www.arareko.net

About a year ago, I made a KDE splashscreen using a FreeBSD image that I found in the web. A few weeks ago, KDE 3.4 was released and I thought it would be nice to update the splashscreen to match the new look & feel.

I put my hands to work and in less than 1 hour I had a new package ready to install. I also updated its entry in KDE-Look for sharing it with the community.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t use FreeBSD. If you use KDE and like the splashscreen, just download it to ~/.kde/share/apps/ksplash/, un-tar(1), restart KDE and enjoy!

Actually, I was expecting this e-mail to come from some kind of automated script from the Yahoo! 360° system, since a few days ago I signed for the beta waiting list of the product. Sincerely, it was much better for me to receive it from a good friend and ex-coworker from Yahoo! México. Thanks a lot mita!

Without hesitation, I quickly signed up for the service. In a matter of minutes, I was customizing my profile and sending some invitations to other good friends. I also uploaded some photos for my albums and my profile.

I explored the blog capabilities of the service. I got a bit dissapointed to see that it’s a very simple CMS. For personal reasons, I don’t plan to migrate my blog to this or another service, but it would be really nice to have syndication options in the Yahoo! 360° service. It would be very easy for the Yahoo! 360° system to have the ability to import our XML, RSS or Atom feeds into our Yahoo! 360° blog. That way, our existing content will be available in both sites! Fortunately, there’s a beta feedback form for sending this kind of suggestions…

I really hope this product exceeds our and its own expectatives. I don’t want it to morph into a big white elephant like Orkut has become. It has my applause for the moment

As always, I was the first one to put my hands on the wall. There I was: with my climbing shoes, my chalkbag, my pack and my music to full volume. After ¼ lap, things got bad for me… Beto was practically running behind me, he was stepping on my heels!

I couldn’t get who or what made him act like a stupid & irresponsable madman (actually, I’m the one who behaves that way most of the time while training ). I had no time for guessing it! I had to run!! He was over me!!!

I began to do long reach moves to gain some distance from him, but he seemed so determined to squash me that my whole effort wasn’t enough. I had to stick with the idea of being a few centimeters away from him.

We finished the first ½ lap and I quickly got off the wall. My forearms were burning and I was dehydrated, I was coming close to be exhausted. Beto on the other hand, was happy to start the second ½ lap without having me in front of him. He simply told me: “See you!”, I thought: “Fscking bastard!! You’ll see what I have for you!” as I took off my shirt, sipped some water, put my pack on and chose the appropriate Slayer’s song for the occasion…

I applied him the same technique: I let him gain some distance. When he saw me so far, he started to think that I was finished, that I was no more an opponent to him, so he relaxed and let the fatigue come in. Then I started to climb very fast… faster than he could realize. Soon I was the one punishing him, I was so close that I could grab some holds just before him. Now I had the control of the game and he was paying the dire consequences of his stupidity.

We finished the first and only lap. We climbed off the wall in a very shameful condition. Now I was the one with the big smile on my face. After a few minutes, we recovered our breath and saw each other with a cynical glare. What supposedly had to be an endurance session turned into an explosive torture festival. We smiled to each other and left the place to celebrate with some hard boulder problems…

We arrived early and chose to play pool in one of the big tables of the place. The time went by and the game seemed to be eternal… none of us could play decently. The table was so big that our aiming ability was shameful… but the talk and the beer were excellent!

After 2 hours of play (and 3 games!), we finally decided to move to a smaller table. We spent another hour there. Ohhh… excellent decision! The next games took about 10 minutes to be played. The table was so small that towards any side we threw the white ball, it was easy for it to struck another one and put it within some hole.

It doesn’t matter who won most of the games, the important thing were the moments of good talk, beer & friendship (and no, I wasn’t the lucky one who lost most of the games ).

Today I had a very dissapointing experience. To meditate a bit about things, I took one of my favorite books and opened it in a chapter whose title is: “This is what you want, this is what you get”. There I found some interesting paragraphs where the author narrates a conversation with his inner self:

Dear Mark: you would do well if once in a while you read what you write.

Keep it instead of giving it. Sharpen the strength and aim well with it, instead of shooting everywhere to anynone who listens. If you don’t make it shine, they cannot take the sun. Besides, each one of them wants what he thinks that corresponds to him, to take it as it is put on his nose.

Say this instead: ‘Here cocoon, grab it like this, this is how I think you should grab it’.

Don’t be polite with me. Leave me alone with my weakness. I’m not giving you the best of me and that makes me to hate myself. My disease insists to admit your breadcrumbs of praise, your interest and your joviality as nutrients. But I don’t need to you. I can surpass my need of your help to deserve you. I will take this doubt and transparency to make with them an armor with which protect me from you. I will wrap myself with it to keep me warm. I will turn it into push. As to doubt from oneself is rough, I will sharpen my tools with it; as of oneself it is the bottom, I can only climb upwards; because the men who are scared of their talent waste the talent and that is to waste life. Instead of it, I want to use my time.

It perfectly described the way I felt today after my miserable experience. Then came another line that matched with my attitude towards the current circumstances:

Come on, hit me, you can’t hurt me. Leave me without food, you can’t kill me from hunger. Tell me that those pitches are vertical, you can’t stop me. Hit me!

PS. The book was Mark Twight‘s Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber

I found at Gunnar‘s blog that he took The Finnish Test. Since I have a very nice friend from Finland, I wanted to know how much I have learned from her. The result was:

Almost Finn
Congratulations! You scored 72%!

You know surpringly many things (or are good enough at guessing). You probably have some idea of what saunas are about and maybe have experienced it. But you’d never slap yourself with birch twigs. (You should try it though, it’s good for circulation)

My test tracked 1 variable how you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 23% on finnpoints

Link: The Finnish Test written by Eteil on Ok Cupid

Not so bad, huh?

My IP address has been banned again

My stupid ISP has a lot of assh***s working with them. They simply doesn’t know how to provide a quality service. Since a few hours ago, all of my e-mails are being returned with messages like this:

From MAILER-DAEMON Mon Mar 21 00:14:12 2005
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 00:14:12 -0600 (CST)
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem
To: postmaster
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status; boundary="j2L6EAUW004360.1111385652/nordwand.arareko.net"
Subject: Postmaster notify: see transcript for details
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (postmaster-notification)

[some lines deleted...]

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----

(reason: 554 Service unavailable; Client host [201.129.28.180] blocked using l1.spews.dnsbl.sorbs.net; ! [1] Uninet/prod-infinitum, see http://spews.org/ask.cgi?S3167)

[rest of message deleted...]

So I went on to the suggested page which corresponds to the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS), then followed the suggested steps and got to this evidence file.

There’s a list of network ranges that are being blocked and where I could see mine:

1, 201.129.0.0 - 201.129.63.255, Uninet / prod-infinitum.com.mx

After that I could see the following (and not so far from reality) message:

Spam ignorant.

Poster child of how not to run a broadband network company when it comes to dealing with abuse.

Then it follows with some more evidence. SPEWS recommends me to require my ISP to fix this issue. These stupid people are going to hear me!

I began by creating a new account in my workstation for setting up the required paths and environment variables. Then I downloaded Zori‘s source code via CVS. Having this done, I continued by compiling the required dependencies (from the FreeBSD ports tree) for it. This is where things got stuck…

popt, glib and libxml2 were already in the system since they’re required by many other ports; gsl (The GNU Scientific Library) could be installed without a problem; but compiling hdf5 as needed by Zori is a whole different thing. Zori also needs hdf5_hl which is not in the FreeBSD ports.

I read in hdf5′s site that hdf5_hl will be included in the next release of hdf5, so I immediately e-mailed the developers and got a quick response; they told me that the new version will be available in a few days, and that as soon as they release it they will update the FreeBSD port.

Since Zori needs hdf5‘s parallel support in order to run, I installed lam7 which is recommended by Zori‘s developers. Unfortunately, hdf5 doesn’t find lam7‘s compiler at configure time (even performing the suggested hacks), so I tried with mpich which maybe also used by hdf5 and Zori. A new problem appeared: mpich port is outdated in FreeBSD, so again I e-mailed the port maintainer and asked him for the necessary update; he said it will be updated soon.

Until all of this issues get fixed I’ll have to pause Zori‘s porting for a few weeks

It has been a long time since all of this began. The cycle ended for us a few years ago, but a lot of memories came to our minds as we spent a few hours with the new group in the mission room. Nostalgy for all the good & bad times we spent there and in the sierra. All the work done and the fruits of it, but most importantly the great friendship that is still alive to these days.

The group will now look for new communities in some region of the country. I’m happy to know that they took this new opportunity to grow and to share all what the group has to give. Good luck to all of you!