Wich Operating System do you use?

From the begining of the computing we have the chance of choose the Operating System (OS from now on) that is running on our computer. Most likely people trends to use Microsoft XXXX because by default it is installed on their computers, which from my point of view it is a very bad practise from the computer manufacturers because they would give the option to choose this or this other OS that I like. But any way, that is a different story than the one I am targeting today.

In the options that we have also there is GNU/Linux and all the range of different distributions within this OS. Therefore we can choose  the distribution we like because we are more use to it or the one that fits better in our computer or that that has been developed for an specific task that we want to do…

Our third main option is Mac OX for the one that have Apple computers and that people say that when you try this one it is difficult to go back to a normal pc… Well my experience with this system is great and I wouldn’t go back to Windows but GNU/Linux is there.

Each of this three OS has it’s owns pros and cons as in therms of stability, usability, GUI, compatibility… You can read more about this topic in this article of CIO.

However I can see the “new” OS that you, me, us are running and using every day and that it is totaly independent of the one that ir running on your computer and that may be you won’t use it anymore in this last years and that we won’t use anymore going back to the old dummy terminals that were connected to a mainframe. You might figure out by this time what I am talking about, I am after all the services that the big companies over internet are providing to the user. How many of you are using all the google stuf? (google mail, google reader, google docs, blogger, the search engine of course) But not only google, Microsoft has all his enviroment under the name of MS Live that contains more or less the same services as iGoogle. I am saying that because more often when you see the screen of a computer you only see a browser running with several tabs open or serveral windows of the server there, but not more than that, so basically we are running and using Google OS with its services, Microsoft OS with its, Yahoo…

Have you ever notice this? This was planned a long time ago, but now at days it is more explicit than it was before thanks to the popularity of clowd computing, the appearance of the netbooks and the evoluton of cellphones and fast comunications by the new mobile networks.

Street photography

Last friday I started reading in xatakafoto some post about street photography. I have done just a few photos of this kind of photography because I was shy of photography people that I don’k know, but having a look to some galleries I have decided to start a serie of it.

For those that don’t know what street photography is about this is the definition that you can find in wikipedia:

Street photography uses the techniques of straight photography in that it shows a pure vision of something, like holding up a mirror to society. Street photography often tends to be ironic and can be distanced from its subject matter and often concentrates on a single human moment, caught at a decisive or poignant moment. On the other hand, much street photography takes the opposite approach and provides a very literal and extremely personal rendering of the subject matter, giving the audience a more visceral experience of walks of life they might only be passingly familiar with. In the 20th century, street photographers have provided an exemplary and detailed record of street culture in Europe and North America, and elsewhere to a somewhat lesser extent.

Many classic works of street photography were created in the period between roughly 1890 and 1975 and coincided with the introduction of portable cameras, especially small 35mm, rangefinder cameras. Classic practitioners of street photography include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Alfred Eisenstaedt, W. Eugene Smith, William Eggleston, Brassaї, Willy Ronis, Robert Doisneau and Garry Winogrand.

So to got for this new challenge in my photography hobby I will use my 3 weapons:

1. My phone, as it is small, fits in the pocket and has got a camera, it is a good candidate to use it almost everywhere during the day.
2. My old compact camera, my sony DSC P7 with its 3,2 Mp is good to get this photos when you go out or you are in a concert or go for a ride with the bike wherever and you can find good shots.
3. But the main one is gonna be my digital-SLR, with the Canon EOS 350D I will do most of the work for obvious reason the quality would be better and you can play with more settings than with the other 2 that I have described above. However it is going to be the most difficult one due you cannot hide it and if you take a photo to people you don’t know they are going to notice it, but I have decided to do it and this is one of the risk that you have to assume.

Once I have told you all of this let me show you some examples of this kind of photography. And I hope you enjoy the galleries coming as the ones that are already in my public flickr gallery.

• http://www.streetphoto.fsnet.co.uk/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/patxiwan/
• http://www.streetphotography.co.uk/

Set up of a xen image

If you want to set up a xen image on a different server than the one you have it running on, once you have copied all the files (image.img, image-swap.img, image-config.img,…) there are some things that you have to have into account.

• Change the config file: the config file has to be according with the new path of the files and you might probably want to change also the way that the virtual image behaves regarding the start, shutdown, or the new network configuration, that might be different if we move network.

But not only changing the configuration file will make our image start correctly, because it can start but with some failures regarding modules dependencies, this can be because when we change the image form a computer to another, if the kernel of the host is not the same as the kernel of the previous host xen server, the modules dependencies wouldn’t be the same and in the “creation” of the image, xen will complain because of this. But there is an easy way to solve this issue it and make xen happy in this step.

• Mount the xen image in a directory by using mount -o loop image.img mount-directory by doing this you can access to the file system of the image as if any other device would it be.
• In the host go to /lib/modules, crate a directory called as your kernel name (mkdir `uname -a`), go inside this new folder and run depmod -a this will create several dependencies modes for your host computer.
• Copy this entire folder into the image it has to be also in the folder /lib/modules and it will tell xen which kernel you have and where to find dependencies for the modules.
• Umount the guest image directory umount mount-directory

Now is when we can start our xen image as we use to do so: xm create -c image-comfig.cfg (-c if we want to see the start console, that helps to see whether if we have a problem or not during the start).

I hope this small tip helps you with the deployment of xen images in different servers.

Create a Xen image.

I have just created my first Xen image.

1. Create a disk image (dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile.img bs=1 count=1 seek=8G)
2. Format disk image (mkfs.ext2 somefile.img)
3. Mount disk image (mount -o loop somefile.img looppoint)
4. Copy your files (tar -zxSf yourtarballingzformat -C looppoint)
5. Unmount your loop (umount loop)
6. Create your swap file (if you want) (dd if=/dev/zero of=xen-swap.img bs=1M count=256) <– no sparse file for this…
7. Create your xen.conf file for that image.

xen.conf…

name            = ‘myvm’
memory          = ‘256′
disk            = [ 'tap:aio:/xen/myvm/somefile.img,sda1,w',
'tap:aio:/xen/myvm/xen-swap.img,sda2,w',
]
root            = ‘/dev/sda1 ro’
vif             = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:22:10:f8,bridge=eth0' ]
on_reboot       = ‘restart’
on_crash        = ‘restart’
vcpus           = 2
kernel          = “/xen/centos_boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.18.el5xen”
ramdisk         = “/xen/centos_boot/2.6.18-92.1.18.el5xen.img”

You just need to change the  kernel and ramdisk according to your host computer settings and play it.

When the car is cheaper than the public transport

Well, most of you know that now I have my car here in the uk, since I have it with me I have been using it to go to work, shopping, traveling a little bit around Ipswich,…
But let’s center on the main use that I give to my car, which is going to work everyday. Before having my bike and going riding as I do when the weather is convenient (I mean when it doesn’t rain) I used to go by bus to my work place, which is next to Ipswich. You can take 2 busses to go there, super route 66 and 66B (only in pick time). Apart from the fact that it is overcrowded, the 66 takes arouund 35 min to go there and a single ticket is 2,40 pounds where as the day ticket is 4,50 pounds and the weekly is 15 pounds, that makes you a mean of 60 pounds per month because it is better to get this kind of ticket rather than the monthly. Apparently 60 pounds for public transport is not that bad, but if you take into account that that ticket is only for one of the companies that is operating in Ipswich only, despite of being the biggest one, the ticket is quite expensive on my view.
On the other hand If we compare this with a car, that takes you from dor to dor about 10 min, because here we don’t have traffic jams due that this is not a big city as London, Madrid,… You have to pay a mean of 35 – 40 pounds in petrol per tank and with one tank you have enought to go from dor to dor the hole month and you are free to go anywhere anytime, not having to wait the queue in the street with the british weather.
I honestly think that is woth to go by car being this cheaper and faster.
My question is… Why the public transport is as expesive in the UK? If they claim that we have to be “green” and not pollute the atmosphere with our cars, why don’t they do something in this aspect to try to call people to the public transport?
All of this not entering in the discussion that if the petrol is cheapper why the price of the ticket is still rising?
I have to say that I still will go either by car or by bike, but I will try to avoid as much as I can the bus service in Ipswich.

Flickr was born again

It’s being time since I uploaded my last photo into flickr but after buy a pro account a couple of months ago and having done so many photos, finally I and feeding my account again with new photos.

Yesterday I started with 2 new sets.

• Porto, where I have uploaded some photos that I didn’t put on facebook due that I think that this 2 platforms are for different purposes.

• The second one is Oslo, this time in winter all snowy and white. I know that summer ones are not either there, but time to time I have a delay in this aspect that.

Apart from that, now that I have the uploader tool installed in my notebook it is going to be easier to upload photos directly from my computer to the gallery, due that it allows you to create sets, add tags, remove them… So it makes our lives easier on the managenment . I will be uploading photos untill I stay up to date. However, as I have been traveling quite a lot in the last few months I have to say that it will take long to finish that work.

Just to finish I want to invite you to have a look to the gallery and feel free to criticise the work done to imporove more and more my photography.

Maradona no es el único que engaña

Beuno, acabo de ver esto en Marca y no es que sea la mejor historia del mundo, xo a este tio yo le daba un oscar a la mejor interpretación por engañar a 3 personas (dos linieres y un árbitro) quizás tambien deba ir a las olimpiadas en la disciplina de salto, porque se le da bastante bien la cosa.

Mirar el vídeo y recordar, esto no lo hagais en casa.

Luego nos quejábamos del España – Corea que estaba mal arbitrado.

Showing data contained into a XML Element

The other day I had an small issue trying to show the data contained into a DOM element, due that I was targeting a null value, because of the way that Node and Element are managed.

Let’s go to the beginning. What I had was a hole Document store in a variable, from that document I got a NodeList of Elements (in this case as it is a NodeList they are Node) that have this aspect, a normal element with data inside:

<c:customer xmlns:c=”http://engage.bt.com/customer”>
<c:id>1</c:id>
<c:name>John</c:name>
<c:lastname>Smith</c:lastname>
<c:department>Finance</c:department>
</c:customer>

I wanted to take the values that the child within this Node have, but they way that the type Node is manages doesn’t allow you to get the children of this element and get the node value that is inside a child such as <c:id>, for instance, because you end up getting the null point that I commented as my problem.

So here it comes the trick, what you have to do is cast the Node (the one shown above) into an Element.

Element customerElement = (Element)customersList.item(i);

Once you have this done, you have to get the Elements within the father by using the function getElementsByTagName(String tagName) , where you will get again a NodeList of elements with the tag name that you say. So now we only have this: <c:id>1</c:id>. So now as a list that it is we should point in the first item, so item(0). Once in this item the value is treated as a child so we need to get that child out by using the function getFirstChild(). Now we reach the point where the value is within our node, so we only need to getNodeValue(), which return a String, so we have to be careful and parse the real Type that we need.

Ok this is been specify step by step, but to make it clear what I used in the end is a function in which you give an Element (<c:customer> in this case) and a tagName (any tag of the children) and gives you the value back. The function is not other than this:

private String getData(Element customer, String tagName){
return customer.getElementsByTagName(tagName).item(0).getFirstChild().getNodeValue();
}

Therefore using this call you get the value for free

String customerData = getData(customer,”c:name”);

Finally updating the iPhone

Yesterday, after a long time since the firmware 2.1 for the iPhone I have updated it yesterday.

First of all I made a security copy to recover everything after the update, otherwise it is a mess to have to put all the contacts, notes and stuff again from the beginning. You loose data yes,  but the important one is there ready for you, that in the end it is what it counts, isn’t it?

So, it took me a while since I got it. I was using my new macbook (the white one), PwnageTool and QuickPwn for 2.1 Firmware to create the new hack firmware and iTunes 8 to install the software in the iPhone once the customize one is done. At the beginning I didn’t know  well how to use Pwnage so I choose the “easy mode” on it and I created a new customize version. Following the instructions that this tool told me I put my phone into DFU mode, I did it and I plugged it to the laptop. Then the way was suppose to be easy, just let iTunes restore the phone and that’s all, but NO. Murphy’s law appeared and I got an error 21, that I still don’t know what is it about, but many people has the same problem whet they update the firmware. So I tried again doing the same process up to the point that it happened to me a few times and I became to be a bit nervous. Once reached this point I decided to use QuickPwn a tool of the same team that does everything directly for you, so I followed the instructions I saw on the screen and continue with the procedure. Well this worked!! But something was wrong again because my phone didn’t catch network :s (I have to say that it was more than 2:00 am) so finally I decided to have it done unless it would cost me the hole night. I tried again with Pwnage and one of the customize software that I had already build from my other attempts and this time, once passed 2:30 am my phone was finally unlocked, jailbreak, up and running with the new 2.1 software. Software which I think is much better than the 1.1.4 because it is faster, you have app store, and a terminal “for free”, so you can play more with the phone when you are on a network

Once I did it I recover the info I backed up at the beginning and I started playing with it. Yesterday I didn’t do much because I was tired , but soon I’ll say how is this new software from my point of view

Gran Cagada

Ayer vi una noticia en la que leí una cosa que no me creía que pudiera pasar, pero sí. Antonio Lobato seguira dciendo tonterias el año que viene en La Sexta. Por qué lo han hecho? No voy a discutir que después de tanto tiempo Antonio no sea un “experto de la F1″ (a Fernando le conoze mejor que nadie, al resto…), pero la manera en la que narra las carreras no es la ideal.Por no hablar de las traducciones que hace en las ruedas de prensa dejándose la mitad de las palabras que dicen e incluso a veces cambiando verdad Antoñito? Para eso mejor cállate y deja que los pilotos hablen en inglés.

Bien, pues esto pasó esta temporada, se nota que hasta Fernando está un poquito cansado de él.

En telecinco hay otra persona que sabe bastante más, no es otra que Gonzalo Serrano, que dejará la cadena también tras el GP de Brasil. Ojalá los directivos de La Sexta recapaticen y den marcha atrás y se quede con Gonzalo y Pedro como comentaristas, entonces si que tendremos un buen equipo de comentaristas. Aunque yo prefiero que prescindan también de Pedro Martínez de la Rosa y éste este en la pista dando espectáculo como él bien sabe.