XBOX 360 with a Full HD 22' Monitor

Finally I decided to buy the XBOX 360, and just for the case I also bought a Full HD 22' Monitor. This is an XBOX 360 Pro, with 60GB HDD, Gears Of War 2 and Sega SuperStars Tennis. I'm only missing a Home Cinema with true Dolby 5.1 surround sound to really enjoy fully the next-gen videogames.

Gears Of War 2 is awesome, bad thing is that I ended the game in the easiest level by mistake and now I'm playing again in normal level... sigh.

Best of E3 2009

After watching almost all videos made by gametrailers from the E3 of this year, I can say that I've been impressed by three games. Well, the third one may not be qualified as a game, but it will be used to play games.

• The Last Guardian (PS3)
• God Of War 3 (PS3)
• Project Natal (XBOX360)

These days I'm thinking that perhaps buying a next-gen console will be a great choice, and I'll save some money in the future as well. The PS3 is too expensive, and the XBOX360 will have Project Natal; I'm not sure which one will buy.

Mass Effect 2 - Prelude to E3

One of the best games I played in my life, Mass Effect, will have soon a sequel. I loved any minute playing the first game, from the beggining until the end. It's one of the few REAL nextgen games that appeared for PC and X360!

Here's the trailer for its sequel from www.gametrailers.com

I can't wait for this amazing game to appear!

The world's most dangerous drug - Meth

Yesterday I had the pleasure to watch a National Geographic's documental about the world's most dangerous drug, the meta amphetamine; also known just as Meth.

This documental talks about the Meth in 74 minutes; luckily it's not very common in Spain, but unfortunately it is in Asia and USA. The video shows you some real cases with its effects and post-effects at long place; I've been very surprised in how the drugaddicts have been degraded physically after a while taking the drug.

Here's an official short intro about it, from the National Geographic channel in youtube. Watch it, and think about it if someone offers or recommends you this drug anytime!

First Sara Romero's videos!

Here are the videos that I captured today of my second daughter Sara. She's pretty just like her daddy, heh. Enjoy!





Compared to the video that I made for Leyre back in 2006, they aren't so different!

The Gathering - Mandylion

This is an album that I've heard a bunch of times, one of the bests ever. I discovered this band back in 1999, when a friend of mine was a fan of them. One of my previous computers (now dead) was named Mandylion due to this album, RIP.

You won't be dissapointed, you'll love it.

Testing out OpenRC - An Universal init system

Talking yesterday with Roy Marples, the author of dhcpcd (among other things) he told me that perhaps I'd be insterested in another of his projects: OpenRC.

OpenRC provides a portable way to start, stop and keep track of services at boot/shutdown, just like the SystemV or BSD style init scripts.

I have to say that I'm very happy with the result after probing it, and definitly I'll use it for my distro. I only needed some tweaks and created some scripts for udev and others. I made a video showing up how the boot process looks like now.



Comparing with previous init scripts that I used (by using RC scripts from Arch and NetBSD's rc.d) doesn't seem to change much, just a few seconds faster.

Kudos for Roy for such great stuff, I'd be nice if I had knew about OpenRC before!

Some mistakes in shell programming

I've been seeing too many mistakes recently related to shell programming, due to some implemented features in GNU Bash (that are really cool if it were the only available shell on the planet). Let me tell you that it's really bad, because if those are used in some critical code to detect some implemented features, they can lead to serious problems in the build stage of the application, as I've seen with GNU autoconf generated configure scripts.

I'm posting this because I've spent a while detecting why libusb didn't have a symbol required by a dependent application; surprisingly that was due to the first mistake I'm explaining below in a configure script.

One of the most famous that you are probably aware of is the == operator used in conditionals. Remember that GNU Bash is the only shell that accepts the following:

if [ "$foo" == "$blah" ]; then
    ...
fi

and another one that I've just seen coming from the xorg detection block in GNU configure scripts (didn't see it until now):

BLAH="goo foo boob"
BLAH+="baobab anotherone"

This is a great mistake! those two examples (surely there will be many more) are relaying in GNU Bash for correct operation! think about it, relaying in such specific features won't do any good for all us.