Culture on Luiyología

My Year 2020 in Books

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Any Goodreads user has access to a yearly report with some statistics and basically the covers of all the books read in one year. In order to have it the user only has to set the books as read and the read date to any time in that year. Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2020 in Books from Goodreads, as I did for my read books in 2018 and 2019.

Data

	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015
Book read	42	56	54	54	57	63
Pages read	6,353	8,037	7,511	9,388	12,136	7,855
Average length (in pages)	151	143	139	173	213	125
Average rating (1-5)	3.6	3.6	3.7	3.9	4.2	3.3

Evolution of my reading stats over the last years

The featured image goes to James Rhodes, as I liked a lot his autobiography. You can read my review in Goodreads but I will summarize it here with the first sentence: Instrumental is a terrible book and at the same time a wonderful one. Knowing the James Rhodes from nowadays, and knowing already a bit about his past, it is even more emotional.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

My TOP 10 read books in 2020

Instrumental by James Rhodes (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Factfulness by Hans Rosling (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Rey Blanco by Juan Gómez Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
El Tío Curro: La Conexión Española de J.R.R. Tolkien by José Manuel Ferrández Bru (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (you can read my review in English in Goodreads)
Cicatriz by Juan Gómez Jurado
The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russel
Si escuece, cura by Esther Samper (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)

FOSDEM 2021, the first virtual FOSDEM

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Due to the pandemic this year I could not make my yearly pilgrimage to Brussels, but I was still able to attend FOSDEM as it mutated to an online conference for the first time. It has not been the same, but it is still an experience I cannot miss.

For those of you who don’t know FOSDEM, I will keep my usual description. It is the biggest conference in Europe (and one of the biggest around the world) related to Open Source development and communities. It’s a huge event with hundreds of talks, workshops, gatherings and stands from all the relevant projects and communities in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ecosystem. It’s also a marvelous place to do networking, because there are not only representatives of those projects but normally also the technical leaders of them. If you are good with names and faces you can meet and greet a lot of important and interesting people.

Being online, this year the interaction was limited to Matrix and IRC Freenode channels in parallel to the live streaming, and Jitsi for the streaming. Everything is open source, and scaled amazingly.

As @fosdem regulars we are really excited our software is used to facilitate this year's uncoventional edition. Kudos to all organizers! 🚀
— Jitsi (@jitsinews) February 6, 2021

I already wrote about it in previous years:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday, Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2018: Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2019: Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2020: Saturday and Sunday

The numbers of this 2021 edition are slightly lower than in 2020 in terms of content, but it’s amazing they could almost maintain the volume of activities and this time reaching to a worldwide audience:

682 speakers in 773 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
51 different devrooms
hundreds of hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
52 online stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, the Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Fedora, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, Jenkins, …

To make it more impressive, take into account that FOSDEM is organized by volunteers, everything is community driven and it’s free to attend. You don’t even need to register beforehand.

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

Getting the Most from Modern Java, by Simon Ritter (@speakjava)

Simon Ritter gave an overview of the most recent updates in the Java language: better switch statements in JDK 12, a preview of the text blocks for JDK 13, simpler Data classes and Records in JDK 14, sealed classes in JDK 15, more on Records, pattern matching and sealed classes in JDK 16…

Overall a good overview by Simon, as usual. I lost the count of his talks that I have attended.

10 Ways Everyone Can Support the Java Community, by Stephen Chin (@steveonjava)

Another popular speaker to explain different ways to support Java, not only with coding. Some of the ideas were:

Contribute to OpenJDK: Find something interesting, discuss your intended changed and finally submit a patch
Join the Foojay community, a new online community for friends of OpenJDK
Join or sponsor a Java Users Group, you can find JUGs almost everywhere although now most of them are online. Even before the pandemic you could already find a few virtual JUGs.
Follow a Java Champion in twitter (I just checked and I’m following almost 20).
Join a specialized Slack channel, write articles in your blog, participate in an unconference event, …

The Death of Openness and Freedom?, by Matt Yonkovit (@MYonkovit)

Matt reflects on how the huge success of Open Source also brought imitators, as in another sectors like sci-fi movies. But success in Open Source has different implications, depending on the project. Matt also comments in the recent problems that we have seen in different communities, from more or less embarrassing licensing changes to projects moved to “as a service” exclusive business models.

The talk is a good overview of the different models, advantages and disadvantages of them. A thought provoking talk with lots of interesting insights.

The Democratization of Databases, by Bruce Momjian

Bruce started with an overview of what democracy or representative democracy means, and the specific advantages of other systems like an autocracy might have in sectors like the military or the space exploration. Software is usually better under democracy as it allows rapid adjustment of goals and expands the pool of talent.

According to the speaker, Democracy in open source works a bit differently. It is a mix of democracy and meritocracy, where voting can be problematic but bad decisions can quickly be reverted. The main drawback is that the plan or road map is not reliable.

Finally, the talk focuses on the PostgreSQL community, and how they operate and evolve.

Mozilla History: 20+ Years And Counting, by Robert Kaiser

Nice summary of all the important milestones of Mozilla by KaiRo. Lots of nice memories:

the origin of the name (mixing Mosaic and Godzilla as in Mosaic Killer), that was later renamed to Netscape
How the Firefox web browser was born
How the Mozilla Foundation started, alongside the Mozilla Corporation
The Mozilla Manifesto, written in 2007
Rust, Firefox OS, Mozilla Hubs and many other things…

Database Performance at GitLab.com by Nikolay Samokhvalov and Jose Finotto

Interesting overview about how Gitlab copes with their massive amounts of users and their strict SLAs, focusing specially in the PostgreSQL database side. I got several interesting inputs from the talk, from automated database health checks (and how they do them), to best practices for the engineers (how they learn and get insights of their usage), how they experiment using thin clones, etc.

25 years of MySQL - A Retrospective, by Dave Stokes (@stoker)

Dave Stoker, community manager at MySQL, gave an historical overview of MySQL since its beginning.

We start with @stoker ! 25 years of @MySQL #FOSDEM2021 #MySQL #mysqldevroom https://t.co/yC4A7gWOwt pic.twitter.com/J15LDat4EO
— lefred - @lefredbe.bsky.social (@lefred) February 7, 2021

It was a nice presentation, with the sense of humor you expect in this nostalgic exercises.

Telegram Bot For Navigation, by Ilya Zverev (@ilyazver)

I have attended several talks by Ilya, some of them online and others here in FOSDEM. He always deliver insightful content, this time focused on how to provide navigation capabilities without relying on a map or a web. Ilya explained that he moved a few years ago to a neighborhood with little data mapped in OpenStreetMap. Instead of mapping all the different venues/places surrounding him individually, he tried another approach. He built his own Telegram bot, first to search for venues and then to add new places.

The main missing part is that the data surveyed using the tool is not being loaded or synchronized with OSM. Hopefully he will include it in the bot roadmap soon.

Making Documentation a First-class Citizen in Open Source Projects, by Ray Paik and Sofia Wallin

Ray and Sofia analyzed the problems that we usually see in open source documentation: lack of consistency mainly. They also explained how a few years ago a cross community group was created with the goal to provide a common way for documentation handling in the LF Networking project.

They gave also several recommendations, for example:

Include the Documentation as part of your definition of done, being a key part of your product/project
Keep the documentation where your code is
Keep an “edit this page” button or equivalent to make contributions easier. This is key during on-boarding processes or just to lower the entry barrier
Recognize contributions, organize documentation specific events

Mental health and free software, by Brendan Abolivier (@BrenAbolivier)

This topic is very delicate, and this is part of the problem. As Brendan explained in the presentation, mental health should not be a taboo. The speaker also added the disclaimer that this is not a specific issue of Free Software, but he focused the talk on this based on his experience.

Free Software usually implies a strong interaction with a community. This sometimes implies staying up late to close an argument or to finish up a pull request, putting a lot of pressure on this. The speaker argues that it can be worse in FOSS compared to other sectors because the emotional aspect is much more important, and everything is happening in public places. On addition to this, joining a big FOSS project also implies a bigger public space and an additional difficulty to take the initiative.

He closed the session with different ways to mitigate the problem depending on your role in a certain moment: maintainer, contributor, employer/manager, etc. The overall recommendation is to try self-care activities, to be generous with your personal time, to be gentle with yourself and to reach a therapist if needed.

Open Source is More Than Just a License, by Don Goodman-Wilson (@DEGoodmanWilson)

The speaker reflects on the differences between the colloquial and institutional descriptions of Open Source, after a few projects have claimed they are open source although they are not. This is partially caused on the emphasized importance of the license over other factors.

According to the speaker, focusing Open Source in just licenses is only necessary when you only want to to mitigate risk management or to reduce costs. Open source should be more about collaboration, openness to participation, pursuing goals that are community-driven, etc. Choosing one license or another should be just a mean to an end, not the end itself.

The speaker proposes using a Ethical Source Definition for software, that summarizes in:

Benefits the Commons, meaning that it can be distributed freely and anyone can use or modify the software
Created in the Open, developed in public view and accepting public contributions
Welcoming and Just Community. Clear rules of governance need to be published and enforced
Puts Accessibility First. It needs to be available to everybody
Prioritizes User Safety
Protects User Privacy
Encourages Fair Compensation

In summary: licenses are important and useful, but put your community first

Penpot, design freedom for teams, by Pablo Ruiz (@diacritica)

Penpot was presented in FOSDEM last year (as UXBOX, its previous name), and one year later Pablo is back in FOSDEM to announce the alpha version. As he did last year, he starts the presentation explaining why they came up with this, and how they discovered they could not find a suitable open and free tool so they managed to create an outstanding one.

Then, he directly started a commented demo using Penpot to re-design the FOSDEM website. It was amazing to see the current maturity of the tool. He completed the demo explaining some integrations they are working on between Penpot and Taiga, taking advantage of the fact that they are the creators and core developers of both tools.

Pablo Ruiz presenting Penpot in FOSDEM 2021 - CC BY-NC-SA License

And that’s all. See you (hopefully in Brussels) in FOSDEM 2022!!

My Year 2020 in Games

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome again to this yearly post, where I try to analyze my gaming behavior during the last year. You can read about my previous years:

2019
2018
2017 (in Spanish)
2016 (in Spanish)
2015 (in Spanish)
2014 (in Spanish)
2013 (in Spanish)
2012 (in Spanish)
2011 (in Spanish)

Data

	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	Total since 2006
Total amount of plays	88	73	101	84	98	1222
Different games played	21	33	61	72	55	440
Games with 2 or more plays	9	9	14	9	15	190
Amount of gaming sessions	62	37	43	36	35	464

Evolution of my boardgame plays over the last 5 years

Games played per year until the end of 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Retrospective

I will organize again the analysis in categories, as the time I spent in RPG or video games is becoming much more relevant.

Boardgames

In 2020 I have played more than in the previous years, and mainly to long games.
I recorded 62 gaming sessions, more than 5 per month, to just 20 different games.
My h-index as a player is now 12. I expected to raise it this year, as I have played intensively to a few games.
I have played 48 scenarios of Gloomhaven in 41 sessions. That is more than half the games I’ve played in the whole year. I love it, and perhaps I should write a spoiler free post in the blog about it.

Role-playing games

With just 8 sessions, mostly online due to the pandemic, we closed in June our Storm King’s Thunder campaign for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
For the moment, we haven’t started a new campaign, with D&D or not, but I hope we will be able to do it as soon as the situation allows it.

Video games

This year I have played more video games than ever, for sure.
In Steam I have played:
- Mostly Tabletop Simulator. I have more than 150h only from 2020.
- I played for a while to This War of Mine. Interesting and challenging, I will probably play again when in the proper mood.
- I finished Firewatch. An intense and well written story. Some passages ended up being too repetitive but the game is short overall.
- I completed The Darkside Detective. Interesting and challenging puzzles, good laughs with a nice design and a fantastic retro based characters and stories.
In January I bought a second hand Playstation 4 from a colleague (without knowing about covid-19 yet) and since April I used it a lot. I have completed:
- Marvel’s Spiderman. The positive things make the negative ones irrelevant. It’s just awesome to swing around Manhattan and I spent hours just doing it.
- Journey. Cute and short game, and both things deserve recognition sometimes. Perhaps too short but take it or leave it.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Dozens of hours, my favourite game so far. Some side quests are repetitive but in general I engaged a lot with the character. Being a huge fan of the novels also helps, but it’s not a requirement to enjoy the game. I played Witcher 1 and 2 just to play this, and it was totally worth it.
- Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, including Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Being a completists, I need to play (if I can) all the saga. After having played (and loved) several Tomb Raider games, this was a perfect match for me and I was not disappointed.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III. I only played the campaign, only single player and no zombie scenarios. Having said that, I liked it and perhaps I could play it again.
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. I enjoyed the spaceship missions and the overall campaign story, but as I played it just after Black Ops III, it was too repetitive sometimes.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda. My first interaction with Mass Effect, and I liked it a lot. Dozens of hours to avoid leaving any single rock unturned, and it was worth it.
- Dragon Age Inquisition. My first interaction with Dragon Age, and it is not going to be the last one. It reminded me sometimes to Pillars of Eternity and Baldur’s Gate, but the story is perhaps more solid and the overall atmosphere is more dramatic. The only thing that I disliked was all the gear evolution related parts, it was confusing and often useless.
Despite having a new PlayStation, I have tried to play in Stadia as well, as a PRO subscriber. I haven’t used the subscription so I finally cancelled it. In 2020 I played.
- Destiny 2, I like the game and I’ve spent several hours but I haven’t engaged yet with it.
- Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year celebration. Only with the opening scene I know I will play it again in the future. It’s probably my favorite Tomb Raider game and I love all of them.
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I bought it with a discount without removing my subscription as it looked like an Uncharted game in the Star Wars universe, and it’s more or less like this. I enjoyed being a Jedi and learning to be one, but I didn’t like the lack of fast travel. Exploration it’s a big part of the game, and it’s nice and challenging, but once you get lost in a labyrinth a few times it starts to piss you off. The end is awesome, that’s for sure.
- Either on Steam, PS4 or Stadia, I plan to keep playing as much as I can also this year. Perhaps eventually in PS5, who knows?

FOSDEM 2020, 20 Years of FOSDEM

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been almost a month since I returned from another intense and thought-provoking weekend in Brussels, although it still feels like it was just yesterday. I couldn’t write this before, as I have been quite busy both at work and at home.

FOSDEM 2020 poster - CC BY-NC-SA License

For those of you who don’t know FOSDEM, it is the biggest conference in Europe (and one of the biggest around the world) related to Open Source development and communities. It’s a huge event with hundreds of talks, workshops, gatherings and stands from all the relevant projects and communities in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ecosystem. It’s also a marvelous place to do networking, because there are not only representatives of those projects but normally also the technical leaders of them. If you are good with names and faces you can meet and greet a lot of important and interesting people.

I already wrote about it in previous years:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday, Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2018: Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2019: Saturday and Sunday

The numbers of this 2020 edition speak for themselves, improving all the figures from previous years:

more than 8,000 attendees in only two days
781 speakers in 817 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
71 tracks in 35 different rooms
more than 400 hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
63 stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, the Apache Software Foundation, OSI, the Eclipse Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, Mattermost, Mozilla, Jenkins, …

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

How FOSS could revolutionize municipal government, by Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper (@divadanese) complete career is amazing: former CTO at Wikimedia Foundation, board member of the Open Source Hardware Association, board observer at Mozilla and board member at Open Source Initiative,… She gave at FOSDEM a very interesting and inspiring talk about the growing presence of FOSS in public administrations.

She started with a brief historical review of relevant projects, highlighting LinEx in Extremadura and Code For America. This initiatives to provide an open alternative for a specific purpose have sometimes failed. In the last years several projects are becoming popular with a common pattern: acting locally to impact globally.

For example: Jason Hibbets (@jhibbets) makes small FOSS projects for his regional county in Raleigh, North Carolina. In Baltimore, a city that was hacked and had to pay a ransom to recover its servers, the amazing people from the St. Francis Neighborhood Center lead by Jacob Green are adapting an international open source platform to provide city services, webs and other functions.

This international open source platform is Lutèce (@LuteceNews), developed by the City of Paris. Lutèce is a 12 years old modular and extensible platform, covering hundreds of city services. Through several projects, mainly built in Java EE, it covers from basic web capabilities to voting systems or workflow functions. Awesome.

Lutèce facts presented in FOSDEM 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

The Selfish Contributor Explained, by James Bottomley

Throughout the years I’ve attended several times to James Bottomley (@jejb_) talks, and it’s always worthy. This time the talk was focused on how Open Source begins as a selfish activity. According to James, managing engineers has always been a problem, even before software exists, because they tend to be opinionated. It’s better to keep a technical motivation than a managerial motivation, but scratching your own itch provides a strong self motivation.

In his first announcement explaining that he was working in a new operating system, Linus Torvalds wanted just suggestions as he expected to code everything by himself, but he was flooded by suggestions and eventually patches. All successful projects run into scaling issues, so how your community or project deals with contributions is essential. Linux solved this success issue with tooling, first with BitKeeper in 2002 and later with Git in 2005.

The Ethics Behind Your IoT, by Molly de Blanc

Molly de Blanc (@mmillions), Strategic Initiatives Manager at Gnome and President of the Open Source Initiative, explained how the Internet of Things is creating new risks and potential security issues due to the lack of free and open alternatives in the ecosystem.

She explained several examples, mainly focused on home surveillance, smart locks and smart doorbells. Smart locks are enabling a new type of abuse. If hacked (or a violent ex-partner) someone can lock you out, open without your consent, etc.

Molly de Blanc presenting at FOSDEM 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Freedom and AI: Can Free Software include ethical AI systems?, by Justin W. Flory & Michael Nolan

Justin (@jflory7) and Mike (@_ nolski _) gave another interesting talk about Ethics and Open Source. They started with an historical overview of GNU, the FSF and the GPL, to explain why the four essential freedoms, written by Richard Stallman in 1986, need to be adapted for AI systems. To create awareness about this, the main initiatives are the AI Now Institute and Partnership on AI.

They continued their presentation introducing some new Freedoms applicable to AI:

Freedom to… audit automated decision-making systems
Freedom to… deliver accountability and responsibility
Freedom to… appeal a decision

They also suggested how we, as a global community, could respect and enforce these freedoms: reproducibility, liability and responsible design, and specially human centered appealing mechanisms.

“Human futures are a combination of data and software.”

In a time where software is often free, companies are selling how people behave. What a strong way to frame this point. #FOSDEM pic.twitter.com/mFYoczki0f
— Matthew Broberg (@mbbroberg) February 1, 2020

Organizing Open Source for Cities, by Jacob Green

The second talk I attended about the same topic, this time from Jacob Green (@jacoblyopen), founder of Mosslabs.io (@Moss4Cities) and open source strategist for both the City of Paris and Johns Hopkins University.

He explained with more detail how to enable a sustainable and free innovation in our cities, through structured collaboration and community. We need a clear, but flexible, institutional interface or framework to advance in cooperation and scaling. He showed some examples from his own initiatives in Johns Hopkins University, the City of Baltimore or the City of Paris with Lutèce (already mentioned in my summary).

The next generation of contributors is not on IRC, by Matthew Broberg

I was curious about this talk by Matthew Broberg (@mbbroberg), technical editor at OpenSource.com. He explained how the communication channels can be more or less inclusive, and how they impact the community itself. He claimed that he does not get IRC, but felt great after creating easily a Github user and having solved an issue in a friendly manner. Most of the modern capabilities are not in IRC, and that is why the communities are shifting to new platforms.

Also, he highlighted that we should move more to asynchronous communication tools, depending on the purpose. He explained how for some people that communication platforms are the third place (after home and your workplace) where you need to feel comfortable and secure. He stressed his message explaining how different projects or companies are distributing their communication needs.

Matthew Broberg about the communications platform adoption in FOSDEM 2020 - CC BY-NC-SA License

The Ethics of Open Source, by Don Goodman-Wilson

Don (@DEGoodmanWilson) offered the audience another view about the theme of my FOSDEM, Ethics and Open Source. Free Software gives freedom to everyone, and it can be argued that it creates opportunities for the already privileged part of the society. It exacerbates existing injustices, encourages exploiting volunteer labor force. This is reflected in the Paradox of Openness, the tension between encouraging knowledge sharing and ensuring sufficient protection for those who share.

We cannot settle with Open Source (as it is described today). It’s necessary but not enough to ask if something is Open Source, we need to ask ourselves other questions like:

What are the forces that have led us to this point?
What do we owe to each other as people?
How do we evolve as a community?

Engineers, Call Your Policy People!, by Astor Nummelin Carlberg & Paula Grzegorzewska

Astor and Paula from OpenForum Europe (@OpenForumEurope) explained their mission, connecting FOSS communities and projects with policy makers (specially in the EU). They explained what they learned during the recent campaign against the Copyright Directive, and how they created the SaveCodeShare.eu portal.

Regulations affect for profit business, but what happens with Open Source? Activism and FOSS advocacy is needed for the future of Europe, but policy makers need evidence. They help collecting use cases showing the impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation. If you can provide one of those examples, please contact them.

Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism, by Deb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson (@baconandcoconut), Director of Community Operations at Software Freedom Conservancy (@conservancy), shared her view about ethical software in the most vindictive talk of the weekend. FOSS still depends on funding, and affinity is key. It’s easy to see the ROI in big FOSS projects, but how can we justify (and measure) helping people as the main business model?

Rainbow capitalism… is still capitalism. Open Source exploitation… is still exploitation. How can we fix things from the inside? Encouraging self-reporting, organizing strikes or walkouts if needed, but mainly building our own alternatives. We should bind our future and our software to ethical choices. She closed with two interesting thoughts: What policy changes are needed? Should we require ethical audits and ethical boards in the companies/projects?

UXBOX, the time for an open source online prototyping platform has arrived, by Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz

Me dear friend Pablo (@diacritica) presented UXBOX (@uxboxtool) in the Open Source Design devroom. He delivered a complete presentation of the project, from the inception a few years ago in a πWEEK at Kaleidos to the current state of development, after receiving funding and important offers to help from external contributors from the community.

UXBOX is the first Open Source solution for design and prototyping. It is based in open standards like SVG, open source licenses, and with a multiplatform and multidisciplinary mindset.

And that’s all. See you in Brussels in FOSDEM 2021!!

My Year 2019 in Games

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome again to this yearly post, where I try to analyze my gaming behavior during the last year. You can read about my previous years:

2018
2017 (in Spanish)
2016 (in Spanish)
2015 (in Spanish)
2014 (in Spanish)
2013 (in Spanish)
2012 (in Spanish)
2011 (in Spanish)

Data

	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	Total since 2006
Total amount of plays	73	101	84	98	84	1146
Different games played	33	61	72	55	71	430
Games with 2 or more plays	9	14	9	15	13	186
Amount of gaming sessions	37	43	36	35	30	401

Evolution of my game plays over the last 5 years

Games played per year until the end of 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Retrospective

This time, I’ll organize the analysis in categories, as the time I spent in RPG or video games is becoming much more relevant.

Boardgames

2019 has been the year with less plays since 2009.
I’ve played only 33 different games this year, and incredibly most of them were new (to me).
I recorded 37 gaming sessions, 3 per month.
My h-index as a player is still at 11. I expected to raise it this year, but I haven’t since I almost played new games.
I have played a lot less to boardgames. Nothing unexpected as this year I haven’t been able to attend Tierra de Nadie (TdN) or any similar convention. Not attending TdN implies at least 25-30 plays less.
On the other side, the number of gaming sessions is not that different. And makes sense as I’m playing more to longer games.
Only In 2019 I have played 19 times to Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, in several sessions with up to 4 straight plays. I’m enjoying it a lot (as the rest of my playing group), so we are continuing with The Hunt of the Ember Crown expansion. I’m even considering starting a solitaire campaign to compare.
I did not fulfill my desire to complete in 2019 all the published games of Unlock! and Exit, but I played 5 and I have bought almost all of them so it’s a matter of time.

Role-playing games

We are still maintaining our monthly Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign. I’ve only skipped a couple of sessions because of business trips or similar issues, and despite that I’ve attended 10 sessions.
I’m sure we will continue with this in 2020 and beyond, if nothing important changes. We will see what happens when we complete the Storm King’s Thunder campaign.

Video games

This year I’ve used Steam from time to time. Chronologically:
- I completed Baldur’s Gate II
- I played for a while to Icewind Dale
- I finished Life is Strange: Episode 1
- I also completed The Witcher
By the end of the year I acquired Stadia Founder’s Edition. I started trying it with Destiny 2 but definitely enjoyed my new Stadia with Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition.
Either on Steam or Stadia, I plan to play as much as I can also this year. For the moment, I’m continuing with Rise of the Tomb Raider

My Year 2019 in Books

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Any Goodreads user has access to a yearly report with some statistics and basically the covers of all the books read in one year. In order to have it the user only has to set the books as read and the read date to any time in that year. Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2019 in Books from Goodreads, as I did one year ago for my read books in 2018.

My 2019 in numbers

I read 7,878 pages across 57 books, a 114% of my 50 books read in 2019 goal
That’s 20 novels (not taking into account comics or short stories)
The average length was 138 pages
My average rating was 3.6 (up to 5)
The longest book I read was my nth reading of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The featured image goes to Nnedi Okorafor, as my main discovery of the year after reading her Binti trilogy. She has won a Hugo, a Nebula, a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

My TOP 10 read books in 2019

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
El paciente by Juan Gómez Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Los girasoles ciegos by Alberto Méndez
Loba Negra by Juan Gómez Jurado
The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor
Sumalee: Historias de Trakaul by Javier Salazar Calle (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Tolkien 2019 in Birmingham

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Showing off my double nationality - CC by-nc-sa License

If you are reading this you probably know already that I am a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, to the point that I joined the Spanish Tolkien Society (Sociedad Tolkien Española) almost 20 years ago and I usually don’t miss any of their events.

Since recently I also belong to the Tolkien Society, and after having missed for probably important (but now forgotten) reasons Tolkien 2005 and Tolkien 2012, the last major events that they organized, I was not going to miss Tolkien 2019. In 2005 the gathering marked the 50th anniversary of the complete publication of The Lord of The Rings. In 2012 the conference was held to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit. This year the Tolkien Society celebrated in Birmingham its own 50th anniversary with the largest celebration of Tolkien ever held. More than 550 attendees and more than 150 activities including talks, panels, workshops, signing sessions, music, theater,…

I have a lot of things to do but I don’t want to miss the opportunity to write here some quick impressions of my experience there. (last minute edit: Quick is an euphemism, as I have spent several hours writing this article). Also, Pablo has published (in Spanish) a fantastic summary of his own experience in Tolkien 2019 and the scarce overlap between our experiences there has encouraged me to complete the article as much as possible.

TL;DR: The good part: I attended around 40 activities, most of them top quality content, and I realize now that more than a third of them had a female speaker. That is a lot. I met in person lots of interesting people, and had the opportunity to spend time and learn from people that I admire. The bad part: I didn’t like the venue, the corridors were too small, it was full of steps and only two of the rooms were big enough for an event like this with >500 participants. The lack of a lunch break not only forced everyone to skip good contents, but also made it much more difficult to meet other people and do proper networking.

The STE delegation with other friends from Spain also attending Tolkien 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Let me summarize some of the talks and activities I attended:

Activities

Heirs of Tolkien? The Major Contenders, by Tom Shippey

The opening keynote was delivered perfectly by Tom Shippey, it was the ideal kickoff for an event like this combining interesting facts and humor. I admire him since long time ago, but even more after having met him in person during the last XXIV Mereth Aderthad. Reading Beowulf together while drinking beer creates some bonding, who could have imagined it.

Shippey, with his usual simple (but effective) slides, started with the slogan of the Deustche Tolkien Gesellschaft: Ohne Tolkien, Keine Fantasy (without Tolkien, no fantasy) stressing how this motto is still correct nowadays. Tolkien was the first author to achieve mass market success with ambitious and top level quality high fantasy, something that was even more difficult in the previous century. Mass market success in fantasy works is more common nowadays, and this is only because of Tolkien’s legacy.

He commented that he is working in a taxonomy of fantasy authors, and also explained who could be a worthy successor of Tolkien. In his opinion only three authors are candidates in quality with their own genuine style: George RR Martin, Stephen Donaldson and Michael Swanwick, all of them heavily influenced by Tolkien. This part was related to the talk he gave in May in Spain comparing the characters, works and values from Tolkien and Martin.

Tom Shippey explaining the fantasy types identified by Farah Mendelsohn - CC by-nc-sa License

To the origins of fairy-tales, by Enrico Spadaro (@EnricoSpadaro7)

Enrico reminded us the relationship of Tolkien with fairy-tales, and explained the folklore tales that the Professor received as input for inspiration, being the most acknowledged of them the Kalevala. The speaker then explained that the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault were not the first ones to write fairy-tales in Europe, as there was an Italian author Giambattista Basile that was the first one (that we know) to include fairy-tales tales in Lo Cunto de Li Cunte. His tales included the first appearance of Cinderella, Rapunzel or the Sleeping Beauty.

On the nature and corporeality of Elves and Fairies according to Tolkien, by Massimiliano Izzo

Very interesting and well documented talk, about how Tolkien speculated on the real nature of elves and how this vision evolved through his life. Metaphysical and sometimes even philosophical discussions that will deserve a quiet read when the proceedings are published.

Four Brethren Heroes of the Gondolindrim - Egalmoth, Ecthelion, Glorfindel and Legolas : A mythic and linguistic exploration, by Andrew Higgins (@asthiggins)

Andrew Higgins explained very briefly how these four important characters are related to heroes from the Classical and Medieval works Tolkien could have known. He commented how Tolkien could have thought the names for each of them, linking as usual the meaning with the character. Again, it will be nice to read the final paper in the proceedings.

Two Realms: Finished and Unfinished Business, by Ted Nasmith

This was the first of many talks focusing on the illustration of Tolkien’s works. This time, Ted Nasmith himself showed us some of his recent commissioned works related to Middle-earth and at the end also to The Song of Ice and Fire. It’s impossible to articulate in words what he showed us: lots of illustrations including preliminary drafts or color tests that I would happily put in my walls.

I specially liked a couple of his recent works: Rhosgobel, Durin’s Crown and the Mirrormere and most of all Turgon at Fingolfin’s Cairn. Wouldn’t mind at all if someone wanted to buy me one.

Ted is not only a gifted artist but also proved to be friendly to his fans and methodical in his work.

Ted Nasmith showing one of his awesome drawings of Treebeard - CC by-nc-sa License

Leaf by Niggle, by Puppet State Theatre (@PuppetStateThtr)

Richard Medringtone from the Puppet State Theatre showed us how one single person on stage can grab the attention of the audience for more than an hour. He is clearly a top professional in acting, and the adaptation of Leaf by Niggle fitted his style perfectly. The stage setting, despite being minimalistic, was adequate and the protagonist made good use of almost all its elements. I loved the play and will see it again without hesitation.

Clothing in Tolkien’s world and what we can see through its historical analysis, by Dr. Ester Torredelforth (@Torredelforth)

Ester, Doctor in medieval art and fashion, made a brilliant exposition of the facts that can be understood or extracted from the way Tolkien describes clothing details. Se used several designs prepared by herself to support her lecture, describing how Tolkien must have known with a decent level about medieval fashion and its utility and symbolism.

Aratalindalë - The Making of a Myth, by Maggie Percival

I was not sure about this talk, but I’m glad I finally attended it. The purpose of the lecture was to describe the process she and some other colleagues from the Tolkien Society followed to prepare the Masquerade for the London WorldCon of 2014 where they won several prizes including Best overall. They prepared a group costume entitled Aratalindalë that included eight Valar as they are described in The Silmarillion.

Maggie explained with lots of details the reasoning after all the designs including the selection of fabrics and how they combined traditional dressmaking skills with modern technology using LED lights in the costumes with certain level of animation designed for each Vala. There are several pictures online but I haven’t found the full video where all the lighting features can be seen properly.

Tolkien and Italy, by Oronzo Cilli (@Tolkieniano)

Oronzo described his research about the relationship between Tolkien and Italy. He traveled there at least a couple of times and apparently there are several details that show he enjoyed and was influenced by the Italian culture. For example, it is known that Tolkien joined the Oxford Dante Society.

Tolkien’s Library, by Oronzo Cilli (@Tolkieniano) with Tom Shippey

One of the editorial releases of the year related to Tolkien studies and scholarship. The book is just a list of what could have been part of the Professor’s own library, and for each item Oronzo describes if the entry comes from a primary source, a secondary source, etc. Quite interesting if you are curious about the type of works Tolkien owned or had read. As new evidence appears, the list will have to be expanded with new entries.

The room was full also because Tom Shippey wrote the foreword and also participated in the lecture.

France 1913. Tolkien’s first job, by Jose Manuel Ferrández Bru (@JosManuelFerrn1)

My colleague from the STE is becoming a regular for these types of events, and no wonder it’s like that with the quality and amount of research he has been doing over the last years. This time the lecture was about how a very young Tolkien got a job as tutor of a bunch of kids during a trip to France. Without spoiling the details, let’s say that the task was suddenly complicated and could have disrupted Tolkien in a unique way.

Jose Manuel Ferrández Bru explaining the intricate relationships of the Martínez del Río Bermejillo brothers - CC by-nc-sa License

The Two Towers of Birmingham, and other follies, by John Garth (@JohnGarthWriter)

It was believed that a couple of towers from Birmingham (Perrott’s Folly and the Edgbaston Waterworks tower) may have provided the inspiration for the Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings. John Garth started his keynote explaining why he does not consider this argument very solid. First of all, which two towers? Minas Morgul and Minas Tirith? Orthanc and Barad-dûr? It’s still ambiguous. Garth reviewed all the early designs that we have from Tolkien about those towers, analyzing the evolution of them.

The lecture also served somehow as a teaser for his next book, titled for the moment as Tolkien’s Worlds.

LOTR on Prime panel, by Shaun Gunner (@ShaunGunner) with Brian Sibley, Dimitra Fimi (@Dr_Dimitra_Fimi), Anke Eißmann (@khorazir), Jeremy Edmonds (@TolkienGuide) and Marcel Aubron-Bülles (@The_Tolkienist)

This panel was promising, first of all because the selection of participants was very well balanced with writers, scholars and artists offering different perspectives about their expectations. Of course they did not give any factual data, and probably that is the reason they were there in the panel giving their opinions freely and not Tom Shippey that is directly involved in the project.

I specially liked the contributions by Brian Sibley, who was fully engaged in all the Peter Jackson films, and Anke Eißmann, who is eager like me to see in the new series a more daring production compared specially to The Hobbit films. Let’s hope they don’t try to imitate the style of Game of Thrones.

Alan Lee’s Sketchbook, by Alan Lee (@AlanLee11225760)

Despite the main room was completely full, the organization switched off the lights for the audience and everyone was in absolute silence listening to the careful explanations by Alan Lee. It was almost magical and completely amazing. We could see dozens of sketches explained from the genius himself, from watercolor exercises to architectural blueprints. Lee’s view on Middle-earth is engraved in the mind of many people (including mine) and we were very lucky that his vision was also omnipresent in Peter Jackson’s films.

There was also time for him to answer a lot of questions from the audience, and perhaps the most interesting were related to their relationship with other artists like John Howe.

Alan Lee explaining one of his drawings about Orthanc - CC by-nc-sa License

Orchestra Concert, by The People’s Orchestra (@ThePeoplesOrch)

After enjoying a couple of beers in a nearby pub we came back for the concert, and we were very lucky as we were able to take seats in the front row just behind the Orchestra director. We were entertained not only with the soundtracks of all the LotR and The Hobbit movies, but also with several other compositions from our vast geek popular culture. Both the orchestra and its conductor demonstrated an impressive quality and charisma, one could see the effort to please the audience.

The People’s Orchestra is a charity apart from a standard symphony orchestra. They provide professional musical training and even work opportunities for unemployed people. Impressive.

Grendel’s Mother and Tolkien’s Women, by Jane Chance (@janegalv)

The speaker was humorous and kind with the audience, taking into account she delivered the talk without any kind of visual support very early on Friday morning. As the recognized expert in the field that she is, Jane spoke clearly and concisely about the role of Grendel’s Mother in Beowulf. After that, she managed to link the topic with the attitude of Tolkien about women in his professional academical experience. The talk was interesting but I could not connect some dots on the spot, hopefully I will with the proceedings.

Pauline Diana Baynes - An artists inspiration, by Jay Johnstone (@jaystolkien)

After having met Jay in the Dealer’s Room and having enjoyed his own amazing pieces of art, I was curious about this talk. I expected him to explain not only his admiration for the artist but also his opinion as a passionate collector. I received what I expected, by far.

Pauline Baynes was a prolific and very special artist. She illustrated or contributed to more than 200 books, gaining international fame as the first illustrator and cover artist of some Tolkien minor works (Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wootton Major, …) and Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. As an example of masterpiece, the speaker showed us the illustration she did for a Nursery Rhymes book, in which she featured 56 different characters from the collected tales in one single page.

I learned in the talk that Pauline illustrated Farmer Giles of Ham by pure chance, according to Jay Tolkien was visiting his editors to complain about the artwork proposal he had received and luckily a sketchbook by Pauline was open over a table.

Jay showed us some less known drawings and we were amazed both with the artwork and Jay’s explanations during the entire hour. He clearly infected me with his passion, I entered the room knowing Pauline Baynes only a little and left as a new declared fan.

Artists in Middle-earth: illustrating The Lord of the Rings, by Marie Bretagnolle (@MarieBreta)

The abstract of the talk announced that Marie Bretagnolle was going to compare two of the most important British editions of The Lord of the Rings, also the only ones with commissioned illustrations inside. First the 1977 Folio Society edition, and the second by Alan Lee for the 1991-1992 Centenary edition.

Marie delivered a clear and interesting talk, comparing the illustrations in both works and analyzing the importance of each drawing depending on the location. For example, the artist needs to take into account that an illustration that appears before the passage that is portrayed can provide inspiration for some readers but it can also work as a small spoiler for others.

Maria is also to blame that I just spent a small fortune in the Folio Society website.

The source texts for Tove Jansson’s illustrations for The Hobbit, by Sonja Virta (@SonjaVirta)

Third talk in a row about illustration. This time the content was focused on the controversially illustrated Swedish edition of The Hobbit in 1962. It was (or is) controversial for the somewhat gloomy tone of the drawings but specially because Tove Jansson presented Gollum as a huge moster. The speaker explained her thorough research on the topic, and the influence that the first Swedish translation of 1947 could have had in Tove Jansson for the 1962 edition.

The Shape of Water in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, by Norbert Schürer

Another pleasant surprise, thanks to the good work of the speaker. Norbert explained with high detail the research he is doing about the influence of the water in Middle-earth. He started the paper after discovering that there was not a lot of scholar work about it, despite the water is omnipresent in The Lord of the Rings in all its forms/states: liquid, solid and gaseous. I’d add another shape to his list of occurrences: the absence of water. After all the tragic journey of Frodo and Sam towards Mount Doom, the absence of water is what finally makes them realize that there is no possible return.

The speaker described as well the taxonomy he is working on, based on the type of representation of the water in each moment: figurative, purely instrumental, only geographical and intentional. This is again a paper I will enjoy reading again once the proceedings are published.

Bilbo, Ulysses and the Greatness of the Unknown, by Gloria Larini

Bilbo and Ulysses, two great characters in two epic adventures. The speaker, taking advantage of her knowledge in Latin and Greek literature, compared both characters and how they embarked on their adventures. For example, both go for the unknown but the initial step is quite different. Ulysses has no choice but Bilbo on the contrary is suitable for the enterprise (at least according to Gandalf).

Another interesting difference between the stories is that Homer did not include the journeys in the narration, but Tolkien does.

Memory, Lore, Knowledge, by Thomas Honegger

Another quite interesting talk. The speaker explained the concepts, remarking the difference that Tolkien made among them. For example, regarding memory we can find live memory (Gandalf, Galadriel, …) and dormant memory (the ring verse, old Gondor lore). The main part of the talk was about the difference (almost opposition) between knowledge and lore. In Middle-earth, knowledge is perceived as negative (Saruman is the main representative) but Lore is usually positive (Ioreth, as the best example). Lore cannot be learned, it needs to be handed over or it will be lost. That is why knowledge can increase, but Lore can only decline.

The Hobbits and I: My Travels in Middle-earth, by Brian Sibley

I knew Brian Sibley since long time ago, what I didn’t knew (shame on me) is that he is still an active tolkienist and such a prolific writer recently.

This keynote was merely self-biographical, as Brian explained in a careful and detailed way his career and complete evolution. He focused first on his biggest hit, the 1981 BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings, to finish with his recent projects including the chronicles of the making and movie guides of the two trilogies by Peter Jackson, the awesome The Maps of Tolkien’s Middle-earth book with John Howe and even an authorized biography of Peter Jackson.

Brian Sibley showing the audience how he receive a book signed (and fixed) by Tolkien - CC by-nc-sa License

‘I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me’: Natural Growth in Writing The Lord of the Rings, by Christina Scull

Christina Scull gave a nice lecture about the creative process of Tolkien. The quote in the title is from Tolkien himself in one of the letters, in which he explained how his own understanding of the characters was changing along the writing process. No surprises here, being Tolkien a huge perfectionist and having spent writing The Lord of the Rings more than 10 years.

Listening to Christina was a delight but for those that did not attend, calm down as it won’t change much respect reading the paper yourselves.

Banquet

I don’t have much to say about the banquet, except that maybe in any hypothetical next event I will consider seriously not attending. We had a good time and it was fun, but it was due to my companions at the table. Being used to the STE gala dinners, I found this banquet insipid and uninteresting. I can live with only three brief toasts and no songs, but the self buffet format was annoying with some starting dinner while others had already finished… it was almost impossible to interact with people from other tables. On top of all this, it was absurdly expensive even for UK standards.

Anyway, I did like a gesture that I will try to copy in our Spanish association. During the banquet, probably the time with more people in the same place, they gave commemorative badges to those who have been members of the Tolkien Society for 10 (a splendid generation!) and 25 years. It is a recognition that is always welcome and appreciated.

Ten Years of Books in Tengwar, by Tsvetelina Krumova

Tsvetelina Krumova thinks that Tengwar should never be written by a machine, as it goes against its nature. According to this reasoning, that I fully share, she began 10 years ago to transcribe some books using Tengwar. She brought some copies to show us and the result is astonishing, even ignoring the infamous amount of hours this woman has spent writing. She also described how the activity itself of writing in Tengwar forces her to focus so much, that she is using this also as a kind of relaxing or meditation experience on a daily basis.

I took another important thought of this talk. Despite the amount of pages and studies that we have today it is still not possible to cook like the elves, to fight like them or it is not clear how could we dance like the elves did. But we can write exactly like the elves, even if we need to write Tengwar in English or Spanish. Food for thought!

One of the books written marvelously in Tengwar by Tsvetelina Krumova - CC by-nc-sa License

Taniquetil: A tale of two cities, by Denis Bridoux

I took some risk, choosing this talk instead of a Sword fighting showcase or a Dwarven Beard workshop, but now I know that I did right.

As Denis was researching on Tolkien’s Taniquetil drawing for the Aubusson tapestry, he realized that there was a mystery to solve in the drawing. At the foot of the Holy Mountain, next to the coast, there are two very very small cities, so small that people usually don’t notice them. Would they be Tirion and Alqualondë? The descriptions in The Silmarillion don’t match adequately with the drawing, despite the low level of detail.

It started to make more sense when he noticed that the watercolor drawing by Tolkien is dated in 1925 when he had already written most of what was published as The Book of Lost Tales (written in 1916-1919 according to the speaker) but not yet the main contents of the Quenta Noldorinwa (written in 1930). This could explain how the drawing depicts more clearly a book that was, in fact, published later.

An Archaeology of Hope and Despair in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, by John Whitmire

This lecture presented the research that John Whitmire is doing, with permission from the Tolkien Estate, using the still unpublished materials in the Tolkien Collection of the Marquette University. His study is about the use of Hope and Despair (as absence of hope) centered in the Characters of Aragorn and Arwen.

The lecture, that will also deserve a slow read in the proceedings, described how he organized the contents in different strata or layers during his research according to the known archaeological practice.

Stratum A is the tale “of Aragorn and Arwen” from the original manuscript
Stratum B1, B2, B3,… are the different revisions of the original manuscript
Stratum C is the fair copy of the tale after all the B revisions
Stratum D is a more refined version, where we find Ivorwen identifying Aragorn personally as hope and Elrond calling Aragorn directly Amir (that means hope)
etc.

The Dim Echo of the Catcher, by Nils Ivar Agøy

In this lecture Nils, that receive during the banquet a badge for belonging to the TS since 25 years ago, describes his research about the connections between Tolkien’s comments on the Nodens Celtic deity and his own legendarium. It is known that the Professor studied about this, to the point he wrote a paper about the name of the Nodens deity and probably traveled several times to the excavations. The speaker described some parallelisms and the presence in The Silmarillion of mentions to a catcher or hunter deity. Interesting read.

Tolkien and His Publishers, by Wayne Hammond

Wayne Hammond with his wife Christina Scull are a reference about Tolkien and his work. They have published several key books about the art of Tolkien in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (that I eagerly possess) and the most important Reader’s Companion and Companion and Guide.

The speaker shared part of this vast knowledge, this time focusing on the relationship of the Professor with his publishers and editors. He told some anecdotes in an entertaining way, including a couple about Tolkien being famous among the publishers for making very slow progress. It was really interesting hearing his comments about the economic negotiations, in which Tolkien apparently was very successful as it is clear now, specially for his heirs.

Illustrating Tolkien panel, by Shaun Gunner (@ShaunGunner) with Alan Lee (@AlanLee11225760), Anke Eißmann (@khorazir), Jenny Dolfen (@JennyDolfen), Ted Nasmith and Jay Johnstone (@jaystolkien)

This panel is another hardly repeatable thing that happened in Tolkien 2019. Only John Howe or the Hildebrandt Brothers could match them in quality and/or popularity. Shaun did a good job distributing his own questions and the ones from the public, so we could all enjoy an interesting session with genuine views and the most relevant opinions of the industry.

Tolkien and the Classics, by Claudio A. Testi with Tom Shippey and Thomas Honegger

Claudio Testi, with the help of Honegger and Shippey, presented a new collection of essays that explore the relationship between the Professor and Classic authors. As they explained, the goal is not always to find connections where there are none but to do the exercise just to assess the result, as is usual in comparative literature.

The collection is organized in three sections:

Tolkien and Authors from Antiquity
Tolkien and Authors from the Middle Ages
Tolkien and Authors from the Modern Period

Masquerade

The Masquerade itself was nice, with some great costumes and/or performances and the rest more or less fine. I have to say that the best part of the evening was during the interlude, when some organizers presented several performances. There were three of them, two portraying the Professor and another one about Sauron motivating his troops, that were hilarious. Sadly I don’t remember the names, sorry.

The parody of the BBC radio show Just a Minute was fine but maybe too long, but I understand that the format was perfect to allow waiting more or less time until the judges agreed the winners of the contest.

The result of the Masquerade contest is the least important thing, but I did not like that they gave prize to practically all but 2-3 participants. I don’t think it would have been very difficult to give 2-3 more prizes and a weird situation (at least for me) would have been avoided.

Geopolitics in Tolkien’s Works, by Lamont Colucci (@LamontColucci)

After reading Colucci’s bio I was curious about the talk. I have to say that my worst fears were fulfilled and in the end the talk was 75% a generic International Relations lecture with a not very subtle American imperialism tone, and 25% how geopolitics and strategy reflect in Tolkien’s works. He stressed that in Middle-earth wars are never won with magic, they are always won or lost with medieval style war tactics and strategies that apparently Tolkien understood and was able to articulate.

Colucci gave us interesting quotes like “as Americans we feel that we are Gondor, keeping other actors like The Shire in peace” followed by another statement about the willingness of the US to prevent Russian invasions to Sweden despite the Swedish do not want to belong to NATO.

Gandalf for President: the Politics of Tolkien, by Shaun Gunner (@ShaunGunner)

Second lecture of the day about politics, that also left me with bittersweet feelings. Shaun, current chair of the Tolkien Society, explained what could be the political inclination of Tolkien based on what we know about him and his context. Based on his research he claimed that Tolkien was in favor of the Scottish independent movement despite feeling proud of his country and idealizing England as The Shire. According to Shaun, the Professor was against all kinds of communism or imperialism, to the point that the idealistic Shire was a Benevolent Anarchy with the Thain acting just as a ceremonial figure without real authority.

The speaker also tried to explain why Tolkien is beloved by millions of people from the whole political spectrum. Related to this, he also said that the Tolkien Society was created in the sixties to claim Tolkien back from the hippies.

Power and Choice in the Second Age: A Political Primer, by Sarah Rachel Westvik

Luckily this third talk was not as opinionated as the two previous ones. The speaker, a student of International Relations, analyzed all the political context and tensions that we can see in the Second Age. She grouped the explanation in realms to cover Númenor, the Elven kingdoms (Lindon, Eregion and Greenwood), Mordor and the Ainur. Nice presentation from an eloquent speaker.

Five or Six Ponies?, by Jessica Yates

A plan of the house of Crickhollow, by Jessica Yates - CC by-nc-sa License

The premise of the talk was intriguing. In the 2004-2005 revision of The Lord of the Rings, the editors changed Merry’s line: “There are six ponies in a stable across the fields…” to “There are five ponies…”. The reasoning for the change was that the original six ponies were for five hobbits plus a pack-pony, assuming that when Tolkien reduced the number of adventurers to four, he forgot to alter that line. Apparently there has been some debate about this change, and Jessica researched as much as she could to solve the mystery.

As part of her research, Jessica draw (and shared copies with the audience) a plan of the house of Crickhollow. I won’t spoil the surprise, if you want to know the answer wait for the proceedings.

Tolkien, Folklore, and Foxes: a thoroughly vulpine talk in which there may be singing!, by Dr Dimitra Fimi (@Dr_Dimitra_Fimi)

Shippey’s was probably the best opening keynote and undoubtedly this was the perfect closing keynote. Dr Dimitra Fimi taught us and entertained us smartly and passionately.

The keynote started remembering the audience about the Rhyme of the Troll, the verses that Sam sung to the rest of the fellowship when they encountered Bilbo’s trolls. Dimitra didn’t just remind us about the song, she sang and encouraged the audience to sing, so we sung. It was fun and easy.

Then she reminded us that the rhyme is based on a traditional English folk song called The Fox. She encouraged the audience again, and the audience carried it out enthusiastically.

But obviously a folklore song was not written in our English. She researched further until she got the original lyrics in Middle English. As you can imagine Dimitra no longer had to ask us to sing, although this time not everyone could pronounce properly but that was not important. Try to imagine a room with 400-500 people of an average above 40 years singing in Middle English. We only lacked a beer in the hand.

There is no better way to finish this article than with a recording of Tolkien himself singing the Rhyme of the Troll. If you are still here, please enjoy:

“Rhyme of the Troll”

Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
Done by! Gum by!
In a cave in the hills he dwelt alone,
And meat was hard to come by.

Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: ‘Pray, what is yon?
For it looks like the shin o’ my nuncle Tim,
As should be a-lyin’ in graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin’ in graveyard.’

‘My lad,’ said Troll, ‘this bone I stole.
But what be bones that lie in a hole?
Thy nuncle was dead as a lump o’lead,
Afore I found his shinbone.
Tinbone! Thinbone!
He can spare a share for a poor old troll,
For he don’t need his shinbone.’

Said Tom: ‘I don’t see why the likes o’ thee
Without axin’ leave should go makin’ free
With the shank or the shin o’ my father’s kin;
So hand the old bone over!
Rover! Trover!
Though dead he be, it belongs to he;
So hand the old bone over!’

‘For a couple o’ pins,’ says Troll, and grins,
‘I’ll eat thee too, and gnaw thy shins.
A bit o’ fresh meat will go down sweet!
I’ll try my teeth on thee now.
Hee now! See now!
I’m tired o’ gnawing old bones and skins;
I’ve a mind to dine on thee now.’

But just as he thought his dinner was caught,
He found his hands had hold of naught.
Before he could mind, Tom slipped behind
And gave him the boot to larn him.
Warn him! Darn him!
A bump o’ the boot on the seat, Tom thought,
Would be the way to larn him.

But harder than stone is the flesh and bone
Of a troll that sits in the hills alone.
As well set your boot to the mountain’s root,
For the seat of a troll don’t feel it.
Peel it! Heal it!
Old troll laughed, when he heard Tom groan.
And he knew his toes could feel it.

Tom’s leg is game, since home he came,
And his bootless foot is lasting lame;
But Troll don’t care, and he’s still there
With the bone he boned from its owner.
Doner! Boner!
Troll’s old seat is still the same,
And the bone he boned from its owner!

See you in the next Tolkien gathering!!

FOSDEM 2019: Sunday

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My Saturday finished having a great dinner with friends and lots of laughs in one of our favorite restaurants in Brussels.

FOSDEM 2019 poster - CC BY-NC-SA License

As usual, my Sunday at FOSDEM started again very early. Lot’s of things to see in a complete set of new devrooms/tracks. This year I focused my second day in the Community and Geospatial devrooms.

Before continuing, if you want to read my summary of the previous day you can follow this link: FOSDEM 2019: Saturday. You will also find there general info and details about the event itself.

Again, I will summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

Supporting FOSS Community Members with Impostor Syndrome, by Sage Sharp

The purpose of the speaker was to share advice and tips about how to support people who experience impostor syndrome, focusing on people from underrepresented groups. Sage gave a quick introduction to the concept to go then directly to the topic. I received several good recommendations: normalize questions, how to give praise, what deserves praise, etc.

We have seen lately lots of talks about the syndrome itself, it’s quite good to hear about how to counter it efficiently. As the speaker said, we as technical and resourceful people, should be able to improve this.

Companies and Communities, Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?, by Deb Nicholson and Nithya Ruff

Companies and Communities have different systems of rewards and penalties. Companies focus on single minded views, and the alignment to the goals is rewarded. Communities focus on personal motivation, even if it’s something that is not profitable or even shippable in the short term. Companies fire people and people leave companies normally against the will of the employer, but in communities everyone leaves voluntarily and usually they can return happily.

Diversity is good in both worlds, to have it and to show it. The speakers gave a very good advice to companies, recommending to send diverse people also to events and conferences, not always the same group of people. Respect also is essential both to a Community norms or a Company culture, this could be enforced in both worlds with a good Code of Conduct.

Another very interesting and useful talk, describing the differences between these two worlds, and how can they benefit reciprocally.

The Open Source Community: its past and future, by Nick Vidal

Open Source is more than everything a continuum, it has been with us for more than 20 years now and it will hopefully stay around many more. In the last years we have celebrated the 20th and even 25th birthday of lots of projects: Debian, Redhat, FreeBSD, … The speaker summarized the history of Open Source, starting with its definition, highlighting the recent complicated stories in Redis or MongoDB.

The historical overview was great, but I particularly appreciated a message about Open Source being based on the gift economy, with gifts far beyond code like openness, freedom and community.

FOSDEM 2019 - Nick Vidal reviewing the Open Source history - CC by-nc-sa License

Continuous Integration to compile and test Navit, by Patrick Höhn

It was great to learn about Navit (a complete car navigation system with its own routing engine), but regardless the project itself the speaker gave great recommendations to improve the Infrastructure aspect of an Open Source project. Infra is usually a challenge in FOSS projects, as most contributors are interested in the project and not the infra part. Resources are needed to host any service, and those resources require funds.

There are several continuous integration platform that offer a free tier for FOSS projects, including platform specific tests and static code analysis. There are also good alternatives for Device Farming and GUI( testing frameworks.

Linking OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, by Edward Betts

One of my favorite talks of FOSDEM 2019, not only because the talk was clear and useful but also because the project behind is a perfect example of a pet project that becomes larger and larger as the main contributor starts discovering additional potential. The current status is awesome and the future looks even better.

Edward Betts has created OSM <–> Wikidata matcher, a powerful tool to link OpenStreetMap data with Wikidata articles (a Wikimedia tool with structured data). There are several benefits for doing this, being the main ones having labels in more languages, OSM data linked to more wikipedia articles and Wikimedia Commons. The tool is not fully automated to avoid false positives being linked, but the tool provides a great assistance.

As an active Supper Mapper and software engineer, I should start doing tools like this. Most of my edits in OSM are totally manual and for some use cases the impact is much more important when you automatize to make more efficient the time that you are contributing. In the short term, I will consider contributing as much as I can to this project.

GraphHopper Routing Engine - New Features, by Peter Karich

Peter gave a nice and clear presentation about GraphHopper, a powerful and fast Java library and web service for routing. The speaker explained the last improvements in the tool, as well as in the routing algorithms they use: Dijkstra, A*, Landmarks and Contraction Hierarchies. The talk included several demos calculating very quickly continental scale routes very fast and efficiently, including alternative routes.

Hikar - Augmented reality for hikers, by Nick Whitelegg

Another awesome project I discovered in FOSDEM. Nick explained the current status related to geospatial Augmented Reality (AR), tools are scarce and normally closed-source so he, as a developer and hiker, thought about a free tool to cover this gap: Hikar. It is an FOSS Android app aimed for outdoor and geographic AR, that overlays footpaths from OpenStreetMap on the camera feed and generates virtual signposts with relevant POIs around the user.

The talk described the technical complexities, the data related issues (elevation is critical) and problems related to the realism of the path and signpost placing. Very interesting and inspiring talk.

FOSDEM 2019 - Nick Whitelegg presenting Hikar - CC by-nc-sa License

Hundred thousand rides a day, by Ilya Zverev

I already attended and reviewed a talk by Ilya Zverev last year and I enjoyed it, and it was worthy again this year. Ilya explained how he is improving the routing algorithms of his current employer and at the same time he is detecting and fixing problems in OpenStreetMap. The main problem for OSM are sources, there are not so many (because of licensing problems) and they get old, so using only certain sources means that we are mapping the reality of yesterday instead of the world as of Today.

He created a set of tools to validate calculated routes, comparing them to the actual traject of the drivers. Using a basic code of colors is easy to check what streets are used in what direction, what turns are abnormally avoided, etc. With this tool, they can notice very fast changes like blocked roads with constructions or reversed streets (temporal or definitive). In order to have reliable data the tracks are as fresh as possible.

FOSDEM 2019 - Ilya Zverev with a visualization of gpx tracks in different colors depending on the angle - CC by-nc-sa License

He gave some ideas for himself or for others to start similar projects: checking highway classification, missing turn restrictions, speed limits, etc.

Open Source Geolocation, by Zeeshan Ali

Zeeshan explained the history of GeoClue, an open source geolocation service for GNU/Linux. The talk was focused on the main challenges they faced and how they addressed the privacy issues related to share the users’ location with other applications.

OpenStreetMap for emergency prep: The view from San Francisco, by Stefano Maffulli

Stefano moved to San Francisco some years ago with his wife, and they were scared about the next earthquake. The found there a lot of people with the same concerns and some organizations providing support for this. For example the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT), a group of civilians that take lessons from the fire fighters about how to spot and use water hydrants or police call boxes, to locate the nearest hospitals or schools, or to avoid places with hazardous materials like car repair shops, construction sites or gas stations.

They used OpenStreetMap as the base for emergency related preparations, as almost everything is mapped or can be mapped in OSM.They improved the map data related to the Emergency Response tasks using trained NERT volunteers, so they could even research the most and lest vulnerable neighborhoods in the city. They are now adding additional features related to other catastrophes like heat or cold waves.

FOSDEM 2019 - Stefano Maffulli presenting his OSM based project for emergency preparation - CC by-nc-sa License

Very interesting project, even for non preppers.

OpenTrailView 360, FOSS StreetView for hikers, by Nick Whitelegg

Nick again on stage to explain another interesting project, OpenTrailView 360 a FOSS StreetView application for hikers. He explained how the tool started in 2010, the problems he faced to gather proper images and how he resumed the project in 2013 when the Sphere pictures appeared in Android phones and this last version (OTV 360) born in 2018 after the appearance of affordable 360 degree cameras.

Nick explained the challenges he faced and the tools he could use from the FOSS community: Mapillary for street-level imagery, GeoJSON Path Finder for client-side in-browser routing, and Pannellum to display the panoramas in the browser. The demo that Nick showed us was very promising, another project to follow closely.

2019 - Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances, by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall

The closing keynote was delivered by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, a software and hardware freedom advocate, developer since 1969 and the current Board Chair of the Linux Professional Institute.

2019 not only marks the 50th anniversary of Unix, but also the 50th of the ArpaNet/Internet and the Apollo 11 Moon landing. ‘maddog’ summarized the evolution of Unix, Linux and the Free Software movement in those 50 years in a hilarious but interesting way. A packed full Janson auditorium enjoyed the jokes a lot, so it was a great way to to compensate the sadness of leaving FOSDEM again.

FOSDEM 2019 - Jon 'maddog' Hall in the closing keynote - CC by-nc-sa License

And that’s all. See you in Brussels in 2020 for the 20th anniversary of FOSDEM!!

FOSDEM 2019: Saturday

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a week since I returned from another intense and thought-provoking weekend in Brussels, although it still feels like it was just yesterday. This year, apart from attending FOSDEM (as I intend to do every year) I took a very early flight on Friday to visit new (for me) places in the city. In just one day I visited the European Parliament Hemicycle, the House of European History, the Parlamentarium and the Museum of Natural Sciences. My most productive Friday in months, for sure.

FOSDEM 2019 poster - CC BY-NC-SA License

I already wrote about it in previous years:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday, Saturday and Sunday
FOSDEM 2018: Saturday and Sunday

The numbers of this 2019 edition speak for themselves, improving all the figures from 2018:

more than 8,000 attendees in only two days
730 speakers in 788 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
63 tracks in 47 different rooms
more than 400 hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
65 stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, Python Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, OSI, the Eclipse Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, O’Reilly, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, VideoLAN, Mozilla, …

FOSDEM 2019 - CC BY-NC-SA License

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended (in chronological order):

Talks

Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today?, by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler

Bradley and Karen are the President and the Executive Director respectively of Software Freedom Conservancy. They focused on people like themselves (and me) that seek to use only free software in our daily tasks, and the compromises that we sometimes need to do in order to achieve certain goals.

Karen explained her concern when she had to put herself an implantable defibrillator with proprietary code inside, with no access to the code even if the manufacturer somehow recognized that it could cause trouble for pregnant women because their algorithms were not properly tined for that situations. She had to suffer some unnecessary electrical shocks during her pregnancy and could not do anything about it. Another common example they gave is about modern websites that force the users to activate JavaScript in order to load in your device complete applications with proprietary software on it.

Some use cases for the general public have several free alternatives but for others there is no alternative so the users are forced to use privative applications. The main call to action of this keynote was for all the open source developers to re-think and re-prioritize our collaborations to close this gap and improve our general freedom.

This was a good opening keynote, although knowing very well the speakers since a long time ago I expected more explicit suggestions (or accusations).

FLOSS, the Internet and the Future, by Mitchell Baker

Mitchell, Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, insisted in her keynote on some of the key messages from the previous one. She explained how a handful of organizations (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) are a clear threat to privacy and openness despite having their core codebase full of FLOSS software.

She showed some of the projects that Mozilla is offering to increase the privacy rights of the users, for example the Facebook Container extension that isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of the web so they are not able to track you everywhere.

She also commented an experiment, trying to track every advertisement that appears in the web to see who is paying for that ad (someone is paying, always) and why this ad is being showed to you. Is it because I’m a man? Is it because of my age? Is it because of some specific behavior?

The keynote ended with some comments about the Addition Economy that rules the world in which we live and the effort that is still needed to fight against hate and violence in social networks. She explained how the rejection of those problems is part of the DNA of the FLOSS communities, and how we need to translate those values to the society using handy and attractive tools for users.

The classic OpenSUSE beer - CC by-nc-sa License

Blockchain: The Ethical Considerations, by Deb Nicholson

We hear a lot that Blockchain is the future but what kind of world do we want to see blockchain make? We no longer live in a world where we can forget or ignore the consequences and the social impact of our work. Deb explained some of the most controversial aspects of this technology:

Do the upsides (transparency, distributed control, etc.) compensate the downsides?
Will Blockchain just make the richest people richer?
If not all the contracting parties understand or can even read the contract… is it legitimate enough?
What will happen if a corporation or group of them owns the majority of the nodes?
Can we maintain this using just solar powered energy?

Mattermost’s Approach to Layered Extensibility in Open Source, by Corey Hulen

Corey, CTO and co-founder of Mattermost, explained how their platform enables extensibility by their users. He claimed that almost 100% of what you see in the UI is accessible via standard REST API calls. Another important aspect to enable extensibility is that the complete data model is open enabling easy load, extraction and manipulation. Client side customizations for the interfaces, extensible APIs, incoming and outgoing webhooks and powerful plugins.

I expected more architectural contents but the talk was clear and very detailed so I learned a couple of nice concepts anyway.

GDPR and the right to data portability, by Laurent Chemla

The right to data portability was intended as a way to enforce competition and to give back to the public some control over their personal data, but it fails in both situations. The regulation does not include a standard implementation or interface so everyone is dealing with this in a different way.

Some of the usual suspects (Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft among others) created in 2017 the Data Transfer Project (DTP) to create an open-source data portability platform, maybe it’s time for a public and central organization to take over the project in order to set it as a global standard.

Enough: How journalism can benefit from free software, by Veronika Nad

Enough is a set of tools, cloud-based or self-hosted, as well as a community composed of technical people and journalists to empower journalists and Human Rights Defenders when protecting their privacy and their sources.

It provides an easy to use platform for non technical people to securely share any kind of data, typically a leak for a global audience. It is linkable from other platforms to serve as a common source, making it possible for anyone to communicate (if needed) securely and confidentially with the source of the data leak. It also includes training contents to teach the participants how to use PGP, TOR, VPNs and similar stuff.

I will consider contributing to the platform, at least to improve the website they have using Hugo.

The clusterfuck hidden in the Kubernetes code base, by Kris Nova

I am not a Kubernetes expert but I learned a lot in this talk. The speaker explained in a pleasant and concise way all the anti-patterns that are present in the Kubernetes code base.

Java Language Futures, by Brian Goetz

Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explained in a fast but clear way all the new features that are coming to the Java Language. He briefly explained the new release cadence (releases every 6 months), project Amber, Valhalla, Loom or Panama to focus later into the details of some relevant improvements.

I want to highlight the enhancements in the switch (preview feature for v12), patten matching and value types.

OpenJDK Governing Board Q&A, by Mark Reinhold, Georges Saab, Doug Lea, John Duimovich and Andrew Haley

As usual in FOSDEM, the complete OpenJDK Governing Board offered themselves for an open Q&A session. Georges Saab (Chair, Oracle), John Duimovich (Vice Chair, IBM), Mark Reinhold (OpenJDK Lead, Oracle), Prof. Doug Lea (SUNY Oswego) and Andrew Haley (Red Hat) kindly answered all the questions from the audience.

I will summarize my Sunday experience in FOSDEM as soon as possible, but this article is already long enough to be published.

Stay tuned!!!

My Year 2018 in Games

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome again to this yearly post, where I try to analyze my gaming behavior during the previous year. I have been doing this since 2011 in Spanish, but this time I will do it in English as with the rest of my posts. You can read about my previous years (in Spanish):

Evolution of my game plays over the last years
	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	Total since 2006
Total amount of plays	101	84	98	84	81	117	161	1039
Different games played	61	72	55	71	52	81	80	397
Games with 2 or more plays (in the year)	14	9	15	13	14	19	40	175
Amount of gaming sessions	43	36	35	30	44	41	36	365

Games played per year until the end of 2018 - CC BY-NC-SA License

Analysis

In this yearly post I used to include a graph with the games played by month, but it turned more or less complex and meaningless as the trend was clear year by year. I tend to play more or less the same along the year with some peaks in the gaming conventions.
In 2018 I went back to the 2016 numbers in amount of plays, with a higher amount of different games played.
I’ve played 61 different games this year, 41 of them were totally new (to me). A very high proportion.
I recorded 43 gaming sessions, almost 4 per month.
Again, in 2018 I have zero hours recorded in the Steam platform. I miss it and I will give it some priority in 2019.
My h-index as a player is still at 11. Reading carefully the data, I expect to go up at least one level in the next period, as I have several games near the h-index frontier.

Retrospective

I still enjoy a lot playing boardgames, role playing games and video games so I will keep this as one of my main leisure activities for 2019
In January 2018 we finished Pandemic Legacy Season 1 the campaign we started back in 2016, but after that I haven’t played any other legacy game. I still love cooperative games and I would not reject starting one with a stable playing group, maybe the recently announced Journeys in the Middle Earth?
I am becoming addicted to escape room inspired board games. In 2018 I have played several Unlock! and Exit and for 2019 my goal is to play all the published games of those two families
I managed (with my party and DM) to maintain since March a monthly Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign, and I only missed one session because of a trip. That is very good news for me and for the entire group, we are enjoying it a lot so we will hopefully continue with the same frequency and passion.
I’m still eager to play prototypes, but since early 2018 I am no longer a member of Asociación Ludo. I was not involved at all so, although I miss some of my colleagues there, I decided to leave after realizing that the association does not benefit from me if I’m only providing economic support. I will consider returning when I’m capable of offering more :-(

My Year 2018 in Books

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2018 in Books from Goodreads:

I read 7,224 pages across 56 books, a 112% of my 50 books read in 2018 goal
The average length was 129 pages
My average rating was 3.7 (up to 5)
The longest book I read was Patria, by Fernando Aramburu

The amount of works is not very important (because some of the 56 are comics or short stories) but still 56 books means almost 5 books per month, that translates to one book per week approximately. Not bad, taking into account the other million things that I do (or intend to do) every week.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

I have included in the ranking three books by Juan Gómez Jurado, including the Top 1, so he deserves to be in the featured image of the post obtained from La Opinión de Málaga.

I’m currently reading El Emblema del Traidor also by Juan but when I finish it I will begin my 2019 reading again books by or about J.R.R. Tolkien. I miss it.

My TOP 10 read books in 2018

Reina Roja by Juan Gomez-Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck (you can read my review here in the blog)
Patria by Fernando Aramburu (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (you can read my review in English in Goodreads)
El rayo que no cesa by Miguel Hernández (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Poeta en Nueva York by Federico García Lorca (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Espía de Dios by Juan Gomez-Jurado
Ndura: Hijo de la selva by Javier Salazar Calle (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Contrato con Dios by Juan Gomez-Jurado
Intemperie by Jesús Carrasco (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)

Travels With Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Travels with Charley: In Search of America is mainly what they call a travelogue o travel literature. It’s not the first time that I read one and I’m starting to enjoy the genre. I added this one to my want to read in Goodreads a long time ago after reading some hilarious paragraphs during a couple of English lessons, and the rest of the book had not disappointed me at all.

John Steinbeck and Charley

In 1960, a 58 years old John Steinbeck bought a small camper to drive around the United States with his dog (Charley). He called the camper Rocinante (here you have a picture of it), the perfect name for a saddle in which to go on adventures. He said before the book was published:

I was advised that the name Rocinante painted on the side of my truck in sixteenth-century Spanish script would cause curiosity and inquiry in some places. I do not know how many people recognized the name, but surely no one ever asked about it.

The book was published in 1962 and Steinbeck died just six years later. Reading this book you can somehow perceive his age, obviously regarding his health condition but also because he didn’t care about others reading what he wrote or did. When he started the arrangements for the trip, everyone tried to persuade him to abandon the idea because it’s age and chronic disease, but he felt he needed the trip and that it was now or never.

During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap. Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

The purpose of the trip was to get to know again his country and, in my opinion, as a way to say goodbye to several places, essential locations for him in the past. This quote summarizes his motivations:

For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago, or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal. My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years.

Steinbeck beautifully describes his feelings about the places or about the people he encountered, and that is what makes this book remarkable. He takes advantage of the trip circumstances to give his opinion on the social and political issues of 1960: decisive election year between Nixon and Kennedy, the embarrassing (even on those days for him) racial issues in the southern states and the cold war against the Soviet Union, just to give some examples.

As one can imagine reading the book, and it was confirmed some years after the publication, some of the dialogues during his encounters are purely fictional as a mean for the author to describe a situation or a way of thinking of the folks he encountered. Part of the magic resides in guessing which ones are more or less distant from his real experiences. He even describes the approach as a disclaimer:

I've always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.

The book contains dozens of brilliant quotes, some of them with a beautiful and intense description that mentally transfers the reader to a certain American landscape:

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.

You cannot use this book to prepare a similar trip, or to discover any of the places that he visited. He also wrote about it in the last part of the book, as a retrospective of what he finally ended writing, in one of my favorite quotes of the book:

If an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear what I heard, their stored pictures would be not only different from mine but equally different from one another. If other Americans reading this account should feel it true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americanness. From start to finish I found no strangers. If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively. But these are my people and this my country. If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself. If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

I really liked this book, and for sure I’ll try to read more from Steinbeck.

FOSDEM 2018: Sunday

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After an interesting Saturday, finished with a great dinner with some friends in one of our favorite restaurants in Brussels, my Sunday at FOSDEM started again very early.

FOSDEM 2018

My choices for the Sunday were again diverse and (in most cases) successful. Apart from the closing keynotes, I spent some time in the Legal and Policy Issues devroom, a couple of talks in the HPC, Big Data, and Data Science devroom and half the afternoon in the Geospatial devroom.

Before continuing, if you want to read my summary of the previous day you can follow this link: FOSDEM 2018: Saturday. You will also find there general info and details about the event itself.

Let me summarize:

Talks

Capture the GDPR with Identity management, by Juraj Benculak

This first talk was a bit disappointing. The intro about GDPR took most of the talk, and I bet that almost all of us who where there at 9am in a Sunday knew what GDPR is.

The recommendations for GDPR arrived very late. The speaker made a brief overview of how you can benefit from a nice data mapping and data governance, and how good it is to observe privacy by default and by design. Then, he introduced Identity Management as the ideal tool for the job demonstrating the lawfulness of all the data processing. The fact that he develops Identity Management software has something to do with it, of course.

Artificial intelligence dealing with the right to be forgotten, by Cristina Rosu

The next talk in the Legal and Policy devroom was luckily more interesting, but again the title was misleading. Most of the talk was an intro to the right to be forgotten, including an overview of all the relevant legal cases starting with the Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González. Cristina Rosu complemented the legal intro with some metrics about GDPR compliance in some countries.

Some statistics on deletion for GDPR compliance

In the last slides, the only part related to Artificial Intelligence, the speaker commented some possible approaches to enhance the right to be forgotten in the AI environment: Obfuscation strategies, data minimization, personal data stores, algorithmic transparency or ethical boards inside companies.

Behind the scenes of a FOSS-powered HPC cluster, Ansible or Salt? Ansible AND Salt!, by Damien François

The speaker, as a systems engineer, is responsible of the automation of a medium-sized HPC infrastructure at the Louvain University. The purpose of his talk, quite interesting, was to advocate for the use of similar tools at the same time, instead of using the same tool for everything. Some features overlap, but he claimed that each tool can be more powerful in certain tasks, and separating tools also helps in defining responsibilities.

They use Cobbler to install and deploy Operating Systems and set-up hardware specific configuration, Ansible for one-off operations (setup RSA keys, register node to services or prepare config files) and Salt for daily management (configure system, install admin software or mount the user filesystem).

He ended comparing Ansible and Salt, reviewing the best characteristics of each of them as you can see in the picture that I took:

What the speaker loves about Ansible and Salt

How DeepLearning can help to improve geospatial DataQuality, an OSM use case, by Olivier Courtin

The speaker started his talk reviewing some of the Quality Assurance tools available in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, being the main ones: Keep Right, Osmose, OSM Inspector and Maproulette. The problem of them, and I know it very well because I’ve used them a lot, is that the detection can be automatic but only sometimes the tool is able to provide fix suggestions or a standard correction guide, and eventually all the corrections need to be done manually by a mapper (like me).

The premise of the talk was about using other datasets to highlight inconsistencies and, potentially, to predict some characteristics not present in the map using DeepLearning and satellite imagery. The results that he showed were impressive, but he also showed that a lot of work needs to be done in order to have enough quality to consider a more automated approach for Quality Assurance in OSM.

Completeness in OpenStreetMap starts by detecting inconsistencies as soon and as detailed as possible.

Applying DeepLearning techniques to improve OpenStreetMap

Re-structuring a giant, ancient code-base for new platforms, by Michael Meeks

After some interesting networking in the stands, I entered this talk with low expectations. I did not regret it because it was very interesting.

The talk was about the huge refactor that was needed in the codebase of LibreOffice to make it work in the Cloud. The speaker explained clearly why they needed to re-structure at all, the main problems that they faced (Windows and Linux rendering APIs) and how they solved critical issues like extreme coupling and threads management.

The summary of the talk in a quote is: “Fix each bug only once”. What a great statement.

Re-structuring LibreOffice

Building Rock Climbing Maps with OpenStreetMap, by Viet Nguyen

This was my first talk in the Geospatial devroom, it was somehow inspiring despite I can’t say that I learned a lot. The speaker explained that, as a rock climbing lover, he couldn’t find good data regarding climbing routes, walls and sectors so he started introducing that information himself in OpenStreetMap. He summarized his experience, the decisions that he had to take, and how he is trying to get more contributors for his project: OpenBeta.

Building OSM based web app from scratch, by Nils Vierus

I could imagine that this talk was going to be very basic and I guessed right, but I wanted to stay in the devroom for the next talks so I stayed in the room retaining my seat.

The speaker made a general overview about Programming languages to build an OSM based web app, IDEs, mapping libraries, OSM data retrieval tools, routing tools and even version control systems. Good introduction to the topic from a good speaker but I’m not sure if this kind of talks should have a place in FOSDEM.

Privacy aware city navigation with CityZen app, by Redon Skikuli

The speaker was nice and funny, but again the talk was not very advanced. It was more interesting when he talked about the Open Hackerspace that he collaborates with in Tirana (Albania) than the part related to the CitiZen App. The claim that the app is privacy aware is very limited. They just don’t keep your navigation data but in the end whenever they ask for the location of the user, an Android device stores the location anyway (directly or when requesting the nearest POIs).

As a nice addition, CitiZen allows the users to modify or insert the POIs retrieved from OSM by editing them inside the app.

Every subway network in the world, by Ilya Zverev

This talk was refreshing and reconciled me with the geospatial devroom. Ilya (software engineer at Maps.me) explained how he ended building the offline subway navigation feature for Maps.me. As he explained, when they started reviewing the available data in OpenStreetMap related to subways they realized that the information was very poor and incomplete. For example there was no way to map properly the connections between lines.

He started building a validator and then station by station, city by city, he improved the subway information in OSM. He even presented a proposal for the subway geospatial information, including new relations for the transfers.

Subway stations schema in OpenStreetMap, according to Ilya Zverev

The story of UPSat, Building the first open source software and hardware satellite, by Pierros Papadeas

One of the most inspiring talks of the entire FOSDEM with a packed full Janson Room (with capacity for 1415 people).

The speaker explained how during 2016, the Libre Space Foundation a non-profit organization developing open source technologies for space, designed, built and delivered UPSat, the first open source software and hardware satellite.

Pierros Papadeas explaining the UPSat design and building process

He explained with some detail how he got involved, the current status of the project, the design, construction, verification, testing and delivery processes, etc. You should consider watching the video :-)

Exploiting modern microarchitectures, Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks, by Jon Masters

The closing keynote was given by Jon Masters (Computer Architect at Red Hat) about Meltdown and Spectre, as he was tech lead for mitigation efforts against them in Red Hat. Jon was surprisingly capable of explaining in less than 50 minutes what are those vulnerabilities about, how they were possible in the first place and what are the consequences of avoiding them. I already knew most of it but Jon made it even clearer for me, and surely for the rest of the audience given the applause he received.

It was specially amusing for me, as I’ve been refreshing my knowledge about the Tomasulo Algorithm these past months.

Microcode, Millicode and Chicken bits

And that’s all. See you in Brussels for FOSDEM 2019!!

FOSDEM 2018: Saturday

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After an uncertain landing a few hours ago (the airport in Madrid was barely working due to a snowy morning), I’ve just arrived home but instead of having some rest after an intense and though-provoking FOSDEM I felt the urge to start writing about my weekend in Brussels.

I’ve been there not only to enjoy this wonderful city with its trappist beers and great food, but specially to attend FOSDEM as I intend to do every year.

FOSDEM 2018

For those of you who don’t know FOSDEM, it’s the biggest conference in Europe (and one of the biggest around the world) related to Open Source development. It’s a huge event with hundreds of talks, workshops, gatherings and stands from all the relevant projects and communities in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ecosystem. It’s also a marvelous place to do networking, because there are not only representatives of those projects but normally also the technical leaders of them. If you are good with faces (or with voices, like @lekum!) you can meet and greet a lot of important and interesting people.

I already wrote about it a couple of years ago, when I even gave a lightning talk in one FOSDEM Fringe event the Floss Community Metrics Meeting (FCM2).

The numbers of this year speak for themselves:

more than 8,000 attendees in only two days
652 speakers in 690 different events (talks or workshops, mainly)
57 tracks in 33 different rooms
more than 350 hours of content, almost all of the events are available online with live streaming during the conference
56 stands of all kinds of projects: FSFE, Python Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, OSI, the Eclipse Foundation, O’Reilly, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian KDE, Gnome, LibreOffice, VLC, Jenkins, Perl, …

FOSDEM 2018

As usual, let me summarize some of the talks that I attended:

Talks

Consensus as a Service, Twenty Years of OSI Stewardship, by Simon Phipps and Italo Vignoli

The Open Source label was born in February 3rd 1998, so we celebrated its 20th Anniversary during the opening day of FOSDEM 2018. Simon (President of the OSI) summarized the evolution of the Open Source environment in the last two decades, also guessing what are going to be the main challenges for the Free Open Source Software for it’s third decade.

He remarked that Open Source (OS) projects should not have a business model, the companies that uses those OS projects are the ones that need a realistic business model. I totally agree with this, OS projects can be relevant and positive for the society in a lot more ways than profitability of the founders. Open Source allows software users and developers to advance in their software freedom at work as well as in private.

He labeled the first decade (1998-2008) the decade of Advocacy & Controversy. We all still remember when in 2001 Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft said “Linux is a cancer” (although now apparently he loves it), or in 2005 when UNIX was made Open Source, or 2007 when Java was also made Open Source. In the beginning most OS was a proprietary replacement, but at the end of the decade everyone understood OS as a benefit.

Simon labeled the second decade (2008-2018) the decade of Adoption and Ascendancy, with three main aspects: broad enterprise adoption, problems with software patents and GPL enforcement. Since 2008 most hidden infrastructure is based in OS, since 2011 OS enabled the web service business era, since 2013 the OS is powering the cloud/containers revolution, … to the point that nowadays we can realize that Open Source is at the heart of most new software.

Simon quoted Eben Moglen and his “Licenses are Constitutions for Communities”, and explained that “Open Source licenses are the multilateral consensus of the permissions and norms for a Community”. That’s why it’s important to respect the licenses, and that explains why for the community any violation of the license it’s felt like an awful aggression.

Derived from the four essential freedoms of Free Software, Simon emphasized the real value of Open Source:

Innovate without needing to ask first
Start where others reached
Stay in control of your own resources
Share upkeep of your innovation
Influence global ecosystems
Be protected from others doing the same

Maybe my favorite talk this year. Don’t expect summaries as long as this one for other talks :-P

Cypher for Apache Spark (CAPS), by Martin Junghanns and Max Kießling

As part of Neo4J, the speakers explained why and how they created Cypher for Apache Spark (CAPS), to provide graph-powered data integration and graph analytical query workloads within the Apache Spark ecosystem. They presented the internal architecture, made a live demo with Spark and Apache Zeppelin and explained that CAPS is released as Open Source inside OpenCypher.

The Computer Science behind a modern distributed data store, by Michael Hackstein (@mchacki)

The first thing that Michael Hackstein (ArangoDB) explained was that he was replacing the original speaker (Max Neunhoeffer, that couldn’t attend for personal reasons), but in the end he gave a great talk about a complex topic, being clear and precise. Anyone could notice that the substitute speaker knew the subject perfectly.

Michael explained the main challenges when building or using a modern distributed data store. He started with an important advice: “The first law of distributed data is… don’t distribute data” :-) Having said that, he clarified that sometimes you cannot avoid it because you need to scale and/or you need to be resilient.

In a distributed system different parts need to agree on things (consensus) but it’s not always easy because the network has outages, drops, delays or duplicates packages, any disk fails or even an entire rack fails. He explained the basics of Consensus, as explained originally in the Paxos Consensus Protocol (1998) and later in Raft.

Another important thought was related to sorting. Most published algorithms are nowadays poorly efficient because the problem is no longer the comparison computations but the data movement between data stores. He explained Log Structure Merge Trees (LSM-trees) as a possible solution.

He also summarized other problems like the synchronization of machines (mitigated with Hybrid Logical Clocks) and Distributed ACID transactions, only supported as off today by Google Spanner (because they have the money to use atomic clocks) and Cockroach DB an Open Source clone of Spanner that achieved it without atomic clocks.

Log structured merge trees (LSM-trees)

Digital Archaeology, Maintaining our digital heritage, by Steven Goodwin (@MarquisdeGeek)

Steven Goodwin is the founder of the Digital Heritage, a (let me quote) “plan to collate the learnings and knowledge of computer systems from 1975 onwards so that students of technology and scholars of the future can understand how they work, how to use them, and how they affected the culture of the 20th century”.

He explained how in a few years time it will be difficult or even impossible to study retro-computers given the fact that its software is either proprietary, closed-source, written in an obsolete programming language or protected to prevent copying. Not only this, the hardware is also failing, the magnetic devices are no longer storing the information and so on.

After raising awareness of the problem, he also gave several recommendations and methods necessary to preserve our legacy using emulations, mainly based in Open Source projects.

JVM startup: why it matters to the new world order, by Daniel Heidinga

In the old world order the deployments were infrequent so the startup time was a very small fraction of the total up time. Now in the new world with CI/CD systems, microservice or serverless architectures controlling the startup time is essential. This topic is very hot right now.

Daniel (OpenJ9 Project Lead) explained the problem and provided possible solutions inside the JVM, focusing mainly in the use of OpenJ9’s SharedClasses.

OpenJ9 startup sequence

Class Metadata: A User Guide, by Andrew Dinn

Andrew Dinn (Red Hat Open JDK) explained clearly what is the Class Metadata and why it matters inside the JVM. He also gave some real-life use cases to explain how design decisions can incur or avoid Class Metadata costs.

Java's Metaspace Constant Pool Objects

Java in a World of Containers, by Mikael Vidstedt and Matthew Gilliard

Mikael (Director of the JVM group at Oracle) and Matthew (also from Oracle) explained that Oracle is focused on maintaining Java as the main language in the containers ecosystem thanks to, according to them, some of its characteristics:

Managed language/runtime
Hardware and operating system agnostic
Safety and Security enforced by the JVM
Reliable as compatibility is a key design goal
Runtime adaptive
Rich ecosystem

Also related to reducing the startup time and footprint needed, they also explained how (using the modular system of Java 9) creating custom JREs allows you to reduce the size of the JDK needed inside the Docker container. A full JDK weights around 568 MB, the java.base module just 46 MB and a reasonable set of modules with complete capabilities could be around 60 MB. It can be further optimized using jlink –compress but it’s a trade-off between size and compressing/uncompressing effort.

After reducing the JDK layer of a container, the next battle is in the operating system layer. They announced and presented OpenJDK Portola Project, a port of the JDK to use Alpine Linux (the base image weights just 4 MB) and the musl C library. Very impressive.

OpenJDK Portola Project

Class Data Sharing, Sharing Economy in the HotSpot VM, by Volker Simonis

Volker (SAP) introduced Class Data Sharing (CDS), explained clearly the implementation details and finally he demonstrated it’s advantages in some use cases.

Class Representation in the HotSpot VM

Hairy Security, the many threats to a Java web app, by Romain Pelisse and Damien Plard

Romain (Red Hat) and Damien (Solaris Bank) gave a fun and instructive talk about security, challenging some myths.

They reminded us that it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ you’ll be hacked.

If you want to read my summary of the next day you can follow this link: FOSDEM 2018: Sunday.

On being a Senior Software Engineer

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For many different reasons I have had to discuss quite a lot recently about the professionalism of some people, technical and non-technical. Sometimes, because a person feels that she (I will use the feminine as neutral gender) is not being treated fairly with respect of her category, or because her performance is disappointing for others, sometimes after unfair comparisons between colleagues, … As a common element, a diabolical concept was almost always being misused in these situations: Seniority.

Having several years of experience does not make you a better engineer per se. A very common case is that someone has experience with something but knows nothing (or knows little) about everything else. Worse than that, in some organizations the senior label is even used almost automatically to justify a promotion or a salary raise after a certain amount of years in the same job.

About 5 years ago John Allspaw (former CTO at Etsy) wrote an article called On Being a Senior Engineer that has aged very well. I would sign that article today, as it details perfectly what could be the differences between a senior engineer and a mature engineer. As the author says, you can expect a senior engineer to be a mature engineer, but sadly it’s not always like this.

In his article (I recommend its complete reading) Allspaw describes a list of traits or characteristics of mature engineers:

Mature engineers seek out constructive criticism of their designs
Mature engineers understand the non-technical areas of how they are perceived
Mature engineers do not shy away from making estimates, and are always trying to get better at it
Mature engineers have an innate sense of anticipation, even if they don’t know they do
Mature engineers understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work
Mature engineers lift the skills and expertise of those around them
Mature engineers make their trade-offs explicit when making judgments and decisions
Mature engineers don’t practice CYAE (“Cover Your Ass Engineering”)
Mature engineers are empathetic
Mature engineers are aware of cognitive biases

The first thing that you need to realize is that almost all the characteristics described are non-technical. Allspaw article can be can be summarized in this quote:

Being able to write a Bloom Filter in Erlang, or write multi-threaded C in your sleep is insufficient. None of that matters if no one wants to work with you. Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes

If I had to choose, I’ll always pick a mature engineer over any so-called senior (or even ninja!) in a particular technology or programming language. In fact, I would not change a good junior for a ninja, but that is another story that will have to be told in another moment.

ING Security Summer Camp 2017

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I had the huge pleasure to participate in a week-long Security Summer Camp organized by the Information Security department of ING Spain. The agenda was very promising and implied some theory and lots of practice, ending with an Escape the Room game and a 2,5 days long Capture The Flag hacking competition. Several speakers from the Infosec Squad prepared talks and workshops about different topics, focusing on Ethical Hacking, secure development, server hardening or OSINT.

Everything was perfectly prepared and organized. I’ll remark (as her colleagues also did) the invaluable effort of Martina Matarí (@da3n3rys) coordinating everything. She also prepared a talk, the Escape the Room and the CTF competition by herself. Thanks Martina and company, it was impressive!!

Let me also say that it’s worthy of praise for a company like ING to allow and promote this kind of events, held mostly in working hours for more than 70-80 participants.

Talks and Workshops

Sleeping with the Enemy: Ethical Hacking workshop

Beatriz Portela (@usr0000) gave a series of workshops focusing on the most common and basic vectors of attack, learning what a vulnerability is and how to take advantage of it.

Server hardening

Sergi Llorente explained how to protect a server from malicious attackers: DDoS prevention, firewall policies, optimal configurations, password and banning policies and even physical attacks prevention policies. Very complete, and ended with a contest asking all the audience to infiltrate a prepared virtual machine with a weak spot, retrieving the admin password and getting access to a console with admin rights on it.

Secure development

Daniel Medianero (@dmedianero) prepared a good combination of theory and practice regarding bad smells and vulnerabilities in code, both in backend and frontend. He even prepared an online survey for the audience to vote if a given code snippet presented a vulnerability and of what kind. It was very educational and entertaining.

Vicente Carreras (@vicentecarreras) checked if the attendees listened carefuly enough in Daniel’s talks with a contest by teams.

OSINT, don’t be part of it

Martina Matarí (@da3n3rys) talked about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), the danger it entails and what proactive methods exist to monitor it and specially to stop being a part of it.

Escape the Room

Sadly I couldn’t participate, but everyone said it was awesome.

Capture The Flag

I was enrolled in the CTF since I signed up for the Summer Camp, but after a hard week with a lot of issues (work related and not) I wasn’t sure if I was going to contribute properly to my team. All it took was for Martina to subtly insist and I forgot about the weariness and recovered my eagerness to participate. Anyway, I had plans to stay at home during the weekend.

For those who don’t know what a Capture The Flag is (in this context), I’ll copy the description from the cfttime.org site:

Capture the Flag (CTF) is a special kind of information security competitions. There are three common types of CTFs: Jeopardy, Attack-Defence and mixed.
Jeopardy-style CTFs has a couple of questions (tasks) in range of categories. For example, Web, Forensic, Crypto, Binary or something else. Team can gain some points for every solved task. More points for more complicated tasks usually. The next task in chain can be opened only after some team solve previous task. Then the game time is over sum of points shows you a CTF winer. Famous example of such CTF is DEF CON CTF quals.

Well, attack-defence is another interesting kind of competitions. Here every team has own network (or only one host) with vulnarable services. Your team has time for patching your services and developing exploits usually. So, then organizers connects participants of competition and the wargame starts! You should protect own services for defence points and hack opponents for attack points. Historically this is a first type of CTFs, everybody knows about DEF CON CTF - something like a World Cup of all other competitions.

Mixed competitions may vary possible formats. It may be something like wargame with special time for task-based elements (like UCSB iCTF).

CTF games often touch on many other aspects of information security: cryptography, stego, binary analysis, reverse engeneering, mobile security and others. Good teams generally have strong skills and experience in all these issues.

The participation on this competition was lower than for the rest of the Summer Camp, as expected taking place in the weekend. From my team (randomly selected from all participants) we were only two of us left. I didn’t know my partner, but that didn’t stop us from organizing ourselves quickly to start solving problems from the same Friday evening. From the beginning I discovered that my partner was a bright and hard working guy, and soon we understood each other very well (Jaume eres un crack).

The challenge was a Jeopardy-style CTF and consisted on solving tasks with difficulties from 1 to 5 distributed in several categories. Each solved task represented a conquered country (as you can see in the map). Optionally, the first team to conquer a country gets more points than the rest. The categories where:

Criptography - cryptography tests, from basic to advanced ones
Forensics - Forensic analysis from network logs, mobile images and other operating systems
Quiz - Questions about hacker culture
Reconnaissance - Searching for people, machines, websites or data starting only with small hints
Reverse engineering - Cracking several kinds of files
Steganography - Finding hidden messages in known file formats
Web Hacking - Putting into practice what was learned during the ethical hacking talks

I won’t spoil here any of the tasks, I’ll only say that for a level 2 cryptography task I spent around 3-4 hours on Sunday. It took me several steps with different types of encryption (which you had to guess) to get the final result (with great relief and joy). There are a lot of examples in the Internet and for some of them you can even find the solution published by a participant.

It was thrilling, very very funny and I learned a lot. The other participants had very good level and competition was fierce. We struggled to lead the scoreboard almost all the tournament, we managed to solve almost all the tasks to avoid a comeback from our pursuers and finally WE WON! Go StarHack Team!!!

Here you have the Final Scoreboard. It can be observed that there was scoring activity during almost all the weekend, nights included. Kudos for all the participants :-)

ING CTF 2017 - Final Scoreboard - CC BY-NC-SA License

The prize for the winners (I discovered it on Monday, I did not care during the contest) was a fabulous Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Pack. Now I have three different Raspi devices so I need ideas, I’m taking advantage of one of them only :-)

FOSDEM 2016: Sunday

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I attended FOSDEM in Brussels last January. I should have written this weeks ago but better late than ever, right?

FOSDEM 2016 - CC BY-NC-SA License

You can read about the rest of my FOSDEM here:

As a retrospective, I attended a lot of talks and almost all of them were very interesting, but looking back now I realize that I should've spent more time in the stands and aisles. I expected to do networking when forced by room capacity issues, but luckily we never suffered this problem despite attending some overcrowded talks (with a lot of people having to stay outside). Perhaps it wasn't so bad, because even so I spent a lot of money on textile products :-D

Our FOSDEM Sunday ended being much like the day before. A large majority of the talks I attended were in the Legal and Policy Issues track.

Let me summarize:

Building a geo-aware Operating System, by Zeeshan Ali (@zeenix, Gnome developer, Red Hat). I was very thrilled with this talk, but it didn't meet my expectations. Zeeshan (and others) have developed great tools for the Gnome desktop: geoclue, geocode-glib and the integration with GNOME Maps seemed great, but I expected some less obvious features (from the functional point of view, of course) than locating yourself on a map. Having said that, geo-awareness in mobile devices was a total revolution, and I'm sure sooner or later it'll also be strongly reflected in our desktops
Results of Google Summer of Code 2015 at OSGeo, by Anne Ghisla and Margherita Di Leo (Google Summer of Code tutors). Being a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation and an addicted mapper, I felt the need to attend this talk. It ended up being an enumeration of projects, without the necessary detail to make the explanation amusing or interesting. At least I recognize that they talked about GSoC with great enthusiasm, made me want to participate at some point
Open source foundations: threat or menace?, by Richard Fontana (@richardfontana, IP, Open Source and Patent lawyer at Red Hat). Mr Fontana gave us a very interesting and thought provoking talk. After a brief explanation about legal differences between 501(c)(3) vs. 501(c)(6) foundation types in the US (and why some Open Source foundations have chosen one or the other), he detailed his concerns about the work carried out by some foundations:
- Sometimes foundations drive to an illusion of property
- We have seen examples of foundations "artificially" prolonging the life of a project, which is not always positive
- Some Open Source projects receive legal support by foundations and liability protection, but he explained that it should only apply if the foundation is in charge of what the project (or volunteer) does. Sometimes foundations (like Apache Software Foundation or Eclipse Foundation) presume of the independence of their projects, and this is a contradiction
- Foundations serving only as right holders in trademark issues
- In some foundations there is not a clear barrier between business management and technical management, as it should be
- Sometimes, the amount of power inside a foundation is derived by the amount of money donated (in cash or man hours), this gives the message that the project from those foundations are for sale
JEP 243: Java-Level JVM Compiler Interface and what it can be used for, by Christian Thalinger (@christhalinger, Member of the HotSpot compiler team, Oracle). This was a very technical talk about how this JEP have changed the Compiler Interface, included into de JDK 9 repositories. Christian explained some of their goals: mainly examine and intercept JIT activity and record events related to the compilation
Status of safety-critical FOSS, by Jeremiah C. Foster (@miahfost). Back in the Legal DevRoom, Jeremiah gave us a very interesting talk starting with a lot of information about safety-critical software and why it is important that software freedom becomes more present in this context. He also discussed it may be even possible to certify GNU/Linux at a safety-critical level, and how copyleft should be mandatory given that it provides more transparency not only in the code itself but also in the entire development process. In GPLv3 licensed projects he explained some concerns about how the install info may require disclosure of the encryption keys used to sign a boot image. Another concern in the industry is that end users should not be able to modify embedded software in safety-critical systems.
Comparing codes of conduct to copyleft licenses, by Sumana Harihareswara (@brainwane, founder of Changeset Consulting). Sumana gave a very well argued speech without media support, leaving clues of a probable theatrical past (or present). The basic comparison was that, just like the GPL restricts some developer's freedom (about redistributing under an incompatible license) to protect all users' freedom to use, inspect or modify the code, in the same way Codes of Conduct restrict some people's behaviour to increase everyone's freedom. I share Sumana's point of view, also when she said that (I quote): we will make better software and have a greater impact if more people, and more different kinds of people, find our communities more appealing to work with
Who's afraid of the DCO and why you should help adopt the DCO for your project, by James Bottomley (@jejb_, Linux kernel SCSI subsystem Maintainer, Odin CTO). Another brilliant talk, with the added bonus that James used Impress.js :-D James presented DCO as an alternative to the popular CLAs. He explained why your project needs a contributor agreement in the first place, why Linux adopted the DCO ten years ago, and a lot of info about best practices and possible problems
Pick a peck of license pickers, An in-depth look at efforts to make choosing a license easy, by John Sullivan (@johns_fsf, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation). John did an interesting analysis of the current options to choose a software license, beginning with the claim that something has to be done because there are still a lot of projects without license but in a clever way to reduce the license proliferation. There are some guides (like the one the FSF itself has) which represent a significant barrier for most users. A lot of text with sometimes hard to understand differences between options. Apart from this approach, there are some popular tools like choosealicense.com from Github or the Creative Commons' license chooser, but they also present several problems. The options order is important, the descriptions may be misleading, summaries are not fair... The QA turn was also brilliant, given that Brandon Keepers (Open Source Lead in Github) was there to argue their position.
Putting 8 Million People on the Map: Revolutionizing crisis response through open mapping tools, by Blake Girardot (@BlakeGirardot, Vice President of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team). The Janson auditorium (with a capacity of 1415 people) was packed full for this closing keynote. Mr Girardot explained perfectly how open source tools have allowed a lot of contributors (including me!) to improve in a radical way our disaster preparedness as a global society. One of the recent examples: After the Nepal Earthquake in 2015, about 700 contributors using open source tools such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's Tasking Manager made more than 13 million edits to OpenStreetMap in the first two weeks after the earthquake. Impressive, isn't it? He also described other tools and projects like the OpenStreetMap Export Tool or the OpenAerialMap project, but as an active member of the OpenStreetMap group, I'll expand the information about this in future posts

See you in Brussels for FOSDEM 2017!!

FOSDEM 2016: Saturday

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I attended FOSDEM in Brussels last January. I should have written this weeks ago but better late than ever, right?

FOSDEM 2016 - CC BY-NC-SA License

After an interesting Friday (as I told you yesterday) our FOSDEM Saturday started early. I attended a couple of talks in the Free Java DevRoom, another couple about Open Source Design but surprisingly most of them were in the Legal and Policy Issues track.

This doesn't mean that this is what matters most to me now (and it matters, a lot), but surely there are other events to listen about containers, virtualisation, Java or Python. IMO, there's no better place than FOSDEM's Legal DevRoom to feel the pulse of the FOSS community.

Let me summarize:

The State of OpenJDK, by Mark Reinhold (@mreinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform, Oracle). The annual review by Mr. Reinholm here in FOSDEM. Main ideas:
- OpenJDK is growing with a lot of new projects (and not only commanded by Oracle)
- 9 main projects and more than 72 JEPs (in that moment) targeting JDK9, including JavaDoc.Next, search capability in Javadocs (powered by Javascript)
- Mark gave interesting tips about Valhalla Project, that may enable Java to have Classes without instances
- He also highlighted Panama Project, an improvement in the JNI to enrich connections between the Java VM and non-java APIs (mostly for C/C++)
This Is Not A Drill - Preparing for JDK 9, by Dalibor Topić (@robilad, OpenJDK Product Manager, Oracle) and Rory O’Donnell (OpenJDK Quality Manager, Oracle). A compilation of accumulated wisdom obtained by projects testing JDK9 early access builds. We already knew that, for the first time, JDK9 will not be fully backwards compatible so some tips about how to prepare your projects for JDK 9 were necessary. If you lead a Java project, you need to pay special attention to JEP 260 (internal APIs will be inaccesible), JEP 162 (removal of some deprecated methods), JEP 220 (changes in the binary structure of JRE and JDK), JEP 261 (the new module system) and JEP 223 (new version-string scheme)

Now listening to "This is not a drill - Preparing for JDK 9" #FOSDEM pic.twitter.com/RU9km0p6t5
— Esther Lozano (@esloho) January 30, 2016

Designing accessible applications, by Samuel Thibault (computer science assistant professor). Yet another talk about accessibility, I've attended a lot of them and sadly they tend to be the same talk again and again. An interesting thought was that the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states that if you (as a developer/company) don't make reasonable accommodations for disabled people, you are discriminating them
Blender as virtual studio lighting playground, by Tuomas Kuosmanen (@tigert, GIMP developer and artist). I attended this talk mostly to meet @tigert but also to see the actual status of Blender (I played with it for a while centuries ago). The talk was amusing but not very advanced, Tuomas told us about a POC he made to recreate a photography studio lightning set-up with blender
Copyleft For the Next Decade, by Bradley M. Kuhn (President at Software Freedom Conservancy and on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation). Perhaps my favourite talk of the day, Bradley is a great expert about Open Source and maybe the main Copyleft enforcer nowadays. He gave some tips to pursue software freedom, and how all of this is in danger if license violations are note enforced. Sadly, he said, given any open source project there's almost always a proprietary version forked from it. A famous example is Apple when they forked BSD. I leave you with an important thought: If Copyleft is not enforced, is there any difference?
Who controls your project? Governance in the real world, by Jesús M. Gonzalez-Barahona (@jgbarah, URJC professor and Bitergia co-founder). Jesús gave a very complete talk about metrics related to governance, and using Bitergia's tools he showed how it's possible to know interesting things about a project like:
- Who contributes? Not only individually, sometimes you want to know how they are affiliated
- How are the changes been reviewed? How are they fixing the tickets? Are we neutral?
- A project's Pony Factor: the lowest number of committers whose total contribution constitutes the majority of the codebase
- A project's Elephant Factor: just as the Pony Factor, but with companies
- Geographical diversity, gender diversity, ...

Full room at "Who controls your project?" @jgbarah talk!! Open Development Metrics for governance analysis #fosdem pic.twitter.com/Fd70nrqZey
— Bitergia (@Bitergia) January 30, 2016

TL;DR on legal strategy for commercial ventures, by James Shubin (@purpleidea, Engineer at Red Hat). James gave the audience a lot of recommendations on choosing a software license. He also explained how a lot of people mix up the concepts of proprietary license and commercial license. He remarked that Copyleft is also the best solution for any employer, because it protects them from a developer/s leaving the company and forking the project. He gave some other examples about how Copyleft has a lot of synergies with profit.

Loved first prediction by @purpleidea :) We are taking AGPLv3 seriously here! #FOSDEM2016 pic.twitter.com/tYkHJ7eAWm
— Taiga.io (@taigaio) January 30, 2016

Open Source is being ruined and it’s all our fault, by Brian Harrington (@brianredbeard). In the same line of the previous talk, RedBeard explained the good vs the bad ways to profit in Open Source. The good ones are mainly (no surprise here): Selling a "boxed" product, selling support or selling subscriptions

You can read about the rest of my FOSDEM here:

FOSDEM 2016: Friday

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I attended FOSDEM in Brussels last January. I should have written this weeks ago but better late than ever, right?

FOSDEM 2016 - CC BY-NC-SA License

As you may know if you are reading this, FOSDEM is a not to be missed event about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). By far, it is the most important gathering about FOSS in the planet. It's an unbeatable opportunity to attend great talks and workshops, but also to hang around with amazing people and top professionals.

The most impressive fact is that FOSDEM is organized by volunteers and everything is community driven, from each year tracks to their schedule. It's free to attend and there is no registration. You just need to show up :-)

This year, the usual huge numbers even increased (source: fosdem.org):

2 days
more than 8,000 attendees
52 tracks in 28 different rooms
569 speakers
618 events (talks, workshops, panels, ...)

Apart from the main event during the weekend and the official Friday Beer Event (the mythic Delirium Café overcrowded with hackers from around the world), each year there are dozens Fringe events around FOSDEM during the previous days, totally independent but also related to FOSS and communities.

I had the opportunity to give a lightning talk in one of those fringe events: the Floss Community Metrics Meeting (FCM2). Let me bring here their own description:

This meeting is intended to be an open venue for community managers, DevRel managers, and FLOSS community experts to present ideas, tools, and analysis that the FLOSS community is already doing with FLOSS platforms. It is open to discuss about collaboration, synergies, etc. It will be organized to foster discussion, but will also focus on development of new tools, improvement of existing ones, and how to spread the knowledge about what is being done and can be done in this area

My talk was about measuring health and ethics in programming languages, a brief version focusing on the metrics aspects of my talk in the last Codemotion event about Governance in programming languages.

Time for @luiyo 's lightning talk at @flossmetrics about measuring health and ethics of programming languages :D pic.twitter.com/tEBhbLZed7
— Esther Lozano (@esloho) January 29, 2016

Let me summarize some of the other talks:

Duane O'Brien (PayPal) talked about measuring velocity from the InnerSource point of view
Sumana Harihareswara (Changeset Consulting) explained some of the usual mistakes measuring FOSS projects. I loved (and will use!) her explanation of the lamppost fallacy
John Sullivan (Executive Director @ FSF) started explaining the FSF's mission ("all computer users must be able to do everything they need to do on any computer using only free software") and then how they use free software project metrics (even in non-software initiatives) to see if they progress towards their goal
Ioana Chiorean (Mozilla Rep Mentor) told us about Mozilla's representatives program, how they work and how they measure their progress
J. M. González-Barahona (Bitergia) showed us GrimoireLab, an impressive open source tool by Bitergia using (among other things) Perceval, Elastic Search, Python and Kibana
Donnie Berkholz (451 Research) about another common mistake, comparing communities and projects that shouldn't be compared between them (OS vs editors vs frameworks vs ...)
Dawn Foster (Univ. of Greenwich) showed us Gource, an impressive tool to visualize repos. I knew about it some years ago and it still has no rival in awesomeness, just look at this demo
Jos Poortvliet (ownCloud) explained how they analyse their metrics: code commiters, ticket participants, discussion participants and so on
Lauri Apple (Zalando) surprised me with Zalando's numbers: 17 million customers, +10,000 employees (+1,000 technologist) and more than 300 open source projects. Not so bad for an online fashion platform... She showed us Catwatch, their own open-source projects dashboard
Jose Manrique Lopez (Bitergia) showed us the evolution of Cauldron, another fantastic tool from Bitergia to display the metrics behind Github repositories
JJ Merelo (Univ. of Granada) described his problems with his own tool to rank Spanish users and repositories from Github
Christoph Wickert (Fedora Project) showed us HyperKitty, a django-based tool to replace Pipermail as the default archiver for Mailman. Looked like a gigantic step ahead of its predecessor
Kristof Van Tomme (Provonix) explained how they started with a tool to generate upgrade reports from Drupal sites in order to review the upgrade status of the site's modules, and ended with a daemon analyzing thousands of Drupal sites to get not only update reports, but lists of sites using a certain module, comparing modules and the demographic of their adoption and son on

TL;DR: it was worth it attending the event, totally, and not only because I was in the speaker roster (with excellent companions).

You can read about the rest of my FOSDEM here:

A Feast for Crows de George R.R. Martin

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: Apenas dispongo de tiempo para preparar (en condiciones) reseñas, pero no quiero dejar la costumbre de poner pequeños pasajes con la esperanza de conseguir atrapar nuevos lectores.

Espero que disfruten tanto como yo del siguiente fragmento de A Feast for Crows de George R.R. Martin. No contiene spoilers, pero sí da una buena idea del ambiente que se respira en la novela, el tono de este tomo me ha parecido especialmente pesimista y desolador (que ya es decir para Canción de Hielo y Fuego).

Crow-Black (and white) by Hamish Irvine,
from Flickr — CC BY-NC

Back on the road, the septon said, “We would do well to keep a watch tonight, my friends. The villagers say they’ve seen three broken men skulking round the dunes, west of the old watchtower.”

“Only three?” Ser Hyle smiled. “Three is honey to our swordswench. They’re not like to trouble armed men.”

“Unless they’re starving,” the septon said. “There is food in these marshes, but only for those with the eyes to find it, and these men are strangers here, survivors from some battle. If they should accost us, ser, I beg you, leave them to me.”

“What will you do with them?”

“Feed them. Ask them to confess their sins, so that I might forgive them. Invite them to come with us to the Quiet Isle.”

“That’s as good as inviting them to slit our throats as we sleep,” Hyle Hunt replied. “Lord Randyll has better ways to deal with broken men—steel and hempen rope.”

“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”

“More or less,” Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

“Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.

“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world...

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them. but he should pity them as well.”

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I've discovered through my dear friend Mónica a wonderful poem called The Chaos. I'm talking about between 146 and 274 funny and well thought verses (depending on the version) about English spelling and pronunciation singularities written by Gerard Nolst Trenité which appeared for the first time in 1920.

I recommend as a splendid exercise that you attempt to read the entire poem aloud (aloud or do not try!). Everyone will get it wrong at some point for sure, but I hope you'll find it fun, challenging and educational. Hint! There is a partial phonetic version of The Chaos poem (both in English and American pronuntiation).

I'm delighted to share with you a 1993-94 version from The English Spelling Society, the most complete version. As a standard practice, words whose spelling can lead to mispronunciation are shown in bold.

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,

Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! 10
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,

Say - said, pay - paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,

But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak, 20
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,

Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining, 30
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.

From "desire": desirable - admirable from "admire",
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind, 40

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Have you ever yet endeavoured

To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?

Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. 50
Blood and flood are not like food,

Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,

Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,

Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live. 60

Is your R correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes with Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,

Buoyant, minute, but minute.
Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;

Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?
Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy? 70

Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.
Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,

You'll envelop lists, I hope,
In a linen envelope.
Would you like some more? You'll have it!
Affidavit, David, davit.
To abjure, to perjure. Sheik

Does not sound like Czech but ache. 80
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.

We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.

Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label. 90

Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,
Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with "shirk it" and "beyond it",

But it is not hard to tell
Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.
Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,

Senator, spectator, mayor, 100
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the A of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,

Desert, but desert, address.
Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,

Cow, but Cowper, some and home.
" Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker",
Quoth he, "than liqueur or liquor", 110

Making, it is sad but true,
In bravado, much ado.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.

Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.
Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,

Paradise, rise, rose, and dose. 120
Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
Mind! Meandering but mean,

Valentine and magazine.
And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,

Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
Tier (one who ties), but tier.
Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring? 130

Prison, bison, treasure trove,
Treason, hover, cover, cove,
Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn't) with nibbled.

Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.
Don't be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;

Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn. 140
Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.

Evil, devil, mezzotint,
Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)
Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don't mention,
Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,

Rhyming with the pronoun yours;
Nor are proper names included,
Though I often heard, as you did, 150
Funny rhymes to unicorn,

Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.
No, my maiden, coy and comely,
I don't want to speak of Cholmondeley.
No. Yet Froude compared with proud

Is no better than McLeod.
But mind trivial and vial,
Tripod, menial, denial,
Troll and trolley, realm and ream,

Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme. 160
Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
But you're not supposed to say
Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.

Had this invalid invalid
Worthless documents? How pallid,
How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
When for Portsmouth I had booked!

Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
Paramour, enamoured, flighty, 170
Episodes, antipodes,
Acquiesce, and obsequies.
Please don't monkey with the geyser,

Don't peel 'taters with my razor,
Rather say in accents pure:
Nature, stature and mature.
Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,

Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
Wan, sedan and artisan. 180
The TH will surely trouble you

More than R, CH or W.
Say then these phonetic gems:
Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.
Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget 'em -

Wait! I've got it: Anthony,
Lighten your anxiety.
The archaic word albeit
Does not rhyme with eight - you see it; 190

With and forthwith, one has voice,
One has not, you make your choice.
Shoes, goes, does [1]. Now first say: finger;

Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,
Hero, heron, query, very,

Parry, tarry, fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath. 200
Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,

Bowing, bowing, banjo- tuners
Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
Puisne, truism, use, to use?

Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite

Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer. 210
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.

Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it
Bona fide, alibi
Gyrate, dowry and awry. 220

Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
Rally with ally; yea, ye,

Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver. 230
Never guess - it is not safe,

We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.
Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,

Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;

Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir. 240

Mind the O of off and often
Which may be pronounced as orphan,
With the sound of saw and sauce;

Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.
Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
Respite, spite, consent, resent.

Liable, but Parliament.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen, 250
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,

Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.
A of valour, vapid, vapour,
S of news (compare newspaper),
G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,

I of antichrist and grist,
Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.

Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
Polish, Polish, poll and poll. 260
Pronunciation - think of Psyche! -

Is a paling, stout and spiky.
Won't it make you lose your wits
Writing groats and saying 'grits'?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel

Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father? 270
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

Hiccough has the sound of sup...
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!

[1] No, you're wrong. This is the plural of doe.

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is going to be my first review in English. Don't Panic! As I recently only read and watch both TV series and films in English (usually without subs) seems to me the perfect way to express ideas and concepts from the books, as well as a way to improve my skills. Please help me notice any inconvenience or mistake.

I've been constantly thinking about this post since I finished the book almost two months ago. In this time lapse Mr. Hitchens died, with the subsequent hard time for us his followers. Embarrassingly I didn't have the time and/or strength to write about it, I found it difficult to write something different than what many others wrote. Although it was not a surprise for anyone, his death truly made me very sad and angry.

Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great

God is not Great is a 2007 book from Christopher Hitchens. In this book he made a fierce and sincere apology against religion, or at least against organized religion. Focusing on the Abrahamic religions, the book contains a perfectly documented collection of facts, personal anecdotes and well chosen arguments. In each of the nineteen chapters the author explains (for example) how religion kills, how do we know some metaphysical claims of religion are false, the lies behind intelligent design, and how some religions have ended in the past.

In Chapter Two, Religion Kills, he described common irrationally violent situations in many cities (Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem or Baghdad) easily attributed to religion. He also wrote about the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie and the crazy actions driven by the US after the September 11 attacks, as examples where religious leaders pursued, allowed and justified big massacres.

In Chapter Four, A Note On Health, he reminds us of some big confrontations between medicine and religion: some vaccines, condoms, the Jewish circumcision and the female genital mutilation rituals, and the pursuing and punishment of homosexuality.

Chapter Five, The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False, where Mr. Hitchens explains the difference between the knowledge of the world today and when some religions where founded. He claims that the necessary leap of faith needs to be repeated, and it turns harder to take the more it is taken.

In Chapter Nine, The Koran Is Borrowed From Both Jewish and Christian Myths he examines the religion of Islam and its holy book, the Koran, asserting that it was not supernatural and simply was a compendium of other religious texts and sayings.

Chapter Thirteen, Does Religion Make People Behave Better?, explains how non-religious people stand and pursue moral causes with at least as much strength and clearness as religious people. He also notes many issues of misbehavior in religious leaders.

In Chapter Fourteen, There Is No 'Eastern' Solution, he blames Asiatic religions as Buddhism and Hinduism with similar sins and problems: the violence, the unverifiable assumptions, the unhealthy manners and rituals, etc.

Chapter Fifteen, Religion As An Original Sin, where he declares that there are several ways in which religion is not just amoral but positively immoral, being the faults found not in its adherents but in its original precepts. These include:

Presenting a false picture of the world to the credulous
The doctrine of blood sacrifice
The doctrine of atonement
The doctrine of eternal reward or eternal punishment
The imposition of impossible tasks or rules

And Finally Chapter Nineteen, In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment, where he argues that the human race no longer needs religion, to the point that underestimating religion will improve mankind, and will boost the progress of civilization. He ends asking atheists to fight for a religion-free society.

Some of the commonly selected quotes are:

Organized religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.
Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.
I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed. History gives us many other such examples, which I am going to discuss later on. But this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion.
At least two major and established religions, with millions of adherents in Africa, believe that the cure is much worse than the disease. They also harbor the belief that the AIDS plague is in some sense a verdict from heaven upon sexual deviance--in particular upon homosexuality.
In Ireland alone--once an unquestioning disciple of Holy Mother Church--it is not estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the minority.
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion and one would like to think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
Conceivably, some readers of these pages will be shocked to learn of the existence of Hindu and Buddhist murderers and sadists. Perhaps they dimly imagine that contemplative easterners, devoted to vegetarian diets and meditative routines, are immune to such temptations?
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers and explanation of anything important.

Mr. Hitchens was an English (also American since 2007) journalist, author and polemicist, in the wider meaning of the expression. He was considered one of the main intellectuals of the world, and was clearly identified as a Pope (in the techie way) in the atheist movement. After a brilliant career with a lot of polemic confrontations with people as Mother Teresa (Hell's Angel documentary) or Bill Clinton (No One Left to Lie To), and demolishing debates against figures like Tony Blair, he faced some serious health issues due to an oesophageal cancer. On 15 December 2011, Hitchens died from pneumonia, as a complication of this cancer.

I'm not used to write bios in this blog, but if that moment comes surely he is going to be among the firsts to appear.