ENLI the good the bad and the ugly

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So after a good part of the week and weekend in Puebla. I had some good experiences, some sour and others a bit tedious. But let’s go step by step, the event was good although more college like than professional.

The college however went as smooth as expected. With lots of speakers, and a good amount of sessions and workshops the event was quite good. I most say however that many conferences suffered changes, delays and cancelations which was also expected.

The audience was also mildly dissapointing with very limited knowledge of FLOSS and this was something I was hoping it wouldn’t happened but having an audience that stares at you with a blank face is a bit annoying. Hoever to be honest the real event comes after the conferences when we all geeks tend to geek out and have interesting conversations about development, industry issues and how to solve them.

Now the really ugly came yesterday with trip back home when I miss my flight and spend lots of money on stupid bus trips from mexico city and back. Had a whole day wasted and the worst part, the Heat lost versus the Knicks.

Well right now I am waiting on the bus and hope I can sleep in my bed tonight.

 

Preparing for ENLI and (re)funding contributors

So tomorrow I am leaving to ENLI and this morning I wake up to a terrible news that one of the oooES contributors got robbed at his place. The news came as a shock and of course I was inmediately concerned that his laptop got lost. So inmediately I wired him some money to get his laptop replaced. In the end I got to talk to him and even though he lost some data, fortunately he had some backups. As I was thinking about this I was also updating my backups.

I spend some minutes on the #Mandriva IRC chatroom since it allows to clarify the options when performing rsync:

rsync -avz ~ /path/to/destination/

and

rsync -avz –delete ~ /path/to/destination/

to keep my files update and delete the files that are not available or are obsolete. I was recomended an O’Reily tutotrial.

In all case, I think that I should remind people to backup and maybe I should start thinking on having web backups. Not just the 2GB dropbox but significally creating a mirror on the web. Unforutnately that would take me mantain a 1TB web disk. Not that I need to backup my movies and music but still.

So back to the ENLI topic, I need to start making the lougage and prepare for the trip. Fortunately the hours are confortable and I think I can be there in no time. So I hope that things work out well. The presentation is surely changing and I think the end result would be satisfactory to the listeners. Just hope to have a good ammount of images.

Analyzing Ghostface’s Purfied Thoughts

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Purified Thoughts lyrics
“Am I a good man? …”

[Ghostface Killah]
Take my hands out my pockets you can see my thumbs
Both of them turned green, from countin the ones
Memorized by the glory, word life
Cut off niggaz who killed Bill but couldn’t do nuttin for me
Shout ’em out every once in the blue and kid too
I never rocked with, laws they keep away we cool
I devised my own stimulus, plan I’m niggarish
I’m tired of eatin those crumbs and black licorice
The frame of mind so {?} like cleansin the mic
Let the imam pray over my head and wash
Thoughts, sterilized, purified, Godly
Watch us gift men and fetch the green like barley
If that shit happen I’ll feed his whole army
Talkin ’bout the angels and peeps in Somali
Try to stay humble, and swallow my pride
In God I trust, now talk about the ones on your five
Crisp dollar billin, catch me in a little hut in Beneen
Village style, feedin the children
Big pots of jasmine tea with Mandela
Africans chantin me on like Coachella
Ghostface bom ba ye, kumbiya my Lord
My death day, 24 karat tomb I lay
Wishin they could bury me, next to the prophets
Nabi, Lut, Is’haq, Musa, Harun, Muhammad
Ibrahim

“Am I a good man?” (I don’t know)
“Am I a fool?” (We’ll see)

[Killah Priest]
The Lord takes me, gathering speeds before winds
High currents, {?} places we formin wings
Kings offering, thrones was there
Man with the 7 crowns on his dome was near
Feet walked over rose petals, song from the ghetto
Face froze in gold like the pharaoh
A dawn in glory, robe of light, a powerful cherub
As he passed the path, white doves cost the eyes of thugs
Eternal heartbeat, in the dark fire in his blood
700 books were opened
It breaks to right, they threw the crooks in the ocean
Scared, brass hair like it grew from goatskin
The chosen has spoken, tablets were broken
The smoke hand grabs an omen
Gravity grabbin me gradually draggin me through hell’s cavity
This is blasphemy, I fell where the jackals be
God felt bad for me but cast me into Caspain Sea
Satan draggin his key, Wu-Family’s the faculty
K.P., K.P.

“Am I a good man? Am I a fool?
“Am I?”

[GZA]
He used to sling in the stairwell
Fast to put the rap on thinking cap, ignite your hair gel
No such thing as a fair sale
He’ll put the bullet out same day, delivery airmail
And on this level a thug’ll sell you garbage
No refund, the only exchange from the cartridge
Where the youths is kept comin back with they life earnings
Ready to make a deal, soul and pipe burning
The outcome tragic, household dramatic
Living rooms to {?}, basements to attics
Support from the B, hit the courts from a fiend
who betrayed one, who had lit the torch for his team
So they sent him gifts, body parts per diem
in a box that held prints but too dark to see ’em

So this song is pretty interesting, all talking about passing out as remarkable men, who not just deal with business, but also business sometimes cloud their mind. Ghostface is always a strange cat to figure out wtih his lyrics. Beside his high pitch voice and his hyper encrypted lyricz. Most people just appreciate ghost based on his flow and passion on his rhymes. However this lyricz do content some message, beside the passion for money Ghost wants to also be valued as a wise man memorized aside from prophets and return to his African roots. I am not sure if this is what he was intending but at least is the way he put the message. I could further  analized it as being master emcee that spurt a legacy of his style and recognized by the ones he value.

KP and GZA are less crypted but more metaphorical, in their own style and vision. I do however think their flow is rather similar and the abstract mental pictures come to life when they put it on a track. KP is more religious so his analogies with the bible are expected. However he reffer to a more intelectual study of relgion and eventually tailing out the ghetto on the “white doves cost the eyes of thugs”.  KP also has a memorized verse as far as word play comes with the line “Gravity grabbin me gradually draggin me through hell’s cavity, This is blasphemy”. This type of rhymes are usually very sticky on the mind because the words relate but the message nevertheless is understood as he goes through hell living in this bodily form and temptations are all over our world. And how studying with his Wu-Fam is the only resource to escape them.

GZA story telling applied to nobody in particular kicks in as a parable. His topics more rooted on the essence of hiphop, blaming emcees for quick rhyming without crafting their arts. Also making an analogy to the drug game where he profoundly sees the rap game as selling crack and people consuming on every place and they only poisoning their brain. He finalize the rhyme with a sellout perspective “who betrayed one, who had lit the torch for his team, So they sent him gifts”  and in the end his reward was more a liability than none. I am not sure I can draw an instant analyze of the verse, will probably need more play to finally think what GZA trully meant. However in context the song is about striving and falling into each dilema of becoming rich without selling out. The flow and production on this track is great, the tempo is absolutly the one you keep your head bopping. Very little chorus based on the sample, just true Wu mentality with more verses than chorus and having the listener focusing on the rhyme.

#JuevesDeDesarrolladores – More good content with Geeks

Today was our 6th meetup for #JuevesDeDesarrolladores at the local Starbucks. We had a great event this time, many more people came than the previous 3 or 4 earlier times. Unfortunately the SB was very crowded and we werent able to have a confortable table. However that didn’t stop us to talk about interesting stuff including a lot of great link share.

Jdd

From some Web Developer tools including 99 Design in order to get great design work where u can find great work from designers for a set price. The next thing is a CSS IDE under the name YAML.  You can easily work out a great layout dinamically and have fluent CSS.

Beside the link share other topics came on the meeting like FLISOL event. Updates from some of the guys helping out on the event.

Dreams of the X and tech fail when you need it the most

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So it was meant to happen, well I had one of those dreams. I didn’t know if I should blog it but I guess even for the pure recollection is ok I guess. I dream about Irina again, althought it wasn’t really about her, it was more about the rush that I feel whenever she was online and things start failing. I remember her being online and msg me, and when I was going to answer, the mouse stop working, and computer locks out. I dump the netbook and start looking for the laptop but I never find it. I was so upset of missing out and a bit frustrated that I tried to call her but for some reason couldn’t find her number on my contact list. I guess it was funny cuz when I woke up I pull the laptop and check the email to see if she was around somewhere. Then I was like… oh is a dream. 😀

Well even if this was a dream, there have been situations when well even if technology didn’t completley annoyances come at the worst time. Right on that criticial conversation, voice chat start going south. Or simply the call wouldn’t connect. I somewhat delivered a huge tolerance for tech, I just asume the alternative like snail mail, phisical dates, and others are even worst or just un reachable.

Again, hope next time Tech doesn’t give up on me when I need it the most.

First video for FLISOL

The video is finally done with some extra clips and a good week in Starbucks primarily were enough to finalize the video full with a custom mix of a remix from the Free software Song and the narrations of one of the most well recognized developers from the FLOSS scene. The end result is this great video which I think will grab the attention of people all around.

 

CoTweet

I am testing CoTweets to manage some of the organizationals accounts I have in Twitter. So that way I would be able to receive notices and such regarding issues and solutions for those. At the same time I am able to add more users that desire to participate on the management of the account. I think this is a great way to manage our social presence in tools like Twitter.

So far I was able to schedule around 15 tweets combined during the week. I hope this is enough to keep the account alive and current.

This week in starbucks….

This week was interesting, and by that I mean a bit unconfortable. Due to some bitching from my roomates, they decided stand up to the man and not pay the electricity bill, resulting in a 2 day (so far) blackout. Forcing me to report the rest of the week from a Starbucks. Is almost 11pm and soon i will be going back to my dark apartment. I’ve been here since 11am when I woke up, took a shower and report to my local starbucks for a good 12 hr period.

Sounds nasty? Well actually it has been quite the opposite. I dunno if its the elevator music or what else, but I have been quite productive everytime I come to the Starbucks. Also was expecting my weekly geek meetup which resulted also in good excuse to be here.

In general the day gave me a good period to produce some interesting work dealing with the recording of my first video for FLISOL, the event I am getting involved and pushing for 2 sites, one in Cancun and another in Villahermosa.

So far it looks pretty good. Good email communication, and great inroads fixing the recording,mixing it and finally generating a first draft of the video. Yesterday I did some 3D and have got some other members of the organization to help me out making some animations and provoking good results.

I will be posting the finalized video, so far I can add the original OGG mix.

The other side of the tunnel

Today I had an interesting dream, the dream was a bit odd since I dont dream about this much. I was giving OpenOffice.org classes about Macros and after what it seems a class a young student came and asked me about an issue with his project. He has been trying to do a sonic histogram. I doubt the reason of doing that on an office suite unless maybe is for capturing the values on the spreadsheet or needed the draw toolkit. Anyway it seems he had issues when capturing the histogram module from outside of OOo and getting it back into the API. I decided it to point him to the documentation about viewers and debuggers on the OOo Basic IDE, explained how the viewer works on the IDE as well as other tools for debugging.

Then my dream suddenly changed, I was outside and the afternoon had a weird cloud formation. Two storm clouds one on top of each other, they were about to block the sun and the sunlight was dimming dramatically, I know it was like a dream or maybe I was  just clouning around but then I start runing towards a tunnel want wanted to get in the tunnel before the sunlights get completely hidden. I mean is not like the it will get any brighter, anyway I sense that there was some hiphop music on my mp3 player, it was some weird remix on Busta Rhymes, the funny thing is that I was listening to space radio — Bluemars and is not even close to hiphop so I wonder where my brain was picking BustaBuss. Anyway.. dream continue, I do reach the tunnel but catch a glimpse on how dark the sky would be. I finally enter the tunnel but keep running and I see the light getting brither on the other end, it seems like there were no storm clouds anymore.

Doublestorm

Document Freedom Day is ON!!

So today, I got the first release by the Document Freedom Day PR department, this will add to FLISOL’s and other local events agenda.

Freedom to Read, Freedom to Write: Celebrating Document Freedom Day 2011

Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) invites individuals, community groups and institutions to celebrate the Document Freedom Day (DFD) on March 30th. DFD is a global day to celebrate Open Standards and open document formats and its importance. Open Standards ensure the freedom to access your data, and the freedom to build Free Software to write and read data in specific formats.

You can participate by organizing activities in your home town. Distributing fliers, organizing talks, adding a banner on your blog, donating money: there are many ways you can help spread awareness about Open Standards.

We would like at least 25 cities to take part in Document Freedom Day 2011. Help us to make this event a global success!

For more information about the event, please have a look at documentfreedom.org.

Find out how to get involved.

Why Document Freedom Day?

An ever greater part of our communication moves into the digital world. In the digital society, Open Standards and open document formats provide us with the freedom to read and write. They are crucial to ensure our ability to exchange information, remain independent of software vendors, and keep our data accessible in the long term. Open Standards also make sure that we are able to communicate and work using Free Software.

What are Open Standards?

Open Standards are a common language that all computers can speak. They enable us to work and communicate using Free Software. They make it possible for developers to write Free Software applications that are compatible with other solutions, and allow users to migrate to Free Software solutions without losing access to their data.

What is the aim of the Campaign?

The campaign brings a message about Open Standards and document formats to a non-technical audience. Open Standards are a basic condition for freedom and choice in software. Document Freedom Day raises awareness for Open Standards and lets everyone contribute to a better information society. It’s easy and fun to participate in Document Freedom Day, whether as a group or as an individual.

Document Freedom Day is coordinated by the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Contacts

Fernanda Weiden
DFD Campaign Coordinator
Vice President, Free Software Foundation Europe
Email: weiden – at – fsfeurope – dot – org
Tel. +41 76 402 1866

Loimar Vianna
DFD Campaign PR Coordinator
Email: vianna – at – fsfeurope – dot – org
Tel. +353 86 234 1911

Karsten Gerloff
President, Free Software Foundation Europe
Email: gerloff – at – fsfeurope – dot – org
Tel. +49 176 9690 4298