chuso.net

Why we care about Paris and not about Kabul

Every time a terrorist attack in the West caught the attention of the media, a response arises from some ideological sectors. Whether the Boston Marathon, Charlie Hebdo or the slaughter yesterday at the Bataclan, there are always those who, after the first signs of media attention, make the same comment: By the way, terrorist attacks like the Paris one happen almost daily in Africa or Asia, but they don't shock us.

Reallocating partitions usage in Linux without formatting

Something that is not unusual to happen: you do bad planning of your disk partitioning and you eventually find out that you have a nearly-full partition and you want to move a directory from that partition to a new disk. If you already have some experience with Linux and command line you will probably know how to safely do this from the same machine and without losing any data, but it may be something a little more difficult for less experienced users.

How Android managed to scare me

Precedent 1 Two years ago, I went to Poland to visit a friend who was there for his Erasmus program and there he met a Slovenian girl. English level in Poland is quite low and, in addition, we were in Bielsko-Biała, which is not exactly the capital, so we managed to get understood primarily via the Slovenian girl and the similarities that apparently exist between Polish and Slovenian languages. One day, we were waiting for the bus to go to Auschwitz and it was quite rainy, so we went into a bar in the deepest Poland that had one of those machines that you put coins so you can choose which song you want to hear.

No, it doesn't work for you

We've all heard this ever. Some may even have used this argument: "it works for me." It seems that it works as a defense of the effectiveness of everything. From homeopathy to ouija including NLP or MMS. If you've tried it and you've seen that it works and maybe you even know more people that say that it works, we could say that its effectiveness is proved, right? Let's see why this argument could be wrong.

"Science is just an opinion," said the postmodern

"Science is just an opinion, as valid as any other," said the postmodern guy in a tweet sent from his smartphone with 4G connection while the MEPG stream received through a fiber optic cable was being decoded to stimulate the electrodes that will polarize the glass that will shape the image of Deepak Chopra on his TV. The same MPEG stream was also being decoded to a series of electrical impulses that cause disturbances in the air that reached his ears to become the sound of the words of the Indian spiritualist.

No, don't blame the user

It is unusual to see a computer engineer defending users. Even more if the engineer is a system administrator. It is known that the relationship between system administrators and users is tense. But when somebody tries to fool me, I get even more tense. Let's go over the facts. The registrar I'm updating the administrative contact of some domain names registered with a well-known Spanish registrar. The company listed as the administrative contact no longer exists and now the domain names belong to another company, so I have to update all the data, but that's another story.

Why there are no good video editing free software

It's something that I ever asked myself and recently I have somebody asked it to me again: what free (as in free beer or as in free speech) video editors are there? A video editor is a very complex piece of software to develop, so there are not many free solutions, the few ones that we can find are not very good and the ones you have to pay for are quite expensive.

How I recovered the system after renaming ld.so

Yes, I know, it may be a little stupid renaming ld.so, can we skip this detail? It's not something I do very often, but that day I felt like I had to innovate or something like that. But innovation was a disaster, it is not a good idea to rename a library linked using its exact path by all system dynamic executables, just to take into account if you are going to have the same idea.

Coriolis Effect and drains, again

It's a widely held belief that water falls down the drain turning in the same direction in one hemisphere of the Earth and the opposite direction in the other hemisphere. I remember, an X-Files episode (which implies that this happened about 15 years ago) where Mulder saw the water falling down the drain turning clockwise and that, Scully, is impossible because we are in the northern hemisphere and water always turns counterclockwise here.

My complaint to TED about TEDxValenciaWomen

La pulga snob - Sexista This Saturday, December 1st, a TEDx event was held in Valencia: TEDxValenciaWomen. Two other TEDx events were held this weekend in Spain: TEDxGalicia and TEDxPonferrada on Friday, but I couldn't pay attention to those two because it was a weekday, I'll wait for the videos to be published. TED events are a set of conferences where speakers can talk about different topics. Originally these were mostly technological topics, as the name suggests.