Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

link (zenhabits.net)

My brother is doing research in Montreal, and shares a house with some friends, near the intersection of Fabre St. and Beaubien Av.

Some weeks ago, he heard noise in the next room. Thinking it was one of the housemates, he ignored the noise. Next morning a laptop was missing. The thief used an insecure door to break in.

Some days later, the doorbell ringed at 5am. They saw a strange guy hiding and walking around the house. He was checking if there was somebody in the house. The neighbor was arriving and found this guy in the back garden of the triplex. He used as excuse, “looking for cigarretes”.

During the week, they saw the suspect several times. Walking around the block looking into the houses and trying open doors. They even made a picture (sadly from behind, but it seems he wears always the same clothes), he has been recognized by various people.

On Sunday, 5 am. My brother again woke up with with noise in the next room. He heard someone inside the house. He did some noise to scare him, without having to encounter him face to face in the next room. The thief escaped. This time he really did a good effort to open not easily reachable window and using a knife.

The police has come twice, but is not able to do nothing. See a Google Map of the thief area and the suspected home of this guy.

This has been a really busy week. Moving to a new apartment. At home I only see boxes everywhere

Lot of news coming from the Java field. I am happy for what is happening with the Java world.

• The strategy for Solaris finally makes some sense: making it like Linux, but with its own strengths. Everyone will win here. (it will be GPL soon][1] ). The only looser will be Microsoft and whose can’t use GPL code. I am not sure if the strategy is right, but making Sun a player with both Linux and Solaris is much better than the “Linux, eeer Solaris, er Linux… Solaris!… Linux!” strategy.
• Flash and Silverlight will get a competitor from Sun and the Java world. This is good news for Linux, as it can be the first free solution on this platform. Watch the demos.
• Platform for cellphones.
• There is a video of a Google Earth like client done by Sun and NASA, based on the new FX technologies. It will be free and can be used as a component in Java programs.

Also:

• Give a look to this Xen virtual machine manager (Enomalism) and the vmcasting rss based format
• PlanetSUSE has a new logo

Back from Spain. Photoset here.

German Parsing Contest. Contract says:

Eine ördentliche Kündigung ist spätestens am dritten Wektag eines Kanedermonats zum Ablauf der übernäachten Monats zulässig. Die kündigungfrist für den Vermieter verlängert sich nach fünf und acht Jahren seit Überlassung Wohnraums um jeweils drei Monate.

You ask lot of german people, and some non-native speakers. “If I tell the owner of my flat this or next week I am leaving, which months do I still need to pay”. ( inclusive ) (If I don’t find a “nachmieter” )

• German non-native speaker: May
• German 1: May
• German language teacher (non-german): April
• German 2: May
• German 3: June
• German Lawyer: June

De vuelta en Alemania.

Aún sorprendido por haber disfrutado de 20ºC y sol en pleno invierno. Más que sorprenderme me da miedo que el clima se este volviendo loco. Bueno, también me sorprende que de un par de naranjas valencianas se pueda sacar un vaso entero de jugo de naranja, el cual no necesita agua o azúcar para saber bien.

En el aeropuerto tuve casi media hora de tiempo libre. Mirando libros me encontré con Freakonomics. Sin recordar la razón por la cual lo recordaba o conocía, lo compré tras leer el resumen. Terminé de leerlo la misma noche.

El libro me gustó más que nada porque toca un tema que encuentro muy importante. La sabiduría convencional. El tomar decisiones o realizar juicios basados en datos o conocimiento que es totalmente erróneo pero que sin embargo mantienen nuestras mentes tranquilas debido a que mantenemos nuestro status quo o zona de confort.

El libro juega con temas como el negocio del crack, la educación de los hijos o y la criminalidad, poniendo a la vista hechos que son molestos para la parte moral o nuestra rígida educación basada en mitos y cuentos de pueblo. Aún así los autores logran mantenerse lejos de hacer juicios morales o pasar propagandas políticas, intentando mantener una posición pragmática.

So this weekend my chilean friend Egon visited me with his brother Wolfgang.

I am able know to give you a really nice overview of Nürnberg in a half day and a long night ;-).

After the mandatory visits to the castle, Hauptmarkt and walking around the innerstadt, we stopped for a real german dinner at Geiß Spital.

Then we continued in direction to Wörde Wiese where we had a top in DeroteBar and Weinerei, where we met a bunch of friends.

While in the Weinerei, a guitar player came in and started to play blues.

He asked us for some money and I ended buying his album for 5 euros. Not that I like blues that much but…. lets support art. He persuaded me to play after him. Well, he just announced I was going to play. So I ended playing live in the Weinerei.

After that we did a quick stop at Downtown. They left today, but my feeling is they liked Nürnberg a lot. Complete photoset.

Back in Nuernberg. No snow. Lot of email to read.

• Ate stuff I missed so much. paila marina (south’s version), machas, and did real asados.
• Big event at home!, met lot of friends.
• Met family!
• Showed Loreto how beautiful is Chile.
• Air France was pretty good. And the way via Paris seems less stressing than via Frankfurt.
• Brought lot of stuff I left there when I moved to Germany.

Full photoset here.

If you want to travel there, check this video.

I am having great time with my brother in Nürnberg. We managed to spend Christmas together in a “family” way even with the other half of the family being overseas. We kept the other half updated with real time photos of our culinary creation:

Also, lot of party on the weekend. Tomorrow we fly to Barcelona.

Happy Christmas and New Year to everyone!

From Inge Wallin’s blog, I learned that OpenDocument is now a ISO standard.

I updated tor and torK packages from the security:privacy repository in the openSUSE build service. I updated also gnash (flash player replacement) to version 0.7.2.

Yesterday I went to see Shantel // Bucovina Club. The party was good and i liked the music. You can get some sample mp3’s from Shantel here.