Diego Berrueta

This week I read Rendezvous with Rama, an all-time classic sci-fi novel by the recently deceased Arthur C. Clarke. Although I'm a sci-fi freak, I've never read this novel before. I wasn't disappointed. The plot is great and the scientific issues are detailed and precise, one of Clarke's trademarks. Definitely worth the read!

I've made a copy of the contents of my old blog to this new one. Unfortunately, the old and lovely AsturLinux blog has some problems due to a strange MySQL error that we don't know how to fix. Many of my old posts were no longer available on the web. I don't think they are extremely interesting, but I was a bit sad of losing them.

It wasn't easy to migrate the data from Drupal to Textpattern. The only helpful resource I found was a sample SQL query. Inspired by that query, I wrote another one that I reproduce at the end of this post in the hope that other people may find it useful. Note, however, that you cannot use it as-is, and it will require customization for your purposes. Moreover, after this query, I had to execute some other queries to fix some minor issues.

So now the archive contains more than 300 old posts, most of them in Spanish, from 2004 to 2007. In other words, a little bit more of noise in the web :-)

INSERT INTO textpattern (Posted, AuthorID, LastMod, Title,
Annotate, status , textile_body, textile_excerpt, Section,
url_title, body_html, uid, feed_time )
SELECT FROM_UNIXTIME( node.created ) AS 'Posted',
'berrueta' AS 'AuthorID',
FROM_UNIXTIME( node.changed ) AS 'LastMod',
node.title AS 'Title',
'0' AS Annotate,
'4' AS status,
'0' AS textile_body,
'0' AS textile_excerpt,
'blog' AS Section,
DATE_FORMAT( FROM_UNIXTIME( node.created ), '%Y%m%d-%H%i' ) AS url_title,
node.body AS Body_html,
node.created AS uid,
DATE( FROM_UNIXTIME( node.created ) ) AS feed_time
FROM node
WHERE node.uid =14

In the last weeks, I've read three essays about three hot topics. I've enjoyed the three of them. In these books, their authors pour their opinions, which are probably different from the mainstream views.

In Free Culture, Larry Lessig (see also his entry in Wikipedia) analyses our culture and creativity, and how the copyright works. I discovered Lessig last year, when I listened to his keynote at TED. I found quite interesting both his ideas and his skills to present the topic, so I decided to buy the book (and yes, I know it's available for download from the link above). Nice reading.

The God Delusion (see also its entry in Wikipedia) is a provocative and sound essay on religion by Richard Dawkins. As others have said about this book, it should be read by both non-believers and also by religious people. Although I didn't find in the book all what I was looking for, it is nevertheless a book that can impact on the way we look at this controversial issue.

Finally, The Assault of Reason by Al Gore (former "next president of the USA", as he presents himself) is a disturbing book about how reason seems to have been removed from the political life. His passionate description of how reason was in the origin of the USA has arose my interest on the foundation of America. After reading the book, I feel (even more) pessimistic about the world we're living on.

Jean-Jacques Solari has kindly translated some W3C documents into French. Among these documents, the Méthodes exemplaires pour la publication des vocabulaires RDF. It's nice to read some of my words in French. Thanks, Jean-Jacques!

I've just returned from a business trip to Madrid. We stayed in a nice hotel with free wifi, a nice webpage and a good and cheap restaurant. However, we were a bit surprised by the menu of the restaurant. The menu was available both in Spanish and English (photo of the English menu). It seems to me that someone used an automated language translator tool. Probably "Pretty of the north" is a too literal (and funny) translation of Spanish "Bonito del norte". And can you guess what "Tubular powders charge of coal" are? It's easy: "Macarrones carbonada" (sic).

In the highway from Oviedo and Gijón to my new hometown, Villaviciosa, there is a viaduct named "Caes". For those of you who don't speak Spanish, the literal translation of the name to English is "You fall". Strange name for a bridge.

The second half of my stay in Cannes included giving a talk to present a semantic web project we have developed at CTIC. Many people seem interested by this application, which has become a Case Study for the W3C Semantic Web initiative.

The return trip was, as usual, eventful. I tried to save some money by taking a train from Mandelieu to Nice. When I arrived to the train station, I discovered that the railways were on strike, and there was no train service. Apparently, the bus line to the airport only works in the summer season. As I had a lot of time before boarding the plane, I decided to walk 8 Km along the shore to Cannes. The weather was ok (although the forecast was rain), so it was a pleasant walk. After a quick visit in Cannes, I took a taxi from there to the Nice airport. I waited four more hours in the terminal, and I boarded with 30 minutes of delay. I miraculously made the connection at Barajas, and finally I arrived home a bit tired.

I'm writing today from Cannes, or more precisely, from Mandelieu, where I'm attending to the W3C Technical Plenary. I came here to give a couple of talks. Today I had the opportunity to describe some work that we have been doing at CTIC. When I concluded my slides, I engaged in a very interesting discussion with some people from the audience, including Ivan Herman and TimBL. It is rewarding to see that these experts are interested by our work. Tomorrow I'll give a sort presentation about a successful semantic web application we did at CTIC.

We're meeting at the Royal Casino (if you want a martini, you have to order it shaken, not stirred -- just kidding). The venue is ok, but I think the location is not. It is not well-communicated to the airport. Anyway, I stay in a nearby, much more economic, hotel. It's funny that, although I'm surrounded by luxury cars, huge yachts, golf courses, casinos, etc., my hotel has a "limited glamour". Frankly, it's not the best hotel I've been to. Surprisingly, there are cats inside the hotel, and also some nasty bugs. But it's cheap and it has a free wifi! Maybe other, more expensive hotels should take note.

This afternoon, I walked across the city while looking for some place to have dinner. Mandelieu is not a beautiful city, but they have a nice castle. Probably other nearby cities, such as Cannes and Nice, are more interesting. Actually, this is my second time around Cannes. The first one was in 1996, if I remember correctly, and I only stopped here for some minutes.

Even if I was on holidays, it has been a very stressful week. I've been busy moving to my new flat in Villaviciosa. It is a small village in Asturias, near Gijón and close to the sea. I don't feel really comfortable in big cities, surrounded by crowds. That's why I chose this quieter place. It's just 15 minutes (by car) from my workplace, i.e., 10 minutes closer than my previous location. Well, let's see whether I can make my life here!

For most of us, SPAM is an annoyance. However, for Bob Servant, SPAM is often a chance to engage in strange conversations. We all receive many undesired email messages with proposals for lucrative businesses or any other personal opportunities. Bob actually replies to them! His ridiculous and funny conversations with the spammers have been collected and edited by an English journalist, Neil Forsyth, in a book titled "Delete this at your peril". Although some pages are a bit boring, in general the book is funny and bizarre.