IP Incredible Paradoxes

Before beginning this rant I have to specify several things about myself:

• I am a software developer, I earn my beer money producing code for several different purposes
• I believe in Free Software but not think of myself as a zealot. I just think that FS happens to be one of the best ways to develop software, and yet another use of Newtons' famous shoulder of giants model for the generation of knowledge.
• I like Linux far more than I like Windows, but have programmed with M$ tools, and learned to program in a windows box

With that out of the way. I'll go on and describe a thing that happened to me yesteday:

I did a little work in the documentation of piece of code that was created on the request of a software development firm. This firm (let's call them Yet Another Elevated Corporation or YAEC for short) needed a software component, and needed it fast, so they hired a friend of mine (let's call him Yet Another Koder or YAC), who in turn, asked me to do a litle bit of the work.
It was an small work, not more that about 50 hours or something like that. As we do most of the times, before even trying to begin coding, YAC looked to the Internet for help. And the internet came to his aid, with shining colors. He found a component that performed a piece of the work he needed to do, in fact, he found the most complicated piece of the code already built for him. The best part was that the license for this code allowed him to use the code for any purpose, as he saw fit. So he did. This meant that the hardes part of the coding was already done. So he delivered to YAEC. The people at YAEC where happy. At no point did YAC try to hide the fact that he had used a piece of code from the net.
So far so good, the code has been delivered and the money is in the bank.
Yet a few weeks later a representative from YAEC calls, furiously saying that all of the code was on the net. YAC calmfully explained to him that his work was indeed not all development, but rather reusing and adapting. To this YAEC replies, with great anger, that YAC should have not charged, that this was unethical behaviour on YAC's part.

<opinion>

One of the few lessons I learned on software engineering is that reuse is good. It is better to use a piece of code that is already tested, provided that it is legal to do so. Now, If you have to perform a task and are given a certain amount of resources (money, time, monkeys -which by the way should not be called resources, it's denigrat
ing-) , and are smart enough to embrace and extend a piece of software that is available on the net you should do so. What you do if you have money, resources or monkeys left to spare depends of the kind of relationship that binds you with the provider of the money, resources or monkeys. If you were hired for a certain amount of money then go party, you did your job. If you are working as an employee, then you should return the resources or the monkeys and awsk for a raise, for giving such a boost to producvtivy. If you are a kind soul, you might even donate the remaining resources to whoever made life easier for you without knowing it. Or donate to charity. It depends, anyway.

</opinion>

New Toy

After a process of decision that took about a month, three visits to Unilago I am now the proud owner of a Toshiba Satellite A25-S279, fully equiped with 60GB on its hard disk, 512MB on RAM, CD RW/DVD Wi-Fi

Freedom

These las few weeks have been great. I have changed my working status, from slave-in-the-payroll to paid-by-the-hour-mercenary. With these changes come certain advantages, like not wearing a tie and being able to have a million hour lunch, along with disadvantages like staying late and working weekends. I have to say that the advantages outweigh the advantages totally. Even if there are things to do, the fact that is me, and not a prestablished timesheet that decide where I will be, fills me with joy. I know that it is not possible to be sure that one will never do something. So I'll say it like this: From now on I will do all that I can do, so that I can keep the ability to choose what I do, and the times I do it in. Yee hay!!!!

On a boat downstream

Rafting:To travel by raft
Raft: A flatbottom inflatable craft for floating or drifting on water: shooting the rapids in a rubber raft.
As one of the latest new comers to this outdoors activity I have to say this definition falls short. What we did last sunday cannot be described as just floating or drifting. It didn't even begin on water. It was a whole day plan, that began with a little horse riding, that I didn't participate in, given my lack of interest on those four legged beasts, and continued on in a two hour walk through a small stream with several ponds and slides carved by the water on stones, to finish gloriously in a trip down the Rio Negro with eight passengers, three guides, a rescue guy, two rafts and a kayak. Whatever I can write about it here doesn't even approach the real experience. The fear when I got thrown of the boat on the first rapid, not bacause of the risk of drowning, that was practically non existent, thanks 90% to the fact that I was wearing a lifesaver and 10% to the fact that I know how to swim, but because of the lack of control over my own body, that allowed the river to do whatever it wanted, without me being able to even have a saying on the matter. It was a lot of fun, a lot of exercise, and a very nice experience that I would really recommend, as long as you are willing to be physically destroyed the following day, as I am today, with a smile on my face and a scratch on my arm. [When, where, how]

Año Nuevo, vida nueva

Last saturday I went to a wedding. It had been a long time since I last attended such an event. About 15 years, to be more accurate. It is the first time I see a friend of mine as one of the main parties involved in this wedding business. It got me thinking: How does one take such an step? How do you know?

As far as steps are concerned, I have taken some myself. Starting next week I'll be working with my current employer only half time, on a per hour basis and will start working towards the construction of my own chuzo on the other half of my time. Right now I am on the optimistic phase of the endeavour; it will mean a lot of work, but right now, from where I am standing it seems like the right choice, and the right step to take, at the right time. Only time will tell.

On other news, as a part of my new agreement, from next week on I am only "A man in a suit" when need arises, instead of "on a daily basis" as it was until know. Let's hope the increased amount of red blood cells that can now flow upwards, free from the knot of the tie help the creativity, that has been rather dull lately.

ProFUCKduction Server

It all began humbly. It was just a rutinary upgrade, you call on the all-powerfull debian, do a simple apt-get update, say yes, get on with your life. Five minutes, tops. But it all went wrong.
apt-get did it's job perfectly, updated the thing and configured, but the ever present libc got updated, and that's where it all went berserk. The pop3 server decided that it would put a message through it's standar error stream telling everybody who would dare to listen, that somebody had used errno without including errno.h, thus producing a dependency. Applications that reference errno without including (usually by doing ``unsigned int errno'') now generate a runtime warning. Well, fucking kill me if I didn't check every bug present with every piece of software on the box I was runnning.
A full hour after the devilish ap-get I had to call the real experts to devise a clever hack that would cool of things and allow the president to read his e-mail via Outlook. A clever redirection of stderr into /dev/null cleared the problem and mail could de read. It just had a little issue: Whenever somebody sent an e-mail it got send, but an error message went back to the receiver telling him that the mail could not be delivered, altough it had been. This just HAD TO BE FIXED.
THen the guy who actually handles the machine came in and tried to fix the wreck, in the process he downgraded libc, thus rendering alll of the machines services unusable.
With the machine already down, the best solution was to install the whole thing into another box, and to pass about 17GB of data from one to the other. So the very small process that was meant to take 5 minutes, actually took 17 hours, and banned me from ever using a root console on a production server. One has to admire sysadmins.

You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. (Tyler Durden, who else?), and to comment on somebody
Stereotypes are lousy. You are not better because you have a degree, and you are not worse because you lack it. You are not wiser because you are older, or foolish because you are young.

FISLC and other demons

Last saturday the FISLC took place. The weather was an awfull mess and not a lot of people came. All in all, most of the time there were more people helping organize than people receiving help. It helped me realize how little I know about Linux. I liked specially the show of Pequelin, a meta distro built for kids, in Spanish.

A few weeks ago I finally came around and replaced my aging Mandrake 8.1 for a Morphix. I have to say I fell for apt-get almost instantly, it is indeed a very nice thing. I still have to restart my network by hand every time I turn the machine on, but I'll come around and fix it pretty soon. I also have to say I have become a huge fan of the mailing list archive, everything one could ever ask for has already been answered there.

Maldito Turo, actualice su blog

Futbol, futbol futbol

The last time I played soccer I was in high school. People say that playing soccer is like riding a bike; you never forget once you've learned. The problem is when, like me, you never learned the first time. I played in this forty people matches, with three simultaneous games going on on the same field, so there wasn't a lot of ball handling involved. Seven years from that, I accepted, for the first time, to go to a soccer match.
I have to say I had a great time. I played as the palomero, whose mission was to wait deep behind the opponents field, and run around the ball.
I did not think I would be this tired afterwards. 36 hours after the match finished my legs have kept their decision to give me a long dose of pain every time I move them. I did not know that playing soccer hurts your (!!) shoulders. I hope that by tomorrow I will have recovered. And will definitively play again.

A chuzo of my own?

It has always been my idea that, as a choice for a living, I would create a company of my own, a compny that build software, to be excat. Be it because of all that was said back in college or because of what I see around, this has been my idea for quite a while. I say it might be a school related illness because of Zarpa and Pepux Labs.

Upon graduation all wise old people around said: Young grasshopper: You should wait for a while, work a little, see what it's like, then you can go and start your own.

Being, as I was and still am, rather inexperienced on these matters, I followed their advice. But when is it a good time to jump ship and start? As one grows older the amount of responsabily increases. It is probably easier to jump ship now, being single and without children, than in the future, where the situation may change.

Anyways, the tought has been seriously crossing my mind lately. Perhaps I have a distorted view of what staring up is like, but as I see it, is the only way I conceive the future, at least in the long term. I don't know If I'll be able to say "yes, boss" when I'm 35, or when I'm 25 for that matter

I've lost my principles and am writing this from a Win2K box I had to install in order to get the software from the office working on my PC. I haven't even installed vi in it.
The age of the chulo

Lately I have been noting the emergence of a phase in life called "the age of the chulo". Like adolescence and old age, it seems to be a phase in life whose frontiers cannot be clearly defined, but that appears to happen in the early twenties. It is supposed to eventually fade out but there have been cases of people remaining in the chulo ages for years.

People suffering from this syndrom can experiment the following sympthoms:

• The expression "Darle a lo que sea" becoms frequent in their speeches


• Aguardiente and vallenatos are more likely to become the companions of a night out, than suicidal rock and Coca Cola


• Suddenly 4AM is not so late, and a half a bottle is not so much

This phase is also known as "Perdición"

I have not seen a Colombian World Cup match since USA94 and I have to say I haven't missed much. Are we eternally condemned to a mediocre performance? Looks like the colombian Soccer team is like a snapshot of the country: Great talent, with poor team skills and unable to cope with either failure or sucess.

23 and counting

When Alexander the Great was 18 he commanded the macedonian cavalry in the battle of Cheronea. When he was 20 he became king of Macedonia. When he turned 23 he was well inside Persia, had already won at Halicarnassus and had already solved the Gordian Knot Riddle.

By the age of 20, Charles XII, of Sweden had already defeated both Denmark and Rusia

At age 21 Mozart had already traveled all of the european courts at least twice as a gifted musician

I became 23 last sunday and the only thing I could do was throw a party. It was very nice tough. A few open-listers attended, and some of them stayed until sunrise.

It was very nice to see a lot of people I had not seen in a while. As an ode to getting old I received news that a friend of mine is getting married next july with his 4 year girlfriend. The thing is, this guy is exactly my age. We graduated from the same school in the same class, yet I don't see myself getting married in the near or far future. Not because I don't want to eventually be married, but because I don't see it as a part of my right now. Will I ever?, let's hope so

Expect pictures to be posted here soon

Run, Forrest, run

Today, after Montoya's unidisputed victory in the F1, I had a race of my own to run.
In Bogota's very own Maratón. The starting point was on Plaza de Bolívar, and the day was rather rainy, not a downpour, but a small shower, but it kept on during the whole race.

I ran the 21Km marathon which is the big one, by Bogotan standards (A marathon is 42Km long, but none are held in Colombia). It was very well organized, with poles marking every kilometer and water or gatorade every two or three kilometers.

Right at the start the race was a huge croud of people and there was no possibility of advancing at any speed that was duifferent from that of the whole group. It wasn't until Parque Nacional, a kilometer and a half ahead, that the mass of people got sparser and some breathing room was possible. I had run the same race last year, and I felt better this time. The rain was not an annoyance, but an aid for not dehydratating, except for the occasional poodle of muddy water that got splashed and went into one's own tennis shoes.

Jogging is a masochistic sport. Right in the end I only wished for the race to end, from kilometer 17 up to the end, my legs were killing me. I could breath fine and I had enough energy to go at a faster pace, but my legs were unable to keep the rythm. I finished in 1:54:07, which is not really good but it beat my previous mark of 1:59:53. Yee Hay

The best part of the whole event was to see all of the people, both participants and public. Despite the continuous rain, troughout the whole race, a lot of people was shouting and cheering, and a lot of car drivers were angry at the race, which closed the roads for them and made the wait for several hours for the whole croud to pass, and I cannot describe the feeling when a little difference of height in the terrain (such as going down 72nd avenue) permitted the view of a huge river of people as far as the eye could see on both directions. That is really overwhelming.

Sincierto

Pues me quedé con las ganas de escuchar a 4AM en vivo. Eso me pasa por llegar a las nueve y cuarto a un concierto que comienza a las ocho y treinta (y que en realidad sólo comenzó hasta como las diez y treinta). En fin, me tocará conformarme con oir las canciones bajadas por MP3. Igual, terminé metido en "La tienda del Café" en Usaquén dónde, entre otras cosas, no venden café.

Ya casi cumplo seis meses en el trabajo. Eso es muuuuuucho tiempo. Hasta ahora, haciendo un balance:

Cosas Buenas:

• He conocido una cantidad de gente, y visto una cantidad de maneras de ver el mundo


• Definitivamente hacer software si es lo mio


• He podido estar involucrado, de manera relativamente cercana en un proceso de negociación del estilo de "cuánto vale esto", "cuánto nos demoramos haciendo aquello"


• He tenido la oportunidad de jugar con gran cantidad de software y hardware(todo de La misma gente, pero que mas da

Cosas Malas:

• Corbata los lunes, martes, miércoles y jueves !!!!!!


• Tener que contarle a una maquinita que es lo que uno ha estado haciendo

Según eso las cosas buenas son "profundas" y las malas puramente operativas, por lo que el balance, teniendo todo en cuenta, es muy bueno.

El domingo es la Maratón de Bogotá. No he podido entrenar, por circunstancias diversas, pero igual la voy a correr. Espero hacer menos de dos horas en los 21km.

Raro escribir en español, mejor sigo haciéndolo en inglés

Compilation at last Several random thoughts

• I wanted to write a very long rant about what I've been doing at work, but found it is not easy to do so, without going into specifics that I'd rather not have published on the Internet, so I'll just have to say we made a bold move that forced a great change, and that now there is a great challenge ahead for me/us and that I'm very happy about it.
  I have the opportunity of playing the role of architect - implementor - maker of policy - dirty coder - etc. And it is just great.


• It look like vacation time makes bloggers very busy, and entries have been rather poor lately. However I have to comment on svigle's life threatening experience: It is weird, when I started driving I thought the worst thing that could happen to me in a car was that I crashed it and got into trouble (as in, trouble paying the reparation). It wasn't until a few years later when a friend of mine died on a car crash, thanks to large doses of alcohol on the driver of a large SUV who crashed the car he rode in, that I realized that driving, and cars can actually kill people, and can actually make one who is behing the wheel, a murderer. That is one of those things that have to happen close to you, for you to realize.


• It would look much cooler on geek meetings if one said "Debian" when answering the perennial what's your distro question. It is more hackish, to say it some way. However I like my machine to be configurable only when I want to configure it. I want for the tools I use to be configurable. I like to configure my apache, or my version of mysql server, but I do not want to configure the X server. I know I use X, but I don't care about the number of Hz the screen runs on. The nice newbie like installation interface made those choices for me, and made them right. There's nothing worst than having to spend a whole week figuring out what makes X crash, because of installing it by hand (or from a bleeding edge testing branch). For me, Mandrake has done the job perfectly, I configured my system carefully where I wanted it carefully configured, but didn't configure it where I wasn't interested. I think that's the beauty of Linux and all it's wide spectrum of choices. You can decide what you want to control and what you want to leave as is.

kNOppix

As One of the best hackers I know notes in his blog, I had the pleasure of being invited to a Geek-fest. As awful as I might look in the pictures (I tend to do that, look awful in pictures) I had a great time. I got to meet the now very famous Juan Luis, and Arhuaco, in the costeñan flesh

Aside from that I got a fresh copy of knoppix. The next day I found out I hadd 11 gigs of wasted disk lying around, so I tried to install it. However, Alejo's CD seems to have become physically damaged on it's trip from his home to mine. Still curious, I downloaded the whole thing all over again. 36 hours later I had yet another knoppix CD. I have to admire the guys, that LiveCD runs like a charm. When installing, it asks almost nothing, which is perfectly good for newbies. After the installation finished and it allegedly installed LILO I rebooted and tested. The thing was nowhere to e found among the other four options in my boot. No problem, I just redid LILO, and up I went. One reboot later I was looking at a screen that said Debian and asked for my login.

All is well, the thing loaded KDE, no problems at all, all the hardware was correctly detected. However.... when I tried to logout, the thing just died, the screen started blinking (as a message telling me no info was coming from the CPU) and it did nothing. When I rebooted I expected e2fsck to make me wait, but nothing major, However, e2fsck quit on me and told me I had to manually rerun it. I did, and after correcting some 20 mistakes in the drives I entered again. Again very nice KDE3, again, on logout, the thing died, and again it sends the hard drive to hell. Being a little faint of heart when it comes to IDE disks I decided to leave knoppix's pretty KDE interfaces to the LiveCD, and remain with my very old, very graphic, very mine, very configured Mandrake 8.1.

00:56:12

Last sunday I participated in a 12 KM run help by Bogota's very own, Clinica Palermo. The race started at the Clinic (Calle 47, Cra 22), went down Calle 26 up to Cra 68, and came back.

• 00:00 Cesar Augusto Londoño calls the departure, and the race starts as a human mass of about 2500 people crawls slowly, like a huge white snail.


• 03:25 The route takes us up Carrera 28's bridge, from there I can see a dense mass of people as far as my eyes get me


• 05:00 The sun starts heating up and everybody seems to have obtained their position in the race, surpasses are less frequent


• 12:00 The race really starts, I forget I'm running


• 15:35 I am about to pass carrera 50's bridge and the leaders of the race are already coming back from carrera 68. They run in a "pique'e choro" kind of way, all the time.


• 20:45I reach carrera 68, that marks the turning point


• 35:00By now there is no huge mass of people, just a few runners scatterd here and there. On the other side of Calle 26 all the people that were walking the race started jumping to the side I was in


• 47:05 We finally get out of carrera 26 and head into the parkway


• 56:12 Yee hay. I'm glad it's over


• finish + 15:00 It was a good race, we should do it again. Yeah, it was really great

So I'm not me

UP until this day I was a believer. I belived in electronical transference, in working coperatively through IM/chat/mail, in coding remotely through the use of internet; in being able to exist in a virtual world, where you didn't have to be physically present in order to be a part of something. However, this approach has it's dangers, as I noticed today.

I admit it, I'm some kind of mentally retracted moron that can remember ascii codes for ñ, > and < (and it's entity representation for HTML), but that is unable to retain the moronic four number PIN for his savings account. So, as one might imagine, I forgot the darned number for the third time and the card got blocked. Since it was far too late to do anything about it, I went to the Internet, and found out what I had to do. The answer was simple: "Go to any of our offices with your Citizenship Card (what the hell, Cédula de Ciudadanía) and the card and we will fix your ordeal in no time.
I effectively went to one of their offices, the lady who I spoke to made me fill a form, with the number of the account and my signature, and faxed it to the office my account was residenced in (which was about 1 hour away by any means of transportation). The fax had to be returned from this office, accepting the change and telling me the new PIN (or the old one, I don't even know). Fifteen minutes later, the fax was not yet there so I decided to leave and come back later.
About two hours later the fax came back: It said the signature didn't match the one they had in their files. To put it in simple terms: I was not me.
So tomorrow, I'll have to go directly to see if me, in the flesh, is really me.
Luckily (or unluckily) the thing is stored by physical means, which allows the physical me to receive the new code, no matter what (or so I hope). But what about electronical stuff?
What happens when we forget the password because SSH automatically introduced it for us in our key? May God help us then

I just remembered....
My kindashrink said I had no soul. Can you imagine? All the posibities that opens? I thing she meant for it to be a turning point in my life or some shit, but it hasn't been. I'll have to figure what to do in order to take advantage of not having a soul.

So what have you been doing?

I tought I had posted just a few days ago, but it wound up being about two weeks from my last post. But, what have I been up to? Geez. Looks like homo corporativus is taking his residence inside me. It seems like a million years ago when I was in school. Reading bluhelmet (whoever that guy is) reminded me of the time I was burning circuits, going to the novena in a hurry to buy that dammned PAL memory that would refuse to burn on the crappy PAL burner in labelec.

Problem with the job: You are always in the same place and your issues last longer. You have more time to solve them (the whole day, instead of the few mins you get), but they don't just die after a deadline. In school you either turned the paper in or didn't, but after the deadline it was gone. You knew that by may 14th all of it would be history.

Bored of meetings (most of the time I sleep through them), tool vendors telling developers that tools will do the job for them, wearing a tie

Happy with meeting a lot of interesting people, developing software, jogging in the mornings when I make it, not wearing a tie on fridays Salir a rumbiar sin pensar en la cuenta

Making software and talking about making software

I know everybody is going to say they knew it. I have to confess I was rather naive. I used to think that the process of building software was about building software.

I used to thing that, in good old fashioned hackerish style, good code should speak for itself, or, to put it in a broader canvas, a good work should need no other help than that of it's contents to be known. Turns out that twisted mixture of influences, known as reality, is not like that. If no other influences existed over the software process, probably it would be about making software, and not much else, just like painting should be about painting. However, when making software one has to think about the software being useful for somebody (which is a good thing) and, in a lot of cases, profitable (as in built on time and under budget), which is not a good thing from the purely theoretical point of view. To add to this already messy melting pot of interests, it is probable that software has to live with existing infraestructure (existing machines, existing software or existing user habits).

As a result of this too much time is spent on talking, talking to other developers, talking to software users, talking to vendors, talking to bosses, talking about the best way of doing things. When compiling a 52 line COBOL program meant punching a whole deck of cards and running it through a machine that only allowed two programs a day per individual, it was right to talk a lot about the software, to actually build it in paper before really building it. But right now, when the length of the cycle has shortened so much.... Is it still necessary to lay out all of the thing that are to be done before actually doing it? Is it even possible? Is it possible to think in advance about all the possible things that might be needed in a devolpment process, and to do so even before the development starts? Furthermore, is it even wise to try to do this?

I think not. I thing that we should use the fact that 90% of a program's functionality is built in 10% of the time (or 80-20, or whatever, numbers can be found to back up any division of those two figures) to our advantage, to let the code talk, because, what's better to demonstrate how a piece of software will work than the piece of software herself?

Talking about talking, today Colibri had 30 messages of people ranting, I don't even know about what. discussing if discussing was a good thing to do. That's our problem. If that time that was spent ranting or back ranting, was spent coding, or translating, or thinking, we would advance faster.

Software building doesn't work by consensus. A lot of very succesfull projects (GNU, Linux, Matanza, etc) work by dictatorship. Everybody can contribute, but there is a reduced core of technically skilled people that has the absolute truth on what goes in and what doesn't. You don't like it, you can fork it.

The amount of caffeine inside my veins will have to be rised as I head into another talk about talking about making software. Yee-hay