Amigos, cuates y similares intercambiables

As stated in the 2012-04-30 edition of the Debian Project News, this weekend I will be meeting Holger Levsen (who has been there for over a week now) in Managua, Nicaragua, as part of the Debian Tour 2012, a set of talks meant to raise awareness and interest on Debian between the Nicaraguan (+Central American) user groups, university students, companies and government.

Not all of the planned activities are present in the Debian Tour webpage. I know I will be giving my talk on Debian in the Free Software projects' universe, this Saturday at Universidad Centro Americana (UCA). Besides this, we will be meeting on Monday with the UCA staff to discuss some DebConf-specific issues. Sunday? Well, I hope^Wfully trust we will have interesting activities as well :)

Biking over Cd. Nezahualcóyotl

April 15 2012, my friend Alberto and I took on a difficult mission: Cross the –allegedly– biggest city in the world and conquer Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, one of its populous and famous districts. Alberto had been to Cd. Neza a couple of times, as he is one of the providers for a physical rehabilitation center built in it, but I had never set foot in it.

My friend Al and me started cycling in col. Escandón, in Mexico's Center-West, followed roughly along Metrobús' line 2 until its terminal, and at Cabeza de Juárez entered Cd. Neza. We went along the main avenue "Adolfo López Mateos" until Bordo de Xochiaca, then all straight until Vía Tapo, almost all around the airport, got lost a couple of times in the way, then back to the heart of the city.

I took only a couple of quick shots, which I have uploaded to this album — We saw so much, so huge, so surreal things, but the main goal we set for this was just to enjoy cycling. I can just complain about one thing: We cycled for maybe 10Km following the main open sewage line in Mexico City. I had never breathed so much shit in my life — take it as literally as you want. But, all in all, an interesting little trip.

Xilitla

On this Semana Santa (holy/major week), Regina and I took a little vacation: We went ~400Km North, to the magical Xilitla, in the Eastern part of San Luis Potosí state. To get there, we went by the Sierra Gorda de Querétaro route: A beautiful but quite hard to drive road, crossing desert, forest and jungle through a very steep mountain ridge. What does hard to drive mean? It means that for ~200Km we had a speed average of 40-50Km/h. The road is in very good conditions, and traffic was quite light. And although our plans were to come back via the other ridge road (crossing Hidalgo state instead of Querétaro), we were persuaded to go the long way instead: We came back via San Luis Potosí city, making ~700Km instead of ~400, but –I'll concede– it was a much easier drive.

But although I take the road as an important part of the vacation, and although it was a very quick vacation, what is it we went to see there? Xilitla is a town at the beginning of the huasteca potosina region, with really exuberant vegetation, that captured Sir Edward James' heart back in the 1940s. Sir Edward, a noble Englishman, was good friends with several surrealist artists, and became one himself. After moving to Xilitla and buying an impressive chunk of jungle, in the 1960s he started building a surrealist garden in the middle of the jungle, which he continued to work on until his death, in 1984. We took some pictures, but of course, they pay very little tribute to the magic and beauty of the place.

And going to the huasteca means going to places of nature, of many crystaline rivers. Yes, only three days (two of them spent getting there and back) are far too little to enjoy it. But even so, we went to the birth of river Huichihuayán (~45 minutes North of Xilitla) and to the Los Micos waterfalls (~20 minutes West of Ciudad Valles). Very nice places to visit, among so many others. We should go back to the huasteca soon!

I uploaded many of the pictures here. They will not be syndicated on the planets that follow my blog on RSS (or for individuals following RSS, FWIW), but you will find them following the relevant links.

And of course: I pay for a very cheap package on my hosting provider. Drupal often answers with an error page when the server is (even mildly) overloaded. So, feel free to hit reload if something appears unavailable.

Around two years ago, the OECD presented a study on residential bandwitdth available per country that triggered quite a bit of debate all over the world — I have seen at least criticism to it in Mexico, in the USA and in Australia. It's very easy to take a simplified view of a statistic and bitch on how sorry the state of our country is. In our case, the outcry was that Mexico was the lowest of all of the OECD countries, and I have seen this repeated on so many topics that it what surprises me is that people keep getting surprised at it! OECD does not represent the ≥200 countries in this world (only the top 30, and the meaning of "top" is not unambiguous).

I found this graph that helps me illustrate this point:

While that graphic is part of a report illustrating how sorry the USA should be for their low position, it shows the OECD member countries. And yes, the only country Mexico could be compared in general terms from those in the list is Turkey. Coherently, they are located at positions 28 and 30.

But what prompted me into writing this post? That some weeks ago I was reading a viewpoint article at the Communications of the ACM magazine: What gets measured gets done: Stop focusing on irrelevant broadband metrics, by Scott Wallsten (might be behind a paywall for you — If you are interested, I can share a copy with you, just ask me by email). Wallsten's article contains the following graph:

I found it pretty telling that, although Mexico sits at the extreme of the graph (and the height of our bar makes it very hard to get a real value out of this particular rendering), our ISPs join a very select group of countries (Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland, in my very subjective measure) by delivering what they promise.

In 2010, the dominant broadband offering was 1Mbps, although higher options have long existed. I always got basically the 100% of what my ISP (Telmex) has promised, even though I have always had the cheapest package available. Some months ago, I got a call announcing we were being pushed 5x into the future, and starting right then, I had a 5Mbps connection. And although I didn't really expect it to be true, I have had a clean 6Mbps (yes, 6 instead of 5) connection.

So, that's it. This post contains no hidden truths, but just what grabbed my attention from a series of data points :-)

I have just bought our plane tickets to Managua, so I can finally say this:

Yes, many of you will ask what happened, I was bragging everywhere I wanted to go by land, driving from Mexico City to Managua. I'd love to, and I'm sure it's completely doable... But we have family issues to attend on July 21, in Argentina. So we will have a beautiful flight schedule (and carbon footprint) for this July:

June 30

Mexico→San Salvador→Managua, 17:35-20:30. Yes, this means I will not be in Mexico to cast my vote on July 1st. Well, I had already accepted this would happen... And the price difference was quite sensible.

July 15

Managua→San José→Mexico, 16:25-22:20

July 16

Mexico→Santiago→Buenos Aires (AEP), 20:30-09:55

July 23

Buenos Aires (EZE)→Lima→Mexico, 08:35-19:00

Several people have asked me on the best airline options for this trip. In our case, to Managua, it was with TACA, US$518 total. You can get tickets for ~US$30 less, but the flight goes through Panama instead of San Salvador, for an extra 1000Km – And instead of ~3hr it makes slightly over 6. Yes, on our way back we will be routed a bit South to San José, but it's not as bad, and it's for a very short layover.

For Argentina? Well, we have always found LAN to be the cheapest and most convenient. This time, TACA/Avianca was a very close second, which lost due to almost doubling the flight+layover time

Why aren't we taking a Mexico→Managua→Buenos Aires flight instead? Because it's ~US$150 more expensive per person. Not *that* much, but still some money. And by returning to Mexico and having a night at home, we will save us the hassle of carrying Winter clothes to Nicaragua and Summer clothes to Argentina.

Oh, and if you are planning on dropping by home while we are away and robbing all of our stuff: There's not that much to take from there, and we have already arranged for somebody to be there while we are away. But thanks for thinking about us, anyway!

[update] And what about DebConf12 registration? When is the system opening for us all to register? Soon, dear friends, we are talking about some related issues, and you will have your registrationi open soon.

Ben mentions he left Google Reader and went back to Liferea, but mentions a series of bugs that keep him from being happy. After pondering it a bit, a couple of months ago I also left Google Reader, but I turned to a free webapp: rssLounge aggregator. Although it does not fully cover Ben's wishlist (I'll get to it now), I am happy using it as it covers my main need: Being able to read my stuff from just about everywhere, without installing even a ssh client (that would make public Windows machines a liability for me, as they could sniff my keystrokes while authenticating to my ssh server). So, for me, a webapp is basically a must.

Well, as for Ben's list:

1. MAY be a desktop or web application.
   Check. Well, I don't know what would fail this :)
2. If it's a web application, it MUST be reasonably secure, e.g. it must not be written in PHP.
   Fail. It's PHP. And that's my main reason for not uploading it to Debian — I use and enjoy this app every day, but it has some bugs I don't really feel like looking into. And yes, maintaining PHP code is ugly.
3. If it's a web application, it MUST allow for multiple independent users on the same server.
   Don't really remember, I set it up just for myself. But in any case, you could install a different instance per user?
4. If it's a desktop application, it MUST embed a browser engine (presumably Gecko or WebKit) so I can follow links without having to switch windows.
   N/A
5. MUST support organisation of feeds by folders or tags, including combined item lists.
   Pass.
6. MUST keep track of which items have been read.
   Pass.
7. MUST support a global 'unread items' list. SHOULD only remove items from this list when I refresh it, not as soon as I move away from an item.
   Pass. In fact, given that storage is cheap, I have set it to never expire old entries. I don't know if it will ever be useful, but as long as it does not hurt me...
8. SHOULD support a three-pane (folder/list/item) view or something similar. Google Reader's list view with expanding items is perhaps even better, though it means links must be opened in a separate tab.
   It's more like Google Reader's
9. SHOULD support folder and item navigation by keyboard.
   Pass.
10. SHOULD have some way to flag/bookmark items for later attention.
    Pass.
11. If it's a desktop application, it SHOULD have some sort of download manager to support podcasts.
    N/A

So, Ben, with only one (big) fail, it might be a good candidate for you.

PS- And hard as it might seem, I am leading an almost-Google-free life now! :) But don't let them hear this, as we want them to keep sponsoring Summer of Code and DebConf.

Some days ago, reading my local Couchsurfing groups, I stumbled across an announcement by Australian Peter Davies to go to each of the 148 stations in the Mexico City Metro system, take some photos of the environment, and document on his impressions.

I have followed and enjoyed the Mexico City Metro blog since I learnt of it, and have grown used to looking forward to the daily post-or-two. Peter writes each of his entries both in English and Spanish (you can tell it's not a native Spanish, but it's a good effort). He has been doing the stations in a very well distributed order (I cannot say it's completely random, but it's surely not lineal or methodical).

I connected wiht his project as I love discovering the city more or less the same way, but with a different system: I try to have at least one long bike ride every two weeks (being "long" something over 40Km). I usually go either to the North or to downtown and to the East by the good old route I always take, and on my way back, at some point I decide just to turn right or left and discover yet another village slurped by the city. I don't usually take pictures, as I'm too much into the cycling thrill, left-right-left-right... But cycling has led me to appropriate my city (I don't know if that's proper English), to make my city really mine, to get to know parts of it I'd never otherwise go to.

Anyway, Peter's is a great way to document urban life. I'm in love with my city, and with expressions of urban appropriation. I loved his project, and if you are interested by what I say, go take a look at his wanderings in the city. I have suggested him two bits to check, but the work is very much an artist's — He accepts my input, but quite probably he will do whatever he pleases ;-) In case any of you is interested in contacting him, I can tell you for a fact he replies :-)

[*] And what is CouchSurfing? Oh, a great community where you can offer a space to crash at your house for unknown people from all around the world. I have never requested a couch, as the Free Software community is much more tightly knit, but I have offered it to several interesting people.