A Catalan Linux Geek in England

From time to time I feel the need to change my blog skin. Now, it features a cool, simple and sleek design. The title of the blog has changed as well, as it is no longer true that I am a linux geek in Catalonia. As many of my readers know I am living in England. A simplistic theme, as simple as the look and feel of Gnome and Mac OS. Hope you like it!!

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The flood warnings have cleared in the area where I live. Today has been a sunny and nice day. The river still carries a high volume of water but hopefully in the following days things will go back to normal. The riverpath is very muddy and dogs, cows, ducks and swans enjoy a lot these conditions.

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Damn weather. Now I have flood warnings all around my area, where I live and where I work. It is nearly impossible that the river reaches my home or the offices where I work, but mother nature is very powerful and a real catastrophe can happen when you never expect it. I am a little bit worried to be sincere and I really feel simpathy for all those in the south who have lost their homes temporarily due to the floods, as it is a very scary and sad situation.

From being in a very hot weather in Barcelona and suffering the worst power outage in Barcelona´s history, to the floods in England. Weather is really mad these days mostly due to the greenhouse effect. Governments must consider this abnormal weather conditions and provide solutions. Otherwise, the Earth is going straight to hell in a handcart.

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After spending some days in the always cool ( damn hot weather though ) and lively Barcelona, meeting old friends and spending very nice dinners with my mother, I am back to Buckinghamshire. I arrived at Luton at 18:15. Incredible, this is the first time ever that easyjet arrives on time as I have had always delays with this company. There was a driver awaiting for me with a luxury mercedes to give me a 40 min drive to my home in Bourne End. Now, back on track and ready to work till next holidays. As for the weather, here is not as warm as Barcelona and there is no humidity. Now, there are flood alerts in my area, but there is nothing to be afraid so far. I have charged my batteries and I hope to write more often in this blog.  

Here some shots, Tibidabo, Telecommunications tower, and Casa Batlló, enjoy:

Well, one day like today one year ago, I set up my wordpress account and I imported all my stuff from blogger. WordPress is still the most powerful blog engine out there, and surpasses blogger in many features. I´ve got nearly 40000 visits in one year and I´m very glad that my posts and how tos have helped a lot of people. I will continue working for the community of opensource being Windows or Linux.

Well, after much investigating and after hours searching the HP webpage I´ve found the solution for my wireless weird problems. It seems that the internet protocol Ipv6 is not very well supported by Microsoft Windows Vista although it comes enabled by default. What a shame!!!. Many people are having weird problems with their wireless and internet connections. The nasty thing is that all seems perfectly ok, and well configured and figuring out that the cause is the Ipv6 protocol is not an easy task. Well, in the following link explains how to disable Ipv6 from your Windows Vista box. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/cableguy/cg1005.mspx#ENAAC You can either disable it from your network connections or by editing the registry. I have had just one problem in a whole week by disabling the ipv6 from the network properties, so I decided to disable Ipv6 interely from my box by editing the registry. Hope I am not going to have problems anymore. This is in my opinion something to be taking into account.

I don’t know why Windows ships with Ipv6 enabled by default when this protocol is not yet very well implemented and not all the network devices support this protocol. If a wireless router, switch or whatever does not support this protocol and you have it enabled by default it can cause problems, such as lock ups, and the only solution is rebooting your box.

In the company I work for many people use MAC and I begin to fall in love with MACs. MACs have an awesome hardware and the operating system is really cool. In fact the operating system is a Unix BSD operating system. My next computer will be a Mac. Here in UK, Macs are more common than in other countries like Spain.  Perhaps is because of its high price, but you get what you pay for, and MAC is of very high quality. Awaiting for the next release of MAC, Leopard, and then I will make a decission. A thrilling year with iPhone and MAC OS X Leopard.

I arrived in UK in February and till now I haven’t had bad weather, just normal temperatures and no raining. Now, with the spring just around the corner, temperatures have plunged. Really cold this week in Buckinghamshire :-(.

Well, I am doing some Perl programming and what I’ve seen at the moment is really impressive. For system administration and coding repetitive tasks, Perl is the most awesome programming language I’ve ever come across. Perl really rocks, and what’s the most interesting thing is that is open source. Perl has a large community, and there are thousands of reusable modules ready to be installed from the comprehensive Perl archive network www.cpan.org. As I like coding for fun, and scripting is one of my favourite hobbies (apart from Linux), I will do some Perl interesting programs for the open source community.

I’ve been a fan of Python for several years, but at this moment I need to learn some Perl, and what I have learned is quite impressive. Perl is a very powerful language with thousands of modules. I went for Python because it has a clearer syntax and it’s purely object oriented, and every time I saw a Perl script I thought it was very cryptic. Now with some tutorials and perl books (thanks to safari oreilly), I’m seeing that I was quite wrong. Perl is very powerful, even more than Python, when dealing with regular expressions, files, directories, and doing small tasks. Perhaps, for larger programs Python is best recommended, because of its object oriented nature (classes and methods). Long life for Perl!!