Felipe Alvarez's blog

Saying goodbye to family this weekend. Going to purchase about $1k travellers cheques, and about $200USD cash, and $300AUD cash. Opening a bank account on day 0 and depositing all that cash. Polishing my resume, and day 2-3 pound the streets.

Schools, colleges, universities, high school
small businesses
large businesses
libraries
doctors offices
dentists offices
lawyers offices

Use resources like:
UQ career centre
jobsearch cafes

I will succeed! Thinking positive!

I leave for Australia in under a week. I’m pretty excited, and I think some time away from the ordinary should be good for me. I’ll settle with a waiting/bar job, or tourism might be fun, if it lets me spend some time outdoors and kill my abs a bit Ideally, I’d like to gain some experience in an ITC (Information Technology Communications) job, but I will have to convince an employer that emplyoing me for just 6 months will be worthwhile to them.

In any case, I’ve got money saved up, and I’ve got the balls and skill and will to earn money, and spend it wisely. I will be looking forward to studying at UQ. I will need to ask them how they see my chances of getting accepted to the program.

Don’t ever type rm * without knowing what directory you are in. Get used to rm -iv * or edit ~/.bashrc to include an alias like alias rm=rm -iv.

I just found out how much not doing that hurts

WHAT?! What do you MEAN you “don’t like Windows Vista!” FINE! But you outta try out Microsoft’s newest Operating System: Mojave

I’ve been getting a bit away from GNU for a small while. I Aced by LPIC 1 exam #1 and I haven’t yet started to study for exam #2. My girlfriend read a few chapters for me, which I thought was excellent. Instead of GNU, I sorta got interested in my old hobbies: hold’em and photography. Paradise poker ripped me of the bonuses I earned, and I’m not in the mood for Pokerstars (their ring games are getting tougher). I bought a digital camera: Sony DSCW110. Got if for a good deal. So I’m readying about photography, and I read this gloriously motivating passage:

Artist: Top Level 7 (equivalent to “Heaven” in Christian mythology)

This is the highest level.

An artist fixes his imagination in a tangible form called a photograph. He captures the spirit of place or person, real or imagined, in this photograph and the viewer responds to this.

An artist is a complete master of his tools. When creating art an artist transcends common existence as his spirit flies up to meet that which he is capturing. He may practice and learn his tools while he is not creating, however when creating the camera becomes an extension of his mind. No conscious thought is expended on the technical issues with which he is a virtuoso while creating photographs.

To make a musical analogy, a musician may woodshed his scales, but when he’s jamming he’s not even thinking about fingerings. He’s lost in the passion of the moment.

Just like professional surfers who have a dozen boards or pro guitarists who have 23 axes, an artist may have a slew of cameras, each for a different purpose.

Likewise, other artists may only have one camera, or none at all. It just doesn’t matter.

Artists sometimes dress funny and tend to stay up late. They usually prefer to photograph attractive young women and are proud of it.

No one ever sees their work since they have crummy ability to promote themselves, and sadly, usually don’t even appreciate their own excellent work. Those that do drop down to Whore, which sadly and paradoxically means you will never see the work of a true artist unless you know one personally. Good artists are usually too embarrassed to show their work to anyone unless you are intimate with them, since their work is their soul.

Artists use any sort of camera, including pinholes and disposables, or 8 x 10s. They use whatever instrument they need to create what they want.

From Ken Rockwell‘s website.

So many good things on this site. Take for example the section on books. He mentions a plethora of books, and even hightlights “the one book you must buy, if you purchase no other.” Just came across this site for the first time. Very impressed. Makes me want to make a site just on Linux, or Poker, or Photography, or Yvonne. My biggest hobbies.

the leaders quoted here free themselves to see a more complex view of their situation. Not only do they see Microsoft as struggling with the nearly impossible task of redefining itself after so many years, but they also emphasize that Microsoft is simply the greatest of the proprietary threats to FOSS — and not the only one — and that focusing too closely on Microsoft brings its own dangers.

Read the full article.

The reason that beating Linux is the highest priority at Redmond is that unlike, Novell, Netscape, Corel, Lotus or any of Microsoft’s previous targets, there has been no obvious company to blow away, no means to starve the competition into submission. And, unlike these other targets, Microsoft is not winning. Linux has grown in influence, and things look to get worse, not better, for Microsoft in the short term. http://www.linux.com/feature/20520

The only reason Microsoft software is the target of so many viruses is because it is so widely used! Why, if Linux or Mac OS X was as popular as Windows, there would be just as many viruses written for those platforms!

Do YOU agree with this statement? This article at TheRegister tries to disprove that ‘myth’.

I’ve had this conversation with many people. The point I try to make, is that Microsoft and other HW and SW vendors rub each others backs, and make millions for unsuspecting losers clamoring for the latest anti-virus update, or newest $60 cd/dvd burning software. HW and SW vendors put cute Windows Vista Capable stickers on everything they sell (read: routers, switches, and mice). Microsoft creates a shoddy O.S. so that others can profit from covering up the cracks, gaps, and holes.

RAID – redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks

What a tricky little thing it is, especially the non-Hardware variety (i.e. a dedicated RAID controller card via PCI bus or PCI-e bus).

These are some of the things I think I know about RAID in GNU:

1. BIOS RAID (a.k.a. fakeRAID) is built onto motherboards to please Windows Users, because XP Home and XP Pro do not come with support for redundant arrays (RAID levels 1 and up). This means it only supports stripping (RAID 0). BIOS RAID is there to ‘save the day’ and support redundancy, as in RAID 1, 5, 1+0.
2. In GNU, one needn’t turn on BIOS RAID, one only needs dmraid (or mdamd), and more than one hard drive (only one is required, but more are highly recommended). All RAID levels are supported via Linux software RAID. The kernel has had lots of modifications over the years to very easily support RAID 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 1+0.
3. dmraid (device-mapper raid) and mdadm (multiple-devices admin) are tools used to manage RAID arrays. I have not yet figured out the differences between them and which one I should use. openSUSE 10.3 has them both installed – adding lots of confusion.