Abastract dream / nightmare

So there’s been a while since the last time I talk about my dreams. And this one is slipping fast. I guess I would try to explain it by abstract terms. Just a collection of fading ideas of what seems to be a risky situation. Like the memories of an old dream I do see myself caught up in a reanactment of that dream but with the knowledge to try it again. With a group of people that I have met through different part of my life, but like an alternative universes their facts are change. I see myself trying to get this girl from Arab origin as many other girls try to get her of my arms. I don’t avoid the party but this time the party comes to me, I found myself in the secret party room, the one I found on my last dream that the whole party was done.

Then I am like in this concert with a huge LED wall bring as fuck and see some high school friends in white hot to the teeth. We exchanging pictures but like always mutherfucker’s don’t know how to take a picture so I will do it myself.

Before all that I am trying to get through trips of deformation and black magic that make zombies of my friends. I see some knowledge of themselves but in the bottom they are all death. I am faking this trust with who I know he is a killah, so who is cheating who. I am ready to run away just before the luck start to turn and I am timing on the first mutherfucker that let it go.

 

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e-Business for the rest of the world

So I have been speaking with my network around the world on the topic of e-commerce, e-marketing based on the conversations that we have recently with my local geek group. We talked at the beginning of why e-commerce never really took off in Mexico. The conclusions where that enviromental circumstances that have not been solved has stagnate the development of the web as most people would like to think about it at least in countries like the US.

The conclusions where that advertising never took off because e-commerce never took off, and e-commerce never really took off because of two big parts of what e-commerce came to become. logistics and billing. The lack of flexibility on billing and the high cost of logistics will make e-commerce too dificult to become.

So even after 15 years of internet we still view e-commerce as:

1. Step 1. Check out the products get the bank account.
2. Sept 2. Go to the bank and direct deposit.
3. Step 3. Scan the receipt and wait for a relatively big overprice over the shipping.

So the surcharge is quite steep, well between 15 to 20 dls. In the US is around 5 USD for a package between a book or a cellphone and will take 2 days across the country. This make it impossible to scale sales and marketing well enough. Which makes it hard to do a good sell.

The second issue is billing where there is a whole book of drama and stupidity when banks still seen as the one and only way to do commerrce in Mexico. From bad deals that these banks have sign with providers that sell them shit non-standard technology makes it way too hard for money to move around. The worst part is that banks have no accountability of these failures. People with debit cards can’t make purchases on regular internet billing tools. Merchant accounts are stagnated and finally commerce in itself is way too hard.

So I start talking with friend in other countries, the first one is Colombia where my friend told me about their ecosystem and how internet savvy is the people in that country. From paypal-like systems like PagosEnLinea, LineaPagos and PSE. The big issue is that is like Cuba where there is an e-commerce embargo where payments are just valid within the country and rarely goes out of it.

The next critical point is logistic, well it seems that Colombia has many choices on this regards, there is not only more companies dedicated to shipping and handling but also much cheaper. At 5-10 dls for regular packages across the country with a 1 to 2 day timelapse.

My next stop is Brazil, where I chat with a friend and gave me some info about most of the companies doing e-business. Big retail like Carrefour, Wall-Mart, Submarine, Ponto Frio, U.S. So big retails already take care of e-business, while billing gets payed with some paypal-like services like DineihroMail, PagSeguro UOL. Logistics are also in charge of quite a few alternatives like Cometa, 1001, Correios, FedEx, TNT Express.

The average cost of a book nationally is 10 dls shipping across Brazil. So we are seen that most of these costs are really high compared between each country.

My next stop I want to be either Chile or Argentina but would be looking around for people that can inform me about the way e-commerce status is available in those countries. I’ll be reporting back.

Heat all you can be

With the series about to finish, the Heatless are about to finish their first tour through Philly. I think this games were pretty tough for what the Heat has done through the regular season. Besides games 2, where they won by 30 really, the trip to Philly was been well fought. Game 3 was a whole night with Philly leading the game until the 4th where Wayde and LBJ took over and won realtively confortable.

Game 4 so far seems like the sweep opportunity but with the Bulls loosing on the last game against the Pacers, Heat needed to remind us all the season is not over. Philly start very strong in Game 4 and Heat fell on a 20 pt deficit, fortunately they proved they could come back and finish the halftime ahead. This was a good wake up call but the whole 3rd Heat really couldn’t control the game yet. By the 4th Heat finally start taking over with still half of the quarter being fought.

Even after the largest lead by 7, Philly came back put it back to 3. Then Heat make a good push and Philly tie them up. This is where the killer instict should be up and instead of increasing the defense, the small drives are perforating the Heat defense. I think if Heat needs to learn something is how to guard the point guard, I know they want to steal and block the shots, that’s why they are more caring about doing that, than making a stop and most times it works. But when they fell, they fell misserably.

Anyway I think that the game was pretty good, fought to the last minute and the opportunities where there to put them to rest. Maybe next game like that they will be able to do just that. Right  now Heat will shut down this one with a sweep and wait on Celtics for the super matchup.

 

Playoff roundup

So far the playoff had been awesome and is good to see the outcomes coming up. They actually started pretty exciting from the get go, Spurs and Lakers were victim of first game upsets. Chicago, the No 1 team in the NBA didn’t had an upset but was just too close to be one, as well with the Celtics. The only confortable team so far has been the Heat which have had a relatively easy game against the sixers.  But let me get back tot he series.

So this is how the East and West matchups where at:

• Bulls – Pacers
• Miami – Sixers
• Celitcs – Knicks
• Magic – Hawks

and on the West:

• Spurs – Grizzlies
• Lakers – Hornets
• Maverics – Blazers
• Thunder – Nuggets

The upsets were a bit shocking for the NBA although really not that much fuzz was done at least on the blogsphere. But it was the first time that a Conference 1 and 2 loose the first game of the playoff.

• Spurs
• Lakers
• Magic

On the flip side, the teams that barely make it were also plenty as well:

• Bulls
• Celtics
• Thunder

In the end the series now likes up like this, and I think some series will go to 7, but we’ll see on a similar post next week.

• Bulls 3 – Pacers 0
• Heat 3 – Sixers 0
• Celtics 3 – Knicks 0
• Magic 1 – Hawks 2
  • West
• Spurs 1 – Grizzlies 1
• Lakers 2 – Hornets 1
• Maverics 2 – Blazers 1
• Thunder 2 – Nuggets 1

OOo4Kids 1.2 es lanzado

Replicado del post de Eric Bachard http://eric.bachard.org/news/index.php?post/2011/04/04/OOo4Kids-1.2-is-out

Descargame
Desde hace 10 días, la versión de 1.2 de OOo4Kids fue lanzado. Haz clic esta liga para descargarlo OOo4Kids ha sido lanzado para Windows (instalable y portable), Mac OSX (Intel y PowerPC) o GNU/Linux.

Cambios
Nuevo startcenter (gracias para Phillipp Lohmann para su grán ayuda)
Cambia el nivel de uso directamente, usando la nueva entrada de menú Ver -> Nivel de Usuario Gracias a Ramtin Khoshniat and Julien Piret del Ecole Commerciale et Industrielle d’Ecaussinnes por su trabajo.
Nuevo modo de cursor, para modo de anotación de Impress. Codigo probado de Benjamin Vialle y Clement Delafargue, de Ecole Centrale Nantes. Gracias a esto!
Nuevo locales: Griegos (gracias a Anas Drakopoulos), Danes (gracias a Peter Leth para la traducción), Ruso y Ucraniano (gracias a Grygorij Gromko para la traducción)
Optimización ARM (OMAP3, Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz), and genric armv6+ instruction set) Gracias a Simon Guinot and Fabien Rendu por su ayuda.

Otros cambios: mejoras de auto-corrección (gracias a Loic Breilloux), port OpenBSD (gracias a RobertNagy) y mucha mas…!!
Para el completo cambio de lista, desde OOo4Kids 1.1 ver el changelog completo.

Versión Debian / Ubuntu
.rpm  son disponibles, pero el .deb, ahora tenemos nuestro repositorio (no oficial) de Debian.

Paso 1: pasa esta linea a la lista de apt-sources:

Paso 2: corre run apt-get update (como root, o usando sudo)

Paso 3: instalar la versión de localización de tu elección
eg. Para versión francesa, solo corre, como root: apt-get install ooo4kids-fr (para versión francesa, pero otras estan disponibles, y solo debes reemplazar fr por tu localización)
Localizaciones disponibles: ar, da, de, es, el, en-us, fi, fr, it, nb, nl, pt, ru, sl, uk, zh-cn, zh-tw

IMPORTANTE: procura desinstalar previamente el OOo4Kids.
Instalar ooo4kids-$tu_idioma ejemplo apt-get install ooo4kids-fr

versión XO
Ver esta pagina. Gracias a Bastien Guerry

Conocenos
IRC:
canal #ooo4kids
servidor irc.freenode.net
Nuestro Wiki

No se te olvide donar
Como puedes ver en nuestra página de descarga, estamos cerca a 750,000 descargas. La mala noticia es que las donaciones aun no se han dado desde hace 10 dias (solo 50 euros si no es que menos) Recuerda que te damos todo sin costo, pero no es que no cueste, y nostros debemos pagar el servicio de servidor y otros gastos.  Gracias por adelantado.

NBA Playoff is a few hours to start

Is finally that playoff time where the Heat really has the time to show and prove and they are doing just great. even without the expectations of the team having the second best number in the east is as good as it can get. well no 1 would be the best but then again is not really about seen Chitown’s threat but about beating Boston.

With LeBron James and Dwayne Wade going playoff mode, we can see a new face of the game that Miami hasn’t shown in the regular season. However the overanlization of the team has overshadow their greatness, and their huge runs.

Hope to see what the other teams will do, beside Boston, Spurs and Lakers, everyone seems to be good.

On a related note, I havent really read the NBA blogs that much, dunno why, but they seem interesting. I should quote some of them for the Heat and Sixers matchup.

The margin for error is small, but the Sixers have found success by limiting their mistakes. They don’t shoot the ball particularly well, but they did have the league’s lowest turnover percentage in the league and 11th-highest assist rate. On the other end of the floor, they had a top-10 defense.

The defense is the key, because stops allow them to run. That’s when the Sixers are most effective and most entertaining. And in making the most of what they’ve got, the Sixers have made Collins a Coach of the Year candidate.

This is no suprise, defense and avoid mistakes, however is much easier said than done. Avoid mistakes when you are playing against the best defense in the NBA is really just a dream. You will make mistakes and what is worth, they will capitalize on that.

FLISOL Cancun

FLISOL 2011 by Lesthack

I’ll quote and translate this post from Lesthack on his blog. Giving a roundup of what this last months raising awareness of the event and how it evolved up to the day of launch.

On 2011 is the 7th year that the Latinamerican Festival of Free Software installations takes place in Latin America and Spain, and we are proud that the number of locations this year came to a wooping 260. Althought there were some locations that for some reason they couldn’t come through, or locations that did had an event but didn’t register on the website.

Mexico this year had a great 53 locations documented on the official wiki of FLISOL, surpasing this year to the ones before and waiting on the next years to increment even more.

This year new people were involved in the national chapter for Mexico including Jorge Luis Hernandez (Lesthack), Alexandro Colorado (JZA), Joshua Laister (Nierox) and Enrique Rodriguez (TheKiken), and sometimes it wasn’t enough, we started to take action by inviting people to participate more interactively on the mailing list [1] and on the IRC [2].

Between meetings in IRC and Skype, and between some glitches, we could put together a plan with action items like improving the way the coordination was currently running.

We improved the website mainly the one for the Mexican chapter, within the constrain of the MoinMoin wiki and carrying an old version, we were able to improve it giving it more dynamic and graphical interfaces, we classify the information on a better way, to make it more readable and easy to go through.

With the goal to rescue some of the chapter from previous years, we had a direct contact with the local organizers to verify their current situation, sometimes we made a difference.

At the end the range of action could have been expanded however there were other things to consider. The work was made from the National Chapter is mainly a work of love, and with other matters like school and work, there needs to be able to find a hole in a schedule so we can fit in this issues.

We are doing a good job, the 2012 Flisol is still ahead of us, is the time to bring some action, forget the discussions that separate one place from the next and work togethers are embassadors of Free Software.

We still don’t know if next year the number of locations will increase not only in Latin america but around the world, we don’t know if is possible retake and rebuild the name of FLISOL, what we do know is that we want to let people know about alternatives that are open as well as new proposals and interaction between us.

Thanks to everyone that made FLISOL 2011 possible, also, we welcome the invitation to organize next year event, at FLISOL 2012.

Nice post and I agree with everything he said, we do have some challenges that has to do with the long period of time between events. Here is where some real work needs to be talked about to mantain these locations for next year and also convince them to produce other events beyond FLISOL like the SoftwareFreedomDay.

We also want to handle the network to come up with ideas of building local tours around the city giving talks to audiences that otherwise would be hard to get like, high schools and Jr High from different parts of the city.

Even if FLISOL 2011 already past, it really hasn’t, there still a lot of work that we need to evaluate and see if there is things that we are still missing or that we are just simply underperfoming.

Let’s try to bring the network more in touch with each other and help build the relationships we need to make this FLOSS community prosper.

FLISOL is not about tech is about people

I am a geek, techie, hax0r, hipster, otaku, gamer, freaker, lurker, coder? When I talk with my family usually they never know what I am talking about. They can’t care less if there was a major fork between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice or that Nokia had dump the Meego project. Facebook and even Google dont really mean much and the youtube new sensation is as alien to them as some thing that exist but can’t be that important.

However this time I am doing an event that is not target to me or the people from my target. The challenge is to get people like me to build an event for people like my parents, all over the country and the rest of the continent.

So one thing is how can we entice the regular non-geeks to a tech event. One thing that we need to understand is that even thought everyone uses technology, most people are bored by it.

They see it as the future, but really they believe themselves about belonging to the past. This feeling is commonly seen on adults but is odd when it comes from kids.

However thsis cause the opposite effect, most kids don’t really think about technology as something that require a lot of thought. So they take the technology for granted and feeling a bit old school when thinking about generating such technology.

Sure we all use technology, technology for our phones, our computers, our ATM, at school and even to pay our taxes. However the more you see people embrace technology they are also more turned off by the idea of developing such technology. At the same time, there is a more social context to technology that are making more people trying to get into e-business. Creating your iphone app, your iphone app and your web 2.0. However, where does free software enters into this. A contrarian driver such as freedom and sharing knowledge become less popular as they dont really catch the idea of sharing is good.

OOo4Kids 1.2 is out

This week OOo4Kids saw the light  of day however there are still some things that we need to go through to call it a formal release. Here I will try to push some of the biggest difference between the previous release.

As always there is a good deal of fixed bugs, the ones that I saw more useful was the UI fixes on the cursor. Thanks to Eric Bachard, Benjamin Vialle and Clement Delafargue for the cursor mode on Impress annotation mode. There was a geat deal of work on the Startcenter thanks to Phillips Lohman. Bibliography module had some work arounds as well and some fixes on the windows installer.

The biggest change is also getting rid of the java library javaldx, javacontext, libjvmaccess, libjvmfwk which add a lot of memory heaviness to the original OOo. Well what you expect? is Java.

There were some new locales added, specifically the greek locale, and a por to the ARM processor which has been a HUGE thing specially given that many cellphones and mobile devices carry the ARM7 architecture.

These seems to line up most of the work fom OOo4Kids, we hope more contributions come in the future.