Disgusted with the Spanish government
I am very disgusted with the Spanish government and their later actions. I bought a couple of books and two T-shirts from the USA, the books from O'Reilly and the T-shirts from Valve.
The books I bought are Learning Python, 4Ed for $54.99 and Python for Unix and Linux System Administration, 1Ed for $49.99. I payed $39.48 for International Air Shipping.
The T-shirts I bought are the Portal 2 Logo T-shirt for $19.99 and Portal 2 Test Candidate Shirt for $19.99, as well. I payed $20.00 for International Air Shipping.
These two companies did not respect what they claimed and used DHL instead. The guys from DHL are not very smart as they go through customs, which is not really compulsory for low cost purchases for personal use.
Besides, the Spanish government has changed their laws. Formerly, they were imposing duty tolls on purchases of value above 150€. They changed it, and now they impose a duty tall to packages from the USA of 19.50€ + 18% from anything worth 22.00€ or more.
My T-shirts cost $39.98 plus $20.00 for shipping and I have to pay around $35 more for them. That's 33% more. What a shame!
This abhorrent measure from the Spanish government is seriously shameless. Besides pulling of lots of money of my salary by their ridiculously high taxes and their miserable social security system, I am now forced to pay absurdly elevated duty tolls for books and clothes. This is so unacceptable and plain wrong. Why don't they tax themselves with their excessive salaries instead?
This is just so frustrating.
Looking for an OVH-like provider in the USA or Canada
This time, let me be the one asking for info to my readers. If you know anything about this, please let me know!
I have been looking around a little for a provider just like OVH but located in the USA or in Canada, but I was not really successful. The closest thing I found is FDC Servers, but I am not happy enough with it, because their pricing is quiet higher than OVH.
GUADEC streamed live in WebM using Flumotion
GUADEC (GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference) of this year, 2010, is being streamed live from several locations (Paris, Copenhagen and Seville) in WebM format using Flumotion and the Flumotion Streaming Platform.
It is amazing to be able to finally start streaming in an open format, no more flash! Remember that you need Firefox 4 or Opera 10.60.
You can find more details about the event and about the streaming here.
You can use the following URLs to watch it live:
Enjoy the live streaming!!!
Frustrated with Vodafone and the Nexus One FroYo 2.2 update
Some sources have leaked that Vodafone is delaying the OTA release of FroYo to all Nexus One mobiles in Europe that were purchased through them for two more weeks. They promised to leave the firmware intact and now they have changed their minds and are modifying it!
They apparently say they are "improving" it so that emergency calls and "other small issues" work properly with their network. I am personally afraid they're gonna nerf some functionality or add some sort of restrictions.
This is just frustrating!
Call for help! Looking for contributors for pylsyncd : Python Live Syncing Daemon
Are you looking for a fast and reliable solution to keep contents synchronized among different systems in different locations? Either if you want to synchronize a few contents or even several terabytes of data, pylsyncd may be the right solution for you.
The application pylsyncd stands for Python Live Syncing Daemon and is a clear alternative to lsyncd. At a lower level, pylsyncd is written in python. It uses pyinotify to detect changes in the files and then launches rsync processes to keep everything properly synchronized.
Apart from being way more efficient than it's C-programmed counterpart, pylsyncd offers many more features and mechanisms that improve both performance and reliability, being the main advantage of pylsyncd against lsyncd is that it uses message queues in order to synchronize in a parallel way several destination servers, saving up time when it is required to have more than one destination. It has been tested in heavy loaded environments of over 70TeraBytes.
At this stage, we have tested thoroughly each and any part of pylsyncd. We have several people from all over the world using pylsyncd in production for over half a year now, with no issues, under heavy load environments, moving several TeraBytes of data. There are already some contributors to the source code, but we are looking to expand our community and make this promising project even larger.
Either if you could ever be a potential user of this application or not, if you are somewhat skilled in python, you are very welcome to come by and give us a hand, not only by improving the source code, applying QA or making performance tweaks. There are a lot of features that still need to be implemented.
We count on you!
Finally a graphics card for Linux that works flawlessly with compiz and is lightning fast
After years of struggling and looking around, I have finally found a graphics card that works flawlessly when running compiz under Linux and that processes all the effects at lightning speed. I've never seen something like this for that reasonable price!
Testing out Funtoo
The other day I decided to give a try at Funtoo (for those that do not know it yet, a variant of Gentoo). I am very impressed with the improvements that Daniel Robbins has done so far.
Among the things that I like:
Today it’s the Greek Independence Day and tomorrow I will start my vacation from work
The first modern Greek state was founded 189 years ago. After suffering massive oppression and several massacres under the Ottoman empire, the Greek population revolted and freed themselves from their oppressors.
Nowadays, Greece is fighting against different kind of oppression, the oppression of speculators, of extremely wealthy people that only care about growing their fortunes and do not care at all for the vast majority of the population. These shameless people are to be blamed for the world wide crises, for the wars around the planet and for the many unfair activities that people end up suffering.
How to be able to use your ssh agent forwarding after using sudo
Recently we have hit with a solution for an issue where we wanted our users to run certain secure commands as root, which included repository commits. This can easily happen to you if you use savon, for instance.
Because of the nature of savon, given that it understands not only about standard permissions and modes, but also of SELinux contexts, this tool can only be used properly as root, if you want to use all of its features.
The problem comes when you need non-root users, that work with certain files in a directory, to be able to commit these changes. You have to use sudo, which you surely already know. For increased security, standard distributions drop most environment variables when you run a command with sudo.
Check that a physical link is up with the proper speed
This check is great to detect when a network cable for whatever reason deteriorates and stops providing the desired up-link speed. It works perfectly for any system that has ethtool installed.
This particular check has helped me as a sysadmin to detect bad quality cables that, after being reused many times, end up deteriorating and do not let me get 1Gbps in RJ-45 CAT 5E cables. I have also been able to detect network card failures, and also malfunctioning switch ports.
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Latest Gentoo Commits
- Fixes bug #315757 with patch of arfrever (Portage version: 2.2_rc67/cvs/Linux... 2010/04/17
- Added QA reviewed notice (Portage version: 2.2_rc67/cvs/Linux x86_64, RepoMan... 2010/04/15
- Fixes bug #207722 (Portage version: 2.2_rc67/cvs/Linux x86_64, RepoMan options:... 2010/04/15
- Version bump. Several improvements. (Portage version: 2.2_rc67/cvs/Linux x86_64) 2010/03/19
- Version bump. Includes several new features. (Portage version:... 2010/03/19
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