian porque si me llaman mientras estoy hablando con otra persona les salta el maldito buzón, y se les COBRA una llamada para NADA.

Es un servicio que no quiero, que me molesta, y que no entiendo por qué tengo. No entiendo por qué no tengo que hacer nada para que se me dé de alta, y sin embargo darse de baja es complicado. Bueno, sí lo entiendo, claro: es un medio de las operadoras de telecom para forrarse cobrando llamadas que de otra manera habrían sido “perdidas”. ¿La verdad?, me dan asco.

Update: se puede lograr la información para desactivar el buzón en esta otra página de Movistar. En resúmen: llamar al 537 y pulsar 4 (quitarlo del todo), o esperar y oir las instrucciones si eres masoca.

Following the “report” series started with my first summary of info about the music collection I listen to, I will update that info in this post.

The data (in parentheses the difference with respect to last report, 5 months ago).

Files

Total files        8073 (+1037)
  - Commercial     4987 (+522)
  - Jamendo        3001 (+468)
  - Other CC       31 (+0)
  - Other          54 (+47)
Total playtime     21d (+3d)
Disk usage         38GB (+6GB)
Artist count       1034 (+217)
Album count        738 (+120)
MP3 count          0 (+0)
OGG count          8073 (+1037)

Last.fm

Playcount           36279 (+10033)

Most played artists Joaquín Sabina - 2516 (+264)
                    The Beatles - 1228 (+245)
                    David TMX - 771 (+172)
                    Silvio Rodríguez - 745 (+119)
                    Fito & Fitipaldis - 622
                    Siniestro Total - 611 (+75)
                    Bad Religion - 573
                    La Polla Records - 537
                    Extremoduro - 443
                    Ska-P - 420

Most played songs   Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 56 (+14)
                    La del pirata cojo (J. Sabina) - 52 (+5)
                    Conductores suicidas (J. Sabina) - 48 (+2)
                    Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 46
                    Y sin embargo (J. Sabina) - 45 (+5)
                    Pacto entre caballeros (J. Sabina) - 45 (+3)

Amarok

Playcount         25596 (+7410)

Favorite artists  Ska-P - 95.08%
                  Leihotikan - 94.39%
                  Rafael Caballero - 94.30%
                  Su ta Gar - 94.10% (+2.24)
                  NanowaR - 94.02%
                  Simon and Garfunkel - 93.84%
                  Juan Luis Guerra - 93.65% (+0.8)
                  La Caja Negra - 93.57% (+1.93)
                  Peiremans - 93.48% (+1.52)

Favorite songs    You shook me all night long (AC/DC) - 99%
                  Km 0 (I. Serrano) - 98%
                  Salir (Extremoduro) - 98%
                  1st movement of Winter (A. Vivaldi) - 98%
                  Torn (N. Imbruglia) - 98%
                  Total eclipse of the heart (B. Tyler) - 98%
                  Todos los segundos cuentan (La Caja Negra) - 98%
                  Fiesta pagana (Mägo de Oz) - 98%
                  New America (Bad Religion) - 98%
                  Las cuatro y diez (L.E. Aute and S. Rodríguez) - 98%
                  Soldadito marinero (Fito & Fitipaldis) - 98%
                  Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 98%
                  Jet pilot (System of a Down) - 98%
                  Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 98%

Yesterday evening I boldly decided to upgrade [[WordPress]] (the software this blog runs on), to version 2.5. [[DreamHost]], my hosting service, provides easy click-through installation and upgrades of software, so I used it for the upgrade.

Sadly, and probably for some mistake I did, everything ended up screwed, and my blog experienced some problems like not showing any post at all! I proceeded to contact the support team, and the response was awesome: they answered incredibly fast, and the solution was concise and correct.

I have to say that DreamHost has surprised me very positively!

As outlined in some previous posts[1,2,3,4], I have been playing around with a piece of Python code to process some log files. The log files to process were actually host.gz files from some [[BOINC]] projects, and the data I want to extract from them is quite simple: the Windows, Linux and Mac shares in the number of computers contributing to them (and the [[BOINC Credit System|work they do]]). By logging this processed data myself, I can see the time evolution of this share, and hopefully show the slow but steady rise of GNU/Linux :^)

I figured out that the contribution to distributed computing projects could be a reasonable indicator of the Windows predominance status. There are many other indicators (for example the number of visits to a web site, e.g. this very one), and I don’t claim that this one is “better”. I just want to add it to the reference list for the reader.

There is a problem with “Windows vs. Linux” figures, and it is that they are not really “competing” products. When cars or soft drinks are the subject, one can figure out the [[market share]], looking at the number of items sold. Linux being [[free software]], one can hardly measure the amount of “sold copies”, and with Windows being pre-installed in most new computers, one can not really trust the “number of computers sold = number of Windows copies sold”, because some users even remove the Windows partition and install Linux on top of it.

Counting the visits to some sites is not without problems, either. Any web site will have a particular audience, and the result will be biased by that fact. When my blog was in WordPress.com, I had roughly as many visits from Windows users as from Linux users, and almost all of them used Firefox as a browser. Obviously this data is not an accurate reflection of the world at large. It so happened that free software users are more likely to surf to sites like mine, hence the bias.

So, without further ado, let me introduce the “BOINC Host Statistics” program (BHS). Here you are a link to its home page. You can find results I have harvested so far in the Screenshots section. For example, the SETI@home credit generation rate statistics follows:

What the plot tells us is that (at the time of writing this) 500 million [[BOINC Credit System|cobblestones]] are being granted to contributors each day. Of them, around 82% are being given to Windows computers, 9-10% to Mac, 8% to GNU/Linux, and the rest to computers running other OSs.

Another reason to love FLOSS: developers are close to the users, and they LISTEN.

I recently started using the Sociable WordPress plugin for this blog. This wonderful plugin by Joost de Valk, lets you put some links to social bookmarking/news/recommendation sites on the web at the bottom of each post, so a reader can send your post to such a site with a single click.

There are many WP plugins that do this, but I liked the looks of Joost’s, and the pleasant way of managing it. I chose Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Technorati and Slashdot, but I felt that at least two sites that I liked were missing from the available sites list: Menéame and Barrapunto.

So I boldly decided to contact the developer, Joost de Valk, and ask for them:

Hi Joost,

I have just discovered your “Sociable” WordPress plugin, and I like it a lot.

However, there is always room for improvement, and as such I would like to suggest you to add links to the following sites:

Menéame (http://meneame.net/)
Barrapunto (http://barrapunto.com/)

Both are Spanish “versions” of popular sites: Digg and Slashdot, respectively.

I mainly write in English, but I think that blogs with a Spanish audience could benefit a lot from these links.

Now I realize I even forgot to say “thanks in advance” or anything… I was a bit unpolite, I fear. Anyway, his answer came a couple of days later:

I’ll add them in the next version, coming out… tonight I guess :)

Can I trust upon you to promote it a bit there? :)

Cheers,
Joost

It is actually true that a new version of Sociable has been released, and it includes Menéame and Barrapunto as available sites. So here it goes your promotion, Joost ;^)

Isn’t it great when people collaborate and are generally nice to each other? Isn’t everyone tired of a society where people don’t do anything unless they get money or power in return?

Thanks Joost and other bona fide developers for your great work.

Last week a new power failure affected the Campus. At least the PCs at the DIPC were reseted around midnight. So, here goes the updated list of blackouts I have been able to compile, with comments if any:

1. 2008-Mar-05
2. 2007-Dec-10 (I used the reboot of my computer to install kernel 2.6.22-3)
3. 2007-Oct-16
4. 2007-Aug-27 (at least three short power failures, 5-10 minutes apart)
5. 2007-May-19
6. 2006-Oct-21 (they warned beforehand)
7. 2006-Sep-14 (Orpheus fell, the DNSs fell, the DHCP servers fell)
8. 2006-Jul-04 (Orpheus didn’t fall)
9. 2006-Jun-16
10. 2006-Jun-13
11. 2006-Jun-08
12. 2006-Jun-04
13. 2006-May-26 (The card-based automated access to the Faculty broke down)
14. 2005-Dec-21
15. 2005-Dec-13

Summary: 15 blackouts in 813 days, or 54.2 dpb (days per blackout). 86 days since last blackout. Average dpb went up by 2.2.

First post in the series: here

I really like the idea behind OpenID, and I already have an account at Weblogs SL. Of course, my WordPress.com also was a valid OpenID provider. Moroever, my isilanes.org site (and before that my EHU page) was turned into an OpenID provider by adding the following lines (extra blank added before “link”, to make text visible):

< link rel="openid.server" href="http://openid.blogs.es/index.php/serve" />
< link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid.blogs.es/isilanes" />

But I was not completely happy with that. I when signing a comment in a blog (for example) with my WP blog URL, my nickname would appear as “handyfloss” (the name of the blog), not “isilanes” (my nick). If I used the Weblog URL (or that of www.ehu.es/isilanes), my nick would be “isilanes”, but clicking on my nick would take the reader to that URL, instead of to my blog.

With this WordPress.org blog these issues are gone. I have installed the Yadis plugin, and now I can sign with the “isilanes” nick, and give a link to this blog.

The configuration of the plugin is really simple: go to Options->Yadis->Add New Service, and select “Other…“. You will be asked for two data: “OpenID Server” and “OpenID Delegate” (both provided by your OpenID account, with Weblog or whoever). Fill in the requests, click “submit”, and you’re done!

First of all: yes, this could have been made with du. Filelight is just more visual.

The thing is that yesterday I noticed that my root partition was a bit on the crowded side (90+%). I though it could be because of /var/cache/apt/archives/, where all the installed .deb files reside, and started purging some unneeded installed packages (very few… I only install what I need). However, I decided to double check, and Filelight has given me the clue:

(click to enlarge)

Some utter disaster in a printing job filled the /var/spool/cups/tmp/ with 1.5GB of crap! After deleting it, my root partition is back to 69% full, which is normal (I partitioned my disk with 3 roots of 7.5GB (for three simultaneous OS installations, if need be), a /home of 55GB, and a secondary disk of 250GB).

Simple problem, simple solution.

As digital cameras get more and more common, and personal photo collections grow bigger, solutions for managing all these images are more and more needed.

I bought my first digital camera (a Nikon CoolPix 2500) almost 4 years ago (now I see the model was 1 year old when I bought my unit), and now I own a Panasonic Lumix DMC FX10 I’m so happy with. I obviously have the need outlined above, plus the desire to sometimes share some pictures over the web. I didn’t want to go for something like Picasa, and made a lengthy Perl/Tk script to generate HTML albums from some info I would introduce.

When I later discovered digiKam, I realized it had all the features I wanted. It is incredibly useful to tag your pictures, so that you can later on retrieve, say, “all the pictures in which my father appears”. It also has many other features, like easy access to image manipulation (of which I only use the rotation for photos requiring it), or ordering of the pictures by date, so you can see how many pictures were taken each month. The humble, but for me killer, features is that you can automatically generate HTML albums from a list of pictures, which can be selected e.g. by their tags.

Give it a try, and you’ll love it.

Hay muy pocos problemas que los ordenadores no puedan solucionar. Y casi ninguno que no puedan crear.