Alfonso Jiménez

Amarok: Project Neon

alfonso — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:27:47 GMT

Ladies and gentlemen, the doors are opened on the Neon project. Neon is no more than a new service by Amarok, which offers nightly builds to the users who want to try the lastest available version. It should be noted that is not a stable version, but it’s intended to be used by everyone who wants to help find bugs or to join development for Amarok.

If you are using Kubuntu Hardy Heron and you are interested on installing it, just add this line to /etc/apt/source.list and install the amarok-nightly package:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

More information | Official Amarok site

Non-free SF on free systems

alfonso — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:17:11 GMT

People are ignorant, but we already know that. As usual, I’ve read something really stupid on Twitter this morning. It said: I hope Apple will develop for everyone [every OS]. I think it would be one of the worst things to ever happen. Why do people want to install non-free software on free systems? If we want a truly free system, we cannot accept non-free software in our system. If people keep installing, running or developing non-free components, GNU/Linux will be turned into a fuzzy combination of free and non-free software. And we also could find free software which depends on non-free packages. The freedom movement would have failed if this happens.

People wants to install non-free software on free systems because they have not idea. They have not been educated using the free software principles. They don’t understand why the software should be free. They are confused between the free software and the open source movement. The universities doesn’t teach anything about the free software principles, even many teachers don’t know anything about free software. People wants to install non-free software on free systems because they don’t know what the free software is.

The insistence of running Adobe Photoshop on GNU/Linux is a good example of this. I’m not going to talk about the Photoshop/The Gimp challenge, although I manage well myself using The Gimp. Each user should know that Adobe Photoshop has a horrible license which it doesn’t allow the freedom to run, modify and redistribute it. The Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), so we have the freedom to run, copy, change, study, distribute, improve the software and release our improvements. That’s how the community gets benefits. The Gimp, like free software, contributes to human knowledge, whilst Adobe Photoshop, like non-free software does not.

I read a message in a mailing list that could not have shocked me more. It said: Google also sponsored some work by Codeweavers to improve [Wine] support for Photoshop (’cause so many people want it) What a bad news for the free software! That’s not what people want, that’s not what GNU/Linux was made for. Why don’t Google support The Gimp instead of a Wine support for Adobe Photoshop?

The match

alfonso — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:34:03 GMT

FC Barcelona are gonna play the most important match of the year tonight. The rivals, Manchester United, will return to the stadium where one of the most glorious night of history was lived They beat Bayern Munchen in the most dramatic European Cup final victory of all-time nine years ago. The city of Barcelona will have the chance to host one of the most attractive matchs of the old continent. Barça will try to hold United to stop their winning streak.

It should be noted aswell that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (probably the two best players in the whole world) will be face to face tonight in Barcelona. Manchester United will try to get a good result to get through to the next round, whilst FC Barcelona will want to arrive at Old Trafford with an advantage. If the Catalans lose tonight, they will say good bye to the season. There is a lot at stake.

Ubuntu on lettuces

alfonso — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:59:59 GMT

I’ve seen on Entre tuxes y pepinos a curious lettuce with the Ubuntu Logo! The company is called El corral de los niños (The children’s farmyard) and it has been seen in Badajoz. And from what I have read, I would like to advise that it can contain bugs

Alfred Eisenstaedt

alfonso — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:25:19 GMT

Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German journalist and photographer. He was born in 1898, however he moved to the United States in 1935. He has been one of the best photographers of the 20th century. He took several portraits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Adolph Hitler, Albert Einstein, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, among others. Many of them appeared on the cover of the famous Life magazine.

Each Eisenstaedt’s picture tells a story. Once he took a picture of Joseph Goebbels, the leader of the NSDAP’s propaganda machine and later the minister in charge of all Nazi Propaganda. Eisenstaedt wrote later: Here are the eyes of hate. I have been asked how I felt photographing these men. Naturally, not so good, but when I have a camera in my hand I know no fear. It’s curious aswell that this picture was taken by a Jewish.

By far his most known picture is V-J day in Times Square. It was taken on August 14th 1945, all the nation was overcome with joy and euphoria, the war came to a close. The picture shows a young American sailor kissing a nurse in a memorable scene.

Eisenstaedt once explained the magical moment: I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing every girl in sight. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking back over my shoulder. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse. I took exactly four pictures. It was done within a few seconds.

Alfred Eisenstaedt died in 1995 and he’s still in memory of many people.

The Mythical Man-Month

alfonso — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:16:48 GMT

It’s obvious that a woman can create a baby in 9 months, but 9 women cannot create a baby in 1 month. This is the idea which The Mythical Man-Month wants to explain. If a job can be done by 5 men in 1 month, it’s said that this job requires 5 man-months. So applying simple arithmetic, would this project be completed in half the time if 10 men work on it? In the software development world, this thought is an outright fallacy. It’s not possible to multiply people by hours. The cost of a project is proportional to the man/months, but the progress is not.

Sometimes, assigning more people to a project to speed up the development is not the best idea, due to the time required to explain, learn, understand, mets, … about the project. Also we can find non-divisible tasks, so only one person can to do it. If we want to reduce the time, the way to do this is not by adding developers but discarding functionalities not implemented yet. For example, in DSDM we have the time and the resources fixed and the functionalities are variable (they depends on the fixed stuff).

The Mythical Man-Month is a chapter of a book called The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering written by Fred Brooks. This book was written 32 years ago, and it’s been one of the most transcendental books about software project management. It was republished as an anniversary edition in 1995 with the essay No Silver Bullet, where the author maintains the idea that there isn’t single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability or in simplicity. The main question is: Is it possible to develop without developers?

Xinc. Continuous Integration

alfonso — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:52:20 GMT

Continuous integration is a software engineering practice, which helps to integrate changes frequently in a project. It speeds up the delivery of software by decreasing integration times. It’s very important when the project is being developed by more than one person. CruiseControl is a free CI server and probably the most used. Xinc (Xinc Is Not Cruisecontrol) is an alternative free CI server made specially for PHP. The Xinc development is led by Arno Schneider, a german developer currently living in Barcelona. Arno made a wonderful presentation at the Barcelona PHP Conference celebrated last month:

We can install Xinc easily with PEAR.

sudo pear channel-discover pear.xinc.eu
sudo pear install --alldeps xinc/Xinc
sudo pear run-scripts xinc/Xinc

When we run the scripts, we can configure some parameters like:

 1. Directory to keep the Xinc config files: /etc/xinc
 2. Directory to keep the Xinc Projects and Status information: /var/xinc
 3. Directory to keep the Xinc log files: /var/log
 4. Directory to install the Xinc start/stop daemon: /etc/init.d
 5. Do you want to install the SimpleProject example: yes
 6. Directory to install the Xinc web-application: /var/www/xinc
 7. IP of Xinc web-application: 127.0.0.1
 8. Port of Xinc web-application: 8080

Once the installation is complete, we need to include /etc/xinc/www.conf in our apache virtual hosts. We also have to have mod-rewrite enabled.

Replace using Perl

alfonso — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:51:28 GMT

This tip probably seems a bit stupid, but I have always found very useful. If we want to replace a string in a file with another string, we can do it easily using Perl:

perl -p -i -e 's|old_string|new_string|' file.xml

Of course, if we need to apply it to several files we can use a wildcard character.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron Beta

alfonso — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:16:40 GMT

The beta version of the latest Ubuntu, Hardy Heron 8.04, has been released. The official release will be on April 24th 2008.

Link | Ubuntu releases

Ciao Captain

alfonso — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:46:34 GMT

Paolo Maldini, as know as Il Capitano said goodbye to the top flight of football after a thrilling match against Arsenal FC. Maldini has been one of the best defenders in the world, and after 24 seasons playing at AC Milan, Maldini will retire from the fields. The rossonero team has said that the number three that Paolo Maldini has used since his debut will not be assigned to any player ever again after his retirement, except his children Christian and Daniel, if someday they would play in the first team.