soledad penadés

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This is hardly funny if you don't travel on the Underground. But if you do, The No Foundation will make you laugh with their self made no-stickers. A pity I still haven't found any of those in the tubes I've travelled in, but I'll pay more attention from now on…

Which also reminds me that I noticed recently that the Victoria line carriages do have that kind of stickers in the space reserved for advertisement on the walls "by default", although usually they are hidden with the advertisement itself. So if there's no advertisement, there's always some kind of ban: keep your music down, don't put feet on the seats… etc

(Once again, via Going Underground's blog)

Salió una noticia hace tiempo en algún periódico inglés (ahora mismo no recuerdo cuál era). Básicamente la profesora de uno de los colegios con mejores resultados académicos dijo que pasaba olímpicamente de los planes de estudios, y que en lugar de estudiar tan sólo fragmentos de los libros, los leían al completo. Y la verdad es que me dejó huella, porque la entendí perfectamente.

Cuando iba al colegio, me desesperaba el hecho de que sólo se leyeran fragmentos de las obras. Así no puedes entender los libros, ni "caer enganchado" en la trama que ha ideado el escritor. Los fragmentos sueltos, fuera de contexto, pueden hacer incluso que malinterpretes el propósito o la temática de un libro. Ojo, que no digo que no sea mala idea utilizar un extracto para por ejemplo, hacer análisis sintáctico, en lugar de los típicos ejemplos chorras: El gato juega con la pelota; sujeto: gato, verbo: juega… ya sabéis…

Pero si lo único que lee la gente son esos extractos, nunca serán capaces de leer cosas más extensas, les parecerán tareas interminables, eternas: el típico lamento tan escuchado en la universidad de "¡Mierda ¡Tengo que leer 30 páginas! ¡Me voy a morir!"

En esto también entra en juego la educación casera: si en su casa no se le enseña a las personas que leer es bueno, sino que exhiben actitudes despreciativas respecto a la lectura y todo lo relacionado con ellos, obviamente no se le puede reprochar a un profesor que no motive a sus alumnos para que se lean un libro. ¿Cómo no va a tener una actitud de rechazo hacia la lectura alguien si en su casa el único libro que hay es un Don Quijote edición especial numerada con tapas bañadas en oro… utilizado como elemento decorativo en el recibidor? ¿O alguien que escucha comentarios tal que "ése tío es un empollón cuatro gafas, rata de biblioteca, todo el día encerrado con la nariz entre los libros"? Cualquier persona oye eso de pequeña, de parte de sus padres, y lo repite como un loro hasta que se lo cree, porque lo dice mamá/papá.

Así que esta profesora no sólo ha tenido los ovarios de dar lo que le ha parecido más sensato, sino que además ha tenido una suerte impresionante. No sería fácil repetir la experiencia en una clase repleta de nengs o de chavs (los nengs a la inglesa ;) … y sí, ¡el nombre viene de chaval!)

Ya me hubiera gustado a mí encontrarme más profesoras así, ya, en lugar de la perla que no me repartía el libro para la lectura semanal si me veía llevando otro (¡mío!) en la mano, tal que "ya tienes uno, ¿para qué quieres otro? ¡ah! ¿es tuyo? bueno, da igual, con uno basta"…

I wanted to have a good repository of my code projects just in case something bad happens. Searching info here and there, I found the following pages useful for setting up my own repository in textdrive, and also installing and configuring the appropiate software on my mac.

So first thing was creating the repository, from the webmin administration tool (in textdrive, of course)

Then I found this cool page by Josh Buhler, explaining how to install all the svn tools for Mac Os X. Once all is instaled, I jumped to this textdrive forum thread on using subversion on TXD, which is a bit old but gave me the idea of how to refer to the svn paths. I thought it was something like svn://…. but it was http://… (no wonder why it gave me a timeout each time I tried to access it!).

With it, I could go to the terminal and make the first import and put the first version in my repository! I did it as it is explained in this good article at macdevcenter: Making the Jump to Subversion. Basically the most important step here is making a copy of your source code before importing to the repository, then import it, rename the first folder as Myfolder_beforeSVN, and check it out again in the MyFolder folder - so you get the contents again from the repository, but this time they are all marked like subversionized, and if you look carefully, you'll note their icon exhibits a little check box - to make clear they are under the subversion domain and they are up to date.

If you are a bit curious and run ls -la in your code folder, you'll note there's a little new (and hidden) folder called .svn which contains something like this:

drwxr-xr-x    12 sole  sole    408 Jan 22 18:57 .drwxr-xr-x   119 sole  sole   4046 Jan 22 18:57 ..-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole    118 Jan 22 18:57 README.txt-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole     78 Jan 22 18:57 dir-wcprops-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole      0 Jan 22 18:57 empty-file-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole  31254 Jan 22 18:57 entries-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole      2 Jan 22 18:57 formatdrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 prop-basedrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 propsdrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 text-basedrwxr-xr-x     6 sole  sole    204 Jan 22 18:57 tmpdrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 wcprops

I think that it is where subversion holds all the info for the files and so on, like the CVS folders which are created in each folder when you use CVS.

And that's all! Now there's no excuse for not being a bit less messy when it comes to having backups and a clean code. Hope you're lucky with it all…

As a big fan of Space Invaders, I can't stop linking to the real story! Extremely funny… I don't know if it's Miguex's work or he's just linking to a YouTube video. In any case, the music by Ken Ishii really fits the images.

From the Accent blog.

Today I finally managed to go to my old neighbourhood, Notting Hill. First stop, Bayswater. I just went there to do some shopping on a Westbourne Grove shop, but it was closed. Anyway, I took a bus and headed Notting Hill Gate, where my favourite bookshop is. It is a small shop where LOTS of books are piled, but it is not messy at all, excepting the ultrabargain boxes, where you can get books for one pound or even fifty or twenty five pence. That's it, for my dear euro currency users, something like 1.5 euros, 0.75 or 0.38 euros.

Don't think in advance: these books are ok. I don't have a clue about where do they get them - but I presume they might buy the remaining stocks from other sellers and then resell them, at very low prices. Which is good, as I do read quite quickly, and I am now developing the ability to do the same in english.

I already have been there twice. First time I bought one of my favourite books: Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I had read it before, but in Spanish, and I wanted to find out how was it written in its original language. It was very funny to read how Doctor Van Helsing spoke english with a strong Dutch accent, his weird grammatical constructions and so on. It is also very interesting to check every place which is located in London, now that I know almost all these places: Piccadilly Circus, Liverpool Street Station… (apart from the fictional locations, of course). And I also liked to discover some facts about Bram Stoker's life, which influenced him when he wrote his books.

Second time I went, I just spent some minutes around the shop and just took the first book which looked attractive. This time it was The Cybergypsies (here is another non-amazon article about the book), by Indra Sinha. And was quite weird, it was the story about about something that not always we have been aware of: all the people which used modems to create point to point communities and relationships, away from BBS's and similars, on those famous MUD's, everything in a semiautobiographic way. Superfunny parts of the books were the descriptions of the home made tools those early hackers built for their Atari's, which allowed them to fight faster in their text-based online games. So if you weren't were good at typing quickly, you still could code your own cheating tool which would type the fighting commands for you, thus allowing you to earn more points and increase your level in the game.

And I hadn't been there for some months as I had been very busy moving home, as some of you might know (if not, you can read the story as well), but today entered the door again and started looking for something from Arthur C. Clarke. I have read a pair of books from Clarke before, but as in Dracula's case, I wanted to see how was the original writing style. First I started looking for Rendezvous with Rama, one of my favourite sci-fi books, so I could compare and also refresh my memory (as I think last time I re-read the book was five years ago). But couldn't find anything… I was just giving the battle as lost and already had chosen the first book which looked attractive (for just 50p! how cannot a book look attractive?), when I gave a last inspection to the sci-fi area and discovered a Rama II book. Woh! I had been looking for that one years and years in Spain… each time I went to a bookshop they never had it.

So I got it and the other one, whose author and title were completely unknown for me, for £3.50. That's simply great! As I don't need to read what everybody is reading (examples: The Da Vinci Code, Bridget Jones Diary), usually priced at around £18, and love to discover new authors, this bookshop is like a little treasure.

If you go to London, don't forget to visit it!