Juan Céspedes - Blog 

Well, I finally managed to automate the publishing of my pictures, and all the pictures from march to June 2010 are already online.

Moreover, the Photolog is growing and growing... I have 32 entries right now and my idea is to have one or two entries per week

1. Solve the white edges
2. Solve the white corners
3. Second layer:
   

   U R U' R' U' F' U F	U' F' U F U R U' R'

4. Orient yellow edges:
   

   F U R U' R' F'	F R U R' U' F'

5. Position yellow corners:
   

   L U' R' U L' U' R U2

6. Orient yellow corners:
   

   R U R' U R U2 R' U2	R' U' R U' R' U2 R U2

7. Position yellow edges:
   

   R2 U F B' R2 F' B U R2	R2 U' F B' R2 F' B U' R2

From 1998 to 2000, I have participated in a few programming contests, such as the yearly ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest and CUPCAM.

Many of the problems proposed for such contests have been recopilated by the University of Valladolid; Ciriaco García de Celis created an Online Judge where everybody could be able to submit solutions, and the system tells them if they are correct or not.

As of today, there are 2694 problems, and I have solved 90 of them. And today I am publishing my solutions here.

For those of you that still don't know venti, I will say that it is a network storage system, heavily used in Plan 9 from Bell Labs and, thanks to Russ Cox, it is part of plan9port (Plan 9 from User Space), and hence it can be used in other operating systems.

Venti is a block storage server intended for archival data. In a Venti server, the SHA1 hash of a block’s contents acts as the block identifier for read and write operations. This approach enforces a write-once policy, preventing accidental or malicious destruction of data. In addition, duplicate copies of a block are coalesced, reducing the consumption of storage and simplifying the implementation of clients.

Venti is the system I use for back-ups of all our Linux machines at work; it is very easy to use, very efficient and very useful. The only problems I see is that it is not yet packaged in Debian, and its compilation and installation is not very straightforward; that is why I packaged it for Debian, creating 2 packages:

• venti-server: It includes the server (venti) and some utilities to create and configure it.
• venti-client: Some clients that talk to a venti server, such as vbackup, vac and vnfs.

I packaged version 20100416-1, but it is not published anywhere yet (but drop me a note if you would like to get it).

During the last few days, we have been walking through the Way of St. James ("Camino de Santiago" in Spanish, or "Camiño de Santiago", in Galician); it's a pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.

It is a very popular pilgrimage, specially during "Xacobeo Holy Year" (those years where June 25th is Sunday, such as 2010).

Trini and me began walking on March 30th from Sarria, and arrived Santiago on April 3rd: 5 days walking about 115 km total.

I told my doctor yesterday (20 days after surgery) that I was beginning to feel rather well, so we decided to go back to work.

I feel about 80% recovered now, and I can do almost everything: I can drive again, I can jump, I can even run (but only a few steps)... and I can sit for a few hours and work rather comfortably.

So, I am back into the real world again...

I have been working for the last few days in improving my web pages (www.cespedes.org and juancespedes.es), specifically the blog and pictures parts (in fact, I have removed all the other parts).

Regarding the blog, well, it is now a real blog :-). I can add entries (like this one) and edit previous ones from a web browser. All the entries are stored in a PostgreSQL database. Every entry has its own, permanent link. People can add comments, and all of them are visible from the permalink in each page.

Regarding the pictures, I have simplified the URLs used to navigate throw them, in order to speed up navigation and to help the web crawlers. The list of all the pictures (more than 64,000) are also stored in the database, and I have added captions to the pictures with localization (in order to show different things in Spanish and in English), and I have created labels to tag each picture.

To-Do list: improve/automate the way I upload pictures, store and show scanned images, crop/rotate pictures, create albums, save list of people in each picture, show Exif information, save the place where each picture was taken...

Before the surgery, I was given a long-acting local anesthetic, which lasted about 8 hours. The main problem in the hospital after surgery was the inability to urinate; at 3am they used an urinary catheter, and that was really uncomfortable. I could not sleep at all until they removed it at 7am. But even then, I still could not urinate until 2pm, and only a few drops, and with a great pain.

On Friday, February 26th, at 3pm, I left the hospital and went home; the doctor gave me a prescription medicine for pain (paracetamol and metamizole), and recommended me frequent soaks in warm water (sitz baths) to help relieve pain.

The first week after the surgery was the most painful time of my life, especially during the first bowel movement.

Since them, I have started to feel better though. I feel about 75% recovered. I still feel a little pain and I cannot sit for long periods of time, but in a few days I will begin working again and my life will return to normality.

After several years "suffering in silence", I decided that it was time for me to solve my problems once and for all. I went to see my doctor on November 18th, 2009 asking for surgical excision, but I had to wait until today for the surgery.

The surgery begun at 19:00, it was performed with local anesthesia and lasted about 30 minutes.

Yet another time, my family and I run 10km through Madrid. My score was not very good; and that could be mostly due to the fact that I have not run at all during 2009 (until today, of course). I would like to get in shape during 2010 and improve that score.

However, the final position in my category was not as bad as I expected, because I am no longer a senior, but a veteran (!)

Previous times in 10km-long runs:

Like every 31st of december, we celebrated this year the traditional "San Silvestre Vallecana", a 10km run that takes place in Madrid, starting in Santiago Bernabeu stadium and ending in Teresa Rivero stadium (Vallecas).

I went with:

• my father (Juan)
• my brother Sergio
• his wife, Cristi
• my sister, Gema
• his boyfriend, Alberto
• my cousin, Iván
• two of Alberto's cousins
• Jorge (Iván's friend)
• Pablo Sánchez Torralba

...and other 25000+ people.

The first of us to finish was, of course, Pablo (about 47 minutes), next to Sergio (52), Iván (55), myself (1:02:56), my father and Cristi (1:15), Gema and Alberto (1:17).

My previous times in 10km-long runs were:

Yesterday I started solving a jigsaw puzzle thar my brothers gave me a few months ago. And I finished today :-)

It's a 1000 pieces puzzle from Schim Schimmel, and it shows a very nice landscape, with a lake, two houses and some trees, all covered by snow. It seemd to be very difficult because of the sky, the lake and the snow, but in fact there is a way to cheat: all the pieces of the puzzle are written on the back, showing some letters which tells the player which zone that piece belongs to (there are 24 zones with letters from 'A' to 'X').

Appart from that, the pieces of puzzle are very thin and weak, and many of all them have exactly the same shape, so it is very difficult to know if you are putting them in the right place.

I don't recommend that brand to anyone willing to buy a new jigsaw puzzle.

When Trini and I were coming back home from Navalmoral de la Mata, we called rover to see if he invited us to his home... but he was not there! He was at Kinepolis with Juanfe, Nuria, Isaac, Vane, and two friends of her, and they were going to see the film "El intercambio" (spanish title for "Changeling"). So we went there and joined them to wath the movie.

It's a film directed by Clint Eastwood, with Angelina Jolie playing a role as a mother praying for her kidnapped son to return home.

It's inspired by actual events that occurred in 1920s in Los Angeles, where Christine (Angelina Jolie) fights against a corrupted LAPD after they returned home a boy which was not her son.

Kinépolis, screen number 25, first row, just a few meters from the actual screen :-)

I always like super-hero movies, and rover liked this one specially because the "hero" does all the sort of things a hero is not supposed to do.

Carol, Charo, Echeva, Navin, Thandef, Vaishali and me were there to have a very nice and funny day.

She came here to do some sort of things, such as meeting with her professor in charge of her Final Project.

Juan-Mariano told me a few days ago that there was going to be a performance of Beethoven's 9th symphony in Pozeulo de Alarcón tonight. And I cannot say no to that, so there we went :-)

The orchestra was all right; the director was fine. But the sound was awful; I had never heard the 9th Symphony with such a poor quality. Even listening from the radio would be better. The reason is that the auditorium where it was played had microphones all over the orchestra and an audio system which retransmitted the music, but the volume went up and down with no reason, there was a lot of distortion with low frequences, and when the chorus was singing, the loudspeakers produced saturation several times.

Marielle Fois was the one who sent the invitation to me. Thank you, Marielle :-)