noticias-de-un-secuestro
Mon Sep 29 21:55:32 2008
En Florencia encontré una libreria estupenda sobre la Piazza della Repubblica, con una buena oferta de libros en español e inglés. Ahí compré, entre otros, Noticias de un secuestro, de Gabriel García Marquez, por sugerencia de mi madre.
La historia lo atrapa a uno desde el comienzo. Relata las vivencias de las familias de los secuestrados por Pablo Escobar y compañía —especialmente Maruja Pachón y su esposo Alberto Villamizar— previos a su entrega a la justicia en 1991. Resulta muy conmovedora y está muy bien escrita.
Cuando eso sucedió yo tenía apenas 10 años y no lo entendía mucho; hoy por hoy apenas tengo algunas imágenes borrosas, impresiones, de la situación política de entonces. Mucho de lo que sé de entonces es por lecturas posteriores. Este libro me recordó muchos elementos de la sociedad colombiana de principios de los 90 —la época del asesinato de Galán, de la guerra de Pablo Escobar y de la Constituyente— como la discriminación latinoamericana a los pobres, el sentir que la vida de un chofer, policía o campesino no tiene ningún valor comparada con la de un periodista o político de clase alta; el resentimiento de los pobres contra los ricos; y la forma de hablar de diferentes partes de Colombia y estratos sociales entre muchos otros.
En este momento me siento un poco lejos temporal, geográfica y culturalmente de esa sociedad en la que crecí, lo que hizo que esta lectura tuviera para mi un valor adicional. Me refrescó bastante leer una novela bien escrita desarrollada en ese mundo.
La recomiendo.
Discussion (4)the-h-bomb-girl
Mon Sep 29 21:32:29 2008
The third book I read during our visit to Italy was The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter, which I read mostly in the train from Naples to Florence.
As I wrote when I described my relationship with Timbuktu, I found myself in a bookstore with a very limitted offer of English or Spanish books. I saw one by Baxter and, since I enjoyed his Manifold: Time, I picked it.
It turned out to be light reading, definitely not one of my favorites but entertaining. It makes good Travel Literature, not making you think much but keeping you interested in the development of the story. With this disclaimer, I recommend it.
Discussionour-friends-from-frolix-8
Mon Sep 29 20:52:38 2008
I read Our friends from Frolix 8, from Pillip K. Dick, —which I bought in Rome along with Timbuktu and The H-Bomb Girl— during our stay in Capri.
Written in 1970, it's set in a dystopian future with a corrupt government founded on the basis of two different types of mutations that effect two new groups of super-humans. It provides an interesting idea of how the first extraterrestrial race with which we establish significant contact may be and how it may affect us.
I found it interesting and unpredictable, definitely recommended if you're into science fiction.
timbuktu
Wed Sep 24 21:31:14 2008
I read Timbuktu, by Paul Auster.
I had previously read his New York Trilogy —Camilo Domínguez bought me a copy when we met in San Francisco— but I didn't like it very much. I thought it was OK but I had greater expectations.
I found my self in a small and charming bookstore in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, in front of Giordano Bruno's statue, looking for books in Spanish or English to read during our relaxing stay in Capri. I had just a few minutes before I had to rush to Piazza Navona to meet Franz Campos and company, into whom I had randomly ran while visiting Rome's ruins. The selection of books in English and Spanish was very limited, pretty much everything was in Italian. I decided to give Auster another chance —I think Camilo said he was fond of him— and, along with Our Friends from Frolix 8 and The H-Bomb Girl, I picked his Timbuktu.
The next day I got back to the hotel rather early; it was raining in Rome. Curiosity got the best of me and I decided to read it that evening.
I liked it. It reminds me a bit of Vonnegut's pessimism and irony, of which his Hocus Pocus may be the finest example. Similarly to how the modern gothic movement finds beauty in topics such as sadness and death, so these novels find the best qualities in the least expected moments and characters (but that's about as far as the parallel between these books and the gothic movement can be taken, in my opinion). A light reading would characterize these books —and also, perhaps, The Fan Man— as depressing and boring. I think that misses the point. There's a lot more to them.
So, while not one of my all time favorites, I enjoyed the story, which I found very creative. I recommend it. Go give it a read.
x-environment-variables
Fri Sep 12 14:26:19 2008
I often switch X servers while I'm running multiple shells and GNU screen sessions. This means that X clients that I run usually end up contacting the wrong X server and I have to spend a lot of time adjusting environment variables or restarting shells.
For example, I'm currently running 11 GNU screen sessions in my workstation, each with an average of 2 or 3 shells. If I go home and SSH into my workstation, many commands will continue to contact my workstation's X server (instead of using the SSH X forwarding tunnel or, often preferable, not contacting any X servers at all).
I decided to fix this.
First, I wrote an xload shell script that initializes X environment variables and runs a command:
#!/bin/sh
function load_env {
if test -f ~/.afc-persistent-environment/$1
then
export $1=$(cat ~/.afc-persistent-environment/$1)
else
unset $1
fi
}
load_env DISPLAY
load_env XAUTHORITY
exec "$@"
Then I added the following to my ~/.bashrc:
if ! test -d ~/.afc-persistent-environment
mkdir ~/.afc-persistent-environment
fi
function save_env {
if test "${!1}" == ""
then
rm ~/.afc-persistent-environment/$1
else
echo ${!1} >~/.afc-persistent-environment/$1
fi
}
function xsave {
save_env DISPLAY
save_env XAUTHORITY
}
function xwrap {
echo $* >> ~/.afc-xwrap
}
function load_xwraps {
for program in $(cat ~/.afc-xwrap)
do
alias $program="xload $program"
done
}
load_xwraps
With this in place, I simply:
- Run xsave when I change X server (or when I decide not to use one) from a shell to make its X configuration global for all other shells (for X clients that I launch from them)
- Run xwrap passing X clients that I'd like to wrap with xload, so that the next time I launch them, they'll use the globally-saved configuration. For instance: xwrap xterm g4 vi vim ssh xlock gaim. Note that I only need to do this once per X client (ever).
- For launching X clients from programs other than the shell (which won't see the shell's aliases), substitute “program ...” with “xload program ...”.
- Run load_xwraps to reload the list of wraps. This is only needed after I run xwrap, which happens very rarely.
static-workaround-for-autocomplete
Mon Aug 18 17:07:32 2008
As implemented on Bash, autocomplete of paths with multiple components over filesystems on NFS or heavily loaded disks is too slow for what I like. I often find my self aborting (with ^C) half-typed commands simply because I happened to trigger autocomplete and it caused the shell to hang, while autocompleting, for more than a second. So I often end up not using autocomplete at all, it just slows me down.
I am trying an alternative approach, that of declaring statically, beforehand, which are the paths I'm likely to type:
import sys;
patterns = [["s", "/home/alejo/src",
[["s", "svnwiki",
[["t", "trunk"]]],
["c", "chicken-eggs",
[["r", "release",
[["c", "current",
[["sw", "stream-wiki"],
["hs", "html-stream"],
["f", "format-modular"]]]]]]],
["i", "i7on"],
["e", "eekfun"]]],
["d", "/home/alejo/doc",
[["w", "wiki",
[["w", "weblogs",
[["a", "azul",
[["d", "xsvnwiki-discuss"]]],
["r", "arhuaco",
[["d", "xsvnwiki-discuss"]]],
["i", "ikks",
[["d", "xsvnwiki-discuss"]]],
["t", "tagae",
[["d", "xsvnwiki-discuss"]]],
["c", "ceronman",
[["d", "xsvnwiki-discuss"]]]
["*", lambda x: x,
[["d", "xsvnwiki-discuss"]]]]]]],
["bw", "bogowiki"]]],
["", "/",
[["v", "var",
[["l", "log",
[["m", "mail.log"],
["a", "apache2",
[["e", "error.log"],
["a", "access.log"]]]]]]]]]]
def searchMatch(p, w, ws):
if len(p) == 2: return [w] + ws
return [w] + search(p[2], ws)
def search (ps, ws):
if ws == []: return ws
for p in ps:
if p[0] == "*" or p[0] == ws[0]:
if type(p[1]) == str:
return searchMatch(p, p[1], ws[1:])
else:
return searchMatch(p, p[1](ws[0]), ws[1:])
return ws
def translateStr(x):
return "/".join(search(patterns, x.split("/")))
def translateFile(f):
for line in f:
print(translateStr(line[:-1]))
translateFile(sys.stdin)
Of course, I'm adding paths to patterns all the time.
Then in my .bashrc, I declare wrappers for commands that I often use in these paths (e stands for “expanded”):
function expandpath { $1 $(echo $2 | python ~/.expand.py); }
function cde { expandpath cd $1; }
function cate { expandpath cat $1; }
function vie { expandpath vi $1; }
function lse { expandpath ls $1; }
# ...
Another option would be to use the complete shell built-in to set this as the autocomplete command for these commands; I haven't experimented with that yet.
What happens is that my brain quickly and painlessly picks the mappings and then things like the following (to see the comments of this post) come quite naturally for me:
$ cate d/w/w/a/d/*workaround*autocomplete
One minor disadvantage when compared with regular autocomplete is that it doesn't give you feedback about the correctness of the paths you type. However, if you want that feedback, you can just use cde gradually and then press up-arrow to continue typing your command. For example:
$ cde d/w/w # RET for feedback, then UP $ cde d/w/w/a/d
Note also that even though I didn't explicitly list the directory for acme's weblog, I can do things like get to its xsvnwiki-discuss sub-directory with:
$ cde d/w/w/acme/d
What do you think? Feel free to use this method (specially, as I said, if you're often typing paths with lots of components over NFS servers); if you do so, please tell me if it works for you.
How can we improve this?
Discussion (7)llamado-a-un-amigo
Mon Aug 18 08:35:55 2008
Este post es para un amigo sumamente inteligente a quién en los últimos años he observado hacer comentarios absurdos como consecuencia de sus creencias religiosas. Supongo que esto comenzó gradualmente; hace poco noté que había llegado a un nivel lo suficientemente alto como para escribir aquí llamándole a pensar un poco mejor sobre los juicios (racionales) que emite.
Religión y racionalidad son temas ortogonales. Eso va para lado y lado: así como no tiene sentido intentar convencer a alguien de que se vuelva religioso o deje de serlo con argumentos “científicos”, tampoco tiene sentido involucrar argumentos religiosos en conversaciones sobre, por ejemplo, ética (salvo, claro está, cuando estas conversaciones se tienen con individuos de creencias religiosas afines).
No me choca tanto que este amigo mio con sus afirmaciones religiosas parezca buscar contagiar con ellas de su creencia en un Dios en cuyo nombre se han cometido tantos crímenes y se sigue haciendo tanto daño (por ejemplo, al oponerse en Colombia a campañas con el fín de educar a adolescentes en el uso del preservativo). No me choca tanto porque sé que es un gesto de bondad, que lo hace pensando en los otros y tratando de ayudarles, aunque anoto que me parece tan arrogante e intolerante como la actitud estadounidense de querer contagiar con sus valores al resto del mundo.
Lo que realmente me choca es ver lo absurdo de las afirmaciones que hace, ver cómo se le nubla la razón. Me choca el gran contraste que hay entre las partes de sus conversaciones en las que no involucra su religión, —en las que demuestra que es un tipo supremamente inteligente y, además, hábil en lo suyo—, con aquellas en las que sí.
Pensaba incluir aquí algunos fragmentos (varias de las afirmaciones son en emails) pero los encuentro demasiado penosos. En uno se refiere al "creer en un ser superior" automáticamente como "tener una ventaja" porque a pesar de que el mundo nos agobie siempre "estará el que nos conforta"; en otro habla de alguien con muchos problemas pero a quién su creencia en Dios le ha traido mucha paz y concluye que esa es una de las "ventajas" de creer en Él, como si los creyentes estuvieran mejor preparados para afrontar sus problemas y no perder la calma que los no creyentes. Esto es, al menos, lo que yo entiendo de lo que dice, los fragmentos parecen haber sido escritos asumiendo que uno sabe lo que él está pensando y ni siquiera podría decirse que son claros.
Así que este es un llamado a un amigo para invitarle a pensar mejor lo que dice cuando involucra su religión, contándole cómo percibo yo las afirmaciones que hace en esos casos. En lugar de colocarse en una posición de humildad y hacer afirmaciones mediocres (“mediocres” según el criterio de la racionalidad), sería mejor no hacerlas, no contaminar con ellas conversaciones interesantes.
blogs
Thu Jul 3 19:17:18 2008
Salvense ustedes. Para mi ya es tarde.
(Espero que Arhuaco me perdone.)
cidade-de-deus
Wed Jun 4 10:49:45 2008
Cidade de Deus se ha convertido en una de mis películas favoritas. Me encanta la música; me encanta la energía de la gente, de esos negros brasileros setenteros; me encanta la fotografía y los paisajes urbanos, el manejo de la cámara; me gusta como muestra una parte de las diferencias sociales en latinoamérica y cómo se ven afectadas por la manera en que el negocio de la droga invierte relaciones de poder llenando de dinero a personas que crecieron en familias que tenían muy poco. me encanta la historia, me encanta que lo involucre a uno en el rio de violencia y logre que uno no reaccione asqueado ante tantas muertes, —ante niñitos matando o siendo matados—, sino que empiece a verlas como otro parte más de la vida, como reir, comer, drogarse, bailar, así también matar; me gusta el desarrollo de la mayoría de personajes;
Ayer la vi, en compañía de algunos de mis amigos de Google, por tercera vez. ¡Mucha peliculota!
manifold-time
Sat May 31 10:20:29 2008
Last week I read Eric's copy of Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time, a science fiction novel set around the idea of natural selection of universes, the question of whether humans will survive beyond just a few years into the future to transcend and colonize the stars and a little bit of time travel and chains of causality. I thought it was enjoyable and did a reasonable job in exploring some interesting topics that would seem ambitious for a single novel to explore.
Last update: 2008-01-27 (Rev 13448)