chuso.net

Let's start with a bit of history.

Casim.ir is a URL shortener developed by Nicolas Hoizey in PHP eleven years ago (stylized by then as Cas.im/ir) with the intention of creating a light and simple URL shortener.

About seven years ago, I installed it to create my own private URL shortener at chu.so and some other open and public ones with some modifications on Nicolas's project.

Shortly after, I started contributing to the project with improvements and bugfixes and almost instantly Nicolas gave me direct write permission.

So far, I've been using WordPress for this website. It's a very powerful and complete blogging software, with a lot of plugins, themes, search engine optimizations, etc. It has been in the market for more than 15 years and continues to be actively developed. It's the undisputed leader in blogging and it's very easy and quick to produce content with it.
On the other hand, I haven't updated this blog for two years, with a single entry in the last 5 years. So why migrate it again? Well precisely for that.

Every time someone asks if I have heard about Bitcoin or tells me they want to invest, there are so many things that I think I could tell and so many links that I would like to share, that I thought it would be better to compile everything in a blog post. And, what the hell, nowadays you're nobody if you do not have a blog post about Bitcoin and which topic could be better to wake up my blog from its two-year lethargy than the bubble of the moment.

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. Because it's Africa. Or Asia.

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.

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. We pay the price and chose Black Betty by Ram Jam and Africa by Toto. And nothing happened, no music was played at all. And trying to complain to the owners of the bar was impossible because, of course, they speak no English at all. So we let it be and just waited until it stopped raining.

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.

Our perception of efficacy is affected by certain psychological and sociological biases that prevent us from correctly assessing the results and even alter them unconsciously. This is a well-known phenomenon and this is why personal experience is a questionable way of generating knowledge. Instead, we use studies carried out using the scientific method that has been designed to attempt to correct and neutralize these biases in order to try to get results as objective and solid as possible. Also, if the results resist falsification tests and replication by different teams, we ensure a more consistent result.

For greater clarity when explaining why personal experience is not a valid proof, we are going to review with a little more detail some of these biases with examples of how they affect the assessment of an outcome. It should be clear that all we apply these biases, mostly unconsciously. So we can't assume bad faith on those who fall into these biases and can't either consider ourselves free of them.

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  Confirmation bias. Probably one of the best known and studied. It may be referred to by many other names or subtypes, some of which are also explained below, like recall bias, cherry-picking, biased interpretation, etc. It is the tendency we have to give more value to cases that confirm our point of view. This applies, for example, if we take a homeopathic preparation every time we have a cold and the third part of the times we do it, we are healed. If we tend to believe that homeopathy works, we will give more validity and representativeness to that cases where we've cured even though it is less the times —and however, it may not be representative even if they were most of the cases, as we will see below. It is the unconscious tendency we have to give more relevance to cases that favor our point of view and disregard those who contradict it.

"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.

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. Now I will transfer the domain to another registrar, so I only need to change the e-mail address to get the auth code to transfer the domain name to another registrar. I will correct the rest of the contact details at the new registrar.
I leave all data as is and just change the e-mail address, then I submit the form and it does nothing. It does not send the data, shows no message, no action, nothing. I try with different browsers and the result is always the same. Since I know a little bit about this, I go to the browser error console and this is what I found there:

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.
There are other types of complex software developments like web browsers and office suites, but a video editor can be even more complex and in addtion it has very specific and small user group, so they will have less ability to attract volunteer developers. Everyone use a web browser, but too few people use a video editor. It is difficult to entice a developer to devote their free time to a project so complex and with so little reception as a video editor and those who do it, won't expend the same effort. A web browser and an office suite have a much larger user base and therefore may attract a larger number of volunteer programmers willing to develop a free version. So there are very good browsers (Firefox, Chromium) and office suites (LibreOffice) and sometimes the free version may even exceed commercial version and although part of their development is done by volunteers as a hobby it also gets support and funding from major corporations and foundations such as Google, Mozilla, Oracle, Apple and Apache. Actually, none of the success stories mentioned departed from scratch but it originated in a commercial project freeing its source: Firefox comes from Netscape, LibreOffice from StarOffice and Chromium ... well, Chromium story is a little different as it has always been free software (KHTML), although it would have been impossible to exists without the contributions of Apple and Google to its WebKit engine through its commercial projects Safari and Chrome, respectively. So to have a free video editor that can compete with commercial versions, we will have to wait for Apple releasing Final Cut source code as free (don't expect for that right now).
In addition , those who have already worked with video editing have proven that it is a resource-intensive task (processor, memory and hard drive), so a video editor has to be efficient and well planned, adding more complexity to the project.
For all this, the few free solutions that are can't compete with commercial software: cut video pieces and put them somewhere else, add some simple effects and little else. As my video editing needs are very basic, with LiVES I have more than enough. Another solution is VLMC from VideoLan people who often do things pretty well (VLC Media Player), but the last time I tried VLMC was still in a very early stage of development and very limited, it was little more than a sketch. I don't know how VLMC have evolved since then, but I would not have much hope now.
An often recommended option in forums is Cinelerra, but my experience with it was disastrous because its instability made it unusable: every time I tried to do something it either hanged or closed, it was impossible to do anything.
But overall, my experience with video editing free software goes back some years, so it may have changed, hopefully well.