nightly revelations

Hereby I would like to report an abuse on our dear friend Nacho . Due to some dark reasons his blog has been banned out from our planet. This post is intended to express our solidarity with him, and from this humble corner we demand his back to our planet. While this unfair situation goes on you still can show your support to him visiting his blog. In the meanwhile you can blame the one who we suspect to be responsible.

Hey it’s snowing here! As it doesn’t snow very often in Zaragoza, everytime it does we take it like if it was a celebration. It’s been nice to wake up and take a glance thru the window this morning to see everything in white. I’ve walked my dogs (a couple of cute boxers) it was the first time for them to see snow and they have been playing on it like a couple of 4-years-old kids.

Of course, as we are not used to dealing with snow in Zaragoza we are experimenting some problems. Mainly related to traffic issues. I got stuck in a traffic jam on my way to office due to an accident. I spent almost 2 hours in the bus, fortunately nobody was injured and I brought my laptop

I’m working on a personal project related to video streaming in my spare time. So far I’ve been using mencoder to capture video from /dev/videoX and encode it. It works fine, but I’m thinking about to change towards a more elaborated multimedia framework. It seems it’s worth to evaluate gstreamer and NMM. I haven’t worked with them yet, I’m just taking a glance at their doc and API’s and they seem really similar. Both of them use concepts such as pipelines, graphs, sink… You have to define a scenario using compenents, by means of a graph the user describe how these components are connected to each other. For example, you have a file source which reads a mp3 file, which is connected to a remote machine which has a decoder which is connected to another machine which plays the raw data or whatever. Hopefully I’ll try them next week. A good thing about gstreamer is that it’s already packaged in debian since ages, while NMM is not yet. On the other hand, the latter is coded in C++, and I feel more comfortable with it than with the G_NEVER_ENDING_CASTS stuff Anyway, I have to make a decision soon.

Last week I downloaded the last available beta for Qt libraries. The final release for Qt 4.0 seems to be due by the end of Q2 2005. Trolltech guys are doing great stuff as usual, for example, they have split the framework in several pieces, such as network, xml, gui, etc… This way we could code server or console apps without linking against gui code. Take a look at his:


magnetic@negro:~/srcs/torrente/src$ ldd ./torrente
libQtCore_debug.so.4 => /usr/local/lib/libQtCore_debug.so.4 (0x0fe0b000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x0fd9a000)
libstdc++.so.5 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5 (0x0fcc1000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x0fc2c000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x0fbfe000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x0fa9f000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x0fa6c000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x0fa49000)
/lib/ld.so.1 => /lib/ld.so.1 (0x30000000)


We’ve linked against QtCore, without using gui stuff at all.

…since I went vegetarian. Yeah, 365 days making an effort to avoid eating neither meat nor fish nor any kind of slaughtered stuff. I gotta recognize it’s been hard to get used to it. The beginning was the trickiest part, even more when your friends are a bunch of bloody-steak-eaters as I used to be. I became vegetarian mainly due to animal cruelty, after finding out how we treat animals in farms. As I said, the beginning was hard. This was due to my lack of recipes. Until then I wasn’t very used to cooking dishes mainly based on vegetables. So I didn’t have a wide range of recipes, hence I run out of ideas quickly. The first two or three weeks I ended fed up of eating always the same: salad and pasta, pasta and salad. Then I started exploring veggie restaurants in Zaragoza like Los helechos, La birosta or La zanahoria. There were just a few ones, but it was enough to realize that there were tasty vegetarian recipes out there. So I began to gather some recipes from the Internet, and step by step i learnt to cook them. I don’t want to show off, but you should try my falafel or my funghi sauce to see how I’ve improved.

Hi!

I promised myself to write more often in my blog but I’ve betrayed myself again. Anyway, I’ve been quite busy working, I’ve had a few days of vacation though. I spent 4 days in Jaca. I was one of the organizers for an event called United cultures in Pyrinees , where a group of around 20 students from all over Europe met to talk about the Bologna Declaration, this is an effort to agree a common higher education space throughout Europe. We also talked about the future European Constitution. And of course, we had time to party What did you think? These kind of serious topics are only an excuse to party. You can take a glance at the photos here.

On the other hand, Helen took advantege of the low fares of the new airline installed in Zaragoza and went to the UK for a few days. Let’s see when I stop being broke and I have the chance to go to London to see my friends as in the good-old times when I studied there.

Back to reality again, I’ll have a couple of exams the following week, so I guess I should study a little bit…

Yesterday morning, the former Spanish president, Jose Mar

I had to give back a book last Friday to the university library. Because I have no operative bike at the moment, due to somebody stealing my forward wheel my main transport is the bus. So I needed stuff to read on my way home – it takes me like 1 h to get my neighborhood – if I did not want to die of boredom. I checked out an interesting book about Computer Vision. I hadn’t read anything about this topic before. But it seems a nice way of having fun using the theory about filters, transforms and stuff we are taught. We have a Computer Vision subject at uni, so I’ll definitely take it in the next semester.

On the other hand, I’ve been working on my dreads a little bit lately. My left side is starting to look like as if I have proper dreads. I had thin dreads, and I’ve been joining them to make them thicker. I haven’t worked on my right side though. And the back of my head looks awful, or at least that’s what people say. Somebody told me it looked like a bird’s nest instead of hair. I have to convince Helen to help me there because it’s quite complicated to do it by myself. I’ll upload a pic soon, to show my rasta evolution to you.

There was an opening party last Saturday for the new place for the downgrade hacklab in Zaragoza. I tried to drop by but I couldn’t because I couldn’t find it. I swear I tried, but it was too cold and we gave up the quest quickly

Hi out there!

Due to Jorge from now on I’m gonna disclose my deepest secrets here. So stay tuned.