Several weeks ago, the people in charge of maintaining the Windows machines in my institute were desperate because of a series of virus outbreaks - Specially, as expected, in the public lab - but the whole network smell virulent. After seeing their desperation, I asked Rolman to help me come up with a solution. He suggested me to try replacing the Windows workstations by substituting local installations by a server having several virtual machines, all regenerated from a clean image every day, and exporting rdesktop sessions.

Via Planetalinux.mx, I read this post by César Espino refering to Wordle.
Quoting from Wordle's main page:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

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Source: Gunnar Wolf

I have to agree with Wouter regarding Firefox Iceweasel 3's suckyness. It might be a superior product in many fronts (I prefer it overall to its predecesor), but were it not for the usefulness of its many available extensions (most notably Web Developer, which has become an integral part of my everyday life), I'd have jumped ship for basically any other browser.
I'm just... adding an <AOL>ME TOO!</AOL> on Wouter's comments... WTF, just go to about:config...

After thinking it over a couple of times, I did it. I told you here about the World Naked Bike Ride. Thousands of bikers, in over 130 cities around the world, voiced their concerns about the lack of caution drivers have towards us, about the abuse of fossil fuels for urban transportation, about the easy we are not to be seen. Many among us have been run over by careless drivers (in my case, no consequences except a broken helmet - And yes, MJ: although the impact was on the flat surface of the road and not on the kerb, the strength of the impact still amazes me).

JROBI, a chess blogger, on energy policy:

A large study in Europe concluded that it takes more gas and oil to produce a bottle of bio-fuel than it does to produce a bottle of gas. What does this mean? It means that Bio-Fuel is more damaging to the environment in the long run, and on top of that it is driving up the cost of basic food supplies. Millions and millions around the world in a number of countries are unable to afford the rising food costs for basic staples like Corn, and for what?

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Source: The Licquia Blog

Every now and then, I want to understand a bit better English. Today, when Joeyh mentioned nettle soup, I had to ask Wikipedia what a nettle is. And Joey, no wonder it itches... It refers to around 45 species of genus Urtica in the family Urticaceae - In Spanish, of course, urtica is known as ortiga, or as blind person's herb, as even a blind person will quickly recognize it to touch - Touching it will cause the apt-named urticaria, which Joey seems to have discovered and learnt to fear.

So it’s a few days after Christmas, and like most of us tech-heads, I’ve got a few more gadgets to play with.

First up: the Creative Zen 4GB. This one was a little bit of a saga.

Last year, we got the kids no-name MP3 players, on the theory that we didn’t want to spend megabucks on something they wouldn’t use. They made valiant attempts to use them, but the little machines just weren’t up to the job. So, it seemed prudent to buy them iPods this year.

Hey everybody,

just wanted to say Merry Christmas to all of you out there. In the next few days, I will create a tutorial on how to setup the AsteriskGUI on an Debian 4.0 etch machine. If you’re interested in testing this, just comment here

I’m very surprised about the popularity of an old post of mine, regarding my experiences with CompUSA. It continues to collect horror story comments, the last one coming less than three weeks ago. While any company has its detractors (especially any company dealing directly with the public), it seems odd to me that people continue to be motivated enough to post to my blog, of all places, their tales of woe.

Carver County, Minnesota, is in big trouble. (via buzz.mn)

Eric Mattson was not surprised that the small vacant lot he bought last year near the shores of Lake Waconia was increasing in value.

What shocked him was the $189 million market value the Carver County assessor’s office came up with for the 55- by 80-foot lot, making it the most valuable property in Waconia and possibly the county.

Of the resulting $2.5 million tax windfall, about $900,000 had already been spent by the time Mattson got the bill and came in to complain. They’re now looking at spending cuts and new taxes to pay for the shortfall.

Wow. Has it really been that long since my last post?

It occurred to me today, as I upgraded to the latest WordPress and watched the ongoing security nightmares, that going through this effort is only useful if I actually use the darned thing.

Yesterday I wrote in Planet Debian requesting information on how to copy binary files to a Linux-based Axesstel modem. Meanwhile, I wrote Axesstel Customer Service with a friendly thank you for making a great product and kindly asking them for pointers. I’ve had some degree of satisfaction when writing to the Customer Services of several enterprises, and I really hoped this would be another one.

48 hours later, they replied with this message:

The whole Kathy Sierra incident is coming to a close, with an NPR interview and a call for a blogger’s code of conduct. (Details at the links; basically, Kathy wrote an innocuous blog about software development, and was harassed into quitting her blog by a few nasty commenters.)

The latter item has touched off a rant by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, about the necessity of moderation:

In two weeks (Dec 3rd) there will be presidential elections in Venezuela. This will be the third time where Hugo Chavez, the current President, will be participating in the elections. The first time, in 1998, he won by 62%, then dropped to 59% in 2000 and currently some polls are giving him between 50 and 60 percent of vote intention. Since 1998, we’ve got a very active electoral movement and controversial situations which have raised very diverse opinions about our electoral system. If I recall correctly, in 1998 people voted using optic forms. In that moment, spanish Indra was the company in charge for the machines and most of the technology used in the elections. That was the time where the Supreme Electoral Council depended on the Executive power, i.e., the President.

Last saturday around 2100 (UTC-0400) some people started joining the #debian-ve IRC channel at OFTC, in order to participate on the very first Venezuelan Bugsquashing Party. We had a lot of people interested not only in squashing but also developing for Debian and other topics. Some DD’s were around, specially Aníbal Monsalve Salazar (anibal) who has been very helpful on testing and uploading packages.