Felipe Alvarez's blog

The Pale Blue Dot

Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out there lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

- Carl Sagan, 1934 – 1996

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I must say I found openSUSE 11.2 to be a major disappointment. I’ve come to expect better, much better, from Novell. If it weren’t for the stability issues with KDE and relatively poor netbook support this distribution would have been a keeper for me. There really is a lot to like. Perhaps the results will be different for people with different hardware. For me, though, openSUSE 11.2 just doesn’t compare favorably to the other major distributions and I can’t recommend it at this time.

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These are from Barack’s Facebook page. Hope his administration doesn’t mind.

Thank you slashdot

It’s not property and you, sir, are not an intellectual.

The very idea that something infinitely reproducible could be considered to have value is preposterous and flies in the face of call macro economic theory. Infinite supply results in infinitesimal value.

Eventually people will realize that what is being called intellectual property is actually the result of a service, then we will all be happier.

I want to pay the person who provided the service, but pretending that something ethereal is property is not the way to do it.

It is simple to create copies, people will continue to do it and the companies who fight it will lose potential customers.

Wake up.

We are willing to pay for the services rendered, but your prices are ridiculous.

I’m getting totally knocked down by all the shit I have going on over the next 11 days. Nov 7th, I have two exams, one for Network Administration (GNU), and one Cicso CCNA exam. On Nov 5th, I have two Cisco CCNA exams. Nov 3rd, I have a Security exam worth 50% of my grade. On Nov 2nd I have an Advanced Cryptology exam also worth 50%. On October 30th, my Cisco CCNA case study report is due. On October 26th I have a Advanced Cryptology presentation on Enigma. I work Oct 23th, 24th, 25th. Today is Oct 22nd.

Can you do the math?

Strategy:

My strategy is to read one lecture for Crypto and Security every day, for 12 days. This way I have a hope of getting a decent mark on those exams, as they are the ones coming up. A colleague of mine from my UNIX/GNU class wants to start going over some of the sample questions posted on BlackBoard. I had to politely decline as I have no more room on my plate atm. I’ll have some time on Nov4th, and Nov6th to lay out some time for GNU and CCNA.

Opinion:

It isn’t fair. The university should have a “no lectures, presentations, or assignments seven days before first exam” policy. Maybe they do, I’ll have to investigate.

As part of National Cyber-security Awareness Month, Googleblog posts some important tips regarding password security.

Creating a new password is often one of the first recommendations you hear when trouble occurs. Even a great password can’t keep you from being scammed, but setting one that’s memorable for you and that’s hard for others to guess is a smart security practice since weak passwords can be easily guessed. Below are a few common problems we’ve seen in the past and suggestions for making your passwords stronger. — Choosing a smart password.

John Lennon would have been 69 years old today.

Happy Birthday ol’ boy.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

Just bought some of this:

In case any noticed, I haven’t updated in a while. Quick hash of what’s been going on:

• bought tickets to fly back home
• crunch time at Uni, lots of assignments, and little time to do it in
• lots of work, working 9-5 today, and 9-5 again Friday, half day Saturday, and also Sunday
• Too much windows 7 has my brain in knots. Try to Alt + F2 to no avail. No konsole, no dig, no quick ssh tunneling, no built-in public key encryption support, no symmetric key encryption support, no zypper or yum, no composite window managers, no freedom to copy, modify, and redistribute
• Sister got engaged! Having wedding in foreign country. Will cut costs of wedding my more than 50%.
• Realised the Security is right for me. Takes hard work, dedication, constant learning, and a very delicate fusion of business goals, financial planning, project management, and technological solution to complex problems including data management, security, information availability, information integrity, and data confidentiality

Have a nice day =)

They’ve just concluded their fifth Google Summer of Code, Google’s flagship global program to introduce college and university students to open source development. Once again, the results this year have been impressive.
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