Pere Benavent

About studying computing and salary

2008-07-31T02:17:00.000-07:00

I've talk with a nice guy who's working in a call center. He's working and studying Computing Engineering at the same time... and he's studying almost the same speciality that I'm studying.

It makes think about why to keep on studying. If that nice guy ends his degree right now he would came to the IT market and if he would be hired as a IT degree he will earns as much as he earns now as a call center operator. Sad.

Don't get confuse. I firmly support the study. But it's a pity that someone with a high degree has to start from a so unfair salary. On the other hand, when he takes experience enough and improve his salary, unfortunately, he still paid under his preparation or skills...
There's no Fog Creek Software or Google company alike in Spain as far as I know...

So, what's the sense in studying a degree in computing? You may is pointless if you're thinking in achieve a good salary. But there're people who studied 'cause they like it. Is it a vocational job so? I don't think so. And if someone starts as a vocational it may end up in some different positions, burned out after a couple of years.
In my opinion you has few options:

Being vocational worker while you can
Start up your own bussines
Work with FOSS and get paid for it

Fedora problems with dvd-slideshow and how solve them

2008-07-30T01:29:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from our holidays in Florence... nice city by the way, very nice in deep.

Since I've carried my DSLR Olympus E-510 with me I've done several photos, now I'm involved in the post production job

I wanna some photo slideshow that keeps amused my family on the TV so I search some software for Linux and I found that (in my opinion) most mature and proper software seems to be dvd-slideshow and it has just one but; there's no GUI for more complicated command line options, it really doesn't matters to me but may to you.

Installation and dependecy problems resolutions are not complicated in Fedora. The only thing I've to take care is to specify -p and -mp2 options in command line. The first one, -p is for generate PAL video output and the second one -mp2 is for generate mp2 audio since it crashes if try to let it with mp3 by default although I got the propers codecs installed.

Object Oriented Programming passed

2008-07-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

Finally I received a phone message with my subject note... and it has been passed with the minimum note to pass it but done.

Now time to try a little relax and plan how its going to be the next semester. Probably I choose two subject for the next six moths instead of follow just one subject. Maybe I'll choose English III plus Information Engineering... don't know really, I've got to meditate on this a little bit...

HAL problem dissapears and NetworkManager is ok

2008-06-11T21:44:00.000-07:00

So in short the title explains everything. Now, I must admit I don't like the idea of using NetworkManager instead of command line. Command line makes me feel with more control and lets me learn more. Nowadays this simple applet is simple and useful, shows me wifi networks, it let me choose what network I wanna use... so I surrender to it

Meanwhile HAL problems has dissapears probably 'cause there's no conflict in having exclusivity access to network devices or so I think.

I have reduce the stack of daemons running at boot time by switching off bluetooth, rpc related daemons and ip6tables. I love chkconfig command line.

Soon I'll push off cube-beryl related software since my graphich card (an old fashioned Svage S3 my laptop is from 2002 and I'm still surprise for that) doesn't support this short of effects.

Fedora 9 just installed

2008-06-03T03:10:00.000-07:00

As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago I've installed Fedora 9 at my laptop.

I've used for the very first time a different method. My laptop (buyed 04/11/2002) is unable to boot from a DVD, I allways have been using the set of CDs but now I downloaded a ISO that allows you to install from the network. This is not new for Debian fans.

So if you look for Fedora-9-i386-netinst.iso you'll find it has only 144Mb, for sure you're gonna need a quite good internet conection. It tooks me around 3 hours to finish the whole process, including type of installation (Workstation, development or webserver), packages selection and download and so on.

Once the boring part was finished then comes the amusing process... as long as I keep my personal home filesystem untouched this part is easier.

By now I've done a couple of customizations quite usual among Fedora's users:

Livna repos: download livna rpm...
1. got to http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/
2. pick up http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm and install it
3. type yum update and install mplayer (I used for see movies, many people prefers vlc software, both of them are a good option) by typing yum install mplaer
4. do the same for ffmpeg (I used it for convert video files); yum install ffmpeg
Flash plugin for Firefox: download flash-plugin-9.0.124.0-release.i386.rpm from Adobe's site and install typing rpm -i flash-plugin-9.0.124.0-release.i386.rpm
Solve some problems with HAL daemon... Pablo has told me that hal doesn't get very well if you use both network and Network-Managed daemons so he tolds me to use the second one or at least one of them, but not both at the same time... I keep myself on tune it accurately

There're more thong to be told but that's enough for now. Soon a second part, 'till then have a look to http://hacktux.com/fedora it keeps a lot of tricks that you were thinking of.

Going on with my OOP subject at university

2008-05-18T03:26:00.000-07:00

I've checked right now my last mark on OOP at UOC and feel very satisfied with it.

I thought my last exercise its going to be a C+ and I've got a B finally so great work for me! that makes me keep on trying with the latest exercise we got now 'cause it may helps a lot to pass the final exam since they uses this exercises to get an average in order to calculate the final mark.

I know how to prototype models, draw UML diagrams, how to translate the problem to the paper... but I feel myself terrible unexperienced in java coding. I hope it will less important the final coding than the -in my opinion- core knowledge which is Object Oriented aproach. Let's see how it finally ends...

ArgoUML

2008-04-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

This days I'm studying OOP at the UOC. We need to draw UML diagrams, this University feels confortable with Free Software and what do you think they recomend for that task? They recomend us ArgoUML which is a nice tool.

ArgoUML has been wrote in Java and one of the most interesting things is that you may get your code in different languages, java, php ... (don't remember if more languages are supported), it supports UML standard diagrams, and finally it runs quite well on my 512Mb RAM laptop.

Red Hat Fan

2008-04-26T09:28:00.000-07:00

I've been using Red Hat distributions since Red Hat 6.2 (more or less) and from then upgrading up to Fedora, passing through all Fedora's...

From different reasons I experienced a quite important problem with Fedora 8 and don't have any time to solve it. I decide give a chance to Debian (pure stable Debian, not Ubuntu or so) 'cause is a very interesting option, now is easy to install and with a lot of advantages (regular updates, security, zillions of packages...)

And I have to say that on my laptop (an old one) it runs faster than Fedora. I know it was going to be that way since Debian compile packages with less dependencies and that make them lighter in terms of memory consuming. But also everything is so different to almost any other distro that it's really annoying. I deeply respect Debian, nothing would be the same without that distro, but I rather prefer using Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS (great choice CentOS it isnt?) for three main reasons:

I'm used to them
they are more familiar in enterprise environments
they're too Linux and FLOSS

But... you know, there's always a but I have to admit that I'm a Red Hat Fan. So as soon as I finish with the subject (Object Oriented Programming) I'm studying at UOC I'll return to Fedora. It would exciting.

Java sucks? Maybe, but less

2008-03-30T22:49:00.000-07:00

I rembember that I've wrote opinions such as Java Sucks and so on. That was my starting point for a long time. Quique, who is a nice person and also a Java coder (yes, both possibilities are compatible) told me that my opinion was forge in suffering very bad code in Java. Now I'm force to write in Java for Objected Orientation Programming subject at my University on-line degree. So, as I was suspecting from a long time, Quique was right. It's very easy write in Java (nice) and it's really a powerfull combination JDK + Eclipse. The truth is that there're very bad programmers all around, or probably, unreasonable customers demanding aplication modifcations constantly that modifies the design and the performance of the whole thing. I'm also still believing that programmers job is absolutely devalued and underpaid here in Spain.

aTunes for your iPod

2008-02-25T22:05:00.000-08:00

I was writting few days ago about alternatives for iTunes software. Nothing against Apple or any other company, just a pro Linux position: I prefer FLOSS software and I prefer run it on GNU/Linux. That's all.

So thanks to Sourceforge mail-list I've found iTunes, I don't find it in my former research so have a look on it 'cause it for three main reasons:

multi-platform since it is written in Java (requires java 6, uses swing for interfaces, if you wanna collaborate to the project they told us they uses Eclipse, and if you may have a look at the sources, you know, free software is like that)
it plays mp4 files, among others, in fact, they have choose the easy way, they relay on software installed on your system
user interface its very iTunes alike so faster learning curve

Last but not least, they got releases since last year and those releases are delivered on regular basis. That releases rhythm and the fact they have joined some other audio player projects makes me perceive aTunes as an interesant software to consider.
Juanjo, I hope this would help you!

What iPod manager choose for Linux?

2008-02-21T00:18:00.000-08:00

This days I'm planning to use free software to manage my iPod instead of iTunes. So, which application should I choose?

Before choose one of them let's rebember what I said before; if I may find the same software across different distributions or even the same software across Linux and MS, this is a clear advantage for me.

I've found this choices:

gtkPod
- fairly mature software
- no new libraries needed, as long as it's a gnome app
amarok
- it's a kde software, and I prefer not to run more libraries than gtk in order to keep my so limited memory free
- it's a mature solution
Banshee
- developed with mono, so it requires an extra runtime
- plays AAC formats but I don't know they manage the whole license stuff
- in their page does not appear nothing related with the iPod's
Yamipod
- it seems to be the most iTunes similar solution
- non free software
- quite odd instalation
- screenshots and features looks fine
Rhythmbox:
- may require added software for tag edition
- it seems no so mature software, very early versions at the moment

Does any of them support m4p format?... Banshee does it, and Yamipod seems to be able to do it, but Yamipod is not free software.

Everytime I've tested some software with my iPod, iTunes does not recognized later I have to attached again to my iTunes... nasty thing. Best solution would be if Apple relases a Linux version. You may sign a petition to port iTunes to Linux

From Fedora to Debian

2008-02-14T02:36:00.000-08:00

I upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 without problems... 'till the day mplayer doesn't run anymore. A very competent guy from Red Hat who's working at our office told me to use livna repos ... I told him about how upset I feel about livna repos vs. freshrpms repos, they both does not run very well together

I believe him and I try livna repos... then begins the show: hal-daemons stops, autorun needs hal-daemon... and don't want to remember that hell. I know what to do: to get disable livna, also freshrpms, uninstall and reinstall hal-daemon (just in case it helps) and so on,...

Since I have been a Red Hat devoted users since Red Hat 7.2 (passing through all Red Hats 8.0, 9s, and Fedoras) I thought some other distro deserves a chance... so I keep my home and I install Debian. I also keep a server running CentOS, if you don't know it, try it.
I'll post more in a not too distant future but my first impression is that everything is clean, well organized, a little bit more fast, and quite different, I mean, there's no /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ or apache configuration file is under /etc/apache2/... and also their start up script is different but, time to learn, which is always good to keep us alive

Finally Olympus E-510

2008-02-14T00:07:00.001-08:00

I've bought a Olympus E-510 instead of E-410. There were three main reasons:

Great discount plus 100€ refund from Olympus (yet waiting for it)
Stabilization
Grip

Grip really doesn't make a difference but is a plus. What really decides me is the discount, it makes affordable to pay the difference and buy the camera with the stabilization

I've done a few photos and also I've attended a workshop instructed by Olympus teachers. There I've got the chance to use the E-3 camera (professional camera from Olympus). Olympus divide their lenses in three groups:

Standard Lenses: the ones that you gonna find in your kit, the one that I use, such a 14-42(1:3.5-5.6) and the 40-150(1:3.5-4.5)
Pro Lenses: pro stands for professional: in that workshop I test the 8mm(1:3.5 Fisheye) and the 12-60(1:2.8-4.0) with SWD (Supersonic Wave Drive)
Top Pro Lenses: as you may assume this are the top lenses, for professional use. I test the 7-14mm(1:4.0), and my Good! I flip with the 150mm(1:2.0) in the studio photos, even more that with the 300mm(1:2.8) outdoors.

You may see a couple of photographies at pbenavent's Flickr, there're just a few of them...

Olympus E-410, my next christmas self-gift

2007-12-17T22:32:00.000-08:00

Since I was a little kid there was a Olympus OM-2 at home. My father wasn't very photografy fan but that camera increased my interest till I really became amateur photographer.

I really like my old and professional OM-2 but time for digital evolution finally has come. The main advantage is not to wait till the photos come from the lab and the money saving. No need to explain more about:

I may shot as much as I can
see immediately how it is
my lens are compatibles with a Olympus digital (using an adaptor not very expensive)
... nothing in common with compact digital cameras ...

After looking for a choice I decided to buy a Olympus E-410. This camera is really affordable among the rest of DSLR, it's intended to be a choice for amateur photographer or a second choice for professional.

The next step in Olympus is a E-510 which is quite expensive and offers two main differences: more professional grip and stabilization in the camera body. The first one is worthless for me 'cause I don't expend hours and hours working with the camera and the second one is not so worthless but I've been told that is fairly more interesting stabilization in the lens than in the body camera. Anyway, there's so much price increase that I'm going to keep the E-410 choice.

Yet with up2date in Fedora, WTF!

2007-11-27T22:41:00.000-08:00

At ending of October I was suffering this error when I try to make yum update and I answer yes in order to install all that yum purposes to me:

Running rpm_check_debug ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve: Package up2date needs python(abi) = 2.4, this is not available. Package rhnlib needs python(abi) = 2.4, this is not available. Complete!

It has been easy at the end... as you may see, that messages shows that my Fedora has yet installed a up2date package. Since I really don't use at all I took it out by typing: yum erase up2date and so on...
But the questions are two:

Why are there an up2date package in Fedora? a legacy question comming fron the ancient RedHat 8 and 9 ages?
How many others useless packages do I have installed?

So I was thinking all around this stuff I two mini-projects come to my mind:

Writte a couple of scripts that retrieves what packages do I have ordered by use: I have no idea if there's some method to retrieve package use frequency, but as I've just say it's just an idea, let's see if it possible or it isn't...
Writte a couple of scripts that retrieves for every single package what other packages depends on it and viceversa, by the way, I've imagine the reports writed under some xml strict DTD so may open it in a browser or read from some other script or import it in a database

Microsiervos: I don't deserve it

2007-10-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite blogs, Microsiervos has mention me again :-) and it has been 'cause I suggest them how peculiar was for me, to find a form that calculates how long are you going to live. It reminds me the chapter from The IT Crowd: Return of the Golden Child.

So here's the Microsiervo's note about life expectancy simulator where they mention me, they use to say no somos dignos so now I must say thank you boys and I don't deserve so much honour

Performance on different CMS

2007-10-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

By reading a web-developer planet I found an article about Measuring some CMS performance. Although the article is wrote in spanish you may understand the main ideas by looking at the graphs.

There're two ideas I wanna to highlight:

Wordpress performance is not good unless you use a cache plugin
Textpattern and Nucleus are the best ones in terms of performance. You may also mention Drupal but with an incorporated cache system

That makes me repeat once more an old idea that I have about this ... CMSs. Wordpress is most popular but its designed for personal weblog. You may use it to build up a website but it wasn't desing for that. Even more; if you use Wordpress you're going to be in a continuous updating job, there're constants updates 'cause security reasons or something.

Textpattern has been planned not just for a personal weblog but also for a hole website, and according Kusor, its code desing is simply better.
I can't say a word about Nucleus 'cause I don't know it.

2007 Bossie Awards

2007-09-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

Bossie Awards are granted to the best Open Source Software for the enterprise, keep attention on that man!: for the enterprise.

Via Slashdot I've arrived to the list where appear 2007 Bossie Awards, once you're there you choose a category. I've had a look on Best of open source in platforms and middleware and there is my dear CentOS.

Most interesting thing is that it has been choose instead of RHEL but they specified that is exactly the same, even they say:
That means you can install applications for RHEL on a CentOS server without any incompatibilities, and all RHEL updates are applicable to CentOS as well. Obviously, no support contracts are available for CentOS, but that?s the draw for many Linux veterans ? the familiar Red Hat distribution, including updates, without the onus of having to purchase a support contract that is never used

The funny part of the story is a comment on slashdot, somebody says:
Interesting that CentOS won for server OS. Shouldn't that go to RHEL?
...and somebody elses anwser: Actually, RHEL won and Centos just made a copy of the award and changed its name.

By the way, Ubuntu wons at desktop category, actually I got a Ubuntu LiveCD to show what Linux is at work, and everytime I can I run it, they flip when they see cube desktop ;-)

EPIC Perl in Eclipse

2007-08-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

Nowadays I'm using VI or Komodo Edit [1] for Perl code editing tasks... (It sound great, if you have a look at my scripts probably you get disappointed).
Both are available under Linux and MS but yesterday Julian (nice guy working at Capgemini) tolds me about EPIC, which is an open source editor based on Eclipse. We better say it's an Eclipse extension to edit Perl , debug and so on with Eclipse.

Why you should use it instead of VIM or Komodo? VI plays another league, I love VI (I'm still learning, well, you never stop to learn once you star with VI) but code folding, frames at coding, auto-complete at such things are more in the code editors or IDE league. Komodo it's quite a lot what I need but it is not open source, and what a pity 'cause I love it. I've been looking for something similar at open source software I don't get what I was looking for. I know there're solutions out there (Bluefish it's supposed to be code folding but as far as I know it isn't it, I don't feel myself confortable with KDE software, and Scite isn't nice to work with... )

So EPIC + Eclipse is a great discover that I'm going to test but it has also disadvantages: and IDE is more than I need, the price for be multi platform is to be wrote in Java and that hurts to my laptop.

[1] don't confuse Komodo Edit wih Komo IDE; first one is free and just an editor, second one is an IDE and you have to pay for it

Three apps for Sysadmins

2007-08-23T00:19:00.000-07:00

Via an article about Flickr Architecture I discover some apps quite interesting:

System Imager: automates Linux installs, software distribution, and production deployment
Ganglia: scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids.
Subcon: allows you to store your essential system configuration files in a subversion repository and easily deploy different configurations to machines in a cluster.

I'll comment each one on next post ... by now, I'm thinking about my lack of practise in sysadmin stuff this days grrrr!

Perl, every where

2007-08-16T08:49:00.000-07:00

This days I'm writting a perl script to verify a 25 port is available on a particular machine. I've writte two different versions:

first one using Use IO::Socket: hard way, dealing with carriage returns, and line-feeds, specially if you're using qmail, and my version was unable to connect with qmail or exchange transparently...
second one using Use Net::SMTP: easy, smoothly way, no problems at all and able to connect both servers (qmail and exchange) using the same script.

I'll put that script at http://postm-scripts.sourceforge.net/ my never-starting project ...

Most interesting thing is that I've talking with a MS Admin about using perl also in Microsoft machines. I hope it happens.

Squid with Active Directory or NTLM

2007-06-11T22:30:00.000-07:00

I've never do that, but have a look to sample squid config file to authenticate with Active Directory ... the main idea it's to do the same as we do before with Squid with OpenLdap. If you're using Active Directory instead of a true ldap server have a look on that.

Note: This entry has been in the draft for too long ... I should writte more often.

Squid with ldap

2007-06-11T22:19:00.000-07:00

I was writting about Squid and I arrive to a sample config file for using squid with OpenLdap. I really don't know if you're using squid ... probably you should do it. And I don't know if you're using ldap ... sure you've to. If you combine squid with ldap it allows you control who is browsing the web or who doesn't it and the main thing is who 'cause squid relies on IP authorization method.

The problem: your method is not useful for me, you just check if the user is a valid user, your method doesn't let us separate all users betwen authorized and non authorized.
The solution: you just need to copy authorized users inside a different OU in your ldap server. If you don't know how to do it look for a ldap administrator ... like me :-)

Save bandwith with squid in five minutes

2007-06-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

I received the Redhat Magazine in my inbox, recently I've read an article about how to start up a squid in five minutes.

Since I know good it runs I must recommend you give squid a chance. If you have a company -little, middle or big company- it would save you quite bandwith. If you're a home user but your network has more than just one computer it will save you too bandwith.

Saving bandwith it's very important thing:

user time experience
you just download from the network what has changed and let squid to do the rest of the job

By the way, squid has changed their website. Now it's a little bit more easy to find what you're looking for. For instance: squid configuration examples, or general squid documentation, or The General Squid Guide ...

Easy to help Fedora 7

2007-06-03T20:50:00.000-07:00

No news about Fedora Project: there's a new version, they switched from Fedora Core to Fedora (since there's no separation between a core and other repositories) and also there're more and more exciting news:

but what I think its really useful for all of you it's to use smolt.

If you wanna help free software easily and you're running Fedora and you're a non tech profile then you can do this:

become root on you machine and type "yum install smolt"
type "smoltSendProfile"

easy, isn't it?

This instrucions were copied from Fedora announce list about Fedora Hardware Profiler and by doing this you're sending an anonymous email to enrich the Smolt Project Result.