Bye, bye The Inq

I’ve been a fan of Mad Mike Magee for a long time and always followed his site The Inquirer with a knack to keep in touch with technology and have a good laugh at the same time. But in the last months (since the “relaunch” on 1st of January this year) the site has become more and more drooling to the point of being intellectually unsavory. I was wondering why until last night while keeping up with two weeks of unread cruft in my RSS aggregator, a piece of news caught my eye: one of the old-time hacks, Paul Hales, retired. Off I went and discovered several things:

• Mad Mike sold The Inq two years ago and I didn’t notice. Jeez, my brains have been on vacation for too long!
• Mad Mike is a fan of Inspector Morse. (I’m a fan of Inspector Lewis too, FWIW).
• Mad Mike is writing at TG Daily.
• Charlie Demerjian is writing at SemiAccurate.

And last but not least, I agree with Mad Mike: He sold a house and the new owners have turned it into a brothel.

¿Cuando comencé a usar Debian?

Buena pregunta. Mirando la historia de Debian y haciendo algunos cálculos de calendario además de tomar en consideración que tuve el primer o segundo mirror público de Debian en mi país, diría que mi primera versión de Debian fué 0.93R5, pues me acuerdo que ya tenía dselect.

On being a businessman and all that

Wandering across Planet Fedora I ran into a blog post from a fellow national that talks a bit about cosaslibres.com. As far as I know through the grapevine, cosaslibres.com is a one-man show that’s been running since the last century or turnabouts.

It is meritorious that the guy had the guts to start a dotcom business in Colombia of all places at a time when most high-end internet users in the country believed that 28K modems were teh kool (wish I had done it). The business has grown but apparently not enough for him to grow as a business person yet; he has spread too thin to give attention to the basics of his business. That’s the failure of many small businesses where the owner can’t let go to become first the general manager and later the main stock holder and president of the board. There ain’t that many people out there as hungry as Bill Gates, Mr. Duh-velopers or Julio Mario Santodomingo…

BTW, that blog should allow OpenID logins. I much rather have people identify with an OpenID that’s traceable than allow open commenting to all with hand-hold moderation as I have set this blog now. Let’s hope wordpress.com becomes an OpenID consumer soon.

The conceptual definition of fanboy

Being adult is to stop hiding from others with masks and lies. Reaching enlightenment is to stop hiding from ourselves and to be able to see reality as is. Both are difficult tasks and many people live all their lives trapped in their own delusional fantasies.

The anonimity lent by the intarweb seems to be a letter of marque to many people who evidently have a murky perception of reality, yet thanks to their insecurity and mental confusion (I won’t talk about intellect because you need a clear mind to start using your intellect), try to impose their cockamamie ideas on others. As well as their incredibly poor use of syntax and ignorance of semantics. And this takes us to trying to distill the concept of the fanboy.

The fanboy is what I say above and worse. Usually male in the early or the late stages of his life. The young ones are ignorant and emotionally confused, therefore arrogant. The old ones are ignorant, thus arrogant but compounded with ill-founded pride due to their self-aggrandizement “my years of experience give me the right to pontificate about life, death and all in-between”. People who think that typing python -c "print 'Hello World!'" makes you an authority. On what, I don’t have the foggiest.

And this brings me to the motivation of this post. Have you been reading lots of blog comments saying the author that he should use PCLinuxOS because it is the best next thing after the discovery of fire? Today the DistroWatch Newsletter comes with a very interesting statistic and a conclusion: the average number of users in an IRC support channel is a realistic numerical measure of the actual user base. Ready to have a reality check?

I’ve given up on Ubuntu, the community

but not on the distribution, yet..

I’m fed up of the hand holding and the political correctness that has statarted to perfuse the IRC channels. I was banned from #ubuntu+1 only because I told some idiotic teenager to use a different version or distribution if he (or she) was fed up with the bugs in a development version that’s not yet stable enough for a new user? Now, I never go there to ask questions but to help. I’ve never got real help in IRC, because in general most people there are a bunch of ignorant children. Rather it is I who gives help to others. I feel justified in my decision of not wanting to teach anymore. As far as I know, my knowledge stays with me and whoever wants to learn what I know may come and beg as all good true students with potential for mastery have done for the last ten thousand years. Does the latter thought offend you? That only means you have lots to learn and I may even teach you one or two things if you ask nicely.

Last Sunday, in that very same channel I had a brief exchange with Sarah Hobbs, aka hobsee, one of the most respected Ubuntu members due to her contributions to community relations where she said “It seems that the technical knowledge of users diminishes with each new release” or something like that, if memory serves me right (I keep forgetting to enable logging in my IRC client). That was in the morning. In the evening, the operators on the channel were a bunch of losers who do not deserve the air they breath and happened what I refer above. Anyway, that very much summarizes my thoughts on the matter. I have started severing my ties to that particular “community” because, if you lie down with dogs you wake up with fleas. I still use the distribution but as things go, I much rather use Debian with Garnome or FreeBSD than Ubuntu and that’s exactly what I’m starting to do. Yet, I do find that there are things to be done within the developer community and Im considering rekindling my long lost interest in packaging, translation and development. Yet, being the steppenwolf I am, I wonder if I would ever fit withing an “open source community” of sorts. Hell, I don’t fit in the academic community (where I belong by my own rights, suppossedly) because I can’t withstand the arse-kissing (and even ball-licking) that goes on among the “established academics” and “scientists”. That’s a game I won’t play, it goes against my sense of selfworth and integrity. I’m too much of a ろょにん not to cringe at the idea of selling out my personal principles.

Security and Speed – Flawed by Design?

Releases/FeatureBootShutdownSpeedup – Fedora Project Wiki

Just giving a quick read to the notes in that entry of the Fedora Wiki, it dawned in my mind (it hit me like a rock, in fact) that surely many of those GNU/Linux boxes 0wn3d by crackers out there, are running Fedora. Sure, netfilter is enabled by default, but that only goes to show the inherent weakness (phoniness?) of the security philosophy used. Simplicity and parsimony are the landmark of well thought-out solutions, hypothesis and theories.

And no, I’m not cuttting any slack to the other big players of the distro wars. Neither Debian nor SUSE, nor Mandriva, much less PCLinuxOS, have truly lock down default network setups; I can’t comment much on the other 500 distros out there. Ubuntu gets closer but it should give weenies the addition of a locked down and licked up netfilter configuration so they can shoot themselves in the foot. Oh! There is a Google Summer of Code project to address exactly that. Expect questions like: “I installed the firewall and now I can’t download my pr0n”.

Comic Books for Grumpy Old Men

Suggested Comic Books for Grumpy Old Men (GGG4 featuring Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, JMS, Frank Miller)

Hmm… I’m still working at this. Found a Spanish translation of “V for Vendetta” the other day and I’ve enjoyed it very much (why are comic books so expensive around these here parts? It wasn’t clay-coated alkaline paper, and the binding is pathetic for God’s sake!).

The iPhone will fail. In your dreams!

My friend M forwarded a comment that crossed one of the mailing lists he subscribes to. (Not sure which one though, he sorta forgot to mention that). Well he is presently a Mac user while I’m a recovering one[1].

He cites a post (that I don’t want to quote it entirely without proper attribution). Here is an excerpt of the end of that post:

I’ve got guys at work who upgrade their phones faster than I change my pants ( Embarassed ) and they use practically none of the phone’s features, they have the ‘latest’ phone because it’s the thing to have! (One guy was getting the Nokia N80 – I commented on the fact he’d be able to use it for VOIP, because it’s got Wifi – He didn’t have a clue!)

The iPhone will succeed because the average punter will not know any better!

Another proof sent by M that the iPhone will sell, and profusely: There is already a shareware application for the iPhone.

I agree with the assessment. As long as there are people willing to throw money on useless objects (even if useless only to themselves) just for the sake of trying to achieve social status, products like the iPhone will have surefire commercial success. He! In fact, that’s a clear demonstration that we “humans” are just big hairless apes, ultimately we care about status in the herd and how much food and sex we can get out of it. It is difficult to leave our animal instinctual behavior behind after all. Things have gotten worse with the centuries, before women would have little bastards with the Landlord and expect a good future for the children (some even got to be Pope!), nowadays they do it with any loser who’s got a Nokia N80.

[1] Not really, I would buy one of them newflangled MacBook Pro thingies with an Intel quad-core in the spur of the moment, if I didn’t know already that those CPUs are pure crap: whoever buys one of those must know that that those Core Duo 2 are two Core Duo CPUs slaped together with nothing more than string and spit. If you want a real 4-core CPU, buy an AMD Opteron 64 or wait for the AMD Athlon 64 and Turion 64 quad-cores later this year, sometime.

The sorry state of minorities in the US of A

Why does KDE use slaves? | Free Software Magazine

Reading the article and the reactions in the comments, I can see a clear confirmation of two different trends in USAn society I observed first hand during the years I lived there. People of african origin are, presently, more racist and classist than their european counterparts. And both ally themselves to justify their racism against other segments of the population: The real owners of the land who were dispossesed, and the immigrants and their descendants from other places of the planet. I wonder if the K.K.K. is an equal opportunity hatred society now.

Which B-Movie Badass am I?

Fun at the Titty Twister. Which B-Movie Badass Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Yep. I don’t have enough fingers on my extremities to count all the S.O.B.s that have called me so. The poor souls lead pathetic lives, I know first hand.