Gunnar Wolf

I opened Slashdot's «Looking back from the 1980s at computers in education» article because I am quite convinced of the point some of the commenters argued before me, (and it's good to know others think as you do ;-) ) — When I got close to computers, learning computing for children basically meant learning programming in a fun way.

For years, my hobbies included Logo and BASIC. At age 7 (by 1983), typing TeX and using Emacs at the computer of the institute where my father worked, I started walking the path I took for my professional life. When I taught computing to high school students as my first paid job (which didn't last long, only a semester, as for an untrained 20 year old it is very hard to control a group of kids nearly his age), I tried to teach some basic BASIC programming (which was the best I knew then)... But no, both students and the school wanted me to focus on teaching MS Office applications. It seemed stupid for me 14 years ago, and it still seems stupid for me today.

Anyway, on Slashdot, I came across this beautiful way to explain what computer education should mean:

"computing is no longer taught in schools (parents look quizzical), they are simply 'trained' (parents look like they vaguely get it). if this was sex instead of computing that was taught in schools, would you prefer that your kids have sex _education_ or sex _training_? (parents finally get it)".

By the way, if you are interested in reading a bit of paleofuturism, to feel the joy and excitement with which computer-aided education was seen 30 years ago, be sure to get the Classroom Computer News issue for September-October 1980, linked from the Slashdot article (and copied over here for your convenience, of course!)

Nobody cares about me, I thought. Whatever I say is just like throwing a bottle to the infinite ocean.

No comments, no hopes of getting any, for several days. Weeks maybe? Not even the spammers cared about me.

Until I read this mail, by Thijs Kinkhorst commenting to my yesterday post:

(…)
(BTW, I was unable to comment on your blog - couldn't even read one letter of the CAPTCHA...)

And, yes, Drupal module «captcha» introduced in its 2.1 release (January 2) feature #571344: Mix multiple fonts.

Only... no fonts were selected. Grah.

Five out of six experts agree:

It. Is. Cold.

No, we are far from this very impressive picture of a fully-snowed UK seen from the sky that everybody and their dog must have seen by now. Still, in Mexico City we are experiencing the traditional one-or-two-weeks-a-year where it is genuinely cold. And, very strange being this Winter (the rainy season is Summer around here, January should be dry!) we have rain all day long.

The Ajusco mountain is around 15Km south from my home, and it is the closest of the giants that surround our valley. Yesterday I managed to get some peeks at it behind the very thick layer of clouds we have. Ajusco looks really gorgeous all snowed, maybe down to the 3400m line (while the city's main area is at 2300m). This picture was not taken this year, we have snow in Ajusco almost every year (although very seldom as much as this time):

(last photo is not current, we have not yet had a clear day to take a picture of our Ajusco yet this year)

How does it feel? Well, I live in Coyoacán, in the flat area of the valley. Remember that houses here are not built to endure extreme temperatures (and this week is what we call extreme, of course ;-) ). According to Yahoo! Weather:

And while the difference appears to be small, what about Magdalena Contreras, ~200m higher, where many people dear to me live (and have even a window pending to be installed)?

People say this cold wave is the strongest in 120 years, since records are being taken. Every year people get excited, expecting that this time we will get snow. This has only happened once in at least a century, in 1966 AFAIR. I do not think this year to be atypical.

Still, I have a reputation for being insensible to cold weather. Everybody wears heavy jackets while I still go to work with my usual long-sleeved shirt and that's it. But the last two days, I have been using jacket and scarf...

But, of course, I don't look as gratious or cute as my cats :-}

I am updating an old package's packaging style to take advantage of the new DebHelper 7 goodities. So far, I have been quite successful, but I hit a problem… And before bugging on IRC, I decided to check with Joey Hess' presentation at DebConf9, Not your grandpa's debhelper.

Of course, not remembering the URL, it was the most natural thing to ask Google:

Of course, putting this thingy aside, the right answer was the first hit. However, what is the first hit for the Grandma version? Quite dangerous: A post in Ubuntuforums for which the Google excrept reads: this tool can obviously eat your cat, poison your grandma, create an earthquake or do any other unexpected harm, so I don't provide any warranty whatsoever.

I sincerely prefer joeyh's version.

During DebConf, Noodles discretely approached me and asked whether I'd be interested and willing to join him as Debian's keyring maintainer. Of course, I felt greatly honored and happy about this. Over the past weeks, we have exchanged some mails where he details how it is handled, and I feel I get the general logic — and this last week (which was quite hectic for me — apologies in advance for all the work and mails I have due for different people!) he finally took the big steps: Requested DSA to give me login rights to the needed machine and RT queue and to be listed in the relevant area of the Debian Organization page.

So, even if I still feel afraid of botching Debian and sending the universe swirling away into chaos, I am most happy, and could no longer hide it. Yay! :-D

[BTW] No, it was not on purpose. I did not grow my beard in order to look like St. Peter. But it must have been part of the decision process!

Today I had a nice and productive day, code-wise. Maybe that's a side effect from being unable to lose my time following E-mail?
Anyway, checking my code with git citool previous to today's git commit, I came accross this method. I didn't even pay attention to it while writing. But it did make me laugh in semi-awe thinking about the great implications it might have. The method signature:

def days_for(who, what, how)

The code itself? Naah, too pedestrian, to simplistic. It will ruin the sight. It just looks so beautifully universal!

Ok, I am compelled to share, even if it spoils it and renders it into a completely regular, even stupid method.

  def days_for(who, what, how)
    return ' —No dates set— ' unless who.has_validity_period?
    days_to = who.send(how)
    return 'Past' if days_to <= 0
    '%d days (%s)' % [days_to, who.send(what)]
  end

DebConf9. Assassins. Nomeata has been killed. So have I. Now, the rules say the sock that kills you should be clean, and by that, I understand it should be not smelly — I guess I could have complained that I was killed in the presence of very smelly cheese. Does that still count?

Today, I will eat at my office — It's the easiest, and as I arrived at ~11:30 and am leaving at ~18:30, I don't want to invest ~1hr in getting a proper meal, which is at ~3Km from here (joys of working in a very large university, joys of coming to work during the vacational period).

Anyway, I don't do this often, so I started looking for names of takeaway/delivery restaurants in the area, thinking about a chapata (ciabatta? How would you write it in anything but es_MX?) or something saladish. I have a menu in my fridge door of La Artesa, a bakery that recently opened for business near to my house (~3.5Km from here). So, lets look at their page.

First thing I look for, menu and prices. Bah, Under construction (and in the best 1996 style, even with the animated GIF and all). They don't want to attract customers, that's for sure.

However, they do have something very unique, something that sets them apart from any other site I have ever visited: They have the most existentialist Frequently Asked Questions section I have ever seen.

I wonder... Will they have a hidden link to the Frequently Given Answers as well?

Having recently become an Unicode (ab)user, in great part due to Kragen's .XCompose, I took again the mission to convince people that resistance is futile, you will be assimilated into the multilingual world of UTF8...

...And given the recent thread in debian-devel regarding how a globbing or similar functionality should be implemented (specifically, given Giacomo's message pointing out that our beloved «/» directory separator is subject to the locale rules)...

I cannot help but to send you to this old piece of MSDN beauty: When is a backslash not a backslash?

In short: If you are surprised because in East Asia they use the local currency to separate directories... Don't be. Blame the 8 bits of extended, non-standard ASCII codepages.

I have been waiting for next-Thursday for many years, and I just found out - by mere chance.

In 2001, Leo Masliah came to Mexico City and performed a couple of shows. I don't remember the reason... But I missed it.

Who is Leo? An Uruguayan artist, living AFAIK in Argentina. Maybe he could be described as a humorous musician and writer... After all, I first met his music, and by far, it is what I know best. However, many (sad and simple) people would fail to see him as humorous, and would think he is just a sad, sick person with sick taste. About his writing? Well, I guess music is the first step, something like to get sickos like myself hooked. His writing is even sicker.

Anyway - Leo Masliah is one of my favorite artists. And he is coming to Mexico! This Thursday, April 9, in the Teatro Bar el Vicio, Coyoacán, 21:30, MX$250.

VERY MUCH worth it.

(Untranslatable, sorry)
Thanks to Lumen (probably Mexico's biggest office and art supplies shops) for the loud laugh.

Little Gunnar - Gift by Nadezhda's friend Lulú. Thanks!

The phrase on this title is often attributed to Pancho Villa (1878-1923), Mexican Revolution leader. He had a fame of cruelty, killing suspects before even questioning them.
Today, it started as a very nice day. I had even time in the morning to find, fix, upload and send upstream a trivial bug in libgruff-ruby... At 11:00, I left the Institute as my father came to the city to do some paperwork... We sat having a cup of coffee in a restaurant near the office we had went to at around 12:00, and my phone rang.
And it was from work. That's never a good sign. My boss told me he was facing a massive virus infection, and decided to disconnect the firewall. I corrected him - that will do no good once the virus is in our system, if you want to disconnect anything, disconnect all of our switches.
Came back, and found him and my coworker stunned and not knowing what to do. He says, the antivirus alarm went off almost simultaneously on the two computers he had on his desk, and in few minutes over 15 computers all over the Institute were ill. The symptoms? Programs not showing up in the taskbar, copy/paste functionality b0rken, many programs misbehaved or just didn't open... They were grimly facing a complete recovery operation they have grown used to: The whole OS has become corrupted or destroyed, we will have to open the computer, extract the HD, install it elsewhere, back it up, reinstall OS and applications, restore the backup. Yes, I know too many extra steps are included here, but I have come to accept their ways of dealing with Windows. Nobody says dealing with Windows is fun. I like my work to be fun, so I stay clear of theirs.
I insisted on turning back one one of the switches, the one for the servers and my machine (and some more in the same physical area). OK'd. But they didn't want to switch on any other switch, so a traffic capture (tcpdump / wireshark) led nowhere - but at least it gave my my Google back.
They have configured the antivirus software we deploy to all of the Windows machines in such a way that it deletes upon sight any malware - And when they manually scan, they blindly hit Delete whenever anything is found as well. Of course, no infected binary was left alive for me to inspect, and the machines were dead. But I was able to glimpse at the name of the deleted file: rpcss.dll.
After googling a bit - Bliss! Joy! I found the answer. So here is the set of interactions, and how they led to this killing spree. Please remember I am a Windows newbie and speak just out of guesswork.

1. This is a fast-spreading virus. My friend Rubén at DGSCA suggest it might be related to this report submitted today; at Barrapunto there is a thread about another virus that appeared four days ago, infected 1.1 million Windows machines on its first day, and so far is around the ninth million. Update: Equivalent thread at Slashdot, for the Spanish-impaired.
2. The virus infects at least two copies of a system binary: %system32%\rpcss.dll and \Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\rpcss.dll. Windows uses the second one to restore the first one in case it is damaged, if I understood correctly.
3. The antivirus does not detect the infection when the library files are written, but when they are linked, so it only spots it the next time %system32%\rpcss.dll is brought into memory.
4. This is a very common library - It takes care of, well, RPC. So, quite probably, this file will be linked again on the next program launch - or accessed when a running program requires anything not currently in RAM? Dunno. The thing is, the library gets linked.
5. The antivirus will happily tell you it has killed a threat! Your nice RPC library is now defunct. ¡Mátalo, luego virigüas!
6. So, of course, notifying the taskbar of a new window appearing, or clipboard actions, or whatnot will refuse to work.
7. Machine restart, full system scan requested. The antivirus finds de second copy of this library in the master directory (\Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386). The virus used this location so that Windows won't restore a clean version over it. But yes, it will fall again under the claws of the antivirus... I guess. Anyway, the antivirus offers to delete this file as well, and does so.
8. User is desperate. My coworkers are desperate. I am... mildly annoyed?

Once I found this line of thought... I went to a working machine, inserted my flash memory, and copied %system32%\rpcss.dll to it. Went back to a sick machine, and ran cmd. Then, it was just matter of copy f:\rpcss.dll c:\windows\system32, a simple reboot (it never hurts to reboot in Windows!), and problem solved!
Oh, as a side rant: I find it extremely annoying and sad that many people I know, sometimes with more experience as a computer operator/supporter than what I have of experience as a living human being, are so scared of using a command-line interface. They were dismayed at seeing no drag-and-drop and no copy/paste functionality were available! copy is not an option.
Anyway... Today was an experience on how a simple, mostly-harmless and quite-fertile virus is able to be terribly magnified by the presence of a trigger-happy antivirus.
Why won't they give themselves a chance to try something else? Say, GNU/Linux? :-/

I am stunned no more people have been bitten by this. Or at least, the Intarweb has not heard about it. Censorship perhaps? I haven't researched more into the causes, but anyway...
I was pushing a project I have had lingering for some time from Rails 2.0.x to 2.1.x (yes, 2.2 is already out there, but 2.1 is the version that will ship with Lenny) - The changes should not be too invasive, as it is a minor release, but there are some quite noticeable changes.
Anyway... What was the problem? Take this very simple migration:

class CreatePeople < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :people do |t|
      t.column :login, :string, :null => false
      t.column :passwd, :string, :null => false
      t.column :firstname, :string, :null => false
      t.column :famname, :string, :null => false
      t.column :email, :string
 
      t.column :pw_salt, :string
      t.column :created_at, :timestamp
      t.column :last_login_at, :timestamp
    end
  end
 
  def self.down
    drop_table :people
  end
end

PGError: ERROR:  syntax error at OR near "("
LINE 1: ...serial PRIMARY KEY, "login" character varying(255)(255) NOT ...
                                                             ^
: CREATE TABLE "people" ("id" serial PRIMARY KEY, 
          "login" character varying(255)(255) NOT NULL, 
          "passwd" character varying(255)(255)(255) NOT NULL, 
          "firstname" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255) NOT NULL, 
          "famname" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255)(255) NOT NULL,
          "email" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255)(255)(255) DEFAULT NULL NULL,
          "pw_salt" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255)(255)(255)(255) DEFAULT NULL NULL, 
          "created_at" timestamp DEFAULT NULL NULL, "last_login_at" timestamp DEFAULT NULL NULL) 

Say... Is this by any chance a keyboard specifically laid out for writing Python?
(Seen in a terminal at the José Vasconcelos library, central Mexico City)